Film review by Jason Day of Cecil B. DeMille’s silent sex comedy Male & Female starring Thomas Meighan and Gloria Swanson.
Comedy
Male and Female (1919)
Silent
The Artist (2011). Read this review to find out how a silent film made in the modern day is a movie classic.
Film review by Jason Day of the modern day silent movie about a silent film idol whose career is destroyed by sound cinema.
Silent
Freudlose Gasse, Die/The Joyless Street (1925)
Director: G.W. Pabst. Sofar Film
SILENT
Producers: Romain Pines, Michael Salkind. Writer: Willy Haas. Camera: Robert Lach, Curt Oertel, Guido Seeber. Sets: Otto Erdmann, Hans Sohnle.
Werner Krauss, Asta Nielsen, Greta Garbo, Einar Hanson, Valeska Gert, Jaro Furth, Agnes Esterhazy, Loni Nest, Egon Stirner.
SYNOPSIS
Set in Vienna during the immediate aftermath of WWI and with the country suffering the effects of hyperinflation, this drama looks at the interactions between several citizens, including avaricious butcher Krauss, poor girl Nielsen and middle-class Garbo, who contemplates prostitution when her father Furth loses the family life-savings on a dodgy share tip.
REVIEW
Based on the novel by Hugo Bettauer, this film is now chiefly memorable for being Garbo’s second full length motion picture and her final film in Europe before Hollywood superstardom and immortality.
It is difficult to see, at least in the truncated American reissue of 1935, which hacks off almost the entire sub-plot of the film involving Nielsen, exactly what else makes the film worth watching. MGM bosses reasoned home audiences would be intrigued to see what their idol looked like 10 years previous so rushed this out in the same year she played Anna Karenina.
This reviewer had the dubious ‘pleasure’ of seeing only the much shorter version that, at least until recently, was still shown in America as director Pabst’s final cut of the production. But for patient audiences, even this abridged ad absurdum film merits attention.
Firstly, Pabst is excellently served by a dream silent era cast. Krauss (the title role in the influential The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) revels in the type of viciously uncaring, dominating male that he could be found inhabiting at this time. In the longer version, he demands a pound of flesh from Garbo for every pound of meat he gives her. In what we see here, his moustache stroking and leering glances are expressed with lascivious glee.
Suspension of disbelief is stretched to the limit in casting Nielsen (then 44) as a middle-aged couple’s daughter, but here she exudes sympathy and it is easy to see, even in her brief moments, why she was hailed as the greatest tragedienne since Sarah Bernhardt. Her screen career was all but over and this is one of the last movies she appeared in, but her work prior to this had even included playing Hamlet.
Gert amuses in a small role as a saucy, shrew faced sales girl who caresses her face with the furt coat she will sell Garbo.
But it’s all eyes on the greater Greta. Aged 19, she is captured in adoring close-up by Seeber and elicits a devestating, soulful intensity, the sort of world-weariness that would mark out her future American performances. Her converyance of angst and desperation is astonishing, for any actress of this period let alone a relative newcomer and is difficult to find comparison – Lillian Gish is similar, but there is less hysteria here. Garbo needs only the slightest expression to show an ocean’s depth of feeling.
The plot sadly unravels and there are silly moments that creep in. Garbo becomes a cabaret girl, but her dancing makes her the least sexy jazz age flapper. Hanson appears as an American soldier to sweep her off her feet in a happy ending that, after Pabst’s grim ‘New Objectivity’ realism, concludes the film on a saccharine note.
Pabst would go on to make more (and better) films, such as his famous collaborations with Louise Brooke Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, but he was finding his feet here. This is a mid-period Expressionist film, but his eye for dank and grimy design is notable more for its subtlety, neatly underlining the difference between the rich and poor and the financial craziness befalling this city.
Further plaudits should go to the inventive camera team, who make clever use of a mobile camera, roaming along the queue waiting for the butcher to open like an interrogating spotlight.
Orphans of the Storm (1921)
Film review, by Jason Day, of the silent epic set during the French Revolution starring Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish. Directed by D.W. Griffith.
Director: D.W. Griffith. United Artists.
SILENT
He Who Gets Slapped (1924). Film review of the silent tragedy starring Lon Chaney
Mania: The History of a Cigarette Factory Worker (1918)
Director: Eugen Illes
Projektions-AG Union (Unrated)
SILENT
Writer: Hans Brennert. Camera: Eugen Illes. Sets: Paul Leni.
Pola Negri, Werner Hollmann, Arthur Schroder, Ernst Wendt.
SYNOPSIS
Mania (Negri) is a free-spirited, popular worker at a cigarette factory in WWI Germany. She is selected by the boss to pose for an artist who is making an advertisement poster for them. Whilst there she meets talented, burgeoning opera writer Hans (Schroder) and the two fall in love. But her beauty also attracts the attention of renowned arts patron Morelli (Hollmann) and he ruthlessly pursues her. He propositions her to become his mistress, or else he will destroy Hans’ fledgeling career. Mania reluctantly agrees, on one condition – they spend their first night together only after Hans’ cherished debut is premiered. It’s a decision that leaves her horribly conflicted.
REVIEW
For 90 years, not many people new that a film called Mania (pronounced Mar-nee-ah) even existed. Now available to see for the first time ever in the UK, she elicits in the reviewer an almost manic depressive response.
There is the elation at the discovery of a new silent film. Even more exciting when you find out it’s a complete feature length film, starring one of the biggest stars of this period and was hardly seen outside of the country that produced it.
But for every up there is a down, in life as in the hunt for rare cinematic gems. For a depression soon sinks in when you realise that, despite the awesomely effective restoration employed to exhume her from the ravages of time, the film is itself completely disposable.
And that restoration work must be given special mention, as a stand alone documentary accompanying the film illustrates. This explains, in beautifully succinct detail, the meticulous (and certainly expensive) work put in by the Polish National Film Archive. We see how new life has been breathed into tired and dusty film stock. No easy feat as nitrate film is the most precious of materials to handle, decomposing after a few decades.
The biggest round of applause at Mania’s London premiere at The Barbican may have gone to composer/conductor Jerzy Maksymiuk for his appropriately operatic score, but the technical staff should take a bow for their dedication, persistence and sharp eye for detail.
Back to the film itself, there are two main aspects to applaud; the design and the star. Leni was at this time a designer, but would become a noted and influential director of Expressionist films such as Waxworks and The Cat and the Canary. Here, he uses an array of curtains, veils, painted backdrops and window panes to conjure up an atmosphere of hedonistic opulence and artistic poverty.
The look of film is, in the main, attributable to him.
Cinema during this period was undergoing a series of important changes in terms of editing, acting, lighting and camera angles. Everyone was influencing everyone and early filmmakers were challenging themselves, slowly developing the markers of an wholly unique form of artisitc expression. Mania, however, is a stilted and impotent piece. There are some blessed close-ups of Negri, but these are used more to show her lovely face rather than as a way to tell the story. The film is further hampered by the default, static camerawork and wildly uneven acting of the lesser WWI silent film.
Negri, the main attraction, transcends these limitations with an entrancing performance. Years before she decamped to Hollywood to become, without argument, the most famous Polish film star of all time, she shows how she could effortlessly command centre stage. Her heavy eyelid mood swings, burst of passion and sensual dancing prove not only how versatile and limber she was (she was a trained ballet dancer in real life and believed dance should be central to a performance), but also how gloriously frenzied she could be.
Beyond the Rocks (1922)
Director: Sam Wood.
ROMANCE
Producer: Jesse Lasky. Writer: Jack Cunningham. Camera: Alfred Gilks. Music: Henny Vrienten (reissue).
Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Alec Francis, Robert Bolder, Edythe Chapman, Gertrude Astor, Mabel Van Buren, June Elvidge
SYNOPSIS
Young Theodora (Swanson) marries a rich older man (Bolder) so her poor, beloved Father (Francis) doesn’t have to go without in his dotage. But she falls in love with a handsome English aristocrat (Valentino), who loves her just as deeply. Recognising her duty to her husband, she tells the hot-blooded lad to cool his heels and stay away. But he chases her across Europe on her honeymoon trying to convince her to change her mind. When her husband finds out about this mutual attraction, he leaves on an exploration to Africa, so the young lovers join a search party to bring him back and beg his forgiveness.
REVIEW
Only a romance filmed in the silent era could be so breathlessly paced, ravishingly photographed, splendidly costumed…and completely dumb in every other regard.
Considering the mighty star wattage on display from two of the era’s biggest and most sexually dynamic personalities, this is a comparatively limp and dusty affair. Swanson was at the peak of her Hollywood powers after a series of titillating social sex comedies with director Cecil B. De Mille and Valentino’s star was on the ascendant after his lusty turn in box office smash The Sheikh.
Cunningham provides a ‘Swiss Cheese’ plot being, as it is, full of holes. With scant regard to logic, humour or excitement, it’s not the most perfect of bases with which to construct a solid movie.
To list a few of those holes:
- When Swanson nearly drowns during the film’s opening reel, the boat she falls out of remains upright and ship-shape and she is clearly only a few feet from shore
- Valentino goes climbing in the Alps clad in day wear and no gloves
- Valentino’s intended fiancée Astor steams open Swanson’s letters to the two men in her life and then deliberately posts them to the wrong people – breaking up the unhappy marriage and paving the way clear for her rival
- Bolder’s “dangerous” expedition to Africa takes him only a few days, so is more of a posh back packing trip.
Considering this, it was not surprising that even the talented Wood (one of Swanson’s favoured directors and who would later go onto helm some major Hollywood classics in the sound era, such as Goodbye Mr Chips) was unable to stir up anything more than a pot-boiler drama, but he should have checked his pacing and scene numbers as the action certainly drags.
The film seems hurriedly made, produced to satisfy movie-mad audiences hunger to see more of the same with their favourite film stars, irrespective of the quality – the so-called ‘Star Era’ of Hollywood.
The story comes from a novel by the celebrated, racy romance author Elinor Glynn, so at least the Mills & Boon melodrama has an understandable provenance.
Posterity has seen that Swanson is held in high regard as a technically sophisticated actress who could underplay the silent movie camera with finesse and splendid timing, but here she overacts with annoying regularity. Befitting her status as a fashion icon, she seems happier parading in the most elaborate clothes and hairstyles of the day. Valentino could be a sensitive performer when the occasion called and here he is sweet and very affecting as a young stud who suddenly falls deeply in love. Cast as an English M’Lord, the titles beautifully explain away his exotic Latin looks by way of a conveniently “highborn Italian Grandmother”.
An important film in terms of film preservation, it was lost for more than 80 years, Swanson even appealed in her autobiography for people to come forward with any copies of the movie for her to watch again. Alas, she died long before a nitrate copy was found in the Netherlands Film Museum in 2003, spruced up and given a gala premier two years later, though some sections still show irreparable damage.
CineSocialUK 