Silent Film Funnymen in the SCV

Newhall's Beale's Cut, seen in Buster Keaton's "Seven Chances."

Last month I wrote about our efforts to place a historic plaque at the filming site of the final scene of Modern Times (1936) next February on the 75th anniversary of the film’s release. I’ll keep you in the loop on our progress. In the meantime, I wanted to write a bit about some of the other Santa Clarita Valley sites used by Chaplin, as well as his friend and rival Buster Keaton.

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In 1921, stone-faced silent comedian Buster Keaton made a film called The Paleface. In one scene where Buster is being chased by Indians, he crosses a bridge that was constructed over Beale’s Cut in Newhall.

Beale’s Cut, located near the intersection of the Golden State (5) and Antelope Valley (14) Freeways, was at one time a 90-foot deep man-made slit carved though a mountain. It greatly aided travel to and from the San Fernando Valley from the mid-1800’s until being bypassed in 1910 by the newly constructed Newhall Tunnel, which was subsequently replaced by Sierra Highway in 1938.

Keaton returned to Beale’s Cut in 1925 while filming Seven Chances. In this film, Buster plays a man who has to be married by seven o’clock or lose his fortune. He fails to find a bride by taking “seven chances” at proposing directly, and in desperation, places an ad in the paper to find a wife. A mob of women in wedding dresses pursue Buster throughout the remainder of the film, briefly chasing him through the cut.

(Beale’s Cut has been used as a movie location many times in the past, most notably in Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne, and in a lost Tom Mix film called Three Jumps Ahead (1923), where he appears to jump the expanse on a horse!)

Charlie Chaplin in "The Pilgrim" outside of the Saugus Train Station.

In 1923, Charlie Chaplin – playing an escaped prisoner disguised as a preacher – filmed part of The Pilgrim a few miles up the road from Beale’s Cut at the Saugus Train Station. At that time, the station was located on Railroad Street across from the present site of the Saugus Café. Since then it has been relocated three miles south to the Heritage Junction Historical Park in Newhall. This park sits next to the William S. Hart Regional Park, which contains the home and ranch of the former silent cowboy star.

Ironically, Hart was the subject of a western parody that Keaton filmed in 1922 called The Frozen North. Buster was angry at Hart for publicly condemning his friend Fatty Arbuckle during Arbuckle’s well-publicized scandal, which was brought on by the death of an actress at a party. In The Frozen North, Keaton pokes fun at the tough, melodramatic character that Hart most-often portrayed in his films. Hart apparently didn’t find the portrayal funny, and refused to speak to Keaton for two years.

(The station was also seen in Suddenly (1954), starring Frank Sinatra, and The Grifters (1989), starring John Cusack, Annette Benning, and Angelica Huston.)

The Saugus Train Station today.

While not involving Chaplin directly, part of the film Chaplin (1991), starring Robert Downey, Jr., was filmed in nearby Fillmore; and Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, two of Chaplin’s United Artists partners, made the silent film Ramona at nearby Rancho Camulos in 1910.

The magicians are no longer with us – Keaton died in 1966, and Chaplin in 1977 – but at Beale’s Cut and the Saugus Train Station, we can still stand where some of their magic was made.