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By PAUL BRENNER
It is illustrative of the
richness of American silent film comedy that a
quirky talent like Charlie Bowers can disappear
completely off the radar of critical appreciation
until a French film archivist in the 1960s began
investigative detective work to uncover a
mysterious comedian known in France as "Bricolo."
Raymond Borde of the Toulouse Cinemateque began
the search after discovering a collection of rusty
canisters simply labeled "Bricolo." After
discovering that Bricolo was the name given to an
American comic named Charley Bowers, Borde began
to scour the world archives for Bowers films. As
usually the case in film preservation, Bowers
films were located throughout the world in the
archives of France, the Netherlands, and
Czechoslovakia and only one film found in Bowers'
own native country of the United States. Eleven of
Bowers's twenty shorts are still considered lost
films.
Bowers's original claim to fame was as the
animator and producer of hundreds of "Mutt and
Jeff" animated films from 1915 until the early
twenties. In the mid-20s, Bowers switched from
pure animation to a hybrid mixture of live action
and animation (like an early incarnation of Jan
Svankmier), comedy shorts starring himself as an
obsessive inventor of gadgets, gizmos,
contraptions, and crazy machines. Bowers continued
with these shorts until after his first talkie
short -- "It's a Bird" from 1930 (much admired by
surrealists like Andre Breton). After "It's a
Bird," Bowers dropped off the map, heading to New
Jersey, working in advertising and industrial
shorts, and drawing cartoons for local New Jersey
newspapers. He reemerged in the late thirties as
the animator for a short subject about oil for the
New York World's Fair (the film was also the first
film produced by Joseph Losey). But after a few
other animations in the early forties, Bowers
contracted a debilitating illness and died in
obscurity in 1946.
Bowers gets his due in Image Entertainment's
two-disc collection "The Complete Charley Bowers:
The Rediscovery of An American Comic Genius" which
includes fifteen shorts (seven comedies and eight
animated films). It is not "complete" however --
another Bowers short, "There It Is," is available
as part of the massive collection "More Treasures
From American Film Archives."
The Bowers collection is very impressive. Bowers
is ingenious the construction of his elaborate
stop-motion mechanical labor saving devices --
unbreakable eggs in "Egged On," a full service
contraption that eliminates the wait staff in a
restaurant in "He Done His Best," a crazy machine
that does everything around the house including
creating life in "A Wild Roomer," non-slip banana
skins in "Many a Slip," mechanical dance shoes in
"Fatal Footsteps," a collection of hybrid grafts
in "Now You Tell One," and (creepiest of all) the
hatching of a hybrid freak ostrich straight out of
David Cronenberg's "The Fly" in "Say Ah-h!"
Bowers's obsessive creations are the centerpieces
of his films. Utilizing stop motion animation
techniques ("The Bower Process"), Bowers
frequently stops his films cold as, for example, a
metal-eating bird is seen gobbling up every bit of
scrap metal in site.
Which is just as well, since Bowers as a comic
lacks the grace and finesse of the great comics
like Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton, comics that
Bowers sought to emulate in his comedies. Keaton,
in particular, is the comic Bowers seeks most to
emulate -- think "The Electric House." But Bowers
-- The Man Who Would Be Keaton -- doesn't have an
ounce of Keaton's charisma and cannot lock onto
the camera with his gaze as Keaton does and give
the audience the ability to see his soul. Bowers
is flat and workmanlike, his comic routines
run-throughs by a stand in.
Then again, not many comics could achieve the
level of a Keaton and Bowers didn't feel the need
to. His genius was in his animations and
inventions and as much as the Bowers Charley
character in the his comedy shorts is obsessed to
the point of callousness in perfecting his
inventions, Bowers the director was equally as
obsessed in the technical details of his stop
motion creations. If his animations got in the way
of character development and universal appeal, so
be it. Bowers had no illusions. As a result, his
films are clean, fast-paced, and, above all,
funny. Something always gets in the way of Charley
succeeding with his invention, but the fun and joy
is getting through the creative process with
Charley; when Charley's inventions fail in his
films it not in the least bit bathetic; we have
already seen the invention succeed and that's all
that matters. Bowers is the ultimate illustration
of Dylan's line about knowing "there's no success
like failure and that failure's no success at
all."
Image also offers a documentary on the rediscovery
of Bowers by Borde and an enticing photo gallery
of stills from Bowers's lost films. |
