Comedy in Movies

Zelig (1983)

There isn’t much film footage of author F. Scott Fitzgerald around, so it’s always a treat to see him crop up in Woody Allen’s 1983 faux-documentary comedy Zelig.

He appears near the beginning, as one of the first people to take notice of Zelig’s mysterious personality alterations. There doesn’t seem to be much information available about where the footage is originally from, but according to a page on the University of South Carolina’s website (which also includes some streaming audio of Fitzgerald reading), what he’s actually writing in the clip is:

Everybody has been predicting a bad end for the flapper, but I don’t think there is anything to worry about.

There’s another brief clip of F Scott Fitzgerald here:

Bataille de Boules de Neige (1896)

I’m sure that if you looked hard enough online, you’d find all kinds of nonsense written about symbolism and social order in this short film from the Lumiere brothers. Theory and analysis are all well and good, but at times they can rob a film of its more simple pleasures.

You may therefore prefer to simply enjoy watching the fine people of Lyon having a fine old time chucking show at each other in the street, probably filmed in the winter of 1896/1897:

Le jardinier et le petit espiègle (1895)

Dating back to 1895, the Lumiere brothers’ Le jardinier et le petit espiègle is generally regarded as the first fictional film ever made. Some claims are more cautious, qualifying it as the first comedy ever made, or the first fully staged fictional comedy film ever made and shown to the public, but you get the idea. This was when the cinema began to make up stories.

The film is less than a minute long, and the gag is familiar enough: a gardener is watering his garden, when a boy creeps up behind him and steps on the hose to stop the water; gardener looks into hose, boy releases foot, gardener gets soaked (and, in this case, administers the boy a savage beating).

Le jardinier et le petit espiègle (also known as L’arroseur arrosé, although technically this was the title of a later in-house remake) has long since been in the public domain, you can watch it below in its entirety. The camera was in a fixed position, so the gardener has to drag the boy back to the starting point for his punishment.

The Man in the White Suit (1951)

When Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness) invents a seemingly indestructible fibre in Ealing’s satire The Man in the White Suit, he soon finds himself on the run from capitalists and workers alike. Finding himself locked in the attic of one of the factory owner’s houses, he makes his escape by lowering himself to the ground on a single strand of his special fibre.

You might think that this was done by rotating the set 90 degrees, Batman style, but you’d be wrong: this stunt was done for real, with Alec Guinness lowered down the side of the building on a length of piano wire.

He was none to sure about this, pointing out that out that the wire, normally strong, would break easily if it had a kink in it, quoting his naval training, and requesting something a bit tougher for what would be a considerable descent. His protests were ignored, the wire attached to his belt, and they began lowering him down the side of the building…

… the wire did break, although not until almost the end of the shot, and one of Britain’s finest actors plummeted the last four feet to the ground.

“No one apologised,” he remembers in his autobiography, Blessings in Disguise. “They rarely do in films.”

Passport to Pimlico (1949)

As the citizens of Pimlico celebrate their new-found independence from Britain in Ealing’s postwar comedy, they keep the pub open late, and it’s not long before the thorny issue of licensing hours comes up. When a police chief asks for the landlord’s identity card, it’s torn up in front of him. The bar patrons promptly follow suit, tearing up their identity cards and ration books and throwing the pieces into the air, in a scene likely to have gone down well with postwar British audiences. The banker (above) burns his.

The ID Cards had come in during 1939, as part of the National Registration Act, and the idea was as unpopular then as it is today. In 1950, Liberal Party member Clarence Henry Willcock was asked to produce his and refused, apparently telling the police constable “I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing”. He was prosecuted – the fine was ten shillings – and promptly mounted a campaign against the cards under the banner of the “Freedom Defence Association”. He even tore up his own card.

Willcock was the last person in the UK (for the moment, at least) to be prosecuted for not producing an ID card. They were eventually abandoned in 1952, although it looks like they may be on the way back.