Silents are Golden: Silent Superstars: John Bunny and Flora Finch

Silents are Golden: Silent Superstars: John Bunny and Flora Finch

As a
followup of sorts to my Vitagraph Studios piece, here’s a look at two of the
company’s most popular stars, now considered icons of early 1910s screen
comedy!

It can be tempting to regard the silent era as
a very well-defined unit of time, where all the films feature the
cloche-hats-and-jazz era and where the existence of, say, a “nickelodeon era”
is somewhat fuzzy and ill-defined. Just about everyone knows that the silent
era was when Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were the huge comedy stars, and
they might also have heard of vague names like Rudolph Valentino and Louise
Brooks.

But like any art form, silent film went
through different stages, from primitive roots of little, one-shot films to the
cinematographic perfection of the late 1920s. And the various genres within the
“silent era” label evolved too, with various stars coming and going as the
years went on. In fact, years before Chaplin started appearing in films,
audiences were fans of other comedy stars–such as Vitagraph’s John Bunny and
Flora Finch.

The cheery, rotund Bunny, with a face that
looked like it was fished out of a puddle, and the rail-thin, pointy-nosed
Finch, were the sort of characters that made for a naturally funny-looking
screen pairing. Vitagraph first teamed them up in 1910, and they would go on to
appear in dozens of one-reel comedies together–about one a week over the course
of five years.

Bunny was born in Brooklyn in 1863 and had
English and Irish heritage. He began his busy stage career in the 1880s. After
25 years of appearing in everything from humble traveling shows to Shakespeare
plays on Broadway, he began to notice how motion pictures were capturing
audiences’ attention. More perceptive than many of his colleagues, he felt
certain that cinema was going to be the next big thing and would likely cause
“lean times” on the stage. Thus, in 1910 he decided to get into the motion
picture game himself.

Initially he found it difficult to join a
studio, thanks to his theatrical pedigree–the ramshackle studios of the time
thought they couldn’t afford to pay him what he was worth. He was finally hired
by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton of the Vitagraph company, although
they also had concerns since most Vitagraph actors made $5 a day. Much to their
surprise, Bunny agreed on a $40 a week salary, about a fifth of what he was
making on the stage.

Flora Finch, born in 1867 in Surrey, England,
also had a career on the stage. Her whole family worked in music halls and
other forms of theater, and Finch herself eventually joined the Ben Greet
Players, who specialized in traveling Shakespeare shows. She immigrated to the
U.S. around 1908, the same year of her first film credit in the American
Mutoscope and Biograph Company film The
Helping Hand. She was in several Biograph shorts for the next year or so,
including the short comedy Those Awful
Hats (1909). Intended as a humorous way to tell ladies to remove their hats
at the movie theater, Finch’s character insists on wearing a comically large
hat and gets removed from the theater with a crane.

In 1910 Finch left Biograph and started
working for Vitagraph, where she stood out with her bony, cartoonish look and
ability to do both broad slapstick and sweeter, more emotional scenes. Her
first pairing with Bunny was in The New
Stenographer (1911), where she played the “very capable, but extremely homely” stenographer.

Bunny
and Finch quickly made an impression on audiences and their one-reel films were
soon in high demand. Exhibitors started referring to their films as
“Bunnyfinches” and “Bunnygraphs.” While broad slapstick was becoming a trend in
comedies thanks to busy companies like Keystone, Vitagraph specialized in
genteel humor that usually revolved around domestic worries and marital
disharmony. The acting style tended to be more natural, more adapted to the subtleties
picked up by the camera.

Bunny
and Finch’s films often had them playing husband and wife, with Bunny usually
getting himself into mischief that he tries to conceal from his slightly
uptight but not unloving spouse. Many of the films had simple, comical
premises. In Bunny’s Birthday Surprise (1913),
Finch wants to throw a surprise dinner party for her husband’s birthday.
Unbeknownst to her, Bunny arrives home exhausted from his workday and puts on
pajamas and heads to bed. When the guests arrive, she calls him to come
downstairs and “he is seen in that garb by the scandalized guests when he turns
on the electric lights.”

Other
films were a bit more elaborate. In the two-reel Father’s Flirtation (1914), for example, the couple visit their
daughter at college and Bunny meets a pretty widow who owns a boarding house.
While he tries to call on her, his wife and daughter show up at the boarding
house and he hides under a bed. He then steals a dress to disguise himself and
ends up in a big chase. A Cure for
Pokeritis (1912), where “Mrs. Sharpe” tries to end her husband’s poker
addiction by staging a fake police raid, is probably the most well-known
Bunnyfinch today–one of the small number that has survived.

Unfortunately,
Bunny and Finch’s prolific partnership would only last a few years. Bunny’s
health declined and he would pass away from Bright’s disease in 1915. Finch
would continue acting in a series of “Flora films” by her own company, but they
weren’t as successful, and she would mainly focus on doing smaller roles in
feature films. Audiences were still fond of her, however, and when she was cast
in the Valentino vehicle Monsieur
Beaucaire (1924) director Sidney Olcott had to assure everyone that she had
a weekly contract and wasn’t just an extra. Finch would pass away in 1940 at
the age of 70 from blood poisoning, not long after making a brief appearance in
the MGM feature The Women (1939).

–

…

–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.

Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.