Silents are Golden: Charley Bowers, The Quirky Genius Of Stop-Motion Animation

Charley Bowers, The Quirky Genius Of Stop-Motion Animation

You’ve heard of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd.
You’ve even heard of Harry Langdon. Roscoe Arbuckle and Mabel Normand? Of
course you’re familiar with them! Heck, you’re no stranger to Charley Chase or
Marie Dressler–or even Monty Banks.

But what about Charley Bowers? “Wait, who?”
you say. In the rarified world of silent film fandom the Bowers name is finally
becoming more familiar, but this eccentric comedian and animation pioneer is
still an obscure figure overall. Considering he was virtually forgotten for
decades before several of his slapstick shorts were rediscovered in the
1960s–and it was still a challenge for historians to find out his name–he’s
enjoying a happier fate than some of his contemporaries thanks to his wildly
unique stop-motion visions.

Bowers was born in the small town of Cresco,
Iowa, and sources vary as to whether it was in 1899 or 1877. In fact, sources
vary about practically every aspect
of Bowers’ life, thanks to his love of telling tall tales about himself–the
more grandiose, the better. He would insist that his mother was a French
countess and his father an Irish doctor (well, they were French and Irish respectively) and that he became a talented
tightrope walker by the tender age of six. Supposedly a circus witnessed little
Bowers’ amazing talents and kidnapped him, not allowing him to return for two
years, and “the shock killed his father.” The rest of his youth was filled with
odd jobs and he claimed to have had experience in everything from painting
murals to acting in vaudeville to bucking broncos in the Wild West. What we do
know for sure is that Bowers was an undeniably talented artist and worked as a
newspaper cartoonist for the Jersey
Journal, Newark Evening News, and Chicago
Tribune in the 1900s and 1910s.

Somewhere along the way Bowers became
fascinated with hand-drawn animation, becoming one of the animators on the Katzenjammer Kids and Bringing Up Father series. In 1916 he
had worked his way up to being the head of the small Barré Studio churning out
the popular Mutt and Jeff shorts
under the wing of the Bud Fisher Film Corporation. Bud Fisher was the creator
of Mutt and Jeff and happily took
credit for writing and directing the films, but the plots came almost
exclusively from Bowers’ busy imagination.

Barré employees got used to their eccentric
boss’s endless tall tales–told in the most minute detail–and liking for
practical jokes. They also suspected that he was involved in more than a few
shady business deals behind the scenes. Sure enough, in 1919 he was fired from
the Barré Studio for padding the employee payrolls–although he quickly
resurfaced to direct another Mutt and
Jeff at a new flung-together studio.

Bowers’ work in hand-drawn animation was
supplemented by his growing obsession with stop-motion puppetry, which he
experimented with on the side. By the mid-1920s he had decided to enter the
realm of live-action slapstick comedy with cinematographer H.L. Muller as his
co-director and co-producer. Bowers would be the star of what was dubbed the
“Whirlwind Comedies” series, featuring the mysterious (and self-patented)
“Bowers Process,” a mysterious-sounding term for his stop-motion animation.

Usually revolving around Bowers as an
obsessive, excitable inventor coming up with Rube Goldberg-esque machines (and
clearly drawing inspiration from Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon), these
Whirlwind Comedies were breezily paced and full of bizarre animated imagery.
Their logic hovered somewhere between “cartoony” and “downright surreal.” In
his first Whirlwind, the wonderful Egged
On (1926), Charley hides a basket of eggs in a Model T’s engine space.
Later he sees the eggs hatching into miniature Model Ts, which zip all over the
floor before hiding under their “mother” automobile. In Now You Tell One (1926) Charley creates a potion that allows him to
grow any type of food using tree grafts. He successfully grows an eggplant
containing a hardboiled egg and a salt shaker, and a pussy willow graft results
in dozens of full-grown cats.

His “Bowers process” brought all this bizarre
imagery to life in painstaking detail, one hand cranked frame at a time. His
many unique stop-motion creatures, such ostriches made of broomsticks and
sentient oysters with pearl eyes, are given droll personalities and little gags
of their own–Bowers never shied away from adding little flourishes that
doubtless added hours of extra work. In A
Wild Roomer (1927), Charley invents a machine that can perform any
household task, from polishing a stove to giving the user an “egg shampoo.” At
one point the plot comes to a halt for a lengthy sequence showing the machine’s
robot arms carefully creating a rag doll and bringing it to life, clothing it,
feeding it a banana, and giving it a friend in the form of a walnut that
hatches into a squirrel. If this sounds like a Mad Lib brought to life, rest
assured that the visual experience is just as confounding.

Bowers and Muller made 20 Whirlwind Comedies,
the series ending with Goofy Birds (1928).
In the early talkie era a series of “Tall Stories” shorts was announced,
debuting with the charmingly weird It’s a
Bird (1930). The short featured Bowers in his first talkie role (wearing a
Stan Laurel-ish bowler hat), where he played a scrapyard worker who hears about
an exotic “metal-eating bird.” He captures the bird with the help of a
wise-talking worm and puts it to work. In one incredible sequence, the bird
lays an egg which hatches a hyperactive blob of metal. It expands and unfolds
into a full size Model T.

While his imaginative shorts were generally
well-received Bowers was always a minor figure, and his whereabouts grew dimmer
as the 1930s wore on. The Tall Stories series didn’t seem to get off the
ground, and he worked sporadically on small shorts starring stop-motion
oysters, mice and other animals. He also animated the film Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939) for an exhibit at the 1939
World’s Fair, which starred singing, dancing drops of petroleum. After
struggling with an unknown illness for several years, he passed away in 1947 in
New Jersey, survived by his wife Winifred.

Soon Charley Bowers’ work was forgotten, but
happily it wasn’t for too long. In the 1960s archivist Raymond Borde bought a
stash of film cans marked “Bricolo,” which turned out to be the French nickname
for Bowers. Thus began a slow revival of interest in this obscure, wildly
unique artist. Today his rediscovered work has been restored, enshrined in box
sets and played at film festivals, finally giving him the credit he always
deserved–and doubtless would’ve gloried in.

…

–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.

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