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I thought I needed to mark the creation of this group, so I've just watched The Cabinet of Dr Caligari again.

I've said in another thread that I've seen very few silents other than The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Metropolis, so I really don't have the experience to comment here. But it always occurrs to me that I couldn't take the exaggerated body language (especially the use of hands, for some reason) and facial makeup if it wasn't for the surrealistic studio sets, which seem to give them an appropriate context. As it is, though, I can watch the film over and over.

It's a different kind of acting: whole body, whole face. It may take some getting used to--like the projection of voices on the stage, very different to film and "normal" speaking.

It just occurred to me that one of the reasons for my recent silents bingeing may be that I MISS seeing people's faces, in this bloody pandemic. I really do.

Took in The Devil's Needle, 1916, with Norma Talmadge and Tully Marshall. Talmadge is one of Franklin's "great stars" I don't recall seeing in anything before but I was intrigued first by the theme of drug addiction--Talmadge plays an artists' model addicted to morphine--and there's the weirdness of minor character stalwart Marshall being cast as the desirable young artist (he was well past fifty and easily looked past sixty...)

She hooks on it her artist pal (Tully Marshall), touting "instant inspiration", he's quickly addicted, his marriage is ruined--scenes of his junkie behaviour, straight out of Burroughs ;)--eventually goes into rehab in an institution with a sunny farm--happy end.

It's filled with scenes you couldn't do twenty years later--Talmadge injecting, crazed Marshall chasing his wife around with a hypodermic to show her what she's missing, even this, I think, buying drugs:

>4 LolaWalser:

This is one reason why I've long been meaning to explore silent film. I have this--perhaps misguided--idea of a golden age of daring and thoughtful film-making in the days before Will Hays dragged up and played The Wicked Witch of the West.

I'm endlessly fascinated by the relative freedom and grown-upness of early film but not sure there was special thoughtfulness, generally speaking. Most of it was still just commercial product meant to attract the masses. However, that it had more candour, well, it seems objectively yes.

And, of course, in Europe and Russia (I don't really know this period in Hollywood at all), there were from the start filmmakers with artistic and/or socially-conscious concerns overtly and seriously presented.

The latest feature-length silent I've seen is The Cat and the Canary, directed by Paul Leni in 1927.

It's the archetypal Old Dark House story, originally a stage play I believe, and of course remade several times. It feels "properly" gothic beyond the genre trappings and despite it's being half-played for laughs, because the heroine is being gaslighted to make her appear mad, so that she forfeits her inheritance of the house.

It's all terrifically atmospheric in the German Expressionist style that was carried over to the early Universal horrors. There are some terrific faces among the supporting cast. Laura La Plante is great as the heroine, and is written with more guts and agency that I might have expected (especially if I assumed things had been steadily getting better on the equality and representation fronts over the past century). The male lead, Creighton Hale, is something of a blank by contrast. He looks and plays the part very like Harold Lloyd in comedy coward mode for most of the film, apart from odd moments where he looks unexpectedly sinister - but of course there's a need to keep the identity of the villain in question until the climax of the film.

This is on a Lobster Films DVD with some bonus features. An inconsequential comedy from 1913 called Courage of Sorts (boastful cattlemen tries to scare prospective son-in-law by dressing as a ghost, prospective son-in-law turns the tables and is allowed to marry the girl); and a Harold Lloyd comedy from 1920 called Haunted Spooks, which has a plot broadly along the lines of The Cat and the Canary. It also has a Flip the Frog cartoon from 1930 (a character created by Ubi Iwerks after he left Disney).

That's one I'll be watching again for the Franklin list... I remember it foggily but fondly.

The extras sound great. I have some Ub Iwerks but not sure about that one, must check. Big fan of Harold Lloyd too.

Is it my imagination, or do I remember a theme-song, 'Hooray for Harold Lloyd'? Perhaps a TV, serialised showing of his stuff?

>9 alaudacorax:

Yep. Thought I did - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKI7-x8sSCM

>2 alaudacorax:, >10 alaudacorax:

Memory is coming back--I've seen a lot more silents than I thought I had.

>10 alaudacorax:

The bad news is, that programme jumbled up footage from different films to make up their own stories. I only found this out recently (I remember it being shown in the '80s, early evenings on BBC2).

>12 housefulofpaper:

Was it a TV series? I seem to vaguely remember it, but all I can find on IMDb is a compilation film he made in '62 - Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy.

>13 alaudacorax:

Yes, made by Time-Life in 1977 and shown in the UK in the '80s.

There's more info. under Harold Lloyd's Wikipedia entry (see the subsection "renewed interest"). It looks like some or all of the shows are uploaded to YouTube - thumbnails came up on Google. I didn't click on them to check - this is just a brief 5 minutes away from work...

>14 housefulofpaper:

Hmm ... so odd that IMDb doesn't list that Time-Life series, not even under 'Archive footage'. And I notice that the Wikipedia entry doesn't actually give the commercial title of it, either.

Saw a bunch of brilliantly restored old cartoons with some interesting innovations--puppets, mixed live and animated footage, 3D--one was an Ub Iwerks, the gorgeously bizarre "Balloonland". Here is a fairly OK YT copy:

Ub Iwerks Balloon Land 1935

Anthony Asquith's A cottage on Dartmoor, 1929, not for the first time but it's been a while... a terrific movie, easily comparable to German expressionist masterpieces.

I don't want to go into the plot because, in case you haven't seen it, you really should AND it's best if you know as little as possible about it. Just watch it.

Just a comment on the segment in the cinema. I expect there are deep film-critical and analytical articles on it galore. But even as an ordinary watcher you can't fail to appreciate the dizzy-making virtuosity of that sequence, the many reflections it makes and excites.

We the spectators of Asquith's movie are watching a cinema audience as IT watches a movie, which we never see. They are our mirror and at the same time they seem to reflect the story unfolding in "real life", between the would-be killer and the couple he is stalking.

Is the movie on the unseen screen the movie WE are watching? Yes, possibly. Are WE that audience? Yes, we might be. Suddenly there is a claustrophobic sensation of being hemmed into a watcher's seat from both sides of the screen.

It's an amazing psychological experiment and really the only one of this kind I have seen in a feature-length movie of that period.

>17 LolaWalser:

Little bit of a Conrad Veidt lookalike, there, in Uno Henning. There's a surprisingly good copy of that on Vimeo.Stuck it on my 'Watch later' list.

>18 alaudacorax:

There is a bit, although the actor was fair (it goes from less to more apparent with the different lighting in the movie).

But also in another sense he's close to Veidt's roles--he plays a very passionate character, and there's probably a discussion to be had whether this passion is un-English and what that means for the story.

>19 LolaWalser:

Don't think I've ever seen it, so I don't know about that, but I'll keep it in mind when I get round to watching.

OPIUM!!! I waited and I waited and I waited and I waited like those forlorn maidens in soggy Northern ballads AND BY GUM I GOT TO SEE IT GLORIOUS AND ALMOST ENTIRE! (Censorship + loss to time's depredations, you know).

But there's still 92+ minutes of it and now cleaned and tinted wonderfully (as the original would have been)... what bliss.

This was a great movie-watching week. Last weekend I saw another rare bird, Julien Duvivier's Le Golem from 1936, shot in Prague. I should write a few words about it, but here's the chief point: HARRY BAUR. Imagine an Orson Welles who could act and you might begin to get some idea of the type and the size of that personality. Magnificent performance--the movie otherwise isn't nearly as good. But there are plenty of interesting things nevertheless, both in and about it.

Someone had posted a great copy of Verdens undergang (The end of the world), 1916, Denmark, and I'm so glad I got to see it, but then it disappeared before I could watch again and get snapshots from it. These are from a lower-resolution copy elsewhere--the film is simply too remarkable to ignore. A masterpiece, and a pioneering one at that. Also, it's CURRENT.

Olaf Fønss plays Frank Stoll, a mine owner with a girlfriend, Dina, he took from another man, a miner. Dina was repudiated by her working class family when she eloped into the life of a kept woman.

There is a comet approaching Earth. The initial news creates a panic on the stock market, with everyone selling and Stoll, who saw a chance, buying. Stoll then manipulates a press release about the expected effect of the comet that falsely lulls people into calm and Stoll makes a killing selling what he bought so cheaply.

Thing is, the comet is still coming for his corner of Europe. He thinks he's well prepared to survive in the corridors under his mansion--very much like a mine.

He gives a gala dinner for his rich friends before (unbeknownst to them) he plans to retire underground with Dina. There's even staged a dance by the rich ladies, in which Dina takes the lead dancing suggestively:

 

But as the truth about the devastating comet spreads--what with fire starting to rain out of the darkening skies etc.--the poor rise up to take revenge on the rich bastards who used them, robbed them, duped them. Revolution at the gates!--except the comet kills everyone and devastates everything.

 

In the end...

 

More from the fabulous Danes... Apparently only these 20 minutes survive from the four-movie series about... *cymbals crashing!* The Daughter of Darkness!!, a woman-criminal. But what a smashing twenty minutes they are! Here she is casing her next millionaire victim (judging by the character casts, all four movies had her going after the rich):



https://www.stumfilm.dk/en/stumfilm/streaming/film/nattens-datter-iv

(English intertitles)

I love everything about this. First, the woman is the lead and it's all action and she's not beholden to anyone or explaining herself to anyone or doing stuff for other people--this is Ripley before Ripley, my friends. Second, not only is the woman the lead, she's not, as is usually the case even when women are the main character, drowned out by male characters (Wonder Woman movie, I'm looking at you). And, hard to tell with the makeup, but... is her assistant played by a woman? (Note to self: collect the delicious instances of female characters in male drag in old movies.)

Oooh, how BAD can a woman get--look at her in her secret underground lair, escaped from prison, surrounded by boxes of DYNAMITE... wearing TROUSERS!!



Wow, Emilie Sannom, the actress, seems to have been as daring a character as the ones she played--she did her own stunts and died in a parachuting accident.

This article strains my Duolingo Danish to the extreme but I'm including it for reference:

https://www.dfi.dk/nyheder/emilie-sannom-filmens-vovehals

A great Czech silent from 1921 about two alchemical villains--one brought to life after having died four centuries earlier--in pursuit of the same woman. It has English subtitles:

Příchozí z temnot (The Arrival from the Darkness) | němý film | Česká filmová klasika

Kafka saw this movie! And so should you. :)

Wonderful location, the imagery is really special.

Villain #1, who gives the beauty's hapless husband a terrible book of magic, with ulterior motives of course:



I don't know what this kind of framing is called but I love it:



Location...



...location...



...location.



Not posting anything with the second villain (the medieval Golemesque zombie) because I couldn't choose.

>21 LolaWalser:

I've just watched Opium (1919).

I haven't come down yet. I'm sort of stunned and really can't get my thoughts in order. I was fascinated by it---I can say that much.

The two actors who really stood out for me for that extra quality of screen presence were Veidt, of course, and Sybill Morel, playing Sin/Magdelena. She was twenty, but looked about fourteen to me, and the feeling grew on me during the film that I could imagine her playing Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I got a sense off her of a hell of a lot of personality just barely being kept under wraps. I was taken a little by surprise by the scene where Veidt and Morel were first in camera together ... and each was totally uninterested in the other's presence.

And the chap playing Armstrong senior had a wonderful face---almost made for caracature caricature.

One last, slightly wicked thought. The director/writer was Robert Reinert. If RR ever had any love-children scattered round the place, one of 'em was Ken Russell. The film had that sort of over-the-top loopiness.

It's probably going to take another viewing or two before I have anything sensible to say about the film itself. There is an awful lot to digest, there. It's literally a window into another age, of course---difficult.

Oh, and one more last thing: I was quite red-herringed by Sin/Magdalena's aliases. Did her names really have no symbolism?

A couple of slight disappointments:

My mention of Puck above reminded me that the shortest day came and went without me watching a version of the Dream, so I decided to hunt up a couple of silent shorts I'd noticed in IMDb searches, made in 1909 and 1913.

Couldn't find the 1913, or anything much about it. I suspect it's lost.

The 1909, made by Vitagraph Studios, was quite fun. They blasted through the whole play in eleven and a half minutes. Interestingly, rather than Titania and Oberon being the quarrelling fairies who trigger most of the action, they had Titania and 'Penelope'.
Going back to Puck, this has a female Puck, too---a young girl called Gladys Hulette who was later to star in the title role in Prudence the Pirate (1916). Just on title alone I really wanted to see that. Nope---IMDb has it marked as 'lost'. I read up on Gladys Hulette and it's really a bit sad. Acting from early childhood, she became a film star, a successful Broadway actress and had oil paintings in major exhibitions, yet she ended up a ticket seller at Radio City Music Hall.

>25 alaudacorax:

Very glad to hear you enjoyed it--I hope you found that great new upload?

The intertitles are a bit wordy, but once you get the hang of who is who, the story more or less writes itself.

I was quite red-herringed by Sin/Magdalena's aliases. Did her names really have no symbolism?

Ha, now that you mention it... one might well wonder! In German "Sin" doesn't mean anything and I don't know how much of a stretch it is to imagine Reinert was playing with words in English. In any case, Sin herself is pure virtue, it's just that she is Armstrong Senior's illegitimate offspring. But her own behaviour is impeccable, as far from sinful and a Magdalen as is possible.

Acting from early childhood, she became a film star, a successful Broadway actress and had oil paintings in major exhibitions, yet she ended up a ticket seller at Radio City Music Hall.

Yes, so sad...and probably far more the typical "movie star" story than everlasting glory.

>27 LolaWalser: - ... Sin herself is pure virtue ... her own behaviour is impeccable ...

I think there were a couple of deliberate red herrings, though: Mrs Gesellius' instant instinctive dislike---almost revulsion---of her; and once or twice her turn of face away from characters, almost as if signaling to the audience she had something to hide.

Also, I was amused to see, way back then, something very like a blooper reel or gag reel at the end of the film---nothing new under the sun ...

>27 LolaWalser: - ... I hope you found that great new upload?

I think so---the length you said and astonishingly good picture quality.

One thing I took away from the film was how racist it was not. I'd anticipated finding it a bit embarrassing, but I did not. Even the Chinese 'villain' was written with a certain amount of Shylock-like empathy---not a black and white character at all (if you'll excuse the phrase). And the relationship between Gesellius and Ali was positively enlightened compared to a lot of stuff in succeeding decades (the elephant in the room being, of course, that all the actors were clearly white).

In 'J. Franklin's choice of 50 American classics of the silent era', posts 6 to 8, we talked about what might have been and what now are seen as masculine or feminine traits. I was struck by the amount of physical affection between men in Opium. I'm assuming that contemporaries wouldn't have noticed it like I did.

I was really impressed by the amount of livestock they managed to include. I've only watched the once, so far, but my impression was that they really did get hold of some elephants and a bunch of lions for filming, not to mention a whole cavalry of horseriders (I can't resist nitpicking that they were African not Indian lions, but it was 1919, after all

>28 alaudacorax:

I think there were a couple of deliberate red herrings, though: Mrs Gesellius' instant instinctive dislike---almost revulsion---of her

I interpreted it as her sensing that the girl was in love with her husband, or at least seeing her as a threat... maybe the envy stereotypically ascribed to women in regard to other younger women?

Even the Chinese 'villain' was written with a certain amount of Shylock-like empathy---not a black and white character at all (if you'll excuse the phrase).

Ha, no--he was mostly green and purple and blue... ;)

I agree. It's still very much an "orientalist" picture, but it does have all those strengths you mention. It's not great that the main non-white characters, Nun-Tschang and Sin, are played by white actors but it was a cool decision not to give them "slanty-eye" makeup. And there were many Asians among the extras (actually I wondered whether the mass scenes may not have been stock footage from some travelogue, but apparently not).

I liked Ali too. Still a classic "loyal servant" but had a dignity of his own--could have had a picture of his own.

Oh, if you enjoyed the animals, you must see The Indian Tomb by-and-by. There is Veidt actually riding atop an elephant!

From what I read, those were circus critters.

>30 LolaWalser:

I interpreted it as her sensing that the girl was in love with her husband ...
But she herself wasn't in love with her husband. You may be right, though.

It's not great that ...
I think Sin was white---I'm pretty sure I remember Nun-Tschang telling Gesellius that he'd married a European, and as Armstrong senior was her father ... So there's this 'white girl trapped among evil orientals' thing going on. Which would set up another red herring by hinting at the 'damsel in distress rescued by handsome prince and they lived happily ever after' trope.

Anyway, only watched once so this is all off the top of my head and I definitely need to, want to and shall watch it again soon. I've really been taken by this film.

>31 alaudacorax:

As far as I can tell, Sin's mother was Chinese. Nung-Tschang tells Gesellius only that they had a European guest (Armstrong) who, despite having a wife and child back home...*cue scene of seduction*

I can't get over what a splendid copy this is. Why oh why couldn't the Murnau/Veidt films have survived like this...

While reading about Kiki de Montparnasse, I learned she made an appearance in a silent film called La Galerie des monstres. It's on YouTube with Russian intertitles, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwsWLBNkCGM&t=3258s. It's also available at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7lsndl with French subtitles but with ads. The film was made in 1924.

The first 20 minutes of the film, which give the back story are missing. In a town in Spanish Castile, a young couple want to marry but when the girl's grandfather forbids it they run away. They end up as performers in a circus, which is where the film begins. His stage name is Riquett, a clown, and she is Ralda, a dancer. They have a baby.

People are constantly trying to tear them apart. There's Sveti, who pretends to be a friend but is in love with Ralda, Flossie, a dancer who's after Riquett and, worst of all, Buffalo, the evil, lecherous owner and a lion tamer. He's in lust with Ralda and is always after her. He plans to fire Riquett and dump his wife.

When Ralda has rejected him for the umpteenth time, he releases a lion from its cage on to the stage where Ralda is dancing. She's mauled but Buffalo claims it was just an accident and forces Riquett's to continue with his act. Madame Violette, his downtrodden wife, has seen what really happened and secretly helps the couple to escape with their child. Once they're safe, she denounces her husband and the other circus people drag him away.

In terms of story, the film is a pretty stock melodrama but it does have some historical interest. The opening of the film features performances by the circus's headliners, all introduced by a barker. Kiki has a short scene to herself and is also in some group shots. This scene becomes increasingly frenetic as the stage becomes more crowded and the dancing wilder. For this sequence and for the lion attack, the film used montages of rapid editing and surrealistic images, techniques that were also employed in other avant-garde French films. There's a shot of just the barker's mouth as seen through the wide end of the megaphone that I thought had a very Un Chien Andalou flavor to it.

Kiki de Montparnasse, who's billed as herself, was at the center of the Jazz Age in Paris. Her body, her face and her name were everywhere. She was a model, a muse, and a symbol of the age. She was Man Ray's mistress for many years and you can see her in his photo Le Violon d'Ingres. Paul Gargallo sculpted a surreal golden bust of her head, most of her face a void save for her smile. Today, her name is that of a luxury lingerie brand that sells not just bras but also riding crops and corsets. There was a lot more to her, of course.

Along with Kiki, two others who deserve mention are:

Jaque Catelain, who directed the film and who played Riquett. He had a long history in cinema, performing through the 50s and appearing in some of Jean Renoir's films.

Lois Moran, who played Ralda. She was 14 or 15 when she made her debut in this film. She also had a long acting career. She was in the 1925 version of Stella Dallas, made the transition from silent to sound, appeared on Broadway, and was on television in the '50s. She also had an affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rosemary Hoyt, one of the central characters in Tender is the Night is supposed to be based on her.

>33 robertajl:

Oh my, thanks. I'll go with the DM version, seems a touch higher res.

She was Man Ray's mistress for many years and you can see her in his photo Le Violon d'Ingres

I got to see the print ("a" print?) in person! Caught the Man Ray exhibition in Vienna in 2018--so well done, not just photos but sculptures, contraptions, films... they also included the explicit photos he made of his and Kiki's sexual intercourse--who knew the first time I saw someone's domestic porn would be in the Kunstforum, rubbing elbows with chic galleristas...

>33 robertajl:

There's a shot of just the barker's mouth as seen through the wide end of the megaphone that I thought had a very Un Chien Andalou flavor to it.

I'd say there's more than just one moment of something... shall we say, out there about it--that entire inter-cut sequence of the clown dancing and the lion tamer assaulting the clown's wife was amazing--and the clown's make-up?!--and, especially, when his wig opens and the "hair" goes wild?! That whole figure could have walked into a horror movie today. (Even without the makeup the clown had a very "modern" face--looks like the kids I see in the streets.)

The three stages of clown--make up; make-up with wig; wig undone--deeply chilling when the clown goes crazy.

   

Oh yes, those scenes of the clown becoming wilder and wilder are compelling and scary. i thought the rest of the movie was pretty pedestrian in comparison.

As an aside, as I was searching on YouTube for the film, this popped up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZqNdDr6XoA&list=PL2D8AA04F09933156. Is his costume based on Riquett's or is it just a black metal thing? I will say that, for a guy nobody really seems to have heard of, Fadades has made an impressive number of "Worst Ever" lists.

>36 robertajl:

Don't know about worst ever lists, but I liked it---in a bemused kind of way ...

Curious name, "Fadades", immediately my mind went to "fadaises". Any chance it could be a parody, some prank or such? Mind you, that era of modern music passed me by almost entirely.

I'm in the midst of watching (not right now, in the sequence) the 1922 serial "La maison du mystère" with Ivan Mosjoukine, here is the link to the first ep on the Cinémathèque française site:

La Maison du mystère, épisode 1: L'Ami félon

I had it marked to watch on Kanopy, so it's great I don't have to use my credits for it.

Very compelling. The plot isn't (so far anyway, I'm about to start ep 5--of 10) supernatural or genre-horrorish, lest the title misleads you. The eps are of various lengths, some only 30 minutes or so, and it doesn't feel "inflated" at all.

Conscious that I haven’t watched much in the way of early cinema lately, I picked out the oldest film in the current MUBI list, which turned out to be Within our gates (1919) by Oscar Micheaux, which claims to be the oldest extant film by an African-American director. Very interesting, astonishingly direct in the way it confronts everything head-on, including some very nasty lynching scenes and an attempted rape, but a bit messed-up dramatically, mostly I think because Micheaux relies on flashbacks very often to convey the content of dialogues, so you end up three or four levels down from the foreground story. And the usual signs of low-budgetness that wouldn’t have bothered anyone in 1919 but look silly now, like the way all the interiors are clearly the same walls with different furniture, and the ludicrously fake facial hair, which wouldn’t pass even in a 21st century coffee bar. Evelyn Preer is brilliant as the female lead, though. Never looks as though she is acting, even when surrounded by the hammiest of hams.

Not silent, but MUBI (in the Netherlands— I think it changes by country) currently has a lot of Sacha Guitry. I watched his Le nouveau testament (1936) last week, quite fun in parts, but too much the stage play really to work as a film. And the usual problem of a director who is also lead actor and writer and is rather fond of the sound of his own voice.

>39 thorold:, >40 thorold:

I saw a film by Micheaux with Paul Robeson... The history of the African-American cinema is very interesting, this whole parallel industry existing until the WWII or so.

Guitry, huh... not a name to conjure with for a long time now... a rare coincidence, I guess, that I too watched something of his quite recently--it might interest you, actually... the director is Marc Allégret (notoriously had an affair with Gide when schoolboy), the star Raimu, and Fernandel appears on film in his first role, as a bellboy. Oh--the scenario is based on Guitry's play:

Le Blanc et le noir (1931) - de Marc Allégret, Robert Florey

Alert to racism, not that it's possible to miss it...

The furniture, especially in the hotel, and the ladies' clothes are interesting. (It's so talky I managed to sketch them all while watching.)

>41 LolaWalser: - The furniture, especially in the hotel, and the ladies' clothes are interesting. (It's so talky I managed to sketch them all while watching.)

Skewered! One of the deadliest film reviews I've ever seen. That got my morning laugh-out-loud out of me.

>42 alaudacorax:

Ha, wasn't even trying... :)

>41 LolaWalser:

This is odd. I recently saw Le roman d'un tricheur and Les Perles de la couronne. Also, as a piece history, his film Ceux de chez nous is very interesting. Made in 1915 to memorialize French culture, which Guitry saw as being under threat by the war, the film records the likes of Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Monet (spelled for some reason as Monnet in the credits) and Rodin, as well as the only known footage of Degas walking along the boulevard de Clichy. YouTube has it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SEY6AK7RDo.

>39 thorold:

A piece of trivia: The father of James Earl Jones, Robert Earl Jones, was in a Micheaux film called Lying Lips (1939).

>44 robertajl:

!! The coincidence is downright spooky. Cool trivia too.

I've added the vid to my playlist--recs from this group.

Protéa, 1913, dir. Victorin Jasset

https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/49285-protea-victorin-jasset-1913/

Only 50 minutes survive but you can tell what fascinated crowds back then. It's so recognisable--cheap pulpy thrills--but done the 1910s style.

In mythology Protéa is Poseidon's shape-shifting daughter; here she is a "famous adventuress" (which at ten I totally believed was a job description).

The McGuffin is some treaty between the fabulous countries of Celtia and Slavonia that gets stolen, retrieved, lost etc. in the usual fashion.

Protéa and her sidekick The Eel spend a lot of time getting in and out various costumes, it's great fun to watch.

Basic Protéa (Josette Andriot--what a Magnificent Nose!):



Protéa in male attire from the credit revue of her costumes:



Protéa as the leader of the all-female Gypsy band:

The Eel and Protéa transforming inside cupboards (we're given the X-ray view):







This thieves' body-sock gear seems to have been very popular--it appears, among others, famously in Feuillade's Les Vampires and Franju's Judex.

Speaking of Franju's Judex, he totally filched that sequence when Francine Bergé and her pal in these same costumes break into Favraux's house from here:

>48 LolaWalser:

Pleased this morning. I've written elsewhere, somewhere, of my fascination with Jacque Rivette's films and especially Celine and Julie Go Boating. I've seen it described as, among other things, a homage to the whole of French cinema, but I am yet to have the viewing experience to work out a fraction of that. Those body-socks have made one little piece of the jigsaw start to click into place, though. I'm glimpsing the reason for the black body-socks in the apparently random roller-skating scene. The 'phantom' in the alternative title Phantom Ladies Over Paris seems to connect back here, too---Fantomas, perhaps---stills from this scene and the alternate title are often connected in articles and webpages about the film.*

Couldn't find a decent-quality still but this was obviously taken while filming:



ETA - * I imagine I'm missing something obvious to more seasoned French cinema buffs.

>51 alaudacorax:

That scene is also said to be a nod to Musidora in Les Vampires. I really must get round to watching this stuff ...

... I've just had a vision of me spending the rest of life watching old films and referring back to Celine and Julie go Boating each time. There are worse ways to spend your life, I suppose.

There's some connection to the circus and circus acrobats here I need to explore more. There were some immensely popular books with acrobat heroes (or anti-heroes). And, of course, showcasing nice figures in tight clothing was always a bonus.

I've just had a vision of me spending the rest of life watching old films and referring back to Celine and Julie go Boating each time.

I saw a headline somewhere panicking about how "it happened, we ran out of television!" and felt very smug about my antiquarian passion. :)

I treated myself to a little Garbo-fest tonight: the 1926 silent Flesh and the devil, which I hadn't seen before, and Lubitsch's Ninotchka from 1939, which I've seen a couple of times in the cinema.

Flesh and the devil, based on a turn-of-the-century German novel, turns out to be gloriously homosocial: Max (John Gilbert) and Uli (Lars Hanson) have been inseparable since early childhood, and spend rather too much of their time, even as officer cadets, hugging and kissing. There's a moment in the opening barrack-room scene where Uli reaches up blindly into the apparently still-sleeping Max's bunk to give him a shake: given that he's reaching for the very middle of the bunk, we can't help wondering which bit of his friend he was intending to grope into wakefulness...

Needless to say, Garbo comes between them, they have to fight a duel over her, and she rushes out over the ice to stop the fight. It's easy enough to imagine what happens next, but weirdly, it doesn't. Garbo falls through a hole in the ice and is never seen again, and the curtain comes down on Max and Uli in a loving clinch! For added value, there was an entirely gratuitous passionate kiss between Garbo and her female co-star Barbara Kent (playing Uli's little sister) just before the big ending. Hollywood was more fun in those days. It was also fascinating to see how much effort MGM was prepared to go to to create a kind of operetta-version of Wilhelmite Prussia. Including a lot of very pretty boys dressed as officer cadets.

Very much the melodrama, and to make it even more OTT the version I watched came with an orchestral score by Carl Davis in the best mock-Wagnerian tradition, which seemed to fit the mood very nicely.



You've all seen Ninotchka, nothing new to say about it, but it is magnificent, especially the early part where Garbo gets a string of clever Billy Wilder lines that she has to deliver with a completely straight face.

"How can such a civilisation survive which permits their women to put things like that on their heads? It won't be long now, comrades."

"I am interested in the Eiffel Tower from a purely technical standpoint."

"If I stay here a week, I will cost the Russian people ... seven cows. Who am I to cost the Russian people seven cows?"

"The latest mass trials were a great success. There will be fewer but better Russians."

Of course, it's patronising about communism and about Ninotchka's feminism, and all those references to Stalin purges are in very bad taste, but it's all done with so much fun and momentum you can't help being swept up in it. And the capitalists don't quite get it all their own way. (I loved Richard Carle as the butler telling us he wasn't in favour of revolution, it would mean having to share his life savings with people like his boss...).

>54 thorold:

"The latest mass trials were a great success. There will be fewer but better Russians."

lol!

It's been ages since I saw any of Garbo's silents, clearly far too long, as I don't even remember that kiss! It shall be remedied forthwith.

My favourite "two guys one gal" set-up is Design for Living with Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March and Gary Cooper. It's Coward, so of course one feels free to speculate about what kind of design it really was... (I haven't read the play)



All the publicity stills take such careful pains to show the two men focussed on her, and never ever looking at each other, it's funny.

But take a look at the poster for the movie... if you didn't know anything about the movie and someone said it was a gay drama, who'd say no?



ETA: oops, could be just a lobby card... but still. Point about "the vibe" stands I think.

Again something unexpected... a Fritz Lang movie I hadn't heard of before--and it has music by my fave Kurt Weill! For this alone you'd think it would be known far and wide, but it seems nobody loved this odd duckling.

You and Me, 1938, with George Raft and Sylvia Sidney, is a bastard child of noir and... Hollywood musical. Midwifed by two Germans. Apparently they forced the script on Lang so that he'd make an American Threepenny Opera. Hence also trapping Weill, the composer for the Brecht/Pabst original, into a collaboration he hated.

The result is a strange combo of threatening and infantile, like a Disney character with brass knuckles taking swings at you.

I'm guessing the movie is easier to enjoy if you're a (forgiving) fan of Lang's and Weill's German work, and in particular if you're familiar with Pabst-directed Die Dreigroschenoper. I'd think that the American audience would find it unpalatable, what with the musical numbers (very few, I hasten to add) breaking into a gangster tale.

Not that the non-Americans would necessarily like it more. Much as I love Weill, most of his American work is to my taste seriously marred by the hamminess and cloying sentimentality of the Hollywood musical. There is its dreadful cheap "operatic" singing style, utterly at odds with Weill's German musical theatre and cabaret, and of course the insistence on "wholesomeness" and unadulterated happy ends.

Nevertheless, Lang produced a brilliant middle sequence with the gangsters wooing back to the fold one of their own (Raft), reminding him in a strange syncopated chorus (almost a rap) of the good old days in prison, and then another when they break into the department store they mean to rob.

Those images are straight out of the world of M. and the Mabuse films.

Raft too would have been great as a real Mack the Knife, rather than the softie who went straight and is now content with a retail job. That dude's a shark and we never believe otherwise.

A still from the sequence superimposing the gang's tavern meetup with their time in prison:

Another movie outside the focus period (it's from 1951), but with a connection to the silents built into the plot: Hollywood Story, directed by... William Castle!

Richard Conte plays a hotshot producer who decides to make a movie based on an unsolved murder in Hollywood from 20 years ago; this of course awakens old ghosts. It's a pretty nifty plot, actually.

What's great about this movie--recall this is after the smash hit of Sunset Boulevard--is the homage paid to "old Hollywood" and the silents. Pictures of old stars, famous Hollywood locations, watching the silents (actually newly-shot footage, so the female lead could play up her "resemblance" to her mother the diva), and appearance, in their real selves, of half a dozen actors from the silent era: Helen Gibson, Francis X. Bushman etc.--still working!

Joel McCrea has a walk-on role as himself too.

The last sequence has hints of Castle the horror director... check out the creepy atmosphere in the props department where Conte has chased the killer:

Very interesting woman and article. I loved her quote: Jeg kan derimod ikke lide de film, hvor vi skal sjæle. Jeg vil hellere stjæle! (I don't like the movies where we have to swoon. I would rather steal) In Danish it rhymes. I thought it was a clever way of saying it

This was an reply to post 22. I can't remember how to link to the post

>58 trisweather:

Hi--that is a great quote!

To link a post hit the "greater than" sign > and then the number of the post you want to link.

>59 LolaWalser:
Thank you. I haven’t been active on LibraryThing for a couple of years, so I have forgotten how to do alot of the things

>60 trisweather:

Welcome back then. :)

>33 robertajl:, >35 LolaWalser:

Just a footnote to this, the info about the film (restored!) on the CF website:

https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/52134-la-galerie-des-monstres-jaque-catel...

Unfortunately the film is not available there any longer (it was up in May, sighhh), but this is to note that a restoration exists and it's at least 13-15 minutes longer than the bootleg versions online.

Maybe Lobster Films will release it soon? We live in hope... Interesting to read about Marcel L'Herbier's involvement and mentorship of Jaque-Catelain (the director/actor).

YouTube came up with Dmitri Kirsanov’s Ménilmontant (1926) for me (https://youtu.be/V7AyQxEq3ZY — an unrestored DVD transfer, by the look of it). It seems to be one of those films cinephiles know about, but I hadn’t heard of it. Lots of fancy double-exposures and nervous panning, and low-level shots of wet cobblestones that look as though they were thought up by someone who knew that this would be a complete cliché 25 years later, so he wanted to enjoy it while he had the chance.

Best bit is a Chaplinesque scene where the desperate and hungry young woman is sitting on a bench with her baby, and a stranger sits down next to her and starts eating bread and salami. Lovely non-verbal storytelling. Kirsanov invests more time in that salami than he does in the equally non-verbal narrative of where the baby came from.

Lots of sisterly hugging and kissing and pillow fighting, but they actually are sisters, so any odd ideas we might have about all that romping in nightclothes obviously aren’t the director’s fault...

Off topic really, but it is kind of a silent film, although made for TV and in my lifetime...

I've just been watching Eric Sykes's famous short film, The Plank from 1979, which came up on YouTube — don't think I've seen it in the last forty years. Tati-esque (but in a very English way!) comedy without dialogue but with occasional sound effects. Some brilliantly-timed gags, often using the characteristic Tati sequence where something improbable and hilarious happens without the character noticing, then something else even more improbable cancels it out, and when the character looks up everything is exactly back where it should be, and only the audience know why they are laughing. And lots of familiar faces popping up in minor roles in the background. It's aged surprisingly well.

I must look for the original 1967 cinema version...

I'm noting all of that but not much time to watch and comment right now. Back in the Gothic group I linked this short (15 minutes) Italian adaptation of a Poe story--the link is to the Cineteca Milano so you have to log in (free registration, or try via Facebook or Google account):

Il caso Valdemar (1936)

Just a note that it may not be suited to the squeamish... (it's the story about the hypnotised dead man who upon release from hypnosis goes to pieces... literally.)

The Beast Must Die (1974) is severely outside the remit of this group of course (although the mere existence of a mash-up werewolf movie/And Then There Were None/The Most Dangerous Game/Blaxploitation thriller - with a gimmicky William Castle-esque "werewolf break" given the audience a moment to guess who is the werewolf, and a black actor getting top billing - is surely something to be grateful for).

The reason I mention it here is the the recent UK Blu-ray release has some interesting extras, specifically two long interviews from what seems to be an oral history project taking the UK film industry for its subject, called the British Entertainment History Project (from the name you have to imagine the net is cast wider than film, and wonder what reminiscences of early television and radio, or the last days of Music Hall, and who knows what else, might be out there). One this disc there's the second part of an interview with film editor Peter Tanner covering 1939 to 1987, and an interview with cinematographer Alan Lawson. Both interviews clock in at about an hour and a half and cover the mens' careers in chronological order.

I suppose there's limited direct relevance to the silent and early sound period, but the interviews do give quite a detailed insight into the day-to-day behind the camera. The ratio of (e.g.) discussion of lens length to studio gossip is heavily weighted to the technical. Hollywood Babylon it ain't!

There must be other interviews in the series dotted not-quite randomly around other Indicator Blu-ray releases (both of the interviewees worked on The Beast Must Die but mention it only in passing and disparagingly: "it was made for American television" (not strictly true) "they can keep it!".

There is a US release of the film due from Severin Films but, looking on their website, these particular extras aren't going to be included.

I love Ozu movies but had never seen any of his silent films. Yesterday, I saw Passing Fancy, made in 1933. (Ozu was one of the last Japanese film makers to adopt sound.) The film is often called a comedy and there are some great comedic moments but, as with many Ozu films, it's an exploration of tensions within a family. Unlike many later Ozu films, which have middle-class protagonists, the film takes place in Tokyo's Fukugawa district, which, at least when Ozu made the film, was poor and working glass. (Ozu grew up in this area.)

The main character Kihachi is good natured and kind hearted but also impulsive, illiterate and feckless. He's the single father of a young son. He and his friend Jiro meet a young, homeless woman one night, Kihachi helps her out, much to Jiro's disgust, and proceeds to fall in love with her. She, of course, considers him an "uncle" (much is made of Kihachi's age, although the actor was only in his mid-thirties.) She's in love with the younger, handsomer, aloof Jiro. Things eventually work out, Kihachi sacrifices his own desire to bring them together, blah blah.

I thought the really compelling plot was the relationship between Kihachi and his son Tomio. Tomio is very bright, good at school, and rather scrappy. The relationship is close but strained, Kihachi is hardly the world's best father, and things get worse as Tomio becomes more aware of his father's limitations. There are a few scenes that are very hard to watch. You also get a good picture of the neighborhood, its cohesiveness and its problems.

The actors who play Kihachi and Tomio are wonderful and made other films with Ozu. I guess the Kihachi character was popular because Ozu made several other films that featured him. In an article I read, Ozu was quoted as saying that when he was growing up in the area, there were many men like Kihachi about.

I'm hoping to find the time to watch more of Ozu's silents. I really liked this one.

Morocco -my first real introduction to Dietrich, von Sternberg - even to Gary Cooper who I was aware of only as a middle-aged cowboy in Saturday afternoon television matinees that I found wearisome.

I was blown away by it - I'd read how sound hobbled film as a visual experience but this never looked less than sumptuous, and never clunky as if struggling with unfamiliar technology.

I found the story and the characterisations surprisingly mature...but I shouldn't have been surprised because its a “pre-code” picture and I already knew know how tough-minded the silents could be, albeit their preferred genre was melodrama (not comedy, not tragedy but permitting itself to draw on both modes and mix them up, and if not perhaps being more true to life, then being able to represent more aspects of life , like a Dickens novel, maybe?).

What with my second-and third- hand impressions and preconceptions of what this kind of film, with these actors would be like, I should have had a fair idea of what to expect; and in fact I think that holds true for many of the individual elements of the film, but when it's all put together...

Any attempt to describe the plot or the characters reads like the tiredest of clichés. But the experience of actually watching the film, was a very different experience.

>66 robertajl:

I don't recall seeing that silent Ozu, but I do remember the first (silent) version of Floating weeds... and I was born, but...--another one with excellent depictions of children (boys). He did like to use the same actors over and over, almost as in an actors' troupe.

>67 housefulofpaper:

It's a beaut! My favourite Dietrich movie. The young Gary Cooper was extraordinarily watchable, as his ineptness and wooden-ness serendipitously conveyed a welcome naïveté and vulnerability.

>68 LolaWalser:

Daft thing: I remember seeing Floating Weeds not very long ago, but I can't, for the life of me, remember if I saw the silent or later. A hazard of sub-titles, I suppose, but I can't remember if I saw it in colour or b&w, either. I remember being quite absorbed, though.

ETA - And now I'm remembering thinking it very beautifully filmed---and I still can't remember if I saw it b&w or colour. Wasn't there something odd about the camera techniques? Never using a moving camera? And something else? Something unusual about the way he filmed? I'll look it up online ...

ETA, again - Looking at Ozu's Wikipedia page, by what I remember of the style I think I must have been watching his later remake, and so outside the scope of this thread ... I do remember I wanted to see more of him, though, so I should start by watching both films, if I can get hold of them.

MUBI has got a couple of F W Murnau titles on offer at the moment — I’ve just been watching Der letzte Mann (1924; The last laugh), starring an amazing set of whiskers (formerly the property of the Austrian emperor, surely?) with Emil Jannings lurking somewhere behind them. A lovely, sad story of a man who gets all his dignity and self-respect from his important job as commissionaire in a big hotel, but is suddenly declared “too old” and demoted to lavatory attendant.

Very clever visual storytelling, interesting contrasts between the luxury hotel and the tenement building where he lives; Jannings overacts like anything but Murnau seems to exploit that to make it all even more heart-rending. And no need for any intertitles except for one near the end to make it clear to us that in any sane world the story should end with the man dying at his post in his humiliating new job, but that this is a commercial film and they’ve been coerced into adding an implausible happy ending. Talk about a disclaimer!

>70 thorold:

The "happy" ending is just tacked on--I believe the first time I saw it in the cinema it was the original "downer" version. But the DVD (the one I have at least), offers both.

I got a new, giant monitor the other day and inaugurated it with Das indische Grabmal.

Murnau’s Tartuffe (1925 or 1926, according to where you look...) last night, also on MUBI, the version with an orchestral score. Felt like a very slight work compared to >70 thorold:, with the storytelling really pared down to the minimum. Probably illustrates the difficulty of making a wordy stage play work as a silent film. But still nice to look at, with Jannings pretending to be Depardieu, and Lil Dagover managing to look seductive at the same time as making it very clear to us how disgusting she finds Tartuffe’s lechery. Also some clever use of (fake) candlelight and some impressive close-ups of Rosa Valletti’s dirty face.

Since it was still early I started watching Céline et Julie vont en bâteau, (1973 and thus off-topic here, but mentioned in >51 alaudacorax: above) but I failed to note that it was over three hours long, and went to sleep well before the end. I’ll have to come back to it before it rolls off the end of the MUBI selection. Interesting and strange, anyway...

(Edited three times because I kept getting the title mixed up...)

>72 thorold:
Céline et Julie... is a great favorite of mine. It's surreal and funny and I'm a sucker for references to Alice in Wonderland. I love the entrance to 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes. It's so beautiful and mysterious.

I saw another Ozu silent, Dragnet Girl, made in 1933. I liked the snappy title. It's a gangster movie with many of the conventions of a Hollywood film. Almost everyone is in Western clothes, there are scenes in boxing clubs, nightclubs, and a modern office. Lots of signs are in English. I saw posters on the wall for prize fights with boxers like Jack Dempsey.

The story centers on the growing attraction between Joji, a small-time gangster, and Kozuko, the older sister of a young man who wants to join Joji's gang. She is sweet, kind and determined to save him. Tellingly, she's the only character who wears traditional Japanese clothes. Joji is attracted to her, much to the dismay of his girlfriend and partner in crime, Tokiko. Tokiko is angry, jealous, but finds she is drawn to the better life Kozuko represents.

Tokiko persuades Joji to reform but he proposes one last heist, partially to help Kozuko's brother, who's stolen money from her, partially to fund their new life. Of course, things don't work out, the police are after them, and Tokiko wants to surrender to the police so they can do their penance and start life clean when they come out. She finally persuades Joji (of course, she does have to shoot him in the leg), and they're led off to prison.

You can see a lot of Ozu's style here, although the camera isn't as static as in later movies, but the low camera positions are there, the use of multiple shots of details rather than a single long shot to establish location, violations of the eyeline rules (sometimes people don't seem to be looking at one another when they speak), no fades, dissolves or wipes, and his fascination with objects. One example is the baby bootee Tokiko is knittting, which gives us another reason for her need to redeem herself.

Certainly not the best Ozu I've seen but still interesting. Even in a gangster movie, it's family and emotion that drives his characters.

Huh, I had no idea Ozu made a gangster film.

Looks like we could form a "Céline & Julie" fan club too...

I saw Robert Wiene's 1923 Raskolnikow (or 'Crime and Punishment') in the excellent copy available at Cineteca Milano--much better than anything found on YT... adding the link for reference:

https://www.cinetecamilano.it/biblioteca/catalogo/record/1182

If you care for Expressionist cinema you gotta see this one way or another.

Also saw Rapsodia satanica from 1915, with one of Pirandello's leading ladies, Lyda Borelli. An ageing woman sells her soul to Satan for youth--the catch is that she must not fall in love. As suicided corpses of rejected suitors pile around her, of course she'll get hit by the love whammy sooner or later...

Fabulous settings, designs, costumes--surprisingly many young men in mass scenes, I thought, given this was made in the middle of the war.

https://www.cinetecamilano.it/biblioteca/catalogo/record/1834

Finally, Barrymore's Jekyll & Hyde, for the third or fourth time. Love that movie. But more about it under the Franklin checklist, by and by...

>75 LolaWalser: Italy only went to war in Spring 1915 — maybe it was made before mobilisation?

>76 thorold:

You're probably right--it came out only in 1917 but (as I just checked) was finished in the spring of 1915.

I’ve just been watching Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: die Symphonie der Grosstadt (1927), another one that seems to be very famous but I didn’t know about. Lots of trains and trams and buses, so very much my kind of thing, but I made the mistake of watching the first version that came up on YouTube, which had no soundtrack. There are others that have the original symphonic score by Edmund Meisel, which makes it more interesting. It’s a film full of things that make a lot of noise, so it really needs noisy music. I loved all the shots of ordinary people just behaving normally, especially the kids, and all the unlikely connections he makes between dissimilar things through clever edits.

Ahh, how I regret now not linking a recent restoration on Filmmuseum (it was up until Sep 9, apparently gone now--and not available on YouTube either), Gefahren der Großstadt-Straße, 1924. If you liked Ruttman's movie, you'd have loved this one! Although very different in approach and philosophy, it's not "artistic", it was educational, teaching people--mostly pedestrians--how to navigate the traffic, and not only that, but also had a fantastic segment on petty street crime and how to counter it! They enacted the most popular cons, showed how to handle bags etc. It sounds dry--I was afraid it would strike most as dull--but I found it fascinating.

It seems it was making the rounds of silent film festivals this summer:

https://www.foerderverein-filmkultur.de/gefahren-der-grossstadt-strasse/

A Fool There Was, 1915, with Theda Bara--one of the few her surviving movies but also one of the most important, in terms of influence. She's credited as "The Vampire"! Frankly I expected something ridiculous but it turns out to be quite a nifty drama, with lots of power.

One of the first (or the first?) femmes fatales on screen, and really a far stronger character than the noir dames of the 1940s--for one thing, she sails through the whole picture as nobody's victim, unscathed and unrepentant. Another fascinating aspect is that her evil seductions are motivated by sheer hunger for domination (and perhaps, or including, sex) and not, as is usually the case, for mere wealth.

Also, she takes pleasure in destroying men and laughing at her victims. She even laughs in the face of the wretch who is threatening her with a gun--at which he aims it at his own head and shoots himself on the spot.



Later she'll snicker at the blood stain on the deck.

All this makes her seem a malevolent deity, even a touch uncanny. This becomes especially evident in the scenes where her hair is let loose and she's wearing just a ghostly shift--here she is derisively scattering flowers on the nearly-dead man she ruined and humiliated repeatedly, in front of his friends, then his wife, then even his small child:



Quite remarkable in more than one way.

Loved this getup:



The large rose she's wearing is practically her weapon--she uses it to ensnare attention, caress the prey, she even beats down with it the gun shoved at her.

Who knew?!?! Peter Lorre and the First Doctor made a movie together!



Peter Lorre as Painter, an eccentric thug, and William Hartnell as his boss and friend, shady businessman Charles Durham. Double Confession (1950)

>82 LolaWalser:

Well, I didn't. Oddly for an old British b&w I have absolutley absolutely no memory of that one. IMDb says it was long thought lost so I suppose that explains it.

>82 LolaWalser:, >83 alaudacorax:

My eyebrow raised a bit at the thought of Peter Lorre as 'eccentric thug'. I'm intrigued if only for that ...

I've seen part of it on Talking Pictures TV, but at the time I was without a DVD recorder. It was released commercially but the asking price for the DVD is currently £40-£50.

It was very strange watching Hartnell and Lorre together. My brain was telling me they don't belong in the same universe, as if I was watching a Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid style fake.

Well, if you hurry (I'm afraid this channel's doomed, too good to last), you can see it in excellent copy here:

Double Confession-1950-Derek Farr, Peter Lorre, William Hartnell, Joan Hopkins, Kathleen Harrison

Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard's son, plays a newspaper man and there are several what I must consider to be meta-jokes about people tolerating him only because of his dad...

More Danes: After reading an exuberant poem about Asta Nielsen by crazy Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen, I had to find out who she was, and YouTube came up with her debut in Afgrunden from 1910. Not a very sophisticated film, in fact a rather clunky melodrama, but you can certainly see why a susceptible young poet might get worked up about Ms Nielsen and her hips.

Obviously the one to watch is her cross-dressing Hamlet from 1920. But I haven’t got to that yet...

Nielsen was... HUGE. Metaphorically. A megastar. I don't think she was the first cross-dressed Hamlet (would that be Sarah Bernhardt?) but maybe first on film... There's a set from Filmmuseum München I've been coveting a long time now, with four of her films. On the big screen I remember seeing her in Joyless Street, but there must've been more...

Obligatory Veidt reference: they acted together in Richard Oswald's sadly lost Kurfürstendamm and in Der Reigen--there are fragments of the latter online. All from the same year as her Hamlet!

I watched Hamlet and posted about it in the cross-dressing thread. Lovely! Apparently there is a short fragment of Bernhardt as Hamlet on film somewhere, says Wikipedia, but Nielsen seems to be the first complete female Hamlet on film.

Google throws up a few claims that Charlotte Charke was the first woman to play Hamlet, others say Sarah Siddons. A long time ago, either way.

>88 LolaWalser: I saw the bits of Der Reigen — interesting, but tantalising!

Also watched a few more of her prewar Danish melodramas, which were mostly fun for the authentic Edwardian-ness of the surroundings (and those hats! — there’s one where she seems to be balancing something the size of a Shetland pony on her head...).

Die Suffragette (1913), one of the ones made by her husband Urban Gad (what a great name for a husband!), was amiably silly, not least for the very half-baked attempts to convey to us that it’s meant to be set in Britain. Asta plays the plucky activist who plants a bomb in the office of a cabinet minister, only to realise that he’s the unknown man she’s secretly in love with, who is presumably an ancestor of Boris Johnson, since she acquires four small children within the blink of an intertitle after kissing him. Not a terribly politically correct film. Asta’s character is called “Nelly Panburne”!

Mod Lyset (dir Holger-Madsen, 1919) was the best of the early ones so far, a silly story, but filmed in a way that kept you interested. Asta marries a card-sharp by mistake, and he’s arrested in what may well be the lamest car chase in cinema history (Asta and her new husband are in a horse-drawn coach on a completely deserted street in central Copenhagen, the police screech past at a thrilling 15km/hr, and pull up far enough ahead not to scare the horses). Then she finds true love with a sexy preacher-man and turns into a Danish Dinah Morris, preaching the gospel from a tree-stump.

Fascinating to think that they were churning those things out at the rate of six or seven a year, more in some cases!

Asta marries a card-sharp by mistake

Who of us hasn't married by mistake!... once at least...

In the attempt to forget the planet, the era, and, basically everything, I've been bingeing some French spoof series of Agatha Christie (well, maybe more self-consciously ironic than spoofy), with a wonderful young actress, Blandine Bellavoir--a real redhead--have I mentioned my weakness for redhead women--SIGHHH. She pops off the screen so. The characters are all deliberately stereotypical but hers, a "girl reporter/detective" feminist-y type, is fresh and modern and alive.

Oh wait, I meant to say, BECAUSE I've been bingeing on this I haven't been watching anything else... but every time I read about Nielsen I feel the urge to indulge.

There is something very addictive about all those obscure Nielsen titles that are now popping up in my YouTube recommendations. Hamlet is still far the most interesting of those I've watched. Nielsen seems to be a lot more comfortable acting in doublet and hose than in Edwardian corsets and big hair, especially as she doesn't have to worry about being taller than most of the men, which is clearly a problem in a lot of the early films. She sometimes looks like a bad drag performer because of all the stooping they made her do.

Something completely different: reading about Russia in the twenties reminded me that I'd never actually seen Man with a movie camera, and it turned out that YouTube was happy to oblige. Rather like Berlin: die Symphonie der Grosstadt (>78 thorold:) in some ways, but much more paradoxical and playful (according to Wikipedia, Vertov would always insist that he had pioneered those shots in his earlier films, and if anything, Ruttmann was copying him).

Anyway, I couldn't possibly dislike a film that has so many trams in it. Wonderful stuff!

For Halloween I rewatched, for the umpteenth time, Nosferatu. Not a rarity by any means, but my favorite vampire movie. Todd Browning's Dracula is important to me. I've been watching it since I was a kid (when it scared me silly), and it was probably the first vampire movie I ever saw, but now it seems dated. On the other hand, I still find Nosferatu very disturbing. Lugosi did have a small part in the lost 1920 Murnau film, Der Januskopf, which starred Conrad Veidt.

>92 thorold: ... Very much not a silent, but I indulged myself this evening with another Soviet classic, the 1936 Circus, with some quasi-Busby Berkeley musical numbers, a strong (but awkwardly timed) anti-racist, anti-German, anti-American message, a performing dog, one superb song you’d never think started life in a musical, and an improbably literary pedigree — by Isaac Babel, out of Ilf and Petrov. But mainly simply good fun and circus stunts.

>93 robertajl:

How sad is it that we don't have Lugosi and Veidt together!

Is it the uncanny Max Schreck that keeps Nosferatu eternally chilling? The more time passes, the more alien he seems.

>92 thorold:

Coincidence... I had not used my October Kanopy credits on time so on Oct 31 rushed to select eight movies from my Watchlist; among others, Eisenstein's Old and new, from the Landmarks Of Early Soviet Film collection, and the surviving fragment of Lev Kuleshov's Engineer Prite's project--now that is doing duty to film science... From the write-up on Kanopy:

'Engineer Prite's Project' is part of a series of films from Ruscico - Russian Cinema Council. 1918 - Lev Kuleshov's directorial debut. This work is extremely important not only for Russian cinema; it became a landmark in the history of the world's cinematograph. For the first time a specific method of montage had been used in this film, which came to be known later as "Soviet montage". Despite the fact that Kuleshov's films had preceded many discoveries of Vertov and Eisenstein, his works are little known outside Russia. Among his students were Vsevolod Pudovkin and Boris Barnet. In the introduction to Kuleshov's book The Art of Cinema (1928), his former students wrote: "It was on his shoulders that we crossed into the open sea. We make films - Kuleshov made cinematography... "

It's hard to be categorical, but the early Soviet films do feel somehow... more modern, less fusty, less boxy-theatrical and outdated than the American ones of the same vintage. You can picture a current movie with the same editing and switches as the Soviet ones--not something I feel about Griffith or other American silents of the 1910s... No wonder Hollywood wooed Eisenstein and the Europeans...

All 30 minutes of Kuleshov's debut available here: Engineer Prite's Project (1918)

English subs under the CC (closed captions) tab.

The Kanopy offer included a 1969 documentary about Kuleshov, featuring himself and... Viktor Shklovsky!, among other. A sequence from it led me to Kuleshov's 1933 adaptation of an O. Henry story... and what do you know, the same channel has that too. Recommended. Interesting to see a black man among the characters (credited as "Negro--V. Rood"--Weyland Rodd, born Wayland Rudd: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734460/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm ) His likeness was prominently used on the original movie poster.



The Great Consoler (1933)

Vaguely linked — if only by the randomness of YouTube — someone else I didn’t know about is Władysław Starewicz, who seems to be claimed as the inventor of stop-motion puppet animation. I saw his The cameraman’s revenge from 1911, a lovely parody of an adultery melodrama with a cast of beetles, grasshoppers and dragonflies. Apparently they were all real (dead) insects, cunningly articulated so that he could pose them. He worked in Kaunas and Moscow before the revolution, moved to Paris later.

>97 thorold:

Tickled pink by that—seriously weird—great fun!

>97 thorold:, >98 alaudacorax:

Heh, yeah, Starewicz's insect animations are delightful.

I saw the longest version of La roue available, in the Flicker Alley restoration. Very strong influence of Zola in the tale of a working class father and son both in love with the girl who was raised as their daughter and sister (but really isn't), both alcoholics etc. Speaking of train movies!--surely this is the mother of them all...

Another Buster Keaton, and for the first time (!): The Cameraman, 1928. Generally described as Keaton's last great film. The first he made for MGM, in a career turn that, basically, ruined him as a creative artist. Couldn't help thinking that the way they misread and missed Keaton's talent was similar to what happened to Veidt with them... They collected these great performers but didn't understand what made them great, how to use them.

There's a beautiful extra (I borrowed the new Criterion set) with two silent movie nerds traipsing all around Los Angeles pointing out the spots where famous scenes were filmed.

From the lovely essay by one Imogen Sara Smith:

(Keaton) and the movies had been born the same year, 1895, and from this first encounter he saw where his future lay; he tore up a lucrative theater contract, took a job with Arbuckle's company, and never looked back. It helped that the camera adored him back. As soon as he stepped in front of the lens, his lucid movements and Swiss-watch comic timing, his astounding athleticism and the subtle expressiveness of his beautiful face, made him a natural creature of cinema. Arbuckle, who became Keaton's mentor and best friend, said his protégé "lived in the camera". He took to moviemaking with a single-minded passion, pouring himself into his films the way fuel becomes flame, leaving nothing behind except light.

>100 LolaWalser: I’m quite fond of Keaton’s late short The Railrodder, made sometime in the sixties as a promotion for Visit Canada, which came as an extra on my set of The General. He “accidentally” crosses the country by rail from ocean to ocean on a borrowed PW trolley in the space of about 25 minutes, with some clever but fairly low-key stunts.

>101 thorold:

That sounds very special. I'm trying to curb my "entertainment" spending but nevertheless eyeing a set of Keaton's shorts... (all pre-MGM, though, so won't include that).

The Criterion set of The Cameraman includes Spite Marriage, Keaton's second MGM movie and last silent. Very likeable. It recycles a situation from The Navigator (my fave Keaton), with a couple stuck on the ocean on an abandoned ship. There's a fantastic sequence where Keaton is thrown overboard and carried swiftly by the waves in the opposite direction to that of the speeding ship--he manages to grab the lifeboat the ship is pulling with the same uncanny precision and elegance with which he'd hop on a passing bus. It's just... they can't have rehearsed a sequence like that, not really. There was clearly a strong current--the waves took him bow to stern in three seconds, and of course he was at a distance, and of course the lifeboat jigged about on its own, and despite all that he executed the grab not just successfully but almost casually.

Also saw Of Human Bondage, 1934, with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. The write-up has it as the movie which propelled Davis to big roles and stardom. I haven't read the book, so this is just about the movie--I detested Philip and felt sympathetic toward that "demon" Mildred so much! Not, I dare say, what anyone intended. :)

Yeah, I gave in... ordered the Keaton shorts and SO happy I did, loving them to pieces. So far I've seen all the ones he did with Fattty Arbuckle. I'd need to rewatch to make sure, but so far I think The Cook is my favourite, for Keaton "walking like an Egyptian", and dancing--and Fatty too, adorned with pots and pans and with sausage links playing the role of the asp.

More Keaton in College, 1927, also for the first time. Just wonderful. I watched the finale three times, just to see him run... and jump and pole-vault through the open window... absolutely exhilarating.

But the loveliest moment is that scene when the students grab him and start tossing him on a blanket, and a woman throws an umbrella at them, which Keaton catches and opens, and then, as he's tossed up, he descends in slow motion because of the umbrella... For me the whole movie coalesced around that, as if it was all made just for that. Sheer beauty.

If you can’t beat ‘em...

I ran out of Eric Rohmer films to watch on MUBI, so I had a look around for Buster Keaton on YouTube and watched Sherlock Jr. (with the surreal stepping-into-the-movie-screen sequence) and the gloriously silly The blacksmith, which is just one long string of precision-timed inanimate object gags, plus a couple of trained horses.

>101 thorold: >103 LolaWalser:

In case The Railrodder isn’t on your DVDs, it turns out that you can find it on the NFB YouTube channel:

The Railrodder: https://youtu.be/xYmcN12M97o
Buster Keaton rides again (Making of documentary): https://youtu.be/5HOWv7Ce69E

>105 thorold:

Thanks SO MUCH! I love that someone did that--and wow, that's a 70-yo man on a speeding thingummy... even without the stunts of his youth, pretty scary. So many nods to his old films, and I'm sure I'm missing 90%...

You mention The blacksmith, which the notes inform me was restored only a few years ago--there are two versions with different content it seems. It comes at the end of the set so I haven't seen it yet.

Have started on the Keaton-produced ones and it's like entering a country never seen before, behind the looking-glass, all wonder and miracles. Take this:

Buster Keaton - One Week (1920)

Walter Kerr (The Silent Clowns):

To sit through dozens and dozens of short comedies of the period and then to come upon One Week is to see the one thing no man ever sees: a garden at the moment of blooming. There had been all that desperate effort at becoming; now self-possessed life has arrived, matter of fact about its beauty.

The one and only Mae West... snapshot from Belle of the Nineties, 1934



An uncharacteristically "fatale" figuration for her--her persona is too much of a good-natured, sporting gal for such dark metaphors... (and it is played for a joke, following a butterfly and a bat background)

Two moments I appreciated especially--when she tells a jealous girlfriend of a would-be suitor that she never takes men off other women, and in another scene, rebuffs someone's aggressive advances saying that SHE likes to pick her men (not be picked by them).

West was for all times... but the movie, set in New Orleans, is VERY dated when it comes to black characters.

In the same set (Universal Rarities, Films of the 1930s), in Million Dollar Legs, 1932, with W. C. Fields there's a hilarious Mata Hari type, a woman "no man can resist". She does a great number dressed in a very interesting gown with cutouts (bare middle section and elbows)

 


Hmm, maybe there should be a costume thread...

This cracks me up

I saw Maurice Tourneur's movie The Broken Butterfly, made in 1919, which was recently restored. (I saw this on a pay service. There are only clips available on YouTube, so far as I could see.) It's a melodrama about the passionate and ill-fated love affair between Marcene Elliott with a composer. The lovers are pulled apart, there's an illegitimate child, a backstory of revenge, death--all in one hour!

The story is over the top and improbable but the film is beautiful to watch (and there's a loyal dog). Tourneur made many silent films and certainly knew his business. His version of Treasure Island is lost and is on many "if only this would turn up in the broom closet of a Norwegian insane asylum" list. The actress Shirley Mason played Jim Hawkins. He is also the father of Jacques Tourneur, who made many films I really like.

>110 robertajl:

Thanks for the inspiration! The library doesn't have that, but I requested The Blue Bird.

MUBI in the Netherlands seems to be having a Chaplin-fest for Christmas, with about a dozen films on offer at the moment. I watched three shorts tonight:
— Shoulder arms (1918) — Charlot on the Western Front, ending the war by stealing the imperial staff car with the Kaiser inside. A lovely sequence where he and a few other soldiers are trying to sleep in a dug-out flooded to a little way above the level of the beds.
— Sunnyside (1919) — Bucolic comedy, including a bizarre silent ballet sequence where Charlot dances in a dream with four pre-raphaelite nymphs, and a superbly-timed mop-gag. Plus goats and a harmonium.
— A day’s pleasure (1919) — A string of random visual gags involving a Model T and a boat-trip, without much pretence at narrative. Ends with Charlot playing what may well be the earliest recorded game of Twister with two traffic policemen in a patch of spilt tar.

... So I had to watch Modern times, of course! Everyone remembers the giant cogwheels and Charlot feeding his foreman lunch when he’s stuck in the machine, but I’d forgotten all the scenes where Goddard gets the limelight, especially the fabulous scene at the beginning where she’s stealing bananas with a knife between her teeth.



And Charlot roller-skating blindfold on the edge of a precipice, and the brilliant restaurant sequence with waiter-Charlot trying to navigate his tray of roast duck through a crowd of dancers and the desperate guest watching it approach and then recede again, and eventually get hung up on the chandelier... I remembered Tati’s version of that gag in Playtime, but had never noticed that it was a Chaplin reference!

I saw Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage, made in 1921. It's based on Selma Lagerlöf's novel, Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness. (She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, BTW.)

In I think 1924, Chaplin said Sjöström stood apart from every other director and he was a big influence on Bergman and acted in several of his movies. His last performance was in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, as Professor Borg.

The film uses flashbacks to tell the story. In the present, the Salvation Army worker Sister Edit is dying of tuberculosis and wants to speak to David Holm, a drunkard, played by Sjöström. She has been trying to save him and is also attracted to him.

Meanwhile, Holm is in a graveyard, drinking with friends, and telling his drinking buddies about his old friend Georges, who told him about the legend that the last person to die each year has to drive Death's carriage and collect the souls of everybody who dies the following year. Georges himself had died on New Year's Eve the previous year. (Lagerlöf was interested in folk tales and this one is from Brittany.)

Gustafsson, a colleague of Edit, finds David, but is unable to persuade him to go see her. When his friends try to drag him there, a fight breaks out, and David is struck on the head with a bottle just before the clock strikes twelve. David's soul emerges from his body as the carriage appears. The driver is Georges.

Through the flashbacks, we learn about Holm's life with his wife and two children, which was initially happy and prosperous. (Both Sjöström and Sjöström had alcoholic fathers.) We then see how, as his alcoholism deepens, he becomes increasingly brutal, until, by the present, he is a violent, frightening character. He too has TB and actually tries to infect his children by spitting on them. (He's already infected Sister Edit.)

There's one scene that seems to be taken directly from Broken Blossoms, when Battling Burrows smashes through the closet to get at Lucy. The scene is repeated here, although it doesn't end in murder.

The story's convoluted. Holm finally repents at Edith's deathbed and Georges, the coachman, brings him back to life.

Lagerlöf was interested in Theosophy and some of this comes through the movie. Also, in the book, Holm's wife is deprecated and partially blamed for his drunkenness. There's a lot of talk about how Edit and Holm were soulmates and would be united in the spiritual plane.

Sjöström made the wife a much more important character and the actress, Hilda Borgström, is just wonderful. She could convey incredible emotion with subtle gestures and facial expressions.

Initially, the movie drew in audiences because of its sophisticated special effects. It uses multiple exposures, particularly for the phantom coach and the driver, and it was, I think, one of the first films to use night-for-night shooting. Sjöström's studio was very modern, with the latest equipment and he used it well.

Over time, as those techniques became standard, critics were harsher on the film, saying the techniques dated it.

To me, the story seems melodramatic but the acting makes it very compelling. Both Sjöström, with his imposing physical presence, and Borgström make this film well worth watching. (Bergman commented on having to rein in Sjöström's performances because they were too over the top.)

>114 robertajl:

It's been ages since I saw that. (Funnily enough it's the only silent movie poster I have up on a wall.)

I'm thinking Murnau's Phantom must have learned from it too, and used (double exposure) with practically the same motif, a ghostly carriage. Too much for a coincidence...

Ah yes. What did I see last--Artists and Models from 1937, with Jack Benny and the lovely clever Ida Lupino... It's as much a musical revue piece as a film--a number of performers, dancers, comedy acts I mostly didn't know, such as Judy Canova, but also Louis Armstrong and Martha Ray. Frothy fun.

Oh, this was great: Café Elektric, 1927, directed by Gustav Ucicky, with Willi Forst and--Marlene Dietrich! Pre-Blue Angel, brunette Marlene, a touch zaftiger than later (not so cheekbony)...

Dietrich plays the daughter of a rich businessman who falls for a ne'er-do-well (Willi Forst), gambler, thief, pimp, and a mean dancer.

Brilliant scene of their mutual seduction--even if you can't watch the whole thing (only German intertitles I'm afraid), give it a gander starting at about 7:25 minutes:

https://www.filmarchiv.at/channel/willi-forst/

The film is up free on that link until the 21st. The end is missing, I'm guessing about ten minutes or so. But the quality is excellent. And it really is silent, no soundtrack provided, so pop on some 20s jazz... "black bottom"!

Can you discern two diamond shapes overlaid on the picture in this screenshot?--they did an effect I don't remember ever seeing before, when Forst sees Marlene the first time, the camera, like his gaze, focusses on her legs--only that diamond is sharp and the rest goes out of focus. Crass and amusing.



Dancing, top view--the legs are a-whirl but no point in freezing the frenetic rhythm in stills...



So delighted I got to see this. The IMDB doesn't even list it in Dietrich's filmography!

Along with the Willi Forst programme, Filmarchiv is running a second one called "Undesirable Kino", comprising a set of films from the 1930s whose makers had to leave or were expelled from Austria by the encroaching Nazism.

I watched Silhouetten, 1936, directed by Walter Reisch, unknown to me, as were the actors. Strange little movie... A travelling ballet troupe arrives in Vienna. The boss, Sanina, is an ex-Russian ballerina on the wrong side of 35. The company is on the verge of financial breakdown--classical ballet just doesn't have the draw needed to compete in the age of jazz and burlesque. One feisty member, Eleanor, is pushing for the modernisation of their numbers--basically, make it sexy. Sanina and her assistants are resistant and want to engage a new classically trained ballerina to replace a girl who killed herself.

There is a bizarre love subplot with an architect whose room Sanina mistakenly enters; in a few days, despite her initial struggle, they are engaged to be married. "I'm ready to be a WOMAN!", she exclaims. However, when she inadvertently makes him wait longer than expected before a date, he decides to break off with her and picks up literally the first girl he sees, which is the young ballerina supposed to replace the dead girl. She came to the theatre for her interview with Sanina but then... follows this guy because he just told her it's much better to be in love and married.

At this point you may justly suspect the writers of being a tad cynical. And goofy. The architect, Charlie West (born in the States to Austrian parents), submits to yet another switcheroo of his brides-to-be when the young ballerina (just turned eighteen) decides that she'd rather dance for a while still, and that the older Sanina, who tried to kill herself, has prior rights. "I only wanted to live for him; you were ready to die for him."

The troupe continues under Sanina's assistants with a programme updated to showcase Vienna's sensibilities--Fasching and waltzes--and Sanina is happily spirited to safety in America.

The "silhouettes" in the title come up when the young ballerina's grandfather shows Sanina a shadowplay of his granddaughter's dancing. It's a type of entertainment long gone out of fashion, mere black silhouettes on a wall. Sanina replies that she too offers a type of entertainment gone out of fashion, only her "silhouettes" are white.

More Buster Keaton, Battling Butler, 1926, just a delight. Keaton plays a spoiled rich young man whose parents pack him off on a huntin' fishin' expedition to "man up". He goes off roughing it in a ritzy car with a mere one servant (a wonderful multi-purpose valet/cook/chauffeur/secretary...), palatial tent, and a full wardrobe.

He loses his heart to a wild mountain girl whose father and brother won't accept a weakling in the family. Fortunately, through identical names he's mistaken for the lightweight champion of the world. Unfortunately, he now must trail the champion, whose career is in ascendance, in order to maintain this persona.

I don't think it's going to be a huge spoiler if I say Keaton's character will in the end prove just as fierce a fighter AND keep his girl.

Even more Keaton. I saw three of his early sound movies for MGM, Parlor, Bedroom & Bath (1931), Speak Easily (1932) and The Passionate Plumber (1932). The last two pair taciturn Keaton with loquacious Jimmy Durante to a fairly amusing effect.

These movies are a world apart from the magical grace of his silents but not as bad as I feared... assuming you can live with Keaton being typecast as a fumbling idiot.

Next I saw The blue bird (1918), based on Maeterlinck's play and directed by Maurice Tourneur. The surviving film is quite damaged so there was a lot of flickering and flaring. Nevertheless, you can get an idea of what a lavish production this was. I didn't care for the story at all, but that's due to Maeterlinck. A couple of poor children are taught to look for joy in the simple pleasures within their reach, including--I kid you not--the Joy of Pure Air (sic). When they sigh over how beautiful is the rich children's home, they are told that their own is just as beautiful, if only they knew how to look at it etc.

Further episodes involve visits to dead grandparents and dead siblings, as well as a trip to the land of Unborn Children, waiting for their turn to enter the world. These children are each covered with a gauzy shroud, making for an incredibly creepy scene. Everything is predestined, even what relationships they'll have with others. Their future brother shouts to the visiting kids, "Tell mother to get ready, and father to fix the cradle!"

I continued the online retrospectives on Filmarchiv with Der Prinz von Arkadien (The Prince of Arcadia) (1932), starring Willi Forst and Liane Haid (she was Lady Hamilton to Veidt's Nelson in 1922). "Arcadia" was represented by Dalmatia, with much location filming in Dubrovnik and the environs, so that was extremely interesting to me.

The next movie in the "Undesirable Kino" programme was Letzte Liebe (Last Love), (1935), with the acting legend Albert Bassermann as an old composer who falls in love with a young Japanese music student. The latter was played by the Japanese wife of the Viennese coffee magnate Julius Meinl II, who financed the film.

Next I saw two more films in the Universal Horror collection. The Night Monster (1942) has Lugosi and Atwill!--but both sadly underused. Captive Wild Woman (1943), with John Carradine, Evelyn Ankers and "Acquanetta" packs a punch but not necessarily as planned back in the day... Carradine's "mad scientist" transforms a gorilla into a girl. The actress was African-American but the PR had her as Native or Latin American (presumably to facilitate filming with whites?) Universal planned to make a series of films with her as a "transformative ape" so I guess it's relatively lucky they made just the one.

>119 LolaWalser: - ... "Acquanetta" ...

Ah. Saw your 'mad scientist' post, checked on IMDb, saw the poster, thought that would be just my kind of schlocky-but-fun film, while not questioning or taking much note of IMDb's description of her as native American. Hunted it up on YouTube and earmarked it for tonight's viewing. Seeing you write that she was actually African-American puts a whole different slant on things ...

>120 alaudacorax:

Well I got it from the Wikipedia--quite an interesting tale behind it all, I'm sure. (Wonder if anyone wrote about her yet...) Of course it's not excluded that she had Native American heritage as well, or Latin American etc.

Oh, btw--don't know how you feel about such things--there is quite a lot of what we'd now see as dire abuse of animals; tigers and lions. I suppose most of it was circus stock footage, and there are clearly sequences that are simply repeated. Still, there is quite a bit of it--whipping, shooting guns near the animals, animals fighting. Just FYI.

>121 LolaWalser:

Yeah—just finished it and really didn't appreciate the circus sequences—some, in fact, as entertainment, were the exact equivalent of dog-fighting or bear-baiting. I skipped through quite a bit, to be honest. With Acquanetta's role—what there was of it—it felt to me that the film-makers had an idea that didn't really work.

I note that it was released a year after Cat People: I wonder if this was a conscious attempt at a variation on the same theme—trying to sell Acquanetta as another Simone Simon.

>122 alaudacorax:

And why 'Acquanetta'? Like her role, it doesn't quite seem to work—unless she ever got a role as a mermaid. I've had a hard time not putting a 'J' in front of it.

Probably a studio decision. I liked her presence--alas that she wasn't allowed more than that...

Finished the Universal Classic Horror set, with Man Made Monster (1941)--Atwill and Chaney Jr.--and Horror Island (1941). The latter was a cheat as it's really a comedy. Some nice character work by the varied bunch and snappy dialogue is about all that recommends it. The other one goes into the Mad Scientist thread...

>122 alaudacorax:

Forgot to say... good call about Cat People, I think, I had a similar thought cross my mind (especially as I'm reading Puig's book where it features).

I'd forgotten to link this on time--what a pity... beautiful restoration.

Katka, or, in a German version Die von der Straße leben, 1926, was according to the description the first Soviet movie to give a wholly realistic, unembellished picture of life in the country, in this case in the metropolis of Leningrad. While this hints at grimness, and indeed the poverty depicted is devastating, there is a vigorous, funny spirit to the story.

Katka (wonderful performance by Veronika Buzhinskaya) is a peasant woman who came to Leningrad after her one cow died with the project of earning money toward the purchase of a new cow. She joins a small army of black marketeers who congregate at certain points in the city, peddling diverse wares and scattering like pigeons when the cops stroll near. Katka's only item is--apples. (I wish I knew how many apples it would have taken to buy a cow, that's never answered.) To make her life more difficult, Katka is also very pregnant, by a slick petty criminal (on schedule to become worse) who dumped her but still hovers around to intimidate and press some change out of her.

Katka befriends a young down-and-out intellectual who is as kind as he's incapable of fending for himself in the rough street life. He becomes her baby's nanny as Katka goes back to selling apples the day after giving birth. It's quite remarkable to see such scenes in an early movie, a man changing baby's diapers, feeding and holding her, taking out for walks, just "mothering" her in general--and it's not played for comedy.

There is a plot with Katka's louche ex and his new girlfriend scheming thievery and robbery, all of which culminates in a showdown between the thief and Katka's friend, who bravely defends the baby and sees his self-esteem restored.

But as much as the plot, or even more, it's the city's magnificent and forbidding background that draws our attention, the crowds streaming through the streets and squares, the vehicles, the vistas taken from vertiginous heights, in contrast with the narrow, dilapidated Dostoevskian hovels of the proletariat. Speaking of which, there is nothing to remind of the now-socialist system, no specific reference to politics at all.

Also saw Stage Struck, 1925, Gloria Swanson and Allan Dwan's seventh and last collaboration. Couple of remarkable things about this movie... One, there is a fantasy sequence shot in dual-tone Technicolor, same as Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera. The contrast between that and the B&W works brilliantly, although I can see people going "oh why didn't they start shooting films in colour in the twenties!" Two... I finally get the origin of Swanson's Chaplin impersonation in Sunset Boulevard--she really was that type of physical-comedy actor, except being a girl, she wasn't really used as that type of actor. Here she has many comic routines of the sort--the fantasised head of John the Baptist on the platter lying on her shoulder turning into a plate of beans as she herself is turned from a Salome into a waitress, the pancake flipping sequence, and most of all, the hilarious boxing match with another woman, Swanson wearing a mask like those Mexican wrestlers, which keeps shifting on her face--eyeholes going everywhere except over her eyes etc.

This scene becomes Keatonish after Swanson defeats the opponent and, having thus earned her moment in the spotlight, launches into a recitation of Shakespeare.

For a diva and a femme fatale, she didn't half mind making fun of herself! I had no idea what a great sense of humour she must've had.

I read Hall Caine's 1895 novel The Manxman and watched Hitchcock's 1929 film version, his last silent. (I posted more about the book in my CR thread)



The film is a love-triangle plot, two cousins, one (the very dishy Dane, Carl Brisson) a fisherman and the other (the very wooden Englishman Malcolm Keen) a lawyer, in love with the same girl (the Czech Anny Ondra — isn't it wonderful how international silents could be?). She marries one but really wants to be with the other. After a ten-second pregnancy and a two-minute delivery indirectly signalled by a nervous game of draughts between the two presumptive fathers, she produces a daughter.

Shades of Jules et Jim, but the dénouement is a very Hitchcock court scene, where he cleverly manages to insert an awkward silence into an already silent film.

The novel is set in the 1870s or 80s, and has a lot of very touristy Manx detail, including Tynwald Day and a fishermen's protest movement, but Hitchcock cuts most of that out and updates at least the costumes to present-day (Brisson's and Ondra's plucked eyebrows are not very Victorian either...). A few of the locations in the finished film are in the island — there's a shot of the steam-packet entering Douglas harbour, for instance — but Hitchcock moved the shooting to Cornwall at some point, apparently to get the author out of his hair. Some of the fishing luggers in the opening sequence have their Fowey registration letters visible.

Apparently there was also an earlier film adaptation of the book, directed by George Loane Tucker in 1916, which has been lost. Kate was played in that one by Tucker's wife, Elizabeth Risdon.

>127 thorold: - ... plucked eyebrows ...

I actually thought the fisherman was a woman, Lotte Lenya, till I read the text.

... Fowey registration ...

And now I'm wondering if the young Daphne du Maurier was up on the cliffs, watching him filming.

>127 thorold:
Fascinating! Nothing directly relevant to add, but I was reminded that Hall Caine was a great friend of Bram Stoker (he's "Hommie-Beg", the dedicatee of Dracula), and then that John Badham substituted Cornwall for Whitby harbour in his 1979 film of the book.

Is the novel worth reading, 125 years after its moment of bestsellerdom?

>129 housefulofpaper: See my review – Caine wasn’t a bestseller for nothing, of course, there’s a lot to like in the book, but it’s not Thomas Hardy... Or even close.

>130 thorold:
I've managed to produce only two or three reviews in 10 years on this site. I can forget that other people are rolling up their sleeves and doing the work! Very informative, thank you.

>129 housefulofpaper:

Dedicatee of Dracula!--quite a distinction.

>128 alaudacorax:

Can't unsee it now...

>127 thorold:

he cleverly manages to insert an awkward silence into an already silent film.

lol

Nice capture btw, the contrast between the jubilant guy and the two mournful/glaring figures is intriguing.

>132 LolaWalser: Kate has just told the two men that she’s pregnant. Pete is simply ecstatic about becoming a father, but the other two know that it’s a little bit more complicated than that in this case...

Another Soviet film that popped up on Mubi, The ghost that never returns (1930), by Abram Room.

It turned out to be a fairly dark drama about a union leader in “South America” being released on leave from jail for a day knowing that the objective of the authorities is to arrange for him to be shot-trying-to-escape. All very modernist and full of scenes where the setting symbolises what’s going on inside his head, lots of Foucault-style playing with the image of the panopticon prison, kind of Modern Times without the laughs or the romance. But with a rather bolted-on ending in which we see the workers’ struggle managing to resist the authority of the state after all.

>134 thorold:

I have Room in queue!--Chess fever, and Bed and sofa. I went looking for his stuff after seeing his epic about Yugoslavia, made on party spec just before Tito fell out with Stalin and chucked into the oubliette until recently. A fascinating bit of history from fifty different angles...

В горах Югославии (In the mountains of Yugoslavia), 1946--Russian dub only

I just love the partisan woman on horseback:

>135 LolaWalser: Bed and sofa is the one I’d heard of, but I haven’t seen it. The print of The Ghost that Mubi have is rather poor quality, I don’t know if there’s a better one out there. But the (modern) soundtrack with piano plus prisoner-percussion effects was well done.

I saw Chess fever in the school film-club sometime around 1980, on actual celluloid. But Wikipedia says it’s Pudovkin and Shpikovsky, not Room.

>136 thorold:

Yes, sorry about the confusion! its just packaged with Bed on Kanopy to make up the minutes. I do want to see Ghost--Flicker Alley issued a DVD currently selling at more than fifty dollars--I'm guessing that's the version you saw. The one reviewer isn't happy with its quality but it sounds as if nothing better may be forthcoming.

Wilhelm Dieterle directed and played the main role in his last silent film, about Ludwig II, the "mad king" of Bavaria. You can see it free until next Thursday here:

https://vimeo.com/516204594

A well-done production which, according to the notes, had a lot of trouble with the censors. I was again impressed by Dieterle's courage. He included unmistakable references to the king's homosexuality, and alcoholism. The former is dealt with in a brief scene showing the king with a handsome secretary, and statues of male nudes in the foreground:



The king, contemplating a statue, lets his gaze fall on the secretary and asks him to come over, where he places him in the statue's pose:



There follows a striking scene of delirium, the temptation/desire represented by a whirl of male nudes:



One minor curiosity, the cast list includes the mysterious Max Schreck but I couldn't find out who he played. There are many extras, and Schreck's sad career after Nosferatu did include many bit and uncredited roles.

I glimpsed one possibility--the tallest soldier in this picture, third from the right?



By the way, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski who played the character in love with Dieterle's character in Sex in Chains here plays Ludwig's mad brother Otto.

Ah yes, forgot to mention the 1932 Der Hexer, with a shudderingly creepy Fritz Rasp (promo still for the movie):



Young women are turning up dead; the latest victim the sister of a notorious criminal known as "The Magician". And it looks as if he may be chasing the murderer himself... Will the police manage to grab both?

Rasp would still act in German Krimis thirty years later, and creepier than ever.

Wow, Abram Room's 1927 Bed and sofa, what a packet of splendid. And surprises. I said it before and I'll say it again, the 1920s were when we reached all the peaks, dared everything.

Of course, the writer here is Viktor Shklovsky, the formalist theoretician and a hip young man about town.

Film opens with a woman and man in bed--that alone is revolutionary. Liuda and Nikolai are a young couple, she a homemaker, he a construction foreman. They live in cramped conditions in Moscow. One day Nikolai's mate from the war, Volodya, arrives in the city and Nikolai invites him to stay with them, sleeping on their sofa. Liuda and Volodya are attracted to each other and when Nikolai is away for a few days, they become lovers. When he comes back they tell him what happened but no one is ready to cut ties off permanently. Now Volodya is sleeping in the bed with Liuda, while Nikolai takes (grumpily) to the sofa.

A tiff between Liuda and Volodya sends the latter to the sofa, while Nikolai takes the opportunity to ingratiate himself with his wife again.

The upshot of all this is that when Liuda falls pregnant, they don't know who is the father. The guys decide to split the cost of an abortion. Liuda goes to the clinic (note: they had private abortion clinics in Moscow in 1926) but then sees a cute baby from the window and decides to leg it.

And she leaves BOTH men, who tell each other, after reading her goodbye letter, that they must face it--they are scoundrels.

It's a comic drama, if such a thing exists--not a farce, but with a lot of ironic humour.

Wonderful views of Moscow from a plane.

Viktor Shklovsky

(It just wouldn't save the touchstone in the previous post.)

I requested Merrily we go to hell (1932), directed by Dorothy Arzner, because Criterion is issuing it soon and I wanted to see how much I'd want it. (Of course I want it, but I'm trying to be better with such expenses...)

It makes an interesting contrast to Bed and sofa. While it's pre-Code, and the screenplay is quite bold for a Hollywood movie, it ends up very conservative, even if the happy end is somewhat muted.

Jerry (Fredric March) is an alcoholic reporter and wannabe dramatist who forsook women after getting his heart broken by a vampy actress, Claire. He meets the lovely good innocent and immensely rich Joan and they marry. For a few months everything is rosy, Jerry is off the bottle and trying to get a play into production. He succeeds, but the lead turns out to be his old flame Claire. She encourages him in drinking and they start having an affair.

Joan decides to be a "modern" woman about it all and starts seeing another man (played by Cary Grant), although the film doesn't clarify whether she is also sleeping with him. She also starts drinking and going to the clubs, cheerfully running into her husband and his girlfriend in various places, still being "modern". But a party in their own home, when Jerry passionately kisses Claire in Joan's own kitchen, proves a step too far and Joan packs her bags and leaves.

Jerry instantly realises he actually loves Joan not Claire, dumps the latter, and tries to reach Joan again but she won't return his calls etc. Then he finds out from the news that she had a baby and he goes to her, in the hospital fending off her father's hostility, and finds out that she too loves him but the baby is dead. Still, they are reunited.

Woman as martyr whose suffering saves the fallen man is not a motif I like. I'm much more with Liuda saying to hell with you to the men.

Joan's little speech about being "modern" and not like her grandmother (who would have left the adulterous husband) also seems oddly topsy-turvy, as it would have been the grandmother who would have had much less choice in whether to tolerate or not the husband's infidelity. But she does recall this as she's leaving, saying the grandma had a point after all.

The setting is light years away from the Russian (or any) working class and there's that aura of unreality that defines Hollywood, truly a factory of dreams for adults and nothing else. Glittering millions, parties, gowns, tuxedos, the leisure of the rich, the promise of such riches to talent if they should get one frivolous play, set in aristocratic 18th century France, up on Broadway.

"Modern" wife observing the husband smooching his girlfriend:

Sylvia Sidney wore some stunning dresses in this

>138 LolaWalser: Too bad I missed your post about the Ludwig II film — it would have been interesting to see that.

Catching up after a bit, I spotted that there was an FW Murnau about to expire on MUBI. It turned out to be the very early Schloß Vogelöd (1921), a fairly undistinguished melodrama with a flimsy disguise plot that Murnau seems to be working very hard to hold back from advancing before he gets to the end of Act V.

Paul Hartmann is suitably moody as the despised Baron Oetsch, and the femme fatale is Olga Chekhova — in her debut role — who looks fantastic but obviously hasn't learnt to act yet. The only really good bit was a totally irrelevant comic scene with a kitchen boy who can't resist sticking his fingers in the meringue mixture. There's also a fabulous shot that only lasts a few seconds where we see Olga and her lover on opposite sides of an empty hall as they realise the awfulness of what they've done. You can just imagine the producer looking incredulously at the final cut and saying "We built you a complete set for that?", but it turns out to be one of the most telling scenes in the whole film.

>144 thorold:

Aw, sorry, it was a good one. I keep hoping, though, as these are restorations made by the Filmmuseum, that they'll finally issue them on DVD or make otherwise available more widely. But they do seem to take their sweet time with it...

That Murnau needed more supernatural pizzazz. It's very much one of those boxy "filmed theatre" pieces otherwise.

Have I seen anything for the thread, hmm, oh yes--Mr. Moto's Gamble (1938). Possibly for the first time. Set in the prizefighting milieu, gangsters and bookies. Mr. Moto is teaching criminology at a police academy. Interestingly (I suppose?), the Japanese Mr. Moto has a Chinese sidekick, played by an actual Asian, actor Keye Luke:

This was fantastic... in more than one sense of the word...

The Dybbuk, 1937, directed by Michal Waszynski



I've no words for how eerie is that scene. The movie is filled with music, from laments to sacral to popular dances, and that's a bride dancing at her wedding, but what a dance... a Totentanz, for she is being possessed by the revenant of her dead true bridegroom.

Paul Leni's last film, The Last Warning, which has been restored by Universal Studios and is out on Blu Ray in the UK (and a Blu Ray/DVD combo from Flicker Alley in the US. The UK release drops a couple of extra features but adds a feature commentary from Stephen Jones and Kim Newman).

Based on a stage play which in turn was based on a novel (The House of Fear - a title that was (re-)used for several films, one actually an adaptation of the novel).

The story concerns a Broadway theatre and a murder committed on stage during a performance of a play. The body disappears and the crime is unsolved. Months later a producer brings the cast and backstage crew back to the theatre, to re-open it and restage the play in order to discover the murderer.

That's the plot, but the story plays out very much in the vein of The Cat and the Canary. It even has Laura La Plante in the lead role.

Leni starts the film with an Art Deco montage evoking the Jazz Age, but is able to use the closed theatre (actually the Paris Opera set from The Phantom of the Opera) as a cobwebbed Old Dark House full of cobwebs, shadows, and so on. The camerawork is astonishingly fluid compared to the static sound movies just coming over the horizon.

Picking up on the earlier, and I guess off-topic thread about Celine and Julie Go Boating that started at >51 alaudacorax: above, I just bought the remastered version issued recently by Criterion. I love this film. There are extras, including a long interview with Rivette by critic Serge Daney. (I just enjoyed watching them wander around 70s Paris, hitting various bars and cafés), interviews with the actors, etc. I just wish you could get the subtitles in French.

I've just spent a childishly delightful eighty minutes. I've been watching The Adventures of Prince Achmed. I was quite entranced. I was especially taken with how what seemed to be a straightforward children's tale would occasionally spill over into surrealism.

>147 housefulofpaper:

I'd love to see that. I'm in the midst of upgrading my viewing capabilities--at least, what I hoped would be an improvement--but even with the expense I'm running it looks as if I won't be able to watch Region 2 Blu-Rays with my preferred set-up. (Will spare you my tale of frustration...)

>148 robertajl:

I got that Criterion too but will watch next weekend (by which time I hope I'll have the new set-up chosen and settled). Three discs promises a lot of extra goodies!

>149 alaudacorax:

hi! What a coincidence to run into everyone here. :) Lotte Reiniger was a genius!

Unusually long spell without seeing an "oldie", for me, but I've been getting more current DVDs from the library and for once trying to watch most of them and not return unseen...

This was a chance encounter on YouTube: Millie, 1931, with Helen Twelvetrees in the main role--and Joan Blondell in a bijou minor one. It has that special pre-Code charm, more freedom, more authenticity... not easy to describe but you know it when you see it. (Also, I wonder if the musical number "It's Nice to Be a Geranium" that a guest performs at a party in Millie and her boyfriend's apartment has some gay connotations?)

Millie the innocent marries for love but barely a year in discovers her husband is cheating on her. They divorce, he gets to keep the baby, while Millie finds low-paying work and generally starts leading a sort of demi-mondaine existence. Not a prostitute, but like other women in dead end low paid jobs, pretty much forced to date for dinners and an opportunity to escape poverty through marriage.

Except Millie has soured on marriage and prefers her hardscrabble way of life to being a housewife. But she's still susceptible to love and almost ready to give it another chance, when she discovers that man is also a liar. After that she throws herself more fully into a lifestyle of a kept woman but refuses steady connections or just anybody--in her way she insists on calling the shots.

What's interesting is that there isn't so much a sense of tragedy as of "c'est la vie". The men are more weak than (as they would be presented in such roles later on) demonic villains. Women like Millie who refuse to put up with the situation pay a price--but she is also admirable and other characters, men and women, admire her.

Seen La Habanera, 1937, directed by Detlef Sierck, nowadays better known as Douglas Sirk. It stars the Swedish Nazi collaborator Zarah Leander who had such a deep singing voice her sound was often mistaken for male--a boon back in genderfluid-loving Weimar Republic. (In Michael Powell's Contraband, which teems with references and nods to the German cinema, Weimar, and Veidt's own career, at one point Veidt's character will solve a mystery thanks to a Leander-like singer.)

Also saw The secret life of Walter Mitty, 1946, about an inveterate daydreamer who falls into a real-life adventure. I've read Thurber's story but don't recall the criminal shenanigans, maybe they are additions for the film. Enjoyed Boris Karloff's turn in it the most.

>153 LolaWalser: Funny. I just watched Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht (It was a Glittering Night at the Ball) 1939 on YouTube, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhJRlhgynsw. It's very, very loosely based on Tchaikovsky's relationship with Nadezda von Meck. In real life, she was his patron but they never met. In the film, well, you can guess. Lots of singing, dancing by Marika Rökk, and, really, I thought it was a lot of trashy fun.

>154 robertajl:

Ha! Thanks for that! Never heard of it and the story looks like a load of old tosh; but I'm a sucker for corny old musicals; Tchaikovsky was my first love, way back discovering classical music as a teenager, and still a favourite (AND I was actually listening to 'The Voivode' on CD when I spotted your post); so I hunted it up on YouTube and I've 'Watch later'd' it. Great.

>154 robertajl:

I was long aware of, but never watched Marika Rökk's movies (still haven't seen one). I did get more interested when this came out:

Star of postwar German cinema was Soviet spy, declassified files show

...but I'm slow to watch musicals these days.

Best sentence:

In 1951 Rökk announced she was giving up her acting career after 16 years. Newspapers at the time said that she wanted to devote herself to running a boutique selling authentic Swiss woollenware in Düsseldorf.

Latest seen: Cobra, Rudolf Valentino's self-produced vehicle from 1925. Valentino plays l'homme too fatale for his own good, since the one nice girl he attracts he loses to his wicked reputation.

Again I note the pleasant strangeness of Valentino's role being more "feminine" than not--women chase him, women blackmail him, women do their utmost to seduce him, while he runs away from them (well, AFTER he falls in tru luv) like a skittish doe etc.

Nita Naldi plays the sultry siren who totally wants to bonk him but then, on learning it's his friend with all the money, changes gears. Valentino sees them off smilingly, then notices the ornamental cobra and the panther, and the cobra transforms into a girl:



METAPHOR ACQUIRED *dinnnnnnggg*

Also seen, A night in Casablanca, 1946. For the first time. I'm not a huuuge Marx Bros. fan but there are better movies of theirs than this. Still, it has its moments. (The seek & hidey-hide sequence with the Nazi's clothes as he's packing, if you know what I'm talking about.) Harpo is my fave.

They say you can't go back.

I'd seen The Blue Angel just once, long, long time ago. I could only vaguely remember it, but remembered being impressed and quite moved.

Tried to watch it tonight and I'm giving up half-way. I can appreciate Dietrich's powerful screen presence, and Jannings, to a certain extent; but his character, the professor, is just not working for me—I just can't believe in it, somehow, and I have no patience for him. And I can't figure out how von Sternberg wants me to think of the professor: as comic; as dislikeable; as empathy-inducing pathetic?

Perhaps I'll give it a try some other time and in a different mood and recapture what I once saw ...

>157 alaudacorax: - ... empathy-inducing pathetic?

Reading over that I realised that von Sternberg hasn't given me a character to empathise with. It's a rather cold film.

>157 alaudacorax:

I watched the English-language version not so long ago but was waiting until I'd seen the original version too, before venturing to offer an opinion (also - confession - I didn't give it the full cineaste attention but had it on while I was working from home).

I thought Jannings was ok, and obviously it it was a performance that impressed critics at the time. That said, there was one moment of pure animal terror from him, which made me sit up and take notice.

Amusingly, there's a moment in the version I've seen where the characters agree to speak English so Lola Lola can follow the conversation. I couldn't NOT recall Sean Connery's "What's a haggis?" line from Highlander...

I've watched Alexander Nevsky this evening. I'd been vaguely aware of this, mostly because of Prokofiev's music, but also because of occasionally seeing it classed as one of the all-time great films. And I'd never seen an Eisenstein film, and wanted to see one.

I should say first of all that I did enjoy it. It was absorbing and entertaining.

However, I was a little surprised at how crudely-made it was. On one hand, the battle scenes were overall rather impressive; on the other, I couldn't help but notice the odd artificial horse, or cardboard armour obvious even in poor black and white, the too obvious lack of expertise in screen fighting among many of the extras.

The storyline was fairly simplistic, too, and I hadn't realised it was so obviously a propaganda film.

Rotten Tomatoes currently rates it at 95% and I honestly can't see that it deserves that. I wouldn't put it any higher than 60% or 65%.

I found the music a bit disappointing, also, being used to it in Prokofiev's cantata form, and having rather poor sound quality on the DVD (Eureka). I'd been rather looking forward to the music.

Actually, the music leads me on to something unexpected. I always liked Basil Poledouris' music for Conan the Barbarian and it's only in recent years I've realised how much it is based Alexander Nevsky's music. But it goes further—I'm fairly sure that some of the Teutonic knights' battle-helmets and other armour were borrowed for Conan, too. I haven't seen the latter film for some years; but it would be interesting to watch the two together.

It's been ages since I saw one of Eisenstein's movies...

Haven't had much time for "moving pictures" recently but I did watch over the last month or so Sunrise (1927) and Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war (1937)--both repeats.

One new one was Pabst's Paracelsus from 1943. I have problems enduring (I think that's fair) movies that were made in Germany during the war. I think this is only the second one I managed to see through (the other one being Baky's Münchhausen). Thoughts about what was going on while they were making these movies keep interfering.

Paracelsus can almost be justified if you decide to look for some sort of "subversion". Mind you, I'm not sure there is any. Pabst wasn't a Nazi, but the film's star, Werner Krauss (yes, Doctor Caligari) played antisemitic characters with apparently no qualms.

There is one haunting sequence that may be interpreted, by those so inclined, as anti-Hitler--when a dancer/mime, who we know is a plague-carrier, entrances the crowd in the pub into following him and mimicking his expressions and gestures. It's hard to see how anyone could avoid drawing the parallels with Hitler's crowds, but the film was vetted, so... there's also a theory that Paracelsus is Hitler--but this in a positive spin, he's the figure who brings sanity to the people while the learned doctors leave them in a lurch.

>160 alaudacorax:

I've been feeling a bit guilty. When I was watching I couldn't help comparing Alexander Nevsky unfavourably with Olivier's Henry V. I suspect that is not really a fair comparison: six years' difference and a different film industry and political climate. I think I need to try again keeping comparisons out of my mind.

I've been reading about the neofascists in Russia so a bit off with their whole medieval history, which they fetishise and mine for inspiration...

Have seen again Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform, 1931. I love this film so much. I got the Kino copy in order to listen to the commentary--embarrassingly, I never noticed before that one of the teachers was played by Erika Mann! It's a small role but you can't miss her, she's the drama teacher with a couple important scenes. Curiously, she seems to have been forced (?) out of the movie mid-way and replaced by another actor (without any lines, just "incorporating" Mann's character during a roll call).

Also curiously, the two lead actresses, linked in the lesbian story, would make ANOTHER film together where they are leads linked in a lesbian story--but with the roles reversed, the piner-after becoming the pinee-after.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_and_Elizabeth

(No mention of the lesbian subtext but that's par for the course...)

Also seen a movie I'd never heard of before but the screenwriting credit to Preston Sturges immediately sold it... The good fairy, 1935, directed by William Wyler, with Margaret Sullavan and Herbert Marshall. As some may recall, I am not a fan of Marshall's, but even his stodgy appearance and dull voice couldn't ruin this gem.

Interestingly, the story is based on a play by the Hungarian writer and expat Ferenc Molnar, often used by Hollywood in this way. (Sullavan too would actually appear again in a movie-based-on-Molnar, The shop around the corner.) Well, that was the Hollywood teeming with European refugees, and the America with hundreds if not thousands expat journals and associations, where Molnar's Central European sensibilities where still intelligible.

Even so, thanks to the Hays Code his cynically sophisticated play had to be thoroughly sterilised and defanged for film production, and it's actually a good look at just how the Code worked to infantilise and fairy-tale-ise stuff for American consumption. For example, the play's female lead, Lu (Louisa), is a sexually aware agent, mistress to at least two men, and her plan is to use one rich lover to enrich another poor one. She's a "good fairy" accidentally, in the end bringing three couples together but herself remaining alone.

In the movie, Sullavan's Louisa is a totally innocent clueless orphan girl just released into her first job (cinema usherette), and with one passing exception, all the men she meets turn out to be extraordinarily nice guys who wouldn't dream of taking advantage of her, but only want to defend and serve her, or buy her mink and marry her.

And they say fairy tales are for children!

Preston Sturges' naughty little fingerprints are all over the screenplay though, so there is much good and subtle fun to be had yet. Should be better known, this.

Margaret Sullavan as Louisa radiantly happy with a "foxine" wrap (the rich guy who knows about such things will disgustedly exclaim that it's "cat"! But she doesn't care...)

Saw a remarkable Japanese phantasmagoria from 1926, A page of madness. Story (and screenplay? not clear) credited to Yasunari Kawabata. The setting is an insane asylum but we also drift off into various characters' imaginary escapades.

Reminded me that it was the Japanese who preserved Karlheinz Martin's Von morgens bis mitternachts--could have been exactly those guys who made this one, so many resonances. But also with Caligari and the Russian dramas.

First Japanese Expressionist film I saw, and there don't seem to be many of those.

>164 LolaWalser:

Is it supposed to be completely without subtitles? The Wikipedia page mentions a live narration; but there seems to be nothing on the copies I've found on YT.

>165 alaudacorax:

The copy on YT I saw didn't have any subtitles or intertitles for that matter, so it's not like one can follow it blow by blow, but I read the synopsis. And it still works quite amazingly...

>166 LolaWalser:

Ah, right. I found a couple of good copies which I just glanced through and one of them must have been yours. I'll look forward to watching. Even in the few seconds I saw, the repentant husband/father seemed to really grip the viewer and there was some beautiful photography.

Is this thread getting too long? Let me know. Or just continue it.

A few re-watchings for me, Sternberg's Underworld and Hitchcock's The Lodger (both from 1927), following Brahm's 1944 version (also a rewatch). Another repeat, the delicious The House on Trubnaya Square (1928). Nineteen-year-old Paranya leaves her village for Moscow clutching a bundle of rags and a live duck.

Saw again The strange affair of Uncle Harry (1945), Lured (1947), and Hangover Square (1945). Postwar forties kept George Sanders very busy... And Arsenic and old lace as a gesture toward Halloween--Raymond Massey done up as Boris Karloff will never not be funny to me...

On YT there popped up Return of Chandu, which reminded me that I never saw my copy of Chandu the magician. Oddly enough, while Lugosi plays the villain in the latter, in Return he's cast as the hero! Unfortunately that is very much the less interesting installment but there's no question that Lugosi makes both movies. This was his peak period.

And after Dracula, Dracula!



Finally, I was delighted to see Kanopy added a restored Filibus (1915), that robertajl brought to our attention. It was great to see such a sharp version. And once again the fiendish female thief lived to go on with her nefarious schemes!

>168 LolaWalser: I haven't been watching any silent movies, or even what qualifies for early cinema, but I too rewatched, for Halloween, Arsenic and Old Lace, so I just had to chime in with how much I also enjoy that film and to add how much I love watching Peter Lorre. If there's anything better than watching Peter Lorre, it's watching Peter Lorre together with Sydney Greenstreet. To that end, I also rewatched The Mask of Dimitrios.

>168 LolaWalser: I can resist no longer! I have been watching this group for a long time but hesitated to join as my silent film viewing is largely confined to comedy, in particular Buster Keaton. I did not think I had much to contribute.

However quite a few of the films you mention are known to me and your Halloween discussion prompts me to mention I married a witch in which Veronica Lake deliciously bewitches Fredric March.

I should say that I am in awe at your sources. I obviously do not explore Youtube enough. most of the other ways you have of viewing silent film in particular were quite unknown to me and I should check them out.

>170 Maura49:

I'm intrigued. The synopsis on IMDb seems so familiar but I can't remember ever seeing the film. I must hunt that up.

>169 robertajl:

Oh my, yes, Lorre + Greenstreet is one of those matches made in heaven. I count four of their--no wait, FIVE! always forget about Casablanca--movies in my stash. This is my plan for today's wet Sunday then--watch them alllll! Thanks Robert. :)

>170 Maura49:

Welcome, Maura, please feel free to jump in any time! We've raved about Keaton in the past and will certainly do so again in the future. I received just the other day the Blu-Ray with The General (watched) and Three Ages (to be seen for the first time).

Yeah, there is a lot of good stuff to be found on YouTube, even in high quality resolution. I sub to a few channels and sometimes get useful recommendations but it also pays to search every now and then. This thread has a few links to European websites offering silent movies (not all links will work at this point, but the main ones should be OK):

https://www.librarything.com/topic/321467#

In North America we get some free streaming through public libraries, I have access to Kanopy and Hoopla. I presume you have something similar?--Kanopy in particular has a generous trove of silent films.

And, the group does include "early sound"--defined to anyone's preference--so don't hesitate to chat about old movies as the spirit moves you.

I know I had seen I married a witch but it must have been very long ago as I don't recall much about the plot at all. I like both Fredric March and Veronica Lake a lot. The former I saw most recently in Dorothy Arzner's Merrily we go to hell--oh, right, posted about it... And as for Lake, I'm just debating upgrading my DVDs with her and Alan Ladd's movies to Blu-Ray--they are very special.

172> Hmm, I get a higher count. Leaving off Falcon, Demetrios and Casablanca, I also know about:

Background to Danger made in 1943 and stars George Raft
The Conspirators made in 1944 and has Hedy LaMarr
Passage to Marseilles made in 1944 and stars Bogart
The Strangers made in 1946
The Verdict made in 1946

I think they're all on YouTube.

Cheers,
Roberta

>173 robertajl:

Oops, sorry Roberta! I mean I have only the five in my collection--Casablanca; The Mask of Dimitrios; Three Strangers; The verdict; The Maltese Falcon. I'm missing Background to danger; Passage to Marseille (I did see this one); The Conspirators; Hollywood Canteen (I believe I saw this too, if it's some revue-type thing); This is our life. I had to check that last one, it seems both Greenstreet and Lorre were uncredited as extras.

>170 Maura49: Thank you for those tips. I'm not too sure that my UK library service is as generous as yours but I will investigate these streaming services. I was recently directed to http://www.classicmoviehub.com/
This fun site includes a streaming service but it may only be available to North american subscribers. I must investigate.

Sat down to lunch and switched the telly on for something to watch while eating. My normal practice is to spend five minutes or more channel hopping and, in the remote chance I actually find something half-way bearable, my meal is eaten so I switch off again. Well, it so happened that I switched on to the opening scenes of Top Hat. Absolutely glorious—ate my lunch with a cheesy grin on my face and I'm going to be cheerful for the rest of the day. I've seen it often before, of course; but you can't see it too often. It's a good day today.

Only problem, my lunch took a hell of a long time ...

Since November I acquired and watched both Background to danger and The Conspirators. The former was more fun; both were "made" to my mind by Lorre's presence.

Turning the thread over...