The Man and the Moment (1929)

Originally posted to Facebook on 3/2/2019

The Man and the Moment was our fifth film from 1929, and the second partial talkie. It had perhaps a half-a-dozen scenes with audible dialog, significantly more than the three such scenes in the previous partial talkie we watched, 1928's Lonesome. Even during the talking scenes, though, there were title cards -- but that was an artifact of its restoration, rather than what audiences saw at the time.

Rod La Rocque plays an idly rich bachelor, and Billie Dove (whom we previously saw in 1926's The Black Pirate) plays an aviator. They devise a scheme to marry one another, so that La Rocque can avoid getting married to a character played by Gwen Lee, and Dove can avoid having her guardian essentially put her under house arrest. By the fact that she has a guardian, I imagine that we are supposed to infer that she is not yet an adult (though Dove herself was 26 at the time) which makes the whole film rather troubling. Another weakness is the contrived nature of major plot points. There would have been no film if La Rocque had clearly told Lee that he wasn't going to marry her, or if Dove had waited the (presumably short) amount of time until she was no longer subject to a guardianship -- both of which seem far simpler solutions to their respective problems than a sham marriage. In any case, as you would expect in a romantic comedy of this kind, they end up developing feelings for one another.

When initially hatching this plot they have a long pre-code discussion about how they wouldn't actually have sex during the marriage, the execution of which illustrates the main problem of the film. It starts out a little bit amusing, but the dialog is slow and unnatural, and the same joke is made several times over a period of several minutes. By the end the kids were literally laughing at how drawn-out the scene was. It doesn't seem fair to blame anyone in particular for this, given the infancy of sound, but Dove acquits herself much better than La Rocque, in this scene and in the movie in general. She gives a performance not too far from the typical acting style a few years later. La Rocque is not at that level; his delivery is slow and wooden, particularly when he is delivering ostensibly witty dialog. The fast-talking leading men of the thirties were clearly still a few years away.

To an even greater extent than Lonesome, this film would have been stronger as a silent, mainly because of the unevenly delivered dialog. But it also would have been stronger if it had been funnier, or cared about its characters a little more.

Our next film will be Hallelujah, our sixth from 1929, our first true sound film, our first musical, and our second film with a predominantly African-American cast. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

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.