Moonlight and Noses

Silent comedy buffs who've seen the Laurel & Hardy short Habeas Corpus will experience a strong sense of déjà vu while watching this film. In both cases the plot concerns a dotty professor who sends a couple of low comedy henchman -- a big guy and a small one -- to a graveyard to dig up a cadaver. Much of the comedy consists of the fumbling efforts of the two gravediggers to carry out their assignment. Another character who is aware of the scheme drapes himself in a sheet and hides in the graveyard to spy on the duo, scaring the small gravedigger when he sneezes.

The interesting thing is that Moonlight and Noses (love that title!) isn't a shameless rip-off of the Laurel & Hardy comedy, it's a predecessor made three years earlier, directed by Stan Laurel during the period when he preferred to work behind the camera. The lead comic in what would become Stan's role is Clyde Cook, a former circus clown who starred in a series of comedies for producer Hal Roach at this time but never graduated to the top ranks. His gruff companion is Noah Young, best known as a foil for Harold Lloyd in many films, variously as a good-natured cop, kind-hearted tough, or sometimes an outright villain. Here, in what would become the "Ollie" role, Young plays it straight and leaves the comic shtick to his partner Clyde. Their employer is good ol' Jimmy Finlayson, who gives a characteristically vigorous performance as Professor Sniff, described in classic style as "goofy half the time and cuckoo the other half." This version of the story also features love interest, for the man spying on the gravediggers (Tyler Brooke) is a suitor for the hand of the professor's daughter, Miss Sniff, who is played by none other than Fay Wray, still a teenager and still a brunette.

Clyde Cook, who wears a Chaplin-style mustache and a blank expression, strikes me as too one-dimensional to score much of an impression. Still, he's amusing at times in this short, as when he threatens Noah Young with a burst of fancy "boxer" footwork, or celebrates his ejection from the cemetery with a Happy Dance. When I viewed this two-reel comedy it was believed that only the first reel survived; at the screening I attended the footage stopped abruptly during the graveyard sequence. Since then I've learned the second reel exists in a European archive. I hope to view a restored version of the complete Moonlight and Noses some day, for the portion I saw was quite agreeable and funny. Apparently director Laurel liked it enough to rework the material three years later in a version that, happily, is readily available.

The slapstick in this short, "Moonlight and Noses," is not my thing, but I appreciate the restoration of the film, as presented during the "Laurel or Hardy" program at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Directed by, but not starring, Stan Laurel, the comic here looks like a third-rate Chaplin impersonator, a Clyde Cook. But, maybe that's just the mustache and hat; it's certainly not comedic abilities that beg for a comparison. Fay Wray also has a minor role. The plot involving a mad doctor and grave robbers had me hopeful for parallels to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," but, alas, no; instead, I'm informed by Rob Stone's notes for Pordenone that it's similar to a later Laurel and Hardy film, "Habeas Corpus" (1928), which I haven't seen yet. There's also humor based on the male posterior, including right from the start and, later, involving a pickaxe--just as there had been in Laurel's prior film in the "Laurel or Hardy" program, "Detained" (1924). The homoeroticism going on in these films will be impossible to ignore after Laurel kisses a man in the festival's final screening, of "When Knights Were Cold" (1922).

Anyways, while I don't find the broad slapstick very appealing, or yet another rooftop chase (the third film at this year's Pordenone Festival to feature one), or that a family of African-American servants appear to live in the doctor's attic only to be scared by ghosts, the festival's director Jay Weissberg brought up a good point before the screening of the films about the cooperative relationship of film archives in preserving these films. Indeed, the digital reconstruction of this one was the result of a fragmentary nitrate print from the U.S. Library of Congress combined with a nearly-complete 16mm copy from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. While ending the festival with slapstick seemed aimed at lifting people's spirits these days when a pandemic has limited travel, including to Pordenone to see these films theatrically and in person with others, it's also nice to be reminded of international cooperation that isn't deadly, but rather preserves our shared culture and history.