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Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of an American Comic Genius
Charles R. Bowers is the Mysterious Stranger of early screen comedy. The details of his life are sketchy. We know that he was born in Iowa in 1889 (the year Charlie Chaplin was born in London). A 1928 press book bio claims that his parents were a French countess and an Irish doctor, that at age five a tramp circus performer taught him to walk the tightrope, and that at six the circus kidnapped him, after which he didn't return home for two years, when the shock killed his father. Between 1916 and 1926 he wrote, produced, and directed hundreds of cartoon shorts based on the "Mutt & Jeff" comic strips. Then in '26 he created a short film that fused live action with lunatic stop-motion animation. Titled "Egged On," it involved an inventor who builds a Rube Goldberg contraption that renders eggs unbreakable. At its climax, a basket of chicken eggs, warmed on the engine of a Model T Ford, hatch open — and out pour a gaggle of tiny Model T's that unfold like origami and trundle around mama Ford until she snuggles them beneath her chassis. The scene is weird and giddily funny.
Other screen burlesques displaying that oddball creativity soon followed. We can wonder if 22-year-old Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel found inspiration in watching Bowers' inventive visual jabberwocky. But today, if not for a few dogged historians and old tins of footage scattered across Europe, Bowers would be utterly forgotten, one of America's lost independent filmmakers.
Now Image Entertainment in the U.S. and Lobster Films in Paris have teamed up to bring 15 surviving Charley Bowers films to DVD. Besides "Egged On," we get others that blend live action and fluid three-dimensional animation. In "He Done His Best" Charley builds a machine that performs all the chores at a restaurant, from cooking to setting tables to serving. In "A Wild Roomer" he invents a white-gloved mechanical monstrosity that bathes, manicures, dresses, and feeds its owner. "Now You Tell One" sees his inventor botanist developing a potion that can "graft anything," leading to gags worthy of a Tex Avery cartoon, such as an eggplant tree that sprouts hardboiled eggs complete with salt shaker. When his girlfriend's home is besieged by mice (one of which wards off her cat with a tiny revolver), he harvests cattail plants to grow an army of felines, the freakiest animated sequence from the age before Ray Harryhausen. Then through clever trick photography Bowers drives a herd of elephants and donkeys into the Capitol building in Washington D.C.
Only the second half of "Say Ah-h!" exists, but we still see Charley feeding an ostrich food ground from a broom, a hoe, a pillow, clothes, and a feather duster, after which the ostrich lays an egg that hatches an ostrich constructed of those items. The surreal creature eats everything in a shed, including a metal stove, and dances to a phonograph record. 1930's "It's a Bird" is a highlight, the only talkie that Bowers starred in. He plays a junkyard employee who captures a rare bird that eats metal. The talking bird is a marvel of bizarre puppet animation, equaled only by a full-grown automobile hatching from its egg.
If "It's a Bird" looks like source material for the 1938 Looney Tunes masterpiece, "Porky in Wackyland," then two of Bowers' clay animation films from 1940 — "Wild Oysters" and "A Sleepless Night" — might have inspired Chuck Jones with their family of house mice conniving to evade the cat or snag some cheese (although the sight of oysters shucking their own shells to assault a mouse is a unique oddity). Other films here include a peculiar oil industry promotional short, "Pete Roleum and His Cousins," that Bowers and director Joseph Losey made for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
After 1940 Bowers drops out of history until his death in 1946, entirely forgotten. French surrealist André Breton wrote a piece lauding "It's a Bird," and years later that became a clue toward identifying the anonymous Bowers. In 1992, Lobster Films began a worldwide search to retrieve the surviving prints. Although Bowers was an American filmmaker, his rediscovery occurred through sources in France, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia. The appeal of these antiquities lies almost solely in Bowers' gonzo imagination. They tend to dawdle and recycle favorite ideas, and as a director-actor he lacks the polish and charisma of his celebrated contemporaries. But his fusion of live action with model animation gave birth to creations that are wacked-out hybrids of Buster Keaton, Willis O'Brien, and that inimitable inventor himself, Dr. Seuss.
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This two-disc DVD set preserves 15 of Bowers' comedies (totaling almost four hours) with commendable restoration work. Signs of age and wear vary throughout these vintage prints. "Now You Tell One" is fresh-looking while "Say Ah-h!" has moments of severe deterioration. But all things considered, these are in good condition with impressive clarity, contrast, and definition. The films' intertitle cards are in French, with optional English subtitles available. As for audio, the "silent" films come with new Dolby Digital 2.0 monaural piano scores by Neil Brand. In addition, some have optional DD 5.1 electronic or accordion scores (yes, you read that right), but those are at best irrelevant alongside Brand's jazzy, uptempo piano that fits the films like a glove. Most of Bowers' sound films come with their original English audio tracks in good condition, though a couple have lost their audio altogether.
Disc Two's big extra is Looking for Charley Bowers, an illuminating 16-minute French documentary about the few international film archaeologists whose detective work led to Bowers' resurrection. Also here is a brief photo gallery of high-quality stills and production photos, including shots from Bowers films that remain lost.
—Mark Bourne
