Hell's Hinges (1916)

Originally posted to Facebook on 7/22/2018

This week we jumped a decade back from 1927 to 1916's Hell's Hinges, which I wanted to see before we got too far removed from the silent era. This was our sixth film from 1916 -- having watched the fifth a year and a half earlier. It was the first film we've seen starring William S. Hart, who was a prolific actor during this period, making eight other features in 1916 alone, and continuing that pace throughout the teens. The majority are lost, but enough survive to get a decent idea of his work.

The film concerns a young Reverend named Robert Henley, played by Jack Standing, and his sister, played by Clara Williams, who journey west to set up a ministry. It is immediately established that Henley is a womanizer, and not up to the task of being a community's moral leader. They arrive at Hell's Hinges, a semi-lawless western town, which nevertheless has a contingent of church-goers who welcome their arrival. "Blaze" Tracy, played by Hart, is not one of them, nor is "Silk" Miller, played by Alfred Hollingsworth, who is charmingly described as "Mingling the oily craftiness of a Mexican with the deadly treachery of a rattler." It was at this point that our hopes for the film began to dim. The film's arc is that Hart becomes attracted to and/or inspired by Clara Williams' character, and begins to mend his ways -- though her role is a bit underdeveloped as the catalyst for his change, and his attraction to her seems to be more about what she represents, rather than her specifically. Her attraction to him, if it truly exists, is even less well motivated.

I had expected skipping back to 1916 to be more of a regression than it actually was. The acting was a little broader, and the film was definitely shot and framed a lot more statically than some of the films we've been seeing recently, but the story was still competently and economically told -- notwithstanding the flaws discussed above. The screenplay was written by C. Gardner Sullivan, who had previously, with Thomas Ince, written 1915's The Italian, which also featured Clara Williams. It was interesting to see Hart for the first time, and to see how he fit perfectly into the tradition of the taciturn western hero -- a clear antecedent to, for instance, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood -- though in some ways he is more extreme than either of them. His character was also surprisingly morally ambiguous for a western hero, though his previous sins are referred to non-specifically rather than detailed.

Next week, we move on to 1928, with Show People, our third film from that year. It stars Marion Davies and William Haines, and is directed by King Vidor, all of whom we've seen previously during this project. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT.

Summary 1910-1919

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/22/2017

Late last year we finished up our chronological viewing of the 1910s, and are now four films into 1920. I thought this would be a good time to single out the films that I most enjoyed or found the most interesting from that period. We watched nineteen shorts and thirty-one features, though the dividing line between the two was a little fuzzy at times, and included some ~45 minute "features." One of those shorter features that I liked was The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs [1912], directed by Léonce Perret and produced in France at Gaumont Studios. As I mentioned in the write-up, it could very easily have been adapted as an episode on the old Alfred Hitchcock show, and coming when it did at the dawn of features it seemed markedly more realistic than the shorts we'd been watching previously, which were largely melodramas or the tail-end of the Melies or Melies-inspired camera-trick films. Two other films, also from Gaumont, were the crime serials Fantomas [1913] and Judex [1916], both of which were over five hours in total length, and both of which were directed by Louis Feuillade. Judex is more consistent in tone, and is probably the better film; I could easily imagine it being rebooted for a modern audience. But Fantomas is more tongue-in-cheek, and more bizarre (for instance the drive-by attempt at murder via python, foiled only by the hero having the foresight to wear a python-proof suit.)

The two films that are likely on any in-depth film history curriculum -- and deserve to be -- are Cabiria [1914] and Intolerance [1916]. The shock of seeing the camera begin moving into a scene during Cabiria -- rather than just panning -- cannot be felt by a modern audience in the same way it must have been felt by a contemporary audience, but one can still apprehend that something new is happening. And it is has a number of elaborate and impressive set pieces as well -- including the dark and weird scenes where children are tossed into an oven embedded in the stomach of a statue of a local god. Intolerance builds upon Cabiria, and adds the famous Babylonian crane shots, as well as an insanely ambitious attempt to make a coherent movie out of four distinct time period. It doesn't completely succeed, and spends a lot of time burrowing down some weirdly misguided moral rabbit-holes, but it's an impressive film, both in its ambition, and in what it accomplishes. Both films are long, and periodically lose focus. Cabiria, though, at least, seems to always have entertainment on its mind, rather than trying to teach some questionable moral lessons.

Besides Feuillade and Leonce Perret, there were three other directors whom we saw more than once: D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Victor Sjöström. Victor Sjöström is the only one of the three all of whose films I liked. Probably the best of his three films we saw was Ingeborg Holm [1913]. Like The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs, it was markedly more realistic than the films we'd been seeing up until that point, and stopped short of some of the sentimental cliches it could have employed, at least up until the very end. It was Dickensian in a sense, in that it told a story about an individual's misfortunes, but also had a focus on the institutional failures that had played a role.

The final feature I'll mention was the one that I personally found the most entertaining from this period: the Douglas Fairbanks feature When the Clouds Roll By [1919], directed by Victor Fleming. It was the funniest of the various comedies we'd seen -- including the films we saw by the canonical three silent comedians -- Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. To be fair to those three, all of their greatest work came in the twenties, and only Chaplin was making features in the 1910-1919 period. Fairbanks, too, probably did his major work in the twenties, but by 1919 he was already well established, and this film features his typical athleticism along with some intricate stunts and some fancy editing. Also it helps that he and his leading lady actually seem to like each other, always helpful in a romantic comedy, and surprisingly missing in a lot of the films we saw from this period (and even today, really.)

As far as shorts are concerned, I can't say there was anything that really stood out for me. Griffith's The Girl and Her Trust [1912] was a good short from the period just prior to features becoming common. I understand there were several other versions with a similar story that Griffith and others shot, but this was the one we saw, and it was a good straight-forward western, sort of a natural evolution of The Great Train Robbery. The Immigrant [1917] was probably the best of the Chaplin shorts we saw, especially the first half which was set shipboard. From Hand to Mouth [1919] by Harold Lloyd was also intermittently amusing. Lloyd's films don't have the touch of obsesssiveness that Chaplin's and Keaton's do, but he does have more of an everyman quality that makes his protagonists a little more sympathetic.

So that's it for the teens for a while -- probably forever in that concentrated a dosage. I'm looking forward to the twenties quite a bit, because I'm expecting the films to be better and stranger and more ambitious, which certainly seems to be the case four films in.

Shorts (1915-1917)

Originally posted to Facebook on 12/14/2016

This was our first of two weekends watching shorts from the teens. We saw five films:

The Tramp (1915)
A Burlesque on Carmen (1915)
Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916)
Teddy at the Throttle (1917)
The Immigrant (1917)

Three of them were Chaplin shorts, the best of which was The Immigrant, which included a brief scene that I half-recognized from somewhere, specifically a few seconds in which Chaplin is half-walking / half-hopping in order to keep his balance on a rocking boat. The Immigrant is split into two parts, the first of which takes place on a ship bringing immigrants to the United States, including their sighting of the Statue of Liberty (which, as I believe I mentioned when discussing 1915’s The Italian, had been built just thirty years earlier.) The second section takes place mostly at a restaurant, once Chaplin and his co-star have settled in America. The best scenes are on board the ship; things slow down a bit once he comes ashore. His costar in all three shorts is Edna Purviance, who was also his co-star in 1918’s Shoulder Arms, which we saw several weeks ago. (The distinction between shorts and features during this period is a bit arbitrary; The Immigrant was half an hour, while Shoulder Arms was only forty-five minutes.)

A Burlesque on Carmen was interesting in that it was a direct parody of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 version of Carmen, which we watched back in May. The sets and costumes and plot points were quite similar, though the jokes were mostly shoehorned into the plot, rather than constituting any real satire of the earlier movie.

The Tramp was the earliest of the three, and probably the least inventive, with most of the jokes consisting of people being hit with bricks or poked with pitchforks or having things fall on them.

Fatty and Mabel Adrift starred Mabel Normand (who we last saw in 1914’s Tillie’s Punctured Romance, with Chaplin) and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The villain was played by Al St. John, Arbuckle’s nephew. His acting in this short was extremely broad, even by the standards of early silent comedies, but apparently he went on to a long career as a Western sidekick in the thirties and forties, including many B movies with Buster Crabbe. This movie was basically about Arbuckle and Normand’s characters' romance and eventual marriage, and St. John’s jealous attempts at sabotage.

Teddy at the Throttle starred Gloria Swanson, whom we saw a few weeks ago in Male and Female. Her costar was Bobby Vernon, who was only an inch taller than Swanson at 5’2. The main villain was played by Wallace Beery, who was married to Swanson at the time. Like her, he bridged the gap between silents and talkies, winning a Best Actor Oscar in 1932. He was also famously referenced in Barton Fink (“Wallace Beery. Wrestling Picture. What do you need, a roadmap?”) The plot of this was similar to a few other films we’ve seen, in that Swanson and Vernon are due to inherit some money if and when they are married, and Beery and his sister attempt to use this information to enrich themselves.

I can’t say any of these films really struck me as worthy of recommendation, but The Immigrant and Teddy at the Throttle were probably the best of the bunch. Next week we see four more shorts, and then move on to features from the 1920s. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

The Matrimaniac (1916)

Originally posted to Facebook on 8/31/2016

The Matrimaniac was the fifth and final film on our list from 1916. Both leads also appeared in Intolerance: Douglas Fairbanks in a small role, and Constance Talmadge as one of the female leads. This is the first film that I recall where I’ve seen Fairbanks in the lead role. My image of him mostly stems from clips from his costume epics -- I usually envision him as having just taken Jack Handey’s course at swashbuckling school (i.e. Laughing, Then Jumping Off Something.) In this he plays an essentially modern character, who is exasperated by the various obstacles he runs into. In some ways that makes his occasional acrobatics a little more surprising, since he's basically dressed for a business meeting. And the film mostly belongs to him; there is occasional cross-cutting to Talmadge and various pursuers, but Fairbanks has most of the main action, which is a little strange given how prominent Talmadge was in Intolerance.

This film, though, couldn’t be more different from Intolerance; it is a light comedy, and conforms a lot more closely to the received popular idea of silent films. The plot involves Douglas Fairbanks and Constance Talmadge deciding to elope against the wishes of her father and her father's choice of a suitor, who discover their elopement plot and chase them to a neighboring town. There is a little bit of stuntwork along the way -- people climbing onto trains, and up the sides of buildings. Nothing particularly startling, but pointing in the direction of where movie stuntwork was heading. This is also probably the most explicitly comedic film we’ve seen since Tillie’s Punctured Romance. It is funnier than that film, but for me that is a low bar.

Next week we begin 1917 with A Romance of the Redwoods, our second film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and the first starring Mary Pickford, the future wife of Fairbanks. I’ve also added our films planned for 1918 to the list, which is shared here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Gretchen the Greenhorn (1916)

Originally posted to Facebook on 8/17/2016

Gretchen the Greenhorn was the fourth film we watched from 1916. It clocked in at under an hour, which was a welcome change of pace after the twelve-part serial Judex and the three-plus hours of Intolerance. It starred Dorothy Gish -- whom we’d previously seen in Judith of Bethulia, along with Lillian Gish, though both of them had tiny parts -- and several other actors whom we’d seen just previously in Intolerance, including Elmo Lincoln, who would later become the first screen Tarzan. The main villain, when he finally shows up, is played by Euguene Pallette, who is not a household name, but who appeared in small parts in hundreds of films, including many classics, up through the forties.

It was directed by Sydney and Chester Franklin, each of whom went on directing well into the sound era, Sydney more prominently than Chester. This film was much more pedestrian than some of the films we’ve been seeing lately -- it uses none of the visual pyrotechnics of Intolerance, for example -- but it is well-made, and probably more typical of the sort of film that was being shown at the time. It is the story of a Dutch immigrant, Gish, joining her father in America, where he works as an engraver. (Ben asked what a greenhorn was -- I told him it was an old-fashioned word for newbie.) It has some superficial similarities to The Italian, from 1915, which we watched several weeks ago. But that movie was much more melodramatic and serious. This film is not a comedy per se, but it is the kind of movie where you can be relatively sure that everything winds up well in the end. It also subscribes heavily to the melting pot idea of America -- the neighbors in their New York tenement are Irish and Italian, with various other ethnicities appearing as well. (Needless to say when people from various ethnicities begin appearing in century old films, there is always the potential for disaster, but luckily nothing rose to the “pause the film and contextualize for the children” category.) In addition to this backdrop, there is a counterfeiting plot, some gunplay, and a romance as well.

Our next film will be The Matrimaniac, our fifth and final movie from 1916. It will be the first film in which we’ll see Douglas Fairbanks as the male lead. The link to our upcoming films, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Intolerance (1916)

Originally posted to Facebook on 8/8/2016

Intolerance was the third film from 1916 we watched, and it turned into a bit of a slog. It ran three-plus hours, so we watched it over a few sessions. This was the second full-length feature by D. W. Griffith that we’ve watched, after Judith of Bethulia. Part of the reason for the extended running time is that four stories -- ostensibly thematically linked -- are presented, intercut, from four different eras: A Babylonian section set in the sixth century BC; an abbreviated story of Jesus, set when you’d expect; the story of the St. Bartholomew's day massacre, set in 16th century France; and a “modern” story, set 1916ish. The modern and Babylonian story get the majority of the running time; the other two are much shorter. Supposedly all of the stories revolve around the theme of intolerance, though the Babylonian story, for instance, just seemed like a power struggle, and some of the others seemed debatable too. I suppose any human conflict can be painted as a story of intolerance, in the sense that antagonists aren’t being tolerant of their opponents’ views. Griffith, of course, was famously intolerant himself, and is probably best known for the odious Birth of a Nation, even among people who don’t know anything else about him. Even in the context of this film, there is a scene where a woman’s reform society in the modern era is commented upon in the title cards, reading “When women cease to attract men they often turn to Reform as a second choice.” I rarely share my opinions with the kids during films (excepting, “Stop talking!” and “Get your shoes off the couch!”), but in this instance I paused the film, and expressed how reprehensible this was.

Another strange feature of the film was that many of the characters were not given names. For example the couple in the modern era were called “The Dear One” and the “The Boy.” This is perversely alienating -- perfectly understandable in, say, a Brecht or a Beckett play -- but not in a film that showed every evidence of wanting its audience to empathize with its characters. Many of the title cards were distancing as well, either written with overly purple phrasing (e.g. “The Loom of Fate weaves death for the Boy's father.”) or providing footnotes in a quasi-academic fashion (e.g. explaining who the Pharisees were, or noting the obscure fact that Judaism uses wine in many of its ceremonies.) “Jeff. Note: This is Jeff,” is how Ben mocked this latter practice. The movie also used the device of cutting back to a woman (played by Lillian Gish) rocking a cradle as a transition between scenes. I imagine this was used to emphasize the human and generational continuity between the various eras, but I feel like this point could have been made without dozens of nearly identical shots (and without the use of a rather famous actress in a non-acting role.)

But, for all the preceding, it was an impressive film in many ways, and it is clear why it has carved out a spot in film history. It is certainly leaps and bounds more interesting and entertaining than Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia, which was made just two years earlier. It takes many of the innovations -- moving cameras, intercutting, extreme close-ups -- that we’ve seen in earlier films like Cabiria, and makes more extensive use of them. In addition, the famous crane shots in front of the stairs in the Babylonian section may have some precedent in film history, but this is the earliest that I’ve seen this effect, and in context it is quite effective and jarring. It also has an enormous cast, both in terms of characters that drive the various plots, and also just in terms of the sheer number of extras in crowds or battle scenes. The two leads in the modern era -- Mae Marsh and Robert Harron -- also played a couple in Judith of Bethulia, but in supporting roles. Here they are probably the closest thing to main characters that the film has. The other competitor for that spot is the female lead in the Babylonian section, played by Constance Talmadge, whose constant mugging, though occasionally entertaining, was also a little distracting. There are also a host of other famous people playing small roles, including a number of future directors, and Douglas Fairbanks, who we’ll be seeing for the first time as a lead in a couple of weeks. Also, the actor playing Jesus (and who also played Robert E. Lee in Birth of a Nation) inspired what is probably my favorite IMDB trivia item for this film, which I’ll quote in its entirety: “Howard Gaye, an English actor who played Jesus Christ, got involved in a sex scandal involving a 14-year-old girl and was deported back to England. Because of the scandal, his name was removed from prints of the film at the time.” I feel like perhaps a more stringent screening process for potential actors to play Jesus may have been in order. (Though perhaps this was karmic retribution for being one of the few films that uses the story of Jesus as a minor subplot.)

The movie picks up considerably in the last 30-40 minutes. The intertitles and interminably rocking cradle used earlier to demarcate the switch between one time period and the next begin to disappear, and we begin to get direct cuts between time periods, trusting the audience to understand which time period is on the screen. And each of the stories are reaching their climax at that point, so you have St. Bartholomew’s massacre crosscut with the invasion of Babylon, further crosscut by a race car trying to catch up to a train in the modern portion, all of which showed that Griffith was capable of building suspense when he chose that as a priority over sharing his idiosyncratic, borderline-crackpot philosophy of life with the world.

Our next film -- the fourth of five from 1916 -- is Gretchen the Greenhorn, starring Dorothy Gish. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Judex (1916)

Originally posted to Facebook on 7/13/2016

Judex was our second film from 1916, and it took us a little longer than planned to finish watching it. It was another serial, directed by Louis Feuillade, who also directed Fantomas. It was twelve episodes long, most in the half-hour range, plus a prologue, so it really felt a bit more like binging on a television show than watching a movie. It had a few actors in common with Fantomas, and also with Les Vampires, an intervening serial which we did not watch. One of the most entertaining things about Fantomas was how insane it was -- python-proof armor, false prosthetic arms, and various ridiculous plot twists. This serial was more level headed and sensible -- making it a better film in many ways, but with fewer signature moments. Judex (played by René Cresté) in this film is essentially a vigilante, similar in some ways to Batman (and may be somewhere in the lineage of Batman’s influences, though that’s a bit murky.) Like Batman, he operates outside of the law, but with his own moral code. He is dressed in black, and wears a cape and prominent black hat -- which is what you’d expect from this kind of proto-super hero, but it does make it a little strange that his chief accomplice is his brother Roger, who dresses in a business suit, and tags along with Judex, a weird conventional grace note to a variety of eccentric adventures -- who probably could have been eliminated from the movie entirely with minimal rewriting. Judex’s primary target is a corrupt banker named Favraux, played by Louis Leubas, who also had a prominent role in A Child of Paris, which we saw a few months back. Given the running time, there is sufficient space to flesh out an assortment of other characters, including The Licorice Kid (an Artful-Dodger-type, named, so far as we could tell, for the fact that he is never seen eating licorice), Favraux’s young grandson (played, I believe, by a little girl who compulsively kisses everyone with whom she is in a scene), an incompetent detective and his fiance (the latter showing up late in the picture and mostly seen wearing a bathing suit, whether or not the situation called for it), and the female ringleader of a gang that is trying to recover Favraux’s money, played by the single-named actress Musidora, who also played Irma Vep in Les Vampires. The movie as a whole was entertaining and polished. It was lightweight, but not as tongue-in-cheek as Fantomas.

Next week we will watch our third film from 1916: Intolerance, one of the canonical “film-school” silents, and the first D.W. Griffith film we’ve watched since 1914’s Judith of Bethulia. It is not a serial, but it is a very long film at over three hours, so I hope we’ll be able to finish it in a single weekend, but we’ll see. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Sherlock Holmes (1916)

Originally posted to Facebook on 6/18/2016

Sherlock Holmes was the first movie we watched from 1916. The play upon which it was based was first produced in 1899, and William Gillette, the star and author, had been a playwright and actor for decades earlier. He was born in 1853, and by the time this movie was filmed he had been playing the role on stage on-and-off for almost twenty years, and would continue reviving it for another fifteen years, into the thirties. The movie itself was lost for many years, until a copy was found in 2014, so it is a minor miracle that we are able to see it. Film-wise it seems relatively modern for its time, with camera movements, and cross-cutting, and a long complex narrative, and all of the other elements that seemed pretty standard by 1916, but were extremely uncommon just five years earlier. You can see some of its stage roots in the fact that there are a large number of verbose title cards, and numerous scenes involve people having long conversations. I don’t know what changes were made to the play, but some of the plot seemed a little disjointed and bizarre. For example, at one point Alice Faulkner, the female lead, played by Marjorie Kay, is being held prisoner in a house in or near London. Holmes visits the house, figures out what is going on, and manages to speak with her, but then leaves both Alice and the criminals still at the house with nothing more than a stern warning to the criminals. They predictably ignore him. (In Holmes’ defense, Alice probably should have left the house as well at this point.) At another point, Professor Moriarty (Ernest Maupain) gets involved, and decides to do away with Holmes. His clever plan? Get Holmes alone in his house and shoot him. This is foiled because Holmes has a gun as well. If only that were something a criminal mastermind might have foreseen! The entire last quarter of the film is a little anticlimactic. The main criminals have been disposed of, but Moriarty is still at large, and is seeking revenge on Holmes with only slightly more sophistication than his earlier “break into his house and shoot him” scheme. This section actually involves Watson (played by Edward Fielding), who has been largely absent through most of the film. Holmes is seeing clients at Watson’s office, rather than at 221B Baker Street, which, we are informed in a title card, has burned down. That seems like a pretty important event to be told about as an aside, but that’s how it’s handled. Despite all of these plot issues, Gillette makes a convincing Holmes, and it is interesting to see how much of Holmes’ iconic nature was already set by 1916. There was a 1922 movie based on the play as well, starring John Barrymore, which we may possibly see if we get that far. (I also dimly remember seeing a filmed version of the play -- actually on a stage with a seated audience -- starring Frank Langella on cable in the 1980s.)

As far as I can tell neither Gillette nor Marjorie Kay ever appeared in another film. Ernest Maupain popped up in a few films up through the end of the silent era, while Edward Fielding, on the other hand, was in a handful of movies until 1940, and then somehow got on someone's list, and started playing small parts in a dozen films every year up until his death in 1945.

Next week we begin our second film from 1916, the twelve-part serial Judex. It is directed by Louis Feuillade, who also directed 1913's Fantomas, which we saw a few months ago. Like that film, this one is long enough at 300 minutes that we are going to watch it over two successive weekends. Our list of films, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT