Among the surprise highlights of the Max Davidson starrer Call of the Cuckoo are the guest cameos by the Hal Roach powerhouse performers Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase, and James Finlayson as inmates of a next-door insane asylum. This was filmed when Laurel & Hardy were just taking off as a team (their heads are shaven from shooting 1927’s The Second Hundred Years), and the quartet seems to be having a great time trying to out-mug each other. Lillian Elliott and Spec O’Donnell are back as Max’s immediate aggravations, and other Roach regulars such as Leo Willis, Fay Holderness, Lyle Tayo, and Edgar Deering are on hand to keep him in constant conniptions. There’s a famous photo of a nude Max sitting in a collapsed bathtub – well, brace yourself, as that scene is in this picture. Nudity was very rare in silent comedies, and after you see the scrawny Mr. Davidson au naturel you’ll understand why.
Leo McCarey laid the groundwork for the Max Davidson comedies, and when he became overall supervisor for the studio, other directors such as Fred Guiol, Hal Yates, and Arch Heath took turns holding the reins. Call of the Cuckoo is the handiwork of Clyde Bruckman (1894-1955) – one of silent comedy’s most important behind-the-scenes talents. Coming from a newspaper sportswriter background, he broke into movies in 1919 writing titles for the shorts of the Lyons & Moran team and Monty Banks. He hit the comedy big time in 1921 when he joined Buster Keaton’s staff of idea men, and worked steadily with Keaton from The Playhouse (1921) to his feature Seven Chances (1925). After freelancing a bit for Mack Sennett and on Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925) he brought Keaton a copy of the book The Great Locomotive Chase – this became The General (1926), which Bruckman co-directed with Buster. Now a credited director, Clyde worked on Monty Banks features and had a stint at the Hal Roach Studio, where he directed some of the formative Laurel & Hardy shorts, Putting Pants on Phillip, The Finishing Touch, and The Battle of the Century (all 1927).
Bruckman helped Harold Lloyd adapt to sound with Welcome Danger (1929), Feet First (1930), and Movie Crazy (1932), yet his fatal flaw was alcohol. He would go on binges and disappear during the middle of shoots, which effectively ended his directing career, although he was still in demand as a writer. However, his penchant for recycling material he had written for other people led to Harold Lloyd suing Universal and Columbia in the 1940s over material Bruckman had reused. This left Bruckman essentially unemployable; in the 1950s he managed to work on Keaton’s and Abbott & Costello’s television shows, but not much else. In 1955 he borrowed a gun from Keaton and killed himself. Around that time Bruckman had reminisced for Rudi Blesh, who was writing his book Keaton, and told Blesh: “I often wish that I were back there with Buster and the gang, in that Hollywood. But I don’t have the lamp to rub. It was one of a kind.”

Steve Massa