Give yourself a treat - buy this DVD
Do you enjoy Slapstick? No!Well neither do I. At least not usually, but......One problem with slapstick is that an elderly woman slipping on a banana skin and experiencing a painful fall is not very humorous. To make it really funny our character has to be a caricature, perhaps of a haughty young self opinionated fop, which means that we are departing further from reality. We can go still further - an assassin threatening a woman and children in their home does not normally get much sympathy. If he falls because he happens to be standing on a trapdoor leading to the basement which gives way at the critical moment, the scene is even funnier - but that much less probable.
At its best most slapstick needs to be played deadpan and the characters must seem unaware of any humour in the situations they are playing - unfortunately only the finest stage actors seem able to do this effectively. There have been great West End and Broadway plays which feature slapstick, but later presentations of the same plays by repertory companies have usually fallen very flat, leading to much slapstick comedy developing a bad name. This has never been true of the cinema where great performances by stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Howard Lloyd have been preserved on celluloid and so do not have to be repeated by less skilled actors. Most movie buffs would be glad to have a selection of these early silent movies as part of their private movie collection which they can watch whenever they wish, but few would buy similar works produced today.
Making a modern silent movie in colour was therefore a brave decision by Mel Brooks, but this film was superbly executed by its great cast and has paid off handsomely. True it does have a sound track and does not depend upon the pianist in the corner to provide the background music or such sound accompaniments as the sundry sirens, splashes and crashes that are part of the story. (This means that Silent Movie does not have a great jagged star with the word CRASH in it, filling the screen at appropriate moments to remind the poor pianist that he had to carry out whatever action management has decided will represent the sound of a crash. Nostalgically this might have been a worthwhile addition to the final film.)Nevertheless Silent Movie follows true silent film traditions in that there are no voices - instead all speech is presented in text on the screen, and the atmosphere of the old silent movies is well maintained.
Such a film stands or falls on the quality of the screenplay and the performances of the principal actors, in this case both are superb. The slapstick is thick and heavy but the acting is so deadpan that I never found this jarring and it was even possible to become involved in the rather trite story line. The reaction of viewers in my age group to such a film is obviously coloured by our memories of old silent films and must differ from those born after the introduction of the "talkies",however somewhat to my surprise I have found that younger viewers of this film seem to enjoy it just as much as old fogies like myself. This is an enormous compliment to the skill with which Silent Movie was put together.
The story line, such as it is, has Mel Brooks, Monty Feldman and Sid Caesar attempting to save a near bankrupt studio by selling the idea of making a modern day silent movie. The outraged studio boss makes the unwise response that this could only succeed if the cast included all the great Hollywood stars of the period, so the trio set out to recruit them all. Meanwhile the Finance Company of Engulf and Desire, who wish to take over the studio, do all that they can to prevent the silent movie from ever being completed. But this is not a film about a developing story as much as a series of short comedy gems, each of which glitters in its own right, all successfully strung together on the tenuous thread of a very thin story. The only reasonable advice to give to those who have not seen it is to treat themselves to a copy of the DVD.
score 9/10
bbhlthph 22 August 2004
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0149924/35093
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