Monty Banks — Monty Jumps Into Features (1924) 🇺🇸

The latest graduate from two-reel comedies to feature pictures is Monty Banks.

He is changing his type of comedy from slapstick and the gag-man’s labored mirth to the subtle humor of farcical themes, just tinged with pathos. And if he puts into his new pictures any of his good-natured forbearance toward his own misfortunes, he should carve an absolutely individual niche for himself.

“Before the war, my father want me to be musician, but I want to go on stage.” Monty shrugs away the struggle that has been his portion. “I could not carry a tune in a sack, neither could I play, so I run away to Paris. I could not get a job to act, so I rig up a shoe-shining stand near the stage door and there I shine the actors’ shoes. I am not ashamed,” the Latin fire shone from his brown eyes, as expressive shoulders played their part in the conversation, “that I have black’ shoes for a living until I could do what I want to do.

“After a while they let me dance and I save some money. I come to America, to Hollywood, to be movie actor. I could speak no English but I must have job, so I try to tell the director what I can do,” in the excitement of living over again that memorable scene he misplaced his tenses amazingly, “but he cannot understand. I see he get tired of me, so I show him. I tumble about, stand on my head. I was frantic. But they laugh and give me job — they connect me with Ford by rope and pull it down the rocky side of a cliff. For three dollars I go to hospital for eight days. Then I fall off of buildings, do fool stunts, because it amuse people and it give me money.”

Once he was in the hospital for six months recovering from injuries received in doing a film stunt. He has worked harder than any of the other two-reel comedians. When the war came, he fought with his countrymen — because of his knowledge of foreign languages, he later served in the Intelligence Department of the Italian Army — and afterwards returned to Hollywood to take up again the only work that be knew, spurred on by the desperate need of money to care properly for his father. The short-reel comedian has to work doubly hard nowadays, take more risks, for all the old tricks and comic situations have become hackneyed — nothing less than his standing on the ledge of a fifteen-story building or turning a somersault over a chasm will amuse us any more.

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Photo by: Nelson Evans (1889–1922)

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1924