The Grin of the Dark (21 page)

'I've left you the fixings if you need to take notes.' Willie unlocks
the back door beside a granite kitchen counter and pauses with her
hand on the doorknob. 'Can you operate a projector?'

'I'd better not try.'

'You bet if you don't know what you're doing with these films. I'll
send Guillermo.' Willie hands me a key from a hook beside the door.
'Don't catch cold,' she says and shuts the door behind me at once.

Is the desert always so cold at night? It makes me feel as if I wasn't
previously awake. A bare dusty path leads to the solitary other
building, a long brick shed about a hundred yards away. As far as I
can see, it's windowless. I glance back to see the naked girls selecting
items from the refrigerator, a sight that seems close to impossibly
unreal. Am I hearing a low vibration in the air? It intensifies,
fluttering against my eardrums, as I hurry between cacti ashen with
dimness to the shed. When I unlock the door the pulsation seems to
lurch to meet me. I could feel that my senses aren't to be trusted – that
I can't see two bulky shapes waiting for me in the dark.

I grope around the doorframe, over the chilly bricks, and locate a
switch. The harsh light of an unshaded bulb shows me two projectors,
which are trained on apertures in the far wall of a room about half the
length of the shed. Both side walls are occupied by shelves full of film
canisters. A clipboard fat with paper and dangling a pen on a string
leans against the foot of the left-hand shelves.
ORVILLE HART MOVIES
,
the topmost sheet announces in large enthusiastic capitals.

My first thought is that Willie doesn't write the way she emails. I
shut the door and pick up the clipboard. The canisters aren't labelled,
and there are far too many of them even if the shelves contain
Orville's entire filmography. I take a can at random and lay it on the
table next to the projectors. The reel inside it bears a peeling yellowed
label with a title in a vintage typescript:
Tubby's Tremendous Teeth
.

I'm so overwhelmed to be looking at an actual film of his, and
perhaps distracted by the well-nigh subsonic throbbing of the hidden
generator, that I've no idea how long I fail to notice someone else is in
the room. When he sets down his burden on the table, my start almost
knocks the canister onto the floor. I don't know how he managed to
stay unheard as he entered the shed and closed the door, especially
since he's at least twice my width. His round swarthy face, which is
topped with oily black curls, appears to protrude from his poncho
without the intervention of a neck. 'You'll be Guillermo,' I tell him.

The nostrils of his broad nose flare, but his disproportionately
small eyes and little mouth don't stir. 'I'll take this in the screening
room,' I decide, picking up the tray that's loaded with a plastic litre
bottle of water and a crusty ham and avocado roll too big for its
plate. 'Could you run this film for me?'

I have to leave the tray on the table while I open the inner door.
Three rows of three extravagantly padded cinema seats, all black,
face a screen not much bigger than the largest television monitor.
Behind it the generator continues to throb. I prop the tray on the arms
of the rightmost seat in the back row and sit next to it just as the
lights, which the projectionist turned on, go down. At least he seems
efficient, but he's as silent as a Tubby film.

Tubby's Tremendous Teeth
is one of his less unsettling films.

We first see him in the street, where people are startled by the sight
of him. A shopgirl falls backwards into a display of hats on grinning
heads. A billsticker topples off his ladder and ends up wrapped in a
section of a film poster – an image of a mirthful mouth that appears
to be consuming him. Passers-by dodge into the traffic to avoid
Tubby, so that by the time he arrives at the dentist's he has left a trail
of pile-ups. The cause of all this is his fixed grin, an extreme version
of the one I've seen elsewhere. It's so relentlessly wide that the teeth
look close to bursting out of his mouth. The more desperately he
points at it, the harder the dentist's receptionist laughs, but I wonder
if audiences would have. Presumably the intertitles are meant to
convey his struggle to make himself understood, but I'm not sure if
they're simply nonsense; none of them is onscreen quite long enough.
At last the receptionist regains enough control to summon the dentist,
who is played by Tubby too. I suppose this is designed to render the
treatment more comical, but as he pulls tooth after random tooth and
shies them in all directions I'm preoccupied with how the stand-in's
face may look. Eventually the patient makes his escape, pursued by
the dentist with a pair of pliers in each hand. In the street everyone
falls about with laughter at the spectacle of Tubby's new grin, the
product of just three teeth. As the next patient takes the chair we see
that the dentist has acquired Tubby's previous expression. The final
shot is of teeth flying in handfuls out of the surgery window. The film
was banned in Britain.

While I'm no friend of censorship, the decision is hardly startling.
Orville Hart's camera is only as static as most of them were in those
days, but it seems transfixed by the outrages it's photographing in
takes that often feel a little too prolonged for comfort, as if the style
is meant to force the audience to respond. By contrast, we're given
barely a glimpse of the manual the dentist consults before starting
work on the other Tubby. I think the text is a version of the intertitles,
but what kind of a joke is this supposed to be?

More fundamentally, how could the man who dominates virtually
every shot have been a lecturer? Laughter distracts me from the
question. Someone in the projection room continues giggling at the
final sight of the dentist even after the screen turns blank. Is it one of
Willie's girls? Surely she wouldn't have come naked into the desert. I
don't know whether I would welcome her or her friend in the
miniature auditorium, but nobody has joined me when a second film
takes the screen. It's
Tubby's Telepathic Tricks
, another banned film.

It contains much to offend the censor, beginning with the book
that librarian Tubby finds in a dusty stack.
Old Tricks
, it's called, but
its elaborate binding and metal hinges suggest the occult. I have time
to read just a single group of letters on the pages he consults: IC-HA,
which could be a hiccup followed by a laugh. He returns the book to
the shelf and puts a finger to his wicked grin, which sets off a shrill
giggle behind me. A face is peering through the glass in front of the
dormant projector. Guillermo's features look transformed by
merriment, especially his expanded mouth.

I find his presence oppressive, together with the closeness of the
screen and the insistent pulsation of the generator. Tubby is at the
library counter. Whenever he serves a member of the increasingly
respectable public, he turns to the camera with a grin that indicates
the kind of thoughts he's reading. Guillermo greets each of these shots
with mirth that sounds as if he's dubbing Tubby. Before long Tubby
discovers that he can project his thoughts, and we're treated to a
series of vignettes in which he pretends to perform some task while a
reader enacts his fantasies in the background. A fan of Westerns
gallops a woman up and down the aisles of shelves, a borrower of
romances seizes anyone who strays within reach and presents them
with kisses I would have thought too passionate for silent comedy,
two amateur historians duel with umbrellas that their violence soon
leaves skeletal, two priests hit each other repeatedly over the head
with larger and larger Bibles... The head librarian attempts to
intervene, only for the staff to build a ziggurat of books and lower
her, struggling helplessly, from a balcony to perch on top. As Tubby
emerges from the library, grinning to signify that he's taking his
havoc further, an avalanche of books collapses in his wake.

An academic might find this anarchy exhilarating in contrast to his
previous career, but is it funny? Guillermo thinks so, and carries on
giggling after the screen turns abruptly blank. I would interview him
about his reactions if there was any chance of obtaining a response. I
continue scribbling observations in the brief interlude before the
screen is filled with
Tubby's Tinseled Tree
.

This time he's employed as a workman to erect a Christmas tree in
a town square. First he plays with the decorations, sitting a fairy doll
on his knee and quaking like Santa Claus with such silent jollity it
shakes the doll to bits, then sporting a tinsel halo until the mayor and
a priest frown at him. He consults a manual – ER, ER, ER, ER, ER
appears to be the whole of the text, and certainly all that I have a
chance to distinguish – and sets about winching the tree upright, with
results even more disastrous than his grin at the audience promises.
To begin with he manages to impale the mayor on the tip of the trunk
– presumably his robe is caught, though it's possible to think he's
more intimately skewered – and once the mayor has been dumped
sprawling in the snow it's the priest's turn to be elevated, waving all
his limbs like a pinned insect. When at last he's rudely returned to
earth Tubby succeeds in erecting the tree, only for the dignitaries to
notice that the fairy is missing from the top. Tubby reconstructs the
figure with its head facing backwards and swaps a leg for an arm, and
then he sticks its wings between his shoulders to help him swarm up
the tree. He perches on the topmost branch while he fits the fairy to
the apex, ramming the doll down with such glee that nobody could
mistake where the spiky tip has been inserted. Up to this point I
wondered why this film was also banned in Britain, but now I'm
surprised it was released anywhere in this form. Tubby balances on
the branch and transfers his angelic wings to the doll. The meaning of
his complicit grin becomes clear as the tree topples under his weight,
which has somehow been renewed. His grin widens as he rides the
tree down to the sound of Guillermo's mirth, but I'm no less shocked
than contemporary audiences must have been to see where Tubby's
bound. His head smashes through the back of a nativity tableau, and
his face appears above the occupants of the stable like a manifestation
of some older and more savage god. In his struggles to extricate
himself he pokes his hands through the backdrop, and the sacred
manikins jig about as if he's their puppeteer. As the incensed
personages converge on him he wrenches himself free, but seems to
have left his head behind. He prances away like a decapitated fowl
and doesn't sprout his mocking head until he reaches the edge of the
square. His pursuers chase him into a park, to be confronted by a row
of snowmen, of which the middle figure bears his delighted face.
Once the unobservant men are past he skips after them. We have to
assume he's capable of making no sound in the snow, like all the
snowmen shambling on either side of him.

What effect is this payoff meant to have on the audience? They
might dream about it later, but surely few would be amused. I hardly
know what I'm scribbling on the clipboard. Guillermo is giggling so
wildly that I'm surprised he can work the projectors, but the film has
scarcely run out when
Tubby's Troublesome Trousers
takes its place
on the screen.

This time he's the manager of a men's outfitter's overrun by mice.
We first see him counting more than a dozen that have been trapped
in cages in a storeroom. Are the intertitles meant to convey his mental
state? 'Enelve, elvwet, teenirth,' he counts before a harassed assistant
seeks help. A pompous customer is causing a scene because the
trousers of his new suit are too loose. Tubby fetches them from the
changing-room and turns his grin on the audience as he buttons a
mouse into the back pocket. The customer expresses satisfaction with
the fit and struts out of T. Thackeray Tailor. He's streets away when
he begins to jump and jerk and lurch, overturning displays outside
shops.

Why don't I find the film as innocent as the makers might have
liked it to appear? Not just because the glimpse of a pamphlet Tubby
drops in the first scene – instructions for the mousetraps – seems not
quite nonsensical enough. FORM, TO KE, T WIT, PROP: I don't
know why the fragments of language strike me as mocking. For the
rest of the two-reeler Tubby and his staff deal with a succession of
obnoxious customers: a mayor, a priest, a judge. Each of them
departs with a mouse in his trousers and adds to the chaos in the
streets. By the end the entire town is a riot that outdoes anything I've
previously seen in a slapstick film.

Although some of it is funny, I'm not sure that's the point. Several
Laurel and Hardy films reach similar climaxes, and in
Liberty
Stan
dons Ollie's trousers without noticing that a crab has slipped into
them, but there's the point: it's a mistake, whereas in Tubby's film the
mice are deliberately planted and we're invited to be accessories to the
prank. Throughout the film he and his staff grin more and more
widely at the audience and at one another. Silent laughter seems to be
their primary mode of communication – at least, it's silent except for
Guillermo's version and the relentless pulsing, which feels muffled
less by the wall behind the screen than by my skull. It could almost
be my brain that's throbbing rather than the generator. At last the
customers deduce that Tubby is the author of their troubles and
prance back to the shop. He makes his escape by releasing the rest of
the mice, which cause such panic that the judge leaps on the mayor's
shoulders, only for the priest to spring onto his. While they totter in
the background as if they're auditioning for a circus, Tubby gives the
audience his hugest grin.

As his pale luminous face fills my vision I make the link I was
searching for earlier. He dodges offscreen, and the image turns black
as the human tower begins to topple into the rioting crowd. My eyes
superimpose an after-image of his face, especially his rampant grin,
over THE END. I could imagine that it's deriding my notion of how
a professor became this performer, and why. Perhaps the films are
designed to instruct. Perhaps they're meant as demonstrations.