Beggars of Life (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 9/18/2018

Beggars of Life was our tenth film from 1928, and the first film we've seen starring Louise Brooks. The screenplay was adapted by Benjamin Glazer, who also wrote the screenplays for 1927's 7th Heaven and 1926's Flesh and the Devil. It was directed by William Wellman and costarred Richard Arlen, both of whom we encountered in 1927's Wings. It also prominently features Wallace Beery, who has popped up in several films we've seen.

Arlen plays a hobo who enters a house looking for food, and finds a recently murdered man. He also finds Louise Brooks, who admits to the killing, though in self-defense. The two quickly leave, with Brooks disguised (not terribly convincingly) as a boy. They try to put some distance between themselves and the dead man while avoiding trouble, and eventually meet up with a band of other hobos, including Wallace Beery.

This depiction of homeless transients treated in a serious way feels new compared to the other American films we've seen as part of this project, certainly as embodied in a big-budget film with name stars. This film in fact felt to me like a premonition of the end of the twenties, and the beginning, in some sense, of the thirties, when poverty and hunger and hand-to-mouth existence became much more focused in the national consciousness. It has a grittiness and a danger to it -- up until the point, about halfway through, where the hobos, led by Beery, decide to hold a mock trial, which devolves into a series of limp jokes involving misuse of legal terminology. The film to that point had seemed basically naturalistic, but the artifice and theatricality of the trial broke the spell (for me at least), and though the film eventually rallied, it never quite recovered.

Beery gives the most charismatic performance in the film, dangerous but charming and mercurial. Arlen and Brooks play their parts as worried, fearful, and increasingly dependent on one another -- less vivid than Beery, but completely appropriate to their roles. There is, also, interestingly, a black character named "Black Mose", played by Blue Washington, who is given a significant amount of screen time. He is played and written stereotypically, but, as I discussed with the kids, I am genuinely unsure whether this is better or worse than the complete absence or extremely minimal roles for black actors which has been the general practice in the vast majority of the films we've seen to this point.

Next week we'll see Road to Ruin, our eleventh film from 1928. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Wings (1927)

Originally posted to Facebook on 3/30/2018

We saw Wings, our third film from 1927, at the AFI Silver the day after seeing The Lodger and Blackmail. This was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (or Outstanding Picture, as the award was then called), and the first film in which we'd seen either Clara Bow or Gary Cooper, though the latter had only a small part.

The film is a WW1 movie about two friends who become wartime pilots, both in love with the same woman back in their hometown. The two friends are played by Charles Rogers and Richard Arlen, and the woman back home is played by Jobyna Ralston, whom we've already seen in a couple of Harold Lloyd films, and who married her co-star Richard Arlen. Ralston, though, is only in the film briefly, though she is talked about by the male leads a fair amount. The real female lead is Clara Bow, who is also from their hometown, and who unrequitedly pines for Rogers. Unlike Ralston, who stays home, Bow joins the war effort and ends up as an ambulance driver, eventually running into Rogers, though he is drunk and doesn't recognize her. It is immediately apparent why Bow was a star -- she is charming and charismatic, though in a cutesy way that is a little dated. However her role in this film is mostly superfluous; she contributes to a number of scenes, but nothing critical to the main plot. The real theme, if there is one beyond spectacle, is the friendship -- or love, really -- between Rogers and Arlen, and how it is elevated above their conflict over Ralston.

William Wellman, the director, served in WW1 as both an ambulance driver and as an aviator, so he no doubt brought a lot of his own experience to the film, and the film is notable for its depictions of flight, which required the lead actors to actually learn how to fly. We see them at times in the cockpit, with planes flying behind them, and there are numerous scenes of dogfights and other maneuvering, which apparently were not faked. There is other playful camerawork besides -- a long shot through a number of tables at a French nightclub eventually arriving at Rogers on leave, animated bubbles illustrating Roger's drunken perception, etc..

The film -- maybe uniquely among the WW1 movies that I've seen -- is not particularly anti-war. It shows a certain amount of death and destruction, but does not weigh in on the rationale behind the war, or the post-war alienation of the participants. This is not All's Quiet on the Western Front, or even The Big Parade. In fact, in one of the less believable subplots, there is an enemy pilot, presumably modeled on the Red Baron, who chivalrously refuses to engage when an Allied plane malfunctions, and who later provides some information to the Americans about a wounded pilot. From my perspective, the refusal of a war movie to grapple with war, or at least acknowledge more strongly that the war was more than a background for a love triangle, comes across as a little callow. But there is enough diverting about the picture to understand why it was popular and why it won the Academy Award.

Our next movie was the final film that we attended at the AFI series. It was The Kid Brother, our fourth film from 1927, and our fifth film starring Harold Lloyd, if one counts 1928's Speedy. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT