Keystone Cops (or Kops)

The Keystone Cops starred in silent movies made by Canadian-born and American-based director and actor Mack Sennett (1880-1960) between 1912 and 1917. Sennett's company in 1912 was called Keystone Pictures Studio; hence, "Keystone Cops."

Slapstick--humor involving someone who, by his or her own clumsiness or ineptitude, becomes the butt of the joke--is as old as comedy. Someone on stage or film slips on a banana peel or takes a custard pie in the face or gets a whack on the rear end and we laugh uproariously. If we have gone out of our way to refine our sensibilities, we laugh uproariously, but still feel bad about making fun of our hapless victim.

The term "slapstick" comes from the battachio of Italian Commedia dell'Arte, a wooden prop of two slats held together at one end so that when one player smacks another player, the battachio makes a loud noise that sounds like it hurts, but does not.

To show slapstick in movies, Sennett used some special effects. He filmed at slow speed so that the action looked faster than it was, and he had every fourth frame of film edited out so that the action looked jerky. I ran into a YouTube clip of a remastered Sennett film, which remastering in part involved fixing filming speed. But if these editors took out Sennett's special effects, I'm thinking that Sennett would not have wanted fixes like that.

In the Keystone-Cop version of slapstick, uniformed policemen chase a bad guy, but instead of calm thinking, quick action, and speedy resolution, they run off in all directions in disarray. The Keystone Cops first appeared in a comedy short, Hoffmeyer's Legacy, 1912 and became popular after their appearance in another short, the Bangville Police, 1913. Starting 1914, they no longer played starring roles, but became a background troupe for Charlie Chaplin and other silent-film stars.We know the names of the actors who played the first Keystone Cops, but the cast changed from movie to movie.

Here is the logo for Sennett's company in 1912:

As for the significance of the keystone in the logo, I will take that up in a later post. For now, let me just remark that Sennett probably chose "keystone" because it is a weighty term from classical architecture. The keystone is the final piece that allows a keystone arch to stand alone, without the scaffolding needed to construct it.

OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

First, a joke, told by my friend Beth:

"I have CDO."

"What's that?"

"OCD with the letters in the right order."

The other day I was working on creating a bad-guy character for the thriller I'm writing. The story is set in 1952. I decided to make Del read every piece of writing that came his way, which is something I find myself doing. As if he, and I, could put together the meaning of the universe by assembling a complete book of these scraps.

For example, here is Del before he assassinates one of our heroes:

In the bathroom, he filled the hotel glass with tap water and dropped in two Alka-Seltzer tablets. “Keep tightly closed in a cool, dry place,” admonished the label on the bottle. When the drink had almost stopped fizzing, he chugged it down. Maybe that would take the edge off this hangover. 

He shaved, showered, parted and combed his hair, and put on a suit and tie.

Some breakfast couldn’t hurt either, he thought.

He went downstairs to the hotel restaurant and sat in a red leatherette booth at the window looking onto the street.

His waitress, “Dodie,” according to her nameplate, came over with the menu and the coffee pot. He turned over his coffee cup so that she could fill it for him. On the bottom of the cup, it said, “Buffalo China.”

Dodie poured his coffee. “What can I get for you, sir?” she said.

He looked at the menu. “I’ll have two eggs over easy, two pieces of buttered white toast, hash browns, sausage links.” He kept the menu so that he could read the whole thing while he ate.

Dodie brought his breakfast, kept his coffee cup full, and without a word replaced the heavy white napkin—embroidered in blue with the words “Colonial Inn”—that he had dropped.

And, after the assassination:

Now it was time to call Chaz and let him know that General Brink was dead, the fixers could clean up his office, and the Pentagon press staff could release their version of the story.

He dialed nine to get outside the hotel switchboard and then zero to get a telephone operator.

“I want to place a long-distance call to Saigon, the U.S. Embassy. I’m calling for Chaz Darnell.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll put you through.”

He lit a Lucky Strike. He listened to a succession of clicking noises as operators connected him from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Honolulu, Honolulu to Saigon. He picked up the first cigarette from the ashtray and lit another one from the first.

He idly read the package. “Lucky Strike—It’s Toasted—Cigarettes.” He always bought himself a couple of packs of Lucky Strikes when he visited the states. These cigarettes were so much milder than the cigarettes he could get in Saigon.

“Chaz Darnell here.”

“It’s Del.”

“Hail the conquering hero!”

“It’s done.”

“I’ll take care of everything else, then.”

Maybe I've reached a sort of pact with my own quirks and oddities. My new motto: make my own idiosyncrasies work for me.

Paladin

The city of Rome grew out of the settlements of seven hills, including the first settled, the Palatine Hill. The Palatine Hill includes Bronze Age remains from as early as 1000 BCE as well as the Lupercal, the legendary cave where orphaned twins Romulus and Remus were nursed by a she-wolf in 771 BCE.

Livy (59 BCE to 17 CE), ventured a guess that the Palatine Hill got its name from the Arcadian settlement of Pallantium. Other ideas put forth include origin in the word palis, Latin for stake, as in a fence made of stakes, or palātum, Latin for palate. In short, we don't know.

At any rate, the emperor Augustus (63 BCE to 14 CE) lived on the hill and later emperors, less chary of showing off their imperial status than Augustus, built their palaces here. The word palace comes to us from Palatine.

Whew! Long way around. Anyway, the word paladin, meaning knight or official of the emperor, comes from the same root word, Palatine. The word first shows up in English in 1592, in the first work of a minor poet, Samuel Daniel (1562 to 1619), but came to us by way of the Old French word paladin, used in the Song of Roland (mid-twelfth century) and other early chansons de geste.

The paladins, also known as the Twelve Peers, were in Charlemagne's service just as the Knights of the Round Table were in Arthur's. They were the best of the French warriors, sent to battle the Saracens (the early word for Muslims) in the Crusades.

I first came across the word paladin in 1957, when Have Gun--Will Travel premiered on television. The hero of the show is Paladin (actor Richard Boone), an educated, gentlemanly "knight without armor" who compares his methods to the movements of the knight on a chess board. He says the knight is an "attack piece, the most versatile on the board. It can move eight different ways, over barriers, and [is] always unexpected." ("The Road to Wickenburg," Season 2, Episode 7, October 25, 1958, Have Gun--Will Travel, CBS, Television.)

Our modern-day Paladin does not wear armor, but he does dress distinctively. On the trail he wears all black, and this struck me, even though I was only eleven, because I was an avid consumer of Western movies and tv shows, and the hero always (or almost always) wore a white hat. In other words, the hero was unremittingly good, never tempted, never wrong.

Perry Mason

I love a hero, and my favorite hero of all time is Perry Mason.

Perry Mason has a long and honorable run. Created by Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) and introduced in his first pulp-fiction novel, the Case of the Velvet Claw (Roslyn, NY: Walter J. Black, 1933), Perry stars in murder mysteries, radio serials, television shows, and made-for-tv movies from the first book until the last movie in 1993.

Perry is a fictional defense attorney in the Los Angeles of his day. (You can sometimes tell which year by the car he drives.) He defends his usually wealthy clients against murder charges by discovering the real killer and by using whatever legal, if unorthodox, means are available to him in the courtroom. He relies on his own wits and the help of his bright and loyal secretary, Della Street, and his man-about-town private investigator, Paul Drake.

Let me remark at this point that Perry is not the classic tragic hero with a fatal flaw; he is the good-guy hero of melodrama. For melodrama is story set to music, with the sound track cuing our feelings, whether joyful or fearful, like the organist at the silent-movie theater.

Aside from the fact that I love him (Oh! too much sharing?), there are numerous signs that Perry Mason is the good guy. Among them, I mention a repeated motif: His client is never guilty, no matter how bad things look in terms of motive, means, and opportunity. And another: When Perry confronts the bad guy in his home or office, the bad guy mixes himself a drink and offers one to his guest, but Perry never accepts. Perry is not a tee-totaller and often has a shot of whiskey or a glass of wine (after dark, of course) once a case is won. Even now, these details play out in modern television shows about crime.

Perry Mason is a man of strength, courage, and integrity. In short, a man after my own heart.

Well, how about a little dose of real life? Raymond Burr, who played Perry Mason on television, was gay, but, for fear of American public reaction, did not reveal his sexuality until late in his life. Apparently, a publicist made up a sad but phony story about a lost wife and son that stuck to him and helped camouflage his 35-year relationship to the love of his life, Robert Benevides. Burr did not outright deny the story about the wife and child; he just refused to discuss it.

But I'll take my heroes where I can get them, and Perry Mason, conflated with Raymond Burr, is still my hero, for his loyalty and steadfastness to his partner and his other great qualities.