Item #: 11247DV Category: SILENT Format: DVD MPAA Rating: G

Woolly Rating: 3/10 (89 votes)

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Kevin Rayburn

Mar 12, 2004 @ 17:58:0

A major cinematic rediscovery
(This is actually a 2-disc DVD set.) "Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery Of An American Comic Genius" Image Entertainment/Lobster Films Five years ago, a private film collector in Indiana invited me up to screen some of his rare 16mm and 9.5mm films. We watched some Lon Chaney, a German mountain film, a WC Fields feature, and lastly, a bonus item: a 15-minute early talkie short called "It's a Bird" made in 1930 by an animator named Charley Bowers. Had I ever heard of him? I hadn't. To the history books, Bowers was the guy who made the popular Mutt and Jeff cartoons from 1915 until the mid 1920s. Interesting stuff, but pretty ordinary when looked at today. "It's a Bird," however, was something quite different - part of the "unknown" Charley Bowers oeuvre of live-action stop-motion animated "puppet" films made from the mid-20s to 1940. What unreeled before me was one of the strangest things I'd ever seen. It started off as a rather hokey conventional comedy and veered into indescribably bizarre antics rendered in some of the most fluid live-action animation I'd seen. The plot: A man whose job is to get rid of junkyard parts finds his panacea in a legendary "metal-eating bird" that he sets off to capture in the heart of the Belgian Congo. After dipping a tough-talking Brooklyn-accented worm into metal paint as "bait", he captures the bird (sort of a cross between Woody Woodpecker and the Dodo bird seen in a couple of Tex Avery cartoons). Back home, it proceeds to eat all manner of metallic objects, large and small. In one remarkable example of Bowers' mastery, a car builds itself with a smoothness of execution that would defeat a latter-day team of CGI keyboard pushers. The "Bowers Process" as the animator dubbed it, is probably nothing more than classical stop-motion, but the results remain in a class by themselves. (The way metallic objects seem to compress and expand in Bowers' films is astonishingly realistic. My 14-year-old, CGI-generation son was impressed enough to ask: "How did they do THAT back then?") "It's a Bird" is on this DVD, as are 14 more rare and recently restored Bowers shorts. Bowers’ thematic concerns, if we want to overintellectualize him, included the merging of the technological and the biological - a sorta slapstick David Cronenberg. Although Bowers physically resembles a cross between Buster Keaton and pasty-faced Harry Langdon, his films are best after their plot setups and conventional slapstick are shunted aside in favor of technological, surreal flights of fancy. Many of his movies revolve around remarkable labor-saving machines, with Bowers playing himself as the inventor. Bowers' optimism in technology and visions of the consumer society are all very much products of the mass-production, go-go 1920s. In 1927's "Egged On" Charley creates a machine that makes normal breakable eggs unbreakable. (Eggs nurtured and warmed on the running engine of a Model A hatch little Model A’s). In 1927's "A Wild Roomer," he creates an enormous machine that somehow is supposed to make housework easier, but like many of his wild rube goldberg contraptions, it's not always clear just what they're really supposed to do. This results in many fantasy tangents unrelated to the plot, and these surrealistic interludes of remarkable animation are when Bowers’ films are at their best. The machine in “A Wild Roomer” can do nothing less than give life itself. A scene where its robotic arms sew a toy valentine into a rag doll--wherein its little cloth chest begins beating and the doll comes to life--is as unexpectedly poignant as it is weird. In 1926’s “He Done His Best,” a vast machine that replaces waiters not only serves and cooks meat and vegetables, it serves FRESH food, growing the peas (which sprout into cans on the vine!) and killing the chickens almost instantaneously. In the wonderful 1926 short, “Now You Tell One,” a series of tall tales allows Bowers’ imagination and sense of humor to run rampant. A herd of elephants march up the steps and into the US Capitol building, a mouse draws a revolver on an injured cat, and a magic growth potion allows cats to grow on trees. These images are remarkable, strange, and not ready for Blockbuster - the very raison d’etre of Wild and Woolly. Ironically there was a downside to Bowers’ vision and art. Like the machines in his films, which often went haywire and exploded (though due more to operator error), Bowers himself imploded. A workhorse and perfectionist who toiled in obscurity, he died a wornout man in his fifties in 1946. The films he made for various indies immediately fell into obscurity and did not surface again until the 1970s among collectors and hardcore animation buffs. By then, much of his work had turned to decomp jelly, and you can see it starting to happen in the incomplete and somewhat incomprehensible 1928 short “Say Ah-H!” Bowers’ greatest brush with fame probably came in 1939, when he animated Joseph Losey’s very first film, “Pete Roleum and His Cousins, a short financed by the oil industry for the ’39 World’s Fair and apparently Bowers’ only film in color. In terms of smoothess of execution and overall look, it is Bowers at the very height of his craft (though somewhat muted in his usual weirdness due to the subject matter and venue). Fans of Russian animator Ladislaw Starewicz and George Pal’s Puppetoons will instantly recognize similarities of style. The set ends on a nice flourish, with a hilarious cat and mouse (and oysters!) puppet film “Wild Oysters” from 1940, and a film that looks like it was made at the same time with the same objects and sets, “A Sleepless Night,’ the latter unfortunately missing its soundtrack. To be fair, not everything here is topnotch, yet neither did Bowers deserve the almost complete obscurity he fell into. The best of this stuff is great, hilarious, head-shaking cinema. **** “Charley Bowers: Rediscovery…” review c. 2004 Kevin Rayburn Kevin.RayburnREMOVE-ALL-CAP-THINGY –TO -WRITE@louisville.edu

<[:-} when oysters attack
i'm not as enthusiastic about this material as kevin r., but it does need to be seen. my favorites were the animated shorts on the last half of disc 2. "wild oysters" is a jaw dropping cel animation short. the early stop motion "a sleepless night" was my second favorite. it shares ideas with "wild oysters." "pete roleum and his cousins" (a petroleum products industry promotional short) is a hellish trip that could actually be dangerous to viewers on inappropriate dietary supplements. the keatonesque live action shorts on disc 1 are very imaginative, but they didn't really resonate with me. "egged on" consists largely of eggs being broken, a theme that shows up in most of these shorts. bowers seems to have had a bit of an egg fetish. some fairly subtle bits of crudeness escaped the censors. characters, in close up, carefully, slowly mouth vulgar expressions, in english. i'm no good at lip-reading, but even i understood them. the killjoy in "fatal footstep" is named "sam sormussel." in "now you tell one," the proto genetic engineering skit about grafting, bowers is sure to make it clear, twice, that he intends to produce only female cats. the branch he uses to do so is from a pussy willow. the first cat doesn't have a tail, so he adds a few cat-tail reeds. my favorite on this disc is [the one] where he joins the police force, a bluntly subversive romp. the intertitles of these shorts are in french (with optional english subtitles), allowing me to learn that the french expression for a scab worker is "jaune."

• GOODBYE UNCLE TOM
Snuff Film... (Tim)

• TAMPOPO
Awesome... (CMH)

• ROMERO
... (Sue)

• VAMPIRES VS ZOMBIES
horrible... (beachmonkey)

• PULP FICTION (COL ED)
a thrill ride... (Alan Hall)

• PERFUME
KINKY, DISTURBING... (DKB)

• BLACK MASK 2: CITY IF MASKS
not bad... (Dedeals)

• ELVIS ON TOUR
Elvis in Concert. ... (elvisandmeatloaf@aol.com)

• BORN YESTERDAY
A great performance... (micca)

• WONDERWALL
Why this film dserves more than a one star rating.... (Eric)

• PIT STOP (LTBX)
... (pike)

• BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE
... (pike)

• BIG BAD MAMA
... ()

• GOODBYE UNCLE TOM
MISUNDERSTOOD... (Caribba)

• MONKEY KUNG FU
the best... (melo70)

• PANTERA 3 WATCH IT GO
WATCH IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!... (leo)

• HOUSE OF STRANGERS
FINE 1949 NOIR/DRAMA... (DKB)

• KEEP YOUR DISTANCE
LOCALLY SHOT DRAMA... (DKB)

• GOODBYE UNCLE TOM
a genius reality check 4 our race we may live in the white mans land & call it hme bt in doing that we deny the truth of our being. All brown skin people nomatta hw light r african rayalty ... (lady swirl)