(Facebook-surfing can either be very boring, or. . . very boring. But I found something tonight. Then lost it, then found it again. It's an interview from this past spring for Humanities magazine, featuring everyone's favorite Italian uncle, Martin Scorsese. Then I get to the end of it and find a Lloyd double-whammy. OK, so when do I get the third one?)
LEACH: How big was the transition from silent to talkies? How
did it affect comedies?
SCORSESE: It all became verbal. The comedy stars in
the thirties were Laurel and Hardy, thankfully, and W. C. Fields, and the Marx
Brothers. Then after the war or during the war, Abbott and Costello, which was
really language, old vaudeville routines. And then postwar it’s Martin and
Lewis, which was a kind of manic craziness and kind of reflection of the
freedom after the war.
LEACH: Two foils.
SCORSESE: Yeah, exactly. But in the silent era,
it’s all physical and visual comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charley
Chase, all these people we’re restoring. There’s a lot of them that are being
restored. It’s quite remarkable seeing these on a big screen.
Young people, when I show it to them, they ’ll ask, Do they talk
in this movie? I say, they don’t talk in this one, but you might find it
interesting. And they do.
LEACH: I’ll bet.
SCORSESE: The great silent dramatic films really
worked extraordinarily well. I mean, they still do if you’ve seen them
restored, meaning at the right speed, the right tint and color, because
everything was in color, but toned and tinted. In any event, they did have
their own international language. Murnau wanted to use title cards in
Esperanto. He said, this is the universal language, cinema. And then when sound
came in, it changed again completely.
LEACH: The movie industry is America
SCORSESE: Norman Lloyd, who was a great actor and
producer, he worked with everybody: Hitchcock and Welles and Chaplin. He’s in
his nineties now. He was just talking on television the other night on TCM, and
he was saying that Chaplin is universal, probably the greatest, because he kind
of told the story of the immigrant. And anywhere around the world people could
identify with it.
LEACH: Well, we thank you.
SCORSESE: Thank you.
(Post-blog revelation. Don't ask me how I find these things. The above shot of the demented old man in the Shriners fez really is Harold Lloyd hanging off the Space Needle in Seattle when he was something like 76 years old. I would've doubted my eyes except, when I looked closely at his right hand, I could see that it was missing thumb and forefinger. How and why he'd do this is anyone's guess, but maybe he was thinking in terms of going out with a big splash.)
