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The influence of film technique on John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer is well established. However, there is another aspect of silent era cinema that is highly present in the novel yet largely overlooked: slapstick. As much as any other contemporaneous film genre, slapstick shared with Dos Passos a skepticism about the controlling nature of modern urban society. A close comparison of the novel and the films of Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, the era's two most popular film stars, furthers our understanding of how Dos Passos sought inspiration in popular entertainment to make his critique of modernity, while also revealing a comic sensibility at work in a novel more frequently viewed through the lens of tragedy.
Keywords: American modernism / John Dos Passos / slapstick / silent film comedy / literature and film
In a "Certain City."
Each crowded skyscraper
holds a budding romance.
It's the one and only thing
the janitor can't smash.
-Harold Lloyd, Never Weaken, opening title
Manhattan Transfer opens with a sight gag. Immediately after the initial italicized chapter introduction, a maternity ward nurse carries a newborn baby in a basket at arm's length, "as if it were a bedpan" (3). An exaggerated visual reaction to baby poop is a joke that would not be out of place in almost any silent screen comedy. The novel ends with its protagonist, Jimmy Herf, down to his last three pennies, aimlessly heading away from the city, much as Charlie Chaplin's prototypical character walked away from the camera in the final frame of his seminal film, The Tramp.
There is no shortage of commentary about the influence of early cinematic methods on the structure of Manhattan Transfer, analyses that mainly focus on Dos Passos's interest in the theories of Sergei Eisenstein and his replication of film montage to the written page. The adoption of film technique within the novel is certainly significant.2 However, there is another aspect of the silent screen era that is highly present in the book yet largely overlooked: slapstick. While I have no direct evidence through Dos Passos's own words, either in diaries, letters or other writing, that he consciously applied slapstick film technique, characters, or themes to the writing of Manhattan Transfer, there are substantial similarities, both generically...