The Beau Brummels (1928)
A filmed record of the vaudeville act of Al Shaw and Sam Lee: two men in matching suits and derbies stand nearly motionless at the footlights, trading deadpan one-liners, a mangled parody song, and a brief soft-shoe.
A Vitaphone sound short from Warner Bros., The Beau Brummels preserves an otherwise vanished style of stage comedy in the performers’ own voices; its selection for the National Film Registry recognized the fragile early-sound shorts as a rare record of vaudeville.
Background
The Beau Brummels is a 1928 Vitaphone short preserving the vaudeville act of Al Shaw (born Albert Schutzman) and Sam Lee (born Samuel Levy), a deadpan comedy duo billed together for decades on the stage. Released by Warner Bros. on September 22, 1928, the nine-minute film records their double act essentially unaltered, pairing dry one-liners with a mangled song and a brief soft-shoe. Vitaphone was racing at the time to capture vaudeville performers on film before the circuit itself began to disappear. The Library of Congress added the short to the National Film Registry in 2016.
What to watch for
Shaw and Lee stand almost motionless at the footlights through the whole routine, their flat delivery and refusal to react to their own jokes doing the comedic work that more physical vaudevillians would have handled with movement. The short survives today only because of a later restoration; the Vitaphone Project helped fund a UCLA Film and Television Archive reconstruction that reunited the surviving picture element with the original Vitaphone sound-disc recording, premiering in 2007 and finally letting modern audiences hear the act in the performers’ own voices rather than read about it secondhand.
