Disturbing the Peace: Florence Turner
Florence Turner was a beautiful woman, with large dark eyes and a long, fine-boned face. She was also riotously funny. A parade of gorgeous comediennes have followed in her footsteps—Mabel Normand, Constance Talmadge, Anita Garvin, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball, Judy Holliday et al.—yet they continue to be viewed as exceptions to some unwritten rule: that women aren’t funny, that only unattractive women are funny, that being funny makes women unattractive. Even Walter Kerr, one of the greatest writers on silent comedy, dismissed female comedians as being handicapped by the necessity that they be pretty. If beauty is a handicap in comedy, Buster Keaton should never have earned a single laugh.
In Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914), Florence Turner blows a sustained silent raspberry at this whole uncomfortable issue. This one-reel British-made comedy centers around Daisy’s determination to enter and win a face-making contest. (Your dial is your map, your pan, your puss, in other words your face.) Practicing at breakfast with her husband, in a bus with two horrified male strangers, or in a police station—after she is arrested for disturbing the peace—she pulls the most hilarious and outrageous succession of faces I have ever seen. But the funniest thing of all is the way she alternates this array of grotesques with a subtle, dignified deadpan. One moment she’s a gargoyle, a ghoul, or a goofball; the next moment she’s an elegant lady, someone who might be painted by John Singer Sargent. Turner has absolute control over every muscle of her face, and her expressions are as readable as the morning newspaper, but also witty and pithy as aphorisms.
After seeing Daisy Doodad’s Dial as part of the BFI’s magnificent compilation “A Night at the Movies in 1914” (which also includes footage of the militant suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst being hustled out of Buckingham Palace by a pair of hulking bobbies), I understood why Buster Keaton had the inspiration to hire Florence Turner to play his mother in College (1928). It’s a wonderful bit of casting—though she was in fact only ten years older than he was. They look remarkably alike, and Turner matches Keaton’s stoic deadpan beautifully.
By 1928, however, she had been completely forgotten, and by the 1930s she would be doing bit parts and extra work. Known at the start of her career as “The Vitagraph Girl,” Turner is not to be confused with Florence Lawrence, “The Biograph Girl,” who is labeled by film histories as the first movie star. Turner was perhaps the second, and was celebrated as both a comedienne and a dramatic actress. In 1912, she was voted the most popular woman in the movies. A year later she left for Britain where she formed her own production company, Turner Films. (The move was attributed to the stifling effect of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which also drove many filmmakers to abandon the east coast for Hollywood.) In 1914, she was voted Britain’s most popular female film star. She also wrote and directed some of her films, including Daisy Doodad’s Dial. Tragically, it is one of only two survivors from her British productions.
Why her career began to fade as early as 1916 seems to be unexplained. She is virtually unknown today, though many of her Vitagraph films survive. The entry on Turner in Columbia University’s online Women Film Pioneers Project whets the appetite even more. For instance: “Possibly Turner’s most demanding role was the rejected lover in Jealousy (1911), a film now lost. Promoted by Vitagraph as ‘A Study in the Art of Dramatic Expression by Florence E. Turner,’ the film was a tour de force for the actress, as she was the sole performer on-screen for the entirety of Jealousy’s running time…Moving Picture World, in August 1911, stressed the centrality of performance to the effectiveness of the film: ‘[The actress] has the courage to let the truth be told in her countenance and movements. The audience gazes into the mystery of a human soul.’”
This sounds well worth seeing, but I’m not sure gazing into the mystery of a human soul would be as much fun as gazing into Florence Turner’s face at the end of Daisy Doodad’s Dial. In a marvelous dream sequence, Daisy lies tossing and turning in bed while a parade of her own ghostly images marches past, each pulling a different wild face. You might think the film will end with her chastened and newly demure, but instead it ends with her in close-up staring directly at the camera and pulling even more faces, defiantly distorting her handsome features with rubbery zeal. A hundred years later, her message is clear.
by Imogen Sara Smith