In the late 60's Raymond Borde of the Toulouse Cinematheque often bought old films from traveling performers and Romani entertainers, who had used them as warm up acts. He found some reels marked Bricolo with their titles missing and was unable to identify the comic. Through research he discovered Bricolo was the French name for American comic Charley Bowers. He wrote to film organizations round the world for information on Bowers without success. Finally a woman at a Canadian film group had at least heard of him. He had been an animator who'd done a hundred odd Mutt & Jeff cartoons in the teens and one of those is found in this set. In the mid 20's though Bowers began to mix live action with stop motion animation. He looks a bit like and modeled himself after Keaton, I think. He lacks Keaton's instinctual brilliance, precision and soul, but his rube goldberg machinery and puppet animation is brilliant. In truth Keaton would never have gone for the fake gags present in these films, objects disappear right under people's noses with no foundation laid for the phenomenon. If Charley can dematerialize objects why does he need to build such elaborate constructions which violate the established logic (such as it is), in the first place, but this is a minor quibble. The films feature French intertitles with English subtitles, but the stories are easy to follow.

In a Wild Roomer Charley the inventor ruthlessly steals his neighbor's belongings and house fixtures as parts for the machine he's building. After finding he's been left a fortune if he can give a successful demonstration of his invention, he returns to his room with the neighbor still waiting by his door, where she'd been when he snuck out earlier. He excitedly invites her in, sits her down on a divan with an attached control panel for a big boxy machine on wheels no less, with myriad gears, levers, pulleys, self cooling and lubricating functions. The control panel suggests the machine has numerous applications. He shows her what it can do. Mechanical arms extend from the front with appendages wearing work gloves. With a funnel like device it extrudes a kind of rag doll, carefully paints its facial features, pops on a nose. It then takes out a Knife, a spool of thread and a small disc shaped object, makes an incision in the doll's chest, takes the disc which we see is a tiny heart, puts it in the incision and sews it up. The heart begins to beat, the limbs twitch, the doll sits up and makes googly eyes at the camera. It pushes itself up, curiously studies its opposable thumbs, then realizes it's naked and becomes embarrassed. The hands return and place a frame in front of the figure, lowers a blind, dresses the doll in bloomers and house dress, stockings and shoes, feeds it a banana, skin and all, produces a nut, which too large to fit in her mouth, hatches a squirrel with a handbag, which contains grooming and sewing articles, a nutcracker and other implements. The squirrel puts everything back in the purse, hands it to the doll and she climbs on its back and exits the scene. The hands come out and push its work surface back into the machine and then fold themselves in as well. The film stops dead for this sequence, which apart from the very beginning of the scene, lacks even reaction shots of Charley and his neighbor.

To demonstrate his machine he must take it to the home of the relative who inherits if he fails to prove his invention's worth. It's too large to fit through the door so he begins cutting into the wall, only to find it won't fit down the stairs, so he saws a hole in the floor allowing it to drop to the room below. Soon he's driving it along the street with his rival's hireling throwing bombs at him.

In Egged On, Charley sets out to create an unbreakable egg. Again he steals everything he needs from the farmer who has allowed him to use his barn loft for a laboratory, and that man's neighbors. With purloined wheels, bicycle pedals, hinges, etc. he constructs an elaborate machine powered by pedaling which runs an egg through a process rendering it elastic. The farmer's family is mighty impressed and don't seem to begrudge his thievery in the least. He arranges a demonstration for the egg shipper's association, but must find a supply of eggs. His first couple attempts result in numerous crushed eggs. Finally he steals a dish rack, dumping its contents into pieces on the ground, steals another farmer's eggs and places them carefully under the hood of a Model T which he stole earlier, drives back to the barn, but the eggs have begun to hatch from the warmth of the engine. Here the film again stops as we and Charley marvel at an entire rack of eggs hatching into baby Model T's, which roll down the fender and off camera until mama seems to call them back, gathering her brood under her fenders, collapses her wheels outward and hunches down.

In Now You tell One a Liars Club is having a competition for the best tall story. After several stabs at examples, one of the attendees is not particularly satisfied and leaves. He encounters Charley in the park with his head in the barrel of a canon which he is attempting to light. Thinking this man must have a story, he pulls Charley out of the canyon and drags him back to the dinner. Charley tells them he's invented a process for grafting anything. we see an odd plant with various fruits and vegetables growing out of one another. He gets an idea, takes an eggplant cutting, a bit of his special milky liquid and an eggplant grows out of it. Charley cuts it open and inside is a hardboiled egg and a shaker of salt which provides him a meal. He gathers a case full of cuttings and decides to sell his magic liquid to the people in the area. Approaching one farmer, he spills a bit of the grafting solution on the handle of the fellow's wheelbarrow and a tiny Christmas tree grows out of it and decorates itself. Charley saws it off and hands it to the man who is not amused at having his wheel barrow ruined and chases him away. Down the road he encounters a woman standing on top of a fence complaining of mice. He helps her down and carries her to her house. Inside there are holes everywhere, a heavily bandaged cat languishes off to one side and his host says he was wounded in a valiant battle with an army of mice. A mouse creeps out of one of the holes in the stairs, peers over the edge at the cat, pulls out a tiny revolver and fires at him as he flees. Out the window he sees a man frantically whacking the ground with a broom while a small boy with a golf bag stands by with replacement brooms. Charley decides to use his magic to help her family. After some missteps he grafts a pussy willow which produces a cat, but something is missing. Charley runs outside and gathers cattails and grafts them to the pussy willow, which now produces tails as well. The room begins to fill up with cats, dozens of them pour out of the room, down the stairs and out into the fields. The man is grateful and Charley screwing up his courage tells him he's in love with his daughter, except apparently she's his wife and Charley finds himself chased off the property. Back at the Liars Club, he's presented with the winner's medal, but insists his story is true. The fellow that brought him in returns him to the park and places his head back in the barrel of the canon.

In all there are seven of these shorts plus another disc of his pure puppet animation style. One sound short, it's a Bird, which also mixes live action and animation, has Charley as a scrapyard worker going on a quest to Africa to find a legendary metal eating bird, which he brings back and we see it consume car parts and other scrap metal. Andre Breton chose this as one of the films which amazed him, it making a list which also included such as Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'or. A color animation on the second disc was Joseph Losey's directorial debut, a propaganda film about the wonders of oil called Pete Roleum and His Cousins. A short documentary on Bowers rediscovery is also included. If there is a weakness to the collection it's in the musical scores. Both the piano and alternative accordion scores seem very unsympathetic. In Fatal Footsteps the music completely misses all the unusual cadences implied by his movements. The accordion scores are even odder and though kind of interesting on their own, mostly wildly inappropriate to the action.

Even among the less heralded minor comics of the era, Bowers is an obscurity. Born the same year as Chaplin, only in Iowa, he died in obscurity after a long illness in 1946. None of the bibles on silent comedy even mention him, not Kerr's Silent Clowns, not Everson's American Silent Film, and yet in his own way he was ingenious. Check him out should the opportunity present itself.