Praise be! It’s the 110th anniversary of the first custard pie thrown in someone’s face in a motion picture.
A Noise from the Deep, released on this day in 1913, features Mabel Normand as a farm girl in love with farm hand Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. Apparently, he throws the pie and she receives it in the face.
The first person to get a pie in the face on film, as far as anyone knows, was Ben Turpin in 1909’s Mr Flip, but that one is pushed into his face (because he keeps trying to kiss the women serving him in shops), not thrown.
Mabel Normand was also famous for being (possibly) the first damsel in distress to be chained to the tracks when a train was approaching in the snappily titled Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life, which you can still see in all its 13-and-a-bit minute glory:
Producer Hal Roach said she was funny because “you knew that if a guy kicked her, she’d kick him back” — and to have been there at the beginning of not one but two movie tropes is not a bad record.
She made 12 films with Chaplin, and 17 with Arbuckle, but her career was overshadowed, partly by the Arbuckle scandal (and others), and partly due to “our reliance on the self-interested memoirs of her better-known colleagues (especially Sennett and Charlie Chaplin)” (in the sadly not whooly surprising words of Columbia University’s Women Film Pioneers project).
Anyway, here’s some more pies.
Laurel and Hardy’s Battle of the Century (1927):
Elmer Fudd and ‘Humphrey Bogart’ in 1947’s Slick Hare:
The scene cut from Dr Strangelove (1963):
Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and many, many others in Blake Edwards’ 1965 The Great Race:
Rita Tushingham, Lynn Redgrave and others in the not-widely-considered-a-masterpiece Smashing Time (1967):
…and, of course, the joyous idiocy of Blazing Saddles (1974):
