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.
TWENTY-EIGHT - NOTES ON
SILENTS
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.