WHAT SILENTS & PRE-CODES HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

[charliechaplinfan]

Love Me Tonight is great too, a fun film. I've recently discovered these films, I still have One Hour With You to watch. I loved The Smiling Leiutenant, I do like Miriam Hopkins and Claudette Colbert and I've completely fallen for Maurice Chevalier. Jeanette Macdonald is a revelation to me because I knew only the actress from San Francisco and her partnership with Nelson Eddy, she's much better when directed by Lubitsch.

[charliechaplinfan]

I watched The Little American starring Mary Pickford directed by Cecil B DeMille a patriotic film made in 1917. The best scenes in the picture are the sinking of the ship that Angela is sailing on, a reference to the Lusatania which was sunk off the coast of Ireland killing American citizens which was the catalyst to America entering the war. Angela survives and whilst in France she slowly becomes involved in espionage and is captured by the Germans but manages to escape when the Allies bomb the execution field. Another memorable scene is in a ruined church, another bomb goes off but the crucifix remains intact. I can only imagine the audiences of the day viewing their sweetheart being sunk and then captured by the Germans.

I also caught a couple of Ozu's silents. Firstly Days of Youth Ozu's first known surviving film, it's interesting because it contains the longest exterior shot I've seen in a Ozu film. Then I followed it with Tokyo Chorus a family comedy set in the depression a man loses his job but has promised to get his son a bike, then his daughter gets ill, there is no job to be had unless he wants to carry a sandwich board for a former teacher. This being a comedy it does end upbeat. It's interesting to see Ozu's technique developing.

I also saw Song of China an intersting Chinese silent from 1936. It's very Confucian in it's telling. A man promises his father on his deathbed and promises to raise his son the same way as he'd been raised and to respect all elders. The man's son takes a wrong turning and gets into gambling and carousing. The man takes his family from the city to remove his son from the temptation and sets up a school in honour of his father. The son decides to return to the city with his wife and son. Many years later the son is summoned by the grandson to his father's deathbed, when he arrives his father rises and forgives the son of the error of his ways.

[myrnaloyisdope]

Been going silent-crazy lately, as I've had some free time, and decided to work on the silentera.com list of silents.

Thanks to Christine, I got to watch the Carl Davis-scored Wings, and was very impressed. I'm a huge Wellman fan, but had held off watching this film due to mixed reviews, but I came away very impressed. Wonderful camera-work, and very ambitious. Knowing Wellman's background as a pilot in WWI, I could tell this film is very personal for him. It's also scripted by John Monk Saunders (The Last Flight and The Eagle and The Hawk), so that was another point of interest. The film has it's weakpoints...namely the contrived rivalry of the two leads, and Clara Bow's disappearance about half way through the film, but the ambition of the project is enough to overcome any plot shortcomings. A very impressive film, and the first film I've actually liked with Clara Bow in it...nothing against Clara, but It and Call Her Savage left me underwhelmed. But the site of Clara in uniform is enough to make me take notice.

I also checked out Wellman's Beggars of Life, and I thought it was fantastic. Wellman, Hoboes, and Louise Brooks is an incredible combination. A great, moody, unapologetically bleak film, with great performances by Wallace Beery, Lulu, and Richard Arlen. Maybe the only complaint is that Lulu is probably the cleanest hobo you'll ever see...I mean she's trying to pass as a boy, but she still has her full makeup on. But that's splitting hairs in relation to how good this film is. It's an underseen gem if there ever was one. Here's hoping a restoration is on the way...perhaps even with the vitaphone score...so we can hear Wally sing?

Oooh, and I finally got around to watching Fritz Lang's 5-hour epic Die Nibelungen. Very impressive, almost larger than life. The dragon sequence is incredible stuff for 1922. The film also fits nicely into Lang's thematic tendencies, as the second part (Kriemheld's Revenge) is concerned exclusively with vengeance, and the sacrifices one makes to get revenge.

I also watched the Laurel and Hardy short Big Business. Incredible is the word best used to describe it. The duo stars as inept Christmas tree salesman (it's Los Angeles afterall), and bring a very Marx-ist(as in Marx brothers) slant to it the film, as it unravels into anarchic violence (they trash the house of a reluctant customer). I haven't seen much Laurel and Hardy, but this seemed very out of character, but in the best possible way.

I also watched the seldom seen Bebe Daniels silent Feel My Pulse, with Bebe as a self-absorbed, neurotic, germophobe, who goes to stay in a sanitarium which is really a bootlegging operation. She's cute enough in the role, and has some neat moments, notably chastising Richard Arlen for his driving, and singing a drunken rendition of 'Sweet Adeline'. William Powell is the heel, and is his usual debonair self, though his turn from bootlegger to baddie is pretty abrupt. The film is pretty meh overall, but there is one incredible sequence that makes the film worth watching. Late in the film during the climax, there is a bunch of baddies rushing up some stairs at Bebe (who's doing her best Donkey Kong impersonation, rolling barrels down at them), when she finds a bottle of Chloroform, and smashes it against the wall. The sequence then is filmed in slow motion (because of the Chloroform) with all the baddies taking absurd pratfalls in slow motion, much to my delight. It all goes on for about 3 minutes, and it's just fascinating to watch, a real nice change of pace from the drudgery of a predictable climax. A mild recommendation, if only for Bebe's cuteness and the slo-mo sequence.

[Gagman 66]

Justin,

You will be very pleased to hear that BEGGARS OF LIFE was already restored in 35 Millimeter by George Eastman House in 2006. I don't think that the scoring track survives though? The film has had a few live screenings. Kevin Brownlow praised the work that they did last year. WINGS is much improved with the Carl Davis score, and hopefully, that is what we will hear on the official DVD release that is forth-coming perhaps yet this year from Paramount. I got a big kick out of FEEL MY PULSE. To few of Bebe Daniel's Paramount features still survive. SIEGFRIED and KRIMHELD'S REVENGE are both spectacular.Great scores on the Kino edition. BIG BUSINESS Is not that Uncommon for the boys, there is mass destruction in allot of Stan And Ollie's Silent shorts. TWO TARS comes quickly to mind.

[coopsgirl]

I watched Hell’s Hinges (1916) this weekend and just loved it. It’s the first film I’ve seen of William S. Hart and I really liked him. I posted a long write up about at the TCM board and I’ll just post the link here if anyone wants to read it.

http://forums.tcm.com/jive/tcm/thread.j ... 2&tstart=0

It looks like some of his films are on dvd and I’ll definitely have to get some more. I’m discovering that I really like silent westerns (even if Gary Cooper isn’t in them – ha!). When Gary was beginning his career he worked mostly in Westerns and since this was just a few years after Hart had retired, he was sometimes compared to him and I can see why. They were both the epitome of the strong silent type (Hart especially since he never made a talkie ) and had similar restrained acting styles and both had very expressive faces and you can tell what they are feeling and thinking just through their expressions and body language.

My copy of Hell’s Hinges is from one of the American Film Treasures sets and it looked really nice. The tinting was beautiful and I especially loved the fire scenes tinted in red. It definitely looked very hellish.

[charliechaplinfan]

I revisited The Merry Widow , the one directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It was great the first time around of on second acquaintance it was even better. I could be carried away on the melody for ages. It made my pile of ironing much easier to do.

A Spray of Plum Blossoms 1931 is one of the earlier appearances of Lingyu Ruan, she shines just as brightly in this as her later features The Goddess and The Peach Girl. It's an interesting tale concerning two friends in the military, there's double dealing, chases, an outlaw story reminiscient of The Eagle.It's also interesting because this is pre Mao and Manchukuo, a glimpse at the military regime of the time.

I revisited Vampyr because if a thread that had sprung up but I found out that I had one of the worst transfers to a DVD possible.

[drednm]

I watched THE SON OF THE SHEIK again, which I hadn't seen in years. Excellent performance by Rudolph Valentino and Vilma Banky (plus they're both incredibly beautiful) and a nice cameo by Agnes Ayres. With Rudy's last couple films, it's amazing to see how his acting improved, became less flamboyant. It's a shame that for so many people, his acting is typified by the hammy, bulging eyed performance in THE SHEIK. This film was a smash hit, released shortly after Rudy's ghastly and lingering death. I remember my grandmother telling me about Valentino's death (she was a teenager) and the newspaper frenzy. The DVD I have shows newsreel footage of his funeral. It was a madhouse. Oddly, one of the last "lucid" things my grandmother said just before she died at 97, was that she was going to the movies to see Valentino. She died about 5 years ago. Almost eighty years after his death, he still had the power to effect people.

[myrnaloyisdope]

Another few days, another batch of silents. Some quick thoughts:

He Who Gets Slapped - Good, good stuff, although a bit disappointing compared to my expectations. Lon Chaney is at his very best, but the I felt the subplot with John Gilbert was extraneous, and distracting. The first 20 minutes give a great build and explain Chaney's character and motivations astutely, then all of a sudden the film spends the next 10 minutes introducing Norma Shearer, and John Gilbert. It broke up the rhythm of the film I found, and complicated a storyline that didn't need it. I thought the idea of Chaney making a profession out of re-living his greatest humiliation was a brilliant metaphor...how we often choose to hang on to our embarrassing moments, and replay them over and over again in our minds...a la Chaney getting slapped ad nauseum.

Traffic In Souls - Early exploitation melodrama about white slavery. Pretty by the numbers, considering the material, remarkably unsalacious. One sequence caught my eye, that being when the 2 Swedish immigrants fresh off the boat are coerced into becoming prostitutes through their general naivete and trusting nature. It's the kind of thing that still goes on today, sadly enough. Another interesting bit was the use of a dictophone to intercept incoming telegraphs, it's fascinating to see old technology at work in these films. Heck foreign prostitutes, tapping phones, it's Season 2 of "The Wire".

Trail of '98 - I was very impressed by the film. It has an epic feel despite it's 85 minute running time, and I was surprised that an MGM picture would be so brutal and bleak. The fights between Ralph Forbes and Harry Carey are pretty shocking in their brutality...not used to seeing men bloodied in these old pictures. Delores Del Rio...well she's gorgeous, and I thought she did a fine job. Even with the somewhat happy ending, the film is pretty despairing in it's depiction of the Klondike...it was a hard life, with death and sorrow around every corner. A great, yet sadly underseen film.

Brown of Harvard & West Point - I watched these on the weekend and was surprised to find they are almost identical: William Haines as cocky Freshman athlete, meek and adoring sidekick (Jack Pickford & William Bakewell), reluctant love interest (Mary Brian & Joan Crawford), Haines alienating those around him, and then coming up big in the climactic football game. I will admit to really enjoying West Point, namely because I thought Haines character was quite complex...cocky, moody, short-tempered and petulant, but with a capacity for good that he refuses to let be seen. In Brown of Harvard he's cocky, moody, short-tempered and petulant, but he's also a whale of a jerk, so it's hard to get behind him when he does see the light. There's nothing underneath the surface. It was still watchable, but I think watching it so soon after West Point really dampened my view of it.

The Student of Prague - reputed to be the first feature length horror film (1913), Paul Wegener directs and stars as a poor student who sells his reflection for $100,000. A fascinating film, and though not particularly scary, it has some creepy moments. Wegener's descent into madness is not as fully realized as I was hoping, but as I've found with a lot of early silent features, a lot is left up to the audience, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but my modern movie-watching brain is wired differently. The ending is pretty brilliant though, and it's definitely worth watching.

Alias, Jimmy Valentine - reputed to be the first feature length gangster film (1915), apparently beating Raoul Walsh's better-known Regeneration to theatres by several months. Richard Warwick stars as Jimmy Valentine/Lee Randall, an expert safe-cracker who goes straight after a chance meeting with the governor's daughter. All the while his past stint at Sing Sing, and an embittered detictive Doyle (Robert Cummings) hang over his head. The film is one of Maurice Tourneur's earliest American films, and shows some interesting stylization. There's a great sequence of a bank heist that is shot from a high angle above, revealing the entire set to be a sort of maze. This works really well because you can see everyone's movement, and the eventual appearance of a night watchman trying to break it up. Tourneur also makes use of a flashback sequence, as Valentine's old pals reminisce about the "good life", revealing scenes of past heists, and past celebrations. The film is quite good if constrained by it's excessive melodrama. I'm interested to see more Tourneur (this was my first), and the 1928 remake with William Haines.
+

[ChiO]

Alias, Jimmy Valentine - reputed to be the first feature length gangster film (1915), apparently beating Raoul Walsh's better-known Regeneration to theatres by several months. .... The film is one of Maurice Tourneur's earliest American films, and shows some interesting stylization. There's a great sequence of a bank heist that is shot from a high angle above, revealing the entire set to be a sort of maze.

I love this movie. The bank heist sequence knocked me out, too. I'd like to see more of his films, but I spend so much time with those of his son.

[Gagman 66]

Justin,

To me HE WHO GETS SLAPPED is somewhat overrated. I don't like it nearly as well as THE BLACKBIRD or several of Chaney's other features. Despite the big name cast and director. That being said, HE is supposed to be getting a new score, and a fresh digital transfer. But the results haven't turned up on TCM yet. The canned music and effects that it has now are from an old 60's series of MGM Silents that used to run on publlc television. I might like it allot better in an improved version.

The thing about it is that you watched the two William Haines features in the wrong order. WEST POINT (1927) is not so much like BROWN OF HARVARD (1926) as it is a combination of both BROWN OF HARVARD, and TELL IT TO THE MARINES. Personally, I thought that Haines was a much bigger jerk in the later film. I kind of prefer the football game in BROWN OF HARVARD to the one in WEST POINT. As Haines Tom Brown character actually gives someone else the chance to be the hero other than himself, in this case embittered rival Ralph Bushman.

THE TRAIL OF '98 is missing some footage. There was a scene for instance where one of the miners goes insane. Probably about a reel to a reel and a half is still lost.

[drednm]

Well I think BROWN OF HARVARD is an incredible film, the one that set the Haine formula for almost all his following films, and the one that made him a major star. The key to a Haines film is that the viewer has to like his silly/annoying character or at least understand WHY he's the way he is. That's where the emotional payoff comes when he has his "rite of passage." With few other actors could this even be a remote possibility. But with Haines it works because he was a natural cut up and wise ass but he was also a terrific dramatic actor.

[myrnaloyisdope]

I do like Haines' quite a bit, and fully appreciate his usual character arc, he does have the ability to pull it off. But I thought he did it much better in West Point, than he did in Brown of Harvard. This is likely more due to script than Haines, as I simply liked his progression much better in West Point. In Brown he is abrasive to the hilt, and completely self-aware of his jerkiness...he knows exactly what his doing throughout. I sensed in West Point, that Haines' Brice Wayne lacked the self-awareness to know how big of jerk he was. He was more of a man-child, a braggart and a blowhard, doing his best imitation of adulthood but failing along the way. I interpreted his piggishness to instinct...when threatened or challenged he puffs out his chest and blames everyone else but himself. That made his realization more striking, because it suggested a transformation from child to adult.

Speaking of Haines, I just watched Spring Fever, and enjoyed that one quite a bit. It was a different turn for Haines, as his character wasn't nearly as abrasive as usual. Here he was a lowly shipping clerk, who helps his bosses golf game, and ends up spending two weeks at a lush country club. Some of the visuals seemed right out of The Great Gatsby...huge hedges, huge cars, snappily dressed guys and gals, all without a reason to live except to be extravagant. Haines becomes the the flavor of the month when he breaks the golf course record, woos Joan Crawford with both the promise of love and money (despite having none)...complications ensue. I thought the pacing was pretty interesting, as the film builds to a seeming climax about halfway through, and then diffuses into an altogether different story. On one hand it was a bit of a letdown, because I was expecting the usual cliche ala Caddyshack of poor kid beating the rich, pompous ass, but on the other hand it was fascinating because I didn't know what was going to happen next. As for stylistic touches, well there was a great sequence that I had never seen before, where the newly wed Haines and Crawford are conversing with the lights out. How to do this in a silent film you may ask? Well the screen goes black, and an oddly left-centred intertitle indicates what Joan is saying, followed by an inter-title on the right side of the screen indicating what Haines' responds. This goes back and forth for a couple minutes, is really quite a cute, and seemingly innovative sequence. I'd never seen such a sequence before, was this a first?

Anyway a good, fun little film.

[Gagman 66]

Justin,

People either seem to love William Haines, or loath the guy? I personally enjoy his films very much. SPRING FEVER was OK, though nothing special I wasn't helped out much by a pretty poor musical score by Darrel Raby, who had composed a very good one earlier on for Tod Browning's THE SHOW. These young composers seem to be highly inconsistent? Just look at Christopher Caliendo? Great score for A LADY OF CHANCE, and a dismal one for LUCKY STAR.

As for other Haines features, do you have THE SMART SET (1928)? I liked this film allot better, and the score by Marcus Sjowell is really very good. SPRING FEVER had a fair degree of decomposition too, which made it not the best choice for a new score. I would have preferred SLIDE KELLY SLIDE myself. Have you seen TELL IT TO THE MARINES yet? How about SPEEDWAY? (With Billy and Anita Page, Not Elvis and Nancy.)

[Ann Harding]

Alias, Jimmy Valentine - reputed to be the first feature length gangster film (1915), apparently beating Raoul Walsh's better-known Regeneration to theatres by several months. .... The film is one of Maurice Tourneur's earliest American films, and shows some interesting stylization. There's a great sequence of a bank heist that is shot from a high angle above, revealing the entire set to be a sort of maze.

I love this movie. The bank heist sequence knocked me out, too. I'd like to see more of his films, but I spend so much time with those of his son.

If you want to explore the silent Maurice Tourneur, here are a few films available on DVD:
The Wishing Ring (1914) and A Girl's Folly (1917, incomplete) are on the DVD Before Hollywood There Was Fort Lee, N.J.
The Last of the Mohicans (1920), Lorna Doone (1922) and The Blue Bird (1918) are also available. They all have a very special cinematography which frames the character like in a painting while offering an incredible depth.
As for his later French pictures, very few are available on DVD. I have seen quite a few and one of the best is La Main du Diable (The Devil's Hand, 1943) a fantasy film where a painter trades his hand to the Devil to gain fame.

[drednm]

and don't forget William Haines in his starring talkie debut in NAVY BLUES with Anita Page.... nice film that continues the Haines formula.