Alice Howell, The Plucky “Scream Of The Screen”

Any screen comedian in the 1910s and 1920s knew that there was no higher praise than to be compared to the Master Himself–Charlie Chaplin. You might say it was the goal in the back of every comic’s mind, whether it was a deliberate one or something that had seeped into their subconscious.

Some comedians, like Charlie Aplin, were…more deliberate than others.

And it wasn’t just the male comics bearing a passing resemblance to Charlie who were deemed “Chaplinesque.” Comediennes with their own funny styles of walking and pratfalling could get the plaudit as well. One of the prime examples is the frizzy-haired, anything-for-a-laugh 1910s slapstick performer Alice Howell, an L-KO star who is largely overlooked today.

Howell was born in 1886 in New York City and got her start on the stage sometime in the 1900s. She was briefly married to Benjamin Vincent Shevlin (they had one daughter, Yvonne), and in 1910 she would marry fellow performer Dick Smith. The couple toured vaudeville in an “eccentric” act called Howell and Smith, the type that specialized in various kinds of comedy, song and dance.

But their lives took a turn when Dick was diagnosed with tuberculosis and became too ill to keep performing. They headed to sunny southern California for his recuperation, and Howell found herself the sole wage earner of the family. In a Film Fun interview she explained: “We need the hard bits of road to make us appreciate the better places…It was up to me to find something that would take care of both of us and I got a job as extra in the Keystone Company. Sometimes I made $6 a week, and sometimes it went up to $9. It’s not easy to be funny on $6 a week with an invalid at home, but I had to do it.”

Her first Keystone role was as an extra in Caught in a Cabaret (1914) starring the one and only Charlie Chaplin who was just becoming popular at the time. It only took a few shorts for her to be given bigger roles, and she would costar with Al St. John in the lively Shot in the Excitement (1914), featuring a sequence where the two run away from a curiously slow-flying cannonball.

Despite appearing alongside Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and other Keystone stars, Howell was whiled away to Henry “Pathé” Lehrman’s L-Ko Komedies (short for Lehrman Knockout). Lehrman had worked for Keystone himself before getting an offer from Sterling Comedies. Getting himself fired relatively quickly, he then set up his own company L-Ko under the Universal umbrella. Clearly trying to compete with his former boss, he hired copies of Chaplin and Arbuckle in the forms of Billie Ritchie and Fatty Voss and would eventually have various other former Keystone players like Mack Swain and Hank Mann join the fold. Howell would soon become one of L-Ko’s top female players, featured heavily in the company’s ads.

A stubby little gal with a round face, round eyes and a rosebud mouth, Howell seemed designed to be a comedienne. Her persona, which she cobbled together relatively quickly, was of a daffy working girl who gets caught up in a grab-bag of awkward situations–everything from wild elopements to attempts to fit in with more fashionable folks. She would pile her frizzy blonde hair high on her head, walk with a funny waddle, and sometimes had a mop and pail in tow. Photoplay would write about Howell: “They don’t call it ‘slavey’ plays in cinema circles. They have a more inelegant name…’Slob Stuff.’ It doesn’t sound particularly classy to the finely trained ear, but it tells the story. Alice Howell is probably the most consistent player of these roles, which constitute a sort of feminine Chaplin characterization.”

L-Ko had a reputation for having its stars do wild pratfalls and dangerous stunts involving racing cars, balloons, and even airplaines–stuntmen would refer to Lehrman as “Suicide” for a reason. Howell did her share of rough-and-tumble work, and if ads are any indication she might’ve done some pretty dangerous stunts for the lost short Pirates of the Air (1916). An ad for the film proclaims that Alice “has nerve and wit and cleverness that enable her to do stunts that would scare the average acrobatic comedian” and says: “Up in the air on an airship–dropping from one aeroplane to another in midair; dropping bombs on the police patrol–sailing through space with an umbrella for a parachute–these are a few of the incidents that will pack your house and send your patrons away happy.” (The ad doesn’t say whether Alice or her costars did all the above, but we can guess that she performed at least a few of the dangerous feats.)

Howell’s popularity grew steadily, and when L-Ko was taken over by Abe and Julius Stern she was given a separate company, first dubbed Howl Comedies (appropriately) and later Century Comedies. (At that point only two other comediennes, Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler, had obtained their own production units.) Century continued much of the wacky slapstick and hijinks Howell was now being known for, as we can see in the synopses for lost shorts like Balloonatics (1917):

Alice is the scullion in a kitchen and around the house. Although loved by the fat cook and the iceman, she elopes with the son of the house. Action becomes faster and soon furious after the marriage. The cook gets into a balloon, whose anchor picks up folks and drops them without regard to their dignity or anatomy. Then the hook-anchor picks up the house containing the bride and groom. The house and its contents fly all over the countryside to a whirlwind finish.

Moving Picture world, July 7 1917.

Considerate of other people, Howell was known to arrive at studio early to put on her makeup, sometimes with her little dog Coo-Coo in tow (he appears onscreen with her in Her Lucky Day, 1920). Well-liked by her coworkers, she was regarded “as much of a good fellow as she was in the days when a three-dollar check looked like a fortune to her.” Cheerily pragmatic, in a 1917 interview with Moving Picture Weekly she insisted:

…She does not want to be featured as the ‘greatest laugh-maker of the age,’ ‘the biggest scream of the screen,’ ‘the funniest female of fancy,’ or anything like that.

“Say that I like plenty of hard work, that I have a boundless ambition to make god, that I have a charming house which I love, that I am happily married, that I have the dearest dog in the world…But don’t say that I’m the marvel of the age, or use any superlatives about me. I don’t want any one but the public to do that. If they think I’m funny they’ll laugh at my pictures and come back to see others. But if they don’t like me, saying that I am funny will never convince them–it will prejudice them against me.”

A couple years with Century lead to a stint with the Emerald Motion Picture Company in Chicago. As frequently happened with these smaller studios, it would merge with other companies to become Reelcraft. Howell would be starred in ten shorts, which included her husband Dick as a supporting actor. He was also one of the directors on the series. Happily, seven of the shorts survive, such as 1920’s Cinderella Cinders and A Convict’s Happy Bride.

Still from Cinderella Cinders.

The couple would return to California where Dick would continue working as a director (significantly, in 1921 he would direct the Marx Brothers’ one-and-only silent film, the lost short Humor Risk). Howell’s filmography got a bit spottier in the earlier 1920s. It’s known that she served as comic relief in features like Wandering Daughters (1923) and showed up in some lower-budget comedy series. Her last starring series would for Universal with costars Neely Edwards and Bert Roach. Howell’s character retained her frizzy hairstyles and funny walk, but had evolved to be more of a genteel, middle-class wife–a change that wasn’t out of the norm for many comics at the time. The Universal series lasted about two years, 1924 and 1925.

Howell’s last known film appearances are thought to be in the shorts A Society Architect (1927, part of the “Van Bibber in Society” comedy series starring Earle Foxe) and the Universal short The Junior Year (1928). At this point her twenty-something daughter Yvonne was also an actress, playing small roles in comedy shorts and features. Yvonne would act until she married cameraman George Stevens in 1930. The Stevens would have a lasting mark on Hollywood–George would one day win Oscars for his work on A Place in the Sun (1951) and Giant (1956), and he and Yvone’s son George Jr. would one day found the American Film Institute.

Alice Howell had handled her money sensibly, investing in real estate and making it possible to live comfortably after she retired from films. These would also provide for her after Dick passed away in 1937. She kept busy with her investments until her death in 1961, and her grandchildren remembered her as “a loving, red-haired grandmother business-woman with a lively sense of humor.”

Moving Picture World, May 19 1917.

Howell’s daughter Yvonne lived to be an impressive 104 years old–at the very least, since her birth date was said to be anywhere from 1902 to 1907. When the news broke in 2010 that she had passed away, obituaries talked about her work in silent films and her husband’s and son’s achievements. And sharp-eyed readers might find some quiet mentions of her mother Alice, the star from nearly a full century ago, usually described simply as a former vaudevillian “who appeared in many comedy shorts.”

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Sources:

Massa, Steve. Slapstick Divas: The Women of Silent Comedy. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media, 2017.

“Alice Howell, a Wholesome Gloom-Chaser.” Film Fun, June 1916.
“She’s a Rough Gal.” Photoplay, August 1917.
Howard, Marjorie. “Her Face Is Your Fortune.” Moving Picture Weekly, August 25, 1917.
“Alice Howell, L-KO Comedienne.” Moving Picture World, March 2, 1918.

Bernstein, Adam. “Yvonne Stevens, 1920s silent-film comedic and dramatic actress, dies at age 104.” Washington Post, June 3, 2010. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/02/AR2010060204590.html (Accessed July 27, 2023.)

https://www.imdb.com/
http://lantern.mediahist.org/
https://www.wikipedia.org/

Silent-ology is pleased to have Undercrank Productions as its sponsor for Forgotten Comedians Month 3! A unique home video label which restores rare silent comedies and brings them to DVD, it works entirely with crowdfunding and in collaboration with the Library of Congress. Silent-ology has been proud to contribute to several of Undercrank’s Kickstarter projects, and recommends that you take a look at The Alice Howell Collection, a 2-disc set featuring 12 of the comedienne’s short comedies.