MABEL’S NEW  HELLO

A fresh look at the films of Mabel Normand has been long overdue. Since her death seventy-six years ago she’s still the most famous female name of silent comedy, but her talents have been taken for granted and her films rarely screened. Like her good friend and frequent co-star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, she’s better remembered for the scandals that she was linked to than for the almost twenty years she spent entertaining audiences. Recently a number of her lost films have resurfaced giving us the opportunity to re-discover and re-examine her place in silent comedy history. By Steve Massa*

Born in 1893 in Staten Island, New York, Mabel became a model for photographers and popular artists like Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg while in her teens. It was a small leap to early movies and by 1911 she was appearing in Vitagraph comedies and D. W. Griffith dramas for Biograph. Although she had no formal training as an actress, Mabel was extremely photogenic and the camera loved her spontaneity and spunkiness. A professional and personal relationship with Mack Sennett led to her becoming his leading lady – first for his comedies at Biograph and then at his own Keystone studio.

The often slapdash and usually rowdy early Keystones rarely stopped to give her an opportunity to do more than perform slapstick roughhouse and react to the gyrations of, Sennett, Ford Sterling and Fred Mace. But soon she was directing many of her own shorts (one of only a handful of women to do so), and when she worked with Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle they were able to slow down the breakneck pace and concentrate more on characterization, particularly in the popular “Fatty and Mabel” series which combined physical slapstick with situational and domestic comedy.

According to legend Mabel caught Sennett in a compromising position with her friend Mae Busch not long before she and Sennett were set to be married. To keep Mabel from leaving the studio Sennett formed the Mabel Normand Feature Film Co. But by the time MICKEY (’18), the first feature, was released Mabel had jumped ship and was working for Samuel Goldwyn. From 1918 to 1922 she made sixteen features for Goldwyn, most of which used a Cinderella-type of plot about a poor or working class girl who wins her Prince Charming by the end of the film. Out of this group of sixteen only three are known to exist today. During this time her behavior and life-style became erratic, said to have been the result of drug use. In 1922 Hollywood was rocked by the murder of popular director William Desmond Taylor. Taylor had been in love with Mabel and had gone to great lengths to get her off drugs, which included threatening certain drug suppliers who probably murdered him in revenge.

Although not implicated in the murder Mabel had been the last person to see Taylor alive and was seriously damaged by the rumors and stories blazened all over the newspapers. At this point she was back at Sennett, having just made the feature MOLLY O’ (‘21). Mack gallantly continued on, producing two additional features, but another scandal involving a drunken party and a shooting effectively stopped her film career. Fleeing Hollywood, she traveled abroad and also tried the legitimate stage in a play that closed before it reached Broadway.

In 1926, F. Richard Jones was director-general of the Hal Roach studio. Having directed Mabel’s Sennett features, he talked Roach into hiring her for a series. Using the basic Cinderella plot of Mabel’s earlier features, Jones surrounded her with strong comedy pros like Oliver Hardy, Jimmy Finlayson, and Max Davidson. The result was a charming group of films, with the last – SHOULD MEN WALK HOME? (’27) a crook comedy directed by Leo McCarey – being one of her all time best comedies. But Mabel’s lifestyle had taken its toll. At times she gets a distracted and disoriented look in her eyes. Anita Garvin, who supported Mabel in RAGGEDY ROSE (’26) later commented “Mabel’s mind was pretty well shot by the time I did that film with her.” Tired and ailing she retired in 1927, and died of tuberculosis in 1930 at age 37.

Out of the nearly 200 films that Mabel made around 99 are known to exist, but much of what’s missing is her mature work – the features for Goldwyn. Although many of her Sennett features and final films for Hal Roach survive they’ve been largely unavailable, causing her reputation to be based on the early ragtag Sennett shorts. Luckily in the last few years lost features such as THE FLOOR BELOW (’18) and HEAD OVER HEELS (’22) have miraculously been found and preserved, and others like MOLLY O’ restored, giving us a better idea of how her career progressed and her talents grew. These newly available features showcase her dramatic talents and her gift for small, intimate comedy moments, which tended to get steamrolled over in the breakneck-paced Sennett shorts, giving us a more nuanced look at her abilities. Hopefully her lost films will continue to be recovered, so that the many talents of the first lady of silent comedy can be acknowledged and enjoyed.

*Steve Massa is a stage actor and historic researcher of American slapstick comedies. In addition to his various essays on the topic, he contributes regularly to documentaries, DVD compilations and film programs about silent comedy at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of the Moving Image, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto and the Silent Clowns Film Series, among others. Within all these activities, Massa's main focus is on the work of forgotten actors and actresses.

Dutch translation published in Biënnale-Zine 2007 pages 16-17