In 2002, the filmed version of the Bob Fosse/Kander and Ebb musical Chicago won the Academy Award for best picture. It was a stunningly great film with a message for our media-manipulated times. The genesis of these works, as well as William Wellman’s 1942 film Roxie Hart, was a hit Broadway play from 1926 by Maurine Watkins, a Chicago Tribune reporter who sensationalized the stories of two female murderers and contributed to their acquittals at trial. One of the killers was Beulah Annan, a glamorous and adulterous party girl who, in 1924, shot her lover, Harry Kalstedt, when he announced he was leaving her. The other was Belva Gaertner, a cabaret singer who gunned down her lover Walter Law as he sat in his car. The larger-than-life producer and director Cecil B. De Mille grabbed the rights to the play, and the result is the 1927 film Chicago.
Chicago takes up the story of only one of the murderers, Beulah Annan, who from this film onward becomes Roxie Hart. Played by Phyllis Haver, she is a beautiful, golden-haired waste of space who is only interested in money and fame. Her straight-arrow husband Amos (Victor Varconi) adores her. He picks up one of her garters as she sleeps, a gaudy contraption with bells on it, and shakes it lovingly near his ear. Later, he waits on a man at his tobacconist shop. This man, Rodney Casley (the great character actor of silent and sound pictures Eugene Pallette), takes an interest in some cigarettes for ladies whose advertising suggests your woman will stay with you if you buy her these cigarettes. Casley laughs that he’s trying to unload his woman. Amos drips that if Casley had his wife, he’d never want to be rid of her. In fact, we learn they are talking about the same woman, Roxie, when Casley fumbles in his pocket for his wallet and comes up with the other silver-belled garter.
Casley goes to meet Roxie to end their affair. She persists in trying to keep him, but he pushes her roughly against the wall and knocks her bureau over. Out spills a gun. As Casley opens the door and steps out into the hall with the words “I’m through” on his lips, Roxie says, “You’re through, all right,” and shoots. A bullet shatters a mirror on the door, and passes through, hitting Casley. The broken mirror is a brilliant spidery image, followed by an equally brilliant depiction of Roxie’s reaction to what she’s done. We never see Casley’s body, only Roxie looking at it as she tries to maneuver around it. You can see the wheels turning in her, trying to figure out what to do, wondering if he’s really dead, being disgusted by the dead body in her front room. She tears the piano roll out of the player piano; this is a reference to the Annan murder in which it was reported that a recording of “Hula Lou” was playing on Annan’s victrola as Harry lay dying in a pool of blood.
Roxie calls Amos, who comes running and phones the police. They and a male reporter show up. Amos tries to take the blame, but the sly assistant district attorney (Warner Richmond) traps Roxie by saying Amos said she did it. She goes ballistic, accusing her husband of ratting her out. Of course, he did no such thing, and the heartless Roxie realizes she’s been set up. Nonetheless, the reporter is thrilled by her seductive good looks and has his cameraman pose her as remorse itself while a cop stands in for the dead man on the floor.
The scenes in prison while Roxie awaits arraignment are clever and all too short. Roxie’s all-out fight with another woman on murderer’s row, who is strapped in to a hip-reduction machine, is comic and a little frightening. The wit and sardonic humor of this film is just as piercing as in the 2002 film, and most of it is done without words. Haver gives a knockout performance, showing the difficulty Roxie has being anything but a chippie. When her attorney Billy Flynn, played with cynical grace by Robert Edeson, has her rehearse her brave, sweet, innocent, and noble looks before they face the jury, she needs a lot of coaching. He puts her in a cream puff of a dress that we are told is pink and has her carry a bouquet in her hands. She looks like an overgrown infant with a nosegay to ward off the smell of her own rotten character. The trial ends with Flynn snatching the bouquet from her hands, tossing it to the floor, and crushing it underfoot, a symbol of delicate womanhood threatened by a guilty verdict. Roxie flings herself on the broken blossoms and passes out. “The defense rests,” Flynn murmurs. You bet it does!
The director of record was Frank Urson, but the hand of De Mille is in clear view. The basis of the real murder, sex, shows how the canny De Mille always had one eye on the box office in his choice to produce the film and in the bawdiness of many of the scenes. Filming the entire murder sequence with Haver in a negligee starts the ball rolling. Of course there is nothing like a balls to the wall catfight to stir the blood. During the trial, a clever sequence showing Roxie’s legs and the curled toes of the male jury shows the Little Bo Peep routine to be a variation on the sex with a schoolgirl fantasy.
De Mille the moralist shows up in the end, of course, preserving his reputation as a God-fearing man with Urson as his front for the smut on display. Amos Hart is on screen way too much, stealing money from Flynn to make up the rest of the $5,000 he needs to hire the lawyer for Roxie in a completely unnecessary scene, and flinging Roxie into the streets, trashing the apartment, and stomping on her photo in a moralistic rage, knowing that he helped her get away with murder. The film should have ended with Roxie disappearing into the crowd on the uncaring streets of Chicago, but we are shown that good triumphs as the Hart’s maid Katie (Virginia Bradford) cleans up the apartment and is poised to become the good wife Amos always deserved. Too late. The phony melodrama of the main story flings the straight-up melodrama of the happy ending into the brass spitoon where it belongs.
Among the many genius works of renaissance man Charlie Chaplin, City Lights stands as a singular achievement. It is not that other Chaplin films aren’t as funny, and the story for City Lights is certainly not as ambitious as, say, Modern Times (1936) or The Great Dictator (1940). If it were made today, we’d call it, perhaps dismissively, a romcom, a slapstick story of a poor man who loves a blind girl and uses his dubious encounters with the more prosperous outside world to help her.
Some may say that City Lights gets its reputation as Chaplin’s greatest film because of its miraculous last scene. No less a writer and film critic than James Agee had this to say about that famous scene:
At the end of City Lights the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the Tramp, sees him for the first time. She has imagined and anticipated him as princely, to say the least; and it has never seriously occurred to him that he is inadequate. She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.
As I watched that ending for the umpteenth time, and the hubby saw it for the very first time, our eyes moistened and our hearts agreed—this scene is indeed the finest ever committed to film. He and I, however, didn’t agree about what happened in the scene, and, in fact, I don’t agree with Agee about The Tramp suddenly seeming inadequate to himself when The Girl’s realization of who he really is is reflected back to him. But more on that later.
The film Chaplin made defied the demand for sound that was all the rage following the appearance of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer in 1929. Wary of having his Everyman speak, Chaplin nonetheless wrote a score that used sound to put across some very funny gags indeed with both economy and wit.
The opening scene brilliantly sets up the great divide between the Establishment and The Tramp. Several rich poobahs stand on a dais in a square to unveil a statue they have donated to the city called “Peace and Prosperity.” Chaplin substitutes kazoos for voices, one pitched low for the men and another pitched high for the lady set to do the unveiling. No title cards are needed to understand the ceremonial claptrap that reaches its climax when the draping falls to reveal The Tramp sleeping on the lap of the central figure. Chaplin milks the uproar over the innocent desecration of this solemn moment by having The Tramp contorting with the grace of a born comic mime to free himself from the sword that has skewered his holey trousers; thinking further, one wonders what a figure with a drawn sword is doing in a statue called “Peace and Prosperity.”
From this antic opening, The Tramp moves through the crowded, uncaring streets to his fateful encounter with The Girl (newcomer Virginia Cherrill, discovered by Chaplin at a boxing match). In one of the many small comic moments that fill the film to overflowing, The Tramp negotiates the gridlocked traffic by climbing in one side of a car and emerging onto the sidewalk through the other side. When he closes the door, The Girl holds out a flower she entreats him to buy. Her entreaty startles The Tramp, who wonders why anyone would think he had the need for or the price of a flower for his ragged lapel. With great subtlety, Chaplin investigates this odd turn of events by having his Tramp take the flower and with slight, gentle movements, pass it in front of The Girl. When her eyes don’t register his movements, his heart instantly goes out to her, and he gives her a coin. When the owner of the car at the curb returns, closes the door, and drives away, The Girl calling out that he did not take his change, The Tramp understands the misunderstanding. From that point on, he plays the swell whenever he visits her and finds himself in both comic and dire circumstances as he tries to be her benefactor.
City Lights is chock full of comic set-pieces that showcase Chaplin’s nimble, cartoonlike movements, particularly when The Tramp comes into the orbit of The Millionaire (Harry Myers) who treats him like a brother when he is in his cups, but rejects him without recognition when he is sober. In perhaps my favorite comic bit of the film, The Tramp encounters The Millionaire on a riverfront as he slips a rope around his neck and prepares to lift the rock tied to the other end and toss it into the river. The Tramp runs to his rescue, only to have the rock dropped on his toe and the noose accidentally slipped over his head, dragging him into the drink. Naturally, in trying to rescue each other, both men end up pulling each other in again and again. The gag ends with the arrival of a policeman, but our fear for The Tramp is upended when The Millionaire declares him friend and takes him home.
The Tramp is scorned or asea when facing the work-a-day world. The Millionaire’s Butler (Al Ernest Garcia) does everything he can to get rid of The Tramp, while two boys on a street corner taunt him and pelt him with peas through a pea shooter. He tries to earn money to keep The Girl and her Grandmother (Florence Lee) from being evicted by shoveling manure from the streets. The Tramp watches a man lead a large team of mules down the street and heads in the opposite direction, only to be greeted by the completely unexpected sight of an elephant lumbering past him. It is with these visual surprises that Chaplin startles the audience and adds a certain whimsical warmth to moments of potential drama or romanticism. This is particularly true at the end of the first meeting of The Tramp and The Girl, when he sits quietly watching her as she gets up to freshen her flowers’ water in a nearby fountain. She fills a pot under his loving gaze, swirls the water around, and then flings it out, drenching her unseen admirer. He shakes himself and slinks off as the scene fades on the innocent Girl refilling the pot.
One of the most beautifully choreographed and realized scenes is The Tramp’s boxing match. After his arrangement to take a dive and split the $50 purse with his opponent falls through, The Tramp must do his best not to get pummeled by a fighter (Hank Mann) whose mere touch has sent men into a concussive swoon. The ingratiating smiles and handshakes he offers everyone from his opponent to his seconds are followed by a perfectly timed stutter step that keeps The Referee (Eddie Baker) between The Tramp and his foe. The Tramp manages a punch every fourth step and grabs the angry boxer in a desperate embrace to avoid a return blow. Further gags, again with The Tramp tangled in everything from the ropes to the bell marking the rounds, make for controlled anarchy and a rather suspenseful match. We almost can’t believe it when The Tramp loses, so close did Chaplin make the outcome, but winning is foreign territory to this outsider. Although Chaplin was by this time the most famous man in the world, one who remains an iconic influence today, he was emotionally bound in his work to his own beginnings as a poor boy who spent a good deal of his youth in a workhouse.
And then there is the final scene. Agee described the scene, and I would only draw your attention to something I learned from Roger Ebert. Notice what happens to the flower The Tramp takes from The Girl. In his close-ups, he holds it close to his face and simultaneously chews shyly on his finger while staring uninhibitedly at The Girl. In the reverse shot of The Girl, we see The Tramp’s hand lower, with the flower about chest high. So emotionally focused are Chaplin and Cherrill that this detail only registers after repeat viewings. I was quite reminded of a reader’s theatre performance I saw of Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell with Paul Henreid, Edward Mulhare, Ricardo Montalban, and Agnes Moorehead, in which my focus was so pulled by Mulhare that I never saw Henreid light a cigar. It’s magic in plain sight.
City Lights is, as its name suggests, lit from within because of the emotional depth of the connection between The Tramp and The Girl. The Tramp is a child with an unselfish love that seeks nothing in return, not even The Girl’s good opinion of him. Once The Girl touches and recognizes the hands she held so often, no terrible regard crosses her face; rather, she seems softly astonished and then sees that love, not wealth, has bought her sight. They outshine the brassy bulbs and neon of the metropolis in which they are barely bit players and prove themselves to be, like the painfully divided man and woman in F. W. Murnau’s masterwork Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans(1927), the real city lights.
Director: Graham Cutts
Assistant Director/Screenwriter/Editor/Set Designer: Alfred Hitchcock
By Marilyn Ferdinand
Film fans, the day you’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived! Just a few hours ago, the rediscovered “lost” film that marks the earliest surviving feature for which Alfred Hitchcock received screen credit debuted on the internet.
Although missing its last three reels, The White Shadow, a good-looking melodrama of uncommon richness, has come back to cast its white shadow upon audiences again through the good auspices of the National Film Preservation Foundation, with restoration work expertly rendered for the New Zealand Film Archive by Park Road Post Production, donated web hosting by Fandor, and a magnificent new score by Michael Mortilla with violinist Nicole Garcia funded by donors to this year’s For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon! For the next two months, anyone anywhere in the world can watch this treasure free of charge here, solving one of the biggest problems in film preservation: offering access to films that have long been out of circulation and are not likely to get wide distribution again.
Annette Melville, executive director of the NFPF and the best collaborator Farran, Rod, and I could have had in making the blogathon a success, says this was one of the most significant finds of recent years: “When the film was recovered last year, David Sterritt, who wrote a book on Hitchcock for Cambridge University Press, pointed out that it was quite a find. But a little more research suggests that it is more like ‘the missing link.’ It appears to be the first surviving feature on which he collaborated with his wife Alma as well as the film that established his connection with the Selznick family. Lewis J. Selznick, David O. Selznick’s father, was the American distributor, and the film survives as a Selznick distribution print.”
So how does The White Shadow stand up as a film? Actually, very well. The screenplay, which chronicles the fates of identical twins—one good, one “without a soul”—shows that Hitchcock’s lifelong fascination with mistaken identity and personality splits began quite early and tracks with the style of melodrama favored in silent pictures. Betty Compson plays devil-may-care Nancy Brent and her demure twin Georgina, daughters of a wealthy and authoritarian drunk played by A. B. Imeson. Nancy meets American Robin Field (Clive Brook) onboard a ship returning to England from the mainland of Europe, a cutaway to the white cliffs of Dover signaling to Nancy that she is almost returned to her “beloved” Devon. Field is immediately smitten with the vivacious Nancy and turns up on her doorstep just as she is becoming bored and restless with life at home. Her romance with Robin is cut short when she impulsively runs away, followed by a father determined to bring her back. Both go missing and the failure of a final effort to find them kills Mrs. Brent (Daisy Campbell).
Georgina meets up with Robin and his friend Louis Chadwick (Henry Victor) by chance, and the romance is back on, with Georgina pretending to be Nancy to save her sister’s reputation. However, when Louis, a painter who has returned to his home in Paris, spies Nancy drinking and gambling in a bohemian nightspot called The Cat that Laughs, he rushes back to Robin to prevent him from marrying the woman who is not the person she appears to be.
I can’t pretend to know much about Graham Cutts and his directorial style, but I would venture to say that the depth of the portrayal Betty Compson gives to her twin characters may be down to his coaching. I would expect Hitchcock to direct the evil twin as more cold and duplicitous, even this early in his career. Compson acts like neither a cardboard goody-two-shoes nor a wildly amoral sensualist. In fact, I felt rather sorry for Nancy for having her character judged so harshly by the title cards. A woman who wants to travel, have the upper hand in romance, play poker, and smoke—in other words, have a man’s freedom—seems to have the kind of spirit Victorian women like Georgina were straining after; indeed, this tale of good and evil seems outdated even by 1920s standards, belonging more to the vamp era of the 1910s. Of course, Nancy wishing her father would break his neck while horseback riding and then showing up his poor “seat” on a horse is awfully wicked, but we are told Mr. Brent made his wife and family miserable. It’s no wonder Nancy ran away.
If a film has to end in the middle, the shot of Nancy at the top of the stairs of the Paris nightclub, gaily unaware that she is about to have a vicious confrontation with Robin, is the perfect place to stop. The synopsis of the rest of the film shows that it veered into a kind of Victorian mysticism with the supernatural restoration of Nancy’s soul. I prefer to write my own scenario for a film that is filled with some interesting, full-bodied characters who deserved better than to have a moralizing fate determine their lives. Some truly suspenseful moments and occasionally murderous emotions leapt from the screen, perhaps revealing Hitchcock’s touch. A raft of interesting villians, from Uncle Charley and Norman Bates to the cruel death dance of Judy/Madeleine and Scottie, have some ancient echoes in this substantial blast from the past happily restored to the world again. Go watch it!
The Phantom Carriage has a power which almost defies description, a sense of an overwhelming darkness crowding the edges of the frame and corroding the very flesh and spirit of the characters on screen. It’s a tale of damnation, for whatever remains after death but also on earth too, the poison of psychological fear and anger blighting life as surely as the tuberculosis bacilli eat away its protagonists inside out. Light, with all its redemptive promise, radiates by contrast from the centre of frames, burning candles and lamps stranded in the midst of shadowy rooms, and from the face of the benighted Sister Edit (Astrid Holm). Edit lies expiring on New Year’s Eve, desperately begs her mother (Concordia Selander) and fellow Salvation Army worker Maria (Lisa Lundholm) to track down the one soul and body she’s been trying to save more passionately than any other. That is the soul of David Holm (Victor Sjöstrom), a drunken wastrel tracked down not in the hovel where his wife (Hilda Borgström) and children are trying to stave off hunger and cold, but drinking in a graveyard with two vagrants who listen as David recounts with amusement the fate of his old drinking buddy Georges (Tore Svennberg), who was tormented by an anxiety that used to gnaw at him on New Year’s Eve. As the minutes tick towards midnight, David explains Georges’ obsession with a folk myth that whoever died at the stroke of twelve on New Year’s would be a cursed and sinful person, charged with driving the carriage that collects the souls of those who die during the year. And, as ill luck would have it, Georges died one year ago on the very night he feared. After David chases off the Salvation Army worker who tracks him down for Edit, he fights with his two companions, one of whom smashes a bottle over his head. David is left for dead, and Death’s carriage soon comes rolling around.
Victor Sjöstrom’s career in film climaxed famously with his role in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1958). In casting the aged director and actor in his film, Bergman was paying tribute to Sjöstrom’s status as a father of the Swedish film industry, and as an artist to whom Bergman and others, both in Sweden and around the world, owed a lot. In his heyday, Sjöstrom’s gift for portraying psychological drama and capturing tones ranging from fulminating unease to outright hysteria was second to none, and his cinematic experiments were as rich and innovative as anything that would soon follow in Germany, France, and the US. Along with Mauritz Stiller, Sjöstrom was at the front rank of Swedish filmmakers well before the First World War, labouring like many great early directors on dozens of short features as the quintessential forms of cinema began to evolve, and finally with his 1921 hit The Phantom Carriage, Sjöstrom gained an invite to Hollywood, where he made great films, often with Lillian Gish, including The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928). But commercial success began to elude him, and his career essentially waned along with the silent film. Sjöstrom’s passionately visual, rhythmic, intimately composed ideal of cinema was at once highly stylised and fascinatingly realistic, as the director amongst other things helped to bridge early cinema with the Swedish stage and its tradition of dark, neurotic realist spectacle as exemplified by August Strindberg.
Today the horror film, in spite of patchy acceptance by mainstream critics, is still essentially considered a fringe genre. In the first quarter-century of cinema’s existence, however, it was a favourite field for directors who wanted to interrogate the possibilities of the medium, as they contemplated the intrinsic link between the mystery of film’s power and images of mortality, nebulous existence and concrete form. This was true of much important early cinema, including several of Georges Melies’ most striking works, Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience (1914), Murnau’s Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919), Wegener’s Der Golem: Wie Er in die Welt Kam (1920), Lang’s Der Muede Tod (1921), Christensen’s Häxan (1922), and Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924). The Phantom Carriage itself stands up amidst the most beautiful, eerie, and dazzlingly rendered movies of its time. One reason the horror genre, which was hardly a genre at the time and certainly not called that, attracted such a wealth of early talent was that it presented possibilities for experimenting with the kinds of special effects available to early cinema, in a fashion that later sci-fi, action, and fantasy films would invite, as a testing ground for evolutions in technology and the inspiration to use it. Whereas, apart from Tod Browning, it would take European directors working in Hollywood and, more crucially, the advent of the Depression to shock American horror cinema into its first golden age, in Europe a superlative glut of definitive moviemaking in this mould was closely aligned with the stylistic moment of what became known as German Expressionism. The time was in tune, too, for the great flowering of these films came in the period directly following the Great War, a time in which a great hole had been carved in European society, the pall of death was an everyday, invasive reality, and fascination with spiritualism exploded in a world that felt not at all metaphorically haunted.
But not all of these films were clear-cut in their exploitation of this mood, as many depict the birth struggles of modernism, as artists wrestled with remnants of folk traditions and the detritus of cultures going through painful evolutions, trying to reject the dead-weight of past truisms to embrace rationalism, but often rubbing fears raw in that process. Sjöstrom’s film was adapted a novel by 1909’s Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and the story is in many ways a familiar piece of post-Victorian abstemious moralism, playing like a darker version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in which a sinner sees the error of his ways through a supernatural encounter. For Sjöstrom, who had been adapting Lagerlöf’s novels regularly thanks to a deal she had made with the studio he worked for, the task was however to retain the complexity of the novel and depict the perverse, dramatically difficult elements onto the screen, precisely at a time when it was becoming clear that film was open to all challenges. The Phantom Carriage becomes a psychological epic about cruelty, fear, and pain, as experienced and exacted by David, an antihero who takes on Dostoyevskian dimensions in his anger at humanity even as he cringes before immutable forces. David, a former carpenter and craftsman, has long since slid into the gutter under the influence of the ironically well-educated Georges, whose habitual cynicism and florid bon vivant postures attracted both David and his younger brother (Einar Axelsson). Georges only ever registered disquiet when New Year’s rolled around and revived the folk tale figuration of the phantom carriage in his thoughts like an annual memento mori.
One of Sjöstrom’s significant flourishes in telling his tale is the complexity of the narrative, refusing to simplify Lagerlof’s storyline, shifting perspectives and offering layers of stories within stories in retracing the paths the key characters have taken to this converging night of fate. Starting with Edit’s plight and then shifting to David and his wayside buddies in the graveyard, Sjöstrom then segues into the past, as David recalls his time with Georges, and through Georges the mythology of the carriage is depicted. This cues a lengthy, sepulchral, superlatively realised sequence depicting the carriage and its hooded, scythe-clutching driver, going about their work. They watch over all varieties of human misery and misfortune, standing by as a plutocrat shoots himself in his immaculate mansion, and plucking the spirits of dead mean just drowned in the sea, the carriage trundling carelessly into the waves and the driver descending to the ocean floor for his prize. It’s easy to recognise the influence of these scenes on Bergman’s figuration of Death for The Seventh Seal (1957) and other elements of the visual design – one shot of the carriage travelling over a hilltop against a cloudy horizon recalls the famous shot of Death leading the dance of the dead that climaxed the Bergman work. Sjöstrom achieves his otherworldly emanations with that simplest and oldest of movie special effects, the double exposure, rendering with stark beauty the scenes of the carriage venturing onto the waves or trundling through the streets, and the spirits of dead wandering and conversing, the human world oblivious to their presence and the dead gazing back at the world they’re cut off from with forlorn impotence.
Yet whilst the film’s pictorial and emotional depictions of oneiric gloom are compelling, Sjöstrom is equally adept at capturing the grubby world its characters inhabit. Lagerglof’s novel had begun life when she was asked to write a treatise on tuberculosis control, but as she worked a narrative came to her with an aspect of social realism mediated by and reconceived through the veils of mysticism and mystery. Sjöstrom answered with its cinematic equivalent: the seamy taverns, fetid flophouses, low-rent apartments, midnight card games, the chilly graveyard, all are depicted with a care worthy of Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), with which the film shares a subterranean mood of acidic reportage and neurotic intensity. One function that the narrative complexity serves is to give the tale a sense of haziness about the veracity of what is seen: it could all be David’s alcoholic horrors or dazed dream after getting walloped over the head. But it also suggests that such distinctions mean little in the face of how it summarises the struggle, and attraction, between the all-encompassing nihilism of David and the naïve yet powerful altruism of Edit. Caught between them are David’s victimised wife and brother, early casualties, emotionally and morally if not mortally, for David’s rage, and yet also participants in and causes for it. After David and his brother fell in with Georges, David did a short stretch in jail for drunken behaviour, and as he was released, the prison chaplain (Nils Aréhn) revealed to David with brutal condemnation that his brother is now also locked up, but for the far worse crime of killing a man in a drunken brawl: the chaplain stated that he was of the opinion David should be doing the time instead. David, horrified and chastened, returned home to his family, only to find they had left without any idea of where to find them, turning David’s ill feeling into an unshakeable and near-psychopathic misanthropy.
The existential angst of The Phantom Carriage is aligned with the pain of the post-war period, even if made in a country that was neutral during WWI, as it resembles the nightmare prophecies and structure of Abel Gance’s J’Accuse! (1919) which similarly climaxes with visions of the dead rising up, possibly hallucinated but still urgently meaningful. The difference is that the horror of The Phantom Carriage is microcosmic, a study in personal degradation and damage but with a reformist social agenda. And yet the film slips out of such limits: the notion that David travels deeper into his personal nightmare out of wilful determination and anger at the cheap pieties and soft options that leave him adrift in a bleak world, gives The Phantom Carriage more complexity. Sjöstrom imbues it with a hallucinatory unease that captures that mood of midnight agony anyone who’s drunk to forget the day’s pain might recognise. When David arises from his own sprawled, shattered body to be confronted by Georges, who has spent the last year driving the carriage, except for him every night has been “a hundred years”, collecting souls like a tired garbage man clearing away the refuse of human existence. There’s a quality approaching black comedy as the grim figure of death proves to be the middle-aged, familiar Georges, but his rank melancholia and sombre missives quickly diverge into a form of horror that penetrates far deeper than the later genre’s usual stock visions of psychos in masks killing sundry teenagers, asking instead, what are we most afraid of in life and in death? Whilst Georges ushers David away from Edit’s deathbed in telling him that the job of taking her soul belongs to other, presumably more exalted spirits, there’s no sight of better worlds or paradises in this vision, only of the afterlife as a place where people walk or trundle along in stunned misgiving, staring back at the life they’ve lived with awareness that hell is a place humans create for themselves.
Of course Georges tells David that he’s going to take his place as the driver for the next year, and when David protests, George binds him with invisible strands and forces him to accompany him to Edit’s deathbed, where Edit, not yet dead but standing at the edge of permeable reality, can see Georges, and greets him with confusion: “Death…but too early.” Edit has her own crosses to bear. Her mother had begged her fellow Salvation Army workers to ignore her frantic wish to see David before dying because having given up her life to the cause and now doesn’t want her death to be consumed by it too. As Georges stands over Edit’s bed, he explains her situation to David, thus commencing another lengthy flashback as the narrative retreats one year to the same New Year’s when Georges himself died, and David, drunk and sick, barged his way into the new shelter Edit and Maria had set up, and passed out on a bed. Edit set herself to fixing up David’s torn coat, oblivious to the fact that in doing so she was breathing in all the germs on it, including his chronic TB, which she’s expiring from at an accelerated rate. When he awakened, David ripped off the patches she had put on the coat, stating, “I’m used to it this way,” and she asked him to come see her in a year’s time to let her know how he was getting on. The pair continued to encounter each-other with a quality of combative aggression mixed with erotic fascination, as Edit confesses she fell in love with David, seemingly everything she isn’t, even as she determinedly wrested one of his friends away from him at a Salvation Army rally. David’s wife, for whom he’s been searching for months, was at the same rally, and after seeing Edit and David argue, explained her plight.
Edit, with selfless determination, set about reconciling the couple, but once returned to his family, David’s long-awaited revenge commenced as he refused to give up his drunken ways, preferring to taunt his wife and breathing precariously over his children. David’s vicious misanthropy is at its rarest when he tells a woman at the rally that she shouldn’t cover her mouth when she coughs, as he takes pride in breathing his lethal germs right in people’s faces. When his wife tried to rebel again and locked him in the bathroom whilst she tried to get the kids away, as she fumbled with the sleeping youngsters he hacked his way out with a hatchet, in a sequence that at once suggests a nod to Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) but looks forward too with unavoidable similarity to the iconic “Here’s Johnny” scene in The Shining (1981), complete with the peculiarly intimate terror of the enraged father figure, a potent and toxic vision of masculine violence erupting in the home. And yet when his wife faints, unable to escape, and David gets free, he props her up on a pillow and feeds her water, greeting her awakening with the harshly knowing words, “It wasn’t as easy to run away this time!” To her exhausted reply, “Haven’t you had enough revenge?” As Edit expires, Georges takes David on to his next stop – the slum dwelling where David’s wife and children are living now, as Mrs Holm prepares to poison them all, a final recourse. Finally David’s self-absorption is shattered and he begs with Georges to save them even at the expense of his own total extinction.
The surprisingly naturalistic acting, particularly from Sjöstrom himself, whose husky physicality gives David the insolent charisma the role needs, is littered with gestural marvels that equal the filmmaking. In an early scene, Mrs Holm is brought to Edit’s bedside, the woman a fidgety, dead-eyed wraith who reaches out with clawing, Nosferatu-like fingers at the slumbering Edit in her anger, only for Edit to awaken and immediately smother the woman in kisses in submissive gratitude. When Maria first finds Mrs Holm, she keeps retreating to each corner of the room, standing with back to the room. Just as affecting is the anguished stroke of his brother’s face David gives when presented with him in his jail cell, and in David’s homecoming as he cringes and smoulders in rage as he stands in the midst of the jarringly empty flat, whilst two neighbour women laugh over his misfortune. One stark shot depicts Mrs Holm and her children standing over David who lies sprawled and passed out on the pavement. Sjöstrom’s best moment comes in one of David’s ugliest, as he first clasps eyes on Edit after learning she’s repaired his coat and she waits with eagerness to see his reaction: David’s expression turns as cold as the winter wind as he perceives the embodiment of everything he’s at war with and feels cannot be his, and his frenzied tearing at the patches of the coat delivers his message, but whilst startled, Edit refuses to be fazed, and her fascination for the simultaneously pathetic and grotesque, yet also powerful David is made weirdly coherent. Her subsequent effort to reunite David and his wife see her perpetuate the great Victorian delusion that all you had to do to normalise any experience, any anomaly, any fracture in human dealings, was to slap a pair of decent clothes on it. Thus the story is complicated by its concentration on the way good intentions often crash headlong into harsh realities.
The Phantom Carriage ends happily, after a fashion, but as in Bergman’s work there’s a sense that redemption and facing up to all that’s gone wrong in life can be exhausting, even counter-productive. David, restored to “life” and rushing to intervene in his wife’s seemingly imminent euthanasia, buckles and weeps when she reacts with aggression and disbelief in his sudden show of concern, and it’s clear that even if he really has seen the error of his ways, the same essential cause of both his good and bad behaviour remains a fretful terror of mortality, the disease still in his lungs and the pain that is his burden. The mood of The Phantom Carriage lingers long after it’s over, and its influence on filmmakers, both in the horror mode and outside it, feels deep: as well as Bergman and Kubrick, its atmosphere and original blend of precise psycho-social veracity and the otherworldly anticipates the qualities of Val Lewton’s epochal film series, whilst other aspects vibrate through the works of Murnau and G.W. Pabst, and prefigure a very different film about a misanthrope haunted by past loss, particularly the flashback to scenes of familial happiness for the Holms, in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964). Like many notable silent films, The Phantom Carriage has seen many editions and restorations over the years, but I recommend the version I saw with an aptly spare and eerie score by the electronic group KTL: where many match-ups between silent films and modern scores, like the several Metropolis (1926) has seen, feel arch in the long run, the KTL score expertly captures the sense of nocturnal foreboding, alienation, and bleak emotionalism that fuels the film. Either way, The Phantom Carriage is an early masterpiece of the medium.
The ancient Germanic and Scandinavian tales of Siegfried or Sigurd were vital building blocks for much middle and northern European folk culture. This was true long before Richard Wagner conflated them for his delirious, impossibly long, musically ostentatious opera cycle, and certainly long before J.R.R. Tolkien absorbed them into his The Lord of the Rings tales. Tolkien’s variation, in repositioning the material as a battle against tyrannical evil, tried to present a completely opposite contemporary tilt on the stories to that assumed by Hitler and the Nazis, who annexed aspects of them through Wagner as lynchpins for their own mythology. Siegfried, the anointed, pure hero who defeated the dragon and yet fell to a spear in the back, presented to post-WW1 German nationalists a powerful metaphor for what they saw as the betrayal of their great struggle by politicians. The possibly apocryphal story of director Fritz Lang’s encounter with Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, who, as Lang later recounted, asked him to become their master filmmaker, is today known by just about anyone with pretences to film scholarship. It’s one of those singular moments where, as with Eisenstein’s contretemps with Stalin or Ronald Reagan’s co-opting a popular sci-fi adventure for a planned weapons system, where cinema history and political history suddenly unite with genuine import. In Lang’s account, he was approached on the back of their adoration of his two-part 1924 film of the epic poem Die Nibelungenlied, and its science-fiction follow-up Metropolis (1926), works riven with Lang’s malleable sense of human masses and colossal design bound together as expressive instruments that seem to dwarf individualism in the face of historic forces. The fact that Lang’s wife and collaborating screenwriter, Thea von Harbou, became a Nazi (albeit, so she said, to protect Indians, like her later lover, living in Germany), and that many of his cast and crew would be doomed, like or not, to keep working in a Goebbels-run film industry, deepened the seeming surety of Lang’s links to the new regime.
However, there were dimensions of Lang, half-Jewish and Austrian-born, and his aesthetics that the Nazis had not understood or had wilfully ignored, and this was one dragon he decided not to cuddle up to. Lang left Germany, arrived in Hollywood as an artistic hero, and finished up as a near-forgotten B-movie helmsman, albeit one who would be rediscovered just as his career was ending. Such is the lay of Lang’s fall from his pinnacle as the world-shaking cinema titan who bankrupted UFA and inspired the likes of Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock to become filmmakers. It’s neither fair nor entirely apt that the original mythology or Lang’s film of it should have to withstand such evil cultural and historical associations, but they still remain. Made nine years before Hitler’s rise to power, Die Nibelungen’s dedication “To the German People” in the earlier context reads as encomium to a beaten and deeply depressed nation trying to struggle its way out of a dreadful collapse in political structures, economic terrors, and appalling loss, whilst the film radiates the sensation of the pre-war neo-classical love for mythology and fantasy now scratching beneath the fanciful veneer of the iconography and finding the real emotion and hard lessons such surviving tales still contained. The tale’s depiction of a maddened clash not only of individuals and peoples, but also values and world-views, fighting each-other to a bloodily apocalyptic nullity, reflects the still sharp memory of the Great War as noble yet incoherent tragedy.
Lang himself hated Wagner’s chauvinistic mash-up, and based his films squarely on the saga written by an anonymous poet who was probably part of the court of the Bishop of Passau at the turn of the thirteenth century. The poem was a product of a phase in European history when rulers were attempting synthesise new loyalties and codes of behaviour, as well as put the burgeoning numbers of poets and troubadours to some use, through formalising national mythologies in the pattern of Homer’s epics: most of the Arthurian tales came out of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court a little earlier. Like such works, Die Nibelungenlied, which obviously combined transmissions of Greek myth, passed on from hazy sources, with folk memories and legends, was a study in medieval ethics and social constructs, which stressed ambiguity on a human level by presenting cast-iron order and morality imbued on a cosmic level: heroes fall because of their blind spots, and the righteous often appear to be uglier than the villainous in attempting to assert an absolute ethic, and finally history, or fate, or society, wins over the individuals even as each venerate the fallen. The poem also neglected most of the oversized mythological details, like Siegfried’s descent from the Norse gods, and instead presented a story squarely set in an historical context, and in spite of fantastical touches like the dragon Siegfried kills and the magical helmet he wears, the tone is largely that of this earth.
The first part of Lang’s work thus kicks off, rather than climaxes with, Siegfried’s greatest mythical hits and, in the total scheme of the films, moves through them at lightning speed. Lang’s film preserves the feudal flavour and fearsome, atavistic sensations of the poem, and yet is also a prototypical version of the same modern moral universe, inflated in scale and resonance but still recognisable, as that Lang explored through less distant prisms in subsequent films as diverse as M (1931), Fury (1936), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Big Heat (1953). Such was a universe where a daemonic quality in human nature wreaks havoc, and mankind on a social level is often disturbingly mindless and reactive. The nobility and ethical strength of the individual barely keeps afloat when such forces are unleashed, the heroes’ loving impulses often transmuting into a hard and unforgiving vengefulness, one that risks becoming monstrous and inhuman in the name of maintaining a human, moral shape to the universe. Lang’s sensibility thus intuitively grasps some of the subtler inferences of the original myth and many like it. In the immediate context of Lang’s run of ‘20s work, where the Dr Mabuse films explored the paranoid mindset of the contemporary and Metropolis posited fables in the future, Die Nibelungen looked for same in the distant past. In each, a similar, sinister sense of plots laid and hatching evil is facilitated by borrowed guises as the means to insidious ends: Siegfried’s use of his magic helmet equates with Mabuse’s use of disguise and the robotic Maria in Metropolis. Lang’s personal art was perhaps most strongly defined in and contained by Die Nibelungen, because, as has been noted, the essential figurations of the tale recur again and again in Lang’s films. Clearly, for Lang, Die Nibelungen was more than a national myth: it was his own.
The early stages recount how Siegfried (Paul Richter), son of the king of Xanten, has been residing for years with bedraggled old blacksmith, Mime (Georg John), of a race of barely-human mountain men, learning hardiness and craft in a lofty cave. Siegfried is introduced forging a sword sharp enough to cut a feather that falls upon its edge, impressing Mime, who tells his charge that his apprenticeship is over, and that he can return to his father. But another mountain man speaks of the castle at Worms, seat of the king of Burgundy, and of the beauty of the princess Kriemhild (Margarete Schön). Siegfried decides instead to do deeds mighty enough to win Kriemhild. Fate gives him his chance right away, as he encounters, on his way, a colossal dragon that rules a mountain grove, in order to present to the world his own vision for mankind’s conquest of death and terror. Siegfried kills the dragon and showers under the blood that runs from its carcass, making him impervious to physical wounding, except at one spot on his back where a leaf from a lime tree falls and sticks. This is the first and most overt moment in the film which seems like a progenitor with endless resonance through subsequent fantasy cinema, perhaps the first great leap forward from Georges Méliès’ rough sketches, with the proto-animatronic dragon moved by steam-powered puppetry, glimpsed drinking from a pool and lashing out at the miniscule but dogged attacker with tail and fire: just about every special-effects driven movie made subsequently owes something conceptually or technically to this scene, from King Kong (1933) through to Jurassic Park (1992) and on to the present.
Siegfried’s legend begins to precede his approach, as his deeds are recounted in Worms to Kriemhild, her mother Queen Ute (Gertrud Arnold), and her brothers, the King Gunther (Theodor Loos), and the younger Gernot (Hans Carl Mueller) and Giselher (Erwin Biswanger), by court troubadour Volker of Alzey (Bernhard Goetzke). Meanwhile, Siegfried, continuing his journey, encounters Alberich (John again), a Nibelungen or goblin metal-smith, who possesses a fabulous treasure, as well as the magic helmet, which confers invisibility. Alberich assaults Siegfried whilst wearing the helmet, but Siegfried overpowers and kills him, leaving Siegfried with his treasure and the great sword Balmung. Now, invincible and able to command the loyalty and needs of men, Siegfried conquers and then commands twelve petty kings, and brings them as his followers to Worms. Siegfried, a king in his own right, hopes to forge stronger bonds between the various European kingdoms. Whilst Siegfried and Gunther become friends, and the court’s band of fraternal warriors are dubbed ‘Nibelungen’ to celebrate the new compact, at the insistence of Gunther’s truculent advisor Hagen of Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), Siegfried won’t be allowed to marry Kriemhild until he helps Gunther marry too. For Hagen has convinced Gunther to expand his realm by wedding the Queen of Iceland, Brünhild (Hanna Ralph), who lives in a fire-ringed castle with an army of shield-maidens. The prodigious Queen has set no easy requirements for suitors: they have to beat her in three tests of strength, on pain of death. Gunther is anything but a champion, and he prevails upon Siegfried, donning his magic helmet, first to invisibly guide his actions in the joust, and then to take his own guise to subdue her on the wedding night when she continues to reject him. In gratitude, Gunther not only lets Siegfried marry Kriemhild, but also goes through a ceremony of blood brotherhood with him.
Lang’s eye, with the tools of the amazing set design and decoration by Otto Hunte, Karl Vollbrecht, and Erich Kettelhut, and the costuming by Paul Gerd Guderian and Aenne Willkomm, allows the essential conflicts and thematic tensions of the early stages of this drama accumulate through distilled signifiers. The initial sight of Worms as described by the mountain men appears like a dream vision, rising above the primal landscape of craggy mountains and colossal forest trees, tangles of wilderness and stygian depths of the unknown, through which Siegfried makes his heroic advance. It’s impossible to miss the similarity of imagery in the moment in which Siegfried follows Albrecht into his cavern to the scene in Metropolis where Fredersen follows Rotwang into the catacombs, although the journey is closer in spirit to that of Freder in the latter film, a trek into the underworld where the hero risks his life but emerges with riches. Siegfried, simultaneously, moves from the very fringes of the world, through the midst of the forest via the dragon and various semi-human races he encounters, to Worms, which, with its soaring battlements and radiating aura of centrifugal power and gravitas, seems like a bastion of all humans can achieve.
The formalistic world of the Burgundian court sees the characters and architecture arrayed in geometric precision, revealing the increasing influence of modern art styles like Cubism infiltrating Lang’s visuals, whilst also channelling the simple precepts of medieval heraldic decoration: such motifs do not however merely look impressive, but communicate ancient assumptions of hierarchy and power, encoded in the very scenery of the drama. Individuals are dwarfed by the might of the church and the palace, and they move into place with precision in obedience to feudal hierarchy at the court. When Siegfried, pretending to be Gunther, overwhelmed Brünhild, he did not actually deflower her, but he took her armlet, a symbol of chastity, and kept it as a trophy. When Kriemhild finds it and innocently sports it, Siegfried confesses his loyal act of deception. Meanwhile, Brünhild, still harbouring misgivings and gnawed at by her actual ardour for Siegfried, starts throwing her weight around in preferring to destroy what she can’t have. She describes Siegfried as a vassal and claims pre-eminence over Kriemhild upon entering the church, an act of contempt that angers Kriemhild so much she retaliates by telling Brünhild the truth about her wedding. Brünhild, maddened to mania, lies to Gunther that Siegfried actually slept with her when pretending to be him. Hagen, who has wanted an excuse to pilfer the Nibelungen treasure, sides with Brünhild when she demands Siegfried’s assassination.
The dialectic of values that permeates Die Nibelungen is reflected not only in the visuals, but in the opposition of characters. Siegfried, whilst embodying classical ideals of Germanic tribal youth, is also imbued with the nascent patina of Christian idealism in borrowing St George’s mantle (although some have also suggested, interestingly, that this aspect of the myth could have roots in the infamous defeat of the Romans by the Germanic tribes at the Battle of Teutoberg Forest, when the Romans wore scaled armour), penetrating the stygian depths of the forest and extending the bulwarks of civilisation, but utterly at a loss when drawn into the orbit of the political, human world. Defined against his virtue is Gunther, whose essential lack of personal direction and strength contrasts Siegfried’s meritocratic gifts carefully imbued by experience and upbringing, a warning against the dangers of mere inherited power. Even more polarised is Hagen, the unrefined old Teutonic, virile, amoral, fearless, shameless, and loyal to the interests of his nation and the improvement of his king, whether the king likes it or not. The demure Kriemhild seems, at first, the polar opposite of the awesome Brünhild: Kriemhild, quiet, eyes constantly downcast, appears the perfectly deferential, decorous medieval maid, whereas Brünhild is a more ancient kind of women, physically dynamic and wildly tribal, carrying associations with Greek mythical heroines and huntresses like Diana and the champion Atalanta, given superpowers by her intractable chasteness, and Lang and von Harbou stack her portrayal heavily towards hues of misanthropic lesbianism. Initial appearances are partly deceiving, as Brünhild proves increasingly volatile and vindictive once her virginity and sovereignty are surrendered, whilst Kriemhild, who early in the film interrupts a violent quarrel between Siegfried and Hagen with a pacific gesture, grows after marrying Siegfried exponentially in character and stature, until she becomes an all-powerful engine of wrath.
Siegfried and Kriemhild embody the persistence of idealism in civilisation, being reconstituted as the Roman world, distant and increasingly irrelevant, is assailed by Attila and his Huns. But idealism is not necessarily positivist in such a realm: it invokes justice and order as well as liberty and socialisation, and the occasional harshness of those concepts. Hagen and Brünhild, who are both, tellingly, constantly sporting helmets with winged crests that evoke more distant tribal roots and totemistic meaning, are refrains from older times, potent and powerful, but also destructive and self-defeating in their extreme sensibilities. Upon her arrival in Worms, Brünhild, who has before clearly been pagan, consulting an old völva who cast the runes, must kiss the cross in the first act of domestication. This historical world depends utterly on codes of behaviour and ritual that enforce and allow assumptions of trust. The gullibility of Siegfried and Kriemhild and the weakness of Gunther are heightened to amusing extremes, and yet of course it’s actually about demonstrating the level of trust invested in those one fights with and lives with. Hagen violates those presumptions in the most profound manner possible, as he tricks Kriemhild into sewing a cross on the back of Siegfried’s robe that marks out exactly where the leaf that despoiled his invincibility stuck, under the pretext of wanting to protect Siegfried in battle. Out on a hunt, whilst Siegfried drinks from a pool, Hagen spears him in the back.
Die Nibelungen is very long – the two chapters in their full-length cuts take five hours to unspool – in part because Lang plays every scene with a smouldering, slow-mounting intensity that registers with electric fixation and precise weightiness the characters’ actions and reactions. In the sequence of Kriemhild’s confrontation with her dead husband, the slow burn pays off for one of Lang’s brilliant little pirouettes of style, as Kriemhild awakens in the night and wanders from her bedroom, the castle now suddenly a trap of voluminous, haunted space, the hunting party returning from the stygian night with Siegfried’s body on his shield. When Kriemhild comes upon Siegfried laid out, she bends over his body in utter devastation. Whilst there’s much less of the overtly experimental and symbolic technique Lang would use in Metropolis here, Lang employs such elements sparingly and exactingly, and here interpolates a livid piece of imagery as Kriemhild envisions Siegfried standing before the blossoming tree where he was kissing her earlier, the tree of spring then waning in wintry fashion to take on the aspect of a glowing skull. Violent tragedy has been prefigured by an earlier dream Kriemhild had as Siegfried first entered her life, of a white bird being torn apart by black ones, rendered in abstracted animation. Kriemhild’s squall of shock soon segues into realisation that Hagen is the murderer, and she rises from Siegfried’s corpse pointing her finger at the warlord with abysses behind her electric eyes, demanding he be punished. But Gunther, who acquiesced to the crime, his brothers, and Volker all, for the sake of the loyalty that is their own, absolute value, step in front of Hagen, announcing their intention to stand by him. Kriemhild vows revenge, and later finds, when Siegfried’s body has been laid out in the cathedral, that Brünhild, having already revealed to her husband that she had lied about Siegfried’s actions, has killed herself there with a dagger in her heart, and rests bent over his corpse, bringing the curtain down on the first chapter.
The bipolar swing from the transcendental adventure of dragon-slaying to this ugly scene seems to chart a grimmer side to the evolution of human civilisation, out of the forest’s shadows and into the different shadows of human emotional and societal conflict. Kriemhild must evolve further and find a way to slay this entirely different kind of dragon. Like her dead husband, she embarks on a single-minded pilgrimage through the forests to fulfil a vow that will change the shape of the world. Strong female characters in Lang’s work were remarkably common even after his marriage to the imperious Von Harbou broke up, and although at first the drama is driven ironically by a clash of intemperate ladies, Kriemhild and Brünhild, later Kriemhild, like the diptych of Marias in Metropolis but contained within one body, is both goddess and succubus, saviour and annihilator, lording over men as she commits unremittingly to her programme no matter the horror that ensues. Whilst Brünhild comes to resemble a femme fatale of the order of Joan Bennett’s Kitty March in Scarlet Street, Kriemhild, like Spencer Tracy’s Joe Wilson in Fury, Henry Fonda’s title character in The Return of Frank James (1940), and Glenn Ford’s Dan Bannion and Gloria Grahame’s Debby Marsh in The Big Heat, is slowly transformed by her dedication to vengeance into a merciless, inhumane force.
If that dedication is held far higher than the mob mentality, here presented in the form of the Huns, invoked throughout Lang’s films, it’s because it retains a fearful kind of beauty, a singular force that stands rigidly opposed to nihilism and defeatism, and thus constitutes as sure a bulwark against utter moral chaos as Worms’ battlements, but which in any other setting but this demands better answers. The formerly demure, ultra-feminine Kriemhild now becomes the baleful icon, resembling Klimt’s vision of Pallas Athena, cowering grown men with her gaze, her brothers downcast and ashamedly tentative before her, as she accepts an offer from Attila (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to become his new wife, as he promises to avenge any offence done to her: Kriemhild forces first Attila’s envoy, Rüdiger von Bechlarn (Rudolf Rittner), a Germanic vassal of the Asian conqueror, to swear this oath. She demands it again when she reaches Attila’s keep, in a spellbindingly intense sequence that sees the magnificently ugly Hun warlord and the beautifully icy German widow find a deep understanding in unflinching gazes and oaths of binding import. Attila is later so nervous about the well-being of his wife and his child she’s giving birth to, he can’t prosecute the siege of Rome he’s started, and when news comes of the baby’s safe delivery, he charges with his men back to his stronghold to cradle his babe with childish glee, and grants Kriemhild’s request to invite her brothers for a stay. Along the way he passes by the film’s oddest piece of symbolism, a gaggle of naked children dancing around the one tree in an otherwise blasted plain, emblems of the endangered but growing state of civilisation in this age.
Whilst Metropolis, with its genetic heritage passed on through so much of science fiction that followed and its giddy, frenetic sense of technique, is the most famous of Lang’s films, Die Nibelungen has all of its virtues and none of its faults, not simply in telling a more lucid story – it is admittedly easier to transcribe a work of great classical literature than compose one’s own parables – but also in conceptual depth, narrative integrity, and consistency of acting. The performing is practically cabalistic in its concentration, particularly from Schön, who does some of the most operatic eye-acting in the history of silent cinema, and that’s saying something. As Metropolis is to science fiction, watching Die Nibelungen feels very much like encountering the ür-text of just about the entire canon of historical fantasy-adventure cinema. Whilst many entries in these genres had been made before, Lang’s boldly composed visions seem to have sunk the deepest roots in the imagination of filmmakers, even those who have never seen them, but rather seen the films they inflected. Beyond the impact of his use of special effects, Lang’s visual alchemy presented an indelible model for anyone working with such material. The temptation to completely reinvent the world presented in a movie according to aesthetic choice and artistic desire is always theoretically open to filmmakers, but as it’s so often a realistic medium, few feel free to do so with material set in the modern world, a choice that is however less fraught in fantastic and historical settings. Thus Lang’s holistic sensibility, turning everything within the scope of his camera into an expressive instrument, could find free reign here, and gave to followers an expressive palate that could be used in endless and intricate variations. The influence spreads over a vast spectrum of cinematic icons: the compositions and stylisation of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1946-58), the historical swashbucklers of Michael Curtiz and epics of Cecil B. DeMille, the visual motifs of Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, and Orson Welles, through to Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (over and above the poem’s influence on Tolkien), John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974) and Excalibur (1981), and historical dramas like Anthony Mann’s El Cid (1961), Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), and Fellini Satyricon (1969). Even sci-fi like Star Wars (1977) bears its imprint; Hagen – or is it Kriemhild? – can be called the absolute original Darth Vader. Lang’s way of settling his camera down to absorb a set composed in precise, static geometry prefigures the self-conscious reproduction of such effects by Sergei Paradjanov. The finale seems to have particularly inspired the core battle sequence in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985).
Die Nibelungen moves with the relentless stateliness of classical tragedy, which is indeed a genre into which the story finally moves, even as the narrative finally erupts with action in an hour-long final sequence of transfixing force. Structurally, it is broken, like an epic poem, into “Cantos” that commence with brief explanatory, pre-empting notes. Kriemhild’s determination to uphold the values she considers sacred – justice and oaths of loyalty – runs headlong into Attila’s own specific absolutes, in this case the nomadic leader’s insistence that an offer of hospitality cannot be violated, so that even whilst he puts the Burgundians in his wife’s lap, he won’t prosecute the vengeance she wants. So, she carefully whips up the Hun warriors, who, wanting to aid the woman whose beauty and statuesque strength seems to them practically god-like, will do anything she asks, so that when the Burgundians arrive, a fight erupts between the partying soldiers of both sides. When a Burgundian soldier runs into Attila’s banquet hall in the keep, shouting, “Treason!”, Hagen promptly, punitively slaughters Attila and Kriemhild’s baby. At the pleading of another of Attila’s German vassals, Dietrich of Bern (Fritz Alberti), he’s allowed to lead Attila, Kriemhild, Rüdiger and others out of the keep, before the Nibelungen close the doors and defend themselves against the waves of Huns who try to hack through the doors and invade via ladders to the roof. The Nibelungen, with their shields and mail as well as fighting prowess, prove near-invincible for the unarmoured, swarming Huns, and so Kriemhild invokes Rüdiger’s oath and demands he lead his own men in, an act which entails the worst possible crisis of conscience: Rüdiger has promised his daughter in marriage to Giselher. But the power of the oath wins out, and Rüdiger moves ominously in to attack. When he tries to strike down Hagen, Giselher leaps in front of the villain in trying to plead with his would-be father-in-law, and dies instead. In the battle that follows, Volker kills Rüdiger, whilst the Huns swarm over Gernot as he pleads with his sister to call them off. Hagen mocks Kriemhild from the keep’s steps after another wave of attackers is beaten off, and finally Kriemhild gives the order to burn the keep to the ground with the remnant Nibelungen inside.
The power of these scenes is virtually indescribable in the infernal concision of the images, especially as the end comes for the Nibelungen, Volker defiantly playing his instrument – in pointed contrast to an earlier scene where he smashed another after Kriemhild left Worms without making peace with any of them – and leading the warriors in song. Attila, outside, in a maniacal trance, rocks his hands to the time of the song, and Kriemhild, at the suggestion from another German vassal that’s she’s been consumed by hate, gestures to the keep and states, “I’ve never been more filled with love,” in admiration for her brothers’ fidelity to their principles. They won’t even let Hagen go out to hand himself over when he proposes to do this. Finally, Dietrich, who, like Attila, is another real historical personage brought into the drama (his real-life analogue was Theodoric the Great, the Visigoth king who conquered Italy), ventures into the keep and overpowers Hagen, dragging him and the king, the last left alive, out to meet the final act of the tragedy. The bleak and dizzying beauty and emotional force of this ending come not simply from the feelings evoked within it and by it, but from the moral ambiguity of it all, as characters one despises suddenly prove themselves heroic beyond measure and true to their private code. Even Gunther gets himself wounded in trying desperately to pluck the fiery arrows from the roof, and Hagen tries to protect the prone king by standing over him with his shield as blocks of masonry crash upon it. The various postures of the characters, their world-ordering sensibilities, finally meet in a mutually annihilating showdown where each major character is forced, one way or another, to destroy what they love most. It’s the darkest possible ending in many ways, and yet bizarrely elating, and it makes, by comparison, most modern descendants of this truly great film experience look childish.
As regular readers here know, there’s not much I like better than finding lost films. Every recovered film fills a hole, however small, in history and provides insight into the artistic or documentary sensibilities of the filmmakers and the culture that influenced their creations. However, some discoveries are truly breathtaking, and the 1971 discovery of A Page of Madness by director Teinosuke Kinugasa himself while going through a warehouse is an extraordinarily valuable recovery. Japanese films from the silent era have one of the lowest survival rates of any national cinema, with only about 1 percent of an estimated 7,000 films still available for viewing in whole or in part. To compound the importance of this discovery, not only is the film silent, but it is also an experimental film, a subset of both silent and sound films that has an even lower survival rate.
Kinugasa, a former actor specializing in female parts, belonged to a group of avant-garde artists called the Shinkankaku-ha (School of New Perceptions). Like the German Expressionists also working at this time, the Shinkankaku-ha attempted to develop mood and subjective experiences through the manipulation of images rather than through traditional narration. Yasunari Kawabata, the 1968 Nobel Prize winner in Literature who supplied the story and part of the screenplay for the film, had seen Robert Wiene’s classic German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). He described that film’s experimental effects to Kinugasa, and these descriptions informed Kinugasa’s approach to tellng the story of a janitor who works in the mental asylum in which his wife is incarcerated for trying to drown their baby.
The film offers what could have been a clichéd opening of suspense, a scene of a dark and stormy night. However, this storm is unlike anything I’ve seen since the Epstein/Buñuel silent The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). Sheets of rain slant in a skewed camera angle, stylized lightning looking a bit like Japanese calligraphy splitting the sky. A goddess-like creature dancing in front of a spinning sphere interrupts the elemental chaos. The image melds with a young woman (Eiko Minami) in tatters dancing in a cement-block cell, her imaginings of herself as an elegant priestess intercutting with her compulsive movements, unable to stop until she has danced herself bloody.
A stooped and aged janitor (Masuo Inoue) moves down the aisle of the cell block of women both restless and prostrate. He registers nothing until he reaches the cell that contains his wife (Yoshie Nakagawa). She stares blankly, madness alive in her eyes, even as he tries to reach into her mind and reawaken her memories of their marriage. Instead, we see a young woman in traditional garb carrying a baby to the edge of a pond and being pulled back as she starts to lower the infant into the water. Water is an important image in this film, a reference to the unconscious from which these dark and chaotic images emerge.
The daughter (Ayako Iijima) she tried to drown has grown to young womanhood and comes to visit her parents at the asylum to tell them of her engagement. Footage of the daughter and her fiancé appears to be missing, and I mistook her for the janitor’s memory of his wife as a young woman. Yet, this mistake still seems to resonate in the film, as the janitor is haunted by his memories and seems to be losing his grip on reality through constant contact with the insanity around him. A riot in the asylum occurs when the segregated male inmates pour into the women’s lock-up as they yelp in a frenzy over the dancing woman. Grotesque faces assault the screen and linger in the janitor’s mind as he imagines the men posing a danger to his wife—an allusion to his own mistreatment of her before she went mad.
A particularly effective scene has the janitor imagine that he passes out masks from the Japanese Noh theatre to the inmates so they can assume identities to replace the ones that have gone to pieces; donning the masks brings them a calming happiness they cannot find within themselves. When the janitor imagines that he places a mask of a lovely woman over his wife’s face and dons one of a wise man himself, we see him remembering what he feels for his wife and his desire to have his affection returned. Masks are always a bit eerie in film, and to see the collection of pale, immovable faces is to force a comparison to the largely blank, immovable face of the janitor’s wife. It is also a reminder that the janitor’s face, largely frozen in a half grimace, masks the tormented mind Kinugasa makes visible only to the audience watching the film.
Kinugasa engenders disorientation in the audience with the use of superimposed images, skewed camera angles, and quick-cut montages that telescope the chaos of the riot, for example, as well as the sharp contrast between the janitor’s imagination and the reality of his world. For example, he sees one bearded inmate menacing him and his wife, but a cut shows the janitor reclining on his bed as this same inmate, meek and harmless, is escorted past his door. Which is real? It doesn’t really matter. We understand that for the janitor, his chosen life and inner pain will forever keep “real” and “normal” a distant land.
The sense of confusion is quite extreme for the audience, particularly since the film has no intertitles. As was the practice in Japan, this film would have had a benshi narrate the story, interpreting the actions of the characters almost like an additional member of the cast. It would be fascinating to see the film with a benshi, but the powerful imagery and committed performances of the actors, particularly Inoue, communicate volumes. The film score used for the print from the George Eastman House uses atmospheric sound effects and a Japanese flute that I felt enhanced the haunted and alienated quality of the film.
A Page of Madness is an incredible achievement of Japanese cinema and a precious find for all cinephiles and scholars. It is also available for free viewing on YouTube.
Early cinema had no shortage of great innovators whose names roll off the tongue of any film lover, but D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau stand as perhaps the signal triumvirate of the medium’s formative influences, with Griffith as grammarian, Eisenstein as architect, and Murnau as alchemist. Murnau had, with Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), made a film nominally within the limits of the Expressionist style laid out by Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang, but pushed those limits outwards and introduced qualities of aesthetic and technical experimentalism into narrative film that soon began to inflect silent cinema far outside German borders. His subtitle for Nosferatu declared the intent and the effect: he made symphonies in cinema. Murnau’s almost endlessly resonating career was tragically short, for only 12 years intervened between the time when the young former assistant to Max Reinhardt made his first movie and his death in a car accident in 1931, just before his last feature Tabu premiered. Murnau’s influence on filmmakers was less how to put together the specific pieces of film to tell a story than as an exponent of “Unchained Cinema,” that is, the use of every element at the director’s disposal to construct an image on screen operating entirely to express a poetic-artistic vision. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, his first American production and one of the defining films of the silent era’s last few glorious years, was to influence filmmakers from the French Poetic Realists to Orson Welles to the New Wave and on and on.
With his legendary run of UFA films like ThePhantom (1923), The Last Laugh (1924), and Faust (1926), Murnau deepened his skill and fame and pushed his belief in pure visual exposition to radical limits. His dramatic sensibility expanded, too: whereas in Nosferatu he presented everyday humanity as literal prey for the emanations of the psyche, he began to more carefully modulate this theme through characters both insignificant, like the hero of The Last Laugh, and titanic, like Faust, who nonetheless are at the mercy of forces within and without that can destroy them or make them indestructible. When Murnau came to Hollywood to make a project he’d been developing back in Germany, Fox Studios’ money and infrastructure was laid at his feet with a boisterous profligacy only given today to the crassest would-be blockbusters. Murnau and his screenwriting partner Carl Mayer set out to create a little drama imbued however with qualities of fundamental allegory, hence the subtitle of “a song of two humans,” which, on the face of it, it like almost a caricature of high-falutin’ pseudo-art. But Murnau’s confidence in his grasp on the poetic lexicon of early cinema and the genuineness of his empathy for characters at the mercy of larger forces was such that he could transmute them into aesthetic riches. Mayer was a specialist at writing chamber dramas about everyday characters, whereas Murnau was interested in the elemental, yet the duo’s disparate interests complemented each other perfectly for The Last Laugh and Sunrise. Sunrise’s unspecific setting, perched somewhere between country and city, old world and new, past and present, artistic traditions and cinematic immediacy, dramatizes its world in terms of such binaries: most important of all, love and hate are entwined here with an inseparable, dizzying potency.
Sunrise tells the exceedingly simple story of a young couple in a state of crisis in an extraordinary manner. Murnau approaches it in a seemingly oblique fashion, starting off with the streams of holidaymakers who come to the tiny village where the main characters live from a city that is darkening and spreading, to quote The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), one of the many films under Sunrise’s influence. The opening shots, utilising overlays and split-screen effects, mimic the style of the era’s travel posters, as if drawing attention to how commercial visions mould our experience of the world, and in particular, the way the urban affluent see places beyond city limits. The very first shot is practically a film school subject in itself in terms of form and function: the artful sketch of a railway station interior and the lettering scrawled across it again evokes advertising, but also the art of the set designers, a touch that allows Murnau to immediately invoke the artificiality of his vision. As the sketch fades into actual set, with a great glass wall allowing us to see the urban context for a departing train, he consciously introduces the organic quality to the way his artificial world is constructed, binding city, train, and the movement of the train together like a museum display of an engine showing all its moving parts. The organic quality of Murnau’s created world extends to later in the legendary sequence on a trolley car where the country gives way first to the detritus-strewn outskirts, then the industrial belts and finally, the urban heart.
Sunrise’s first act is built around erotic obsession, intrusion and parasitism, so it’s fair that the film starts off with the city penetrating the country like a virus, ready to infect it and leech off it. The attitude of “the Woman of the City” (Margaret Livingstone), the vampy vacationer who stays behind in the rural village, is signalled very early when she has the woman renting her a room clean her shoes while she’s wearing them. The Woman is the embodiment not simply of the flashy thrills of urban modernity, but also of irresponsible sexual excitement itself, and her whistle to alert the Man (George O’Brien) that she’s waiting outside his hovel of a farmhouse is the call of the Siren, a Lorelei or female counterpart to Count Orlock. She fills a void of desire and excitement for the Man because the flush of romance has entirely left his life. The Man’s farm is failing, and the Wife (Janet Gaynor), silently aware of her husband’s infidelity and pain, slogs her way through days and nights and takes care of their infant son in glum distraction. With her old-fashioned hair style and sexless persona, she inhabits the idea of a wife from another era where it scarcely has traction, and the marrow has been sucked out of the Man along with the nobility of labour.
The Man leaves his barely furnished dinner table to venture into the reedy fringes of the lake that separates the village from the tramline to the city. Under the moonlight, he meets the Woman, who, in her black coat, has a panther’s aspect. Murnau matches the vamp’s promises of an electric life in the city with gaudy visions of whirling, expressionistic models and a split-screen shot of a bandleader thrashing time before a battery of horns and a dance floor that churns a storm-swell of sensual thrills. Lust and murder are instant bedfellows, as the vamp suggests to the Man that he arrange for his wife’s death by drowning. The Man flies into a rage at the suggestion and almost strangles her, but this is just prelude to carnal frenzies in the moonlight. The Man’s violence only stokes the Woman’s lust, her lunatic dancing and shimmying drives him to bury his face in her crotch in a scene that’s still amazing for the unrestrained manner in which Murnau presents sex and the death wish with raw, Freudian force. A tracking shot following the couple’s footprints in the mud, the vamp’s hard-heeled shoes showing up as utterly impractical, captures the insidious muck of their actions, as she cuts bulrushes for him to tie together and use as a buoy to keep himself afloat after he tips his boat into the water.
Glazed in Murnau’s nocturne eroticism, the first third of Sunrise suggests the distant prototype of all film noir, with a dash of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. If the Wife is femininity rendered stale and mute, so, too, the Man’s masculinity is contorted and volatile. When the Man returns to his home, carrying the guilty bundle of bulrushes, the Wife pulls a blanket over his sleeping form with a care that’s sublime, and when he seems the next day to reach out to her, she’s all too willing to believe he’s coming back to her. The build-up to the Man’s aborted attempt to kill his wife is prolonged when the family dog senses evil in the air and jumps aboard their rowboat, forcing the Man to turn back and take the dog inside. The Wife’s buoyant mood sinks in sensing, but not quite realising, her husband’s nihilistic mood, a mood that finally shows itself when he rises to do the deed, stiff and hunched, arms straight at his sides, like Orlock in Nosferatu But his wife’s terror brings the man back to his senses. He chases after her when, after they reach the shore, she flees onto a trolley, and the two journey into the city barely aware of anything except their own mutual horror and shame.
Much of silent cinema tends to look old—feel old—in a fashion deeper than mere technological modishness: through so much of it there is the incidental depiction of a world rapidly changing. For instance, all those Keystone Kops chase scenes depict a Los Angeles being built, and the shifts in fashion take us from the fading of Edwardian gentility into the sleekness of the Jazz Age within a decade, reminding us that the golden age of silent cinema came at a time when the world made a definitive shift into the one that, more or less, we still live in, but people still cast glances over their shoulder. Cinema of the time also had an eye toward a world beyond American borders: a huge proportion of the population in that time had been born overseas, many in places where the city depicted in the film was as exotic as and equivalent to the new country they came to. The other truly great depiction of marital pain in the new urban age from this time, King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), seems amazingly contemporary because it’s keenly attuned to the pulse of a purely modern, industrial city’s rhythms and realities. Sunrise operates in a different fashion, trying to be universal and timeless, even whilst still describing the world in which it was made. Murnau’s work, with one eye constantly back on a mythic past and the other on an oppressive present, feels like a barometer for the age, and the film’s elemental conceptualism emphasises all this: at its heart it’s a love story, yes, but it’s also about the way people are defined by place and time, and how they also might escape that definition. Just the same as the Man is beset by outsized moments of despair, rage, joy and sensual frenzy, Murnau’s movie operates according to the same bipolar spirit, swinging between poles of menace and anguish, and freewheeling ebullience and liberation. Sunrise, in its way, is a cinematic equivalent of one of Dostoyevsky’s characterisations, embodying and encapsulating multiple impulses and the way variations on the same basic feeling can draw one in diametrically opposed directions.
When the Man and Wife reach the city, however, they find a temporary release from the things that have nearly destroyed them both. Far from being entirely populated by people like the vamp, the city proves as alive with variety and human quality as anywhere else. Here buildings take on the outlook of alien embassies, and human visages are menacing and magnificent all at once. Sunrise, once it reaches the city, isn’t all that great a distance from the films of Chaplin and Keaton in its wry, observant take on individual quirks, from tipsy waiters to comically presumptuous lotharios to photographers who take secret delight in the unruly romanticism of their subjects, and its feel for the individuals contending with an almost-overwhelming new world. Murnau repeatedly makes a gag of situations that seem momentarily threatening, but prove eventually to be all right, as when the Man and Wife get frantic over thinking they’ve knocked the head off a classical statuette belonging to the photographer, not realising that it never had a head, and when an alarm over not being able to pay the bill in a swanky nightclub proves only momentary, as the Wife reveals she’s stashed some funds away for a rainy day. Even the finale renders the same basic idea on an epic and urgent key. Murnau’s visual excitement never gets in the road of his essential material, but rather dovetails with its richly conceived, poetic intensity. When the wife gets off the tram, still dazed, the husband grabs her and swings her through the traffic, constantly in danger of being knocked down; once the pair reconnects, they drift through the traffic with a weightless evanescence, and shift realities back into a pastoral setting before coming back to reality, where their kissing is holding up a river of traffic.
If Sunrise is taken too literally, it could be construed as a portrait in pathology, with the Man’s wild swings between ardour and homicidal feeling the stuff of horror tales. In context, however, it’s a virtually metaphysical portrait of how terrifyingly close such intense emotions are. It’s momentarily bracing to note that Murnau, gay and very Prussian, was one of the cinema’s great portrayers of grand, erotic passion and emotional immediacy, but then again, stereotypes never lasted long with him. The Man’s swing from cyborg-like fixation in the boat scene to crumbling, guilty mess sees the male and female roles reverse, the Wife holding power of life and annihilation in her hands and whose understanding of his emotional fatigue has a maternal element. The crucial scenes of the whole film comes when the pair, still bleary and shell-shocked from the evil morning, stumble into a church, where the spectacle of another couple’s wedding provides catharsis for them, repeating compositions of the man’s earlier tussles with the Woman as he buries his face in her belly, but with completely different emotional meanings. This scene segues into Murnau’s best joke, as our couple emerges from the church like they’re the ones who have just been married, to the bewilderment of the waiting folk outside. It’s both amusing and fittingly alarming then when, as the Man gets a shave, he’s hovered over by a manicurist who evokes the Woman and the Wife is bugged by a moustachioed letch who tries a bit too forcefully to chat her up, stealing one of the flowers the Man had given her. The Man, brushing off the manicurist, rises from his seat, unfolds a pocket knife and, with a triumphal flourish of reclamation and resurgent power, hacks the flower from the stranger’s lapel.
Of course, the film’s diptych of female types, blonde Madonna and vulpine brunette Whore, is reductive, but it does offset the Man, who combines violently opposing temperaments common to all men but stoked to fever pitch in him—just as Murnau had earlier in Nosferatu and The Phantom, and would again in City Girl (1930), presented similarly internally conflicted female characters. Gaynor, who herself won Best Actress in the 1927 Oscars for three performances (the other two were in Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven and Street Angel), was used by the directors for her capacity to seem limpid yet luminous, whilst suggesting a less elfin Lillian Gish. O’Brien, mostly a Western actor who much later would star in two of John Ford’s Cavalry trilogy, is a fearsome physical performer, and when he and Gaynor come alight, it’s magic.
The process of the couple’s reconciliation is completed in a gigantic nightspot, memorably depicted on the exterior as a gigantic roulette wheel. There the Man becomes a momentary hero with his simple farmer’s fearlessness in hunting down a prize pig that escapes from the neighbouring sideshow. This sequence is a stream of hilarious vignettes of eccentric, flaky, sexy, ludicrous humanity, culminating as our couple is cheered on in performing the “peasant dance” in a display of deft physicality and pure partnership that delights the city crowd. Again this scene straddles worlds: for Germans Murnau and Mayer, it simply evokes the immediate reality of the national culture and the intrusion of the rural populace upon the urban. In the context of an American movie, the idea of a “peasant dance” evokes the immigrant experience, and at least for me, the curiously similar dancing styles often exaggerated in the Disney Silly Symphonies, which drew their inarguable popularity from aiming precisely at the nexus of audiences who covered a colossal range of cultural references. Simultaneously, the dance resolves what has been schismatic—city and country, male and female, fun and marriage, the world of two and the world at large, new and old.
Whilst the rural environment that the Man and Wife come from is a world of primal environs and singular, transcendent emotions, the city is a place of synergies, frippery, shallow wonders, and real ones, too. Perhaps the only other film that communicates the joy of rediscovering the love in a pained relationship as authentically as Sunrise is Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1951), a film that is in many ways a temperamental opposite: Rossellini’s intimate, ironic realism illuminates the inside of its characters through the tropes of the world as found rather than reordering the world. Sunrise’s finale offers up melodrama, as natural forces as immutable as the emotional ones seen throughout the film endanger the Man and Wife as they sail back to their village. Plot motifs converge with cunning symbolism as the Man gives the bundle of bulrushes that was supposed to save his life to his Wife just before their boat is capsized, an act of perfect charity, though the Man is washed ashore while the Wife is left to drift in the lake under the steadily disintegrating bundle: when the Man and fellows from town return to the becalmed lake, they only find drifting rushes leading the Man to believe the worst, and the vamp believes he’s pulled off the murder.
Murder indeed almost happens, as the Man this time comes out in reply to her whistle to throttle her almost to death, only to be saved by Murnau’s use of a gigantic close-up. More specifically, a gigantic close-up shot of the couple’s maid (Bodil Rosing) shouting out that the wife has been found alive, saving the femme fatale in the nick of time. But the sense of technique, the sheer go-for-broke feeling of Murnau’s employment of Rosing’s face, is inescapable, the purest distillation of form and function he can offer. Murnau follows it up with an equally perfervid close-up of the Wife, long hair at last unfurled, awakening in bed to the man’s kiss, as the pair dissolves in a beatific air. It’s a moment where the opposites in Murnau’s vision of the universe finally melt away, and the carnal becomes spiritual.
They’re back again. The creative team behind the successful OSS 117 spy parodies—filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, his wife and leading lady Bérénice Bejo, and his leading man Jean Dujardin—have turned their talents not only to another subgenre, but to film history itself. The Artist is a backstage Hollywood story made as a black-and-white silent film, complete with title cards and music score. Modern silent films are more numerous than many people think, though The Artist will be a novelty to the majority of people who go to see it. Unfortunately, as a silent-film fan, I found myself quite confused by this film and feel it distorts the record on the transition from silent to sound pictures in a way that further offends John Gilbert, a silents legend who ended up unjustly on Hollywood’s ash heap.
The film begins unlike any real silent film: a spy is shown in extreme close-up being tortured with electroshock treatments by some Russians who want him to spill his secrets. He refuses to talk and is tortured to unconsciousness. Fortunately, the spy’s faithful dog comes to the rescue, the baddies are beaten, and the spy returns to the arms of his lady love. This sequence, the climax of the new George Valentin (Dujardin) film “A Russian Affair,” is intercut with an audience in a large theatre and George and his costar Constance (Missi Pyle) sitting behind the screen waiting to take their bows at this, the film’s premiere. This clever opening signals the modernist sensibilities that will be brought to bear on a film era spanning from 1927 to 1931, from the Roaring Twenties through the 1929 stock market crash and into the Great Depression and the rise of the movie musical.
Following the (silently) thunderous applause of his appreciative audience, George mugs with Dog (Uggi) on stage like the old vaudevillians they must have been, as Constance fumes about not being introduced until the very last moment. George exits the theatre, and one of his fans, while trying to retrieve the autograph book she drops, stumbles into George. He forgives the intrusion, and the young lady, Peppy Miller (Bejo), makes herself an overnight sensation by posing for the newspaper photographers and giving George a kiss that makes it to the front page of Variety. George’s disaffected wife Doris (Penelope Ann Miller) refuses to believe the innocence of the encounter, particularly when she sees George with Peppy at the studio, where the aspiring starlet has wormed her way into a nonspeaking cameo on George’s new picture. The pair signals their attraction by repeatedly flubbing their brief moment together on camera; studio boss Al Zimmer (John Goodman) wants to fire her, but George uses his clout to keep her on.
In a classic reversal of fortune, Hazanavicius produces credits for several films showing Peppy moving from the bottom of the list, through the common variant billings of the time (“Pepi”), to top-billed star as the studio switches to all-sound pictures and new faces to usher the new era in. At the same time, George, scoffing at talking pictures, heads toward ruin. He loses his fortune in the stock market crash, his wife leaves him, and the studio drops him like a hot potato. He and Dog move into a small apartment, along with his loyal chauffeur Clifton (James Cromwell), who works without pay until George fires him for his own good. After George has pawned everything of value and become a full-fledged alcoholic, Peppy rescues him after he has nearly died in a fire of his own making and resurrects his career by turning him into a musical comedy star alongside her. Their final number, a tap dance routine reminiscent of Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s “Begin the Beguine” turn in Broadway Melody of 1940, is the only nondream sequence with sound, as the stubborn silent “artist” embraces light entertainment in all-sound pictures.
The character of George is a compilation of classic silents stars, including Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, but he seems most modeled on Greta Garbo’s regular costar John Gilbert. Dujardin’s appearance mimicks Gilbert’s, and George’s reason for refusing to make talkies, “Nobody wants to hear me speak,” alludes to the myth that Gilbert did not make the transition to sound because he had a poor speaking voice. Gilbert also got an assist out of obscurity from Garbo, who insisted that he was the only man she’d play with in Queen Christina (1933), and Gilbert was an alcoholic. However, making George an egoist who declared his own film artistry as the reason to reject sound, not to mention a laughable voice test by Constance a la Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, undercuts the real reasons behind Gilbert’s problems and those of other silents stars—high salaries and more power than the studio bosses cared for them to have. George is reduced to an actor whose pride is his only impediment, and that includes having the hubris to declare himself an artist when Hollywood insists that it will support only happy campers who churn out light entertainment for a downtrodden nation.
Filming The Artist without sound seems a very confused choice to me. The big reveal at the end that George has a French accent would seem to confirm his fear of sound due to his voice, but what exactly does the choice do for the rest of the film? I’m afraid I don’t really see the point as anything other than some high-concept conceit that seems a particular attraction of The Weinstein Company, which picked this film up for American distribution. Is it fun to see modern acting styles done without sound or color, or to pick through the film references placed like Easter eggs throughout the film (e.g., the breakfast table scene between Charles Foster Kane and his wife in Citizen Kane or the verbatim score for Vertigo in the fire sequence)? Honestly, I felt these were cheap attempts to engage my cinephilia instead of giving me a film that was well conceived with a strong point of view.
The area where this film shines is in the incredible talent and likability of Dujardin and Uggi. The pair works very well together, particularly in the gripping scene when George is overcome by smoke in his apartment and Dog barks desperately at him to get up and leave, finally exiting the scene and racing down the street to attract a policeman (Joel Murray) to the conflagration. This scene plays remarkably true to silent film conventions and maintains its own integrity, with the exception of a comic moment when an older woman (Annie O’Donnell) waiting for a bus tells the cop he probably should see what all the fuss is about.
The extremely crisp look of the film gives a hint of what a new nitrate film might have looked like to audiences in the silent era, though even restored films from nitrate we see today don’t look quite this good. In general, the costumes were a treat, but I was a bit disconcerted to see Peppy in full flapper regalia for a 1930s film she was starring in. The Artist was also surprisingly chaste by both 1920s and pre-Code standards; George and Peppy never act on their attraction, making the relationship one of mentor-protégé despite plot developments that assert it should have been more, for example, Peppy buying all of George’s personal effects at auction and saving them in her mansion for a time when he could be reunited with them.
I enjoyed various components of this film and thought the performances were generally quite good, but perhaps I am too much of a silent-film buff to really give it my full endorsement. And if I’m not the target audience for this film, then who is? This talented team should have thought this one through a little further, as I feel there’s a first-rate film in here somewhere straining to come out.
My love affair with Colleen Moore started the night I saw Ella Cinders several years ago at Chicago’s Silent Summer Film Festival. The most I had seen of Moore before that was in short film clips outside Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry display of her Fairy Castle, built for $500,000 in the mid 1930s and toured around the country by Moore to raise an eventual $650,000 for children’s charities. I never paid much attention to those clips, though they included a scene from Ella Cinders, so anxious was I to see the wonderland in miniature she created just for kids like me. Looking back, it’s easy to see how the woman who inspired this dollhouse for fairies would be exactly the kind of actress who could cast enchantment over an entire nation. After the premiere of Ella Cinders, she did indeed become the most popular actress in America.
At first, no one would make this light comedy based on the story of Cinderella. Some clever promoters decided to drum up demand for the film by launching an “Ella Cinders” comic strip in 1925 with characters from the film script, and a heroine who looked exactly like Moore. “Ella Cinders” was a big hit, not only inducing First National to make the picture, but also establishing a comic strip that would run for 36 years.
Ella Cinders is the put-upon servant of her stepmother (Vera Lewis) and two stepsisters, Lotta and Prissy Pill (Doris Baker and Emily Gerdes). Her only friend is handsome and gentlemanly George Waite (Lloyd Hughes), nicknamed Waite Lifter because he is the iceman who hauls the blocks to stock the iceboxes that fill their home town of Roseville, Colorado. Ella, longing to escape, learns that Lotta plans to enter a local beauty contest whose winner will receive a cash award and a contract with a Hollywood studio. When she goes to the photographer for a headshot to enter in the contest, she is plagued by a fly buzzing around her face. It is the headshot showing her cross-eyed with a fly on her nose that wins the contest for her, providing the judges with a good laugh instead of a dime-a-dozen beauty shot. Shrugging off her rags with the money to buy some new clothes, and with a train ticket in hand, she heads for Hollywood, only to find that the contest was a scam and that there is no studio contract waiting for her, only the same struggle to crash into a studio and get noticed that others face.
Ella Cinders offers some sight gags to tickle our fancy, but they pale in comparison to what Moore does on her own. For example, desperate to win the contest, she steals a book on acting off the chest of her sleeping sister and tries to follow instructions. Notably, the book says that being able to act with your eyes is the key to success (and an interesting take on acting in the silent era especially, with the cross-eyed look that catapulted Ben Turpin to comic fame included in the book). Director Green offers special effects of Moore apparently crossing and swirling her eyes in different directions to get laughs, but I was more impressed with her attempts to match the looks in her mirror. Similarly, when posing for the headshot, she is a mass of uncertainty, putting her hat at different angles, clutching some tulle around her face, leaning her chin on her finger, and other strange poses that are funny and charming at the same time. In Hollywood, she is thrown out repeatedly by a studio guard she is trying to get past. Her final attempt is to wrap a silk throw around herself and put a mannequin head on top to disguise herself. The image is kind of amusing, but when a dog unmasks her, her tear through the studio onto different sets is guilelessly funny.
The most famous scene in the film is her encounter with Harry Langdon. She sees him holding a door closed during a scene, and goes to his aid with the line, “They’re after me, too.” The gags Harry uses to hide her from the guard are pretty standard stuff—bobbing up and down to conceal her behind him, throwing a blanket over her and pretending she’s a table he’s having lunch at. For my money, the best bit is when she accidentally plugs a lion’s tail into an electric outlet and runs for her life. She ends up screaming for help on a set on which a fire is being simulated with blow torches, and the director, thinking she’s the actress he hired, congratulates her even after he sees the real cause of her distress. Naturally, she is put under contract and eventually wins herself a Prince Charming—George is actually wealthy, loves her, and goes to California to marry her.
I could quibble about details, and I certainly think the comedy bits are very routine and not very funny for modern tastes. But none of that matters because my sweet Colleen shines in every frame. She truly is incandescent, a warm and mirthful soul I love to spend time with whenever I can. Indeed, I found myself with an indelible smile on my face throughout my recent re-viewing of the film. Moore herself searched her whole life for prints of her many lost films without much success, but there is always hope that one will turn up somewhere the way Her Wild Oat did. Whenever and whatever it is, I’ll be there, communing with my favorite star.
It has been a few months shy of two years since I first learned about the cache of American films from the silent era found in the New Zealand Archive, and almost as long since I learned that a long-lost film by John Ford called Upstream was among them. Preparing for the first For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, I was let in on the secret by the organization for which we chose to raise money, the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF). A lot has happened since those first organizing discussions: we’ve held another blogathon, one of the films whose restoration we funded (The Sergeant, 1912) is soon to be released on DVD by NFPF as part of a collection of Westerns, and Upstream made its repremiere in Los Angeles last September. The film has only shown in a handful of venues since then, none of them near Chicago.
That changed two weeks ago. A friend of mine told me Upstream was to screen at the University of Wisconsin Cinematheque in Madison in a few days’ time. How had this amazing information escaped my notice?! I was so excited I could barely contain myself. At last, a chance to see what I’ve known about and worked for for so long. And what a show it was! The UW Cinematheque is a wonderful venue for free screenings of a wide range of films during the school year. Jim Healy, the new director of programming, came to UW after 10 years at George Eastman House, so not only are his taste and pedigree impeccable, but he also has a direct line to film sources throughout the world. Upstream was to have played at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema during their “Illuminating the Shadows: Film Criticism in Focus” symposium (which brought my blogathon partner Farran Smith Nehme to town to sit on two panels), but an equipment problem caused the detour to the Cinematheque. Thus, with apologies to Farran for leaving her and the symposium behind, the hubby and I set off for our favorite neighboring state.
The evening Healy had planned was a tribute to the Fords, Francis and John, beginning with a screening of a short film, When Lincoln Paid (1913), directed by Francis (that’s him as Lincoln, too). The nitrate film had been found moldering in a New Hampshire barn and was taken on by Eastman House for restoration; Healy informed us that after the discovery, additional scenes were found elsewhere, so restoration of the title is ongoing. I look forward to seeing the film in its nearly complete form when the “new” scenes are edited in—it’s an extraordinarily gripping story of how Abraham Lincoln pays an I.O.U. to the owner of a boarding house years later, after he becomes president and is conducting the War between the States that caused the unfortunate woman to lose her son, a Union soldier, to a Confederate firing squad. (This film and brother John’s were both given brilliant piano accompaniment by David Drazin, a musician who has quite spoiled silent film lovers in Chicago with his witty, appropriate soundtracks improvised right on the spot.)
John Ford’s recovered film is a much different sort of film—a show biz story brimming with comedy and a lighthearted love triangle. Most of the action takes place in a boarding house for vaudeville performers run by Miss Hattie Breckenridge Peyton (Lydia Yeamans Titus), a former vaudevillian whose several posted signs let “resting” performers know that they must pay in advance. Raymond Hitchcock, in one of his last film performances before his death in 1929, plays the big star staying at Hattie’s with a wonderful shabby gentility. Hitchcock, a true star of the theatre whom audiences of the time were so sure to know that he wasn’t even given a character’s name, uses his reputation and liberal amounts of flattery to get Miss Hattie to overlook his outstanding debt to her. A knife-throwing act made up of the knife tosser Jack La Velle (Grant Withers), his target, Gertie Ryan (Nancy Nash), and their assistant, Eric Brashingham (Earle Foxe), aren’t booked up either. Worse for Jack, Gertie is carrying on a flirtation with Brashingham, the last in the line of an acting dynasty, and like the last in line for anything, he was shortchanged in the talent department.
All of the boarders, even Miss Hattie, hope for a big break when Gus Hoffman (Harry A. Bailey), a booking agent, shows up during their communal dinner. Everyone runs to greet him except Brashingham, who is far too busy slaking his appetite to bother; naturally, Hoffman is there to see him. The Brits want a Brashingham to play in a new production of Hamlet, and talent is no object. Dramatic actor Campbell Mandare (Emile Chautard), who reveres Shakespeare, offers to coach Brashingham. The pair stays up all night rehearsing, and Brashingham makes a breakthrough. He sets sail for London, makes an enormous triumph, and grows a head the size of the Titanic. He returns to New York and visits the boarding house as a publicity stunt on the day Gertie and Jack are married. Will Gertie, who carried a torch for the ham for some time, regret her marriage? Will Jack throw a knife at his former colleague’s fat head to deflate it? Will Brashingham be able to fit his head through the front door at all? It’s for the viewer to see and enjoy.
The performances in the film are uniformly wonderful. Chautard does Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” scene that, regardless of the lack of sound, is magnetic and full of feeling. We see the difference between his rendition and Brashingham’s over-the-top recitation not only in the lack of obvious gesticulation, but also through lighting that offers a dramatic counterpoint to Chautard’s emotive face. The comedy dance team of Callahan and Callahan is wonderful as an odd-couple pairing. Ted McNamara’s face is the map of Ireland, while Sammy Cohen’s is kosher for Passover. They couldn’t be brothers if they tried, but their differences land them a print ad for cosmetic surgery, with Cohen offering a side view of his angular proboscis in the “before” picture, and McNamara showing a diminutive nose in the “after” photo. The partners also dance quite well, and offer an early comic scene as their rehearsal in their room above the dining room sends plaques of thin, loose plaster crashing down from the boards that form both their floor and the diners’ ceiling.
I thought Earle Foxe was a little overstated during his snob phase, though the groundwork was laid very nicely by his half-hearted romancing of Gertie that was more mercenary than marriage-minded. His humanity comes out best when all of his lines go out of his head just before curtain in London, and he’s in a very believable panic. Ford offers a ghostly image of Mandare appearing in a dramatic special effect to bolster Brashingham’s courage. Nancy Nash looked adorable, (I covet her three-piece suit), and Grant Withers didn’t overdo the jealousy. I really felt for him when Brashingham crashed his wedding, sending Gertie into hiding upstairs.
I’ve seen a number of film critics tying themselves into knots trying to “auteurize” Upstream. The truth is that Upstream is a wonderful comedy that wouldn’t be recognized as a John Ford film if you didn’t know he directed it. But it does reveal that he was always great at directing ensembles that could accommodate stars without selling them the deed to the farm and that comedy was in his blood. I could never understand the strange mixed tone of his film Pilgrimage (1933), a rather serious World War I film that unaccountably goes slapstick in its middle act. Now I think I get it.
Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North is credited with being the first full-length, ethnographic documentary in cinematic history. As we understand the term “documentary” today, this film certainly stands as the most famous of its time, that is, a documentary that is not merely a document impassively recording occurrences in front of the lens, as with the “actualities” from the dawn of filmmaking, but one that preserves cultural artifacts with either implicit or explicit points of view about those artifacts. Flaherty would be one of the first documentarians to fiddle with the truth to preserve things he found valuable. In Nanook and Man of Aran (1934), for example, his aim was to document ways of life that were becoming extinct. Flaherty banished any modern tools or methods used by the Inuit tribe he recorded in favor of filming their traditional way of life; in Aran, the fishermen of Ireland’s Aran Islands literally reenacted traditional practices they had already abandoned.
You might call Flaherty something of a Luddite, despite his use of photographic equipment in filming and editing his material, and someone who may have romanticized traditional societies even as he saw the evidence of their hardships with his own eyes. His bias toward simplicity comes roaring out of The Twenty-Four Dollar Island, a 13-minute documentary in which the city of New York itself is the main character. The film is included in Anthology Film Archive’s nine-hour DVD set, Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941, a brilliant attempt to make it and other vital and fascinating films unseen no longer.
The Twenty-Four Dollar Island is another startlingly original work, portraying the mechanical organism that is a robust industrial city through its architecture and machines. While I don’t know what the original score for the film sounded like—or even if it had one—the new score by Donald Sosin provides a strong complement to Flaherty’s point of view that a city is something close to a fascistic overlord that, nonetheless, reflects human civilizations through the centuries.
The film opens with an image on paper: an historic drawing of the 1626 trade Dutchman Peter Minuit supposedly made with Native Americans—boxes of trinkets worth $24 for Manhattan Island. Title cards tell us the Dutch immediately built 30 houses. Next, we learn the new city of New Amsterdam grew to 1,000 residents by 1656. The film then juxtaposes a drawn map of the original New Amsterdam settlement with photos of the metropolis that had spread out on the same site by 1926, the year this film was shot. The next title card introduces Flaherty’s subject proper: “New York, symbol of impressive industry, finance, power, where men are dwarfed by the immensity of that which they have conceived—machines, skyscrapers—mountains of steel and stone.”
A couple of men are glimpsed on the edges of the frame as they maneuver some earth-moving equipment into place. Steel clam shovels dig into the sand and move on threads of chain into the air to deposit their loads in a nearby container. The music, which until now had trafficked in Native American motifs, starts to take on a stronger rhythmic intensity, as though it were imitating the heartbeat of the city, and synthesized tones emphasize the mechanistic nature of the subject. Ships belching black smoke and dwarfing nearby ferries and tugboats fill the frame. The Hudson River, visible on the maps shown at the beginning of the film, seems to be brimming with seafaring traffic, like a bathtub awash in rubber duckies and toy boats. Bridges spanning from the island to the surrounding land cut a swath through the sky; when the river traffic and bridges enter the same frame, the sky is all but obliterated. The total encroachment of the urban human habitat on the natural landscape of the island will fill the frame at the end of the film.
New York seems like some ghastly nightmare to Flaherty. Men building the mighty structures of the city work in deep holes, chipping at bedrock with pick axes and sliding down loose earth and rubble. The rock is loaded into a container and lifted by a crane out of the hole. During the scene, my mind raced to the building of the pyramids, which employed devices and many men working with their hands to erect the pharoahs’ tombs. As if by magic, the next image is of a building whose upper half is shaped like a stepped pyramid.
When the film segues to some of the skyscrapers then standing in Manhattan, a tree limb or two break into the frame. Not all of New York is hard and pushy, the film seems to want to say. The music softens with strains reminiscent of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” but trending in the direction of his more atonal Third Symphony, and the examples of grace and elegance then in existence are boxy or overly fussy, reflecting a basic bad taste. If only the Chrysler Building had been finished in time to be photographed for this film, this section might have made a better case for New York’s softer side.
Flaherty captures the muscularity of New York, its ugliness, and deliberately eliminates most humans from the frame. It’s hard to believe the title card that says there were 8 million people living in the city in 1926, so completely does the island seem entirely populated by buildings and machines. There is nothing left from 1626 for Flaherty to recreate ethnographically, and without the elemental roots of the city—only its bedrock bones being hacked to pieces by drone workers—Flaherty seems to find little to dignify in his portrait. His point of view is clear; The Twenty-Four Dollar Island is a mesmerizing and amazing achievement for him and for its new scorer, Donald Sosin, who captures the spirit of the film and enhances it significantly.
UPDATE: Terrific interview with Brian Meacham, the AMPAS scholar who discovered the New Zealand cache.
By now, most of the film world knows about the partnership between the New Zealand Film Archive and the National Film Preservation Foundation to repatriate and restore 75 American motion pictures that no longer survive in the United States. The news broke in the New York Times yesterday and has been all over the media, Twitter, and Facebook. Frankly, Farran (The Self-Styled Siren) and I were a bit miffed. We were told we should not make the announcement until this afternoon, and here comes someone to steal our thunder! But scoops are what newspapers are about, and this was a big one.
Sworn to secrecy out of deference to the New Zealand government, Farran, Greg Ferrara (who did our ads and banners), and I have known since last fall that the New Zealand archive was the next big project for the NFPF, but we had no idea what the nitrate experts would find as they examined the existing footage. The news is amazing! About 70% of the nitrate prints are virtually complete, and more than two-thirds have color tinting. Included is John Ford’s full-length feature Upstream (1927), a backstage romance involving an aspiring Shakespearean actor and the daring target girl from a knife-throwing act, and a trailer for the director’s lost feature Strong Boy (1929), starring Victor McLaglen. Maytime (1923), an early feature with Clara Bow, was found, though afflicted with the “bloom” that signals nitrate deterioration. NFPF got to this film just in time!
We promised the blogathoners a good film, and initially, we were to fund Moonlight Nights, a short comedy featuring child star Gloria Joy. But Annette Melville, the wonderful executive director of NFPF who has been so helpful to us, found a real treasure that helped double our money. The Sergeant is a very important short western that will be included on the Treasures V collection, thus receiving matching funds from the federal government. Here’s why it’s so unique.
The Sergeant is one of the earliest surviving narratives shot on location in Yosemite Valley. The one-reeler shows the magnificent terrain prior to the creation of the National Park Service, when U.S. Army cavalry troops kept order, and it is the military presence that provides the backdrop for the story.
The western was one of many made by the Selig Polyscope Company, the early motion picture company renowned for its action pictures. Based in Chicago, Selig sent director Francis Boggs west in 1908 to find authentic locations for westerns. Shooting films across the Southwest, Boggs made his way to Los Angeles, where he set up the city’s first movie studio. Boggs hired Hobart Bosworth, one of the first trained Shakespearean actors to crossover to the then-less-respected art of film; Bosworth appears to play the sergeant in this one-reeler, which he probably also directed.
Very little survives from Selig Polyscope, aside from Col. Selig’s papers in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After the murder of Boggs on the set in 1911, the company continued on with its popular Tom Mix westerns, the early serial The Adventures of Kathlyn, and animal pictures (the Selig menagerie became part of the Los Angeles Zoo). However, the company failed to make the transition to features and ended production in 1918.
This remarkable film—part western, part travelogue—survives through the single copy shared by the New Zealand Film Archive. The original nitrate distribution print was shrunken but complete. Thanks to our funding, the print was painstakingly copied to modern black-and-white safety negative film. This transfer was made from the negative at 16 frames per second and the tints added digitally to reproduce the colors on the original print.
For the exhibition print, color film will be cut in for the red- and amber-tinted intertitles so that the film can be enjoyed today as it was originally seen by audiences in 1910. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is supervising the preservation and will house the nitrate source material, preservation masters, and access copies so that they will remain available for years to come.
We also raised enough funds to restore The Better Man, a 1912 film produced by the Vitagraph Company of America. It’s another western in which a Mexican-American outlaw proves himself the better man. The stills look intriguing.
The newly recovered films will be preserved over the next three years and accessed through the five major American silent film archives: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which are collaborating with the NFPF on this project. Copies of the complete films will also be publicly available in New Zealand and viewable on the NFPF web site.
We extend many thanks to Jamie Lean, Division Director, the New Zealand Film Archive/Ngā Kaitiaki O Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua, who said, “Hundreds of American motion pictures from the silent era exist in archives outside the United States. We hope that our example will encourage other international partners who have safeguarded ‘lost’ American films for decades to share their long-unseen treasures with the world community.”
Clips of The Sergeant are up on the NFPF website, and you can take a look at a list of some of the other films returning from their long hiatus here. You can also kick in some more money for the rest of the films that need preserving (not to mention shipping: Each reel has to be sent using precautions for hazardous materials!). As Gareth over at the Siren’s place said, “I’ve almost never had a sense of such concrete value coming from a donation.” Amen.
When films were born, the inventiveness of the many, many film production companies that sprung up all over the world boggles the mind. In Berlin alone, in addition to the state-sponsored studio, there were nearly 300 independent film producers jostling for a place in front of a public eager to consume this new form of entertainment. Among them was a well-off fellow named Louis Hagen, who bought literal tons of film stock at a low price believing that his investment, a hedge against rising inflation, would grow exponentially as the demand for movies continued to grow. Lotte Reiniger, a gifted silhouette artist who ran in avant-garde art circles in Berlin, taught art to Hagen’s children and benefited from his largesse by being given film stock and a place in his attic to film what became The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving, feature-length animated film.
Reiniger apparently could create intricate silhouettes out of paper in nothing flat, and this ability gave her the confidence to create an entire Arabian Nights world, inspired by the fantasy novels she loved to read, using paper characters that had up to 50 hinged components. She and her small crew, including Carl Koch, her cinematographer and husband, bent for hours in the cramped attic, exposing 300,000 frames of stop action with the fragile and easily disturbed silhouettes and sets. Filming and editing took three years, and at first, no one would book the film. It took many years to earn back its investment, but there was no doubt that it eventually would when the standing-room-only audience for the first screening left the theatre dumbstruck at the marvel they had just seen. Some 84 years later, I and the hubby joined their ranks after we were privileged to attend a live-music screening of this important and awe-inspiring film at the Portage Theater, a surviving movie palace on Chicago’s Northwest Side that has done more than its part to keep vintage films alive and on display.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed tells interrelated stories, though they are mainly centered on Prince Achmed. He, his sister Princess Dinarzade, and their father The Caliph of Persia, hold a great reception on the palace grounds at which visiting dignitaries pay tribute with fine gifts. The finest of them all is a horse that can fly, offered by the scheming African Sorcerer. The Caliph offers bags of gold to buy the horse, but the Sorcerer will only accept Princess Dinarzade as his wife in exchange. When Achmed runs to her side to defend her, the Sorcerer has him mount the horse and sends him up in the air—without telling him how to return to Earth. The Sorcerer is imprisoned, but Achmed is set free to have the adventures he always dreamed of.
Achmed’s ascent is beautifully shot, with dark clouds obscuring his form as he rises higher and higher, then snow to reflect the cold outer atmosphere, and finally a blanket of stars. He discovers how to descend only after he has traveled far from his home—as the Sorcerer intended—and lands on the island of Wak Wak, home to spirits, including their beautiful ruler Pari Banu. They make him a warm welcome and fight for his attention in a scene of comic bawdiness, but once he sees their queen, he will have no other.
Interestingly, Achmed becomes a Peeping Tom when Pari Banu and her attendants fly with the aid of their bird-shaped cloaks to a pond where he is hiding and strip nude to bathe. Achmed is one of the few characters who has eyes, and they very expressively suggest his lust; the nude figures of the women even have nipples. It’s actually quite an erotic scene, and one that ends in outrage when Achmed steals Pari Banu’s cloak and forces her to leave with him on his flying horse.
The pair ends up in China, and Pari Banu must be rescued from being married off to the Emperor’s Fool. Achmed and Pari Banu meet the Witch of the Fiery Mountains. We marvel along with them as fire explodes from the mountain scenery, and the witch becomes their ally against her sworn enemy, the African Sorcerer. But the spirits return to recapture Pari Banu and bring her back to Wak Wak, where they intend to punish her for agreeing to leave them because she has fallen for Achmed. At this point, the story of Aladdin intrudes, as only the one who possesses the lamp may enter the spirits’ lair. We learn how he found the lamp and won Princess Dinarzade by created a palace and riches for her, but how the Sorcerer then stole the lamp, the palace, and the Princess in one fell swoop. An epic battle between Achmed, Aladdin, the Mountain Witch, and the Sorcerer ensues that’s really quite thrilling, and soon all is made right again.
The silhouettes themselves and the multiplane settings in which they interact are highly detailed and absolutely beautiful. For example, elaborate star-decorated robes, amazing in their cut-out detail, clothe Pari Banu and Princess Dinarzade, and set pieces such as the stolen palace floating on a cloud back to Persia have mystery and wonder written all over them. But I was most impressed by the amount of personality Reiniger was able to infuse through posture and natural-looking actions. When Pari Banu and Achmed kiss, it looks more real than many of the Hollywood kisses I’ve seen in countless movies of the Golden Era. Her attention to detail, not only in the forms but also in the actions the characters take, is astonishing. For example, Achmed is fighting a hydra-like demon summoned by the Sorcerer. Every time he cuts off one of its heads, it grows back. The Mountain Witch comes to help him by cauterizing each neck that has lost its head, thereby preventing it from growing a new one. This attention to a small plot point shows more care than many of the CGI action films we see today. And the color tints, restored to this film in 1998, give a jewel-like brilliance to this fantastical tale.
Reinigier, we were told before the screening, was a product of Victorian-era thinking, and her silhouette art comes from that era. Yet she was embraced by the avant garde and created a work that looks startlingly modern even today. Perhaps not coincidentally, animator Nina Paley used hinged forms (though they were not animated via stop action) and shadow puppets in her film Sita Sings the Blues, another tale of the exotic Orient that many consider ground-breaking for another reason—it is under a Creative Commons license. These two women showed the future the way, and I, for one, am thrilled and grateful. l
There are a lot of legendary eyes in the history of film: the impossibly beautiful lines of Greta Garbo’s, the bedroom eyes that won Rudolph Valentino millions of adoring fans, the fathomless blue of Paul Newman’s, and Elizabeth Taylor’s musgravite eyes.
Chicago has only one set of famous movie eyes: the kohl-rimmed orbs of Theda Bara, the cinematic world’s first break-out femme fatale. Her eyes have been the symbol of the Chicago International Film Festival since its inception, looking back at the audiences that view the latest Ken Nordine CIFF trailer before each screening. The logo, in fact, is ubiquitous, appearing on programs, posters, street banners, and souvenir tee shirts. Would that we had as many frames of the rest of Theda Bara as we do of her eyes. Bara made 44 films, but only six have survived in full or in part, one of the lowest survival rates of any major star. Were it not for the fortunate survival of the film that launched her persona of The Vampire, A Fool There Was—with a crisp DVD transfer from the Killiam Collection print by Kino—we might never have truly understood what she meant to an entire generation of women, or why.
The turn of the 20th century was the vampire’s first crucible moment. Bram Stoker had just published his Dracula, the template for vampire films largely centered on a male vampire for most of the 20th century. Yet, it was a painting Philip Burne-Jones exhibited in 1897 that actually created a rage for female vampires. The painting, The Vampire, shows a rapacious woman in a flowing nightgown leaning over a handsome man sleeping in bed. The raw sexuality of the painting stirred the primal current running beneath Victorian propriety. A play about a vampirish woman called A Fool There Was hit the stage in 1909 and was adapted for the screen. Unknown actress Theodosia Goodman of Cincinnati—soon to be redubbed Theda Bara—was chosen to play The Vampire.
Burne-Jones’ painting inspired Rudyard Kipling to write a poem, “The Vampire,” that is recited episodically in title cards throughout the film:
A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care),
But the fool he called her his lady fair
(Even as you and I!)
Oh the years we waste and the tears we waste
And the work of our head and hand,
Belong to the woman who did not know
(And now we know that she never could know)
And did not understand.
A fool there was and his goods he spent
(Even as you and I!)
Honor and faith and a sure intent
But a fool must follow his natural bent
(And it wasn’t the least what the lady meant),
(Even as you and I!)
Oh the toil we lost and the spoil we lost
And the excellent things we planned,
Belong to the woman who didn’t know why
(And now we know she never knew why)
And did not understand.
The fool we stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside—
(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died—
(Even as you and I!)
And it isn’t the shame and it isn’t the blame
That stings like a white hot brand.
It’s coming to know that she never knew why
(Seeing at last she could never know why)
And never could understand.
The film illustrates this poem by presenting us with the downfall of one John Schuyler (Edward José), a prominent diplomat shown at the beginning of the film literally enjoying the dawn of a new day with his good wife Kate (Mabel Frenyear) and young daughter (Runa Hodges). Their paths cross briefly with The Vampire (Bara) and her current amour, Reginal Parmalee (Victor Benoit), whom she has just about used up. A fleeting glance passes between John and The Vampire. When we see the sun set on the day, a title card tells us it is also the end of happiness. Reading in the paper that John is about to set sail for Europe on the “Gigantic,” The Vampire decides to sink her fangs into him, a task made all the easier because Kate will be tending to her injured sister (May Allison) instead of sailing with him.
The historical details in this film are fascinating. For example, in one scene, Kate is seen being driven through the streets to John, automobiles intermingling with horse-drawn vehicles. In another, The Vampire begins her seduction by arranging to have John’s deck chair positioned next to hers. Yes, the deck chairs actually had name tags on them, something I did not know before seeing this film. When she flirts with him on deck, she drops a flower that he is obliged to retrieve for her. As he bends down, she raises her skirt just enough for him to see her ankle!
Despite this outward timidity, the film reeks of sex. John, having abandoned his work and family to live with The Vampire in Italy, considers returning. Powell juxtaposes scenes of John’s daughter being tucked into bed after saying her prayers with The Vampire, her long hair reminiscent of the ubiquitous long hair of ghost women in Japanese horror films, sliding down John’s body to lay prone at his feet, her whole body beckoning him to pounce. The longer their affair continues—he returns with her to New York and moves her into his townhouse with him—the more dissipated he becomes. He drinks heavily, his eyes become as kohl-black as hers, and his form becomes stooped and feeble; he really seems to be losing his life essence to her as though she were draining his blood like a proper vampire. Men are powerless to resist her, even when they receive warnings, as Parmalee did from a beggar whom The Vampire had ruined financially, or when offered the comforting arms of wife and child.
The wanton cruelty of The Vampire, shown in the very first image of her picking up two roses and laughingly crushing one blossom in her hand, must have thrilled the Victorian-trained women who first saw it. To be so bad, so sexual, so assertive and domineering over men must have seemed like a breath of fresh air to these disenfranchised, proper ladies. We are meant to sympathize, of course, with the destroyed family and heed the message that Kate readily consented to when contemplating divorce, “Stick, Kate, stick.” But for a whole generation of women confined to domesticity, The Vampire’s parties, lavish wardrobe, and power over men proved irresistible as well. Bara became a star overnight, fetishized by women who wanted to wear what she wore, say what she said, and do what she did. Her run of fame lasted 10 years, until a more modern version of the emancipated woman—the flapper—supplanted the vamp.
Although the vamp seems hopelessly outdated, young women seem to have retreated from the sexual hunger Bara so effectively portrayed. Although clothing styles seem to be hooker-lite these days, the most popular vampire myth for girls today is Twilight, with its utterly chaste and good heroine and her chivalrous vampire lover. Women are consumed, not consuming, on the big screen. Yet, the vamp endures. Turn on a daytime soap opera and feast your eyes on the scheming females through which today’s domestic women fantasize a more exciting, free life.
King Vidor deserves to be held high in the pantheon of American directors, and yet he’s never quite gained the stature he deserved in comparison with the likes of Ford, Hawks, and Wyler. Perhaps this is because his best work was more intermittent and mainly done as a young man, during the silent era. He spent much of the late 1940s and ’50s taking shoddy work for hire, ending his feature film career with his uneven adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1956) and the truly awful Solomon and Sheba (1959).
The colossal project that was The Big Parade reputedly sprang from Vidor and his desire to create movies with a longer life span than the almost instantly disposable general cinema product. His idea was shepherded to realisation by Irving Thalberg at a time when films about the Great War were largely considered box office poison. The risk paid off: The Big Parade was an event movies of the 1920s, and is still officially recorded as the highest grossing silent film ever made, making more than $22 million in its worldwide release, a colossal sum for the time. The Big Parade holds up mightily, obviously superior in terms of cinematic construction and dexterity of expression, and a testament to silent-era Hollywood’s sweeping force and openness to innovation in style and story. The film could well have helped invent the basic structure of the modern war movie, and tonal disparities aside, echoes can be seen even in a film like Full Metal Jacket (1987), particularly in the finale in which a wounded soldiers’ buddies are driven to irrational actions in the face of an unseen threat.
Vidor’s inventive filmmaking is evident from the get-go, depicting various strata of American life called to action by cutting between construction riveter Slim (Karl Dane), bartender Bull O’Brien (Tom O’Brien), and rich layabout James Apperson (John Gilbert) at the fateful moment the U.S. declared war, announced by hooting sirens and marching revellers. Even Gilbert falls for the hypnotic spell of patriotism, which, as a title card puts it, can awaken in a heart in which it has never stirred, and joins several of his pals in the march to the recruiting office. Gilbert returns home to his plutocrat father (Hobart Bosworth), loving mother (Claire McDowell), and ludicrous brother Harry (Robert Ober). Mr. Apperson is proud of Harry, who’s putting his shoulder to the wheel by organising double shifts at their factory, and demands of his other shiftless son that he either pledge some effort to the war or get out of his house. Jim sarcastically asks if he can stay the night before clearing out. But his girlfriend Justyn (Claire Adams) excitedly lets slip the news, which he wants to keep from his worried mother, that he’s already joined up. In basic training, he’s thrust into a unit that includes Slim and Bull, and learns the ropes of soldiering alongside them.
The first half of The Big Parade is generally played as a romantic comedy laced with serviceman humour, predicting the likes of MASH in the sardonic contrast of dutiful patriotism and filthy reality. It observes the tawdry and amusing proliferation of petty irritants, deprivations, and perils of military service, and the awakened native guile of the khaki-clad wayfarers in coping with the alienation of distance, language, and an unfamiliar and dangerous situation. Thalberg’s original hope had been to film What Price Glory?, the hit Broadway comedy-drama by Maxwell Anderson and military veteran Laurence Stallings, but the rights to that had already been purchased. Thalberg had Stallings write a new scenario for The Big Parade that has a strong resemblance to Glory. Vidor brilliantly employs Irving Berlin’s sarcastic anthem “You’re in the Army Now” as a motif for tying the early segments together; it becomes an integral part of building their esprit de corps as the recruits sing it when they march, and then its lyrics are quoted repeatedly as the company contends with a filthy bivouac in France that lacks showers and other conveniences.
Jim soon devises a way to wash—converting an empty wine barrel into a showerhead suspended in a treetop, with the unexpected result of drawing mademoiselle Melisande (Renée Adorée), whom Apperson ran into when transporting the barrel, to entertain herself with the sight of their naked backsides. Soon, Jim’s efforts to strike up a relationship with Melisande—assigning himself to “skirt detail” as the title cards put it—draw him into her farming family’s circle of friends who gather to read letters from relations at the front. In a comic piece, Slim and Bull raid the wine cellar while Jim sits with Melisande and her friends, causing a ruckus that nearly gets Jim arrested by some MPs. Recognising that they got him into trouble they save his hide been starting an even bigger ruckus. Such hijinks could have been buffoonish if not for the intricately observed, nuanced behaviour that is one of the great pleasures of silent films, building hilarious bits of business: for example, Jim’s efforts to break apart a rock-hard cake Justyn has sent him so he can share it with his fellows or introducing Melisande to the pleasures of chewing gum.
Moreover, The Big Parade is cunningly structured. Except for the bookend scenes stateside, the bulk of the film takes place in the course of two or three days, and the comedy and romance gives way soon enough to the grimmer tasks at hand. The film was reportedly expanded after test audiences responded enthusiastically to its fresh, romantic, antiheroic style, but no seams are apparent. The sequence in which the troops are ordered to the front, setting off a storm of frantic activity in the eye of which Jim and Melisande make their despairing goodbyes, was so instantaneously iconic that Vidor lampooned it four years later in his comedy Show People. It’s both vintage Hollywood schmaltz and a startling piece of filmmaking, alive with motion and drama in the smallest details, leaving Melisande finally alone on a desolate road, the big parade having surely gone by. Jim, Bull, and Slim ride off amongst an armada of trucks and tanks to meet their baptism of fire, first in a sniper-riddled forest, and then in a crater-riddled wasteland.
The way the sequences build is all the more extraordinary for possessing both spectacle and gut-grabbing mystery and threat, in a vividly coherent vision of men in the midst of war. After the grandiose vision of the “big parade” itself, they march first into teeming, shadowy threat in the forest, and then into the midst of a colossal campaign, and finally, finish up lost, alone, isolated, surrounded by darkness, as if they’ve stepped off the end of the earth and ended up in hell. If Stendhal’s vision of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma has a clear cinematic counterpoint in a movie, it’s here. Pinned down by machine gunners, Slim, Bull, and Jim to draw lots to see who will go out and try to knock out one of the enemy emplacements. Slim “wins,” ventures out, and succeeds, but is riddled with bullets on his return and is left to die without a rescue attempt. Jim explodes in outrage when he and Bull are ordered to stay put, demanding “Who’s fighting this war, men or orders?” He goes to find Slim, and Bull pursues. Bull is quickly killed. Jim is wounded in the leg when he finds Slim, also already dead. Jim, flushed with hysteria and adrenalin, takes out another machine gun nest on his own, allowing the rest of the unit to spring from their foxholes and advance.
Jim awakens in hospital and hearing that Melisande’s farmhouse has been the centre of fighting, rises from his bed, sneaks out the window, dragging his crippled leg in search of her. But she’s already been shipped out with her family and other refugees, and all Jim accomplishes—revealed when he returns home—is having his leg amputated. This shocks his mother, and Vidor evokes the sprawl of her thoughts with a montage of her memories of him from infancy to manhood. This brilliant flourish underlines Vidor’s recurring fascination for cycles of mortality and internal struggles between transcendence and nihilism, essayed in works like The Crowd (1928) and Hallelujah! (1929). Vidor could also make a film as idealistic as The Citadel (1938) and as ornery as Beyond the Forest (1949) fit into this fascination, swinging from poles of mystically charged births to ignominious deaths.
In the end, Jim’ larger quandary at home is that he’s still in love with and haunted by Melisande. But his mother knows that Justyn has fallen in love with Harry, and soon enough Jim is free to return to France and track down Melisande, who is labouring in the fields.
The storyline is plainly stock, but The Big Parade retains force and vivacity for a great many reasons, not the least because of its uncluttered simplicity, eye-level humanism,likeable characters, and an unruly mix of then-fresh elements makes it more ambiguous in tone and meaning and less ponderously grave than the more strident All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). This contrast is acute in a scene very similar to the one in which All Quiet’s hero was stranded in a foxhole with a dying enemy soldier: where the later film goes all out to establish the common humanity, The Big Parade evokes the idea without declaration, and with a dark sense of the unimportance of that humanity in such a ferocious situation.
Gilbert, who had been a top matinee star already for several years but for whom this was surely the peak of his career, is a poised and restrained screen presence whose charisma is nonetheless effortless (although he does give into that worst habit of silent actors, waving his arms around in declarative fashion in his climactic foxhole speech). The fate of The Big Parade’s heroes reflects the connivance of classic Hollywood’s bosses, as MGM’s conniving executives went on to help wreck Gilbert’s career and cheat Vidor out of the small fortune that would have come his way—having as he did a percentage of the profits in his contract—by talking him into taking a smaller compensation. As Vidor himself put it, “I thus spared myself from becoming a millionaire instead of a struggling young director trying to do something interesting and better with a camera.” C’est la guerre. l
D. W. Griffith is a difficult filmmaker to approach. So vital to the history of cinema and so problematic in the shadows of his unforgivably racist The Birth of a Nation (1915), the irony of Griffith’s career was that he destroyed it in trying to answer the criticisms leveled at his greatest success. Intoxicated by the melodramatic swoon of Thomas Dixon’s KKK-propagandising source novel and dismayed by the forced realisation he had produced a work that offended many, Griffith was to take up the theme of prejudice and social conflict again and again: an opening title for Broken Blossoms suggests there is a warning in its tale of a cold-hearted brute that the most casual insults are essentially the same as physical assault. His sophistication in cinema accompanied an artistic sensibility solidly rooted in the sentimental codes of Victorian fiction. Broken Blossoms itself is built around the most discomforting and titillating of themes for audiences of the era—miscegenation—as a Chinese hero and an English waif are thrown together as a match more or less made in heaven.
For such a director, a triangular character drama set in a slum might have seemed a comedown from recreating and demolishing Babylon for the colossally ambitious Intolerance (1916), and yet Broken Blossoms became a landmark in the career of Griffith and its star, Lillian Gish. Initially met by producer Adolph Zukor with dismay, the film proved a huge hit that revived Griffith’s career, and it’s still a tremendously intense and provocative experience 90 years later. Griffith used his innate gifts to create a statement confirming less as more, constructing a compulsively exciting melodrama and a cultural parable out of the most minimal elements.
Griffith, though inevitably wary and teasing in portraying interracial eroticism, isn’t subtle about reconfiguring audience sympathies. Its hero, Cheng Huan, referred to as The Yellow Man (Richard Barthelmess), is a conscientious, idealistic missionary, and its villain, “Battling” Burrows (Donald Crisp), is a vicious, depraved icon of Anglo-Saxon brutality. In between them is Lillian Gish’s victimised heroine Lucy, the epitome of the endangered, fragile feminine archetype in the Victorian pantheon. Three stock figures, but also three figures of nuanced realisation play in a work that seriously interrogates the nature of humankind as both impossibly aspiring and irrevocably bestial.
The opening scenes, set in a Chinese treaty port, establish the story and the theme of a clash of cultures and peaceful and warlike impulses. Here are the clearly organised and repeated images of yearning and transcendence: the sight of a ship steaming out of Cheng’s home port, and the act of a monk ringing a temple bell. Cheng Huan’s ambition, amusingly enough, is to take the Buddhist teachings of tranquility and peacefulness to the “barbarous Anglo-Saxons, sons of toil and strife.” His religious instructor encourages his desire and implores that he remember his creed out in the world. Cheng’s first encounter with rough Western ways happens before he even gets on the boat: a gang of American sailors who are brawling playfully. Mistaking this for serious conflict, Cheng Huan intervenes and offers a quote that evokes the common ideals of Buddhism and Christianity in a variation on “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Cheng Huan is immediately knocked over as the scrap continues, literally and metaphorically turning his perspective upside-down.
Several years later, Cheng’s fortunes have reduced his to a dispirited, opium-addicted “Chink store-keeper” in Limehouse. The only bright spot in his day is the sight of Lucy, who drifts aimlessly around the docks and alleys and delights at the dolls in his store, before returning home to face the relentlessly abusive Burrows, a professional boxer. Harried by his manager for his overindulgence in drink and women before a return bout against the Limehouse Tiger, Burrows is in an especially vicious mood. When he accidentally knocks a frying pan Lucy is holding to serve him supper and spills hot fat on his hand, he delivers to her a terrible beating, before departing for his training residence across the river. The physically shattered girl stumbles through the streets to Cheng Huan’s shop and collapses on the floor.
There are still very few commercial films that depict domestic violence with such unvarnished, unforgiving ferocity. “The manager’s complaint about drink and women puts Battling in a rage – he cannot take his temper out on him – he saves it for a weaker object,” a title-card puts it, explaining Burrows’ taunting of his daughter, who is so habitually unhappy she can only “smile” by pushing the corners of her mouth up with her fingers. The film is defined rhythmically by the build-up to Burrows’ two great explosions. The first, after the fat-spilling, sees father herd daughter with a whip in hand, Lucy trying to dissuade him by cowering and cleaning off his boots. She senses that her abuse can only have one end and begs her father to stop, not for her own sake, but because he’ll be hung for murder eventually. The second outburst comes, of course, after Burrows removes Lucy from Cheng Huan’s shop. Lucy, knowing what’s coming, locks herself in the cupboard, with ever-increasing terror as her father hacks at the door in a sequence that anticipates just about every horror movie ever made.
It’s Griffith’s technique that makes Broken Blossoms more than a tawdry melodrama, though his success is as manifest in the sense of realistic environment and attentiveness to the performances of Gish and Barthelmess as it is in the montage and structural showiness. Once the action shifts to London, Griffith puts us into the headspace of his three protagonists with associative flashbacks. Yellow Man, Lucy, and Burrows are introduced in their respective situations, and Griffith bends the narrative arc back to illustrate their lives: Cheng Huan reflecting on the world of vice and opium dens he’s trapped in; Burrows on his most recent pulverisation of an opponent; and Lucy on her alternatives, from the housewife with a filthy household who advises her, “Whatever you do, dearie, don’t get married,” to being “Warned as strongly by the ladies of the street against their profession.” Cheng Huan has arrived “where the Orient squats at the portals of the West,” as an intertitle puts it, scratching out a living and expending it in an opium den where the refuse of many nations congregate and, it’s hinted, copulate. “Fifteen years before one of Battler’s girls thrust into his arms a bundle of white rags – So Lucy came to Limehouse” explicates Burrows’ contempt for his daughter and her own desperate clinging to a scrap of velvet that is her mother’s only inheritance.
Although Griffith didn’t leave the backlot, there’s a documentary feel to the observation of Chinese musicians and the seamy environment of Limehouse. Griffith keeps his narrative moving, and its elements constantly interrelate structurally, such as the scene in which Burrows’s second bout with Tiger alternates with Cheng resisting his urge to make love to Lucy. Perhaps the most vital manifestation of his cinematic vision when the camera takes Lucy’s point of view in two crucial, late sequences that posit the two men who battle for her in likeness. Cheng Huan, almost overcome by his desire for Lucy in kissing her, and her father in his wrathful rage, are both photographed in looming, first-person ultra-close-up, each man rendered threatening and alien. The difference is in the resolution. Cheng restrains himself, and the title-card assures us that his love remained “a pure and holy thing.” Burrows has no such restraint. The film’s bitterness is remarkable, though leavened by an often corny, but heartfelt poeticised idealisation, in which Cheng renames Lucy with the “love-name” of White Blossom.
The narrative’s ironies extend from an opening in China where the everyday activities of the local families and promenaders are disturbed by foreigners, to Cheng’s encounter at his Limehouse shop with two friendly Christian ministers. One tells him that “My brother leaves for China tomorrow to convert the heathen.” The Yellow Man, suppressing a wry smile, offers, “I – I wish him luck,” before they give him a book on Hell, about which he already knows too much. Later, when Burrows discovers that Lucy is living with Cheng Huan, the card tells us, “Battling discovers his parental rights,” outraged at the notion of his daughter “with a dirty Chink.” The film becomes an almost cosmically realised battle of the sacred and profane, beyond the reach of the tawdry interracial dramas Sessue Hayakawa was starring in at the time. Cheng’s capacity to retain his humanism and defend Lucy’s femininity even when confronted with incredible degradation and temptation is the story’s great question; and even the peace-loving Cheng is finally driven to kill Burrows, if only in self-defence.
When Burrows’ sleazy mates discover his body and run to fetch a policeman, the bobby is discussing a story in the newspaper commenting on war news: “Better than last week – only 40,000 casualties.” It’s the only confirmation that the film is set during World War I, a virtual throwaway touch, and yet it confirms the film as a broader study of the destructive capacity of humankind in general, in which the only bulwark is Cheng’s religious and romantic idealism. Griffiths even subverts his own clichés, the climax employing his already-famous cross-cutting techniques in a race to the rescue. He ratchets up the tension as Cheng, arming himself with a revolver, dashes to Lucy’s aid as Burrows breaks into the cupboard, but he gets there too late to save her from a fatal beating. Griffith proved that manipulative cinematic techniques could be used to make tragedy as thrilling as triumph, and could then be used in a fashion that’s critical and not merely involving.
Broken Blossoms is not without faults, chiefly in some pretty overripe title cards, the presence of Cheng’s Chinese foil Evil Eye (Edward Peil Sr.), who doesn’t contribute anything to the story other than some stock ethnic sleaze, and Crisp. Crisp would develop into one of the talkie era’s more restrained actors and is physically fine for the part, but his idea of telegraphing psychotic rage is to warp his mouth in odd shapes like a grade schooler trying to be scary. That said, he does offer up a splendidly insidious touch in his final rampage of holding Gish down and repeatedly tapping the stock of his whip on her forehead in dreadful prelude. Whilst, obviously, Cheng ought to have been played by an Asian actor, Barthelmess nonetheless is splendid as the Yellow Man, particularly in the early scenes, with his resigned smile and air of cynical equanimity. He even indulges in a bit of stoner comedy when Cheng still intoxicated with opium, returns to his shop and thinks that the prostrate Lucy is a hallucination. When he and Crisp finally confront each other over Gish’s dead body, the mutual, animalistic hatred fairly vibrates. And Gish herself is quite remarkable in her understatement, whether drifting through scenes in dour misery, contending with Cheng’s attentions with a gentle, almost amused distraction, or building terrified hysteria when her father’s rages approach. She had protested to Griffith that she was too old for the part, but you’d hardly imagine it.
Emil Jannings has the distinction of being the first Best Actor Oscar winner for his performance in the film under consideration here, The Last Command. It’s interesting that the Oscars set a precedent they would follow faithfully up to this day—honoring actors for previous performances. There is no question that Jannings would have garnered a Golden Boy for his moving performance in The Last Laugh had the awards existed in 1924. The Last Command is inferior in every way to that film, and Jannings’ performance as Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, cousin of unfortunate Czar Nicholas Romanov, while showing off the Swiss actor’s ability to gain an audience’s sympathy, is kind of a walkthrough in most respects.
The Last Command has a wraparound story in which the Grand Duke is a down-and-out immigrant working as an extra in Hollywood. The director of a Russian war epic, Lev Andreyev (William Powell), surrounded by assistants, is working his way down a stack of head shots. He’s not happy, even though his assistant director (Jack Raymond) says it contains every Russian in Hollywood.
Andreyev finds one headshot that seems to mesmerize him; he turns it over to read the actor’s particulars: “Claims to be the cousin of the Czar and the commander of the Russian Imperial Army. Little acting experience. Will work for $7.50 a day.” Andreyev tells his assistant to get the man in and fit him with a general’s uniform. When his landlady knocks on his door to tell him there’s a call for him, the Grand Duke opens his door tentatively and shuffles lethargically to the phone in the hall, his head shaking incessantly.
The cattle call in the morning is a frenzy of extras trying to get their costumes and props. The dazed Russian moves from window to window, gathering up his uniform, saber, boots, and hat. When he goes into the dressing room crowded with other extras, the man next to him tells him to stop shaking. “I can’t help it. I’ve had a great shock in my life.” Another sees a medal the Russian unwraps from among his personal items. “The Czar gave it to me,” he says. The extra snatches it and humiliates the old soldier by making him fetch it off the top of a bayonet. The Grand Duke escapes in memory to Russia and his glory days.
We’re taken to 1917, just before the Russian Revolution. The Grand Duke, confident and resplendent in his fur-trimmed coat, is inspecting his troops, who are ill-supplied to fight battles on every front. The Czar, however, thinks war is a board game. He makes demands that require the Grand Duke to pull divisions from the already outmanned front lines just so that he can inspect them. “This is the kind of thing that feeds the revolutionists.” Two such suspected revolutionists, Lev Andreyev and Natalie Dabrova (Evelyn Brent), have been rousted from their flat and brought in to headquarters. The Grand Duke interrogates them both, striking Andreyev across the face with a riding crop and taking Dabrova as his “guest” when the command must move to different quarters.
Dabrova behaves like a glamorous ornament, but plots the Grand Duke’s murder. She invites him up for coffee in her room, but secrets a pistol she has stashed among her belongings under a pillow. He sees it, but does nothing to stop her. She asks him about his devotion to Russia, and he says he would give his life for his country. Her resolve wavers. When he gets up to get her a cigarette, she pulls out the gun but, shaking, collapses into tears. She admits she loves him. Naturally, love cannot conquer the Russian Revolution. Revolutionaries capture the Grand Duke’s train and execute his entourage in a mob frenzy. Dabrova sacrifices herself to help ensure the Grand Duke’s escape from Russia. He leaps from the train and watches as a trestle the train passes over collapses into a frozen river below. His head shake starts from that moment. The memory having reached its climax, we return to Hollywood and the reunion of the Grand Duke and Andreyev on set.
The script, written by von Sternberg but credited to someone else, is a very silly affair. The Ebertfest audience laughed out loud at the purple prose of love he injected into it, and also at the intentional and witty jokes. When the Grand Duke’s valet (Michael Visaroff) is caught for a second time trying on the Grand Duke’s great coat and smoking his cigarettes, the general exclaims, “If you catch him doing it again, remove the coat and shoot the contents.” The seriousness of the backstory is undermined by the improbabilities required by Hollywood at the time. For example, although Dabrova is taken straight from interrogation, she seemingly has a huge, chic wardrobe at the ready. Perhaps the Grand Duke bought it or had it from his previous mistress, but where did the gun come from? It’s the usual illogic of the early costume drama in action.
An escape of Andreyev and the other prisoners was well staged and exciting, as was the taking of the Grand Duke’s train. The mob frenzy was believable, but Jannings’ endless mugging at them started to try my patience. Powell was excellent as a committed revolutionist, as was Brent. The final scene of the film is both melodramatic in a bad way and undercut by a callous joke. The scene could have worked as a reconciliation between the Grand Duke and Andreyev, who must have seen the failure of the revolution (why else would he have left Russia?) with 10 years’ hindsight and felt more sympathy for the general’s urgings not to believe the traitors to Russia. Von Sternberg despised working with Jannings, so I can imagine he may have deliberately ruined the actor’s last impression.
The Alloy Orchestra’s score worked well in the grander moments of the film, but was too pompous-sounding for the many light moments, particularly in the first act. I’ve had this complaint with them before, that their scores are not particularly sensitive to mood changes. The print of the film was spectacular, though it seemed to have been synched at the wrong speed.
As a silent-film buff, I am perhaps harder on this film than the average filmgoer would be. It’s perfectly enjoyable. Just don’t expect too much of it.
Film interpretations of works by Nobel Laureates in Literature
Directors: Maurice Tourneur/George Cukor
Nobel Laureate: Maurice Maeterlinck
By Marilyn Ferdinand
In 1911, three years after he wrote and premiered his fairytale play The Blue Bird, Count Maurice Maeterlinck of Ghent, Belgium, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee said in making its award, “In appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers’ own feelings and stimulate their imaginations.”
The Blue Bird seems to be the stuff that inspires affection from generation to generation. It has been a movie at least five times over (though surprisingly not by German-occupied France in during World War II, which would seem to be a natural fit for the French-language fairy tale)—two silent versions, a 1940 version starring Shirley Temple, an animated telling in 1970, and finally, in 1976, the first U.S.-Soviet film collaboration, with Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, and Ava Gardner acting alongside dancers of the Kirov Ballet. I doubt we’ll ever see another retelling. Although the story tracks fairly closely to L. Frank Baum’s 1900 classic The Wizard of Oz—animals and inanimate objects that can talk accompanying children on a quest through various lands of enchantment, a mistaken apprehension of all witches/fairies as being ugly, true happiness found right at home among one’s loved ones—The Blue Bird has seen little but failure at the box office. What is it about this fairy tale that fails to appeal, and do the two film versions under consideration here bear the blame for their individual failures?
The play
Maeterlinck’s play tells of a brother and sister, Tyltyl and Myltyl, who live humbly with their woodcutter father and hard-working mother, Mr. and Mrs. Tyl, their dog Tylo and their cat Tylette. One night the children observe a great celebration taking place on the other side of the woods, at a rich family’s home. When they fall asleep, they share a dream in which the Fairy Berylune, who resembles their neighbor whose daughter is sick, sends them on a quest for a blue bird that will bring happiness and ultimate power and knowledge to all humanity.
The fairy gives Tyltyle a hat with a diamond on it. When he turns the diamond, he can bring forth or dismiss the spirits of animals, plants, and things. His diamond brings forth the souls of Tylo, Tylette, Sugar, Fire, Water, Bread, Milk, and most importantly, Light. These beings will accompany the children on their quest. They will die, however, when the blue bird is found and returned to the fairy. Tylette determines to spot the children one way or another, even if it means harm will come to them. Tylo considers Tyltyl and Myltyl gods who he will protect to the end.
The searchers make several stops: the Land of Memory, where the children see their Granny Tyl and Gaffer Tyl and numerous dead siblings; the castle of Night, where Tyltyl bravely enters the many chambers the hold fearsome beings of darkness (ghosts, sicknesses, war, shadows and terrors, and finally, mysteries); the forest where the trees and wild and barnyard animals determine to kill Tyltyl to stop Man from conquering them forever. They go to the Palace of Happiness next to search for the blue bird. They encounter the Luxuries—the Luxury of Knowing Nothing and the Luxury of Understanding Nothing, the Luxury of Being Rich, the Luxury of Eating When You Are Not Hungry and the Luxury of Drinking When You Are Not Thirsty.
The troupe visits the Palace of Happiness next to search for the blue bird. They encounter the Luxuries—the Luxury of Knowing Nothing and the Luxury of Understanding Nothing, the Luxury of Being Rich, the Luxury of Eating When You Are Not Hungry and the Luxury of Drinking When You Are Not Thirsty. The Luxuries try seduce the group to stay with them, but Tyltyl turns the diamond, and the troupe ends up in the Cave of Miseries, where they do not linger, and pass into the Hall of Joys. Here the children learn of all the happinesses on earth—the Happiness of Being Well, the Happiness of Pure Air, the Happiness of Blue Sky, and most important of all, the Happiness of Maternal Love.
They pass through the Graveyard and enter the Kingdom of the Future, where the children waiting to be born work on the gifts they must take with them into the world—from the ability to achieve pure joy to leading a united solar system. The children meet their brother, who is to be born the following year and who will die quickly of the diseases he brings with him to the world.
At last, the children bid farewell to their companions, watching them fall silent again and facing fairy Berylune to tell her they failed to find the blue bird. At that moment, they see how beautiful their own home is. Of course, their parents are dumbfounded at their actions and their story about all the places they visited. Suddenly Tyltyl and Myltyl realize that their pet turtle dove is blue. Overjoyed, they run with it to the sick girl to help her feel better. She pets the bird, but it escapes. Tyltyl tells her, “Never mind…don’t cry…I will catch him again.”
The films
Each film, with some adjustments, is surprisingly faithful to the source material. With a six-act play, some shortening was called for. The silent film omits the forest scene and moves the Land of Memory to just before the children return home. The 1976 film shortens the Land of Happiness to include only Maternal Love’s encounter with her children and omits the beasts from the forest scene.
Each version uses a great deal of the dialogue Maeterlinck wrote, preserving his lessons about the state of the world and the important things in life. In Tourneur’s film, the ghosts in the castle of Night shrivel a bit. Night (Lyn Donelson) says, “(My ghosts) have felt bored in there, every since people Man ceased to take them seriously.” In Cukor’s film, the ghosts are actually frightened by the children. Costuming is different as well, with the silent ghosts little more than sheets and the more contemporary ghosts depicting famous specters, such as the Headless Horseman.
Nonetheless, despite its sometimes stagebound scenes and more rudimentary sets and costumes, Maurice Tourneur’s The Blue Bird is much more highly regarded that the star-studding, international creation of George Cukor. I’ll hazard a few guesses why.
Perhaps most importantly, the children who play Tyltyl and Myltyl in the silent version, Robin Macdougall and Tula Belle, are much more natural and realistic as country rustics than the cloying Todd Lookinland and Patsy Kensit. A good example is one scene in which the children bring back a dozen blue birds they’ve caught in the castle of Night, only to see them die when exposed to light. Macdougall and Belle are perplexed and saddened that they got fooled into catching blue birds that were not the authentic blue bird of happiness. In Cukor’s production, these avian deaths are an excuse to rustle up a song as his camera positively oozes over the crying faces of Lookinland and Kensit. Plus, I was distracted that the latter pair spoke with American and British accents, respectively.
The music is another important difference between these films. The Tourneur version features a brilliant new score by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra that is one of the best silent film scores I’ve ever heard, bringing drama, humor, and mystery in just the right amounts, and featuring sound effects that add to the pleasure of viewing the film. Irwin Kostal, a film scorer for Disney, turns in a banal, even laughable orchestration for the few songs that made the final cut. His Russian collaborator, composer Andrei Petrov, was singularly uninspired in creating songs for this film. His ballet for the genuine Blue Bird as beautifully danced by Nadezhda Pavlova and other members of the Kirov was the lone musical highlight.
Of course, another major difference is the cavalcade of Hollywood legends that lend their talents to Mr. Cukor’s effort. Elizabeth Taylor plays several roles (Mrs. Tyl, Fairy Berylune, Light, and Maternal Love). It has become fashionable to diss Taylor’s work of the 1970s as unbearable kitsch, but I think she does a good job in this children’s film. Her mother Tyl is a bit too harsh and wooden at first, but she is, well, a luminous Light in whose care I would happily put my trust if I were Myltyl or Tyltyl. Jane Fonda as Night plays her part as though she’s always aware that she’s in a children’s film; a more natural, less wicked witch, approach would have served the film better. Cicely Tyson as Tylette is completely wasted in a highly truncated role.
There is no single star better in this film than Ava Gardner as Luxury. She is dressed beautifully in red and moves among the circus performers, gluttons, idlers, and narcissists with ironic self-indulgence. In an exchange written for the film, Tyltyl asks her which Luxury she is. Her saucy, perfect answer is, “You’ll understand more about that when you’re older.” Cukor’s hand is most evident in bringing this fun performance out of Gardner. Indeed, the entire Luxuries scene is extravagantly entertaining.
The Tourneur film, with its color tints and some effective special effects, really has the air of enchantment about it. (I’m told by a friend who saw it at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival a few years ago that it’s absolutely stunning on the big screen.) For example, in a close-up of the kitchen hearth from which Fire (S. E. Potapovitch) emerges, dancing flames are superimposed upon a writhing figure as the body of a man slowly comes into focus. It’s a great effect. Tom Corless as Tylette is absolutely wonderful, mimicking feline movements and habits with great skill and charm. It’s a shame his character is made out to be so nasty, but it certainly shows that actors have more fun playing characters that are bad rather than virtuous.
The audience reception
I was reasonably engaged with both of these films, noting how they departed from the play, yet finding those choices reasonable. I was taken by individual lines in the play that found their way to the screen. For example, in the castle of Night, only War still is a potent threat to humanity. The other spirits of the night no longer hold power. “(My ghosts) have felt bored in there, every since people Man ceased to take them seriously,” says Night. Or when Maeterlinck shows how memory keeps loved ones alive when Granny Tyl says, “We are always here, waiting for a visit from those who are alive. They come so seldom!” and Gaffer Tyl says, “Yes, we get plenty of sleep, while waiting for a thought of the Living to come and wake us. … Ah, it is good to sleep when life is done. . . . But it is pleasant also to wake up from time to time. . . .” Or when he extols the virtue of seeing beneath the surface of life, when Maternal Love says of her brilliant dress, which Tyltyl has never seen his mother wear, “No, no, I always wear it, but people do not see it, because people see nothing when their eyes are closed. . . . All mothers are rich when they love their children. . . . There are no poor mothers, no ugly ones, no old ones.”
So why has this story faded, why was the box office so quiet? The story is quite wide-ranging and a bit confusing, so that may be one problem. However, I think Maeterlinck’s philosophy of static drama, a kissing cousin to Berthold Brecht’s epic form, might be the culprit. Feeling that human beings are controlled and propelled by fate (brought out tidily in the Land of the Future episode), he preferred unemotional line readings. Certainly, the directors of these two films did not adhere to this standard, but the more global concerns of Maeterlinck meant he used his scripts as somewhat preachy bully pulpits. It seems odd that a writer who believed in fate would attempt to school people on the correct way to treat each other and the environment.
I consider these two films to be fine entertainments for children, and if you can get beyond the wretched music of the Cukor version, ones that parents might want to sit in on.
Marion Davies means different things to different people. To those unfamiliar with silent films, which comprise the bulk of her filmography, she may mean nothing at all. To others, she is the mistress of newspaper mogul William Randolph Heart and the model for no-talent singer Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane. Finally, to those who love silents, she is one of the silver screen’s first and best comic actresses.
Davies, born Marion Douras, began her career in show business on stage, where she made a great success in a variety of comedies, musicals, and as a chorine in The Ziegfeld Follies. She made her first film in 1917 and three more in 1918, two with backing from Hearst. She worked steady and successfully, promoted prominently by the Hearst newspaper chain. By 1928, she was a major star able to secure the services of the best talents available. MGM’s Show People was produced by “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, directed by the great King Vidor, and features cameos and short scenes by such big stars as John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin playing themselves—a true insider look at Hollywood. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that this film is lit from within by the comic gifts and down-to-earth charm of its star Marion Davies.
Show People, a quintessential movie about the movies, tells the story of Peggy Pepper (Davies) a southern belle from Savannah, Georgia, driven cross-country by her daddy, General Marmaduke Oldfish Pepper (Dell Henderson), to become a big star in Hollywood. Bumping along the uneven roads in their open-top jalopy, the General and Peggy, looking all the world like Col. Sanders and Little Bo Peep, finally find their groove in the streetcar rails that run past the major film studios of the day—Fox, First National, Universal. The Peppers pull up at the gate of Comet Studios, where Peggy tells the guard that she wants to speak to the president. “What about?” he asks. “I want to be in the movies!” “Casting office,” he replies, pointing to his left.
Full of enthusiasm, Peggy and the General walk past the other wannabes to the receptionist’s window. “I want to be in the movies,” she declares. The receptionist calls one of the casting directors (Tenen Holtz) over. “Can you act?” Oh yes, the Peppers assure him, and the General hands Peggy his handkerchief. She raises it in front of her face. When her father calls out an emotion, “Sad…Angry…Yearning,” Peggy lowers the scarf to reveal her interpretation of each feeling. They’re laughingly bad. Peggy is so sincere, however, the assistant gives her a card to fill out.
Weeks go by, and Peggy’s big break still hasn’t come. She’s not even getting extra work. At the studio canteen, she and the General try to make their 20 cents go as far as possible. They sit down near a pleasant young man who recognizes a starving artist when he sees one. He introduces himself as Billy Boone (William Haines), a working actor at the studio. Peggy says she has hopes of becoming a dramatic actress. Billy shares his meal with them. Overjoyed, the Peppers befriend Billy. He later delivers on his promise to get Peggy work on one of his pictures.
Peggy’s first day on the job has her weaving her way through various sets to find the one where she belongs. She ruins a take by tiptoeing across a set as a torrid love scene ensues in the foreground, and narrowly escapes a drenching as bathing beauties splash in a pool. Finally, she locates Billy, who introduces her to the director (Harry Gribbon). He gives her her direction—come through the door and look surprised. She goes to the other side of the door as the other actors practice various pratfalls, with one of them getting knocked to the ground several times. Finally, the director calls action and cues Peggy to come in. When she steps through the door, she is hit from across the set with a stream of seltzer water. Her surprise is genuine, as her gape-mouthed drenching has the cast and crew in stitches. Peggy, however, is humiliated and runs off in tears. She wails to Billy that she wants to be a dramatic actress. He tells her everyone has to pay their dues and encourages her to be a trouper and go through with the film. Summoning all her strength, she prepares to come through the door again for some close-ups of her “big moment.”
When the film premieres, Billy takes Peggy to see it. She watches the audience laugh hysterically, and gains a bit of pleasure from it, even as she winces painfully to see herself hit with pies and being chased by Keystone Kops. After the screening, as Billy and Peggy stand in the vestibule of the theatre, a producer and a little fellow named Charlie Chaplin converse. “She’s really got something,” the producer exclaims. Chaplin spies her and Billy, and goes over to them. He pulls out his autograph book and asks them to sign: “I’m just crazy about signatures!” Peggy is annoyed by the intrusion, but Billy gladly signs and hands the book back. “Who is that little fellow?” Peggy asks as she watches him get into a limo. “Charlie Chaplin!” Billy exclaims. Peggy faints into his arms.
Peggy continues to churn out comedy shorts, but eventually the call comes from High Arts Studio. She and Billy enter the studio grounds. A car pulls up, and a man and woman get out. “Who is that?” she asks Billy. “Marion Davies,” he answers, and Davies as herself looks around. In an endearing bit of self-deprecation, Peggy shows that she doesn’t think Davies is all that much. The pair forgets about Davies, and goes to the office. Trying to calm Peggy’s nerves, Billy says he won’t sign if they don’t take her, too. Alas, when the receptionist calls for Miss Pepper, they both get up. “Miss Pepper only,” says the receptionist. Peggy says she won’t sign if they don’t take Billy, but the crestfallen Billy encourages her to go on.
On her last day with her old gang in the comedy unit at Comet, Peggy becomes tearful and promises not to forget them. Billy, however, is not at the farewell party. She finds him waiting outside the soundstage door so he can speak to her privately. He says his good-byes and seals them with a kiss. Tearfully, Peggy goes off to become a star. And boy does she ever! At the advice of her leading man Andre Telefair (Paul Ralli), a phony count who used to be Tony the pizza slinger, she changes her name to Patricia Pepoire (a reminder of Marion’s own change to the Anglicized “Davies” on beginning her stage career) and transforms into a diva. She rarely sees Billy or her father (who, strangely, has been MIA until the scene below), so Billy calls her up to invite her over for dinner. Her pretentious buffoon of a maid (Fanny Brice lookalike Polly Moran) answers the phone:
One day, Peggy is shooting in the same location as Billy’s film unit. He sees her and stands out of sight to watch her play. After the director yells cut, he approaches her and starts kidding her about the old days, pushing at her until she snaps. She’s humiliated by the sight of him and never wants to see him again. Billy, hurt and thoroughly chastised, slinks off to become a part of “Patricia’s” buried past. Trying to put her beginnings completely behind her, Peggy is set to marry Andre. But as her attendants put the finishing touches on her wedding attire, she flashes back to all the good times she had with Billy. She calls off the wedding.
In the end, Peggy, her swollen head shrunk down to size, asks King Vidor to cast Billy in her next picture. When he reports for work, Peggy hides and instructs King not to say that she is in the picture, too. When Billy comes to the door of a cottage on the set, Peggy walks through it. The lovers are reunited, both having learned valuable lessons—Peggy, about humility, and Billy, that keeping audiences laughing is a safe career path but one he has outgrown.
This fictional film within the real world of Hollywood, dotted with its biggest stars playing themselves, is both a lampoon of what happens to star-struck, naïve kids when faced with fame and fortune and a flattering gaze at Hollywood’s elite. The film certainly touches on the broken dreams that are the lot of most of Hollywood’s hopefuls, but sticks within the Jazz Age ethos of glorifying high society. We completely believe Marion as a goodhearted soul who lets her image get the better of her—in fact, Marion Davies was said to be just as good-natured despite being surrounded by the rich and riches associated with Hearst. Nonetheless, the film is obviously an inside job, one that probably thrilled audiences of stargazers while promoting MGM’s human “product.”
My favorite scenes are between Haines and Davies. Great friends in real life, they are able to be emotionally open to each other. When Billy comforts Peggy, the scene is longer than I would have expected, giving the pair ample room to talk through her trauma in a very realistic way. In addition, when Peggy banishes Billy from her life, her anger and cruelty come vividly off the screen. Haines deftly plays Billy’s bewilderment and incomprehension and brings his sad resignation slowly and painfully to the surface. It’s a devastating scene that might provoke a few tears.
Beyond these stellar attributes, it’s a genuine thrill to see the real facades of the great Hollywood studios, particularly since some of them are gone or merged with other studios. Watching Peggy tiptoe through set after set shows exactly how active the studios were churning out every variety of entertainment. And when Billy’s troupe comes upon Peggy’s High Arts production, we get a feel for the location shooting that was the norm in the silent era.
Show People is a truly fine film that showcases the enormous talent of Marion Davies, a talent that would fade from movie screens in only a few short years. I think of it as both a love letter to Hollywood and to one of the greatest funny women it ever produced. l
In 1928, the silent film era was nearing its end, Greta Garbo was at the height of her popularity, and her frequent director, Fred Niblo, was four years from the end of his career. The Mysterious Lady, a fairly standard-issue Mata Hari story, paired Garbo, as Russian spy Tania Fedorova, with leading man Conrad Nagel, as Austrian officer Karl von Raden. Only the year before, Garbo repeated the great sensation she made with her Flesh and the Devil costar John Gilbert in Love. They were an electifying pair on screen, but Gilbert’s frequent dust-ups with studio head Louis B. Mayer brought his career to a premature end. As Garbo’s leading man in The Mysterious Lady, Nagel offers fans a rougher sexuality, one that helped Garbo reach further into a darker aspect of herself—moving from someone who is born evil (The Temptress, Flesh and the Devil) to one whose evil is pragmatic and ostensibly patriotic. The Mysterious Lady thus presents a certain evolution in the Garbo oeuvre, one that enhances her exoticism while allowing her to emotionally shade her shady ladies.
Niblo opens the films with a wonderful scene. Horse-drawn carriages bunched together, moving in and out of the frame in a dense tapestry, deposit their elegantly dressed passengers at the entrance of a Vienna opera house. Two soldiers, von Raden and his friend Max Heinrich (Albert Pollet), rush to the box office to buy tickets at the last minute. The performance is sold out. Just then, a man returns a ticket to the box office. He gives the pair a suspicious sidelong glance, but leaves quickly. The ticket clerk says he can sell the soldiers one ticket. Max insists that Karl take it; Max intends to let a few cabaret girls entertain him.
Max is seated in a box. In front of him is the sumptuous back of a woman leaning on the edge of the box, paying rapt attention to the singers on stage. He concentrates his gaze on her, her soft curls, her curved arms. During a brief lull in the action, she turns to him and says, “Franz, you’re very late.” Surprised that he is not her cousin, she blushes. The pair are obviously attracted to each other, as they both squirm deliciously in their chairs, a really wonderful scene. The opera ends with the soprano dropping to her knees and moving toward the tenor in what looks like a declaration of love and plea for forgiveness.
The woman leaves and goes outside, only to be greeted with heavy rains and no ride home. As she stands on the street in confusion, Karl catches up to her and offers to take her home. She accepts, and when they arrive, she invites him in. They drink cognac and chat. Then Karl sits down to play her piano. He reprises the theme from the last scene of the opera, and she sings it. He falls in love on the spot. In rough passion, he grabs her from behind. She turns and invites his kiss. It’s a wonderfully choreographed scene of seduction, moving from polite to alarming to passionate.
Karl and Tania spend the next day in typical movie happiness—frolicking in nature. When their day is at its end, Karl tells Tania he must leave for Berlin for a short while. Tania wonders if there can again be days as wonderful as they have had. Karl vows to come back soon, and they will have many more such days. When he leaves, Tania goes inside and opens a letter. Someone named Boris tells her he misses her terribly. A rueful look crosses her face. Foreboding is in the air.
Karl picks up some important military plans from his superiors and is told by his Uncle Eric (Edward Connelly) that the woman he was seen with the previous night is a notorious Russian spy. Karl’s disbelief turns to anger. Karl boards the train and secures the documents in a briefcase. Tania bursts into his compartment from the adjoining compartment, telling him she had to see him one more time. He rebuffs her and accuses her of setting him up. She admits it, but says she really does love him and wants him to give her a chance. He becomes enraged. She says, “Don’t make me hate you, Karl,” but nothing will get through to him. In the morning, he awakens and finds that the documents are missing. He is arrested, courtmartialed for treason, and thrown in prison. The rest of the film details his escape and his plot to track down Tania and recover the documents and his honor.
There are so many wonderful moments in this film. For example, Karl’s public disgrace is really excruciating to watch. The ritual—broken sword, removal of all signs of rank and medals of accomplishment, and finally, cutting of buttons from the uniform coat—is done with precision and a horrible coldness we don’t feel Karl deserves. In another memorable scene, Boris (Gustav von Seyffertitz), Tania’s lover in waiting (it appears they have never had sex), throws her a birthday party. The camera movements for the party are done in standard movie language—close-up on a tray of champagne glasses opening up to the party full of guests laughing, talking, and dancing. But a titillating undercurrent moves through this swirl as Karl, posing as a professional musician, sits down at the piano with his stack of music. A quick glance at Boris and then at Tania sets up the major tension for the remainder of the film. In a nice double exposure, we see Karl’s thoughts as his image gets up from the piano bench and strangles Tania, who is standing next to him singing.
Garbo is excellent throughout. She wears little make-up in her opening appearance, looking fresh and innocently lovely. Her flirtation with Nagel at her home is perfectly orchestrated—step close, move back, circle around a table to pour a drink. When she is cornered by Boris, who has had her watched ever since he discovered that von Raden was on the premises, her fear and confusion are those of a wild animal. She has no plan for escape—indeed, probably knows there is no hope of it—but keeps working selflessly to free Karl, wondering all the while whether he plans to take his revenge on her or believes that she loves him. It’s a real tour de force that is a pleasure to watch.
The film is part of a recently issued Turner Classic Movies collection of Garbo films. It was scored by TCM’s 2000 Young Film Composers Contest Winner, Vivek Maddala. I thought his score was a bit cheesy in spots, particularly his sentimentality during the love scenes, but the love theme from the opera that recurs when Tania thinks of Karl is touching. The film from which the DVD was made was in a poor condition in parts, particularly the first reel, but it’s all there and visible even through the scratches and pops. This film is a must-see for Garbo fans, and well worth any film lovers’ time. l
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"You have my highest praise!" – Andreas, Pussy Goes Grrr
Chicago has only one set of famous movie eyes: the kohl-rimmed orbs of Theda Bara, the cinematic world’s first break-out femme fatale. Her eyes have been the symbol of the Chicago International Film Festival since its inception, looking back at the audiences that view the latest 
The turn of the 20th century was the vampire’s first crucible moment. Bram Stoker had just published his Dracula, the template for vampire films largely centered on a male vampire for most of the 20th century. Yet, it was a painting Philip Burne-Jones exhibited in 1897 that actually created a rage for female vampires. The painting, The Vampire, shows a rapacious woman in a flowing nightgown leaning over a handsome man sleeping in bed. The raw sexuality of the painting stirred the primal current running beneath Victorian propriety. A play about a vampirish woman called A Fool There Was hit the stage in 1909 and was adapted for the screen. Unknown actress Theodosia Goodman of Cincinnati—soon to be redubbed Theda Bara—was chosen to play The Vampire.
The fairy gives Tyltyle a hat with a diamond on it. When he turns the diamond, he can bring forth or dismiss the spirits of animals, plants, and things. His diamond brings forth the souls of Tylo, Tylette, Sugar, Fire, Water, Bread, Milk, and most importantly, Light. These beings will accompany the children on their quest. They will die, however, when the blue bird is found and returned to the fairy. Tylette determines to spot the children one way or another, even if it means harm will come to them. Tylo considers Tyltyl and Myltyl gods who he will protect to the end.
The Tourneur film, with its color tints and some effective special effects, really has the air of enchantment about it. (I’m told by a friend who saw it at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival a few years ago that it’s absolutely stunning on the big screen.) For example, in a close-up of the kitchen hearth from which Fire (S. E. Potapovitch) emerges, dancing flames are superimposed upon a writhing figure as the body of a man slowly comes into focus. It’s a great effect. Tom Corless as Tylette is absolutely wonderful, mimicking feline movements and habits with great skill and charm. It’s a shame his character is made out to be so nasty, but it certainly shows that actors have more fun playing characters that are bad rather than virtuous.
On her last day with her old gang in the comedy unit at Comet, Peggy becomes tearful and promises not to forget them. Billy, however, is not at the farewell party. She finds him waiting outside the soundstage door so he can speak to her privately. He says his good-byes and seals them with a kiss. Tearfully, Peggy goes off to become a star. And boy does she ever! At the advice of her leading man Andre Telefair (Paul Ralli), a phony count who used to be Tony the pizza slinger, she changes her name to Patricia Pepoire (a reminder of Marion’s own change to the Anglicized “Davies” on beginning her stage career) and transforms into a diva. She rarely sees Billy or her father (who, strangely, has been MIA until the scene below), so Billy calls her up to invite her over for dinner. Her pretentious buffoon of a maid (Fanny Brice lookalike Polly Moran) answers the phone:
