PRESERVED FILMS

The Village Chestnut (1918)
Production Company: Mack Sennett. Distributor: Paramount. Directors: Raymond Griffith and Walter Wright. Cast: Chester Conklin (Teacher), Louise Fazenda (Adoring student), Myrtle Lind (Teacher’s favorite), Paddy McGuire (Student), George Gray (Student), Harriet Hammond (Student), Eva Thatcher (Mother), Gene Rogers (School board), Sylvia Ashley (School board), Pat Kelly (School board). Transfer Note: Copied at 18 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress from source material provided by EYE Filmmuseum. New Music: Ben Model. Running Time: 22 minutes.

After spending two years as a third of the Triangle Film Corporation (along with D.W. Griffith and Thomas Ince), Mack Sennett withdrew from the organization and went solo again in 1917. He set up a prestigious distribution deal with Paramount, an agreement that lasted about three and a half years before he moved on to Pathe. Only a handful of the Sennett/Paramount shorts survive, so the finding and restoration of The Village Chestnut is an important addition to the Sennett canon.

This short was designed as a showcase for two of Sennett’s best-loved stars — Chester Conklin and Louise Fazenda. Having worked onstage and as a circus clown, Conklin joined Sennett’s company in 1913. Quickly becoming a silent comedy icon, in his studio output Conklin alternated between two personas — the put-upon bumbler “Fishface” and the villainous schemer “Walrus.” Spending most of the teens in shorts such as Between Showers (1914), A Bird’s a Bird (1915), Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts (1916), and His Smothered Love (1918), Conklin left Sennett in 1919.

Besides shorts for Special Pictures, Fox Sunshine Comedies, Punch Comedies, and the Tenneck Film Corp., he more importantly moved into supporting roles in features. Some of the most noteworthy include Greed (1923) and The Duchess of Buffalo (1927), and he was teamed with W.C. Fields in Two Flaming Youths (1927), Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1928), and Fools for Luck (1928). The change to sound saw him starring in shorts for Paramount and features like Her Majesty Love (1931) and Modern Times (1936). By the late 1930s he was turning up in much smaller bits in numerous Columbia shorts and features like The Great Dictator (1940) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), and his career continued until the mid-1960s. He died in 1971.

Louise Fazenda was Sennett’s pigtailed country bumpkin, often taken advantage of by conniving cads like Ford Sterling and Charlie Murray. She came from the stage and in 1913 took up residence in Universal’s Joker Comedies, where she was part of the ensemble and learned the rudiments of film comedy. By 1915 she’d landed at the best comedy studio in the world, Keystone, and soon became one of the organization’s stars. Looking as plain as possible, she specialized in gawky kitchen slaveys and goofy country girls, but in addition to being a skilled comedian she was a fine actress who endowed her outlandish comedy roles with emotion.

Leaving Sennett in 1921, she starred in other shorts series and then made the jump to features. First in supporting roles in pictures such as The Night Club (1925) and The Bat (1926), she was soon starring in features for Warner Bros. that included Footloose Widows (1926) and A Sailor’s Sweetheart (1927). The arrival of sound saw her remaining an in-demand character actress, busy in pictures such as Wonder Bar (1934) and Swing Your Lady (1938), as well as shorts for Al Christie and RKO. Married to producer Hal Wallis, she retired in 1939 and devoted herself to charity work until her death in 1962.

Codirector Raymond Griffith is remembered today as the star of the excellent 1920s comedy features Paths to Paradise (1925) and Hands Up! (1926), but he spent five years behind the scenes as a writer for Sennett. When sound revealed that his voice was only a raspy whisper due to a childhood bout with diphtheria, Griffith returned to writing. He became a producer at Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox and retired in 1940.

—Steve Massa, film historian and author of Slapstick Divas: The Women of Silent Comedy and Lame Brains and Lunatics: The Good, the Bad, and the Forgotten of Silent Comedy.

About the Preservation
The Village Chestnut was preserved in 2018 at Colorlab Corp. using the only known surviving element: a 35mm nitrate print from EYE Filmmuseum. The intertitles were translated from the Dutch and are modern re-creations. The work was supervised by the Library of Congress with funding provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

About the Music
A resident accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress' Packard Campus Theater, Ben Model has performed live scores for silent films over the past 30 years at film festivals, universities, museums, and historic theaters around the country. He is also the producer and co-founder of The Silent Clowns Film Series in New York City. For more information about his work, please visit his website.