Raymond Griffith
How did Raymond Griffith get to be so forgotten? I first read about him in Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns, and though he sounded fascinating in Kerr’s lambent prose, I found it hard to imagine a really great silent comic having slipped into the land of amnesia so thoroughly. Yet, if you seek out the performer’s work on YouTube (few legitimate avenues offer his movies), you’ll see an extraordinary comedy player.
Griffith is unlike Chaplin, Keaton and Llloyd in that he doesn’t offer an iconic silhouette: his “costume” was a top hat and tux, and his dapper appearance calls to mind France’s great Max Linder. But though Griffith could and did play it straight (notably in Todd Browning’s 1923 White Tiger), he wasn’t seen as a straight actor with a gift for elegant comedy, like Adolphe Menjou. Griffith played a supporting role in the Menjou vehicle Open All Night (1924), and it’s clear he’s a comedy turn, brought in to spice things up with a broader kind of farce. Griffith had, after all, gotten his start at Keystone—where his promotion from gag man to star was swiftly followed by demotion back to the story department, so ill-fitted was his style to the Keystone school of mayhem. Today, Griffith’s few surviving shorts look much more watchable than the hectic knockabout of the typical Sennett programmer. True, they have no structure, but Griffith provides moments of reflection and comic calm amid the maelstrom of brickbats and slaps.
Griffith was a uniquely reactive comedian. He could throw himself about with some courage, but never aspired to the knockabout wonder of a Keaton: his original background was the legitimate stage, not vaudeville. Instead, he uses his reactions to the events around him to provoke laughter. His standard attitude is sang-froid, but rather than showing the elegant man who hilariously loses his dignity, Griffith makes the dignity hilarious, an absurd spectacle of conceit, yet so human as to be oddly appealing. When the façade is cracked, a whole array of little details emerge, lightning-fast changes of face and posture, each amusing in itself but truly hysterical in combination. Langdon could make shyness funny, Keaton was a master of astonishment, Chaplin could evoke desperation, but Griffith might combine all three in a few seconds.
Keystone—supporting work—stardom. A clue to Griffith’s modern obscurity can be found in the fact that so many of his films are lost. Despite becoming a founding member of Twentieth Century Fox, Griffith apparently didn’t ensure his films were well preserved, as Chaplin and Lloyd did: important movies from all three stages of his career are lost. Paths to Paradise (1925), perhaps his most impressive extant film, is minus its climax, and Trent’s Last Case (1929), his last silent, directed by Howard Hawks, is also frustratingly incomplete.
I choose Paths to Paradise because what’s left of it is nearly perfect and shows Griffith’s most distinctive qualities at their purest, stripping away the slapstick of The Night Club, and the cartoony effects of Hands Up! (1926), fun though those are. Here, Griffith stands revealed, the comic as cypher. His character, a con-man and safe-cracker, has no name of his own, presenting a different identity to everyone he meets, and remarking via intertitle: “I always answer pages. One never knows what will happen.” But this roguish adventurer’s suavity is constantly punctured: Griffith will become bashful, flustered, panic-stricken, fatuously triumphant at the drop of a silk hat (“fatuous” is an emotion he really claims for himself: his picture accompanied the word in the 1928 edition of Funk & Wagnall’s Illustrated Dictionary. That is a true fact and not in any way a lie I just made up). Really, he has no persona, no equivalent of Chaplin’s little fellow or Lloyd’s boy next door. To watch him is to watch a succession of masks dropping, each a perfectly captured emotion, but each discarded as soon as it’s served its purpose.
Griffith’s stardom didn’t last into talkies, and for a poetically perfect reason: he had no voice to speak of, or with. His vocal cords had suffered a trauma onstage during adolescence, and he couldn’t utter more than a whisper. In one final short, The Sleeping Porch (1929), he played a man who’s lost his voice and must resort to pantomime, and in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) he’s a dying soldier, his voice a hoarse rattle. The rest is silence.
by David Cairns