Who Was Clyde Bruckman And Why Did The X-Files Name An Episode After Him?
Silent Sundays: Periodical Ruminations on Silent Film Directors
Named the best episode of The X-Files by Vulture in 2016, season three, episode four aka “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” is not only a great episode of television, it’s also a silent film comedy primer.
Written by Darin Morgan, who won an Emmy for his teleplay, the episode is a monster-of-the-week episode that centers on the titular Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle, in an Emmy-winning performance), an insurance salesman who has the uncanny ability to predict exactly how people are going to die. This comes in handy when Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) need his help while investigating a serial killer in the Twin Cities region who is targeting fortunetellers and clairvoyants.
But did you know that Boyle’s character was actually named after a silent film gagman who worked with everyone from Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and The Three Stooges?
Considered a key figure in American comedy, Bruckman was born on June 301, 1894, in San Bernardino, California. He began his career as a sportswriter for newspapers like the San Bernardino Sun, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Examiner, and Saturday Evening Post. In 1919 he started working in the movies writing intertitles for Universal Pictures before moving to Warner Bros. and then eventually landing at Metro Pictures where he began working with Buster Keaton as a gag writer.
Along with co-writing several of Keaton’s most beloved feature films like Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), and The Cameraman (1928), he also co-directed The General (1926), which has often been cited as one of the greatest films ever made. Bruckman also worked with Harold Lloyd, co-writing the feature film For Heaven’s Sake (1926) and co-directing Welcome Danger (1929). During this time Bruckman also directed four early comedies starring Laurel and Hardy while they were at Hal Roach Studios including The Battle of the Century (1927), but more on that soon.
In the 1930s he worked with several comedians, including W. C. Fields, whom he directed in The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933) and Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935). In the 1940s and 1950s, Bruckman directed many episodes of television, working on shows like The Buster Keaton Show and The Abbott and Costello Show, although he often re-worked old Keaton and Lloyd gags, which got him in hot water, particularly with Lloyd. When Bruckman lifted a sequence from Movie Crazy (1932) for The Three Stooges’ comedy Loco Boy Makes Good (1942) and a squence from The Freshman (1925) for their film Three Smart Saps (1942), Lloyd sued Columbia and won.
Much like his namesake in this episode of The X-Files, Bruckman had a tragic ending. After borrowing a .45-caliber pistol from Keaton, which he claimed was for a hunting trip, Bruckman parked his car outside of a restaurant in Santa Monica, California, entered its restroom, and shot himself in the head, leaving behind a typed note for his wife and asking that his body be donated to science as he didn’t have money to pay for a funeral.
Along with its titular nod to the tragic Bruckman, the episode is filled with homages to other silent film luminaries who had slightly less melancholic ends. The local detectives that Mulder and Scully partner with are named after Edward F. Cline and Jean Havez.
In 1914, Cline began working at Keystone Studios for Mack Sennett where he first supported Charlie Chaplin and also claimed he came up with the idea for the Sennett Bathing Beauties. Once Buster Keaton branched out from playing second fiddle to Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Cline partnered with Buster Keaton working as his co-director and gag man. Over the next several years that made many of the definitive films in Keaton’s career, including Neighbors (1920), The Haunted House (1921), The High Sign (1921), The Boat (1921), The Electric House (1922), and The Balloonatic (1923). Cline directed about sixty comedies for 60 Mack Sennett comedies between 1914 and 1933. In the 1930s, Cline began working with W.C. Fields at Paramount, directing him in films like Million Dollar Legs (1932), opposite Mae West in My Little Chickadee (1940), and in The Bank Dick (1940). Cline died of cirrhosis in 1961.
Havez also worked closely with Arbuckle, Keaton, and even Harold Lloyd. He was also a charter member of ASCAP, having written several popular novelty songs in the 1910s. Havez wrote or co-wrote such comedy gems as Oh Doctor! (1917), The Hayseed (1919), The Garage (1919) for Arbuckle; Grandma’s Boy (1921), Dr. Jack (1922), and Safety Last! (1923) for Lloyd; and Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), and Seven Chances (1925) for Keaton. He died in 1925 of a heart attack at the age of 52 and is buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood.
One of the unlucky victims — a man who owns an astrology based investment company — is named Claude Dukenfield. This is actually the real name of comedian W.C. Fields aka William Claude Dukenfield, who, as I wrote above, was part of this same group of early influential film comedians that worked closely with Bruckman. Like a lot of his contemporaries, Fields began his career in vaudeville, originally finding international acclaim as a silent juggler. Later he became a featured comedian in the Ziegfeld Follies. He made his first appearance in a film in 1915, although he didn’t really begin his film career in earnest until 1924, working steadily until the mid-1940s. Fields is considered one of the most influential comedians of all time, and was even praised by the surrealists, who were enamored by his absurdism and anarchistic pranks, inspiring works by Max Ernst and René Magritte. Fields died on Christmas Day, 1946 at the age of 66. According to his partner, Carlotta Monti, the day that he died she sprayed water on to the roof with a garden hose so that he could imagine falling rain, his favorite sound. This has been disputed by his biographers, but feels like a story that is in line with the themes in “Clyde Bruckman’s Last Repose,” so I’m going to believe it’s true.
The homages to the silent era don’t stop with the character names. Once Mulder and Scully decide they need to put Bruckman in protective custody, they move him to a hotel called “Le Damfino Hotel.” This is an homage to the name of Buster Keaton’s boat in the 1921 two-reel comedy The Boat, which co-stars Sybil Seely and was co-written and co-directed by Edward F. Cline. Gabriella Oldham, author of Keaton’s Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter (2010), considers this pun, which appears multiple times in the film, as “probably the longest running single pun in the history of the silent film.” According to biographers Marc Okkonen and Ron Pesch, authors of Buster Keaton and the Muskegon Connection: The Actors’ Colony at Bluffton (1995), the boat got its name from a powerboat entry in an Actors’ Colony regatta in Muskegon, Michigan. Co-founded by Patricia Eliot Tobias, Melody Bunting and Wendy Merckel on October 4, 1992 (aka Buster’s birthday), members of The International Buster Keaton Society are known as The Damfinos.
The unnamed serial killer (played with detached psychotic verve by Stu Charno) is ultimately revealed to be a bell boy at Le Damfino Hotel. This is likely an homage to the 1918 two-reel comedy The Bell Boy, which was written, directed, and stars Roscoe Arbuckle along with Buster Keaton, Al St. John, and Alice Lake. Arbuckle and Keaton play a couple of bellboys at the Elk’s Head Hotel, where Sr. John is the head desk clerk and Lake is the hotel’s manicurist. Along with the many slapstick jokes in the film, there are also visual jokes that allude to Rasputin the Mystic, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and and even Kaiser Wilhelm. A review in The Moving Picture World wrote that Fatty Arbuckle’s “fertility of invention supplies him with the right piece of business for every situation. Al St. John as the hotel clerk, Buster Keaton as the assistant bell boy and Alice Lake as the manicurist are a trio whose acting ability is equaled only by their disregard of life and limb.” I wish I knew who made up the tarot deck featured in the episode, because it is gorgeous2.
Lastly, the final sequence where Mulder and Scully take down the killer includes this moment with a banana cream pie. This is most definitely an homage to the great pie fight in the silent Laurel and Hardy short The Battle of the Century (1927), which Bruckman directed from a script by Hal Roach and H.M. Walker. Estimates put the number of cream pies used in the short’s finale as anywhere between 3,000 to 10,000 pies! For decades, only a three-minute sequence featuring the pie fight was believed to be extant because it had been featured in a documentary by Robert Youngson. Thankfully, the first reel was found in the 1970s, while the complete second reel of the film, including the entire pie fight sequence, was discovered by film collector and scholar Jon Mirsalis in 2015. The film is now available on home video as part of the set Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations.
According to The New York Times, the earliest pie fight in cinema was likely in Mack Sennett’s A Noise From the Deep (1912), in which Mabel Normand throws a pie in Arbuckle’s face. Mabel also featured this gag in her film Caught in a Cabaret (1914), in which Charlie Chaplin tries to throw a pie at Chester Conklin, but creams Mabel instead.
Along with its myriad homages to silent era comedians, “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” is largely a meditation on free will and fatalistic determinism, with the titular Bruckman finding himself living a pretty cynical life after he starts thinking too hard about all the things that had to conspire for The Big Bopper to have been on that fateful plane with Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly the day the music died. While Bruckman has succumbed to the idea that everything in the future has already been laid out, making any choice or action completely inconsequential, Scully suggests that free will still has a place in our lives when she accidentally gets on the service elevator, which allows her to save Mulder’s life. Never mind that Bruckman would probably argue that Scully’s accident was already determined and that she was always supposed to be Mulder’s savior. The episode leaves it up to the viewer to decide what they believe.
For his mordant performance Peter Boyle won the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series. At this same ceremony where he won, he was the presenter for the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series category, handing writer Darin Morgan his award for writing this episode. According to Morgan, this is when the two first met. Along with this classic episode of television, Boyle is probably best known for playing the monster in Mel Brooks’s film spoof Young Frankenstein (1975), Ox Callaghan in While You Were Sleeping (1995), and as Frank Barone on the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond (1996 to 2005). Boyle passed away on December 12, 2006, at the age of 71 from multiple myeloma and heart disease.
The line that launched a thousand internet threads. Is Scully actually immortal? I like to think, yes. Several other episodes, including the sixth season episode “Tithonus” and at least one episode in season 10, continue to imply that Scully will live forever.
This is also the episode where Scully adopts her dog, which she names Queequeg from Moby Dick, another work of art that contemplates fate and free will, after its previous owner, Bruckman’s neighbor, passes away. The episode ends with Scully and her new puppers watching the Laurel and Hardy comedy The Bullfighters (1945), which was co-directed by Laurel and Malcolm St. Clair, who also began his career doing slapstick for Sennett and writing gags for Keaton, and was co-written by W. Scott Darling, whose long career started by writing for the serial The Hazards of Helen in 1914, circling us right on back to the silent era3.
I started an Instagram account for my love of the silent era, so if you’d like more micro-doses of silent film daily, give ✨ Nitrate Dreamland ✨ a follow.
Approximately 92 years before I was born. Bonus points if you can figure out how old I will be turning on Tuesday.
Someone on BlueSky tracked this deck down for me. It’s the Tarot of the Witches Deck by Fergus Hall:
I have also learned that this deck was originally commissioned for the Bond movie Live and Let Die Although, I imagine the Page of Cups as a bellboy was done by someone in the art department just for the episode.
Most of the silent films referenced in this piece can be watched on Archive.org, YouTube, and Kanopy.
This is incredible analysis. Connecting the narrative brilliance of "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" back to the actual architecture of silent slapstick shows just how deeply layered The X-Files really was. Darin Morgan wasn't just writing a monster-of-the-week episode; he was preserving film history. Brilliant breakdown.
What a freaking great article!