Given these various roles, who then was “Keystone Mabel?” The first film in which “Mabel” is used in the title is Mabel's Lovers, released November 4, 1912. This was followed by a good many more films so denoted, lasting up into 1916. “Mabel,” then and as such was the character who took on these roles and guises: e.g. “Mabel” as girlfriend, “Mabel” as race car driver, as spouse, as daughter, etc. In other words, she was, generally speaking and most of the time, essentially the same exaggerated female, “Mabel,” albeit in different roles and situations. While there is at times a sensuality about her played-up for comic situations, such as bathing beauty settings, more frequently her character is an undaunted tomboy or demi-tomboy who spars, competes against, or else engages in some kind of playful frolic with villains, suitors, or childhood chums in one absurd circumstances of one kind or other. Yet though a tomboy, hers is a girlish sort rather than a boyish or more masculine kind – and which contrasting girlishness (i.e. contrasting to her male, hyper-activity) is all part of the humor of it. Although we speak of “Keystone Mabel” here, in the common parlance of the time she was known first as the “Biograph Diving Girl” or “Diving Girl,” later as “The Keystone Girl,” and then “Keystone’s Mabel” or “Keystone Mabel.”
Rather than flee from a dangerous situation, her character will sometimes, out of naiveté or innocence, turn about to face it. In The Brave Hunter, for instance, she encounters a large circus bear on the loose. Though at first startled, rather than run she looks into the bear’s eyes and starts playing with him. Such gumption was not uncharacteristic of her in real life, as recounted by Minta Durfee in the early 70’s to interviewer Don Schneider:
“...[S]he came down every Sunday and she and Roscoe would swim from in front of our house, to the Venice pier and back again, at 11 o’clock every Sunday morning.
Occasionally, “Mabel” will herself be acting or putting one over on some one else within the story. In a film like Oh, Those Eyes and Tomboy Bessie, for example, she plays someone who is play-acting in order to mislead another or others characters. In such situations, she is essentially and really a naive coquette seemingly sure of herself. Yet when thwarted, vexed or exposed, as called for by turn of events, her confident facade drops off into tears and dismay or else laughter at the incongruity of things.
In a later interview, Mabel provided some thoughts on her comedic characterizations and the use of subtlety in a farce.
“Try to burlesque somebody. You'll notice that you probably do it with the sort of a brush that the bill-board posters use while small boys admiringly surround them. But you won't appear as clever to grown-ups as the poster-pasters do to the younger generation. Your brush is too thick, too wide, too everything. Burlesque is a delicate art, believe me. I'm no highbrow, as I said before, but I know that. And I know too, that when you make fun of people you have to mimic them with just the slightest exaggeration in order to be really funny. If you overdo it, you ruin, you ruin your performance, and it’s pretty hard not to overdo your act. You have to watch every gesture, every action, no matter how small. A careless lifting of eye-brows may spoil a perfectly good hand-gesture. Watch your step all the time, and watch everything else you have about you, too. If you seem to have any idea that you're playing at something, you won't get across.”
Her Art
“I loved Florence Turner and Mary Fuller, but every fiber in my body responded to Flora Finch’s celebrated comedies; and though I was quite unconscious of it, I can see now that I was always wondering how I would do the funny little stunts she did in her pictures. And, quite likely, figuring my way would be better!
There are two key elements to Mabel Normand’s screen art. The first of these is her ability to be both romantically appealing and boisterously funny at the same time. Traditionally, though with some exception, the funny women in common stage dramas and vaudeville were of ungainly appearance; their grotesque features and manners being what usually made them amusing. Flora Finch, for instance, the then popular Vitagraph comedienne (with whom Mabel made at least one film), was noticeably tall and thin. Mabel on the other hand demonstrated that it was possible for someone to be both very pretty and not only amusing but even rollicking. The humor here is of a paradoxical kind, arising out of the contrast between her petite prettiness, and her willful, sometimes rowdy conduct. Being beautiful and acting funny perhaps seems easy and simple enough for an attractive actress to do. But pulling it off effectively on screen, in a slapstick environment no less, is a good deal more challenging; for it demands an actress to do nothing less than balance and reconcile the ridiculous and the sublime. This in turn requires a more than normal perceptivity of self and other persons in the immediate surroundings. It is an intuitive and sympathetic kind of intelligence based on a natural understanding of human feelings and character, as opposed to something learned through academic or scientific instruction. Part of what makes it all work is that she avoids trying to upstage other players, indeed, is often empathetic toward them, while not above making herself the object of her humor. For this the audience understood, more easily related to and excused her when she otherwise went wild or acted up.
A newspaper reporter once asked her whether it was hard for a pretty woman to be a success in film comedy:
“‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Most pretty girls who go into comedy work are content to be merely pretty. The great difference is to put character into acting without either distorting your face or using comedy make-up. Anyone who photographs well can walk on a scene and flirt with the comedian which is all that most good-looking girls are required to do in comedies. It takes very little ability on their part for all they have to do is follow direction. (And here Miss Normand gave an imitation of a comedy coquette flirting according to the commands of her director). But to make a farce heroine more than a mere doll, you must think out the situation yourself and above all you must pay great attention to every little detail in the scene. The little bits of business that seem insignificant are what make good comedy.’”
The second key element to Mabel Normand’s film art is her emotional fluidity: that is, her remarkable ability to go from one emotion to another in a credible and convincing manner. The range of feeling she could express was by any standard phenomenal. And despite their rapid frequency, the emotions are authentic and ring true. Indeed, she is even believable when we know her character in the story is merely pretending the emotion.
A nominal instance, of which there really are countless, of Mabel’s agility to skip from one emotion to another with swiftness and ease is in the Keystone short Those Country Kids. She is sitting at the edge of a well with Roscoe Arbuckle, as a rural bumpkin, standing beside her. The two are amicably chatting and laughing together when Roscoe, with his big frame, accidentally knocks into her into the well. She falls backward and almost plummets into the well but that her legs hold to the well’s rim. Roscoe, aghast, apologizes as he helps her back up. After reassuming her seated position, she vehemently gives him a good whack in the face with her hand; to which he responds by bawling. Seeing that she's made him sad, Mabel immediately attempts to console him, and the two make up. This approximately minute long sequence ends with her putting her arms around the distraught Roscoe and saying (in effect) “There, there, it’s o.k.”
Mabel’s father, Claude Normand, at one time was a small theater and club pianist, and all her life Mabel showed a conspicuous love and devotion to music, and this is reflected overtly in a number of her films. In Hot Stuff, A Strong Revenge, and Mabel Lost and Won, we see her dancing, playing piano in Troublesome Secretaries, and singing Caught in A Cabaret. Like Chaplin, the mutability of her gestures and emotions has a pronounced musical quality, with her exaggerated gestures and movements on screen subtly synchronized to and with deeper emotions she herself ostensibly feels within. A comparison might be to dancing in which a dancer’s physical movements change to the movement and beat of the melody and rhythm, and, with respect to acting on screen, as if she were “dancing” to the succession of action and emotions in a given scene. This is easier to understand when we realize that there might be performing musicians, for example violinists, banjo players, pianists, etc., present when a film was being shot. Music accompanying filming, however, was only made standard practice by the time of the later Goldwyn and Sennett features, and could not always be had at Keystone except when filming indoors.
Her Technique
Mabel Normand's basic screen technique (as opposed to her “art”), as found in her slapstick films, also involved two essential aspects:
1. Physical gestures
A simple, general listing suffices to give us a good idea of the kind of comic mime technique she had at her disposal; bearing in mind that each of these gestures or expression is not infrequently used in conjunction with one or more of the others.
1.) Physical gestures:
2.) Facial Expressions:
One device Mabel employed, as pointed out by Sam Peebles, in Classic Film Collector, Aug. 1970, is the screen aside. With this, she would look into the camera and make some kind of facial comment about the action taking place, similar to a stage actor’s aside (to the audience.) Films where we find this include Tomboy Bessie, Mabel’s Married Life, Fatty and Mabel’s Simple Life and Wished on Mabel.
For all the fun she created and displayed, Mabel took what she did seriously and usually with affectionate enthusiasm. On screen she is typically very energetic, and this energy tends to inspire and impart itself to those with and around her. She often acts in such a way, usually on films made within the studio, that one can, with little difficulty, imagine a lively audience cheering her on. Somewhat similarly, she is sometimes like a child at play. In Katchem Kate, for instance, she portrays a junior detective who disguises herself as one of a band of male outlaws, and the effect is one of an imaginative child playing “cops and robbers” or “cowboys and Indians.”
A WORD ABOUT THE STUNTS
“I have had to dive and swim in rough ocean scenes. I have fought with bears, fallen out of a rapidly moving automobile, jumped off a second story roof into a flower bed and risked life, limb and peace of mind in innumerable ways -- and all to make people laugh. Some work days I have gone home and cried with ache in body and heart and at the very moment of my misery thousands of theater-goers were rocking in their seats with laughter at some few scenes in which I had worked a few weeks before.
There is some controversy about which, if any, of her stunts prior to 1916 Mabel used a double for. Although Sennett's thriftiness alone might suggest or attest Mabel did most of them herself, both tradition and the extant films themselves also do or seem to support this interpretation. The following are a list of some of these:
There are a few anecdotes related of Mabel pulling pranks in real life, such as when she reportedly tormented Nick Cogley with smoking smudge pots as he attempt to convalesce at home while recuperating from a leg injury -- which show that she herself was (at least in her younger days) not above playing roughly. As well, it is common to come across accounts or claims of her using bad language. Presumably there is some truth behind both of these kinds of stories and reminiscences – but exactly how much is easily exaggerated and difficult now to say.
“Chester Conklin: Gloria [Swanson] thought Mabel was rude and coarse.
To Continue...
“So one Sunday morning they came back, and instead of the two of them getting out of the water immediately and coming up on the sand, there was something going on, you couldn’t make up your mind just exactly what it was, but I could see her arm over something, and I don’t know what it was over, and nobody else did. Some people were standing, and of course all the strolling people on the strand, naturally came every day -- it became a regular excitement on Sunday, to see these people dining, all these stars, and people from the theater, and they were all standing there, and nobody could make up his mind what it was that was going on out there.
“Well, what it was, as they were swimming back, from the Venice pier, up came a dolphin, and instead of Mabel being frightened like anybody would, -- because none of us knew anything about dolphins in those days -- she just put her arm over the neck of this dolphin and he swam right along with them.
“And do you know, every Sunday, for nearly a year, he came and swam with them, down and back, until one day they came back and then he disappeared, and they never saw him again. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that wonderful?”
“And to give you a sidelight on another angle of our early history: I had nobody to tell me what to do. Dramatic actresses had the stage to fall back on, the sure-fire hits of theatrical history in pose and facial expression; but I had to do something that nobody had ever done before.
“I had no precedent, nothing to imitate, for Flora Finch’s art, based as it was on her angularity and candidly exploited homeliness, never would have fitted me. Other comediennes with equal frankness got their laughs with their fat bodies or their somewhat ghastly grotesquery of gesture.
“Since all previous laughs had been achieved through the spoken word and, in our early days, through slapstick hokey, I had to cleave a new path to laughter through the wilderness of the industry's ignorance and inexperience. I created my own standard of fun, simply letting spontaneity and my inborn sense of what is mirth-provoking guide me, for no director ever taught me a thing.”
2. Facial expressions
"But the heart-breaking scenes are not everyday occurrences. In many of the pictures the parts we play we love just as much as the audiences that see the finished product exhibited. There is the sweet and the bitter, much the same as in any other profession or business in which a girl makes her living.”
“Minta Durfee: Mabel was not coarse, and she was not vulgar. She was fun. All the time. It was Gloria who saw herself as a great tragedienne.”
[quoted in The Keystone Krowd by Stuart Oderman, p. 48]