The Bakery

"The Bakery," I am led to believe, is a fairly typical film of the once-popular comedian Larry Semon, and I am beginning to get the impression that one has to be in a very particular frame of mind to enjoy a Larry Semon film. You can expect a plot (or even a sequence of events, really), you can't expect to get an impression of the character of anyone you see, and you can't expect anything subtle or sophisticated. Larry Semon was brilliant in a very narrow field -- creating and executing wacky sight gags.

So "The Bakery" exclusively makes use of that talent, and it's full of wacky sight gags, and pretty much nothing else. They are united only by the fact that most of them are generally connected to the setting of a bakery. Those sight gags are certainly well done, though -- many of them involve huge set-piece stunts, elaborate props such as the spinning pie display here, or seemingly impossible tasks such as training a monkey methodically to unravel a scarf on camera.

Of course, Semon was notorious for racist humor, and we don't get through the film without a joke based solely around the fact that white people have been covered in soot. The pre-Stan Laurel Oliver Hardy, often Semon's second banana, is hidden somewhere this film beneath a huge moustache, playing a shifty bakery employee who steals money. He plays the slapstick well, and mixes his villain persona with some of the put-on chivalrous gestures that were his specialty. Semon himself, when not mid-stunt, projects the impression of the classic whiteface clown.

An audience who meets this on its own terms and is prepared to enjoy some big, crazy, creative stunts will get a lot of smiles from this -- as long as they don't look for any of those extra elements that sometimes make other comedies good.

Larry Semon made 'The Bakery' during the phase of his career when he was trying to be Chaplinesque. We see him here in the titular bakery as the general dogsbody, just as Chaplin was employed in various workplaces in several of his Essanay and Keystone comedies (notably 'Dough and Dynamite', also set in a bakery). And here, as in several of Semon's other comedies from this period, Oliver Hardy is cast as a villain very much in the mould of the characters played by Eric Campbell in Chaplin's comedies for Mutual. In 'The Bakery', Hardy is even wearing bushy eyebrows and a moustache that make him resemble Campbell in 'The Adventurer'.

For once, Semon makes a distinctive entrance. We first see his character only from below the waist, the upper half of his body concealed beneath the stack of parcels he's carrying. Only after he stumbles through a trap door do we see his face: one of the most naturally comic faces in all of silent films. Too bad that Semon's comedic inventiveness never caught up with his appearance.

Some of Chaplin's short comedies got a great deal of comic mileage out of one unusual prop; notably the escalator in 'The Floorwalker'. In 'The Bakery', Semon gets impressive mileage out of a rotating pillar of shelves, each shelf containing a different cake. Semon spins the pillar so that its protruding sign spins round and hits Hardy in the back of the head. Then Hardy chases Semon round the pillar, prompting Semon to take the natural (and very Chaplin-like) lurk of riding the pillar while it revolves, so that he can relax while Hardy pursues him.

There's even a Chaplinesque plot line here, with a shortage in the bakery's books. I expected Hardy, as the villain, to be the culprit here ... and was surprised when things went otherwise. Elsewhere, there's a Prohibition gag involving a bottle labelled 'Home Brew'. (Which makes as much sense as a bag of cocaine marked 'Cocaine'.) I'll give a good-sport award to actress Eva Thatcher for a sequence in which a mouse climbs into her clothing; too bad the routine isn't funny.

The real mystery of this Semon short is the brief but virtuoso performance by a trained monkey. This monkey looks exactly like Josephine, the monkey who gave such remarkable performances in Harold Lloyd's 'The Kid Brother' and Buster Keaton's 'The Cameraman'. But those movies were six and seven years after 'The Bakery' ... is it possible that Josephine's movie career lasted for so long? I'm absolutely certain that this is the same monkey; I wish I could verify it.

'The Bakery' is well above Larry Semon's average, largely due to the fact that for most of its length he's emulating Chaplin's brand of comedy. Unfortunately, by the end of this short movie, Larry Semon has reverted to his true nature, and we get one of those wildly implausible Semon gag sequences: this one involving a ladder that manages to tip its occupants into ladies' bathrooms and other inconvenient places, in a manner that's too implausible to be funny. There's too much cakery fakery in 'The Bakery', but at least it's concentrated into the last 300 feet or so of this short movie. I'll rate 'The Bakery' 6 out of 10, much higher than I'd usually rate a Semon film.

It's hard to believe that back in the early 1920s, Larry Semon was one of the top movie comics--as he is practically unheard of today. In fact, I think the only reason I found this short on DVD was because like many of Semon's films, his co-star was Oliver Hardy and this film was part of Passport Video's "The Laurel OR Hardy Collection"--films featuring one or the other before they were permanently teamed in 1927.

While I have never been a huge Larry Semon fan, I have seen a few dozen of his films and appreciate that he CAN be exceptionally funny and his stunts amazing to watch. Unfortunately, this is not the norm, as most of Semon's films are rather mediocre for the genre. However, I was very, very happy to see that this was not a typical Semon film but one where all the action and plotting worked perfectly--producing one of the funnier comedy shorts of the 1920s I have seen. While it lacks the sophistication and polish of the best of Keaton and Lloyd, for laughs it's hard to beat this film. I particularly loved the scene where he tried to get the mouse off the customer--you'd have to see it to believe it. Plus, in this film the stunt-work is very high energy and amazing--particularly the huge falls through the trapdoor from one floor to another. I don't know how they did this dangerous work without someone being killed!! Funny, high-paced, and coming together like a true work of art, this is Larry Semon at his absolute finest.

Other than Oliver Hardy playing the same type of villain as Eric Campbell, I see nothing else that resembles Chaplin in the least. Chaplin was never as physical in his comedy as Semon was. "The Bakery" is thin on plot like most all of his films but if you're looking to laugh a plot does not seem that necessary. And laugh you will as this film has some of the best sight gags ever put on film. The mouse sequence is one of the funniest in the film, as well as the owner falling into a vat of dough one story below. The teetering ladder across a fence into the motorway just missing large oncoming trucks is pure genius! This film really is one of the best from Semon then at the height of his career with Vitagraph. While Chaplin would often milk a single gag to unbearably long lengths in many of his films, Semon would move quickly through all his usual gags. The 1921 review of this film claimed it brought the house down at the Rialto during its premier...it's easy even today to see why. If you're a Larry Semon fan you may also want to check out "The Show" from 1922 or "School days" from 1920, which were also released from Vitagraph.

Larry Semon is, sadly, likely the most historically overlooked of all the "silent clowns".

Critics panned his films later in his career, due to his refusal to change from tried-and-true slapstick formulas, and he was soon forgotten in the public eye after he died too young of tuberculosis.

Also, whomever may get a chance to actually see one of his flicks, be warned they are often not "PC" in today's world, containing racial stereotypes, etc.

HOWEVER...

"The Bakery" is pure fun from the start, with pies, lard, soot, food, flour, and whatever else happens to be handy flying thruout! This silly romp is very worth seeing, if you can find it (a very hard thing to do).