THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
CREEPING FAD, CREEPY PARODY THE SCREEN It's hard to imagine two art forms more different than stage comedy and screen comedy. Of course, both require timing, precision, control, etc. and because...
...Simon has become a little confused on this point, though, and thinks his plays will be funny when he acts like a machine...
...In Simon's version, all the aforementioned detectives are invited to a manor house one night by a host very much there, in the person of Truman Capote, who challenges them to solve a murder yet to be committed...
...The situation is that a has-been director named Funn (Brooks himself) is trying to make a comeback by lining up a lot of stars to act in a silent movie...
...The steamroller is passing in the street as Reynolds loses patience and tackles this triple-decker, etc...
...Brooks' Silent Movie could easily have been just as mechanical in its execution, for it too reworks the same situation four or five times...
...to pick him up and put him down physically is villainous...
...In it a group of people are invited to an island retreat where their host is not present and all his guests begin to be murdered one at a time...
...Because the comedy in movies tends to be physical, the hero cannot be the dominant sort of fellow he is on the stage...
...Though Murder by Death is allegedly a movie, the five detectives and their host are in fact six stage characters who've found their author...
...but in Murder by Death, Neil Simon doesn't...
...Out of respect for the occasional good work done by the cast, I won't mention who they are...
...Chaplin worked in just this way in his silent movies too, spinning out an insane plot in order to string together the sight gags, and making us just that much more receptive to the gags as a result...
...I am number one here," announces Capote when he joins his guests...
...It relies on acrobatics instead of wit...
...But it is also because movies by their very character invite the sort of sight gags, stunt work and optical illusions that cannot be done on the stage...
...It must serve, paradoxically, to make him look like a clod, a buffoon...
...What Neil Simon attempted doesn't even allow for the possibility of this sort of thing...
...On the screen comedy is more naturally physical than mental...
...The artist keeps control while the character he plays must appear to lose it all the time...
...Consequently, in movies all that control must be hidden in the hero himself...
...The title sets the tone for most of the gags in this movie...
...and because screen comedy usually relies on long shots, in that genre more than any other movies also work at the same distance from the audience as stage plays...
...The lip of his suit of armor gets hooked on the arm of a chair, and knocks it off, as Funn approaches Lisa Minnelli during the shooting of a costume drama...
...Essentially the hero of a stage comedy has to be funny with his mouth, and the only way to do that is to manipulate or obliterate what everyone else is saying or doing-in other words, to be in control...
...Rather than beginning with a plot premise, like the falling gargoyle which he then has to try make funny five different ways, Brooks obviously begins with the end result of the gag, some funny visual that has occurred to him, and just makes the plot lead up to it somehow...
...To put someone else down verbally is funny...
...Once the first detective to arrive has had a gargoyle pushed off the roof on him as he knocks on the front door, Simon has to have every detective in turn suffer the same fate as if the whole movie were proceeding down an assembly line...
...Simon is trying to take off all the great detectives who have been featured in movies over the years-Sam Spade, Charlie Chan, the Thin Man, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple-but he manages only to rip them off instead...
...In Silent Movie Mel Brooks realizes it, too...
...Not only are the playwright and actor in control of their character, but the character is in control of the situation in which they have placed him...
...The archetype of the artist-hero is here not Noel Coward, but Charlie Chaplin...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Re-takes and editing make it possible to execute stunts that couldn't be dared on the stage...
...Simon's ideas never had a chance...
...But in a stage play the control that's needed to produce the laughs usually has to carry over into the personality of the hero...
...This is partly because screen comedy was at first a silent medium and had no choice about how it would be funny...
...Even leaving aside the overemphasis of "if you know what I mean," this stuff is a pretty pale imitation of Noel Coward, and pitiful fare for a movie...
...To work up to this gag, Brooks simply has Funn approach Burt Reynolds for the film by standing on the shoulders of two assistants (Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman) inside such a raincoat...
...The fact is that the very irrelevance of this whole routine to the plot makes it all the funnier...
...It was Bergson, as I recall, who observed that comedy is mechanical-that it occurs when people act like" machines...
...He meshes the characters he creates-a butler who is blind, for instance, with a cook who is deaf and dumb-just like the cogs of gears...
...They're redundant too...
...This is just as true of Cary Grant and William Powell as it is of Chaplin...
...Drawing room comedy of the sort written by Noel Coward is what plays best on the stage, and the archetypal hero who appears in it is always some elegant cosmopolite like Coward himself...
...But Simon is a newcomer, and an opportunist who shows he hasn't really given enough thought to movies to parody them successfully...
...You look more like number two to me, if you know what I mean," retorts the Sam Spade character...
...A movie gives the comedian lots of chances to get a stunt right once, whereas on the stage he has only one chance each night to get it right time and time again...
...What keeps Brooks' treatment from becoming repetitious is that he works the opposite way from Simon...
...As a plot for this grab bag, Simon lifts the story line from Ten Little Indians, a movie made in the 1940s and based on an Agatha Christie work...
...Brooks has been mining this vein for several years now, Westerns in Blazing Saddles and horror films in Young Frankenstein...
...Thus a funny concept that Brooks visualized becomes a hysterical sight gag...
...One such gag Brooks includes, for example, is the sight of a stilt-man in a raincoat ran over by a steamroller whose driver thinks he has squished a giant...
...Both these films are ostensibly part of the movie-savvy, movie-crazy fad for parodies...
...As Brooks also understands, like Chaplin, when you put such physically improbable gags before the camera, it will be in little, accidental details of the execution that the gags will become truly hilarious...
...By throwing together a bunch of master detectives in a manor house Simon has provided himself with six quip artists and concocted a run-of-the-mill drawing room comedy...
...and with five leading characters, all of them in exactly the same predicament, Simon can't resist the temptation to mass-produce jokes...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 16
