For part one click here:

Marjorie Beebe
misbehaved in almost all of her movies. She was clearly a bit of a rebel and
there is definitely something Pre Code about her attitude, but she was not
trying to make some great sociological point. Her aim was to amuse; she wanted
to be a comedienne and to make people laugh. She therefore had to be found out
in her misbehaviour. The loglines one could write for her movies were pretty
consistent, Sassy girl gets her
comeuppance or She was the author of
her own misfortune but she found all sorts of ways to make this happen. She
became the butt of the slapstick but she was the complete opposite of the
put-upon woman. She was claiming the lead role that had generally been the
preserve of the great male clowns, Chaplin and Keaton and Roscoe Arbuckle.
To do this
properly she had to get stuck into all the physical hi-jinks that they put
themselves through, and to make it funny she had to subject herself to all
sorts of indignity. None of this presented a problem to Marjorie Beebe. She was
naturally athletic, and she loved staying in role to show her character’s
mortification as her latest uppity young lady gets- her sometimes literal-
dressing down. She was an excellent rider. In a spoof Western Hold ‘er Sheriff (Mack Sennett 1931) a
boy’s hat blows off as Beebe rides by. She leans low out of the saddle to
retrieve it and hands it to the boy without stopping. This scene has no plot
relevance; it is there merely as a bit of Marjorie Beebe trick riding. She was
also a powerful swimmer, a useful attribute given that her mentor Mack Sennett
had become a little obsessed with filming underwater.
In Dance Hall Marge (Mack Sennett 1931)
she’s in her usual trouble. She’s a club hostess, playing it quite risqué, and
upsetting various men with her antics. She’s chased around a ship and has to
dive off it. Floundering through shallow, dirty, sandy water in a flimsy
evening dress she seemingly cuts a sorry figure. She slips over getting in more
of a mess. The man pursuing her has some sort of pellet gun which he keeps
firing and every time he does Beebe clutches her bottom. It’s a lovely signal
that this is not some helpless victim. This is Marjorie Beebe still clowning
around. She comes to a pier and clambers up the struts very athletically, and
in her high heels. She climbs on to the top of the pier where there is a parked
car. She gets into the car and starts it. But she puts it in reverse, and it
careers straight back into the water where she proceeds to drive it as fish
swim past her.
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Just look at Beebe
clamber up that pier- the chase scene in Dance Hall Marge.
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The whole sequence combining athletic chutzpah with temporary abject humiliation would have put off many an actress but Beebe loved this sort of routine. Incidentally it can best be seen not in the original short but in an excellent latter-day French compilation Ça c’est du Cinéma (Claude Accursi and Raymond Bardonnet 1951) which features most of the greats of slapstick cinema. The French have always loved cinema, and have idiosyncratic preferences which generally prove to be sound. At the beginning they list the star performers such as Keaton and Laurel and Lloyd, Billy Bevan and Jimmy Finlayson. Only one woman is given a main credit and she is Marjorie Beebe. Long after she had been forgotten in her homeland those French guys understood and appreciated her exceptional talents.
As for her
dressings down one has only to look at one of her films where she moonlighted
away from Mack Sennett. In 1931- her annus
mirabilis when many of her best titles were made in that all too short
career- she teamed up with Dane and Arthur in the Paramount short A Put-Up Job (Albert Ray 1931). It’s about building a prefab house and
is a re-run of Buster Keaton routines, but Karl Dane gets the material to work
for him too. Beebe is in a supporting role but she makes her presence felt.
She’s Mrs Blimpo, and she and her husband have been landed with Dane and
Arthur, fresh from the Job Center, who are to put up their new house. Mr Blimpo
is pretty hopeless and Beebe clearly wears the pants. She finds Dane a rather
engaging presence and starts flirting with him as soon as they meet in the
house agent’s office. On site she continues to parade around; one morning she
comes out of the house half-dressed and fiddling with the suspenders on her
dungarees. They trail along the ground and Dane inadvertently steps on them.
Down come the dungarees and Beebe is left with exposed panties.
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Down
comes Mrs Blimpo’s dungarees- Beebe in A Put-Up Job
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Marge
Clancy’s frank assessment- Beebe loses face in Doubling in the Quickies
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Confidence quickly restored- trying again in Doubling in the Quickies |
Marjorie Beebe
always got into trouble and it was always through her misbehaviour. It was
hubris in that instance. Sometimes it was lust or impertinence or disobedience.
In Racket Cheers (Mack Sennett 1930)
it was criminality as she teams up with her gangster boyfriend for a fraudulent
caper. But she gets drunk at the sting and pays for it at his hands. A dream
sequence at the end has the best routine as Beebe sits on board ship
(wo)manning a submachine gun which she is firing at the entire American Navy,
after them for their illegal activities. She fires off round after round, a
cigarette clamped firmly between her lips. In the blink-and-it’s-over single
reel Hot News Margie (Alfred J.
Goulding 1931) it’s back to hubris and chutzpah in the very modern tale of a
tabloid reporter going way over the top, and in Cowcatcher’s Daughter (Babe Stafford 1931) it’s just about
everything, a twenty minute catalogue of rampant and Beebily bad behaviour.
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24
carat misbehavior from the charmer of a Cowcatcher’s Daughter- complete
with cow
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I love Marjorie Beebe!
ReplyDelete'Great actress!
ReplyDelete