I’m here to talk about farces. About romantic comedies, TV sitcoms, and silent slapstick. About Charley Chase, the Marx Brothers, and Charles Coburn. I’m inspired this week by the lovely 1943 romantic comedy The More the Merrier, with Jean Arthur, which TCM is running Monday night. But I’m also hoping you’ll not only set your DVR for that gem, but maybe seek out a DVD of Charley Chase’s Mighty Like a Moose… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
One dictionary definition of “farce” is: “a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations.”
Here’s another: “a light, humorous play in which the plot depends upon a skillfully exploited situation rather than upon the development of character.”
Here’s Wikipedia on the subject: “a farce is a comedy that aims at entertaining the audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, and thus improbable. Farces are often highly incomprehensible plot-wise (due to the many plot twists and random events that occur), but viewers are encouraged not to try to follow the plot in order to avoid becoming confused and overwhelmed.”
Here’s my definition (summing above the above): farces are sitcoms. Which is why I’m not all that enamored of the suggestion that farces are about their absurd situations and not their characters, because without a good grounding in character the absurd situations are too ridiculous to register. And it’s character that separates the popular sitcoms from the footnotes.
Throughout my tenure on this blog, I’ve been exploring a recurring theme. It’s my contention that American screen comedy underwent a massive evolution. It started with a largely male-dominated world of silent slapstick, but the advent of sound coincided with a shift towards a female-dominated, more ensemble-focused style of romantic comedies. Screwball comedies were farces—and they paved the way for television sitcoms.
Blah blah blah, right? Let’s watch it in action. Of all the silent clowns, there was one slapstician who more than any other seemed to be working in a sitcom style decades before TV even existed—Charley Chase
Let’s take for example one of Charley Chase’s most admired creations, a two-reel short from 1926 called Mighty Like a Moose.
The premise is, at root, as old as they get. One of the classic farce setups involves a husband or a wife setting out to test the fidelity of their partner by engineering a fake affair. One of them takes a disguise, woos the other under false pretenses, and lo and behold an “affair” has begun. Think of the opera The Merry Widow. Or that Kate Bush song Babooshka.
But Chase brings a brilliant, and twisted, twist: in his version, both hubby and wifey are in disguise. How’s that you say? Through the magic of plastic surgery! Charley and his wife each “have some work done,” but in secret as a surprise for the other. The changes are enough they don’t recognize each other. So Charley and his wife are flirting with each other believing themselves to be straying, while also desperately trying to steer clear of their spouse.
The result is twenty minutes of four people rushing around a house, opening and closing doors in an intricate dance of just-missing each other—except it isn’t four people, it’s just two.
This is Chase’s forte. The precision timing is peerless. But if you do treat yourself to this gem, watch the doors. Of all the definitions you could offer up of farce, maybe the most practical is: “the comedy of opening and closing doors.”
The Marx Brothers boiled the whole genre down to its essence and burned through it in just a handful of minutes in Horsefeathers, with the various Marxes and Thelma Todd rampaging through a bunch of doors (and putting on and taking off their “rubbers” as well). (Sorry you missed this—it was on TCM last Thursday).
But if you really want to have some fun with opening and closing doors in a movie that isn’t determined to parody the whole concept, check out the infectiously charming 1943 George Stevens comedy The More the Merrier on Monday.
To understand all the door slamming going on in The More the Merrier we need to step back and take notice of a particular subgenre of screwball comedy. I’ve written here before about one flavor of screwball used “comedies of remarriage” and divorce as a tricky way to tell stories about sexually mature and experienced adults experimenting with other partners, but to do so without falling afoul of the Production Code’s prohibitions on depicting adultery. Well, there were other tricks employed by screwball—and one of them was the Roommate Trick.
In these films, an unmarried couple would be thrown together into intimate living conditions by circumstance, allowing the filmmakers to explore the ways that enforced intimacy nourished romance, without the censors getting too enraged. Think Hands Across the Table, Rafter Romance, arguably you could include the ur-screwball It Happened One Night in this subgenre—and of course all its clones, like Next Time I Marry.
Where The More the Merrier riffs on that approach is in numbers. You see, we start with apartment-dweller Jean Arthur. She lives in Washington, DC during the pitch of WW2. And in them days, the sheer volume of people who had to come to DC to coordinate the war effort quickly overwhelmed the housing stock leading to epic housing shortages. For example, statesman Charles Coburn, who has come at the behest of Senator Noonan but finds no room at the inn. He blusters and talks his way into getting Jean Arthur to lease out half her apartment to him (he’s like that—a go-getter who never takes “no” for an answer).
She’s a wee bit worried that people might talk—an unmarried man and a woman sharing a room—and the smile on Coburn’s face when he realizes she’s concerned that people might mistake him for her lover is one of the sweetest gags in the film. (One of the sharper gags, by contrast, comes in a scene set at Arthur’s workplace—dominated by women, with all the men off to war, the ladies wolf whistle and sexually harass the lone male employee.)
Coburn, meanwhile, sublets half of his half of the apartment to airplane engineer Joel McCrea—who is more likely to be mistaken for Jean Arthur’s lover, especially when the two of them start falling in love.
Control freak Jean works out a meticulous schedule, down to the second, for how she and Charles will go through their morning routines without accidentally crossing each other in the bathroom. The first iteration of this timetable is a slapstick gem, but it’s the second go-round that pays the gag off. Because the second time has all three of them swinging through the doors, with Coburn desperately (and mostly excellently) trying to keep both Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea oblivious as to the other’s presence.
If the central joke in Mighty Like a Moose was how two people moving in and out of doors could be mistaken for four, The More the Merrier takes three people and makes it look like two.
The film was a revelation for Charles Coburn. He’d been a Hollywood mainstay for years, but playing gruff patriarchs and overbearing battleaxes. Films like Bachelor Mother and Vivacious Lady depended on his comic timing, but barely tapped his potential. By casting him as a loveable old rogue, rather than an insufferable bastard, The More the Merrier found the best use for Coburn’s talents—and earned him an Oscar for best supporting actor.
Ernst Lubitsch took his cue from this and cast Coburn in Heaven Can Wait in essentially the same role—the magic pixie dream grampa, if you will.