Haunted Spooks/The Haunted House

[masterofoneinchpunch]

This is a rewrite of something I partially wrote several years ago.  I had rewatched both of these in October as I tend to do every year.
 
Haunted Spooks (1920: Alfred J. Goulding, Hal Roach) ***½/****
The Haunted House (1921: Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton) ****/****

I thought I would compare and contrast two famous silent shorts on the same basic theme: the “fake haunted house” which is itself an offshoot of the “old dark house” theme.
 
In Haunted Spooks Harold Lloyd plays his typical The Boy character, but with a small twisted twist. After a snubbed love affair he decides to commit suicide (much like Keaton would do in Hard Luck a year later and much like he would do a year later in Never Weaken), which he is completely inept at. Luckily he runs into a lawyer (or the lawyer almost runs into him) who is looking for someone for The Girl (Mildred Davis whom Lloyd would later marry in real life) to marry. He has no issue with this and gives up his current quest for The End sans Burt Reynolds. The Uncle (Wallace Howe) is trying to trick them out of their inheritance. They are supposed to live in the house for at least a year, but if they fail in this her Uncle gets the inheritance. To do this he, from an idea from his wife, creates a haunted house.
 
In The Haunted House we have the more familiar variation of this theme of crooks establishing a haunted house to get away with their nefarious deeds (several Scooby Doo episodes, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken – you know you like your Don Knotts). Here we have local crooks led by Keaton-villain Joe Roberts who created an elaborate haunted house to cover up his counterfeiting scheme. Buster Keaton is the bungling bank clerk who happens upon this scheme, but at the same time gets blamed for a robbery at the bank and barely escapes while using the “haunted house” as a safe house along with criminals and the cast of a Faust flop who are hiding from angry patrons after a disastrous performance.
 
In The Haunted Spooks the house is more of the end of a punchline since its presence is at the end of the short but the house in The Haunted House is one of the best visual gag themed films of its time. It is an elaborate built, well thought out haunted house. Both films are disjointed in storyline, but neither is hurt by this. It seems like a natural progression within the plot both leading up to the haunted house. However, their approach with it is different and that approach is what makes the difference between a good movie versus a great film. So much thought is given into the mechanical gags* of The Haunted House, which is often a modus operandi of Keaton’s movies since he was a natural tinkerer, that the house itself becomes a character like the brilliant dilapidated mansion in Crimson Peak or in the 1999 version of The Haunting (or is this reference too literal; almost a subgenre as I can think of a whole bunch of other examples.)

However, the most known fact about the film** is that this is the movie where Lloyd lost a thumb, a finger, was blinded for a period of time by a prop bomb that exploded in his face. After this he wore a hand prosthesis for most (probably all) of his work including toward the end of this film.  If you are not looking for it, it is easy to miss his fake hand.  All close-ups later on in the film are done with body hand doubles (reminds me of how James Doohan’s hands were often doubled in Star Trek close-ups because of a missing finger he lost in WWII or almost any card trick in any movie.)[t]
 
On aspect I noticed for the first time after several years of watching these is that both have at least one excellent scene of moving from foreground to background.  The type of film used flattens out the space so that there really is no need for focus if an object or person changes depth.  So you get to see uses of “deep focus” which would be made more famous years later in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (occasionally you might read a canard that he was the first to do this which really makes no sense.)

Buster Keaton is one of my favorite comedians, so I am a bit biased. But his popularity had endured because his comedy is brilliant. He is appreciated more by critics now than he ever has during his lifetime and like Chaplin the resurgence started near the 1960s and has not stopped since.  But I am a Harold Lloyd fan as well.  Harold Lloyd to me is the most underrated silent comedian now next to Charley Chase, though Lloyd along with Charles Chaplin was one of the most popular comedians of his era.  It helps that their films are so much easier to get a hold of in the States including several releases from Criterion on both Chaplin and Lloyd while Kino has put out Buster Keaton’s silent and some rare sound films like the Educational shorts (which for the most part I like and prefer them to the Columbia shorts he would do soon after.) I have the R1 New Line Home Video The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection which unfortunately is OOP, while Criterion has the rights and are slowly releasing the films and some of the shorts with additional new extras. Funny as I reread this a year later it still holds true: Criterion is slooooooowly releasing the Lloyd films but at least they are available in blu-ray.

Here is an interesting blog entry on the acting differences between “the big three” while focusing on Harold Lloyd. I found this when searching for the difference between the acting styles of the two. He correct in that Keaton would elongate scenes if the comedy was there where Lloyd is more plot oriented working off of what comes his way. He believes that this is because of Keaton’s vaudevillian background and Lloyd’s strictly movie background. While Keaton was the more physical of the two, Lloyd had no issue with doing stunts as well. Lloyd was the outwardly more emotional of the two (this is not saying much since Keaton was known as the stoneface – though he did act through the eyes) and often took a more optimistic approach that Keaton.  One thing he is not quite right on is that Keaton’s deadpan demeanor is not as apparent in the Roscoe Arbuckle shorts.  You can see him cry, laugh and run a whole gamut of emotions.
 
* Love seeing them in Hong Kong films for example the mediocre Fearless Hyena 2. 
 
** There is some controversy as to how racist Haunted Spooks is. While the portrayal of the blacks is stereotypical in the aspect of them being scared by ghosts, the fact is everyone else besides the Uncle as well. However, the use of intertitles in its characterized drawings of blacks is the most racist aspect about the film and the most difficult to defend.
 
Sources:
Roger Ebert on Safety Last
Roger Ebert on The Films of Buster Keaton
Commentary on Haunted Spooks: Suzanne Lloyd, Annette D'Agostino Lloyd and Richard Correll

Edited December 13, 2016 by masterofoneinchpunch

[Super Ninja]

So after accepting the task of watching these two short, I can only thank @masterofoneinchpunch for recommending as I really enjoyed immensely watching them. Also, that's a great write up sir, very informative and it makes me wanna rewatch The Haunted House. In case anyone is interested, both shorts are available on YT. Here are my thoughts.

Haunted Spooks (1921) - Seeing Lloyd and Keaton in (let's call it) a horror comedy is something completely new for me, and I have to say HS was short and sweet, making me respect Lloyd's work even more. The opening background music gives you a good idea of what you're in for and sets the tone that you know is going to be light, despite this short's attempt to deliver its gags from another, scary perspective. There's nothing scary about it even though I wish there was, but the comedy definitely delivers and despite its 25 minute runtime, HS offers more laughs than most of today's feature comedies. I hope the new generations of movie lovers won't neglect these, now hundred years old movies, that would be a real shame.

HS offers Lloyd's recognizable slapstick mixed with daredevil stunts though there's nothing really dangerous on display. The script is once again brilliantly written, and I loved how the actors weren't only listed but their characters described as well and not only that, the cast/character card introduces the viewers with the time and place where the story is about to take place. The main take away for me were funny and creative title cards which add a flavor I haven't yet tasted in silent movies and I have to say I very much liked it. One thing I was lacking though was camera movement, seems that's something that was only later on introduced in silent cinema. Compared to The Kid Brother, HS feels almost like a filmed stage play and the mise-en-scene of the two directors doesn't help making it less static. With its depiction of blacks, HS should have found its place in the recent Shudder documentary Horror Noire: The History of Black Horror (2019) but I don't remember it being mentioned there. Despite not being perfect, Haunted Spooks is funny, witty and hugely enjoyable short from one of the masters.

The Haunted House (1921) - Maybe it was a mistake watching HS before THH, because Keaton's short felt a bit underwhelming. I always felt Keaton is the king of taking basic, even predictable jokes and taking them hilarious, unpredictable places. That's why THH felt more basic as in you can see where the jokes are coming from, but no less creative only in a different way. Instead of light and witty, Keaton opted for a more surreal and even morbid, but the end result is something I wouldn't call one of his finest efforts. It's funny how both shorts pretty much neglected the supernatural by turning humans into fake spooks and just by covering them with a white sheet. Keaton does feature impressive scene of a man assembled by two skeleton-like creatures and brought to life as well as other ideas that can't be just logically explained, which gives his haunted short a mysterious dimension that is very much welcome, at least in my book. Being that Keaton is my favorite among the three, I was actually surprised to like Lloyd's short better.

[masterofoneinchpunch]

@Super Ninja You start to see the camera move more in the mid and later 1920s.  It is amazing how fast cinema progressed when you think about it.  Watch the Edison shorts or even the Lumiere shorts gives you an idea (not you will find movement now and then, it just is the exception not the norm).

Keaton would do the absurd more in the shorts than in full-length features (meaning anything goes in a short where he wanted the audience involved in the characters and storyline in the longer films).  Keaton was quite good with the camera and special effects.  Obviously this is not as noticable as Sherlock Jr. or The Playhouse, but he tends to be quite good at placement and composition.

But its great to see some movie tropes way before we would think of them (and it is possible that some of these predate cinema and are in theater -- I've done some studying of earlier theater, but not enough).

Both of these I watch every year so that says something about the rewatchability of them.