Film review by Jason Day of the silent movie adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter about an adulteress woman in a puritan community. Starring Lillian Gish.
Silent
Director: Raul Walsh. United Artists.
SILENT
Producer: Douglas Fairbanks. Writer: Elton Thomas, Lotta Woods. Camera: Arthur Edeson. Music: Gaylord Carter. Sets: William Cameron Menzies. Special Effects: Hampton Del Ruth.
Douglas Fairbanks, Snitz Edwards, Charles Belcher, Julanne Johnston, Sojin, Anna May Wong, Brandon Hurst, Tote Du Crow, Noble Johnson.
SYNOPSIS
Ahmed (Fairbanks) is the Prince of all Thieves in ancient Arabia, a young man who “takes what he wants” when he wants it. That is until he meets the ravishing Princess (Johnston) and decides to abandon his career, temporarily at least, in order to woo her. But he has first to complete many dangerous tasks to win her hand, as an evil Mongol Prince (Sojin) is after her too.
REVIEW
The great granddaddy of all Arabian Nights fantasy films is still thrilling, fun, rousing entertainment nearly 100 years after its premiere.
Early cinema swashbuckler Fairbanks, the dash good-looking, athletic movie legend, husband of Mary Pickford, was at the peak of his Hollywood powers so was obvious casting in the role of the Prince of Middle Eastern kleptomaniacs, a one man crime wave for whom the ASBO couldn’t have been invented quickly enough. This is his most fondly remembered film in a career that saw him play Robin Hood and The Man in the Iron Mask and Zorro. As an example of the ‘Star System’ that operated in Hollywood at this time (where movie roles were moulded around the personality, or at least their public personality, of the star who was playing them), so the film is tailor made for Doug’s brand of bouncy gymnastic gyrations and boyish, carefree good larks.
If Johnston’s insipid turn as the Princess ultimately proves irritating, this was probably more because of the convention for female leads in Hollywood action films of the silent era to swoon and pale into insignificance next to their macho co-star. At least we have a smashing, exotic support cast: Wong excels as the Johnston’s duplicitous Mongol maid and the mysteriously named Sijon is a creepy villain in the Nosferatu vein.
Its influence also stretches across the decades, due in most part to Menzies’ astonishing Baghdad design, a unique ‘Arabopolis’ with towering minarets, art deco furnishings and a grandly synthetic beauty (the undulating fabric that makes up the Midnight Sea prefigures a similar design used in Fellini’s Casanova). Anyone watching Disney’s vulgar, noisy version of Aladdin with gobby Robin Williams as Genie will also see the similarities. Menzies would go on to design many other famous films and this was an early indicator of his extravagant style.
Made back in the day, long before CGI and computers, some of the ingenious special effects have managed to withstand the test of time. The flying carpet is still humorous and convincing and the trick photography in the Magic Crystal is impressive. Unfortunately, the winged horse and underwater sections (Doug’s walk toward the Mermaids’ Lair stinks) are rather less so and invoke some hilarity.
Despite this and the rather hefty running time (2 and a half hours no less), director Walsh manages to inject enough pace and verve to provide a film that still casts a shimmering light down the cinematic timeline.
Film review by Jason Day of Cecil B. DeMille’s silent sex comedy Male & Female starring Thomas Meighan and Gloria Swanson.
Comedy
Film review by Jason Day of the modern day silent movie about a silent film idol whose career is destroyed by sound cinema.
Silent
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.
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
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:
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.
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