Shorts (1923-1929)

During our second week of shorts from the 1920s, we watched a Chaplin film, an experimental French film, three Disney shorts, and two silent shorts from Laurel and Hardy.

In The Pilgrim (1923) -- which at 47 minutes I've rather arbitrarily classed as a short -- Chaplin plays an ex-convict who disguises himself as a priest, and is taken in by a community who mistakes him for another priest. This is complicated by the fact that one of his friends from prison is in the same town and recognizes him. Chaplin reliably plays his normal persona, and has many of his typical cast-mates present: Edna Purviance, Mack Swain, and his brother Sydney Chaplin. Like many of his films, it's divided into a sequence of set pieces, but it's one of his more muted outings -- comedically, visually, and from a story perspective.

Ménilmontant (1926) came in a DVD set called "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s," an imposing title. The film itself is relatively accessible though, its most "experimental" feature being its lack of title cards. This makes it occasionally opaque; however we have seen a number of commercial films that used few or no title cards (including notably 1924's The Last Laugh.) It tells the story of two sisters played by Nadia Sibirskaia and Yolande Beaulieu, who are orphaned early in the film, and their subsequent lives in the city. It was written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, a Russian working in France. The film begins and ends with violence, a jarring framing device -- though what occurs during the main body of the movie could potentially have worked independently. In addition to the lack of title cards, another technique which felt innovative was the use of a few striking images of characters fading in and out, showing elapsed time. I expect there are earlier precedents for this, but it was used effectively, and was less clichéd than showing clock hands turning, or using more conventional cuts.

Steamboat Willie (1928) is the most iconic short that we watched during this session, having introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and having been excerpted and parodied extensively. The short's events are fairly random, but the through-line is Mickey, Minnie, and Pete traveling on a boat, making music using various on-board animals. Although this film has synced sound, there is little if any dialog; the sound is confined mostly to music tracking the on-screen action, with some additional interspersed muttering. I should remark, too, that the gracious and thoughtful Mickey Mouse of which I got a lifetime's supply on the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse animated TV show when the kids were growing up -- had not yet emerged. This Mickey Mouse is rather less benevolent, particularly to the other animals that don't seem to have been granted Mickey's mysterious ability for abstract thought.

That carries through to Plane Crazy (1928) in which Mickey builds a plane, looking with admiration at an image of Lindbergh (before he became disillusioned by Lindbergh's politics during WWII.) In his drive to become an aviator, he again uses animals in various cavalier ways. At one point, while airborne, Mickey terrifies Minnie by recklessly steering the plane in an attempt to get her to consent to a kiss. When she still refuses, he kisses her anyway, and in response she jumps out of the plane. Dark stuff. As with the previous film, there's very little dialog; I believe Minnie says "Who me?" at one point.

The third Disney film The Skeleton Dance (1929) doesn't feature any of Disney's famous characters, but is pretty well described by its title, and is basically five and half minutes of skeletons dancing around and making music -- as well as some black cats and owls.

It's hard to judge how innovative or impactful any of these Disney films were at the time. It's certainly true that we haven't seen anything like them previously in this project, and that within a few years Mickey Mouse had attained an iconic status that persists to this day. But it is also true that we didn't find any of these cartoons particularly funny. This may in part because we were brought up with their superior successors, including the Looney Tunes cartoons that became popular in the next decade -- but I find it hard to believe that even by the standards of the time a lot of the gags in these shorts weren't a bit limp and repetitive.

Along similar lines, Big Business (1929) was the first of two Laurel and Hardy shorts we saw, both silent, and although Laurel and Hardy became more famous in the sound era, their act, with its barbed friendship, already appeared to be largely in place. It involves them as two traveling salesman -- selling Christmas trees -- and particularly their feud with a hostile customer, played by James Finlayson. This particular short was not on the same level as the canonical silent comedians that we saw last week, with much less visual imagination, but it did have a certain sense of escalating destructiveness which was well-executed.

The second short of theirs that we watched -- Liberty (1929) -- was not quite as focused. They play prison escapees, and a huge chunk of the film involves them trying to rectify having earlier put on each other's pants. Also a live crab somehow winds up in one of the pairs of pants. This is all exactly as clever and high-brow as it sounds. James Finlayson from Big Business shows up again, as the owner or employee of a music store outside of which Laurel and Hardy wreak havoc. Eventually they end up on supposedly elevated girders of an in-construction building -- a situation both contrived and derivative, echoing the last week's Harold Lloyd short Never Weaken, except a decade later. However, on the plus side, and in a bit of continuity from Ménilmontant, this short has very few title cards -- and the ones that it does have could easily have been eliminated (e.g. "What did you do that for?")

That completes our sampling of short films from the 1920s, and our survey of the 1920s in general. I plan to summarize that experience in another post at some point, but next week we're moving on the 1930s with our first feature from 1930, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers.

The Black Pirate (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 5/13/2018

The Black Pirate was our seventh and last film from 1926, and the fifth film we've seen starring Douglas Fairbanks -- the first since 1922's Robin Hood. It is a landmark of a sort, in that it is the first film we've seen that was filmed entirely in color. Color in this case means 2-strip Technicolor, which is the same process that was used for parts of 1925's Ben-Hur. As with that film, the color doesn't look completely natural, but it is obviously an early example of a coming change that would end up being almost as significant as the addition of sound. Unlike the switch-over to sound, though, which happened over just a few years, the industry change to producing almost exclusively color films took place over several decades. In fact, looking over my list of potential upcoming films, I'm not sure we'll start seeing full-color films on a regular basis until the late thirties.

The film itself is a straight adventure movie, not too different in style from Fairbanks' Robin Hood, but simpler and more focused. Fairbanks is in full swashbuckling mode here, perhaps a little less hyperactive than in Robin Hood, but still doing a lot of jumping and climbing and sword-fighting. He plays the victim of a pirate attack who, in order to survive and get back to civilization and avenge his father (who died in the attack), temporarily becomes the pirate leader -- an accomplishment that seems like it ought to be a little more difficult than portrayed. His main antagonist is another pirate, played by Sam De Grasse, who was also Prince John in Robin Hood. Billie Dove plays the love interest, but I imagine it was a rather unrewarding role for her, as she is given very little to do. This film holds up decently well as entertainment, but I'm not sure it would be terribly well-known today without the element of color. That novelty never quite wears off, and the sight of a blade dripping red with fake blood certainly has a kind of immediacy which has no exact parallel in the films that we've previously seen.

Next week we return to 1927, picking up with our fifth film from that year, the monumental Napoleon directed by Abel Gance. I have also updated the list (https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT) to add our planned films from 1928, including Speedy, which we saw at the Alamo in Winchester in 2016, and which I have decided retroactively was part of this project all along. Unfortunately I have once again exceeded pretty dramatically my goal of four films a year, but I am working on getting that back on track so we can maybe finish this project before Ben goes to college.

Faust (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 5/9/2018

Faust was our sixth film from 1926, and our third directed by F.W. Murnau. It was also our first German expressionist film since Metropolis, a few months earlier. Of course Metropolis was actually from 1927, but we had seen them out of order because we'd had the chance to see Metropolis on the big screen at the Alamo.

The movie stars Gösta Ekman as Faust, while Emil Jannings, whom we saw in Murnau's 1924 film The Last Laugh, plays the devil. Ekman would die in his forties in 1938, and Jannings would die in 1950 -- and make no movies during his final five years because of his Nazi affiliation during the war -- but the female lead Camilla Horn lived until 1996, and was appearing regularly in movies and TV up through the late eighties. (Bruce Springsteen also wrote a song about her, in a weird bit of trivia.)

In tone this film is probably closer to Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu than The Last Laugh. It tells the familiar Faust story, with Jannings' devil granting Ekman his desires in exchange for his soul. The early parts of the film are dark and atmospheric, and the initial summoning scene in particular is quite strong and dramatic. Unfortunately not long after Faust signs his contract with the devil that intensity starts to seep away as Jannings becomes less threatening than comical. Ekman begins pursuing Horn, and Jannings in parallel pursues Horn's aunt as a distraction. Jannings' scenes in this section of the movie are broad and hammy and strangely light-hearted, given that Jannings is supposedly the incarnate force of ultimate evil. The movie rallies a bit in its final section, but overall it reminds me a bit of Lang's 1921 film Destiny, in that some striking scenes and images are undermined by stretches of not-terribly-amusing comedy.

Next week is our seventh and last film from 1926, The Black Pirate. It will be our first truly color film, and our fifth film starring Douglas Fairbanks. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Tell It to the Marines (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/25/2018

Tell It to the Marines was our fifth film from 1926, and our third starring Lon Chaney. He co-stars with William Haines -- Chaney playing a Marine drill sergeant and Haines playing a young recruit. The obligatory scenes of training camp and difficult postings are present, though overall the film paints a rather rosy picture of Marine life. The female lead is a Navy nurse played by Eleanor Boardman, who is the focus of a sort of a love triangle. Chaney, refreshingly, has enough self-awareness to see that he is a generation older than her, and his attraction is relatively friendly and platonic. This is by far the most normal character we've seen Chaney play, though he is as charismatic as always. Haines, maybe surprisingly, is able to hold his own, and their interplay is the strongest feature of the movie. Haines also tries to impress Boardman, and takes her on a date where he keeps her much longer than promised, and refuses to drive her home, and is otherwise generally obnoxious. Of course she is publicly furious with him, but the movie decides that she in fact likes him after all. This is not necessarily an impossible development, but the movie seems to think it altogether natural -- which sadly is only the first of several errors of judgment. The second is telegraphed by the credits, which list Warner Oland as "Chinese Bandit Leader." Oland, of course, was a Swede who later played Charlie Chan in a series of movies throughout the thirties. But even before that moment could unfold, Chaney and Haines ship out, and are stationed on an island, presumably in the Pacific. There Haines meets and becomes involved with Carmel Myers (whom we'd earlier seen in Ben-Hur as an Egyptian who attempted to seduce Ramon Navarro), appearing in darkening makeup as an islander. These scenes are even worse than the later scenes with Oland, which themselves are not so great.

The frustrating thing about this film is that it has some very strong sequences with Chaney and Haines that are weighed down by the flaws described above. Chaney is at times a boss, a mentor, a rival, and a friend to Haines -- and Haines matches Chaney with a well-calibrated initial irreverence that eventually matures into a certain amount of depth. In the end it is too flawed to recommend, but it certainly has some of the pieces of a good movie.

Our film next week is Faust, our sixth from 1926, and our third directed by F.W. Murnau. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

The Flying Ace (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/17/2018

The Flying Ace was our fourth film from 1926, and the first to feature an all black cast. In fact this is probably the first film we've seen in this project that features African Americans in any kind of capacity for more than a minute or so. It was directed by Richard Norman, a white man who specialized in making so-called "race films." Obviously mainstream Hollywood had minimal interest in those kinds of films in the late twenties, and this film was made at Norman's own studios, in Florida.

The film's plot involves a WWI flyer, played by Laurence Criner, who is tasked with solving the theft of a large sum of money from a local train station. The female lead is played by Kathryn Boyd, and initial suspicion falls upon her character's father. Not unlike a Columbo episode, it is revealed to the audience fairly early on who the criminals are, though some of the details of the crime are filled in over the course of the film. And in many ways this does seem like an episode of a detective show -- both because of its short running length, and because of its evident low budget. In some ways it also reminds me of 1912's The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs, which we saw back in 2016 -- but of course that film was made more than a decade earlier, which was an eternity in terms of the development of movies during this era. The earlier film was innovative for its relative sophistication and realism, and for its use of a film within a film. The Flying Ace by contrast does not feel particularly innovative from a film-making standpoint, but it was of course pioneering in that it gave black actors an atypical chance to appear on the big screen in non-stereotypical parts, and black audiences the chance to see them. I don't know whether the kids were able to recapture a bit of that feeling or not. None of the actors in this film had the opportunity to really become established movie stars, though Laurence Criner popped up regularly in Hollywood movies for the next few decades. This of course continued to be a problem in Hollywood, and is a problem today as well, but as we head into the thirties and forties, I'm hoping we'll get a chance to see Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, and a few of the other rare black movie stars from the early days of sound.

Next week we see our fifth film from 1926, Tell It to the Marines, the third film in which we've seen Lon Chaney. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Flesh and the Devil (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/15/2018

Flesh and the Devil was our third film from 1926, and it starred John Gilbert and Lars Hanson, both of whom we've seen as leads before, and Greta Garbo, whom we haven't. It is also the first film we've seen directed by Clarence Brown, who is not a well-known name today, but who shares the distinction with Alfred Hitchcock, King Vidor, and Robert Altman for having the most Best Director Oscar nominations without ever winning. We'd seen Gilbert recently in 1925's The Big Parade, and Lars Hanson even more recently in 1926's The Scarlet Letter, directed by Victor Sjöström. Like Hanson and Sjöström, Garbo had recently moved to Hollywood from Sweden, where she was an established film star, and had in fact already appeared on screen there with Hanson.

In this movie close friends Hanson and Gilbert are soldiers together, and become involved in a love triangle with Garbo. This film often lapses into melodrama, but the relationship between Gilbert and Garbo is surprisingly naturalistic, probably enhanced by their real-life off-screen relationship.

But, not unlike Wings, the movie's ultimate aim is to elevate the importance of the two men's friendship over their rivalry for Garbo, though this is undermined by the fact that their friendship is strained less by their mutual love of Garbo than by the fact that Gilbert hides the truth from Hanson. Garbo, as it is gradually revealed, is basically amoral and hedonistic, which results in some strong scenes for her, but also serves to lower the moral stakes, as it absolves (or at least the movie seems to think so) Gilbert and Hanson of any responsibility for the various consequences, including those in a particularly manipulative finale. Still, the film is notable for its performances, the chemistry between Garbo and Gilbert particularly.

Next week, we see The Flying Ace, our fourth film from 1926, which is what used to be called a "race film," and features a cast of African-American actors, who have been notably missing in almost all of the films we've seen to date. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

The General (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/10/2018

The General was our second feature starring Buster Keaton, after 1923's Three Ages, and our second film from 1926. It's also one of the handful of films from this period that I'd seen before we began this project.

Keaton plays an engineer during the Civil War who becomes involved in chasing and recovering a stolen train. This is apparently based on an actual event, but only very loosely. What this film has in common with a lot of the better silent-era comedies is a certain precision and timing, which is striking even when it is just coordinating a few performers in a mundane setting, but really achieves a type of impossible grace when it is performed with multi-ton trains that are being choreographed with a such a seemingly light touch. This is all enormously impressive, but I have to admit I did not find it as funny as I'd remembered, perhaps because I was too familiar with so many of the sequences. The thing I found the most amusing this time around was Keaton's character's frustration with his leading lady, Marion Mack, who is given a little more comedic business than many of the female leads in the comedies that we've seen thus far. Interestingly the kids made vocal observations about Keaton playing a Confederate, jokingly booing when he succeeded at this or that. The film itself is not political (except in the sense that being apolitical is political), and Keaton could easily have been playing a Union soldier with a change of uniform and one or two title cards -- but the kids still found his allegiance off-putting, at least enough to joke about. I'm not sure how funny they found the whole thing, but then I never really am. Allison, after seeing the famous scene where Keaton throws one railroad tie at another to knock it off the track, remarked "skillz", so I think she was at least a little bit impressed by the athleticism and scale of the movie.

Even though I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped, it is clear that this is just objectively a better film than Three Ages, to the extent that objectivity means anything when talking about films. For the bulk of the movie, the jokes serve the story and are not shoehorned in arbitrarily. One could perhaps criticize the romance for being perfunctory, but the main body of the film flows naturally, rarely dragging and without much fat or obvious exposition.

Next week we'll see Flesh and the Devil, our third film from 1926, and our first starring Greta Garbo. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

The Scarlet Letter (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/7/2018

The Scarlet Letter was our first film from 1926. We saw it at the Library of Congress's Packard campus, which is more than an hour's drive south, in Culpeper. The main reason I decided to make a trip that long with the kids was that the 1926 version of The Scarlet Letter -- despite being a well-rated and popular picture at the time -- is not easily available, either streaming or on disc. A good print exists for it, and it is occasionally shown on TCM, but for whatever reason it does not appear to be obtainable via my normal method of half-heartedly googling. By contrast, the 1934 version with Colleen Moore can be purchased from multiple sources, and I saw more than one complaint from people who thought they had ordered the earlier version and received the later. Their vocal and proportionate responses were much as you might expect.

I had never been to the Packard campus before, and did not know what to expect. As it turns out it has very much of a museum approach to screenings. No popcorn was available, for instance, much to the kids' disappointment, and we had to go through a metal detector prior to the movie. Additionally there was a short lecture before the film, which was interesting -- I did not know, for instance, that Sjöström had spent a good chunk of his childhood in the United States -- but not generally the approach we'd been taking with this project.

As with He Who Gets Slapped, this film unites director Victor Sjöström with an established Hollywood star -- in this case Lillian Gish -- whom we hadn't seen since 1920's Way Down East. It also stars Lars Hanson, another Swedish émigré, who had worked with Sjöström before coming to Hollywood, and would do so again, both in Hollywood and also after they'd both returned to Sweden.

I have never read The Scarlet Letter, nor seen any other adaptation, but I had a pretty good idea of the plot just through cultural osmosis. As an aside, the logo of a company at which I worked for several years is the word Harris, with the A in Harris dramatically drawn in red. While working there I occasionally asked what this scarlet A was meant to represent, and whether it implied that something shameful had occurred that the company was being punished for. I don't believe this ever amused anyone besides me, but it did make me think that there were probably a few layers of executive leadership who had a limited knowledge of English literature. In case any of them are reading this, Hester Prynne (played by Gish) lives in 17th century Massachusetts, and becomes pregnant through an affair with a local minister (played by Hanson.) Unwilling to expose the father, she is sentenced to wear the scarlet letter A -- for adulteress -- and she and her daughter live under that burden of shame, while the minister also, secretly, lives with similar shame and guilt. The lead role is very much on-brand for Gish, who again plays a living martyr. Additionally, though she was in her mid-thirties at this point, she credibly plays someone who I believe was supposed to be a decade younger. Hanson too, does a solid job of playing someone tormented by repression and guilt. Sjöström's direction is as good as you'd expect, though a bit more conservative than in his earlier films.

The original novel was written in 1850, and set two hundred years earlier, and the movie of course follows suit. I think, at times, setting a story in the past allows one to reflect on what has and hasn't changed -- but just as often I think it allows the audience to undeservedly congratulate themselves for living in a more enlightened age. I think that is why many films about civil rights, for instance, are set in the past, and I think that criticism could apply to this film as well. As a story about specific people, I think it works fairly well -- but I think the specific situation they find themselves in manifests itself in such an archaic way that it creates a barrier to linking it to a universal experience.

Next week we see The General, our second film from 1926, and our second Buster Keaton feature. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT