Many a Slip

I remember the first time I saw a Charley Bowers comedy as part of a silent film variety program; it was like discovering that Buster Keaton had a first cousin from Mars. Slightly built, with dark side-parted hair and a long, pale face, Bowers sometimes bears an uncanny resemblance to Keaton, enhanced by his ingenious underdog character and his interest in machinery. But his films are much zanier, more truly bizarre and surreal. Keaton, especially in his feature films, was a stickler for logic, authenticity, and believable stories. Bowers was an illusionist; the core of his art is the dream-like fantasies he created through stop-motion animation: cars hatching from eggs, a stuffed doll coming to life, a mouse firing a gun. His background was in cartooning and animation, and he brought a loopy, far-out sensibility that is closer to the cartoons of the Fleischer Brothers than to the work of any other silent comedians. But comparisons are inadequate; Charley Bowers was unique.

While he's not a great performer, Charley is a winning presence in his own films. The key-note of his character is enthusiasm: he's constantly bounding and hopping around in excitement over his inventions. He usually played an inventor, a guy with a one-track mind, calmly monomaniacal, unquenchably visionary. He invents a process that renders egg-shells unbreakable, grafts a pussy-willow bush that grows live cats, builds a fully-automated restaurant kitchen and constructs a pair of shoes that dance by themselves. As a friend of mine pointed out, Charley was an early type of the "techno-geek," a technically brilliant guy who is weak in social skills. His off-beat behavior often sabotages his success; he doesn't always get the girl. Many of his films follow the downbeat pattern of THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT: violent hostility overtakes the well-meaning inventor when his inventions go awry or threaten the status quo.

Charley Bowers' films are usually more mind-boggling than laugh-out-loud funny, but MANY A SLIP is simply hilarious. It starts with a delicious premise: Charley the inventor sets out to develop a formula for non-slippery banana peels. (Has he considered how many slapstick comedians this would throw out of work?) He hides out in a basement workshop, avoiding the interference of his battle-ax mother-in-law, and he goes about his work with methodical zeal. He has a spidery multi-armed machine that dunks peels in experimental solutions (everything in his workshop is labeled "patent applied for") and he tests the treated peels himself, trudging heroically up a staircase and letting himself skid to the bottom. When he gets tired of that he starts planting them for others to slip on, popping out of trap doors and poking a fishing-rod out of a hidden window. A montage of pratfalls follows, until he finally achieves a peel with good traction. It's not too surprising when the man who offers him $50,000 for the invention turns out to be an escaped lunatic.

Believe it or not, this is one of the less weird Bowers films I've seen. It contains only a small segment of animation, when Charley looks through a kind of microscope (it looks like a giant, inverted telescope) and discovers the germ that's responsible for making banana peels slippery, a little critter that skates and slithers around woozily. This is scientific progress, silent comedy style.

NOTE: When I watched this film on the excellent Lobster Films DVD "Charley Bowers: the Rediscovery of an American Comic Genius," I didn't realize that I was seeing only the second half of a two-reel film, all that survived at the time. Then, at a screening presented by Serge Bromberg, the head of Lobster Films, I got to see the whole thing, a complete print having recently turned up. Most of the best stuff is in the latter half anyway, but the first reel shows the arrival of Charley's mother-in-law and her two dreadful sons for a visit, and some of Charley's other inventions, including a bicycle-powered player-piano and a self-feeding coal boiler that causes the radiator to melt into a puddle. We also see a man (who returns at the end) offer Charley a reward for the invention of a non-skid banana skin. Enraged by Charley's erratic inventions, his mother-in-law storms off to the police station—and that's where the version on the DVD picks up. Here's hoping that more lost Charley Bowers work will be discovered—there's nothing else like it.

This is an amusing little feature that efficiently uses its basic premise. The concept in itself is not only simple, but far-fetched, and yet the story eases into it very smoothly, making a very wacky idea seem quite logical - as wacky ideas tend to do in the world of Charley Bowers.

The story has Charley as an eccentric inventor, who this time is trying to come up with a way to make banana peels less slippery. His character approaches it with the zeal, discipline, and persistence of a devoted scientist, and it is pretty funny to see both his methods and his seriousness in pursuing such a pointless project.

The gadgetry and the accompanying slapstick both work well. Shorter than most of Bowers's features from the era, it's a good example of getting a lot out of a premise without trying to drag it out too long. It's entertaining and worth seeing.