Silent
Flesh and the Devil (1926). Fil review of the silent drama starring John Gilbert and Greta Garbo
Silent
Variete/Variety (1925)
Film review by Jason Day of the silent film Variete/Variety starring Emil Jannings and Lya De Putti. Directed by E.A. Dupont.
Silent
Sherlock Jr. (1924) / Seven Chances (1925)
Director: Clyde Bruckman. Metro/Buster Keaton Productions.
COMEDY
Cast & Credits
Producers: Buster Keaton, Nicholas Schenck.
Writers: Jean Havez, Joe Mitchell, Clyde Bruckman.
Camera: Elgin Lessley, Byron Houck.
Sets: Fred Gabourie.
Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Jo Keaton, Erwin Connelly, Ward Crane.
SYNOPSIS
A movie projectionist (Keaton) who is also studying to be a detective in his part-time, finds himself wrongly accused of stealing a watch. Returning to his full-time job, he falls asleep during the latest romantic blockbuster and imagines himself and the girl he loves (McGuire) are transported into the movie to play the characters on the silver screen. Comic mayhem ensues.
In Seven Chances, a lawyer (Keaton) finds he has been left a large amount of money in a distant relative’s will – payable on condition he marries, by 7pm that evening. Easier said than done when none of the society girls he approaches do anything other than laugh at him.
REVIEW
I would never usually combine two film reviews into one, preferring to let every individual movie stand on its own. But it seems appropriate here. Not to diminish the quality of Keaton’s comedies as stand alone pieces, but as both here cover similar ground thematically, comically and in terms of construction, this seems a neat and tidy approach.
Of the two film’s recently shown at Stratford Picturehouse courtesy of The London Screenstudy, Sherlock Jr. is the more famous and certainly the funniest. Seven Chances suffers from a protracted and dull opening that includes a disposable, two-tone technicolour sequence chronicling how Keaton, as every season of the year approaches, cannot profess love for his woman. It doesn’t help that the colour is of the poorest quality, almost as if it was hand-tinted by employees of the Georges Melies’ movie factory back in the very early days of cinema. The crudely drawn black characters (sometimes portrayed by white actors in black face) are more disturbing. Once comfortable in your seat, you will find yourself cringing and shifting from side to side to shrug off such sensibilities.
But back to Sherlock and Arthur Conan-Doyle himself may have giggled with delight in the cinema at the delightful and raucous send-up Keaton and co. made. Sherlock shows how sophisticated Keaton’s films had become in the short-time he progressed from two-reel comedies (a reel relates to approximately 10 minutes of film, the amount of stock in a film reel at this time) to feature films, the last of his series of short films being only one year previous (he would make one more silent short in 1925).
The use of the framing device (the ‘film within a film’), which can be a clunky addition if handled by a director merely seeking artistic kudos, is ingeniously utilised in a short segment when Keaton jumps into the screen. Initially, he is booted out again by the film’s leading man, but he perseveres and we are treated to a segment that contains some of the smartest trick editing on the silent screen. Caught between cuts to different locations, he is allowed no rest by the medium he is trying to hijack and is thrust into arctic tundra, rocky outcrops and manicured gardens. Cinema has no respect for this man who toils for it.
The framing device also allows Keaton to satirically explore the beauty and unpredictability of the cinematic medium, playing with the notion of what is real and what is illusion (he replaces the film’s leading actors with people in his ‘real life’ and as he swims to freedom in the film, we then cut seamlessly to him as the sleepy projectionist sat on a stool, ‘swimming’ whilst seated).
Sweetly, the projectionist even needs tips from his on-screen peers for help with wooing and kissing his girl. Sherlock Jr. may be a comedy, but it is an ideological and technical stride ahead of the smartest films being made in France or the esoteric Russian montage school.
But let’s not forget the jewel in this little crown that is the comedy – both film’s culminate in the most extraordinary manner, a crescendo of increasingly dangerous and clever stunts. Keaton’s background working with circus performer parents is clearly in evidence here as well as his athleticism at, for instance, dodging falling boulders as well as hundreds of eager spinsters (the ‘all the single harridans’ number in Seven Chances). The staging of these scenes, particularly in Seven Chances, is eye-poppingly impressive but given how you almost need to catch your breath as each moment passes to the next, it also shows how he his talent could run away with itself if left unchecked.
Keaton is undergoing a mini-renaissance at present, with the BFI holding a season of his films. Clearly there is no need for reappraisal, but to give modern audiences the chance to enjoy his artistry again.
The White Shadow (1924)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Woolf & Freedman/Selznick.
SILENT
Cast and Crew
Producers: Michael Balcon/Victor Saville.
Writers: Michael Morton, Alfred Hitchcock.
Camera: Claude L. McDonald.
Sets: Alfred Hitchcock.
Betty Compson, Clive Brook, A.B. Imeson, Daisy Campbell, Henry Victor.
Synopsis
A tale of two polar opposite twin sisters, Georgina and Nancy (Compson) – one craves the party life in Paris, the other is a good girl with a ‘soul’ (the shadow of the film’s title). Mixed in with this is a gentlemanly American (Brook) who ends up romancing both following a joke played by one of the girls.
Review
One of the ‘Hitchcock five’, a number of previously lost or rarely seen movies made in the silent era by the director Alfred Hitchcock because the copy of the film had degraded to such a degree they were deemed unwatchable. The films were released in 2013 by the BFI to much fanfare following the committed efforts of film restorers.
The White Shadow is not one of the better films and this isn’t just because a third of the film is lost forever. Co-producer Balcon said in 1969 that the film was rushed into at the time as they were desperate to retain Compson, a popular actress at this time in Britain and then later in Hollywood, as a leading lady (she had just helmed their hit Woman to Woman) before she returned to the states.
Big mistake as this film tanked at the box office and the results show with a thin and frustratingly dull plot. Think of one of the most boring story-lines in Downton Abbey without the words. It doesn’t help that a segment of the film is missing entirely leading to a shocking jump in the story where several characters have either died or changed beyond recognition; the script was obviously silly but this is compounded further at this point.
Amongst the amusing silent movie period discrepancies are the tourists who change their travel plans so they can hook up with a total stranger on a boat and the sensitively worded police communications (which thankfully have improved since 1924) on missing person letters, explaining to frantic loved ones that “thousands go missing and are never seen again”.
The restorers are to be praised whole heartedly for their own masterful cinematic wizardry. International teams must have been run ragged cleaning and re-framing this little batch and richly deserve the plaudits heaped on them. Although there a few brief moments during the film when the original film stock’s disintegration was too much to overcome, it never detracts from watching the film and reminds us again of the quality work that has gone in here.
Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari/The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920)
Film review, written as an archive newspaper article, of the silent expressionist classic about a mysterious doctor associated with a travelling carnival and a spate of murders.
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Director: Robert Wiene. Decla.
Silent
Genuine. A Tale of a Vampire (1920)
Director: Robert Wiene. Decla-Bioskop AG.
SILENT
Producer: Erich Pommer
Writer: Carl Mayer.
Camera: Willy Hameister.
Music: Larry Marotta (reissue).
Sets: Walter Reimann, Cesar Klein
Fern Andra, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Ernst Gronau, Harald Paulsen, Albert Bennefeld, John Gottowt, Lewis Brody.
SYNOPSIS
The subject in a painting about a high priestess of yore comes to life and escapes when the withdrawn artist who created her falls asleep. She is bought and then locked up, but released, only for murder and mayhem to follow. Eventually, the protagonists round up local villagers to try and contain this wanton apparition.
REVIEW
After such an auspicious push to his career with Das Kabinet Des Dr Caligari/The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) director Weine, having hit an artistically and thematically lucrative seam (as well as a cheap one), quickly felt how the laws of diminishing returns can come to roundly trounce on one’s new found success.
This was his follow-up to that well-received first dip into expressionist cinema, in which the outside world is wildly distorted to represent the inner thoughts and motivations of the characters or story. This time around the expressionism in the design, performances and story is odd and jaunty, rather than being genuinely creepy.
The purple tinted screens are really vivid and the lighting is clever, using the shadow of a Max Shrek-like characters to look like Nosferatu. But this time around, the idea to save money by inventingly designing the sets on canvas backdrops in place of wooden, look just cheap and an odd pick and mix of imagery is used rather than forming part of a coherent production design.
Andra turns in a briefly silly performance as the title character. The nods to the expressionist style are there as she stretches her hands to the sky on seeing the ladder that will help in her escape, ages before she needs to actually start climbing. She’s gone a bit wild in a past life, which explains the crazy hair do. The rest of the acting confirms to the type of overly histrionic and mad gestures one would get in such a film of this period.
Maroletta provides a new, appropriately bleak score.
Perhaps Wiene’s trick film it seems was of the one pony kind.
The Outlaw and His Wife (1918)
Director: Victor Sjostrom. Svenski Filmindustri.
SILENT
Producer: Charles Magnusson.
Camera: Julius Jaenzon.
Victor Sjostrom, Edith Erastoff, John Ekman, Nils Arehn.
SYNOPSIS
Iceland, mid-18th century: Strapping stranger Eyvind (Sjostrom) rocks up at wealthy widow Halla’s (Erastoff) farm one day. She immediately takes a liking to him, much to the consternation of her courtly brother-in-law (Arehn) who proposes marriage to her so he can grab her land and money. She refuses as she is interested in the stranger but Arehn is sure this new man is a fugitive on the run for stealing. Sure of his innocence, Halla believes Sjostrom’s story that it was an innocent one-off and he isn’t a career criminal, but to secure their romantic future together, they go on the run and live as outlaws in the hills. That is until Arehn, who never forgets a slight, finds out where they are hiding.
REVIEW
Director Sjostrom, also known as Seastrom during the American phase of his career in the 1920’s, is more famous for his work in front of the camera during his twilight years, starring in two films for the even more renowned Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, To Joy in 1950 and Wild Strawberries (1957).
It was this latter movie that he is most identifiable with, but he had a much longer career, stretching back to the days when Scandinavian cinema was in its infancy, a cinema that he would help to develop and define.
He also occasionally starred in his own films, like this frigid Western, more of a ‘Northern’ given the locale and was sometimes paired with his soon to be real-life wife, Erastoff.
Sjostrom’s pastoral dramas were progressive for the time in that the wild and rugged landscapes reflected or exemplified the harsh story lines and conflicted emotions of his characters. Iceland’s rough tundra and grassy hills, covering the bare and cold rock underneath, pre-empt the tragic path that the narrative will take. Our two lovers are unable to escape their past; Eyvind cannot, as much as he tries, cover-up his previous mistakes. The land becomes an unwelcome third person in this relationship, envious and spiteful, also represented by Eyvind’s lonely friend (Ekman) who lives with them but lusts after Halla and plots his pal’s death.
Some of the naturalistic scenery is awesomely captured on film and must have been an invigorating sight at the time to movie goers, with crisp waterfall showers and dizzying cliffs that dwarf the humans.
Sjostrom also is sexually liberated enough to inject a risque set-up to Halla’s homestead arrangements. Her farm is staffed almost exclusively by young burly men who compete with each other on manual tasks to impress her. Eyvind secures himself a position by besting all of them with a task of strength, leaving us in no doubt about what this merry widow has in mind for him.
In this regard, Erastoff is something of a revelation. Long since forgotten by film scholars and enthusiasts (she essentially retired from the screen after marrying Sjostrom in 1922), she is passionate and emotion-led, expressive and dramatic with a slightly wild look in her eyes as she buys Eyvind new bed blankets presumably to keep them both warm, baits him into wrestling her pompous brother-in-law to destroy that man’s masculinity and then promptly throws him out when he won’t marry her.
Sjostrom’s films have a tendency to focus on sad little marriages blighted by the cruel hand that circumstance and outside prejudice deals them. Such as the drunken men who disappoint their women in The Phantom Carriage, 1921, Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson as the hounded adulterers in The Scarlet Letter, 1926 and Gish and Hanson again enduring a forced marriage in The Wind, 1928. This is no exception, though being silent cinema we progress through a series of extremes. Such is the depth of their love, outside forces lead these two into murder, infanticide, poverty and madness.
As a side note, one of the most impressive scenes is of Sjostrom’s character dangling from a rope on a cliff edge and having to be pulled up. He performed this himself (with a safety line, out of shot) and nearly died when, just as he got to the top, an over-excited assistant let go of the safety line to embrace him.
Herr Arnes Pengar/Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919)
Director: Mauritz Stiller. Svensk Filmindustri.
SILENT
Producer: Charles Magnusson.
Camera: Gustav Boge, Julius Jaenzon.
Music: Matti Bye, Fredrik Emilson.
Sets: Axel Esbensen.
Richard Lund, Mary Johnson, Axel Nilsson, Erik Stocklassa, Bror Berger, Hjalmar Selander, Concordia Selander, Wanda Rothgardt, Gustav Aronson, Jenny Ohrstrom-Ebbesen.
SYNOPSIS
In the early 16th century, three Scottish mercenaries led by the young Sir Archie (Lund) escape from their Swedish captors and cause havoc in the local countryside as a vicious winter storm envelops the land. Famished, they chance upon a local vicar Arne (Selander) who is said to possess a large chest of silver coins. They kill him and his family, apart from his beautiful adopted niece Elsalill (Johnson) who hides from them. Sometime later, a distraught Elsalill is taken in by friends of her dead family and is romanced by Sir Archie, who hides his true identity from her.
REVIEW
Stiller was one of two preeminent directors of early Swedish film who helped in no small part to put Scandinavian cinema firmly on the movie map. Whereas his better remembered peer Victor Sjostrom’s oeuvre focused on small, intimate pastoral drama, Stiller concentrated on epic, moralistic action films or sophisticated comedies.
His films are marked by a more lavish and playful style (we open the film with the mercenaries leap-frogging over each other to get a guard’s attention) with an emphasis on technical innovation. Herr Arnes Pengar is no exception, with commendable use of mobile camera in several scenes, impressive visual effects of ghosts communicating with the lead characters and the stunningly filmed finale, in which Elsalill’s mourners clad in funeral black snake their way across a frozen sea to reclaim her body. This particular moment is still breathtaking nearly a hundred years on and influenced other film-makers, such as Erich von Stroheim.
This is a downbeat film, with an emphasis on premonition – the spectral faces of the future haunt Arne’s wife who correctly predicts their part in her family’s downfall. Faces from the past dog those in the present too, as the ghost of Johnson’s adopted sister Berghild spurns her into vengeance whilst also taunting Archie, the man who killed her. Past, present and future are not dissimilar in Stiller’s tale and melt into and out of each other with a bloody, unrelenting fluidity. Even one of the character’s dogs is called ‘Grim’ as if to further underline the depressive elements of the story.
Johnson is a pretty and mournful heroine in a draining turn. She is a lover stricken with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, brooding for a slaughtered family, contemplating an awesome suicide to stitch up the killer she has fallen in love with. This is a subtly powerful piece of acting, delicately delivered, making the emotional punch hit harder.
Lund, an important early romantic lead in Swedish film, also scores with a level-headed performance as the vicious thug redeemed by a good woman.
There are the usual silly, silent movie things that defy belief: Sir Arne might not be the smartest vicar in the parish if he leaves his treasure chest out for all to see. For Elsalill to not put two and two together that the trio of mysterious new men in her neighbourhood might be linked to the three men who killed her family a week previous is a crime in itself, but grief affects us all in different ways.
The spine-tingling score creates just the right atmosphere for a chilling story that is miles away from the first bawdy scenes we are given of soldiers larking about. This is a thriller in all but name and the music complements the murders and duplicity on screen.
City Girl (1930)
Director: F.W. Murnau. Fox Film Corporation.
SILENT
Producer: William Fox.
Writers: Berthold Viertel, Marion Orth.
Camera: Ernest Palmer.
Music: Christopher Caliendo (2008)
Sets: Harry Oliver.
Charles Farrell, Mary Duncan, David Torrance, Edith Yorke, Guinn Williams, Richard Alexander.
SYNOPSIS
Country bumpkin Lem (Farrell) takes a trip to the big city to sell his father’s (Torrance) precious wheat. Whilst eating at a diner, he strikes up a romance with the pretty but downtrodden waitress Kate (Duncan). Impulsively following the direction of a fortune card, he proposes to her. Delighted at the thought of a relaxing life in the country, she accepts and the overjoyed couple travel to his Minnesota farmland home. But the loved up couple face the scorn and derision of Lem’s father, who physically assaults Kate. When Lem fails to defend her, the relationship sours and Kate finds herself chased by farmhand Mac (Alexander).
REVIEW
The reputation of German movie maestro Murnau towered above his peers as much the man physically did, standing 6ft 9″ in his cotton socks.
Transplanted to America under the aegis of film producer William Fox and given complete and utter creative freedom, he produced the blissful, but expensive, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, of which City Girl is a companion piece.
But Sunrise, despite all of the critical kudos it heaped on Fox’s studio, earned very little money and Murnau found his creativity curtailed and there on in he was watched a little more closely. His work, thankfully, did not suffer too much as a result: there is no complete print of 4 Devils (1928) but City Girl shows Murnau on elegant top form.
Based on the play The Mud Turtle by Elliott Lester, it continues in a similar vein to Sunrise with the contrasts between rural and urban life, but this time around it is the countryside that is the harsher environment toward the outsider, who now is the supposedly worldly wise woman whose unexpected naivety leads her out of her comfort zone, rather than the innocent man driven mad by lust for a sexually forward harlot.
This is a simple morality tale, but evocatively told. Murnau, rather than trying to crack a sweet nut with a sledgehammer, presents the contrasts vividly with consummate cinematic skill.
In the country, the bread has to be sliced by hand for the little family. In Kate’s city, toast magically appears pre-sliced on an industrial conveyor belt to cope with demand.
In the countryside there are only vast expanses of arable land for boisterous locals. In the city, solitary and depressed Kate lives next door to an ever passing train and tends to a single flower. She has only a mechanical bird in a gilded cage for company. The robotic tweeting of this pretty ornament is a near perfect reflection of the automaton, wind-me-up-and-watch-me-go nature of Kate’s function as a waitress.
In this job, there is also an obvious continuation. Kate ups sticks for the sticks but soon finds that the life of sunbathing leisure she hoped for yields only more of the same drudgery – although they wear dungarees instead of suits and hats, she soon finds herself back in waitress garb serving endless cups of coffee to endlessly famished men.
Kate also has to deal with the prejudices and snobbery of the labouring classes – waitress is spelled out in letters that loom over the viewer, a millstone of suspicion hung draped over her.
Murnau weaves into this tale some adorable visual imagery, such as the newlyweds running and kissing through the wheat fields and the initial scenes of Kate and Lem first meeting which have a coyly sexual frisson.
Farrell, who was a popular box office star in the late 1920’s and throughout the 30’s, has exactly the right brand of wholesome, apple pie beauty for such a role, a boy who seriously needs to “man up” and grow a couple. Usually more beautiful than his leading ladies, he is the eponymous wide-eyed innocent, mooning over Duncan and blushingly turning away when her skirt rides up and he can see her thighs. He makes you feel this is the sort of man who believes a fortune card prophecy that if he marries a woman he’s known for only 10 minutes it will put the world to rights.
Duncan complements him delightfully – a stellar silent movie turn of expressive eyes and suggestive, dramatic posture. Duncan was a capable performer who started late in silent movies (movie debut 1927) and retired too early only six years later.
Der Heilige Berg/The Holy Mountain (1926)
Director: Arnold Fanck. UfA/Parufamet. (U)
SILENT
Producer: Harry R. Sokal.
Writers: Arnold Fanck, Hans Schneeberger.
Camera: Sepp Allgeier, Helmer Lerski, Hans Schneeberger, Arnold Fanck.
Music: Edmund Meisel.
Sets: Leopold Blonder.
Leni Riefenstahl, Ernst Petersen, Luis Trenker, Frida Richard, Friedrich Schneider, Hannes Schneider.
SYNOPSIS
Diotima (Riefenstahl) is an acclaimed dancer who lives in the Alps. She falls in love with Karl (Trenker), a reckless mountaineer and adventurer and the two become engaged. Karl’s best friend Vigo (Petersen), a young alpine sports competitor, develops a boyish crush on Diotima. Karl, on seeing them in a friendly embrace, mistakenly sees an affair and challenges his friend to a treacherous mountain climb. Vigo accepts and they head off into the dangerous weather conditions, Diotima chasing after them.
REVIEW
The extraordinary roller-coaster that was German cinema after the First World War and during the 1920’s encompassed the deranged, outward visual fantasies of Expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1919), mammoth mythical epics from the Germanic past (Siegfried, 1924), slice of life realism ‘street movies’ (The Joyless Street, 1925) and movies such as this, the ‘Bergfilm’ (mountain film) which extolled the rugged, beauty of alpine nature and physical outdoor pursuits, a very German occupation.
The best of these were made by ‘Dr’ Fanck who made a series of these romantic dramas, most or all of which starred his repertory company of actors/stunt people such as Trenker, Petersen and Riefenstahl (more of whom later). The story is unabashedly simple, but narrative always took a back seat on the snow plough in Fanck’s films as the scenery, sports, heroics and comradeship were the focus.
He does create an interesting character in Diotima though. We need no titles to tell us that this woman is the embodiment of her surroundings. A raw and untamed sexuality, we first see her as a silouhette slowly appearing and almost merging with the landscape. Diotima is the land, air and water; her opening dance has her swirling on the coast, conjuring up a tempest as her movements become more energetic.
Fanck does not present his setting as some glittery, tinsle-strewn winter wonderland. The picture postcard beauty of the Alps is off-set by the violent nature of these environs, the increasing aggression of the weather clearly matching the heated emotions of the characters as the love triangle develops. There are swirling rivers , biting winds and deathly avalanches that not only shape the mountains, but also the lives of those who worship these hellish peaks. There are some lovingly filmed moments; Trenker imagining a mighty palace of ice as a home for him and Riefenstahl as he becomes delirious during a storm and the blue-tinted night time search party, lit by flares.
Fanck’s prologue explaining that there is no trick photography is no false claim, the daredevil skiing and mountaineering sequences were largely filmed on location and features the actual stars.
The performances are largely neglected, but Trenker makes a stout hero and Petersen’s throbs with the right sort of hormonally challenged enthusiasm. Riefenstahl was most certainly a better director than an actress and, given the fitful, epileptic dance she employs, a far greater actress than a hoofer.
Comfortably viewing with hindsight, this is a seductive but slightly dangerous film. One can pick out and analyse the calling cards of proto Nazism in the sweet symbolism. It is in fact difficult to divorce one’s thinking from going down that mountain path, particularly considering Riefenstahl’s later career as the most technically and artistically gifted film-maker employed during the Nazi regime, making a handful of documentaries that would propel and then destroy her career. But Fanck’s film still stays on the right side of the peaks, as an otherwise innocent fusing of the deep bond, respect and love between man and nature, a respect for our world that is mostly missing from modern cinema.
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