Customer Reviews

Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett

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I'm a big fan of not only silent films in general but silent comedy in particular, so you would think that I'd be the natural audience for Simon Louvish's new book on Mack Sennett, D.W. Griffith's protégé and the man behind the Keystone Studio, which produced (or at least discovered) such comic geniuses as Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle. Well, you'd be right: I am the natural audience for "Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett." So why was I so disappointed?

It has some new information on the life of the Canadian-born producer and his life and times, but the book is so vilely written that I found it a chore to read. It almost feels like Louvish, who wrote a far better book on the Marx Brothers and other books on famous comedians that I have not read, fell under the stylistic influence of Gene Fowler, a previous Sennett biographer and the maudlin biographer of John Barrymore, whose prose style is replete with every sappy literary cliché known to man (memorably described by Edmund Wilson: "...the style couldn't be more journalistic in a flowery, old-fashioned way... [it] has no structure and no harmonics. It is something that is exhaled like breath or exuded like perspiration."). If you doubt my word and decide to read the book anyway, try and count the number of times Louvish uses the archaic word "quoth" in a sentence.

So I'm torn about this book. There simply aren't enough good books about this period, and there is some new information to be gleaned from Louvish's pages (although I found myself disagreeing with some, but not all, of his conclusions). But its wretched prose style, if you have any feeling at all for the English language, will set your teeth on edge. You might not care if you're a real fan of early silent comedy, and if that's the case go ahead and read it. But don't say I didn't warn you.

This book is a lot better than the previous reviewers would have me believe. Louvish had access to the Mack Sennett Papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, something that previous writers like Walter Kerr and Kalton Lahue did not.

Of course, Sennett did not include his private papers in the collection so little is known of his private life--which he apparently kept private. Louvish posts hypotheses based on fact and states that these are Not Proven; he does NOT claim that Sennett was gay. Of course he is putting a modern gloss on the behaviour of people from nearly a century ago. People really did behave, and talk, differently then.

Some of his material, particularly new material about Mabel Normand, is saddening and worthy of note.

This is also the only book to tell the very moving story of Ben Turpin and his terminally ill wife, whom he supported until her death.

There are some erroneous statements in the book that could have been better edited; Chaplin toured the USA in a production called MUMMING BIRDS, not EARLY BIRDS; Buster Keaton was drafted in WWI, not enlisted; and Roscoe Arbuckle's THAT MINSTREL MAN was made for Keystone, not 'just as he was about to join Keystone.'

I do recommend that you consider this book. There is a lot of good material in it that is of interest to the silent historian.

And I've not read the word 'quoth' once.

As comedy is central to the development of cinema, a book on Mack Sennett is essential. Sennett was a movie pioneer who produced some of the earliest slapstick comedies. The films spawned such important comedians as Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Harry Langdon. They were also an early, albeit comparatively brief, training ground for the likes of Harold Lloyd and Charley Chase. Director Frank Capra enjoyed some of his early success writing and co-writing Sennett productions. Louvish examines Sennett the man and tells the story of Mack's work from his early days with D.W. Griffith to his own productions beginning in the early teens and lasting into the 1930s and the talking picture revolution. Even for comedy film buffs who have read a great deal about this genre, Louvish offers a lot of interesting information that does not appear in other sources. There have been few truly good books on Mack Sennett and his work. This one is quite good. Recommended.

What sets Louvish apart from other Sennett biographers is the primary source material he used on his effort. The Sennett archives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for example, were unavailable prior to 1991.

When you combine this with a very readable style, a meticulous chronology of Sennett's life and a catalog of his films, you have something future film historians can reference and aim to top.

Writing biography is grueling, thankless work. Long hours spent in archives cataloging and organizing are required before pen can be put to paper. Simon Louvish has clearly done his homework here.

Good job!

As a biographer, Simon Louvish is a great novelist. I mean, how else would you draw a conclusion that someone is gay because they never married and took care of their mother until they died? Of course (dopey me!)-they must be gay!

Horse puckey.

Louvish's main claim in this extremely derivative and clunky biography is that Mack Sennett was either closeted or a very quiet gay man. What is his proof? The answer is below:

Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Zero. Big bagel.

There is no proof given in this book for this hypothesis, and except for some veiled clues, there is nothing anecdotal, nothing supported by documents published or unpublished, and nothing that appears in some musty forgotten legal file. Louvish just throws this out there with nothing to back it up-the worst form of research and writing. For that alone, this book deserves to perpetually be in thrift store shelves and yard sales. Added to that, the things he does have correct have been presented in better books in better ways. Even Sennett's own autobiography (KING OF COMEDY) for all its faults of accuracy and syntax does a better job than this thing, and you can get more entertainment (and primary sources) from Gene Fowler's FATHER GOOSE than this claptrap.

Check out Kalton C. LaHue's KOPS AND KUSTARDS, Walter Kerr's THE SILENT CLOWNS and any books by Kevin Brownlow or William K. Everson and you will get better writing and more facts in one paragraph than you get in this entire tome.

Forget it. Feh.