Originally posted to Facebook on 10/15/2018
The Mysterious Lady was our twelfth film from 1928, and the second we've seen starring Greta Garbo, after 1926's Flesh and the Devil. It is also the second film we've seen directed by Fred Niblo, after the 1925 blockbuster Ben-Hur.
The film stars Conrad Nagel as an Austrian military official, who meets and falls in love with Garbo -- secretly working for Russia. She steals military plans entrusted to him, and he chases her east, posing as a piano player. This is perhaps the first real spy film we've seen, pre-dating the Cold War spy vogue by a couple of decades. Also notable, it takes a fair amount of time showing the relationship between Garbo and Nagel build; there is a long sequence before he knows the truth, in which they simply spend the day together, hiking and enjoying each other's company. This is effective and surprisingly unusual, and in strong contrast to, for instance, Flesh and the Devil, where Garbo and John Gilbert are almost immediately infatuated with one another.
Of course, the kind of intensity of feeling on display in Flesh and the Devil is one of the strengths of silent film, and choosing a more prosaic route gives this film something of the feel and pacing of a sound film -- and it probably would have been just as good or better had it been made a few years later; the scenes with Nagel playing the piano while undercover in enemy territory might have worked quite well in a sound film for instance.
This is the kind of film that I think gets lost in the shuffle a bit. It is not startlingly excellent, but is strong and sure-footed, perhaps verging on slick. It's unlikely to show up on any lists of the great silents, but nonetheless tells a good suspenseful story and presents leads with real chemistry -- a standard which more films should aspire to, and which is certainly an enormous improvement over last week's The Road to Ruin.
Next week we'll watch The Battle of the Sexes, our thirteenth and last film from 1928, and the fifth film we've seen directed by D.W. Griffith, the last being 1920's Way Down East. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
Showing posts with label Fred Niblo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fred Niblo. Show all posts
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)
Originally posted to Facebook on 1/8/2018
Ben-Hur was our fourth film from 1925. It was directed by Fred Niblo, and is the second film we've seen starring Ramon Novarro. We'd previously seen a short version from 1907, and Ben and I saw the 2016 version when it was in the theaters, so we were somewhat familiar with the plot.
The story revolves around Judah Ben-Hur (Novarro), a Jewish resident of Jerusalem, who comes into conflict with his childhood friend, the Roman Messala (played by Francis X. Bushman) and ends up separated from his family as a slave on a Roman galley, trying to recover what he's lost and reunite with his family. In the 2016 version a significant amount of time was spent detailing the deteriorating relationship between Ben-Hur and Messala -- and indeed this was probably the most interesting part of that movie. In the 1925 movie that is all telescoped -- Messala is, from the start, a much more straightforward antagonist. The key sequences of this film (and the 2016 version as well) are the battle at sea, and the chariot race. Both were groundbreaking at the time, and still hold up as well as you would expect in a big-budget film of this kind -- and, consistent with the reputation for the general disregard for safety in silent films, both were rumored to have resulted in the deaths of stuntmen or extras.
Another element that would have captured the attention of contemporary audiences was the Technicolor sequences -- something I became aware of only in preparation for this viewing. I didn't tell the kids ahead of time, and they were suitably impressed ("How did they do that?" asked Alli) -- though it's questionable whether these sequences really add anything beyond spectacle to the movie. However that is in keeping with the spirit of the film, which too was largely spectacle, and it was certainly something we hadn't seen before during this project. We'd previously seen hand-colored movies from the early days of cinema, but this was the first film for us with color captured during filming -- in this case using two-strip Technicolor, which didn't register the full spectrum, but for a specific palette was bright and dramatic.
These color sequences were mainly used for the religious segments of the film (though a few other random sequences were in color as well), presumably to imbue those segments with an added significance, which was in tune with the film's general approach towards Christianity. The subtitle of the film (and the book) is A Tale of the Christ, and the filmmakers clearly intend the film to revolve around Ben-Hur's spiritual awakening, but from a purely storytelling perspective, many of the religious sequences seem extraneous, especially the recapitulation of biblical stories which don't involve Ben-Hur directly. Additionally, the decision was made to not show Jesus Christ directly, often only showing his hand reaching in from off-screen. I imagine this was done in order to be respectful, but it ends up reading as a bit odd, as if Jesus Christ is being played by Thing from the Addams family. It is also a different approach than had been used in previous movies, including, for example, 1916's Intolerance which we'd watched a year earlier, and which had an on-screen actor playing Jesus, including in the biblical 'cast the first stone' scene which is in both films.
But this film does succeed as a strong example of a big-budget action-focused blockbuster, perhaps the truest embodiment of that category that we have yet seen. Novarro carries the film quite capably, as he did in 1923's Scaramouche. I preferred that earlier film, because it filled out its characters better, and was a little more thoughtful, but Ben-Hur is on a larger scale and is much more of an epic, recalling some of the similar large-scale films we'd seen from a decade earlier (e.g. Cabiria, Intolerance, Last Days of Pompeii, etc.)
Our next film is Lazybones, our fifth film from 1925, and the first time we'll see Frank Borzage as director. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
Ben-Hur was our fourth film from 1925. It was directed by Fred Niblo, and is the second film we've seen starring Ramon Novarro. We'd previously seen a short version from 1907, and Ben and I saw the 2016 version when it was in the theaters, so we were somewhat familiar with the plot.
The story revolves around Judah Ben-Hur (Novarro), a Jewish resident of Jerusalem, who comes into conflict with his childhood friend, the Roman Messala (played by Francis X. Bushman) and ends up separated from his family as a slave on a Roman galley, trying to recover what he's lost and reunite with his family. In the 2016 version a significant amount of time was spent detailing the deteriorating relationship between Ben-Hur and Messala -- and indeed this was probably the most interesting part of that movie. In the 1925 movie that is all telescoped -- Messala is, from the start, a much more straightforward antagonist. The key sequences of this film (and the 2016 version as well) are the battle at sea, and the chariot race. Both were groundbreaking at the time, and still hold up as well as you would expect in a big-budget film of this kind -- and, consistent with the reputation for the general disregard for safety in silent films, both were rumored to have resulted in the deaths of stuntmen or extras.
Another element that would have captured the attention of contemporary audiences was the Technicolor sequences -- something I became aware of only in preparation for this viewing. I didn't tell the kids ahead of time, and they were suitably impressed ("How did they do that?" asked Alli) -- though it's questionable whether these sequences really add anything beyond spectacle to the movie. However that is in keeping with the spirit of the film, which too was largely spectacle, and it was certainly something we hadn't seen before during this project. We'd previously seen hand-colored movies from the early days of cinema, but this was the first film for us with color captured during filming -- in this case using two-strip Technicolor, which didn't register the full spectrum, but for a specific palette was bright and dramatic.
These color sequences were mainly used for the religious segments of the film (though a few other random sequences were in color as well), presumably to imbue those segments with an added significance, which was in tune with the film's general approach towards Christianity. The subtitle of the film (and the book) is A Tale of the Christ, and the filmmakers clearly intend the film to revolve around Ben-Hur's spiritual awakening, but from a purely storytelling perspective, many of the religious sequences seem extraneous, especially the recapitulation of biblical stories which don't involve Ben-Hur directly. Additionally, the decision was made to not show Jesus Christ directly, often only showing his hand reaching in from off-screen. I imagine this was done in order to be respectful, but it ends up reading as a bit odd, as if Jesus Christ is being played by Thing from the Addams family. It is also a different approach than had been used in previous movies, including, for example, 1916's Intolerance which we'd watched a year earlier, and which had an on-screen actor playing Jesus, including in the biblical 'cast the first stone' scene which is in both films.
But this film does succeed as a strong example of a big-budget action-focused blockbuster, perhaps the truest embodiment of that category that we have yet seen. Novarro carries the film quite capably, as he did in 1923's Scaramouche. I preferred that earlier film, because it filled out its characters better, and was a little more thoughtful, but Ben-Hur is on a larger scale and is much more of an epic, recalling some of the similar large-scale films we'd seen from a decade earlier (e.g. Cabiria, Intolerance, Last Days of Pompeii, etc.)
Our next film is Lazybones, our fifth film from 1925, and the first time we'll see Frank Borzage as director. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)