Mack Sennett told Cameron Shipp, “I was a Canadian farm boy with no education. I moved to the United States and worked as a boilermaker. A man who was to become President helped me, in an odd sort of way, and I wound up as a motion picture producer, many times a millionaire when I was on top of the heap.”

Sennett was 74 when, in 1954, he recalled those career years that had made Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressler movie stars and that had given future stars Gloria Swanson, Carol Lombard, W.C. Fields, and Bing Crosby their first opportunity to appear in film. From 1912 and into the 1920s, the public howled at his slapstick Keystone productions that featured pie-throwing and car-chasing nonsense. He believed comedy was based on making everything ridiculous. Movie director Frank Capra recalled Sennett telling him, when he was a gag writer for Sennett, “Virtue, authority, sweet love, wealth — all ridiculous.”
 

Winner of a special Oscar in 1937, Mack Sennett was the creator of the kinaesthetic Keystone Kops, the sheik of slapstick, the aga of gag, and the boss of buffoonery during the silent era. This 1920s view jokingly portrays Sennett unable, due to lack of funds, to get in to see one of his films. [Photo, courtesy National Film Archives]

Known in his heyday as the “King of Komedy,” Mack was born in 1880 and christened Mikall by his Irish parents, John and Catherine Sinnott, who were farming in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Before the turn of the century, they left Canada for Connecticut where Mikall became a boilermaker. He had more ambitious plans, however, and went to New York in 1902 to study voice.

Back in Northhampton, Connecticut, he saw Calvin Coolidge, a local attorney who would become President of the United States in 1923. Coolidge had earlier met Canadian-born comedienne Marie Dressler, then appearing at a local theatre, and had suggested the young man from Quebec should see her; she in turn urged him to meet David Belesco who placed “Mack” into vaudeville acts and the chorus of a few musicals before Sennett, as he now spelled his surname, was hired at $5 a week by pioneer movie director D. W. Griffith at the Biograph Company in New York in 1908.

Ambitious and inquisitive, Sennett studied the film comedies being produced in France and began writing scenarios. By 1910, Griffith, lacking a flare for comedy, made Sennett his principal director of comic productions. By 1912, with some 80 one- and two-reeler films produced, Sennett attracted the attention of a New York film company that was prepared to back him in order to establish a comedy branch as part of its film operations.

Sennett established his company, Keystone, in Los Angeles and brought some of his favourite players from Biograph with him, notably the comic actress Mabel Normand whom he had met at Biograph and who became the love of his life. He soon added, mostly from vaudeville, a number of others such as Ben Turpin, to mass produce one- and two-reel films.

In 1913 when Chaplin joined Keystone, Sennett, according to David Robinson in his biography of Chaplin, explained the Keystone method of making films. “We get an idea, then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase which is the essence of our comedy.” To highlight the chase scenes, he introduced an inept police force known as the Keystone Kops. To add further excitement, he introduced the Sennett Bathing Beauties; this gave Gloria Swanson and Carol Lombard their start in movies.

As many as three one- and two-reel films a week were produced with Sennett making the final editing decisions for all of them. In 1914, he personally directed Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first full-length comedy produced in America. It featured Chaplin, who developed his tramp act while working for Sennett, and Marie Dressler, who was making her first movie. It was one of the last films Chaplin made at Keystone as Sennett refused to pay Chaplin the $1250 he wanted. Chaplin wrote to his brother, “Mr. Sennett is a lovely man and we are great pals but business is business.”

In 1915 Sennett teamed up with Griffith and Thomas Ince, and the three biggest names in the American movie business at the time combined to create Triangle Films. Sennett, however, then formed his own company two years later to make slapstick comedies but, in the 1920s, a more sophisticated public wanted better stories and character identity than Sennett’s pie-throwing, cop-chasing farces. He made a few other full-length movies mainly to showcase Mabel Normand and, as early as 1929, made a movie in colour. By then, however, “talkies” were the rage, and new movie giants such as Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Goldwyn were firmly established in Hollywood.

In the 1930s, Sennett introduced W.C. Fields to his first “talking” part and discovered Bing Crosby after he had been turned down by three other studios but, by 1935, his movie-making days were over. He briefly returned to Canada to live in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, but Hollywood had become his home and he returned to the movie capital.

In 1937, he was presented with a special “Oscar” at the Academy Award festivities for “his lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen.” He kept in touch with the film industry for the rest of his life. When Sam Goldwyn won an Oscar in 1947 for The Best Years of Our Lives, Mack wired him, “My hat’s off to a pioneer who is still pioneering.” In 1954, Cameron Shipp completed Sennett’s autobiography — Gene Fowler had written a biography 20 years earlier — and in 1960, after a long illness at the Woodland Hills country home in Hollywood, Mack died in his 80th year.

Mel James