Show People (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 7/27/2018

Show People was our third film from 1928. It was directed by King Vidor, and starred Marion Davies and William Haines, all of whom we've seen before during this project -- Marion Davies in 1922's When Knighthood was in Flower and 1927's The Red Mill, William Haines in 1926's Tell It to the Marines, and King Vidor as the director of 1925's The Big Parade.

This was another film with a Movietone soundtrack, signaling the incipient end of the silent era, and the kids were impressed that, for the first time, we heard the MGM lion roar. ("Whoa!" they said.) Until recently I had actually believed that the point of the MGM lion -- and its roar -- was to signal to audiences that they were watching a sound film -- but we've seen the lion roaring silently on films dating back a few years, so obviously that was incorrect.

Show People is a Hollywood movie about Hollywood, similar in some ways to 1923's The Extra Girl, but its humor is broader than that film, which is especially notable when you remember that a long sequence in the earlier film involved Mabel Normand not being able to tell the difference between a dog dressed up as a lion and a real lion. Marion Davies in this case plays the newcomer to Hollywood, and is eventually helped out by William Haines, who is a slapstick comedian at a minor studio. Haines, as we saw a few months ago, held his own against Lon Chaney in Tell It to the Marines, perhaps surprisingly. But he does less well up against Marion Davies in this picture. She is clearly the star of the film, and gives her normal charismatic performance, though she is a bit less charming and more self-centered than in previous films. In fact, the major arc of the film follows her rise up the Hollywood ladder, forgetting her friends along the way. But she is obnoxious not only on the way up, but also when she rights things at the end. Haines also is fairly obnoxious in his role, and never quite shows his character's core of seriousness as he did in Tell It to the Marines.

Neither The Extra Girl nor this film was intended as a brutal satire of Hollywood exactly, but this film has a little more of an insider feel than the earlier one, which gives it that much less bite. It reminded me of the phenomenon of celebrities who have been mocked on Saturday Night Live showing up in person, to signal that the mockery is all in good fun -- whether or not that is (or should be) the case. And there are a number of celebrity cameos throughout the movie, playing themselves, including William S. Hart, Douglas Fairbanks, and John Gilbert. Some show up only briefly in a single shot, but some, like Charlie Chaplin, are mentioned by name, and actually have a short scene with the lead characters. The Extra Girl had a few celebrity cameos as well, but nothing close to the star power of this film.

I think I would have preferred if this film had taken a stronger approach in one direction or another -- either to have been funnier, or to have had less two-dimensional characters, or to have been more scathing about Hollywood. But it was entertaining, and it was certainly interesting to see the impression Hollywood had or wanted to create for itself at this point in its history.

Next week we move on to The Crowd, our fourth film from 1928, which was also directed by King Vidor. 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.

Robin Hood (1922)

Originally posted to Facebook on 7/4/2017

Robin Hood is our fifth film from 1922. It is the fourth film we’ve seen starring Douglas Fairbanks, but the first swashbuckling costume drama -- which is the type of film for which he is probably most famous. It is also the first that is not explicitly a comedy, though it is certainly light-hearted. It also stars Wallace Beery (whom we last saw in the 1917 short Teddy at the Throttle) as King Richard -- and Alan Hale as Little John. Alan Hale, in addition to being the father of Alan Hale Jr. from Gilligan’s Island, reprised his role as Little John sixteen years later in Errol Flynn’s 1938 version of Robin Hood.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is how long it takes Fairbanks as the Earl of Huntingdon to become Robin Hood. The first half of the film depicts his adventures in the service of King Richard, including jousting tournaments, wooing Marian (played by Enid Bennett), and accompanying Richard as he leaves for the crusades. Fairbanks is his normal athletic, exuberant self -- which is perhaps appropriate to our received image of Robin Hood, but a little odd when you consider that by the time he becomes Robin Hood he has lost everything from his former life -- or has every reason to think he has, in any case. This is the kind of movie where there are an awful lot of people throwing back their heads and laughing flamboyantly -- which as I think about it is something I don’t recall ever actually having seen happen in real life. Overall I probably would have preferred the movie to either be more dramatic, or more genuinely funny, and perhaps done a little bit less coasting on Fairbanks’ charisma -- but it had a professional sheen, and was intermittently enjoyable in a broad crowd-pleasing way.

Next week I’d planned to see our sixth and final movie from 1922, but I haven’t received it yet, so until it arrives we are going to move on to our first film from 1923: Scaramouche. I’ve also added our planned films from 1924 to the list, which can be seen 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.

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

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

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