Some people look at Biffle and Shooster and say, “Why?”
Others look at Biffle and Shooster and say, “Why not?”
The legend goes that they were a vaudeville team who
attained a measure of fame in the 1920s, working in Katz’s Kreplach Kapers.
They were fairly typical entertainers of the era: song-and-dance men who functioned
as straight man and comic. Biffle did impressions, and Shooster played the
guitar and ukulele. When sound came in, they, like many other performers of the
era, trouped out to Brooklyn and made a couple of Vitaphone one-reelers. But
they led to nothing, and the boys returned to the stage.
Enter Sam Weinberg. A millionaire realtor (and a fiercely
proud and liberal Jew at a time when anti-Semitism was rampant), he was a fan
and thought it would be fun to get into “the pitcher biz.” He signed them in 1933
to a three-year contract to star in four two-reel comedies a year. The duo
headed out to the coast, and he hired the best free-lance people he could
afford to make the shorts.
The boys were kind of comedy shape-shifters, emulating
whatever other team fit the scenario: the Stooges in one film, Laurel &
Hardy in another, and so on. On the one hand, this kept their films distinctive
and non-repetitive (even if the gags weren’t, especially in the ones written by
legendary joke recycler Clyde Bruckman), but on the other, not having concrete
identities kept them from making a bigger impact. Still, their films were
remarkable for what they were able to get away with—Weinberg didn’t fear the
Hays office; movies were just a lark for him, so threatening to put him out of
business carried no weight—thus he was able to lace the shorts with ethnic
humor at a time when the major studios were shunning Jewish characters and
themes to placate Hays’ right-hand man, the notoriously anti-Semitic Joseph
Breen.
At the end of the three years, with business declining,
Weinberg signed them for another year, but the budgets were slashed. A fifth
and final year followed, with the shorts extended to three reels in the hope
they would prove attractive to exhibitors playing longer films as single
features. It didn’t help, and in 1938, they all amicably went their separate
ways. The boys continued to work in film sporadically, and kept busy in night
clubs and later on early TV variety shows, but their moment in the sun had set.
So why should anyone care about Biffle and Shooster?
Don’t we have enough comedy teams from that era already? Not necessarily. Freed
from major studio constraints, they had the opportunity to try things other
comics couldn’t. The veteran talent behind the camera also relished the
relative freedom; as long as they came in on schedule and budget, nobody cared
if, say, an actor’s break-up stayed in the final film, or if a Yiddish
profanity snuck past the less-than-worldly Breen, or if a black butler actually
talked back to a white police detective. And some surprisingly big names would
pop in for a couple of days to let down their hair and act silly (Weinberg had
sold many homes to stars and remained friendly with them).
Sadly, none of Biffle and Shooster’s films have survived.
And so Michael Schlesinger, at great personal expense, has taken it upon
himself to refilm them exactly as they were done in the 1930s. And some of his
latest efforts will screen at the Egyptian on August 16th at 3:00, followed by
a cast and crew discussion. When asked why he would go to all this trouble to
resurrect by proxy a comedy team that never really hit it big in the first
place, he simply replied—
“Why not?”
Michael Schlesinger is a trustee of the American
Cinematheque, retired movie-studio weasel, scrappy independent film producer,
and is clearly, utterly insane.