The Grin of the Dark

stares at me as though I'm an intruder. I point at the projector that holds the next film and show him my palms to signify that he should wait, and then I step outside. Apart from the stars strewn across the sky in patterns I don't recognise, the night seems blacker than ever. It and the bite in the air provide little relief from the insistent spectacle of Tubby's grin and the sounds of the projectionist's appreciation and the labouring of the generator. Nor does standing in the open help me to decide whether my interpretation of the films is a genuine insight or just the product of jet lag, since my brain feels as though it's still in transit. I'm gazing at the cacti arrested in various postures that seem close to meaningful on the lit stage of the ground outside the doorway when Guillermo starts to laugh.

Am I the joke? In a way, because I turn to see that he's projecting the next film. I would have noticed sooner if the films weren't wholly silent, lacking even a music and effects track. 'No,' I shout, but he's too intent on the film to respond. Could I ask Willie to intervene? Presumably she speaks his language. As far as I can see the house is entirely dark, and I don't want to waken her. I dash to the screening room, to find I've seen the film in Those Golden Years of Fun.

I wish I'd been in time to read the title, even though I'm certain of it – and then I realise how I can. I hurry to the projector. My head feels as if it's reeling like the spool of film by the time I manage to decipher the words on the label. They are indeed Tubby's Terrible Triplets. I stagger back to my seat and close my eyes until I stop feeling like a passenger on an aeroplane that's fighting turbulence, and then I grin at all the Tubbies in the toyshop. Smilemime was mistaken or lying about the film, just as he is about me.

I'm right about it in another way. When the toyshop manager wakes up in the asylum, having dreamed that his bedroom has been invaded by his tormentor times three, the trio of attendants all have Tubby's face. Each of them widens his grin at the audience before they converge on the manager and the film ends. I believe I would prefer my theory of the intention behind Tubby's films to be wide of the mark.

It surely can't apply to all of them, however much the glinting of his gleeful eyes seems to suggest that it does. Perhaps I'm simply watching too many of his films without a break. In Tubby's Trick Tricycle he rides the machine up walls and across ceilings, leaving rooms and entire buildings lying on their sides or upside down. Nobody could imitate that, and I hope they wouldn't mimic his behaviour in Tubby Tattle-Tale, in which he causes wilder and wilder fights by telling the absolute truth about people, although each intertitle trails off before we learn what secrets he betrays. In Tubby's Table Talk he reduces an elegant dinner party to chaos with his conversation, which the intertitles render so nonsensically that it bewilders me too. In Tubby's Telephonic Travails he communicates nothing but laughter with the instrument to anyone who contacts him – a bank official, a debt collector, a lawyer – until they're helplessly infecting all their colleagues. Tubby Takes the Train casts him as a Western bandit who holds up the passengers to make them perform circus stunts and variety acts, an apparently harmless crime until the driver starts juggling with coal and the unmanned train goes off the rails into a desert. Tubby Tries It On turns him loose in a costume shop, and every time he sets out for a fancy-dress ball he's mistaken for the role he's playing. By the end of the film he has left a mayoral banquet in disarray, and a police awards ceremony, not to mention an entire courtroom where he acted the judge.

Silent comedy often poked fun at the pompous, but is there more of an anarchic point to his choice of targets? I scribble this as yet another observation to be pondered. If it weren't for my notes I might feel that the films have merged into a single image of Tubby's luminous face grinning horse-like at me as a prelude to transforming a tennis tournament into a battle with rackets, or judging a pie competition by how spectacular a mess they make when flung at his fellow panellists, or letting his two little nephews – miniature replicas of him – leave a theatre in ruins with their antics at a talent contest, where they jump higher and higher on each other's shoulders before using the chandeliers as trapezes... I'm increasingly bothered by the notion that there's some aspect of the films I've overlooked, but the harder I strain to identify it, the more my eyes flicker and my brain throbs. Eventually I see his first two films. In The Best Medicine he has a minor role as a travelling quack who dispenses a tonic that causes uncontrollable merriment, while in Just for a Laugh the character takes centre stage, though with a different name, and sells hysteria to an entire small town. Both films show him consulting the kind of unintelligible book that makes an appearance somewhere in all his two-reelers. Now the only one I've yet to watch is Tubby Tells the Truth. But the next film on the screen is an Orville Hart sound feature, Fool for a Day.

I'm not surprised it failed to restore Charley Chase to stardom. He starts out as dapper as ever, the image he revived with a guest appearance in Sons of the Desert, but doubts over his impending marriage cause him to take refuge in a travelling circus. He's a good deal less at ease as a trainee clown, and keeps giving the audience abashed glances that are contradicted by his painted grin. On the night he turns every act into a mass of pratfalls, but although he's finally chased away by the maddened ringmaster, the show is a roaring success. In an epilogue the circus returns to town and Charley takes his wife and children to see it. The ringmaster recognises him, and the last shot has Charley fleeing for the horizon, pursued by the deranged ringmaster and the rest of the performers, animals as well.

I wouldn't class the film as screwball. Smilemime was wrong again. On the other hand, Gimme Da Brain is certainly the most violent Stooges film I've seen, and the finale in which the trio juggle with the monster's brain and shy it at one another until Colin Clive as Frankenstein takes it like a pie in the face is hardly likely to have pleased the British censor. Hart's film with James Finlayson and Oliver Hardy, The Course-We-Can Brothers, seems innocuous enough until I nod off halfway through. I regain consciousness at the start of the credits of You're Darn Tuten, in which Laurel and Hardy play Egyptologists. Hart is credited with the intertitles, and surely it's my inability to stay awake that robs them of sense. I pinch my thigh hard so as to concentrate on Crazy Capaldi, the director's first fulllength film.

This is certainly the original uncensored version, before it was cut for a reissue. The grinning gangster's murders are played as black comedy, but I find it hard to enjoy on that level, though Guillermo audibly does. He's especially amused by the protracted dance performed by the silhouette of a machine-gun victim as the wall on which it's cast fills with holes. Capaldi's death in the electric chair is also mimed at length by a jittery shadow, and the projectionist thinks this hilarious too. I'm relieved the experience is over, but I'm still scribbling notes about it when yet another film begins. It's Ticklin' Feather, Orville Hart's unreleased swan song.

It opens with the Cherokee protagonist riding a donkey into the Western town of Bedlam. Once he's past the brawls and gunplay that fill the main street, he finds he has to lodge in the stable with the animal. He meets every situation with a grin that looks both resigned and secretive. Do I dream that he says 'Me meek. Inherit earth'? I waken to see him overcoming gunmen by chortling as he walks up to them and disarming them with the feather he wears in his headband. Perhaps the film was shelved because it was too silly to release, but I wonder how any filmmaker could have been irrational enough to think it would help his career. 'Me bring you peace,' the hero says, unless that's only in my sleep. When I next look he's the sheriff, but that's not the end. The film loses its grip on my attention, and I dream it has turned into a hardcore orgy, until I see that the woman grinning with orgasmic pleasure as she's mounted by a man while she manipulates two others is up there on the screen.

The air feels insubstantially but relentlessly invaded by the rhythm of the action. It's the throbbing of the generator, but I could imagine that the sensation is emerging from the image. I don't need to watch Willie's films, even if this one may be a homage to something older; did she choose the performers for their dated appearance? The only film I want to see now is Tubby Tells the Truth.

As I leave the auditorium Guillermo takes his time about withdrawing his hand from inside his baggy trousers. I pretend not to notice as I turn to the shelves, only to falter. The gap left by the film that's running is halfway along the lowest shelf of Orville Hart's work. I'm dizzy again by the time I succeed in reading the label on the reel. The title is She Screws to Conquer, in outdated type on yellowing paper. It's an Orville Hart film.

It's clear from the titles that all of his films on the bottom shelf belong to the same genre. I doubt they deserve more than a mention in my book. I can see nothing to distinguish She Screws to Conquer from the mass of hardcore films, except perhaps for the participants' grins, which look close to fixed. I'm overdue for a break. I open the door and emerge into the desert, and almost fall back into the shed.