Dorothy Devore.
THE WORLD OF SILENT COMEDY IS DOMINATED BY THE NAMES OF famous men—Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and others—with women generally relegated to the ranks of leading ladies, in reality little more than supporting players. If any female comedy performer from the silent era has instant name recognition it is Mabel Normand (1892–1930), not because she was one of Mack Sennett’s stars prior to Chaplin or because she directed some of his earliest short subjects, but because she was the comedian’s leading lady and went on to enjoy a starring career in her own right. (The fight against drug addiction certainly did not hurt her modern fame, even if it did have a devastating effect on her career, leading to an early death.) Yet there is another female comedy star, with a unique and original style, who also began her career with Mack Sennett and was also there as a female support in the first film Chaplin both wrote and directed, Laughing Gas (1914), one of at least seven Chaplin films in which she appeared. Her name is Alice Howell.
This volume—the first book-length study—represents a tribute to a relatively forgotten pioneer of screen comedy, an actress with a unique comedic style who appeared, by my count, in at least 150 films, the majority of which are lost. As a result, modern audiences have been unable to appreciate Alice Howell’s talent. Yet when a film is unearthed and seen today, viewers never fail to be impressed and, perhaps more important, amused. Hopefully, this rediscovery process will continue.
Alice Howell is a member of a small group of genuine silent film comediennes who was a star in her own right, as opposed to being a leading lady present merely to provide support for a male comedian. Unlike the majority of her contemporaries in the field, she was a comedienne, and they were not. Edna Purviance played in support of Charlie Chaplin. Bebe Daniels (who then and later displayed a humorous side to her personality) was Harold Lloyd’s first leading lady, later to be replaced by his wife-to-be, Mildred Davis, and then by Jobyna Ralston. Buster Keaton had a number of leading ladies—Anne Cornwall, Marceline Day, Marion Mack, Kathryn McGuire, Sally O’Neil, Natalie Talmadge (his wife in real life)1, et al.—as did Harry Langdon, with Madeline Hurlock and Natalie Kingston. They were not primarily comediennes. Two of Langdon’s leading ladies, Joan Crawford in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) and Priscilla Bonner in The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927), could never be considered comedy players. Priscilla Bonner was a waif of a figure, there to lend credence to Langdon’s childlike innocence. Joan Crawford certainly could and did display a comedic side in some of her starring roles, but with the passing of the years, it was obvious that her métier was drama or melodrama. Some comedians, such as Carter DeHaven, Sidney Drew, and Larry Semon, featured their wives—Mrs. Carter DeHaven (Flora Parker), Mrs. Sidney Drew (Lucille McVey), and Dorothy Dwan, respectively. Billie Rhodes was a lightweight comedian of the 1910s, more charming than funny. Her husband, the overweight “Smiling Billy” Parsons, did not play opposite her but he did serve as her producer. Opposites worked well together in silent screen comedy, as rotund John Bunny proved with his choice of the thin and angular Flora Finch. In general, this latter group were proponents of what is perhaps best described as refined feminine comedy with not a hint of slapstick or physical gags. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle utilized his obesity in pursuit of physical humor, but John Bunny’s humor is restrained (almost barely perceptible) and limited to appropriate facial expressions.
Just as silent comedy relied on obese men, it was not without its overweight comedy ladies, most notably Babe London, primarily associated with Christie Comedies, and mention should also be made of Mert (or Merta) Sterling, who worked with Alice Howell in the 1910s and was active in comedy shorts through into the late 1920s. From the legitimate stage and vaudeville came Marie Dressler and Trixie Friganza, both of whom made much of their size and both of whom, truth be told, were probably not at their best in silent motion pictures. Friganza worked primarily as a character actress on screen in the 1920s and 1930s. Dressler, despite being the star of Chaplin’s first feature, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, was at her most entertaining with the coming of sound, where her constant “mugging” for the camera somehow came across as less obnoxious as say in the silent drama, The Divine Lady (1929), in which she plays Corinne Griffith’s mother. Marie Dressler teamed with Polly Moran for a couple of silent films in the late 1920s, and around much the same time, Anita Garvin and Marion Byron were teamed by Hal Roach in three comedy shorts, influenced by the teaming of Laurel and Hardy, and the best known, and available, of which is A Pair of Tights (1929).
Perhaps the most fascinating, and also the least known, of overweight silent film comediennes is Wilna Hervey (1894–1979), who weighed in at 300 pounds. Prior to entering films in the mid-1910s, she had studied at the Art Students League in New York and in later years, she was to become an established artist—ironically, Babe London also had aspirations to be a painter in later years, although her work is sadly unprofessional. In the early 1920s, Wilna Hervey, who seems to have specialized in playing Swedish characters, appeared as housekeeper Katrinka in the “Toonerville Trolley” series and as Tillie Olson in the “Plum Center” series, in both playing opposite Dan Mason. At this time, she met Dan Mason’s daughter, Nan, who was also a painter, and the two entered into a lifelong domestic partnership.2 Coincidentally, Hervey’s brother-in-law was Eugene V. Brewster, pioneering fan magazine publisher, responsible for Motion Picture Classic, Motion Picture Story Magazine, and Shadowland, among others.
In any discussion of comedy performances of the silent era, one needs to differentiate between comediennes and female comedy players. Prominent among the latter are the aforementioned Bebe Daniels, Marion Davies, Colleen Moore, and Constance Talmadge. They all are eminently able to provide entertaining and funny performances, which have easily stood the test of time, but they are not specifically comediennes in that they are also capable of giving dramatic performances where necessary. Constance Talmadge (1897–1973) manages to be very funny and also very serious, for example, in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). Colleen Moore ended her career with a moving interpretation of the wife of a humble railroad engineer who becomes a power-crazed, philandering industrialist in the sound drama The Power and the Glory (1933). One of the funniest comedy performances of the silent era is given by Beatrice Lillie in Exit Smiling (1926), but Lillie is primarily a stage comedienne who relies on the spoken word, and in Exit Smiling, one can almost hear her comedy patter throughout the film.
Certainly, the American silent film boasts a number of actresses primarily associated with dramatic roles who proved remarkably adept at comedy when required. Dorothy Gish made her mark as a comedienne as the Little Disturber in D. W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World, and went on to star in a series of Paramount feature-length comedies. Gloria Swanson demonstrates her slapstick credentials in Allan Dwan’s Manhandled (1924), in which she is a hapless shopgirl trying to survive a rush hour commute on the New York subway. Unfortunately, at least to me, it seems that Swanson’s features are a little too exaggerated and not suited to comedic effects. However, she certainly proves me wrong in the same film with her Chaplin impersonation, described by Movie Weekly (August 23, 1924) as being “as brilliant as anything we ever saw on the screen.” Swanson reprises the impersonation, and the years have not dimmed her abilities, as Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. (1950).
Swanson had worked for Mack Sennett (although not at the start of her career), and the producer also was responsible for introducing three leading ladies to the screen, Phyllis Haver, Natalie Kingston, and Marie Prevost, all of whom learned the art of comedy in his short subjects. It is too bad that Clara Bow did not begin her career as a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty. She would have looked good in swimming attire. In fact, she looked good in anything, and was a proficient comedienne, giving if not exactly athletic performances but certainly strenuous ones (matched apparently by similar off-screen efforts).
Possibly, the fundamental difference between these women and Alice Howell is that Swanson, Bow, and company were first and foremost actresses—stars—capable of taking on any role in any genre. Alice Howell was certainly a star in her own right, but she was strictly a comedienne. She neither attempted nor apparently was offered any other type of characterization.
Constance Talmadge tried to explain the role of women, such as herself, in relationship to comedy in 1927:
People often wonder why so few actresses in Hollywood take up comedy as their métier. While there are fully a dozen well-known comedians, the screen comediennes who have reached stardom are few indeed. It is probably this very necessity for being a little ridiculous to get good comic scenes that results in there being so many more comedians than comediennes. Women are afraid of being laughed at—no matter how good-natured the merriment—and look forward to graduating as soon as possible from the comedy class.3
In support of Talmadge’s argument, it must be noted that those women who do appear to want to be laughed at and ridiculed during the silent era are those with physical issues, such as obesity, or those who are unashamedly plain or grotesque in facial appearance. The same might obviously be said of many male comedy performers of the era, but, then, perhaps the men are more emotionally equipped to deal with ridicule. It might also be that female audiences did not respond at that time to any type of feminine comedy that was not genteel. In 1927, a writer in the trade paper the Moving Picture World, observed that “slapstick comedy with man-made laughs, and broad masculine humor seldom pleases the woman patron…. The reason that Our Gang comedies are such a great success is because here is humor that is gentle and that the feminine heart can interpret and enjoy.”4
One problem, more from a modern perspective, is that slapstick comedy involving women must also of necessity involve some form of physical abuse of the comedienne by the male support. A comedienne can fall down, perform a pratfall, without the aid of others, but often she will need more than a gentle shove and perhaps more than a hint of an embarrassing and/or offensive sequence of events. At the time, as far as actresses were concerned, it was an irrelevancy. In 1919, Norma Talmadge (whose forte is drama and not comedy) wrote,
An actress who takes up pictures as a career must not be squeamish, and if the director feels that a woman must be struck in order to make the picture realistic she must be game and take the blow.
Dramatic picture actresses are not called upon to take the rough and tumble handling that the makers of comedy pictures inflict upon each other, but every once-in-a-while one gets home from the studio with black and blue arms and an aching back just the same.5
Certainly, Alice Howell takes more than her share of physical punishment. As early as 1914 and the Keystone production of Shot in the Excitement, she takes both facial and head punishment on a par with that experienced by any male comedy player of the period. In 1917, Moving Picture World noted, “She is one of the few performers totally unafraid to take all the bumps and thumps that make up the life of a slapstick performer.”6
Vulgarity on screen was an issue not only in terms of physical humor but also subtitles. In a 1920 editorial, Motion Picture Magazine railed against the use of expletives in the latter, arguing, “Let us, then, make a renewed effort to keep the English of our screen literature pure. All these surplus expletives are unnecessary and, being of benefit to no one, have no place in the world of today.”7
Producers sought to depict their female players not as rough hoydens but rather family women who relaxed between takes by knitting for their menfolk, particularly in the war years. “In the East and West,” it was reported, “the girls of the flicker stage ply the needles relentlessly. They are doing their bit and getting a lot of fun out of it.”8 Louise Fazenda was pictured as efficient at knitting, while comedy partner Chester Conklin also tried his best with the needles.
Dorothy Devore.
Others might seek to adopt a moral tone, but Alice Howell’s producer, Century Comedies, in 1917 argued very differently: “Exhibitors were prompt in realizing the possibilities of a woman being featured as a comedienne in opposition to male fun-makers on the screen. State rights buyers readily perceived the advantages of the radical departure from set custom, and have taken a like interest in the new product.”9
Three silent comediennes who might be singled out as contemporaries of Alice Howell, possessing a similar ability either to perform physical comedy or readily adopt a visible humorous appearance, are Dorothy Devore, Fay Tincher, and Gale Henry. Dorothy Devore (1899–1976) was primarily a Christie comedienne, and as such was not expected to do anything more than be pretty and to look good in male attire (something of a penchant for producer Al Christie). However, in the 1924 feature film Hold Your Breath, she performs stunts every bit as impressive as those of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, climbing up the side of an office building. And while it is obvious that a stunt double is also present, it is equally clear that Devore performs some relatively dangerous maneuvers along a ledge on the third and fourth floors of the building.
Fay Tincher (1884–1983) entered films in 1914 and worked in a starring role for D. W. Griffith before demonstrating another side to her character with the Mutual Komic Comedies, also in 1914. Often she would play characters named “Ethel,” a name which perfectly matches the type of role, and she favored bold-striped dresses, not exactly grotesque but certainly eye-catching. Interestingly, Tincher ended her career in the mid-to-late 1920s, playing Min Gump in “The Gump” series based on the Andy Gump cartoon strip. Tincher actively fought against slapstick portrayals, arguing while also demeaning her potential audience: “I could have done that sort of thing when I first began, and got big pay for it, too, but I don’t do it. I hate it. There’s no art in that sort of thing, and there’s nothing funny in it, either, for people with any brains.”10
Gale Henry (1893–1972) also entered films in 1914, and she comes closest, many would agree, to Alice Howell’s comedic style. It seems remarkable that earlier she had been an opera singer in light of her embrace of make-up to emphasize her relatively unattractive features and costuming, which, like that of Alice Howell, did nothing to suggest any physical appeal. Harsh as it may be, the reality is that Gale Henry was no beauty. Like Howell, she would often play a “slavey” or a scrub lady, and like her colleague, she also worked at L-Ko with J. G. “Jack” Blystone. Unlike Alice Howell, and what makes Gale Henry perhaps more important to feminist film historians, is that she had her own production entity, the Model Comedy Company, which she cofounded with her husband, Bruno J. Becker, and which operated from 1918 through into the 1920s. While Alice Howell was busily involved in real estate in later years, Gale Henry continued on screen in character parts through into 1933.
Fay Tincher (center).
At least one modern commentator, Steve Massa, has written at length on Gale Henry, noting the elongated quality of her appearance, and adding,
Her angular and unconventional looks … made her perfect as lovelorn spinsters, overbearing wives, and burlesque country girls. Her thinness gave her the appearance of a living stick-figure—all gangly arms and legs, with incredibly expressive shoulders that would rise up to her ears with joy at the arrival of a new beau or plunge and almost disappear due to some embarrassment or disappointment.11
It is perhaps not unsurprising that it has been suggested that Gale Henry was the prototype for cartoon character Popeye’s girlfriend, Olive Oyl.
Certainly, there are at least two actresses who appeared opposite major silent comedians deserving of respect and recognition for their own comedic capability. First is Dorothy Sebastian (1903–1957), surely an actress worthy of more attention. In Spite Marriage (1929), she is a perfect comedic and athletic stooge to Buster Keaton, while at the same time displaying genuine and serious emotion in relationship to her character’s personal life. In a wonderful and extremely funny sequence, Sebastian is like a rag doll as Keaton attempts to get her into a chair. And on board the yacht, in the film’s climactic sequences, she is very obviously doing her own stunts.
Then there is Gertrude Astor (1889–1977) in The Strong Man, in which she is billed as the second female lead. Much as I admire female lead Priscilla Bonner, I have to admit that it is Astor who should be top-billed with her hilarious vamping of poor, innocent (and somewhat irritating) Harry Langdon. It might be argued that Gertrude Astor was actually continuing a tradition of comic vamp performance in Langdon comedies that began at the Mack Sennett Studios with Madeline Hurlock, supposedly identified by the producer as “the wittiest of all vamps.”
Both Dorothy Sebastian and Gertrude Astor are beauties, but unlike most other female comedy performers of the silent era, Alice Howell is not a glamorous leading lady. As did Mabel Normand, she enjoyed a considerable career as a comedy star, performing almost entirely in short subjects between 1914 and 1927, but unlike Mabel Normand, she was strictly a physical comedienne, relying on humor created by her body language or her facial expressions, a comedic style more closely associated with a man than a woman. And, unlike Mabel Normand, Alice Howell’s characterizations seldom changed even as she moved on from Mack Sennett to L-Ko comedies and later Century Comedies, created to feature her unique talent. The parts might have been different, but the characterizations were remarkably similar. She was a tall woman, and the roles were designed to suit her height. The other major difference, at least in my opinion, between Alice Howell and Mabel Normand is that the latter got everything she wanted while working for Mack Sennett, because the producer was fond of her. Similarly, at Goldwyn, it is obvious that Normand was a favorite. Alice Howell certainly did not attract Sennett’s eye at Keystone, and later, it seems unlikely that Henry “Pathe” Lehrman or other producers saw anything in her but a means to generate income.
Alice Howell out of costume and make-up in a photograph inscribed to a fan and her leading man, Phil Dunham.
The commedia dell’arte, dating back to the 1500s, used stock characters, much as do the films of Mack Sennett and Henry “Pathe” Lehrman. It was also the only type of theatre from that period and later in which women could, and did, appear. Unlike Shakespeare’s original productions, the female roles were played by women. The English playwright and poet Ben Jonson described one of the women of the commedia dell’arte as a “tumbling whore,” and while the latter part of his description would be inappropriate identification of Alice Howell, the first part is not. The “zanni,” the eccentric or mischievous servants of the commedia dell’arte, have been described as the “driving force of the plots,” and in much the same manner, the servants which Alice Howell so often portrayed are the driving force in her comedies.
Unquestionably, Alice Howell is the first female on screen to continue the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, and there is even more relevance. Just as audiences of the commedia dell’arte knew what to expect in terms of the characterizations on stage, so did Alice Howell’s audience know what to expect from her character. She delivered what a movie audience in the 1910s and 1920s wanted of her.
For a few short years, Alice Howell was one of the top comediennes of the silent era. She was neither as famous nor as popular as Mabel Normand, but she was every bit as acrobatic (if not more so), and, out of character, she was certainly as physically attractive as Normand. Alice Howell’s beauty was far from the gamin-like or innocent quality of Mabel Normand, but rather more mature and wholesome. Large, round, expressive eyes dominate a Rubinesque face—there is a hint of unspoiled Irish charm—and, unlike so many of her contemporaries, her looks are not tied to and of the silent screen, but ageless. Certainly, Alice Howell had an expressive face, with one contemporary commentator noting that “her face is so mobile in ordinary conversation that you understand the secret of her extraordinary power of her facial expression on the screen.”12
However, it was not her looks that made Alice Howell a screen star, but rather her ability to camouflage them in eccentric attire and make-up. She worked hard at how good she might appear, not in the conventional sense but in terms of the slavey or scrub lady character she was portraying. On screen, Alice Howell’s clothes are grotesque, ill-fitting, and ill-suited. Her hair is piled into a mass (and a mess) of golden curls, and usually topped with the most unsuitable of hats. Alice Howell has the curls of a Mary Pickford, but she utilizes them far differently than the first lady of the silent screen. As was explained in 1917:
She takes her light yellow fluffy hair, which is really pretty when properly dressed and doubles it into a large knot over her forehead as a kitchen mechanic; pulls it into an enormous pompadour as a lovesick waitress; fluffs it into a high, grotesque mass of curls, as a caricature society woman.13
The eyebrows are overemphasized. The eyes often set in a vacant stare. Remarkably, while the eyes may be an empty void, Alice Howell manages to make them expressive when necessary. Her hands, when not in full emphatic force, are often clasped around a mop and a bucket.
Photographs in costume really do not do justice to Alice Howell. It is the body language, the timing, as much as the make-up and attire, that make the character. As she explained in 1917:
The absurd costume makes meaningless antics even less funny than they are in ordinary clothes … I have succeeded in making people laugh hardest at my pictures when I was wearing a very nice evening gown. Your whole body must work with you. The idea is to exaggerate just in the right place. You know how just one comic touch in the middle of a serious situation will upset everybody’s gravity the same as a very feeble joke in a church will make everybody helpless with laughter. Well, that is the principle in a comic make-up—indeed of all comedy. Otherwise it is just senseless slapstick stuff with all the absurdity dragged in by the hair. That sort of thing never makes people laugh really hard. An inch is a very small thing, except on the end of your nose. That is the principle in a nutshell.14
She does not so much walk as shuffle like a penguin. The comedy works because of who is in the costume, not because of the costume. As with Chaplin, there is something of a balletic quality to Alice Howell’s step. The penguin analogy is a good one, but while Alice Howell may waddle like a penguin, there is no ongoing clumsiness to her walk, and when there is, it is a deliberate action, part of a gag.
As the Moving Picture World noted, “She is not afraid to take chances or to make herself look ugly, indeed she prefers to look in character and sends a character picture even for reproduction.”15
I might argue that Alice Howell is unique among comediennes of both the silent and sound era. There is no other female player to whom she may be compared, with perhaps the possible exception of Gale Henry, and her natural male counterpart is Charlie Chaplin. The facial expressions are often contemptuous of society and all around her, reminiscent, if anything, of the attitude of vaudeville star Eva Tanguay, who was billed as “the I Don’t Care Girl,” and who also adopted outrageous costumes that, unlike those of Alice Howell, suggested more than a hint of vulgarity. There is a marked difference between the vulgarity sometimes to be found in an Alice Howell film and the very sexual vulgarity that Eva Tanguay exuded on stage; I am sure Alice Howell and her producers and directors would never have considered her sitting with her legs suggestively wide apart as did Eva Tanguay. The manner in which Alice Howell utilizes her hands and her feet was compared by contemporary critics to the style of Chaplin, a reminder that while other female performers of the day might have expressive hands, who else received praise for the eloquence of their feet?
In perhaps the only review of an Alice Howell comedy in the fan magazine Photoplay, second-string critic Kitty Kelly wrote of Automaniacs, released October 1, 1917: “Alice Howell, aspiring to be the feminine edition of Charlie Chaplin, dresses queerly, mops her hair up in a mess on top of her head, kicks freely and puts a pained-surprise expression over her face, the while she comedies at the head of her company.”
In another fan magazine of the period, Motion Picture Magazine, Hazel Simpson Naylor described her in May 1916 as “so excruciatingly funny that she might justly be called the feminine Charlie Chaplin.”
Here is contemporary proof, as if needed, that Alice Howell was generally viewed as a female Charlie Chaplin. It might also be noted that the “Scream of the Screen,” as she was identified in 1917, also enjoyed the titles of “the Lady Douglas Fairbanks” and “the Skirted Max Linder.” However, as she told the Los Angeles Evening Express (September 29, 1917), “I don’t want any borrowed glory. I am just as much a star in my own way as the well-known male fun-makers.”
The eccentric attire is, of course, valueless without an eccentric personality. Off-screen, Alice Howell is very much a businesswoman, “a modest sort of person,” as she was described in 1918,16 very straightforward and very obsessed with one thing, and one thing alone: real estate. However, as grandson George Stevens Jr. recalls, she was not without a comic side:
In looking back at her, all my memories are warm. And notably, I am quite certain, I never talked to her about movie acting and I have a feeling I did not know she had been an actress, or if I did—it wasn’t given much importance.
Which I guess is a long way of saying that I knew her as a grandmother. I remember her walk. She walked with her toes pointed out. And I remember her humor. She was not “on” very much, but I recall dissolving in laughter at her telling me how one time she had to go to the bank and at the same time she had to take some hats from one place to another. As she was leaving her house she determined she could save a trip if she put all the hats on her head instead of making several trips. Well, of course, it turned out she went to the bank with four hats on. In this way she was somewhat like my father, who, as a result of his Laurel and Hardy years, went through life knowing how to build a hilarious story out of everyday life.
If Alice’s career was over by the mid-twenties, that meant she lived a non-theatrical life for more than thirty years. I would see her sometimes at our place with Grady Sutton,17 but other than that I wasn’t conscious of a circle of friends from the film world or any preoccupation with what was going on in the film world. She seemed to me to be a loving red-haired grandmother-business-woman with a lively sense of humor.18
The films are very much nothing more than a means to an end—with the money she earns, she can invest in land. On-screen, however, Alice understood perfectly the elements of comedy.
Alice Howell’s rise to stardom as a comedienne was not a speedy affair. An apprenticeship at Keystone with the likes of Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Mack Swain, and Charlie Chaplin must have helped towards an understanding of silent comedy, but, ultimately, Alice Howell became a star thanks to her own brilliance, her own sense of comic timing, with initial support from producer Henry “Pathe” Lehrman, and, above all, thanks to creative direction from J. G. “Jack” Blystone. It took almost three years for Alice Howell to graduate from supporting player to leading lady, to star. The starring years were relatively brief, and the decline from screen fame was slow and, from an outsider’s viewpoint, depressing.
When I first prepared this monograph almost fifteen years ago, I deliberately subtitled it “An Imperfect History,” in that, despite considerable research in trade papers of the period, many unanswered questions remained as to Alice Howell’s career. Alice Howell’s years on the screen are also demonstrative of an imperfect history. The rise to stardom is natural and expected. The decline, puzzling and confusing. As a comedienne, she may have been perfect, but as a human being there are flaws in her make-up (grotesque or otherwise), an imperfect approach to the business side of filmmaking. Both interior and exterior forces appear to have been at work here.
Why did a brilliant partnership between star Alice Howell and director John G. “Jack” Blystone end so abruptly? Were emotional elements at play here? Why did Alice Howell choose to leave Hollywood to make films in Chicago, whose early importance as a filmmaking center was long over? Why, from 1920 onwards, did she make one bad career move after another? Her daughter, Yvonne Stevens, rightly points out that Alice Howell’s primary concern was the purchase and management of real estate in Los Angeles. Once she had acquired sufficient assets, the film career was negligible. But then why continue at all? Why accept supporting roles in comedy shorts rather than leave the industry while still a star?
Life is very imperfect, very unfair, and so it has been for Alice Howell’s reputation. She supported Charlie Chaplin, and yet he makes no reference to her in My Autobiography (Simon and Schuster, 1964). Neither can she be found in the first major study of Chaplin’s work, Theodore Huff’s Charlie Chaplin (Henry Schuman, 1951), nor David Robinson’s Chaplin: His Life and Art (McGraw-Hill, 1985). Despite discussing a number of Keystone films in which Alice Howell appears, Robinson does not even list the actress in his “Chaplin Who’s Who.” Critic Walter Kerr, in what is often described as the definitive text on the subject, The Silent Clowns (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), pays fond tribute to Mabel Normand but makes no reference to Alice Howell. Her name appears only once in the New York Times, in a listing of the cast members of the 1923 feature Wandering Daughters, and there is no discussion of her in the actual review. Alice Howell’s performance in that production is mentioned by the reviewer in Film Daily (July 1, 1923), who pondered why she was “not very funny at any time in spite of the humor she is supposed to get over.”
Alice Howell in Distilled Love (1920).
If Alice Howell’s name is missing from modern sources, contemporary ones are little better. There are only three known fan magazine articles devoted to her, and references in trade paper publications are generally little more than one or two paragraphs in length. “Baby Peggy” was to replace Alice Howell as the star of Century Comedies in the 1920s, working with Alice’s husband, Dick Smith. As the only living member of the film industry who dates back to the same era as Alice Howell, “Baby Peggy” was asked if she had any reminiscences. Her response: “As for the lady you mentioned, I never met her, and I do not even remember Dick Smith himself.”19
Only a handful of buffs and historians, including this writer, have recognized Alice Howell’s talent. She is the subject of an entire chapter in Kalton C. Lahue and Sam Gill’s Clown Princes and Court Jesters and an enthusiastic and lengthy entry in Glenn Mitchell’s A-Z of Silent Screen Comedy. The most recent attention paid to Alice Howell is by Steve Massa in his book, Lame Brains & Lunatics: The Good, The Bad, and The Forgotten of Silent Comedy, which also examines the lives and careers of some other unrecognized comedy players.
James Roots does not appear to have been aware of Steve Massa’s work when he published The 100 Greatest Silent Film Comedians in 2014. What he would have thought of it, I don’t know. Roots notes my “floridly” insisting on naming Alice Howell as the female counterpart of Chaplin, so I am sure he would not share Steve Massa’s enthusiasm for the lady. Of course, we don’t know what Steve Massa might have thought of James Roots. At least Roots does devote one-and-a-half pages to Alice Howell, placing her in “the Second Rank” of silent film comedians, along with a strange assortment of other female comedy players, including (quite questionably) Jobyna Ralston, Anita Garvin, and Bebe Daniels. Alice Howell is actually in good company when one considers two of her male counterparts, also reduced to that “Second Rank,” are Max Linder and Max Davidson, not to mention John Bunny. Mabel Normand is the only silent comedienne to make it to the “the First Rank.”
While ignorance rather than sexism plays a part today in relegating Alice Howell to a secondary place in film history, can the latter have played a part in limiting her publicity and promotion? In all probability, if sexism was involved, then it is casual rather than premeditated. When Motion Picture Magazine in May 1917 published a cartoon depicting the Slapstick Firmament, there were no female performers caricatured. Of the nine men, only Chaplin and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle are truly deserving of a place. Sidney Drew, for example, is hardly a slapstick comedian, while Lloyd Hamilton and Bud Duncan (“Ham and Bud”) are rightly forgotten. Frank Daniels worked at L-Ko, but he was never as big a name as Alice Howell. Hank Mann is little more than a supporting comedian, and Billie Ritchie (another L-Ko player) is of questionable lasting fame and reputation.
I first saw Alice Howell in my native England in a short titled A Mere Man’s Love (and which has subsequently been identified as the 1920 Reelcraft release Distilled Love.) I was so taken with her performance (including a highly acrobatic stunt involving climbing up and clinging to a twenty-foot ladder) that I wrote of her, and even included a frame enlargement from A Mere Man’s Love, in my first book, Early American Cinema (A. Zwemmer/A. S. Barnes, 1970). It is curious that I should have been so taken with Alice Howell that until I viewed the film again more recently, I had no recollection that the villain of the piece is played by Oliver “Babe” Hardy.
Subsequently, as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s major retrospective on “American Film Comedy,” Leonard Maltin asked me to program a tribute to silent screen comediennes.20 One of the films I selected was the 1920 short Cinderella Cinders, which had earlier been made available to collectors on 8mm and 16mm by Blackhawk Films. Audience response was quite extraordinary, with Alice Howell being hailed as a major “lost” talent.
Stan Laurel, comedienne, as Wild Bill’s mother in Wild Bill Hiccup (re-edited and released as Wide Open Spaces, 1924).
But the reader does not necessarily need to accept my opinion of Alice Howell, or even that of those members of the original Museum of Modern Art audience. One of the great comedians of both the silent and sound era, Stan Laurel, once commented that he considered Alice Howell to be one of the ten greatest comediennes of all time.21 That evaluation would presumably place her on a par with Lucille Ball, with whom she has been compared by at least one Internet critic. That same individual describes Alice Howell simply as “wacky,” and there is perhaps no description of which she is more deserving.
Alice Howell vanished from the screen before the coming of sound and never found a place in the multi-volumes dealing with silent screen comedy. She did, however, have a daughter, Yvonne, who was to become the wife of legendary film director George Stevens, and Yvonne had a son, George Stevens Jr., who was to become an award-winning filmmaker himself, as well as founder of the American Film Institute and the Kennedy Center Honors.
