Edgar Kennedy — “Who’s Got Fundamentals Any More?” (1938) 🇬🇧

“Who’s got fundamentals any more?” asks ‘Slow-burn’ Edgar Kennedy in an interview with

Russell Ferguson

I’ve had twenty-six years of it now. I was a prize-fighter for a bit before that, but I reckoned if I had brains enough for a boxer I had brains enough for an actor. I was one of the Keystone cops, with Mack Swain, Chester Conklin, Roscoe Arbuckle [Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle], and all those boys. Mack Swain, he died last year, Chester Conklin’s pretty well off by now, doesn’t act much.

Not that I’ve done so bad myself. I can’t stay in features all the time — every two or three years I take a turn at directing. I’m a comedy director, I’ve directed Laurel and Hardy (Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy) and Charley Chase and things for Hal Roach. It gives me a change and keeps me off the screen for a bit. I do six shorts a year for R.K.O., too. I have to start right in when I get back this summer.

I guess I’m one of the guys that never let himself get too big — like Jean Hersholt for instance, just moving along and doing his work without wanting to be a star. Stars get too much money, and they get into bad pictures, and that’s one of the ways they go out. You see, when a star gets popular the company gets to rely on him to sell pictures whether they’re good or bad, and anyway, if the star is real big they can’t afford to pay for good support.

If you’re a good featured player, now, it pays you in a lot of ways. You get good money, and you get into good pictures, because if the company has to pay a good figure for you, they want to put you in something worth while so as to get their money’s worth out of you. When a featured player gets well known, he gets into better and better pictures; when a star gets well known, there’s the danger he gets into worse and worse pictures, for the reason I’ve said. I don’t know if I’ve made it clear for you, but that’s how I figure it out.

Now, there’s Adolphe Menjou — there’s a guy I’ve never seen in a bad film. Do you ever think what a background a man like that has got? What experience? He’s always working too, because he’s a damned fine actor. He gives his experience to the whole bunch, he wouldn’t let a picture get bad, even if it was shaping that way, he’d throw his weight into it and pull it round. A man like Menjou is worth all the money he gets, because he knows his job from the bottom up.

You know, I think the men who were in the silent films have it over the newcomers who belong to the talkie time. Do you remember the old silent days? We had to act everything, and make the right faces and stand the right way and dope out actions and gestures for everything. That experience stays with you — many a time I forget my lines because I’m working inside on the business that goes with them, may be wrestling with a doorhandle or having a stand-up argument with a wardrobe door, and if it doesn’t work out, I forget my lines because I haven’t got the whole thing going smooth, from inside, while some guy standing by like a poker thinking of nothing but his lines comes out with them as smooth as silk and thinks he’s an actor.

That’s what the talkies have done to the movies. In the old days, if you didn’t act it, nobody knew what it was supposed to be. Nowadays, talk, talk, talk, it’s all on the sound track, and you can get by without acting at all. Did you know that there’s a new school of acting taking place just now? They don’t act.

I’ll tell you a funny thing to show you what I mean. It was — well, he’s a good guy, so I won’t tell you his name. He was to get shot through the shoulder in a fight, and step forward when he heard “Anybody hurt?” and say “I’m shot through the shoulder”. Well, we play it, and he steps forward and says “I’m shot through the shoulder”, like saying “I’m all out of cigarettes” or something. The scene has to be taken again for some reason, right at the end of our stay on location, when we’re all tired and wanting to get home, and I says to him “Only another day now” and he says “What for?” and I says “For your shooting scene”.

He says “Hell, that will take less than half an hour”. I says “Yes, the way you did it. Have you ever been shot through the shoulder? It hurts like hell, and that bullet was supposed to go clean through you from the back, or else it was a pretty bum bullet. Look, hit me in the shoulder, never mind shooting me, and I’ll let you know I’ve been hit, and I was a prize-fighter”. “Ah”, he says… “you’re out-of-date. We don’t act nowadays”. I couldn’t resist it. I says, “Damn right. You don’t act, but you call yourself an actor”.

There’s more to it, too. With all this talk, there’s something has gone out of the movies, nearly. I don’t know if you remember, but in the old silent days you and I and my wife could go to a movie, and come out with three different ideas of it, because we were three different people.

Look, what I think is, people are interested in what a guy is thinking, not what he’s saying, at least, they may be interested in what he’s saying, but what they like best is to figure out for themselves what he’s thinking, without being told. That’s where they get the real joy, in seeing for themselves what’s not too obvious. This is hard to explain, I guess, but I’ll prove it to you.

Have you seen Will Hay’s act at the Palladium, his school act? Well, it’s a swell act all right. Remember the bit where he has that gag “Moses was the daughter of Pharaoh’s son”, and one of the kids asks him to write it on the board, and he writes “Moses was the daughter of” and then stops there with his back to the audience and his arm in the air ready to write and does nothing. It gets the biggest laugh in the whole act. Now, I ask you, why? Would it be funny if he said “I can’t spell Pharaoh”? Would it? It would mean exactly the same as stopping there. But the way Will does it, the audience gets its chance to use its own judgment, and that’s why they think it’s so good. I guess the audience contributes. That’s a fundamental part of the whole game.

But who’s got fundamentals, any more? I guess the most of the movies start way up top, with no fundamentals, they don’t get down to the things that get the belly-laughs, or really do something to you.

Just to show you what some guys know about acting, I’ll tell you about the first musical I ever played in. The director has an idea and calls me into one scene, and says “Ed, I want you in here, and I want a slow-burn, and I want it in four beats of the music”.

Well. I ask you. Can you imagine what it feels like to be asked to do a quick slow-burn? I’m a reasonable guy, so I practised a minute or two. and then told him it was no use. He goes to the music director, and comes back with the great news that I can get six beats. This was just about as bad. Finally, I got eight beats from him and made it. But hell! What an idea! Slow-burning to a metronome. Timing isn’t done with a clock.

Timing is just thinking. I said that to you away back, when I told you about forgetting lines, through having my head full of timing.

Hullo, Will. Come right in, Will. Well, well, so you’re sliding out before they see you go. I don’t blame you, Will. When are you getting a rest? At the week-end? Well, you deserve it. So long, Will.

There’s a man that’s doing a picture and a week at the Palladium at the same time. That’s what I call working. He’s a great guy, a real fifty-fifty guy. He makes a team. I never worked with a guy I liked working with better. He was a bit sin with me at first.

His hobby is astronomy, he has quite a place, quite an observatory or whatever it is you call it, at his private house at Hendon. I guess he loves his hobby as much as his screen acting.

Sure, I like it here at Gainsborough. I like the way Will works, I told you, and I like the way the whole place works. They are treating me as well as ever I have been treated in my twenty-six years in the movies. Do you know, I get my own way in practically everything? I don’t always get what I asked for at first, but what I do get is always what I want, because we just talk things over, and if my way’s best, we do it like that, and if their way’s best, I see it while we’re talking, and we do it like that. Everybody takes part in any discussion. Will, little Tommy Bupp and our Director, Marcel Varnel, and there’s no bad manners or quarrels, and nobody gets on his high horse and can’t get down, and there’s nobody waiting for you in corners saying “That guy’s got it in for me, know what he said to so and so?” and there’s nobody asking you to take sides.

I like England too. I wish I could have some place in the country and go to it at nights. Hotels are not my kind of life, but I have to stay in a hotel, working till half-past seven with a call next morning at nine. I eat most of my meals in my room because I’m too tired to dress that time of night. Like a working man? Sure, that’s what I am, a working man.

But still I’ve seen a good bit of London already and I took a trip up to Edinburgh last week-end — Princes Street is the loveliest street I’ve seen — with that castle on the hill and all.

The only thing that amused me about England was seeing people eating with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. At home we were taught to cut everything first and eat it dainty with a fork, and many a time I’ve smacked my boy and said “Would you put that knife down?” but I guess he’s a natural Englishman or something. The English are so good at it too, they use the knife so pretty. I tried it, but hell, I couldn’t get anything on the fork. I told my wife about it as soon as I saw it, and she didn’t believe it, till one night we were dining out and she exclaims “Ed, Ed, I saw a woman do it. I saw a woman do it.” Well, I’m getting over it. I guess it must be right enough for here. I expect Queen Elizabeth does it too.

What have you seen recently? Tom Sawyer? Was it good? A swell film? Yeah, I guessed so. All the same, films should be films, not made out of books, at least, not well-known books, because books are alive, and they are quite different for different people. A film of a book is never more than fifty per cent, successful for me, often a good deal less, at least, as a film of the book. One book I read when I was a kid — no, I’ve never read it since, I’m afraid to, I might lose something of it — was “Les Miserables”. Every time it’s filmed, I go and see it. Every time, I feel, they’ve missed everything. But every time it’s good as a film. Do I say it’s a lousy film? No, I have no right to say that, because the man that made it has as much right to his Les Miserables as I have to mine, though I may go on thinking I know more about it than he does. Anyway, you should never say a film is lousy. It’s not fair. It would be all right to lay into it if the guys weren’t trying, but hell! I’ve never seen a film where the actors aren’t trying all they know. Maybe not your way, but if you knew how much sweat goes into it, you would let it go by, even if you didn’t like.it much. Anyhow, that’s my point of view, and I guess I know a little about films.

I’ll tell you a good gag to try on some guy when he comes out of a movie with you, saying “God, that stank.” It works every time. Start off with “Well, I thought the bit about the shoes was kinda nice.” He says “Yes, so it was”. Then go on with “And the bit where the girl waved the handkerchief”. He says, “Yes, quite nice”. Then you say “And the bit where the dog ran out”, and he says “Yes, it was quite well done”. Then when you’ve got him that far you say “Why, you liked the main things in the film, and you have the cheek to say it’s lousy. You goddam son of a bitch, what do you expect for a quarter?”

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Edgar Kennedy, Frank McHugh and Joan Blondell in the Warner Bros, hit “Three Men on a Horse”

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Top: Edgar Kennedy with Janet Gaynor in A Star Is Born.

Above: “Three Men on a Horse.”

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Collection: World Film News, July 1938