Friday, Oct. 21 Movie Notes by Jon Hildreth...

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5 SHASTA COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL Friday, Oct. 21 Movie Notes by Jon Hildreth... kept in his head a burst of creativity that has never since been equaled in the movies. This film is remembered as an early Lillian Gish star part, though the location shooting is equally interesting, and the costumes, hair styles and so forth take us to an alien world. 6pm - $1 Laugh Program Angora Love (1929) Laurel & Hardy In Angora Love Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy get adopted by a goat, which somehow brings on landlord trouble. I m grown-up enough to accept The Boys together in a hotel room with a double bed, but when there s a goat involved, one that badly needs a bath, I m not sure what to think. There s no way around it: the film may be a trifle grotesque. Even the title is a head-scratcher. Angoras are sheep, I think, and that Love business is a little odd, too, considering the film s last shot, but at least homophobes will rejoice to know for sure that the goat is a lady. Pass the Gravy (1928) (Max Davidson) Max Davidson, a Jewish comedian born in Berlin, made a number of comedies for Hal Roach, many directed by the great Leo McCarey. This item has a fairly elaborate plot leading inexorably to a food fight, of course. What s interesting is that this is a director s picture. All the comedy comes from reaction shots, which is just as well since there wasn t anything particularly funny about Davidson. It s A Gift is the one and only Snub Pollard masterpiece. Pollard was a fine second banana, but no genius, and never found a mentor to make him a major star, as Harry Langdon briefly did but this one time Snub set the world on fire thanks to wonderful material that perfectly embodies the spirit of the Roaring Twenties, when everything new was the bee s knees and everything old was merely Victorian. 7:30pm - Outside the Law Underworld (1927) Preceded by Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912, D.W. Griffith) Both of tonight s films have been called the first gangster film, but since a great many early North American films were set in big city slums, gangsters have been in pictures for nearly as long as movies have told stories. Who knows what the first gangster picture really was? The Musketeers of Pig Alley has the better claim. It was made by the great American film pioneer David Wark Griffith 99 years ago, at which time he was making two pictures a week, usually from scripts he developed and A vitally important piece of action takes place in long shot at the very edge of the frame a rare directorial gaffe for Griffith -- but after all, the rules were not yet graven in stone, and nobody suspected that a day might come when, watching movies on TV, we d miss important little details like this one. Just keep checking out the left side of the picture in the bar scene and you ll be fine. Griffith s reputation has been tarnished by the revulsion modern audiences feel towards The Birth of a Nation, a great but flawed film with more than a hint of racism. In future festivals we hope to show that Griffith was a Dickens-like moralist, not the demonic monster we read of on the Internet, and that The Birth in no way typified his pictures. In fact, none of his pictures are typical: the extraordinary variety of his work is one of the many qualities that made him a master. Underworld marked Josef Von Sternberg s first success in a career noted for wild ups and downs. His first film, The Salvation Hunters, was made for less than $3,500 and caught Chaplin s eye, says legend, when the film s lead actor bribed a projectionist to show the first reel by accident in Charlie s home. Hunters showed a profit, having cost virtually nothing, and the famed comic hired Sternberg to make a feature, A Woman of the Sea, starring former partner Edna Purviance. We don t know, but there may have been a falling out; in any case the film was either never publicly Silent Film Fest 2011 at Old City Hall, 1313 Market Street, Redding, CA Page 5

6 SHASTA COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL Friday, Oct. 21 Movie Notes Continued... shown or only shown once, depending on who you believe, and Chaplin is said to have destroyed it deliberately in the presence of an I.R.S. agent to substantiate a tax write-off. No fool, he retained a print or two, but after his wife died, rumor says his wife, Oona, destroyed all prints. In any case, the picture seems to be gone. Between Hunters and A Woman, Sternberg directed The Exquisite Sinner for Metro. The studio disliked the movie, called journeyman director Phil Rosen in for retakes, the film failed, but at least one copy exists. After two debacles in a row Sternberg landed a job as an assistant director at Paramount. As a reward for reshooting half of Frank Lloyd s Children of Divorce in three days, he was tapped to make Underworld, which Paramount then shelved. You poor ham, take my name off the film, wired its writer, Ben Hecht. But in New York it appears that the spirit of Preston Sturges had taken up residence, and lo and behold, a Times Square theater needed something to show. On opening there, Underworld created such a sensation, solely by word of mouth, that the theater had to stay open all night, George Bancroft became a star, and Hecht changed his mind, which was just as well because the film won him the first Best Screenplay Oscar there ever was. Incidentally, Howard Hawks claimed he had a hand in writing the picture, but he was a man who never let the truth get in the way of a good story, so we don t know if he really did but Hawks used a character s name ( Feathers ) and the spittoon scene from Underworld in his classic John Wayne western, Rio Bravo. (At least one critic claimed that Rio Bravo is a remake of Underworld, making one wonder if he d seen either film.) Underworld is usually called a gangster picture, and often cited as the first of the gangster cycle, but it s really a love triangle set in Von Sternberg s land of glittering surfaces and shadows where beautiful people meet and drift apart. His characters always have A Past, a disillusioning one at that; they rarely fit silent film stereotypes. According to at least one writer, Sternberg apprenticed with a New York portrait photographer and later claimed he brought the art of still photography to the moving pictures. Another story has the young Sternberg haunting New York s famed Armory Show, which gave the young man and indeed the U.S., a first taste of modern art. In any case, he somehow developed a stunning visual sense, and few films are more beautifully photographed than his. He was, in fact, the first director admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers. For me, Underworld is pure delight. What stays in mind are such privileged moments as the one when Feathers first arrives at the club where the seedy Clive Brook works as a janitor. She s at the top of a spiral staircase and he s at the bottom. A single feather from her wrap floats down to him, and the viewer knows that fate intends to tie the two together despite her shimmering glamor and his general grubbiness. I couldn t begin to say how this scene works, but it does, brilliantly, and of such small details is the Art of Film composed. Sternberg lasted only seven more years at Paramount, with one excursion to Germany to make the smash hit Die Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) for UFA, with Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. Of his talkie output, only Morocco and Shanghai Express, both starring Dietrich, were successful at the time. On loan-out to Columbia he made Crime and Punishment with a perfectly-cast Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, but the film did about as much business as you might think. Paramount let him go shortly thereafter, when The Devil Is a Woman played to slow business, and his last six films were either flops or never completed. I, Claudius, his last shot at a great picture, was to be produced by Alexander Korda in England, but the production collapsed for complex reasons, as told in a fascinating BBC documentary, The Epic That Never Was. One other, The Shanghai Gesture, often seen on early TV, has become a serious contender for the all-time #1 camp classic, and there was also a fine Army documentary called The Town, but the rest are mercifully forgotten. The victim of a childhood made miserable by a brutal father, Sternberg believed that to be respected, he had to be feared, and his own lack of Silent Film Fest 2011 at Old City Hall, 1313 Market Street, Redding, CA Page 6

7 SHASTA COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL Friday, Oct. 21 Movie Notes Continued... anything like common politeness may have been the chief cause of his difficulties in life. In any case, he made too many enemies and his career came to a standstill. Interest in his films returned to life when The Scarlet Empress, about Catherine the Great, was released by the prestigious Criterion Collection and became recognized for its bizarre sets, extraordinary photography, and Marlene Dietrich s radiant presence. Since then, there have been revivals and retrospectives, and the man has regained some of his former prestige, at least among film buffs. Silent Film Fest 2011 at Old City Hall, 1313 Market Street, Redding, CA Page 7

8 SHASTA COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL Saturday, Oct. 22 Movie Notes by Jon Hildreth... 10am - Women s Rights (Early Version) Master of the House (1925) (Theodore Dreyer) Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer is best remembered for one towering silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and for four fine but dour talkies which came out decades apart: Vampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud, all of them involving strong women (in the case of Vampyr, a bit too strong), and all available on home video. In the Twenties, though, Dreyer was a reasonably prolific director of all sorts of films, always well-done. He was skilled at comedy, though his are comedies in the Scandinavian manner, not overburdened with belly laughs. Master of the House is a beautifully constructed little picture, taking place in just two rooms. The first part simply shows the many things that go into running a home, depicted in rather long shots. Only after the story gets moving does the camera get close to the action. The net effect is that the spectator gradually gets more involved as the story progresses: a neat trick, considering that what the film has to say wouldn t have been readily accepted by all viewers in 1925 Europe. Feminism was just a rumor, but respect for the female principle is what this film has to offer. First we see what is wrong with things as they are: the husband imagines himself lord and master even though he knows nothing of what it takes to run a household. His downtrodden wife has little hope he will come to his senses, but his former nanny has other ideas. Her plan to make him rethink his role is the film, and I won t spoil things with more comment. Dreyer spent most of his life and made what money he made not from his own films but by managing Denmark s greatest movie theater, a post he gained thanks to the Danish government s pride in an internationally-illustrious citizen, but time and the availability of much of his work has operated in his favor, and few directors are more respected now. 12pm - The World s Wealthiest Tramp The Kid (1921) (Charles Chaplin), preceded by The Adventurer The Adventurer, last of the extraordinarily fruitful Mutual series of comedies, was Charles Spencer Chaplin s most popular film up to then, perhaps because Chaplin had four whole months to prepare it, an unheard-of luxury at the time, or perhaps because it returned to basic, fast slapstick after the broadening of themes and storylines that mark the series as a whole. Chaplin s timing was so exact by then that a genre that had once been crude knockabout farce had become as precise and as graceful as ballet. The film begins and ends with a chase. Chases in Chaplin pictures give him ample opportunity to display his invention and skill, and these are no exception. His flawless impersonation of a lamp and some by-play with sliding double doors are highlights of the final chase. The Kid was Chaplin s first feature, and the first of his films to emphasize poignancy, the Chaplinesque quality, over pure laughter. This being the case, some downgrade the film as not funny enough, but I think they miss the point: it s an actor s picture, and a child actor s picture at that. What Chaplin did with little Jackie Coogan was nothing short of astonishing, and reveals the studied nature of Chaplin s own performances. Every move, every flicker of an eye is calculated, yet the illusion of spontaneity is wholly convincing. Chaplin taught the kid the part as he would have taught a dog a part, but then, of course, there is That Scene, the one no dog could learn. The whole film leads up to it. When the powers that be try to wrest the Kid away from the Tramp, the outpouring of emotion on Coogan s face is without parallel in Silent Film Fest 2011 at Old City Hall, 1313 Market Street, Redding, CA Page 8

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10 SHASTA COUNTY ARTS COUNCIL Saturday, Oct. 22 Movie Notes Continued... Fleming is now remembered for two spectacularly successful collaborations: The Wizard of Oz (partly directed by King Vidor) and David O. Selznik s Gone With the Wind (partly directed by George Cukor). But as our film shows, Fleming began as an inventive, almost an experimental director, obviously in love with the medium s limitless creative opportunities. One highlight is the therapy-induced dream sequence, a triumph of early special effects, still effective today. 7:30pm - Nation-Building With John Ford The Iron Horse (1922) (John Ford) The Iron Horse (1922), an epic on building the first transcontinental railway, was the first major hit by one of the great American directors, John Ford. It was Ford s first treatment of a major event in American history, prefiguring his later masterpieces. With a documentary-like flavor, George Schneiderman s photography seems to transplant us into a real time and place. The physical details of railroad building, the westward movement of pioneering communities, the clashes with Indians, a cattle drive, a buffalo herd, a saloon gun battle, and other essential elements of Western myth all seem brand new. It did not hurt that Ford s Uncle Mike had actually been a member of that railroad-building crew, and the young Ford grew up listening to his songs and stories. We will see the film s rarely-presented American Version this evening. What exactly does that mean? In the silent era, the best takes were reserved for the American version of a film, and the second-best takes were edited into a European version, which frequently means that the American versions feature better acting, particularly from less-experienced performers like our heroine, Madge Bellamy. Certain sequences were deemed more interesting to Americans than to Europeans, and such sequences were longer, as here with the Indian attacks which make our American version more exciting. There are two different stories to this film, and which one you follow depends on your point of view: there is the story of the white settlers, and there is the story of the Native Americans vain attempt to stop the white settlers. Apparently someone decided Europeans wouldn t care for the Indian story, and unfortunately the European version is most widely shown today. You may think you ve seen The Iron Horse when you actually haven t not all of it at any rate, and not, perhaps, the best of it. Abraham Lincoln has a way of showing up unexpectedly in American epics, and here he not only appears, but telegraphs the end of the picture with a Presidential spoiler. Ford s weakness for stage Irishmen is present as well, with the usual numbing influence, but these so-called comic sequences are mercifully short compared to, say, Victor McLaglen s drunk scene in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon which goes on (and on and on) for most of a reel. Incidentally, Fox was grooming Bellamy for stardom and inserted a number of close-ups of her over Ford s objections. He complained about it for the rest of his life. Diffuse by nature, an epic needs a strong hero to hold it together. George O Brian s performance is powerful and charming. It s fair to say he carries the picture. If Miss Bellamy hadn t had him, she would have been sunk for certain. When the silent era ended, O Brian s star waned, but, like such other silent stars as Mae Marsh, he remained in the John Ford stock company as long as he was able to work. Silent Film Fest 2011 at Old City Hall, 1313 Market Street, Redding, CA Page 10

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