100 Years Ago Today: Eddie Cantor Speaks!

100 years ago today, believe it or not, Eddie Cantor appeared on film for the first time. And — even crazier — it was a talkie. This remains a little known fact. Eddie starred in an experimental Deforest PhonoFilm in 1923. This puts him in a talkie four year prior to his rival Al Jolson. What’s more, it’s a honey of an experience. It’s basically Eddie doing stand-up, as he did in vaudeville and in his early Broadway revues. The patter is supplemented by two songs  “The Dumber They Are, the Better I Like ‘Em,” and “Oh, Gee, Georgie”. The official title of the film is A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor, Star of “Kid Boots“. The show hadn’t opened on Broadway yet, but it was plainly already in the works and it made sense to mention it.

Eddie Cantor is not someone we think of automatically when we talk about early comedy shorts, not in the same way we think of Edgar Kennedy, Charley Chase, Clark and McCullough, and others. But he made a few crude ones in the late 20s and early 30s. That Party in Person (1929) was a Paramount experiment to test him for talkies. He exchanges crosstalk with a flapper named Bobbe Arnst, and warbles a few numbers, just to see if he might be their answer Warner Brothers’Al Jolson (as he had been on the stage). They tentatively followed up with “Getting a Ticket” (1929) an adaptation of one of Eddie’s punning revue sketches, with Charles C. Wilson as a traffic cop, and “Insurance (1930), with Wilson as an insurance doctor. You can also see several of Cantor’s sketches in Glorifying the American Girl (1929).

After the success of Whoopee (1930) it was instantly perceived that Eddie could carry entire musical features, and there was no reason both with shorts, apart from the occasional promotional appearance in what were called “documentary” shorts — basically newsreels that showed stars kidding around at home, work, or in social settings.

For more on show business history,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, for more on early comedy cinema please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.