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

A Man There Was (1917)

Originally posted to Facebook on 10/7/2016

A Man There Was was our last film from 1917, and the second film we’ve seen directed by Victor Sjöström, the first being Ingeborg Holm, from 1913. In some ways that earlier film seemed more like a conventional feature than this one -- even though it was made at the very beginning of commercial feature films. This one is based on a poem by Ibsen, and the title cards are apparently excerpts from that poem -- a rhymed translation into English in the version we saw. It is set during the Napoleonic wars -- fifty years before the poem was written, a century before the movie, and two centuries from the present day. The lead character, played by Sjöström, is a sailor who, I hope I can say without spoilers, suffers tragedy and seeks revenge. It reminded me a little of a Griffith short we saw earlier this year called The Unchanging Sea (also based on a poem), but is significantly darker and more intense. In some ways this movie is closer to an illustrated version of the poem than what one might expect from a feature, and as a result it is fairly single-minded about telling its story, with few extraneous details, and a running time of less than an hour. It has some strong imagery as well, of the sea and the coast, and the aging protagonist. It is perhaps a bit melodramatic, but with a certain sense of heightened reality.

Next week we begin 1918 with Stella Maris, our second film starring Mary Pickford. I’ve also added our planned films for 1919 to the spreadsheet, which is linked here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Wild and Woolly (1917)

Originally posted to Facebook on 10/1/2016

Wild and Woolly was our third film from 1917, and the second we’ve seen starring Douglas Fairbanks. Like The Matrimaniac, it is set more or less in the present day (i.e. 1917.) Also like that film it is a light comedy with some mild stunt-work. The plot is unusual and seemed promising: Fairbanks plays the rich son of a railroad magnate. He idealizes the West, and is sent to Arizona, imagining it to be as represented in novels and movies, despite the fact that by 1917, the Wild West is essentially gone (though still within living memory.) The town, however, is aware of his misconception, and decides to play the part in an attempt to curry favor with him (and his father). However, this premise never lives up to its potential for a few reasons. First, and most significant, was the portrayal of Native Americans as the main antagonists, in the broadest and most unsympathetic way. At one point, when a group of Native Americans are terrorizing a bar, snarling and theatrically drinking liquor, I considered calling it quits, like we did for Traffic in Souls, and finding a replacement film for the following week. But by that point we were near the end, so we managed to finish it up. Thankfully I didn’t have to spend a lot of time explaining everything to the kids -- they were fully aware, and we’d had a similar conversation when we’d watched The Perils of Pauline a few months back. But even aside from that problem, there were other major issues with the film. For one, Douglas Fairbanks’ character doesn’t come off as charmingly misinformed; rather, he appears to be psychotically deluded, and a bit of a bully to boot. And he never really receives the kind of comeuppance you might expect the spoiled rich businessman’s son to receive in a film like this. He does give a speech at the end, where he acknowledges the error of his ways, but it’s not clear why, since his delusion is more or less what saves the day. The romance, with a town resident played by Eileen Percy, is also basically pro-forma -- not strongly motivated or convincing. Definitely a disappointment. Interestingly the director (John Emerson) and one of the writers (Anita Loos) were later married, and were also credited as writers of The Matrimaniac. Anita Loos, particularly, had a long and bizarre life that is worth Wikipedia-ing, and continued writing for the movies up through the forties, as well as writing the book and musical upon which Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was based.

Our next film, and our last from 1917, is A Man There Was, which was directed by and also stars Victor Sjöström, who also directed Ingeborg Holm, from 1913, which is one of the more naturalistic features we’ve seen from that early period. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Tillie Wakes Up (1917)

Originally posted to Facebook on 9/17/2016

Tillie Wakes Up was the second film we watched from 1917, and was a sequel of sorts to 1914’s Tillie’s Punctured Romance. In fact there was also an intervening Tillie film as well, but it is now mostly lost. As mentioned last week, neither Chaplin nor Mabel Normand are in this one, but Marie Dressler returns as Tillie -- though her presence and character name is literally the only thread connecting these two films. In this movie she is now married, unhappily, and living in an apartment building with a similarly unhappy neighboring couple. She decides to make her husband (Frank Beamish) jealous by going out with the similarly neglected husband of the neighboring couple, played by Johnny Hines. This cliched plot is redeemed by only two things: First, one of the places they visit is an amusement park -- either Coney Island or someplace very similar. I recently saw (but haven’t written up yet) Harold Lloyd’s Speedy, which was made a decade later in 1928, and this sequence makes me wonder if he was consciously emulating this earlier film. Certainly his version is significantly more sophisticated, with jokes that look like they were planned out in advance, whereas this movie mostly relies upon showing Tillie being discomfited by the various rides (all of which look very unsafe by today’s standards.) The most striking parallel between the two movies was a ride consisting of a disc in the floor, which spins its seated riders off to the sides as it quickly rotates.

The second interesting thing about this film was the absurdly slangy title cards, which are impossible to capture without examples. One read, “They missed Mattewan because Officer 666 was too tired to make a pinch. He thought they were a couple of nuts!”, which I think means they weren’t arrested because the officer didn’t take them seriously. Another read “Tillie had never tasted anything stronger than orange Pekoe and J. Mortimer was a bug on Clysmic, but they fell off the wagon with a splash that scared all of the Mackerel out of the Harbor,” which I believe means they weren’t used to drinking, and ended up getting very drunk. There were dozens of cards like these, and some of them were so absurdly obscure I just had to guess when translating for the kids. They were the most amusing thing about the film, although we were laughing at them as much as with them. I do wonder, though, if they really dated from 1917 or had been revised in the twenties or later. Some of them seemed a little too irreverent and jokey for 1917, and we haven’t seen anything like them in the contemporaneous films we’ve been watching, certainly not in this kind of concentrated barrage. One bit of evidence for a later vintage was the use of the word “hep,” which may have been in currency in 1917, but is more associated with later periods. Also, Oscar Hammerstein was mentioned, who was young and not particularly famous in 1917. I thought this latter piece of evidence had clinched it, but after doing a little research it appears Oscar Hammerstein had a grandfather by the same name who was also a well known theatrical figure, and it’s possible they may have been referring to him. So it’s still an open question for me. With the exception of the title cards, the movie was probably about as funny as Tillie’s Punctured Romance (i.e. not very) but there was something slightly more charming about it, perhaps having to do with the fact that it was a decidedly lower budget and less meticulous affair.

Next week we’ll see Wild and Woolly, our third film from 1917 and our second film starring Douglas Fairbanks. This list is linked to here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

A Romance of the Redwoods (1917)

Originally posted to Facebook on 9/9/2016

A Romance of the Redwoods was our first film from 1917. As I mentioned last week, it’s the first one we’ve seen starring Mary Pickford, and the second one, after Carmen, that we’ve seen directed by Cecil B. DeMille. In another prominent role is Charles Ogle, who played Frankenstein’s monster in the sixteen minute 1910 version we saw earlier this year. This film is ostensibly a melodrama, but it has a strangely light tone not completely in sync with its plot. The initial contrivance that sets the film in motion is that Mary Pickford’s character, living in Boston, is orphaned, and decides to follow her uncle out to California. However, in the meantime her uncle has been killed by a group of Native Americans (or “Injuns” as one character calls them in a title card), and his identity assumed by a stagecoach robber played by Elliot Dexter. Since this movie is titled “A Romance of the Redwoods,” you can probably guess where this setup leads -- though the leads don’t have a particularly strong chemistry, and the romance is more announced than truly shown. But the plot has enough twists and turns along the way to keep it interesting, if not essential.

Next week we’ll watch our second film from 1917, Tillie Wakes Up, a sequel to Tillie’s Punctured Romance from 1914, minus Chaplin and Mabel Normand. Marie Dressler is still in it though, playing the title role. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT