I last wrote about Dwan on July 11, 2014; the subject was his extraordinary 1930 film Man to Man(1930). Dwan had a long career, starting with D. W. Griffith in 1916 and making his final film in 1961. His films were usually done quickly, with minimal budgets, but he obviously learned from Griffith where to put the camera, how to cut a scene, how to get subtle performances from his actors. Getting Gertie's Garter is a farce -- complete with slamming doors, climbing out of windows, hiding in haylofts and under beds. Dennis O'Keefe, a skilled farceur, plays an absent-minded professor who has to recover a garter he gave an old girlfriend before his wife finds out about it, when he is required to testify in court (the man who sold it to him pocketed the money). It starts out in a Boston hospital, where he dreams that his wife is strangling him with the garter, and moves quickly to Ipswich, where O'Keefe's former girlfriend is about to get married and four couples (including a blackmailing servant and his wife) get mixed up in attempting to keep track of where the garter is (at one point O'Keefe walks around with it stuck to his butt).
The physical comedy is mostly in long shot --something Dwan learned from Griffith and Chaplin -- and it is quite effective in conveying disorientation and confusion. Whether one finds this funny or not depends on many factors, of course, but I have said numerous times that the best comedy is the most serious; Getting Gertie's Garter is at one level an elegantly choreographed farce, but at another level it is a serious film about love, marriage, jealousy and commitment. I would also say that the screenplay (credited to Dwan and others) displays an impressive level of civilized discourse, where peccadillo, roue', and dissembling are words in everyone's vocabulary.
No comments:
Post a Comment