'Musty Suffer,' Shemp Howard, 'Veep' on DVD and Blu-ray
By Mark Voger/The Star-Ledger
The Mishaps of Musty Suffer
$19.95 (DVD), Undercrank Productions
Raise your hand if you know Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Fatty Arbuckle.
Okay, now keep it raised if you know Musty Suffer.
Yeah — me neither, until I viewed this collection.
Musty is a hobo played by Harry Watson Jr. — a veteran of the circus, vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies — in a series of comedy shorts produced in the middle 1910s, of which 24 survive.
Wearing a false nose, clownish makeup and tattered rags that make Chaplin's tramp look like a Rockefeller, Watson employs every trick he learned in those other milieus.
He's a shameless mug artist — closeups of his goggle-eyed, rubberfaced reactions punctuate each short — but his comedy often surprises.
Weird things happen.
Camera tricks are employed — superimpositions, backward film — that belie the films' nearly 100 years.
We see Musty's dreams, hallucinations and fantasies.
An "automat" restaurant becomes Watson's sandbox.
When Musty is hired by Drs. Pine and Nut as a guinea pig for their experiments, logic is obliterated. The short becomes one avant-garde bit after another.
"Forgotten (but not gone)" is the winking slogan of "The Mishaps of Musty Suffer," eight comedy shorts that have been, for the most part, unseen since their initial release.
These are new digital transfers of the films, which were preserved by the Library of Congress.
The films are: "Going Up," "The Lightning Bellhop," "Just Imagination," "Blow Your Horn," "While You Wait," "Local Showers" and "Outs and Ins" (1916) and "Spliced and Iced" (1917).
The plots usually involve Musty finding employment. Some exteriors in "Blow Your Horn" — in which Musty becomes a bicycle messenger — may have been filmed in Fort Lee, according to a news release. (The Musty Suffer shorts were produced in the Bronx.) "Local Showers" depicts a dentist's office as a kind of purgatory.
Accompaniment is by pianist Ben Model, an accomplished specialist in the scoring of silent films, who funded the DVD via Kickstarter.
Extras include a publicity film of Watson, in character as Musty, visiting Chicago and receiving the keys to the city from "acting Mayor Moorehead." (Judging from the footage, you weren't a man in those days unless you wore a straw hat.) There's also unrestored footage from an incomplete Musty short.
"The Mishaps of Musty Suffer" is available exclusively through amazon.com.
