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.
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.