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 (1918-1919)

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/1/2017

Last week we watched our second and last batch of shorts from the teens. They included:

A Dog's Life (1918)
The Bell Boy (1918)
From Hand to Mouth (1919)
Bumping into Broadway (1919)

All three of the canonical silent comedians are represented: Chaplin in A Dog’s Life, Keaton in The Bell Boy, and Harold Lloyd in the other two.

We’d seen three Chaplin shorts the previous week, and the new one was along much the same lines, including the presence of Edna Purviance as his leading lady. Quality-wise it was in the middle of the pack: not as good as The Immigrant, but better than The Tramp. Much of the plot revolves around Chaplin trying to obtain money and food, which is essentially the premise of the earlier shorts as well.

That basic plot is also the basis of Harold Lloyd’s From Hand to Mouth, though Lloyd is a somewhat more accessible leading man. Chaplin often has a slightly alien presence -- including his unusual appearance, and his ignorance or lack of concern with normal human conventions. Lloyd comes across as more of a normal human being down on his luck. His co-star in this film was Mildred Davis, who eventually became his wife of forty-plus years.

Bumping into Broadway was another Lloyd short from the same year, and had many of the same supporting cast, excepting his co-star, who in this case was Bebe Daniels, an actress whom we’d seen in a bit part in Male and Female, and who was active in movies and TV well into the 1950s. Interestingly both films end with dozens of policeman chasing people around, which conforms to a stereotype of silent comedies. Neither film was made for Keystone, so these weren’t technically Keystone Cops, but seem likely to be a derivative of some sort.

I’d taken the kids to see 1928’s Speedy back during the fall at the Alamo in Winchester, so this wasn’t their first time seeing Harold Lloyd. He’s a decade younger in these shorts, but his persona already seems to be basically intact.

The remaining short, The Bell Boy, was a Fatty Arbuckle picture, and co-starred both Keaton and Arbuckle’s nephew Al St. John, whom we'd seen in the previous week’s Fatty and Mabel Adrift. This is the first time we’ve seen Keaton however, and although he isn’t the star of the picture his talents are prominently on display, and you can see an athleticism and apparent willingness to endure pain for the sake of a gag that are unlike Chaplin or Lloyd. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, he reprised much of this short twenty years later in the sound era, with 1937’s Love Nest on Wheels, and also used a portion of it almost fifty years later, in a 1966 short called The Scribe. Like all of the shorts this week, this film has a lot of scattershot jokes, some of which are better than others. Interestingly there are some topical references to Rasputin and to Kaiser Wilhelm, making this and Shoulder Arms the only two films we’ve seen to directly reference World War One while it was actually occurring.

Next week we begin the 1920s, with our fourth film by Cecil B. DeMille, titled Why Change Your Wife?. I’ve also added a new set of films from 1921. As with 1920, I’ve failed to keep to my original plan of targeting four films a year, and have instead selected five. This should take us into early March. I’m definitely hoping to hit sound films this year, since I would like to finish this project before the kids go to college, but we shall see. The updated list is shared here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

True Heart Susie (1919)

Originally posted to Facebook on 12/11/2016

The final feature we watched from 1919 was True Heart Susie, the third feature we’ve seen directed by D. W. Griffith. It’s also the first we’ve seen starring Lillian Gish, though we’ve seen her previously in smaller parts, including in the unrewarding role of endless cradle-rocker in Intolerance. Her co-star is Robert Harron, who played the male lead in the modern section of Intolerance. Gish plays the title character, who lives in a small town with Harron, and has, since grade school, been in love with him. Harron fitfully reciprocates, but ends up marrying another woman, played by Clarine Seymour. Interestingly Harron and Seymour would both be dead by the following year; Harron via a self-inflicted gunshot, and Seymour of pneumonia following intestinal surgery. Gish on the other hand lived for seventy-three more years, dying in 1993, and appearing in movies well into the eighties.

In this movie Gish is portrayed as basically angelic, while Seymour, if not quite demonic, is certainly portrayed as selfish and unreliable. In the most amusingly anachronistic bit of disparagement, Seymour is described as the type of woman who wears paint, while Gish, of course, doesn’t. And this is part of a larger pattern -- all of Gish’s choices are presented as virtuous, including misleading Harron on several occasions, and generally not making her feelings known to him. Perhaps this is the model Griffith had of appropriate female behavior, but it appears ludicrous today, and I imagine to many audiences of the time as well -- since this was not the attitude shown in the other films of the period that we’ve seen (or at least not to this pronounced degree.) Basically this is the same flaw that polluted Intolerance; Griffith’s tendency to be at least as interested in espousing his strange and retrograde moral ideas as in making an entertaining movie. Another irritating trope in this film, which continues to crop up in films even now, is that Gish is described in title cards as being plain, despite clearly being a movie star. Notwithstanding all of the above, this movie may be the most conventionally entertaining of the three Griffith features that we’ve seen, but that only means that it is more entertaining than the uneven and muddled Judith of Bethulia, and more conventional than the sprawling and sui generis Intolerance.

So, with this film, we’ve wrapped up the teens, at least as far as features go. During the next two weeks we’ll watch a selection of shorts before moving on to the twenties. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Hawthorne of the U.S.A. (1919)

Originally posted to Facebook on 11/20/2016

Hawthorne of the U.S.A. was our third film from 1919. It starred Wallace Reid, whom we last saw in a leading role in Carmen, from 1915. There are a variety of other familiar faces as well: Lila Lee, the female lead, and Theodore Roberts both appeared in Male and Female, from just a few weeks back, and Charles Ogle we’d seen as far back as 1910 playing the monster in Frankenstein, and also more recently in Romance of the Redwoods. Also present was Harrison Ford as the protagonist’s best friend, or as IMDB calls him, Harrison Ford (II). I’ve been vaguely aware that there was a silent film star with the same name as the modern actor, but this was the first time I’d seen him in an actual film. The film itself is based on a play, and is essentially a romantic comedy, though with a slight satirical tinge. It begins with Reid winning a fortune at Monte Carlo, and making some vaguely anti-monarchical statements. This encourages some revolutionaries from the fictional country of Bovinia to draw him into their attempts to overthrow Bovinia’s king. Once he arrives in Bovinia, he ends up falling in love with the king’s daughter, and gets involved in various other intrigues. Overall it is a lightweight, occasionally amusing film, with no serious political points to make, excepting possibly the out-of-style viewpoint that the solution to foreign instability is just a good dose of American common sense. The revolutionaries even today seem reminiscent of the Bolsheviks, and certainly must have seemed that way to the audiences of 1919, but the source play was performed on Broadway in 1912 (and, as an aside, starred Douglas Fairbanks), so 1917 is presumably not the specific satirical target.

Next week we watch True Heart Susie, our final film from 1919, and our third feature from D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish and Robert Harron. After that we’re going to take a couple of weeks to watch some shorts from the teens, and then move on to the 1920s. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

When the Clouds Roll By (1919)

Originally posted to Facebook on 11/17/2016

When the Clouds Roll By was our second film from 1919, and our third starring Douglas Fairbanks. This was also the first film we've seen directed by Victor Fleming, who directed many notable films up until his death in the late 1940s, but who is probably most famous as the primary director of both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind in 1939, the latter for which he won a Best Director Oscar. The plot of this film is a little complex, and begins with the unusual premise that Fairbanks’ doctor is attempting to drive him to suicide, and has enlisted a number of his friends and neighbors towards that end. However, after a while the movie changes course, and becomes more of a romantic comedy, with his boss enlisting him to help cheat his love interest’s father out of some land. Of course, he doesn’t know that he’s cheating her father, or even that he is her father, or that... Anyway, complications and misunderstandings ensue. I doubt anyone would contest that this is the strongest Fairbanks film of the three that we’ve seen so far; The Matrimaniac was enjoyable but slight, and Wild and Woolly was quite flawed in a number of ways, but particularly by its endless stereotypical depictions of Native Americans. (Sadly this film has a borderline racist joke near the end as well, but it is thankfully brief.) But by saying this film is an improvement over its two predecessors, I am not offering faint praise -- it is really significantly better, particularly in terms of stunts and production values, and is better written as well, with a more complex plot. There is one sequence, early in the movie, where Fairbanks walks up the walls and across the ceiling of a house in a manner so similar to Fred Astaire’s scene in Royal Wedding that it is hard to believe that the latter wasn’t quoting the former. In addition, Fairbanks and his love interest (Kathleen Clifford) have a little bit of chemistry, more so than usual in the romantic comedies we’ve seen to date, and actually seem to like each other for reasons other than the dictates of the plot. When you watch this film, and a few others we’ve seen recently, you begin to realize that somewhere along the line the resources available to make movies has increased drastically. Some of the features we’ve seen -- Gretchen the Greenhorn, for instance, or Romance of the Redwoods -- seem like they could have been made by a few dozen dedicated people. This isn’t universally true -- Intolerance and Cabiria were both massive undertakings, for instance. But those were essentially art films. When even a romantic comedy clearly requires the work of hundreds of people over months, something has clearly changed. Additionally, this movie also reflects changing times, specifically the dawning of the twenties. One clear marker is that a friend of the heroine is singled out for her bobbed hair, but more generally the dialog is slangier, and it seems more energetic and buoyant. I hesitate to outright recommend it, because it is paper thin, and very contrived, but it is high-spirited and amusing -- probably the best comedy feature we’ve seen to date.

Next we’ll watch our third film from 1919, called Hawthorne of the U.S.A.. It stars Wallace Reid, whom we last saw in a leading role in 1915’s Carmen. The list as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Male and Female (1919)

Originally posted to Facebook on 11/12/2016

Male and Female was the first film we watched from 1919, and the third film we’ve seen directed by Cecil B. DeMille. It is also the first we’ve seen starring Gloria Swanson, probably twenty years old at the time. She is probably most famous for her silent work, but continued appearing in movies and television well into the 1970s, including notably Sunset Boulevard, in which DeMille also appeared. This movie is based on the play The Admirable Crichton, written by J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. It has been adapted a few times over the years, and is probably somewhere in the lineage of Swept Away and its remake as well. It concerns a group of upper-class Britons and their servants who are shipwrecked on an island, and find their social roles inverted as a result of their isolation and the need for survival. Crichton, the butler who takes control post-shipwreck, is played by Thomas Meighan, and the eldest daughter of the upper-class family is played by Swanson. The majority of the film takes place on the island, though there is a probably too-lengthy portion set at the family’s London estate prior to the shipwreck. There is also a strange fantasy sequence, during which Meighan and Swanson imagine themselves in Babylonian times, with Meighan the emperor and Swanson a Christian slave thrown to the lions for refusing to submit. As with several films we’ve seen from this period, the incredible effect of Swanson being in the same shot with an actual lion is achieved by disregarding civilized norms of workplace safety.

I haven’t read or seen the original play, so I don’t know how it compares, but from the changed title of this version, I suspected that the depiction of the new social structure of the island was going to be rather sexist, and that certainly turned out to be the case. I think there is a larger point to be made about how the influence of society inhibits or shapes how sexism manifests itself, but this movie doesn’t attempt anything that sophisticated. It basically collapses into a love triangle, with Swanson and Lila Lee, playing the scullery maid, vying for Crichton. Its commentary on the collapse of class is similarly shallow and essentially suggests that the class roles are inverted on the island because Crichton is competent and best able to aid everyone in survival. There is the briefest suggestion of the use of force to maintain order, but only in relation to a character who was refusing to do his fair share. Otherwise Crichton is portrayed as being of too noble a character to enforce his position by violence. This is essentially a romantic comedy, though, and is meant to be lightweight -- so I am not arguing that it should have explored sexism and class structure more deeply. By all appearances the filmmakers would have been poorly suited to take that route, and I suspect a better approach would have been to adopt an even lighter touch.

Our next film is our second from 1919, and the third we’ve seen starring Douglas Fairbanks: When the Clouds Roll By. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT