She Could Be Chaplin! by Anthony Slide

Author:Anthony Slide
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Neely Edwards, Alice Howell’s leading man in the 1920s.

One advertisement assures exhibitors that Alice Howell’s “sparkling personality adds spice to the comic adventures of her other team mates,” while the other confirms that Roach and Edwards “are supported by Alice Howell, whose quaint impersonations have endeared her to millions of fun-loving fans.”

As these advertisements imply and as the films confirm, not only is Alice Howell no longer the star but her characterizations lack the strength of her earlier roles. An argument might certainly be made that she could be identified as a feminist in the 1910s but not in the 1920s. Earlier, her humor had relied on militancy in her performances, as, for example, with Lunatics in Politics (1920), in which she burlesques a masculine woman applying for the position of police chief. As the trade paper Motography noted in 1917, “That man should have a corner on screen comedy was taken for granted until Century Comedies made Alice Howell a star and brought to an issue a point that will hereafter be open for discussion—whether a woman can be funny as a man in acting for pictures.”13

Amazingly, even in modern times, there has been a suggestion put forward in the academic community that women are basically unsuited to slapstick comedy because of the shape of their bodies. A very silly argument.14

Even in these later films, as the wife, Alice Howell determinedly has to make an attempt at taking charge of her husband (Neely Edwards) and the overbearing male servant (Bert Roach). In Should Poker Players Marry?, released on March 8, 1924, she resolves to prevent her husband from playing poker, and, as the reviewer in Exhibitor’s Trade Review (March 15, 1924) noted, she adopts a “militant stride and domineering wifey attitude.”

Alice Howell is perhaps a little plumper in the face, and her performances hint more at a style of flustered comedy that Billie Burke might have been well known for a decade later, rather than the comedienne’s acting of a decade earlier. She still has that wide-eyed look and the hair is piled up in a “frizzy” mess on top of her head, but the grotesque attire would seem to have disappeared. She actually wears clothes that any leading lady in films of the period might have adopted without thought. Generally, there is no reference to Alice Howell in the few reviews of these shorts that appear in the trade papers.

In One Wet Night, released on April 14, 1924, she plays Neely Edwards’s wife. In one memorable scene, she and Edwards are hosting a dinner party when a deluge of storm water comes down through a four-foot hole in the ceiling. It is a sudden rainstorm around which both the plot and the gags revolve. And it is the drenching water that rids Alice Howell of her frizzy hair and flattens and straightens it. Here, the comedy is primarily the job of Bert Roach as the household butler, but, ironically, it is Alice Howell who provides the best sight gag in the film as she is seen in the first shot using her dog’s front paws on which to wind wool.

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