Bottom line: A film scholar pays homage to the clown prince of early film -- unlucky in business but a superb artist.
By Simon Louvish (Faber & Faber, 376 pages, $25)
Mack Sennett was born an anarchist, a disturber of the peace who captured working-class resentments and turned them into comic mayhem at the expense of authority of all kinds. "Nearly every one of us lives in the secret hope that someday before he dies, he will be able to swat a policeman's hat down around his ears," he once remarked. "Lacking the courage and the opportunity, we like to see it done in the movies."
Had Attorney General John Ashcroft's minions been at work a century ago, they would surely have noticed that the cop-twitting Sennett was a foreigner, a farm-born Canadian who, having endured the terrors of an evangelical boarding school, had good reason to rebel. They would have made a note on his dossier that Sennett, born Michael Sinnott, had changed his name, and they would have wanted to know why. But would they have noticed that the Keystone Kops, Sennett's comedic hallmark, owed their origins to yet another foreign culture -- namely, the French?
British film scholar Simon Louvish makes the connection in "Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett," a highly readable life of Sennett and his work. Along about 1907, Louvish posits, Sennett, who had hitherto aspired to a career as an opera singer, saw a Pathe short in which a dog steals a pork chop from a butcher's shop and proceeds to outsmart a pursuing squadron of flics. "End shot: close-up of the dog, wearing a policeman's kepi, happily gnawing the chop."
That little French film was enough to change Sennett's life. So, too, was a happy apprenticeship with D.W. Griffith, who taught Sennett the craft of filmmaking. "He was my day school, my adult education program, my university," Sennett recalled of Griffith, and on the course of their daily walks from New York's Biograph Studios to Griffith's apartment uptown, he got a thorough schooling in every aspect of the business, including acting.
Sennett was soon able to pay it forward. Over the next two decades, now in California, he made hundreds of silent films under his Keystone rubric, launching the career of the legendary but ill-fated comic actor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, discovering the great Mabel Normand and Ben Turpin and giving the fledgling Charlie Chaplin a needed lucky break. (Sennett's 1914 film "Tango Tangles," featuring Arbuckle and Chaplin, was, Louvish notes, "the only movie in which Chaplin appeared without appreciable makeup, sans mustache, large or small.") He even gave Frank Capra his first shot at directing, along with a tongue-in-cheek list of rules for the job ("Thou shalt not be seen carrying a book. No gags in books, saith the Lord").
It was the madcap Keystone Kops series that earned Sennett his greatest fame -- and the admiration of the vast working-class audience that he sought and a considerable fortune that Sennett lost through lavish living and failure to foresee the rise of sound film. His decline and fall is surely one of the saddest in motion-picture history: In just a few years, Sennett went from Hollywood millionaire king to bankrupt has-been. When he died in 1958, he was living on a pension of $227 a month.
Louvish brings Sennett's era to life in these pages, and Keystone fans and novices alike will learn much from the great anarchist's successes -- and failures.
Gregory McNamee is The Hollywood Reporter's literary critic. He can be reached at gm@gregorymcnamee.com.
REVIEWS going back to spring 1991 are available to our online-service subscribers via our archives. Not a subscriber? Click here to learn about the benefits of our premium service.
