In a review of The Half Breed, I emphasised what a joy it ws to rediscover "the other Fairbanks", the fine comedian of the early films so long obscured by the image of "the swashbuckler". I pointed out in that review that it was the comedian not the swashbuckler who first became the big star and this film, the first United Artists release, could not better underline that fact. Half Bred is a curious sort of halfway house between the two Fairbanks but this film (even if there is already plenty of acrobatics) is still very definitely Douglas the comedian and a very good example of the genre.
It has I suspect not very much to do with the titular author and director, Joseph Henabery, and rather more to do with the mysterious Elton Banks aka Douglas Fairbanks. In fact the film seems very largely to be based on Hawthorne of the U.S.A., a play by James B. Fagan "set in Oberon, the small capital of Borrovina, a small independent state somewhere in the mess of Southeastern Europe" in which Fairbanks had played the central role on Broadway (1912-1913) and which was itself filmed in 1919 by James Cruze with Wallace Reid in the title role. "In one scene" wrote a critic of this play "he punched the Secretary of War, upset much of the army, and kicked a seditious prince in the chest before jumping off a balcony"
It is difficult to place Fairbanks as a comedian. He is clearly not a vaudeville comic in the manner of Arbuckle, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon and all the plethora of lesser lights. Nor is he a sitcom comedian of which John Bunny, Max Davidson and Sidney Drew were the silent prototypes. I suggested in the other review that there is a stylistic resemblance with the great French comedian Max Linder (I might have added the young Lubitsch) and an affinity, unusual in US comedy, with the more "absurd" style of European comedy.
Surprisingly (but not perhaps as surprising as it might seem) Fairbanks (real name Ullman) has rather more in common with the rather later US tradition of stand-up-based comedians, most of them also of East European Ashkenazi stock - Kubelsky (Benny), Bob Hope (the goy that proves the rule), Kaminsky (Kaye), Levitch (Lewis) and even Komigsberg (Allen). Fairbanks kept his own Jewish origins dark but did not entirely disown them. Jewish humour peeks through at several points in this film.
Compare, for instance this comedy with Bananas (1971) and the similarities are not far to find. Here we have the typical Douglas character of the early comedies, searching for some meaning to his existence (and a mother) while there we have an Allen in eternal search of a suitable soulmate, which, for Allen, comes to much the same thing. Both become embroiled more or less accidentally in a political intrigue in an imaginary foreign kingdom.
Of course there are all the differences one might expect between a drama of the teens and a drama of the seventies (plus the fact that Fairbanks politics are highly reactionary and Allen's leftist) but the two films nevertheless have very similar strengths and very similar weaknesses. There is a strong sense of comic fantasy, often careless (or rather carefree) with regard to continuity and pleasantly oblivious to the normal tenets of US film realism. The celebrated "surreal" nightmare that appears in When the Clouds Roll By was in fact originally shot for this film.
But this is combined with a rather weak and simplistic notion of political satire.... Bananas would later look woefully frivolous in the light of the "real 9/11" of 1973 (the assassination of Allende and establishment of the Pinochet regime in Chile). His Majesty the American, which had government backing and was originally intended to promote Wilson's Fourteen Points had to be hastily rewritten after the non-ratification of the League of Nations and ends up being inadequate either as propaganda or satire. Both films therefore end up in this respect, as Henabery put it, as "a load of hash".
Both films also have subdued subtexts concerning drugs (Allen) and drink (Fairbanks). They were respective subjects on which both men were mildly puritanical. Fairbanks was a teetotaller (see the milk-drinking scene) and Allen has never touched drugs (not even marijuana).
Fairbanks shares also with Allen a taste for sly topical references more or less in propra persona that deliberately break the illusion of the film. Sometimes those references have become difficult to decode. What, for instance, should one make of the impassive man of strange aspect with the prominent apple's apple in the hotel? When someone enters, the man suddenly becomes animated and the two do something that makes Douglas react with mild disgust. I have watched this scene several times on the relatively poor copy available to me but cannot for the life of me work out what is going on.
Then there is the mysterious balding man reading a newspaper in the street to whom Fairbanks addresses the question "Are you stading for President over here?" Logically this should be William Gibbs McAdoo, the lawyer and former Secretary to the Treasury under Woodrow Wilson (and Wilson's son-in-law) who failed to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920 since McAdoo was also legal adviser and major shareholder (along with Fairbanks, Pickford, Grifith and Chaplin) in United Artists. But it doesn't look like him.....
If anyone has any information on these two strange little scenes, perhaps they could post it.
