Mabel Normand in Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916)
Mabel Normand is someone I knew more as a concept than as an actual screen personality. As Mack Sennett's one-again-off-again betrothed, and his favorite leading lady at Keystone, she helped discover Charlie Chaplin and threw the screen's first custard pie. And she was a wild girl who gave good copy. ("Say anything you like, but don't say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.")
I'd seen her in some early Chaplin films, typically rather disorganized affairs where she cries a lot and is almost crowded off the screen by rhubarbing clowns (Mabel's Busy Day, 1914). It was always a problem, making any impression amid the chaos of a Keystone movie, which is part of why Chaplin hated it. No room to breathe for the gags,...
Mabel Normand is someone I knew more as a concept than as an actual screen personality. As Mack Sennett's one-again-off-again betrothed, and his favorite leading lady at Keystone, she helped discover Charlie Chaplin and threw the screen's first custard pie. And she was a wild girl who gave good copy. ("Say anything you like, but don't say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.")
I'd seen her in some early Chaplin films, typically rather disorganized affairs where she cries a lot and is almost crowded off the screen by rhubarbing clowns (Mabel's Busy Day, 1914). It was always a problem, making any impression amid the chaos of a Keystone movie, which is part of why Chaplin hated it. No room to breathe for the gags,...
- 5/29/2014
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
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