The Grin of the Dark

TWENTY-NINE - REELS

I don't know how long I've been watching Orville Hart's films. When I attempt to take a break, Guillermo stares at me as though I'm an intruder. I point at the projector that holds the next film and show him my palms to signify that he should wait, and then I step outside. Apart from the stars strewn across the sky in patterns I don't recognise, the night seems blacker than ever. It and the bite in the air provide little relief from the insistent spectacle of Tubby's grin and the sounds of the projectionist's appreciation and the labouring of the generator. Nor does standing in the open help me to decide whether my interpretation of the films is a genuine insight or just the product of jet lag, since my brain feels as though it's still in transit. I'm gazing at the cacti arrested in various postures that seem close to meaningful on the lit stage of the ground outside the doorway when Guillermo starts to laugh.

Am I the joke? In a way, because I turn to see that he's projecting the next film. I would have noticed sooner if the films weren't wholly silent, lacking even a music and effects track. 'No,' I shout, but he's too intent on the film to respond. Could I ask Willie to intervene? Presumably she speaks his language. As far as I can see the house is entirely dark, and I don't want to waken her. I dash to the screening room, to find I've seen the film in Those Golden Years of Fun.

I wish I'd been in time to read the title, even though I'm certain of it – and then I realise how I can. I hurry to the projector. My head feels as if it's reeling like the spool of film by the time I manage to decipher the words on the label. They are indeed Tubby's Terrible Triplets. I stagger back to my seat and close my eyes until I stop feeling like a passenger on an aeroplane that's fighting turbulence, and then I grin at all the Tubbies in the toyshop. Smilemime was mistaken or lying about the film, just as he is about me.

I'm right about it in another way. When the toyshop manager wakes up in the asylum, having dreamed that his bedroom has been invaded by his tormentor times three, the trio of attendants all have Tubby's face. Each of them widens his grin at the audience before they converge on the manager and the film ends. I believe I would prefer my theory of the intention behind Tubby's films to be wide of the mark.

It surely can't apply to all of them, however much the glinting of his gleeful eyes seems to suggest that it does. Perhaps I'm simply watching too many of his films without a break. In Tubby's Trick Tricycle he rides the machine up walls and across ceilings, leaving rooms and entire buildings lying on their sides or upside down. Nobody could imitate that, and I hope they wouldn't mimic his behaviour in Tubby Tattle-Tale, in which he causes wilder and wilder fights by telling the absolute truth about people, although each intertitle trails off before we learn what secrets he betrays. In Tubby's Table Talk he reduces an elegant dinner party to chaos with his conversation, which the intertitles render so nonsensically that it bewilders me too. In Tubby's Telephonic Travails he communicates nothing but laughter with the instrument to anyone who contacts him – a bank official, a debt collector, a lawyer – until they're helplessly infecting all their colleagues. Tubby Takes the Train casts him as a Western bandit who holds up the passengers to make them perform circus stunts and variety acts, an apparently harmless crime until the driver starts juggling with coal and the unmanned train goes off the rails into a desert. Tubby Tries It On turns him loose in a costume shop, and every time he sets out for a fancy-dress ball he's mistaken for the role he's playing. By the end of the film he has left a mayoral banquet in disarray, and a police awards ceremony, not to mention an entire courtroom where he acted the judge.

Silent comedy often poked fun at the pompous, but is there more of an anarchic point to his choice of targets? I scribble this as yet another observation to be pondered. If it weren't for my notes I might feel that the films have merged into a single image of Tubby's luminous face grinning horse-like at me as a prelude to transforming a tennis tournament into a battle with rackets, or judging a pie competition by how spectacular a mess they make when flung at his fellow panellists, or letting his two little nephews – miniature replicas of him – leave a theatre in ruins with their antics at a talent contest, where they jump higher and higher on each other's shoulders before using the chandeliers as trapezes... I'm increasingly bothered by the notion that there's some aspect of the films I've overlooked, but the harder I strain to identify it, the more my eyes flicker and my brain throbs. Eventually I see his first two films. In The Best Medicine he has a minor role as a travelling quack who dispenses a tonic that causes uncontrollable merriment, while in Just for a Laugh the character takes centre stage, though with a different name, and sells hysteria to an entire small town. Both films show him consulting the kind of unintelligible book that makes an appearance somewhere in all his two-reelers. Now the only one I've yet to watch is Tubby Tells the Truth. But the next film on the screen is an Orville Hart sound feature, Fool for a Day.

I'm not surprised it failed to restore Charley Chase to stardom. He starts out as dapper as ever, the image he revived with a guest appearance in Sons of the Desert, but doubts over his impending marriage cause him to take refuge in a travelling circus. He's a good deal less at ease as a trainee clown, and keeps giving the audience abashed glances that are contradicted by his painted grin. On the night he turns every act into a mass of pratfalls, but although he's finally chased away by the maddened ringmaster, the show is a roaring success. In an epilogue the circus returns to town and Charley takes his wife and children to see it. The ringmaster recognises him, and the last shot has Charley fleeing for the horizon, pursued by the deranged ringmaster and the rest of the performers, animals as well.

I wouldn't class the film as screwball. Smilemime was wrong again. On the other hand, Gimme Da Brain is certainly the most violent Stooges film I've seen, and the finale in which the trio juggle with the monster's brain and shy it at one another until Colin Clive as Frankenstein takes it like a pie in the face is hardly likely to have pleased the British censor. Hart's film with James Finlayson and Oliver Hardy, The Course-We-Can Brothers, seems innocuous enough until I nod off halfway through. I regain consciousness at the start of the credits of You're Darn Tuten, in which Laurel and Hardy play Egyptologists. Hart is credited with the intertitles, and surely it's my inability to stay awake that robs them of sense. I pinch my thigh hard so as to concentrate on Crazy Capaldi, the director's first fulllength film.

This is certainly the original uncensored version, before it was cut for a reissue. The grinning gangster's murders are played as black comedy, but I find it hard to enjoy on that level, though Guillermo audibly does. He's especially amused by the protracted dance performed by the silhouette of a machine-gun victim as the wall on which it's cast fills with holes. Capaldi's death in the electric chair is also mimed at length by a jittery shadow, and the projectionist thinks this hilarious too. I'm relieved the experience is over, but I'm still scribbling notes about it when yet another film begins. It's Ticklin' Feather, Orville Hart's unreleased swan song.

It opens with the Cherokee protagonist riding a donkey into the Western town of Bedlam. Once he's past the brawls and gunplay that fill the main street, he finds he has to lodge in the stable with the animal. He meets every situation with a grin that looks both resigned and secretive. Do I dream that he says 'Me meek. Inherit earth'? I waken to see him overcoming gunmen by chortling as he walks up to them and disarming them with the feather he wears in his headband. Perhaps the film was shelved because it was too silly to release, but I wonder how any filmmaker could have been irrational enough to think it would help his career. 'Me bring you peace,' the hero says, unless that's only in my sleep. When I next look he's the sheriff, but that's not the end. The film loses its grip on my attention, and I dream it has turned into a hardcore orgy, until I see that the woman grinning with orgasmic pleasure as she's mounted by a man while she manipulates two others is up there on the screen.

The air feels insubstantially but relentlessly invaded by the rhythm of the action. It's the throbbing of the generator, but I could imagine that the sensation is emerging from the image. I don't need to watch Willie's films, even if this one may be a homage to something older; did she choose the performers for their dated appearance? The only film I want to see now is Tubby Tells the Truth.

As I leave the auditorium Guillermo takes his time about withdrawing his hand from inside his baggy trousers. I pretend not to notice as I turn to the shelves, only to falter. The gap left by the film that's running is halfway along the lowest shelf of Orville Hart's work. I'm dizzy again by the time I succeed in reading the label on the reel. The title is She Screws to Conquer, in outdated type on yellowing paper. It's an Orville Hart film.

It's clear from the titles that all of his films on the bottom shelf belong to the same genre. I doubt they deserve more than a mention in my book. I can see nothing to distinguish She Screws to Conquer from the mass of hardcore films, except perhaps for the participants' grins, which look close to fixed. I'm overdue for a break. I open the door and emerge into the desert, and almost fall back into the shed.

The sun is above the house. It's brighter than white – so fierce that the sky is seared colourless. I squeeze my eyes shut and clap a hand over them, and hear a door open ahead of me. 'Finished at last?' Willie says.

I slit my eyes at her bleached image in the kitchen doorway. Today's shorts are even terser, and otherwise she's wearing just a singlet. 'Unless you've got Tubby Tells the Truth,' I say.

'I was thinking, but I'm sure I don't.' She blinks at the amplified groans in the shed. 'Is that me?'

'You,' I say without much sense.

'Not in the movie. I stay out of sight. Is it one of mine?'

'No, it's one of your grandfather's. I take it that's how he ended his career.'

'Those were his last movies, yes. Don't you think they're worth watching?'

I shut the door behind me to protect the films from the heat. Though the door muffles the girl's voice, I have the idea that the air is still vibrating around me, so imperceptibly that I can't be sure. As I make for the house the glare of the sun feels like a spotlight in an interrogation room. 'I think I've seen enough,' I say. 'Maybe I'm not qualified to judge.'

Willie looks more unimpressed than I find appropriate. 'How about you?' I ask as I sidle past her. 'Were you influenced by them?'

'By the way he moves the camera, sure, and the editing. And I try to bring in humour like he did.'

I'm abashed to have observed none of this. Before I can ask her to be more specific she says 'Need a drink?'

'I could certainly see off a coffee.'

She fills a large mug from a percolator and hands it to me, followed by a jug of cream from the refrigerator. 'So was it worth coming so far?'

I'm distracted by the cartoon frieze of fellatio and cunnilingus that encircles the mug. Until I regain control of my thoughts her question seems as uninterpretable as the intertitles in her grandfather's silent films. 'I'm sure it was,' I tell her.

'You don't take notes.'

'I do,' I say and lurch to my feet. 'I've left them.'

'It's okay, he's bringing them.' She opens the door to the heat and the projectionist, who has loaded the tray with my plate and plastic bottle and the clipboard. 'Gracias, Guillermo.'

'Yes, thank you,' I say before discovering that he has spilled drips, presumably from the bottle, on my notes. Scattered words are swollen and distorted, but at least they're comprehensible. I blot them with a blank page while he converses with Willie in Spanish. As he plods giggling out of the room she sits opposite me. 'Gee, you're some messy writer,' she says. 'Can I see what you wrote?'

'Let me send it to you when it's in better shape.'

'Tell me what you thought at least.'

'I wonder if his sense of humour was too much for the public or the studios back then.' Sensing her dissatisfaction, I feel bound to add 'The world could be catching up with him and Tubby too.'

'You can tell anyone that's interested in reissuing them where the movies are.'

'I will. So how long did he carry on making films?'

'He made the stag movies during the war, and then he tried to set up a radio station. It was supposed to just broadcast comedy, but it ended up too weird for the sponsors. Not stuff you'd want to hear late at night, my grandmother Hart used to say. He'd invested everything he owned in it, even his house. The way she told it, it wasn't the loss that killed him so much as not being able to reach the public any more. Mind you, they were divorced by then.'

'He didn't invest the films you've got, or did he?'

'Nobody wanted them. He gave them to her, because she was in quite a few of them. Leonora Bunting.'

She played Capaldi's moll and Chase's wife in Fool for a Day, and a saloon-keeper with a shotgun in Ticklin' Feather. She must have been at least a decade younger than her husband. Are three films quite a few? I haven't decided whether to ask if she appeared in his later work – surely it's an irrational notion – when Willie says 'He couldn't have known she'd get religion.'

'And yet she still kept all the films, even – all of them.'

'Even the horny ones, sure. She was brought up never to junk anything, and she'd been through the Depression too, but I wonder sometimes if there was another reason. My mom said once it was like Leonora was afraid to let them out of her control. I figured she didn't like the idea of people watching them any more.'

I can only conclude that the actress must indeed have performed in her husband's less reputable work. What else makes sense? I've watched more of his films in a single session than very probably anyone else in the world, and the only noticeable effect is to leave me feeling that I dreamed them and have already forgotten parts of them, if all this isn't just a symptom of jet lag. 'You have, though,' I remind Willie.

'Most of them.'

I don't know why that makes me feel so solitary, but my retort sounds accusing. 'Why not all?'

'So I've still got some left to enjoy.' Perhaps she sees I'm dissatisfied, because she adds 'I never really watched any till I persuaded my folks to let me have these. I did see Crazy Capaldi on television one time, but it was missing a whole lot of footage. All the prints you saw were uncut. I believe some weren't ever released that way.'

'Didn't your parents ever try to get them shown?'

'My mom inherited the frugality gene and that's the only reason why we have them. My folks ran a sporting goods store and they used to keep them in back with the guns and ammunition, but I don't believe they had any kind of plan for them. They didn't want me to watch them, only I guess they figured when I started making movies it couldn't do me any more harm.'

I can't quite bring myself to ask whether they're aware of her genre. Instead I say 'Did they know about his wartime work?'

'He worked with Rogers and Astaire, you ought to realise, but he never got a credit. Their director was a friend of his. Orville wrote a whole scene where Ginger's given a drug and she talks crazy stuff on a radio show, and you can see where they cut it because it was too weird.' Willie shakes her head and says 'You're asking did my folks know he made fuck films? I highly doubt it. I didn't till I watched them.'

Before she has said five words her bare knee rests against my trousered one. I withdraw mine as gently as seems polite. 'So what was it your parents didn't want you to watch?'

'Any of Orville's movies. My pop thought there was stuff in them they didn't own up to was how he put it. He and mom only ever saw the release versions of just a few of them, but they even thought some of those were I guess you'd say blasphemous, though they could never pin down how. They weren't as religious as Leonora got, but they were pretty conservative. My mom once said Orville's movies were like propaganda for a world where you couldn't depend on anything and nothing mattered any more. Still, that's what she said about all kinds of movies that were around while I was growing up.'

'I take it you're saying she was mistaken.'

'You'd think so, wouldn't you, when I've turned into the opposite of just about everything she believes in.'

Have I triggered some buried guilt? 'You haven't told me your view of his films.'

'I like them. I admire them. They're a lot of fun. They make me laugh. I don't believe they deserve to be forgotten.'

'They won't be,' I say, which earns me her hand on my knee. 'Anything else?'

'Sometimes I wonder how much he owes to working with your guy.'

'He's not just mine,' I say and use that as a pretext to sit up in my chair, drawing my leg out of reach. 'Do you know what Leonora Bunting thought of them?'

'I understand she blamed your guy for all the problems Orville had with censors and distributors, even on his sound movies after they parted company. She used to say your guy got inside his head.'

'And did what?'

'Left him still trying to make the kind of movie your guy wanted to make.'

'Which was...'

'I don't know exactly, but she thought he wanted to change the world somehow.'

'I thought it was Chaplin who did.'

This brings Willie's reminiscence to an end, or the arrival of Mona and Julia in the kitchen does. Both of them are as bare as their feet. I flash them a grin and look quickly away. 'You were a long time out there,' one says.

'Back to reality now, huh,' says the other.

I feel as if the air has grown insubstantially oppressive. The glare of the desert and the parched sky through the window appears to have intensified. It resembles the threat of a headache, which is aggravated by the squeal of the legs of my chair on the tiles as I push it back. 'If you'll excuse me,' I say, 'I think I'm ready for a nap.'

'Let us know if you get lonely.'

'Dream about us at least.'

'Girls,' Willie intervenes.

She sounds rather too maternal for my liking. She has made them seem younger still. I hurry to my room and consider a cold shower, but exhaustion overwhelms me at the sight of the bed. As I fumble the blind shut the image through the glass appears to shiver with the heat or, I could imagine, with the pulsation of the generator. I stumble across the room and fall on the bed.

The next I know, I seem to be dreaming in accordance with instructions. I look down my body to see who's mouthing my erection. The face that rises into view does indeed belong to one of Willie's performers. When I check again it's the other girl, and the third time I see Willie herself. Despite her task, she's able to present me with a grin – so much of one that it widens her cheeks, stretching them luminously pale, along with the rest of her face. The same condition has overtaken the girls on either side of her. All three have Tubby's gleeful face.

I flounder out of the dream and off the bed, grabbing my watch as I go. The seconds are urging the minute towards seven o'clock, but in the morning or at night? Should I be heading for the airport? I stagger to the window and claw the blind aside. The sky is dark, but the streetlamps are lit. They show me pallid elongated buildings writhing in the depths of a canal.