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1931: The Public Enemy

The Public Enemy: If the silent era of American cinema was dominated by escapism in the form of romantic melodrama, comedy and swashbuckling adventure, it seems that by the time sound had become established the studios were discovering an appetite for something darker and grittier.
Mervyn LeRoy's "Little Caesar", released in January of 1931, was the first great gangster picture, and it defined the form:  Young man gets in with the wrong crowd, quickly makes the transition from juvenile delinquent to murderous gangster, then suddenly it all goes wrong, leaving him precious little time to reflect on the error of his ways. But like "Dracula" (see below), "Little Caesar" is technically undistinguished and looks for the most part like a filmed play. William Wellman's "The Public Enemy", released just a few months later, raises the bar considerably. This is one of the first true sound films - not merely a silent film with added dialogue or a stage production with added camera, but one that used sound creatively. Much of the most brutal action happens offscreen, but is none the less shocking for it. When the two young gangsters, Tom Powers (James Cagney, practically inventing the art of sound movie acting) and Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) spot their double-crossing old boss "Putty Nose" in a nightclub they tail him back to his flat to settle the score. Putty Nose pleads for his life, and tries to remind them of their old camaraderie by singing at the piano, but is abruptly cut off as Tom shoots him. We don't see this happen because the camera discreetly pans over to Matt's horrified face, then we only hear the gunshots and the discordant notes as Putty Nose slumps over the keyboard,
Equally shocking in a different way is the breakfast table scene in which Tom, irritated by his girlfriend's needy attitude, loses his temper and pushes his grapefruit in her face. No-one gets killed or injured but the sheer unabashed contempt of the action hits you like, well, like a grapefruit in the face. (William Wellman reportedly included the scene because he often felt like doing it to his own wife.)
The film's most powerful moment, though, is purely visual - Tom's 'homecoming' in the final scene of the film, and its effect on his brother. It features one the most disciplined moments of acting - by Cagney - you'll ever see.

Also from 1931: 
 
Dracula: Strange as it seems now, Dracula revolutionised the American horror film genre not only by being the first major horror talkie, but by introducing a supernatural element, something preceding films of the silent era avoided. It looks somewhat stilted and stagey to the modern eye, partly through Tod Browning's going-through-the-motions direction and partly through being an adaptation of the stage play, rather than the book, but the perfomances save it. Edward van Sloan's strong, dignified van Helsing, Dwight Frye's unhinged Renfield - more comic than horrific today but still a tad chilling and a joy to watch - and of course Lugosi's definitive, hypnotic interpretation of the Count himself.
It's worth adding a word about Lugosi: Despite popular belief, he didn't play Dracula in numerous sequels to the exclusion of all else. He played many and varied roles in horror films of the 30s and 40s, always to great effect, and only played Dracula on screen in one other film: 1948's "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" - and brought sufficient dignity to that picture (as did Lon Chaney Jr) that it's more worth watching than some of the preceding 'serious' Universal monster movies.
             
Spanish Dracula: Filmed concurrently with the English language version, George Melford's direction easily outstrips Tod Browning's, but Carlos Villarias isn't in Lugosi's league. He's exactly like a bloke you know from work who's gone to a Halloween party as Dracula.      

Frankenstein: The other first great monster movie of the sound era, and by far the better of the two I think - great in so many ways, but mainly in Boris Karloff's performance as the monster. He combines the innocence of a newborn child with the rage of a wounded animal, and creates a character both terrifying and sympathetic. It's easy to parody the grunting speech and the lumbering walk, but it was a true original in its time and an achievement seldom, if ever, matched in the history of horror films. Dwight Frye shows his versatility as Dr Frankenstein's hunchback assistant Fritz (not Ygor - he makes his first appearance in 1939's "Son of Frankenstein" - played of course by Bela Lugosi.)

M: Fritz Lang's first sound film, featuring a chilling performance by Peter Lorre as a serial child killer, is horror of a very different kind. As stylish and compelling as you'd expect from the master, but especially notable for the scene in which Lorre accuses the 'kangaroo court' of professional criminals who plan to lynch him. He admits his crimes but pleads that he is the victim of a monstrous compulsion - that he has no control over his actions and did not choose to be the way he is, unlike his accusers who are criminals by choice.        

City Lights: Chaplin raised a few eyebrows by continuing to make silent pictures after everyone else had moved on, even Keaton and Lloyd - though neither of them managed to carry their success over into the sound era, but 'City Lights' was a huge success. A blind flower girl mistakes Chaplin's tramp for a rich man. The tramp, having fallen for the girl, has to use all his wits to find the money to have her sight restored.
Typical for Chaplin, himself a child of the London stage, the story has echoes of Victorian melodrama, but is carried off with such virtuosity I defy you not to get just a little choked up at the end.
One of its best sequences, an extended visual gag in which the Tramp tries to dislodge a stick from a sidewalk grating, was cut from the finished film and not rediscovered until the 1980s.      

Pardon Us: Arguably, the comedy crown had by now passed to Laurel and Hardy. Well established in short comedies, this was their first feature - though like others before them it took them a film or two to master the form.  It seldom gets shown today perhaps because of racial sensitivity - Stan and Ollie escape from prison and hide out among a village of plantation workers by blacking up - though there isn't a hint of malice in it, and it gives Hardy the chance to show off his sublime singing voice with a rendition of 'Lazy Moon'.  

1930: Hell's Angels

HELL'S ANGELS:



We've finally reached a year in which all the films I've watched are sound films. Not only that, but sound technology has reached a point where it's not so clunky as to be a distraction, and directors and editors are getting to grips with the style and pacing of sound pictures. It was an expensive film to make largely for that reason. Production began in the silent era - presumably, like "Wings", as a response to the general fascination with aviation that accompanied Charles Lindbergh's 1927 crossing of the Atlantic - but took so long that much of it had to be reshot for sound.
The film has some colour and tinted sequences - night scenes, as was the custom, are tinted blue, while the ballroom sequence is in two-strip Technicolor. The DVD must have been struck from the only surviving colour print - the one that was given to John Wayne by Howard Hughes in the 50s and only rediscovered in 1989.
Although inevitably melodramatic and stagey by modern standards, it represents a marked advance in storytelling on previous war adventures like "Wings" and "The Big Parade", with their formulaic "boy loves wrong girl, boy suffers terribly in war but meets right girl in the process" story arc. This might be down to the intervention of James Whale, who insisted on a rewrite when he was brought in to direct after the changeover to sound.
The story follows three Oxford students (rather mature-looking ones, naturally) - two English Brothers - Roy and Monte - and Karl, a German. Helen, the love interest, is played by Jean Harlow in her first screen role. Although idolised by the naive Roy, she also gets entangled with Monte, which gives her the opportunity to coin the expression, 'to slip into something more comfortable'.
In between the scenes of romantic drama, we get some spectacular set pieces, which really show us where the money went, beginning with a Zeppelin raid over London, which ends with the airship being shot down by Roy and Monte's squadron. Their planes are damaged but they land safely, and in a particularly spectacular and beautifully hand-coloured piece of model work - or is it? - the burning wreckage of the airship falls out of the sky directly above them.
Later on, the brothers volunteer for a dangerous mission to destroy a German munitions depot. No expense was spared here. It really looks as if Howard Hughes and company built a full-size mockup of the depot - several buildings complete with roads, trucks, and all the other visible infrastructure - on an area the size of a couple of football fields - and bombed it to bits from the air. It's an impressive sight, and is immediately followed up with a full-on aerial dogfight which pulls no punches about the brutality and horror of this type of combat.
Finally there is a dramatic showdown with the grandfather of all German-Officer parodies, complete with what must be the first recorded use of the lines "So we meet again!" and "For you the war is over!". For all that, though, the climax is genuinely dramatic and emotional. Inevitably the film looks dated at times from our modern perspective but if you can slip into '1930' mode, it's more involving and far less clunky than most sound films from this period.

ALSO FROM 1930:

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: This deservedly legendary film, from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, shows the German experience of the First World with uncompromising frankness as it records the front-line experience of a group of schoolmates, hectored into joining up by their jingoistic schoolmaster, and promptly disillusioned as they are killed off one by one. The scenes of trench warfare are truly gruelling, on a par with "Saving Private Ryan" over sixty years later - a tour-de-force of early sound film editing and direction.    


ANNA CHRISTIE: I got through whole silent period without watching a single film from one of its great legends, Great Garbo, so the sensation announced on the posters for this film - "Garbo talks!" - didn't carry the same impact for me as it did for audiences of the time.
Early talkies have the reputation of being stagey and studiobound compared to the grand spectacle of the late silents, and this is a prime example. It's scarcely more than a filmed version of the stage play on which it was based, with very little added in the way of cinematic technique. Garbo is magnetic though, in all her glorious glumness.

ELSTREE CALLING: A revue of stage entertainment, using the framing device of a television broadcast. BBC radio was only a few years old but amazingly its first TV service began this year. Evidently it caused enough excitement for Elstree to produce this forward-looking feature. The acts are a mixed bag to a modern eye - an assortment of American Vaudeville and British music hall and nightclub acts. The music and dancing are still impressive but the comedy is pretty dire. It has curiosity value as the revue segments were directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and the dance numbers are stencil-coloured, probably one of the latest examples of the technique that dates back to the turn-of-the century Pathé fairy-tale films.
It's a surreal experience at times, partly for the scenes of a frustrated home viewer trying to fix his faulty flatscreen (!) TV with a hammer and screwdriver, and especially for the "Taming of the Shrew" segment, a very free adaptation of Shakespeare which involves custard pies, a riderless motorbike being tamed like a lion, and an enraged Anna May Wong in a skimpy silver costume throwing piles of furniture down a staircase.

1929: Man with a Movie Camera

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA:

Dziga Vertov's documentary of a day in the life of a city (a composite of Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa) regularly ranks highly in lists of the greatest-ever films and top in lists of greatest-ever documentaries. It's been on my must-watch list for years; I even owned a DVD of it for years but never opened it up till I got an HD TV. I found that it upscaled really badly, so decided to wait for the Blu-ray - or rather, the second Blu-ray, since the first to appear was the version with Michael Nyman's music. Though highly regarded by some, I found this hard on the ear when I dipped into it on YouTube.
Eureka Video finally brought out their version earlier this year with a score by the Alloy Orchestra, and I'm glad I waited for it. With the exception of a few odd choices of sound effect (modern sirens over shots of speeding ambulances, a string orchestra over a shot of a pianist) it's terrific - a dynamic composition that matches the pace and energy of the images.
The film itself is a snapshot of one day of Soviet city life, from the silent streets at dawn, the citizens waking and going to work, working, then playing, exercising, drinking, relaxing - and finally going to the cinema to see this same film, because it's also a record of its own creation. Via a second camera, we see the cameraman himself putting himself in front of, under, and on top of trams, trains, bridges, furnaces, and factories. He's made to look very daring. Shots freeze in mid-action and are revealed to be clips of the film in the hands of the editor, who trims and splices and thereby allows the film to continue until finally it reaches the projectionist, which is where we came in.
Vertov uses every film-making and editing technique at his disposal to great effect - time-lapse, film speeded up and slowed down, multiple exposure, split-screen; shows (nearly) every aspect of life  - birth, death, marriage, divorce, work, play - and does it as such a breakneck pace that by the end of the film I felt like I had to pause to get my breath back.
The film's explicit aim is to create a language of cinema - an art form that owes nothing to theatre, poetry or literature. It succeeds wholeheartedly. It doesn't invent all the techniques it demonstrates but it works as a pretty thorough compendium of all that had been created up to that time and integrates them successfully into a single film. It's poignant that 1929 is the last great year of the art of the silent film, so - along with a few other candidates - this film could be regarded not just as its masterpiece but as its climax.    
         
ALSO FROM 1929:

So many choices from this year that I would like to have added here but these posts are getting so far apart I need to move on, so I've settled for the following:      

WELCOME DANGER: Harold Lloyd's first sound film was originally shot as a silent, and it shows. Production was switched to sound before the film was released and the result is a clumsy, overlong affair that alternates between tiresome sound scenes and laborious dubbed ones that could have been effective had they remained silent and been edited a lot more tightly. The film is nearly two hours long and feels like it. Its only saving grace is that Harold's character, as usual the poor schmuck who manages to make good at the end despite being dismissed as an incompetent nonentity by those around him, has a couple of truly dramatic scenes in which he has to put up a desperate fight to save himself and the situation. But it's a gruelling watch to get to them.

UNDERGROUND: Anthony Asquith's first film with full director billing is a story of four young working people in London - particularly interesting if you've been a young working person in London because the experience doesn't seem to have changed all that much - crowded tube trains, shabby bedsits and precarious jobs.

PICCADILLY: A. E. Dupont's drama of showbusiness rivalries is worth a watch for the same reason - though the nightclub setting is a bit more upmarket, and leads me to wonder whether there is still such a genteel evening-dress establishment quietly lurking somewhere in Mayfair, and if so whether its patrons are relics of a bygone age or just postmodern aficianodos. Also notable for the presence of Anna May Wong, freshly arrived from Hollywood, as a kitchenmaid turned exotic dancer, and Charles Laughton as a disgruntled diner - surely the prototype for Mr Creosote in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

ATLANTIC: A.E Dupont also directed this first screen dramatisation of the Titanic disaster (in all but name, for legal reasons) - somewhat less successfully. Although the action sequences of the panic on deck and the rush for the lifeboats are well staged,  the dramatic scenes are risible. The leaden pace seems to be an attempt at generating tension, but the melodramatic style might charitably be interpreted as a late example of the Victorian style of theatrical acting. This clip from a 1980s Clive James programme gives a fairly accurate sample. The ship's orchestra famously and heroically played on deck till the last minute - "Nearer My God To Thee", according to witnesses - but the sound editors seem to have had some mischievous fun here by having them play jaunty numbers like "Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be" and " A Life on the Ocean Wave".

A COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR: Asquith squeezes in one more before the dawn of sound with this tense thriller - probably his silent masterpiece, with its painterly composition of shots, dramatic lighting and virtuoso editing. The story plays with our loyalties, as the main character, Joe, a socially awkward barber, loses the object of his affections to a customer, but then becomes a more sinister presence as he threatens the life of his rival. When he escapes from prison with murderous intent we're kept guessing about whether he will earn our sympathy again.
The sequence in the cinema adds a wry commentary on the shift from silent to sound as the protagonists to to see a talkie. The audience is enraptured as they watch a comedy on screen (unseen by us but we're shown a programme that tells us it was Harold Lloyd) but become awkward and uncomfortable as the talkie comes on, and they have to remind themselves not to laugh or talk too much, or clap at the good bits. (Interestingly, even today I've noticed that the atmosphere at a silent comedy tends to be far more relaxed and joyful than at any sound film - complete with spontaneous applause.)          

FRAU IM MOND (THE WOMAN IN THE MOON): Fritz Lang's last silent film doesn't have the operatic grandeur of "Metropolis" or the menacing villainy of "Dr Mabuse the Gambler" but it does succeed in being the first carefully-researched 'hard' science fiction epic, telling of the first successful manned mission to the Moon. The first half is more spy thriller, and mainly serves the purpose of putting an antagonist on the rocket for dramatic purposes (one with Hitler's haircut and dress sense, interestingly). Once we get to the space part though it's all uncannily accurate - Apollo could almost have been a straight remake.  From the concept of a staged rocket to a diagram showing the flight path and the respective gravity fields of the Earth and Moon, it's hard to believe it was all worked out 40 years before the real thing. Only the presence of air on the Moon dates it.

BIG BUSINESS: Unlike the other great silent comics - Keaton, Lloyd and Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy were just getting into their stride in 1929, with their best days still ahead of them in the sound era.
this is possibly the best of their silent shorts as they ill-advisedly try to sell Christmas trees door-to-door in sunny California. After picking a fight with reluctant customer James Finlayson they end up wrecking his house while he destroys their car. For years afterwards Producer Hal Roach told the story that the film crew went round to the wrong house and trashed some innocent couple's home while they were out. Whether that's true, who knows, but it doesn't hurt the film's entertainment value.

1928: The Man Who Laughs

In 17th century England, James II has a rebellious nobleman executed and his young son disinherited. As a sick joke, the boy, Gwynplaine, is given over to a notorious band of gypsies, the Comprachico - who buy and mutilate children to display in their travelling freak shows - and his mouth carved into a permanent, ghastly grin.
The Comprachico are then exiled from England but leave Gwynplaine behind to fend for himself. Wandering in the snow, he rescues a blind baby girl from the arms of a frozen, dead mother, and the two are are taken in by a kindly travelling philosopher, Ursus.
Years later, Gwynplaine and Dea, the girl, are grown up and still living with Ursus in a modestly successful travelling show, with Gwynplaine as their leading clown, "The Man Who Laughs". The two are in love but Gwynplaine holds back, afraid that Dea would be repelled if she understood his true appearance.
Meanwhile King James's former jester, the devious Barkilphedro, has learned that Gwynplaine is alive and in England, and schemes to profit from revealing this to the new monarch, Queen Anne.
He has Gwyplaine arrested and later tells Ursus's company that he is dead....

Adapted from the Victor Hugo novel, and an early entry in Universal Studios' horror tradition that led from "The Phantom of the Opera" in 1925 to the Dracula/Frankenstein/Wolf Man 'monster movies' of the 30s and 40s. "The Man Who Laughs" was directed by Paul Leni, who arrived in Hollywood from Germany in 1926 and tragically died of sepsis in 1929, just as he seemed to be getting into his stride.
This film is unusual in Hollywood horror in that the monstrous-looking character is monstrous in no other way. Gwynplaine is tortured, certainly - doomed to show a grotesque grinning face to a world that only wants to laugh at him, while feeling forced to distance himself from the girl he loves, but unlike, say, Dracula, who is pure evil, or the unhinged Phantom of the Opera (also a Victor Hugo creation, incidentally), he's a pure, gentle soul who wouldn't hurt a fly. The horror of this film lies in his isolation from the rest of mankind, portrayed in the form of Stuart England at its most hostile, brutal and capricious - the winters are cold and merciless but at least the executions are summary.

Gwynplaine is played by Conrad Veidt, already a big name in horror from his performance as Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Less menacing here, but no less powerful, with the same intense aura of inner torture.

It's largely forgotten now that during the two or three years that straddled the transition from silent to sound films, many pictures were presented with a synchronised soundtrack - a recorded track of music and, to an extent, sound effects, but no dialogue, and no sound recorded on-set. This was the technique used in the more clunky sound parts of "The Jazz Singer". It's a slightly awkward halfway-house between silent and sound pictures, and wasn't in use long enough for it ever to be mastered. The soundtrack for "The Man who Laughs" is of this type, and it's a pity really because it's a great film and deserves better. It's crying out for a modern orchestral score by Carl Davis - as well as a decent restoration. I watched on Amazon Instant Video, which was watchable but not great.


ALSO FROM 1928:

STEAMBOAT BILL JR: One of Keaton's last great silent features, but fairly undistinguished for most of its length, until the climactic storm that features the iconic shot of the end of a house falling on Buster, but narrowly missing him because he's standing under the window.
Since the title of the film was inspired by the song "Steamboat Bill", itself inspired by a great steamboat race of 1870, it's easy to imagine that Keaton originally had something very different in mind - perhaps a climactic steamboat race on the scale of "the General" - but had to drop the idea for budget reasons. Certainly most of the plot looks to be building up to something along those lines, and the storm sequence looks a bit tacked-on. Pure speculation, but what a film that could have been.

STEAMBOAT WILLIE: Another sound revolution - not the first sound cartoon but the first to 'get it', and integrate images with music to wonderful effect as Mickey Mouse plays the tune 'Steamboat Bill' by abusing the anatomies of various farm animals  - using a cat as bagpipes, the teeth of a cow as a xylophone and so on. Not a cartoon that would get made today, because of course we'd all be inspired to go right out and do the same thing.

SPEEDY: Harold Lloyd's silent swan song shows him still at the top of his game as an eternal optimist who can't hold down a job. A vintage set piece shows him trying to last a day as a cab driver despite an escalating series of mishaps. The de rigeur climatic cross-town chase has him desperately trying to complete a run on New York's last horsedrawn tramcar to save it from being taken over by unscrupulous developers. In true silent movie tradition, a spectacular, unscripted mishap when the tramcar collides with a pole and loses a wheel is retained in the finished film, and the story adjusted to accommodate it. Also there's some historic images of Coney Island in the 1920s.

THE CIRCUS: Chaplin's first film since 1925's "The Gold Rush" shows him at his best in every respect - expect perhaps for the maudlin theme song on the 1970 soundtrack. It's the usual setup - tramp falls for girl but inevitably she just sees him as a rather sweet friend. Many sequences are Chaplin at his absolute best - trying to escape from a policeman through the circus fun-house, trying to walk a hire-wire while being harassed by monkeys. The ending is unusually poignant even for Chaplin because of the role the tramp actively plays in his own fate, and for a fleeting moment as he watches the circus depart, his expression of regret and controlled despair is just a little bit more real than usual, and makes one wonder all the more why he never mentioned this film in his autobiography.                  

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC: Director Carl Dreyer enraged his sponsors - who were expecting a spectacular epic - by instead filming the story of Joan of Arc as an intimate courtroom drama consisting almost entirely of close-ups. The result is generally regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. Renee Maria Falconetti's performance as the strong but terrified Joan is compelling from her first appearance, no less so because you know where it's going.

THE WIND: Lillian Gish stars in - and produced - this claustrophobic tale of a naive Virginia girl who moves out west to join her rancher cousin's family and start a new life. Expecting a rural idyll, she instead finds a bleak, sandblasted world of tumbledown shacks, rough cattlemen and the incessant, brutal wind - depicted as a giant, bucking ghost horse in the sky - that threatens to drive her mad... and perhaps does. Another one that's deserving of a remastered release - in spite of the jarring, studio-sanctioned happy ending. I had to watch a copy made from an 80s off-air VHS recording - but at least it had the superb Carl Davis score.  

SHOOTING STARS: British silent films are often dismissed as cheap and clunky compared to the budget of Hollywood and the artistry of Europe, but Anthony Asquith's first film of many (although A V Bramble is credited as director) shows that wasn't always the case. Only 26 when he made this, it's a very assured and polished work. A story of romantic intrigue and jealousy at a film studio, it gives an interesting glimpse into the workings of such a place at that time.    




 

1927: Wings

Probably the greatest war film of the silent age.
Two city boys from well-off families, Jack and David, fall in love with the same girl. When the USA joins WW1, they both enlist in the Air Corps and become fighter pilots. They become best friends and put their rivalry on the back burner. Meanwhile Jack's lifelong friend and neighbour Mary (Clara Bow) is in love with him, but still just thinks of her as the kid next door, and she's determined to change that.
The plot is standard melodrama - the theme of the young man shifting his affections from the wrong girl to the right one has featured in most of the non-comedy films I've watched from the 1920s. What raises this film above that standard pattern is the the way things pan out between the two young pilots during their combat missions. As a French officer remarks at one point, 'C'est la guerre' - but it does highlight the cruelty of war more effectively than most films, so have a hanky ready.
The battle scenes, both on the ground and in the air, also raise the bar significantly. The dogfight scenes look totally authentic and are actually filmed in the air, with cameras attached to the planes. The trench warfare manages to be simultaneously epic and human in scale. Throughout, the camera is kept mobile and used inventively - especially so in the cafe scene at the Folies Bergere, in which it tracks over the top of several tables, passing between couples who are kissing, drinking, arguing - a virtuoso piece of cinematography. We're really reaching the peak of silent cinema here, in the very year that its death knell was sounded by 'The Jazz Singer'... particularly unfortunate for the two leads, Clara Bow and Buddy Rogers. Rogers has a packed filmography for the last few years of the silent age but his career fades away sharply as soon as sound comes in. Perhaps like many actors his voice didn't match the public's expectations. Clara Bow, perky and charming here, also dropped off the screen on account of her Noo Yawk twang. It certainly wouldn't have gone with her rich-girl character in this film.
For the first time, though we see a familiar face from the sound era - Gary Cooper as a young, but already battle-weary, pilot.

Also from 1927:

THE JAZZ SINGER: Now we're talking... not very much, though. For a film of such standing in the history of cinema, this is actually quite an undistinguished little melodrama, though worth a look just to witness the first faltering steps of sound cinema. About 80 percent of the film is silent, and our first look at a sound sequence is of young Jakie Rabinowitz singing in a jazz club, and shortly afterwards we see his stern, disapproving father singing a ritual in the synagogue. It's clear from the lack of background noise and the poor synchronisation that the film has been matched to a recording made separately. Later, though, we get the real thing when Al Jolson, as the now grown-up Jakie, sings a couple of numbers. Having watched so many silent movies recently,  I got some idea of the impact his exuberant rendition of 'Toot-toot-tootsie' must have had.
Most dated scene: Jolson in his dressing room, torn between staying at the theatre for his Broadway debut and leaving to sing at the synagogue in the place of his dying father. He talks about the pride and traditions of his 'race' while dressing up as a caricature of someone else's, without a shred of irony, unless I missed it.            

SUNRISE: F. W. Murnau's first American film is often listed among the greatest ever made. On the face of it it's a fairly simple melodrama but it's executed with total virtuosity, and has a universal quality. The settings could be Europe or America and have qualities of both. The cars and fashions tell us it's the 1920s, but some vague, dreamlike version of it. Murnau pushes the craft of silent film-making, using spilt-screen and double-exposure like a paintbrush, to such a degree that you wonder if he felt the pressure of sound nipping at his heels: In just two or three years it would be impossible to make a film like this.  

METROPOLIS: One of those films, like Napoleon, that has taken decades to put back to something like its original form after having just a few initial screenings, followed by lots of heavy cutting by distributors. The latest version, with most of the gaps now filled by a very poor 16mm print found in an archive in Argentina, finally gives the film the coherent plot and character motivation that was missing from earlier versions. Far and away the most spectacular science fiction film made up to that time, and for a long time afterwards. Still a contender for the greatest, even if the operatic acting style has gone out of fashion.

COLLEGE: Buster plays an academic student whose disdain for athleticism at his high school graduation speech alienates his girlfriend. Once at college he takes up sport to impress her but only ends up annoying the athletes into the bargain, until of course it all works out.
Not quite vintage Keaton, and it didn't help that my copy was very poor. The plot struggles to fill the running time and there's little innovation in the comedy. It does however have one of the best endings, which shows us, in a brief montage of the Buster and his girl's later life, what 'happily-ever-after' really means.

THE KID BROTHER: Harold Lloyd, perhaps because he relied more on a team of writers than did Keaton, is still at the top of his game here, even if the plot is much the same as usual. Here, he plays the youngest brother to two tough lumberjacks and their father, the sheriff. When the father is wrongly accused of stealing it falls to Harold to recover the true thief and the money before the lynch mob gets their way. Best of many great scenes is the crane shot where Harold, having just fallen for the girl he meets in the woods, climbs ever higher up a tree to catch another glimpse and call after her as she walks away.

THE LODGER: Hitchcock's first proper 'Hitchcock' film need make no apologies for being an early work or a silent one. It's atmospheric and compelling and done with great technique. Sadly I was put off buying the blu-ray of this because of negative reviews about the new score by Nitin Sawhney: it's got a pop song in the middle of it - the perfect thing to bump you out of the film.
I stuck with the version I have as part of a box set - a good restored print but with no soundtrack at all. I put "The Orchestral Tubular Bells" on the record player and that worked well enough.

NAPOLEON: Abel Gance's six hour epic was intended to be the first in six films about the Little Corporal's life, but the first one turned out to be such a monumental and expensive task that further films would have been impossible even if sound hadn't thrown all the cards in the air.
Although seldom seen, this has become something of a legendary film on account of its history. Appearing just before the birth of sound, it took the art of cinematography to a whole new level with its innovative use of camera movement, rapid editing, and triptych scenes in which three adjacent screens were used to show either a panoramic view of a single scene, or three scenes simultaneously. Unfortunately it failed to make the impact it deserved. Recut several times, by different people and for different markets, the edits that were most widely seen were evidently profoundly inferior to the original. Much if it has been missing for most of its history and has been painstakingly reassembled for over 50 years by film historian Kevin Brownlow. A restored version was screened in 1980 with a live orchestral accompaniment by Carl Davis and in New York with one by Carmine Coppolla. Remarkably Abel Gance was still alive to witness the rapturous reception at both events.
Unfortunately the two music scores have led to rights issues which resulted in screenings being restricted to those with live orchestra, which of course has kept showings to a bare minimum, but that now appears to be resolved with a cinema run and DVD release in the UK planned for late this year, as well as a new French restoration due to appear in 2017.  
I haven't yet seen the film - until now opportunities have been few and far between - but my ticket for the next screening with live orchestra, in November, was booked nine months in advance.


     

1926: The Black Pirate

A merchant ship is attacked by pirates. They pillage the ship then blow it up, crew and all. Two survivors are washed up on a beach - the man we come to know as The Black Pirate, and his father who soon dies from his ordeal. The younger man swears revenge. When the pirates come ashore to bury their loot, Black Pirate reveals himself and asks to join their crew. To prove himself, he kills their captain in a fair fight. They're all cheerfully impressed by this except the deceased captain's right-hand man, who is understandably restrained, but MacTavish the Scottish Pirate - two caricatures for the price of one - jollies him along and Bad Pirate accepts the situation for now. 

Black P further proves himself by capturing the next ship singlehanded, and MacTavish moves that he be made their leader, but then a beautiful young woman (Billie Dove) is discovered hiding, and Bad Pirate 'wins' her by drawing lots with some of the other pirates.
Black P takes her under his wing before any harm can come to her, though, and announces that she is wearing a jewel that identifies her as a princess and therefore a valuable hostage. Shifting operations to the captured ship, he sends the pirate ship demand a ransom to but now he has to keep the 'princess' safe from the clutches of Bad Pirate and avoid bloodshed as far as possible, while maintaining the pretence that he's as much a bloodthirsty cutthroat as his crew...

Fairbanks's follow-up to "The Thief of Bagdad" is shorter and less spectacular, but a lot more fun. The opening scenes of the merchant ship being pillaged by the pirates are startlingly, even hilariously brutal, compared with the relatively genteel swashbuckling of Errol Flynn just a few years later, though with minimal on-screen blood and gore. For instance, the pirate captain spies one of the captive crew, tied to the mast, taking off a jewelled ring and swallowing it. He instructs another pirate to retrieve it and then calmly chews his fingernails until the other man returns with the ring and a bloody knife. Later on, Bad Pirate calmly weighs up which of two stolen swords to keep for himself by casually stabbing another captive with one of them to test the blade.

The pirates have clearly all been carefully picked by the casting department to looks as villainous as possible, while Donald Crisp provides endearing light relief as McTavish the Scottish Pirate and Sam de Grasse makes a good slimy villain in the Basil Rathbone mould. Billie Dove is very majestic as the love interest and is good at making wistful faces, but she does get to be brave and resourceful at one point too.  

Although Hollywood still has a little to learn about getting the most out of a dramatic climax - Bad Pirate gets his deserts a little too briskly - the film keeps up the excitement all the way through, and the hero has to rely on genuine wit and resourcefulness as well as his charm and athleticism to bring it to a happy conclusion, so the film is still a thoroughly entertaining watch to a modern audience.
A few shots belong in a 'best of' montage of silent action films - Fairbanks splitting the sail as he slides down it with a dagger; his crew swimming underwater en masse (though in fact on strings) to attack the pirates, then manually hoisting their victorious leader up several decks by passing him man to man.
This was one of the first feature films to be shot entirely in Technicolor, though it's still only the red-and-green, two-strip variety. The more recent Park Circus DVD is a sharper transfer than the older Kino disc, though the Kino DVD has 18 minutes of out-takes with an interesting commentary by Rudy Behlmer.

 Also from 1926:

THE GENERAL: Keaton's greatest film, I think. Buster plays an engine driver in the American South. When the Civil War breaks out, he tries to enlist but is refused. He is not told that this is because he is more valuable as an engineer and feels rejected, while his girlfriend now rejects him because she is under the impression he never tried to enlist. When Union spies steal his locomotive, he commandeers another one to give chase, and ends up rescuing the girl and foiling a Union plot to catch the Southern army unawares. 

This film has some of the most daring and painstakingly staged screen comedy ever filmed. It's gripping to watch as you know it's all done for real. In the scene where he has to manually move some huge wooden beams out of the path of his engine, the slightest mis-step could have been disastrous.  

This is available on a Region 2 Blu-ray from Amazon Spain, complete with the terrific score by Carl Davis.
        

BATTLING BUTLER: As in 'The Navigator', Keaton plays a rather helpless and clueless rich youth, who is sent on a camping trip by his father in the desperate hope it'll make a man of him. He falls for a mountain girl, and wins her approval because he is mistaken for a famous boxer of the same name, and has to spend most of the film keeping up the fiction in the run-up to a big fight. For the most part, it's a standard plot and there's not much new here, but it does have one of the most satisfying finales of any film ever.    

ADVENTURES OF PRINCE AHMED: As the oldest surviving animated feature, this deserves a long entry in some future animation blog, but I can't ignore it here. It's basically an animated Chinese shadow-play - the story is told in silhouette throughout, with remarkable sensitivity and some clever special effects. The story is also a little more layered that your average fairy-tale as we have two pairs of lovers, whose tales are intertwined, instead of just one.          

THE PLEASURE GARDEN: Worth a look as it's Alfred Hitchcock's first film as director, and his comic touch is already visible in the opening scenes as a bunch of lecherous old men watch a line of chorus girls at the music hall. The rest of the film is a pretty standard melodrama without much to distinguish it, though. Having said that I was only able to view an old print, not the recent BFI restoration, so there may be more to it that I've missed.

FAUST: F. W. Murnau's poignant adaptation of the German folk tale is distinguished by some stunning cinematography and special effects work, and by Emil Jannings as the demon Mephistopholes, comic and chilling by turns.  

FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE: Harold Lloyd, by now almost going through the motions, this time as a spoilt socialite who can simply buy a new luxury car each time one breaks down. He accidentally makes a donation to fund a mission in a poor part of town and stays on as its patron when he falls for the girl who runs it, of course. The whole film might have been constructed around the climactic chase scene where Harold once again has to get all the way across town to get to a wedding in time, only this time he has half a dozen drunk vagrants in his charge and he has to get them there too.

1925: The Lost World

From the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, and best remembered today as the precursor to King Kong.
Mildly unhinged explorer Professor Challenger returns to London from an expedition to the Amazon, where he claims to have found an isolated land, high on a plateau in the jungle, still populated by dinosaurs. Unfortunately all his photographs have been lost so he has no evidence. Ridiculed by the press and the scientific establishment, he decides to return, this time with the daughter of a missing comrade, and a handsome young reporter (you can guess how that part will play out). Sure enough, back in the jungle, they find their dinosaurs - but become trapped on the plateau for a while, have a few dangerous encounters with them and witness some impressive dinosaur fights before escaping. But what about returning with proof? Incredibly, no-one's thought to bring a camera this time, but fortunately there's an unconscious brontosaurus handy as well an another expedition with lots of manpower and ropes, so they decide to take it back to London.
Glossing over the logistics of that, we cut back to London where the professor is giving another lecture, promising to show them his proof any minute now (he's somehow managed to keep it quiet). However the dinosaur has other ideas and escapes as it's being unloaded from the ship. Running loose in London, it causes panic and wrecks a lot of buildings (including the Blue Posts, a perfectly good pub in Soho) before swimming out to sea. Professor Challenger, having traded public ridicule for being the cause of this mess, sits on the ruins of Tower Bridge and has a cry. The end.
It's a thrilling ride, but not for the last time in film history the focus on spectacle leads to the narrative falling a little short. Here's an alternative synopsis:
A young man wants his girl to marry him, but the girl, who is clearly bit flighty, can't commit until he's added a bit more manliness to his CV. So he goes off to face some terrible danger, falling in love with another, more worthwhile girl in the process. Returning home, he feels duty-bound to marry the first girl but is relieved and delighted to find she's married an accountant in his absence. Happy ending all round. It's exactly the same plot as "The Big Parade", released the same year and described below. However, it's likely no-one was bothered by this as, technically, the film is stunning for its time. The dinosaurs are brilliantly executed, even if the human characters' interaction with them is limited to hiding behind trees and shooting at them. (Bessie Love, the love interest, only gets to look pretty and scared, while more hands-on jeopardy is supplied by a man in an ape costume.)  The dinosaur battles are so far beyond anything previously seen on film it makes you wonder where the learning curve was.
The most important thing about this film though, is its legacy. We have it to thank for King Kong, Jurassic Park, and Ray Harryhausen's whole wonderful career.    
           

Also from this year:

THE WIZARD OF OZ: This is actually a pretty awful film. For a while in the early 20s its star and director Larry Semon was one of the great silent comics, right up there with Keaton and Chaplin. When they started making feature films he felt under pressure to do the same and spent a fortune securing the film rights to L Frank Baum's book. Incomprehensibly, though, he thought it would be  good idea to use little more than the title as a basis for an extended succession of silent-short set pieces and slapstick gags, with a very minimal plot holding it all together like string round a herd of cows. The Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion and Tin Man are just disguises that the farmhands use to hide from the villains in Oz, destroying their magical quality altogether. Unsurprisingly, the film was a critical and commercial failure. Semon's career faded away and he died, almost forgotten, just a few years later.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN: After the previous few years, this feels like an abrupt shift into a more modern style of film-making: more dynamic and inventive lighting and composition, fast editing, acting that is passionate without being theatrical. Much of it still gripping, particularly the Odessa Steps sequence in which the citizens, out in support of the revolutionary sailors, are gunned down by the tsar's army. However - and this might seem blindingly obvious - it's all a bit, well, communist. I don't mean that as criticism of the film's politics - I think that's irrelevant in evaluating it as art or entertainment - but we're expected to sympathise with masses of people rather than with individuals. People come and go in the narrative as faces in a crowd. We see little or nothing of their lives as individuals so we're not as moved as we might be when awful things happen to them.
Also, it's worth noting that, largely due to this film, Sergei Eisenstein's name is synonomous with the invention of very fast editing as a means of building tension. In fact Abel Gance did it first with 'La Roue' in 1923.

SEVEN CHANCES: Buster Keaton has to get married by 7pm to inherit his uncle's fortune. Naturally there's already a girl he's in love with but he makes a mess of the proposal and she turns him down. His business partner advertises for prospective brides and hundreds turn up at the church, but the priest assumes it's all a practical joke so they become an angry mob, after Buster's blood. Meanwhile he's received a message that his girl will marry him after all. All this builds up to one of silent cinema's great chase scenes, involving hundreds of irate brides and a spectacular sequence in which Buster has to dodge hundreds of boulders, from small to huge, as they roll down a hill. The blatant artificiality of the rock-strew hillside creates a delightfully comic-strip sense of unreality.
It's a lot of fun but at 45 minutes is still more of an extended short than a true feature. Buster's best work was still to come.

THE FRESHMAN: Harold Lloyd goes to college. A naive country boy, his expectations of college life are based on the movies, and he makes a fool of himself on his first day. His fellow students, though, turn it into a huge joke by letting him think he's a cool and popular guy, all the time laughing at him behind his back, including the football team who let him think he's a substitute when in fact he's just the water-boy - a demeaning role for an aspiring athlete.
In a big inter-college match, though, over half the team are injured and the coach sends Harold on in desperation. Through a combination of luck, ingenuity and enthusiasm, he scores the winning points.
Coming as it does on the heels of "Girl Shy",  I didn't take to this one quite so much. Perhaps it's partly because the plucky-but-awkward-underdog-gets-the-girl plot is wearing a little thin, but mainly it lacked the spectacular, daring physicality of his previous two films. If you find American football exciting, you might feel differently.  

THE GOLD RUSH: Chaplin's back, with one of his most famous films.
My DVD has both the 1926 silent version and the 1942 version with Chaplin's own music and commentary. I much prefer the latter - it's about 20 minutes shorter - the silent one drags a little at 90 minutes, and I was hard pressed to spot what was missing, besides the intertitles. Georgia Hale is the love interest, somewhat more brash and arrogant than the usual sweet-natured Chaplin girls, but it gives her character room to develop.
The film opens with a spectacular recreation of an endless line prospectors labouring up the 'Golden Stairs' of Chilkoot Pass, the mountain path to the goldfields of the Klondike. Apparently location filming proved too gruelling, so after months of set-building and shooting Chaplin moved the whole production back to Hollywood and shot indoors.
The best part of the film, I think, is the sequence when Chaplin and his companion wake up with a hangover and feel as though the cabin is tilting back and forth - initially unaware that it is actually balancing on the edge of a cliff.
In the silent version, I think we glimpse the real Chaplin, not the character, in the final shot. As he kisses the girl - he was having an affair with Georgia Hale in real life - he gives the camera a dismissive wave of his hand, as if if he wants to carry on doing just what he's doing rather than continue acting.        

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA: Notable as the first in Universal's great tradition of horror Movies, it now looks like a montage of cliches - but that just shows how profound its influence was.
The unmasking of the Phantom to reveal his shark-like, cadaverous face now feels relatively tame, though no doubt it had more impact on the big screen.
It always strikes me as curious how a generation fresh from a terrible war and no stranger to hardship, injury and terrible disease - that must have seen more ghastly things in their everyday lives than most of us - were apparently so much more disturbed by on-screen horror then we are today. Perhaps it was the novelty of the experience, or perhaps it was precisely because it did seem closer to the real world.  

BEN HUR: One of the great epics of silent cinema, it's a bit sad to note that its status has been reduced to a mere extra on the blu-ray of the Charlton Heston remake - it isn't even mentioned on the cover - yet it stands up pretty well. Ramon Navarro actually makes a more credible lead than Heston. He has a sensitive, vulnerable quality that the larger-than-life Heston lacks, while still holding his own in the chariot race - which, incidentally, also holds its own against the one in the later film, largely because so much of the action - including a spectacular multi-chariot pile-up - looks unplanned.
The transfer on the Blu-Ray is from a 1988 Thames Silents restoration, but it looks pretty good in HD despite its age.

THE BIG PARADE: Probably the first great film to tackle the experience of the First World War.
The first half is all rather lightweight as three chums enjoy a bit of fun and romance in the French village where they're billeted en route to the Front... but then it all turns serious. Our main hero is engaged to a girl back home but falls in love with a French girl. Remembering his prior commitment, he feels duty-bound to make light of his new entanglement and walk away. The girl understands and does likewise but as the troops are mustered to board the trucks to take them to the war, both realise they are making a mistake and frantically hunt for each other in the crowd as the trucks pull out. It's a grippingly tense scene. They find each other, or course, and exchange affections fairly unambiguously in their fleeting last moments together. The climactic shots where the girl, unable to let her lover go, is dragged along the road as she clings to a chain hanging from the back of his truck really ought to look hysterically melodramatic today, but somehow they don't. The fact of a film being silent somehow allows it to get away with things a sound film never could. The film is most memorable, though, for its depiction of war. The scene in which the new recruits, having been thoroughly humanised to us in the first half of the film, now have to act like cold automata as they march through a sniper-ridden forest, impassively killing and being killed as they go, is deeply chilling.

THE PLEASURE GARDEN: Hitchcock's first film as director, and worth a look for that reason alone. This was restored by the BFI along with eight other early Hitchcocks, but that version has yet to see a DVD or Blu-ray release, so I had to watch a rather scratchy old print in which it was hard to tell the two female leads apart.
The opening scenes in a theatre, with a front row of lecherous old men enjoying a chorus line, have Hitchcock's impish sense of fun all over them and are the scenes most often seen in documentaries about him, but it's not long before it settles into a fairly standard melodrama - skilled in execution but very conventional.            



   

1924: Sherlock Junior

Phew, a tough choice this year - which is partly why it's taken me so long to get round to it.
Someone said I should pick more esoteric films than I have been, since everyone's familiar with Chaplin, Lloyd etc - but having covered those two I can hardly let Keaton off the hook - perhaps the most daring and durable of the three.
Old Stone Face, arguably, has worn a little better that Chaplin to modern audiences as his films are less sentimental. He said the audience had to decide whether to care for his character. He wouldn't ask for their sympathy in the narrative.
Here, Keaton plays a young small-town movie projectionist - so poor he has to depend upon finding lost dollar bills among the litter he sweeps out from the cinema after the show. He doesn't have much luck though as the customers come back looking for the lost cash, and he's honest enough to give it back to them - once they've accurately described it for him.
Keaton gets thrown out of his girlfriend's house after a slimy rival frames him for stealing her father's watch. Suspicious of the rival, and inspired by his book on how to be a detective, he follows him - but the rival traps him in a railway goods truck. At this point we see one of the most remarkable moments in all of silent film, but no-one was aware of it till years later.
As the train pulls away, he gets out through the roof hatch and grabs the chain of the railside water tank, inadvertently turning on the spout and bringing a torrent of water down on his head. He falls to the tracks, and gets up again in time for a handcart to pass under the gushing water, soaking its occupants, who spot Buster as the one responsible and chase him into the distance.
The action was all impeccably staged and appears on film exactly as planned, except that Buster seriously underestimated the power of the water coming from the spout, and instead of merely dropping the ten feet or so to the tracks he is slammed to the ground, invisible under the gushing torrent until a few seconds later when, unperturbed, he gets up to run away from the handcart guys.
What no-one knew at the time was that the impact had broken his neck. A lifetime of punishing falls and stunts - ever since being thrown around the vaudeville stage by his father as a three year old - meant that he was made of such tough stuff that he didn't find out about it until an x-ray revealed the knitted bone years later.
Back at the cinema, he falls asleep and dreams that his girlfriend and the rival are in the film, playing more glamorous versions of themselves. He run into the cinema and up onto the screen, but once up there the scene keeps changing around him, and in a sequence of painstakingly calculated cuts he find himself in one location after another - a rocky hillside, a jungle, a busy road, - with barely time to avoid the hazards of one environment before it cuts around him to the next. It all looks spontaneous, and Buster acts it out as one flowing scene, but it must have taken weeks to plan and film.
The rest of the film is of the standard boy-girl-misunderstanding-chase-resolution variety that had now become the standard movie comedy feature plot, but it's pacy and inventive, and engaging thoughout. Unlike the previous year's "Three Ages", Buster has now got the hang of structuring a film around plot and character rather than gags, the essential element in a comedy feature as opposed to a short.

Also from 1924: Harold Lloyd's GIRL SHY. I really wanted to review this one - I watched it specially for the first time last week and was on the edge of my seat. Harold plays a would-be author, hopelessly shy and crippled with a stutter,  who hopes to publish a book on how to be successful with women, despite his total lack of experience. On his way to the city to hand the manuscript to a publisher, he falls in love with a rich girl, and depends on the book being published to get the money he needs to marry her. However he's laughed out of the publisher's office, and painfully breaks it off with the girl by pretending he never really cared. Heartbroken, she accepts a proposal a man who has been pursuing her for some time - a tall rake with a pencil moustache, much like the rival in "Sherlock Junior". In the final act, it's the morning of her wedding and Harold learns, in quick succession, that the man is an adulterer, and that the publisher has decided to release his book - as a comedy - and has sent him a substantial advance. The film concludes with a marathon chase scene as Harold commandeers cars, horses and tramcars in a mad rush to stop his girl from marrying the wrong man - silent action comedy at its absolute best.

Every bit as notable - Douglas Fairbanks in THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. No spring chicken at nearly 40, Fairbanks' gymnastics in this spectacular 150-minute epic are sufficiently larger-than-life to compete with the enormous, magical sets. Fairbanks plays a vagabond thief who spurns the work ethic preached to him in a mosque he accidentally stumbles into - via a magic rope and a window, naturally - until he falls in love with the princess and has to compete with three undesirable princes to win her hand. Cue a series of picture-book adventures featuring dragons, caves of fire, mermaids and flying horses. The moral - hard to miss as it is is literally written in the stars both at the beginning and the end of the film - is that 'happiness must be earned'.
The BFI blu-ray features an orchestral soundtrack by Carl Davis - an arrangement of music from Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade". The acting is interestingly stylised - broad and theatrical, as in the days before D W Griffith.  Sojin Kamiyama is particularly effective as the scheming Mongol prince - he acts in an odd, two-dimensional fashion as if consciously imitating the puppets of Chinese shadow-plays. Anna May Wong plays his spy, under (very little) cover as a servant in the Princess's palace.
 
The BFI has two notable archive documentaries from this year out on Blu Ray, both with transporting, subdued music specially composed by Simon Fisher Turner - THE EPIC OF EVEREST, a record of the Mallory/Irvine expedition, and Herbert Ponting's THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE, a late edit of his 1912 film of Scott's tragic polar expedition.
The Everest film is interesting not only for the footage of the climbers on Everest - rather sweetly kitted out as if they were hiking from Interlaken for the day - but for its record of life in the Himalayan villages en route. "The Great White Silence" is more than anything a wildlife film - an aspect that be would far more novel and fascinating to contemporary audiences than it is to us, spoilt as we are by Attenborough and co. What little there is of the polar expedition is a precious record, and the sequence of Scott's party acting out the routine of having supper in their tent and bedding down for the night reveals the human faces of the legendary explorers and the rapport between them. If you can lip-read you can probably even make out the odd snatch of conversation.              
       
         
   
   

1923: Safety Last

Safety Last

Yes, it's the film with one of the most iconic images of the silent period, Harold Lloyd hanging off that clock. I'm not planning to do the most obvious or famous films from each year, nor necessarily the ones I happen to like best - I just wanted to do this one.
Anyone who bangs on about silent comedy will be quick to tell you that there's more to it than tinkly pianos and speeded-up pratfalls, but this one really does set the standard. I saw it at the Hackney Empire a few years ago, introduced by Paul Merton, and it was as funny and thrilling then as it must have been in 1923. Anyone outside hearing the laughs and shrieks from the audience must have wondered what was going on.

Chaplin had proved that silent comedies could work at feature length with 'The Kid' two years earlier - the secret was that you had to blend the comedy with real drama and well-developed, sympathetic characters, and you had to have a solid story, just like any other feature drama, that would hold an audience's attention for an hour or more.
The first 40 minutes of this film achieves that. Harold is a country boy going off to the city to make his way in life, so that he can marry and support the girl he loves. However he's making slow progress - working hard, but still only a sales clerk in a department store. Unfortunately he's been exaggerating his success in his letters to the girl, and now she's coming out to visit him. He manages to fool her into believing he's the manager of his department, to the bewilderment of his colleagues, but he still needs lots of money in a hurry if they are to get married. Fortunately he overhears his bosses offering a $1000 reward for anyone who can get the store the publicity it needs, so he arranges for an old friend he ran into earlier (who happens to be a talented climber) to scale the outside of the tall building, thus attracting a crowd. But due to an earlier comedy of errors his friend is on the run from a policeman, and Harold has to stand in for him and start the climb until the friend can shake off the cop and take over. Needless to say, he ends up doing the whole climb.

Despite all the tricks of Melies, Pathe, etc, which formed the staple of silent film's early years, this was still an age when what was seen on the screen was taken at face value, as opposed to today when we assume what we're watching is artificial unless we're told otherwise. If Harold appeared to be hanging off a clock face 200 feet above a city street, that's exactly what he was doing. No blue-screen, no back projection, no model work and certainly no CGI. The reason it looks real is because it is. Granted, the wall and the clock are constructed on the roof of another building, and there are safety mats just 15 feet beneath him, but even knowing doesn't detract from the thrill of watching it.

Opportunities to see this on a cinema screen are few and far between but if you can at least see it on a big TV, please do - and with an audience as well, even if it's just a few friends.


ALSO FROM 1923:

A Woman of Paris, Chaplin's sole venture into directing serious drama. It's a good film but it's not funny and he's not in it (except in a heavily disguised cameo), which is no doubt why it wasn't a hit. It seems he was trying to kickstart a career as a serious actress for Edna Purviance, his frequent leading lady, whom he never married but was clearly deeply fond of. Sadly it didn't achieve that goal either. It's a moving story that confounds expectations. The message (or one of them) seems to be that the life that will make you happy isn't necessarily the life you think you want.

Three Ages: Buster Keaton also jumped on the comedy feature bandwagon this year, but he's still finding his feet with the form here. He seems to be stuck for an idea for a feature-length story and instead tells the same one three times, borrowing from Griffith's "Intolerance" to cut between three eras - modern times, Roman times and the stone age. In each one, he's competing with the unscrupulous Wallace Beery for the hand of a lady. It's basically three two-reelers intercut. There's just enough gags to keep it going but it struggles. The Roman sequence is the best of the three, especially the part where he's trapped in a Colosseum dungeon with a lion, and understandably keen to be friends with it. Struggling to remember the story of Androcles, he gives it a manicure.      
                     

1922: Haxan / Witchcraft Through the Ages

 This year brought two of the greatest early horror films, F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu", and Benjamin Christensen's "Haxan". I've watched them both this week but I've picked "Haxan" as my film for the year as it's the more neglected of the two. "Haxan" is what would today be called a drama-documentary. It's a picturesque tour of witchcraft in the late medieval world; how it was allegedly practiced, why, and by whom - and about what happened to those people.
 It begins with a summary of the medieval view of the world and its place in the universe using contemporary art and artifacts, then goes on to show witches of the time practicing their evil deeds, as seen through the fevered imaginations of those who feared them. In its most intense sequence, an old woman is arrested by the inquisition, tortured, and inevitably spills the beans on all her evil deeds - midnight masses with other witches, cavorting with the devil and giving birth to his monstrous children, flying over the rooftops with other witches - she names her enemies who got her arrested in the first place, who will now be arrested in their turn.
 This film has more startling images in any ten minutes than just about any ten other whole films. Unsurprisingly it was banned in most countries as wicked and profane (and consequently lost for many years) and it's certainly lurid and shocking, but beneath the surface there's a serious message for all ages - that rumours, accusations and counter-accusations can get out of control if not responded to with caution and rationality, with tragic results.



 ALSO FROM 1922:

Nosferatu, of course - the other great horror film and the granddaddy of all vampire pictures. Still probably the most unsettling, more so I think than any of the Universal or Hammer Dracula films, and rivalled only by Werner Herzog's remake. The current restored version, available on Blu-ray from Eureka, is about 20 minutes longer than any previous version.

Grandma's Boy: Harold Lloyd enters the comedy-feature fray and goes to the other extreme from Chaplin, having a sweet old lady rather than a sweet little boy.

Oliver Twist: Only 13 years on from the previously reviewed adaptation, this is a world away in film-making terms. The story is neatly condensed, and presents a convincing Victorian London. I'd have said David Lean owed much to it, including the scene of Bill Sikes's terrified dog trying to escape under the door as he murders Nancy, except that the film was considered lost at the time. Jackie Coogan is not too nauseating as the eponymous goody-no-shoes who fails to be corrupted by either workhouse or gang of pickpockets, and Lon Chaney makes a menacing Fagin.

Dr Mabuse the Gambler: Fritz Lang's epic crime-thriller serial about a master criminal whose power of will and hypnosis seem almost supernatural. Another German masterpiece with odd future-echoes of that country's own history.  

1921: The Kid

We're not done with Chaplin yet. No apologies - this is a great film, also it's the only feature film in my collection from that year.
Simple plot - A poor and unmarried young mother abandons her baby in a car outside a mansion. Soon she regrets it and goes back but the car has been stolen and the baby dumped in an alleyway, where Charlie finds it. He brings the boy up in his own little attic room in the slum, where the story picks up five years later. The two are poor but happy, scraping a living with a window-repair scam (the kid breaks them then runs off, then Charlie, with glazier's gear, fortuitously passes by.) All's well till the kid gets sick and the doctor learns he's an orphan then the authorities come round to take him to the orphanage.
At this point we get one of the great scenes of silent cinema. The kid, an amazing five-year-old Jackie Coogan, is dragged off kicking and screaming by the welfare officer and his driver and dumped in the back of their truck, while Charlie, pure terror on his face at losing the kid, is held back by the neighbourhood policeman. He breaks free and runs over the rooftops in pursuit of the truck, leaps into the back as it passes, fights off the welfare officer and rescues the kid.
Jackie Coogan is Chaplin's great discovery in this film -an amazing performance from a five-year-old. There's not the slightest false note in his cries and pleas as he begs the welfare officer not to take him away. It may be silent but you can hear it anyway. Unsurprisingly this was the second biggest grossing film of 1921 (after "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", with Rudolph Valentino).
Chaplin had seen Jackie in a vaudeville act with his father, and was so impressed he became preoccupied with thinking up ideas for a film to use him in. A week later he'd heard the boy had been signed up by Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, and was kicking himself for not doing it first, until he found out Arbuckle had signed Jack Coogan, the father, not Jackie.
Chaplin had trouble coaxing the emotions out of Jackie for this scene though. Jack was on the set and told Chaplin, "Leave it to me, I'll make him cry". He went off with Jackie and came back with him two minutes later, suitably distressed. They shot the scene, and Chaplin, concerned, asked Jack how he did it- he hadn't hurt him-? "No, nothing like that", said Jack. "I just told him if he didn't perform we'd REALLY take him to the orphanage."
Reassuringly, Chaplin goes on to say that Jackie told him afterwards " I knew Daddy was only fooling".  
It's an episodic film, like most silent comedies up to this time - a string of set pieces in search of a plot - but it works, and like much of Chaplin has a timeless, universal quality. This will be as funny and heartrending in a thousand years as it is today.
When Jackie Coogan reached 18, he found that his mother had somehow managed to spend all the 68 million dollars he'd earned up to that time. Legislation was subsequently brought in to stop that sort of thing happening.
Incidentally, here's Jackie at the other end of his career:

1920: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

Looking for something a bit different from Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin? How about this?
I think I've watched this just once before, ten or twelve years ago, probably on the portable TV I had at the time. This time I watched the newly restored blu-ray - a whole different experience. It was pin-sharp and looked like it was filmed yesterday.
Having said that, there used to be a certain mystique about watching scratchy old prints- it made them feel more like they came from a different age. And when you're young, the fifty or sixty years that had passed since the films were made seems like an incredibly long time. Now, well - I've lost things in the backs of drawers for nearly as long.
I wouldn't go back, though - it's great to be able to see such beautiful restorations of these films.

So, Caligari: A travelling showman is exhibiting something unusual in his tent at the town carnival: Cesare, a catatonic young man in a box, all dressed in black, with a cadaverous, haunted face, who only wakes up when commanded by Caligari. Sort of a pet emo. Meanwhile, series of murders is being committed in the town and the Cesare is the key suspect. But what is Caligari's role, and what is the motive?

The first thing any book or documentary tells you about Caligari is that it was the first German Expressionist film. The sets are all very stylised, full of weird angles and exaggerated perspectives - a very dreamlike effect. It almost seems a pity to put real actors in front of them. It's also very theatrical, and I wonder if a contemporary audience would have seen it that way, or if the sense of artifice comes from a modern familiarity with more realistic production design.
It's one of those films that you might interpret a different way with each viewing - I'll probably watch it again soon with the commentary - but its preoccupation with the power of will is intriguing; of one man exercising a sinister control over others - especially with Hitler's rise just a few years away.

Overall, still quite effective after all these years - maybe not as scary as it once was but still unsettling, especially Conrad Veidt as Cesare, and quite unique.







 

1919: Daddy Long Legs

All I've got in my collection from 1919 is four undistinguished early shorts from Harold Lloyd, but a quick look at Wikipedia reveals that the second biggest grossing film in America this year is "Daddy Long Legs" with Mary Pickford, adapted from the novel by Jean Webster. As it happens it's available on Amazon Instant Video so I've just watched it for your benefit. (You're welcome.)
A baby girl is found in a dustbin by a policeman and given to the orphanage, where she has a generally miserable time until an anonymous sponsor sends her to college. She then becomes a successful writer and consequently a successful socialite, and has to choose between two men.
It's hardly a groundbreaking classic. The story is a fairly standard melodrama - worrying about which man to marry, that sort of thing - and the narrative structure is pretty rudimentary.
On the upside, Mary Pickford is a delight to watch, with more charm in her little finger than most modern stars have in their whole implants.
She's most fun in the early orphanage scenes, running about and causing mischief - she's supposed to be an older child here - 12 or so I suppose - and she's remarkably convincing considering she's actually 29. However since this is supposed to be a very harsh time in her life most of it is actually a bit too much fun - getting drunk on a discarded beer bottle for instance, accidentally pushing a bitchy girl down a well, and so on. All this is clearly designed more to use Mary Pickford to her best effect than to serve the story. Only a couple of incidents - the death of a small child and Mary's character Judy being punished by having her finger burnt on a hot stove to teach her what Hell is like - really make the point of the orphanage being a terrible place.
Once she leaves, it's routine melodrama stuff but with the occasional inventive scene, such as the one in the Cupid company offices where one of a group of winged babies is being ticked off by his boss by accidentally shooting two guys with one arrow. He cries while being told "you've probably set off one of those darned eternal triangle things". This is one of those scenes that highlight what the movies lost when sound took over.
Favourite line: "Love is a bad habit. It's much safer to have the measles - they ain't near as painful."

Anyway, if you're looking for something to watch on Amazon Instant Video, you could do worse - just don't read the synopsis, it gives too much away. And they're lying about it being in HD.



       
     

1918: Shoulder Arms

Not a lot of options for 1918. Chaplin only made two films this year, this one and "A Dog's Life".
In "A Dog's Life", Charlie's tramp meets a pretty girl (Edna Purviance), sees off some ruffians, and the two go off together at the end - much the same story as most of his last few films, but with a cute dog added to the mix. Chaplin, not surprisingly, remarked in his autobiography that one his biggest problems was constantly finding new ways for a pretty girl to fall in love with a tramp.
So, let's look at the other film. Cecil B. De Mille had cautioned Chaplin that it was dangerous to make fun of the war, but being Chaplin he followed his inspiration anyway. It paid off and the film was a big hit.
It picks up with Charlie in a training camp in America, struggling with learning how to march properly with his splayed feet and so on, then cuts to the trenches where he's having a miserable time. (A tracking shot through the trenches anticipates Kubrick's "Paths of Glory".) In one scene he and his bunkmates are trying to sleep in a trench that is flooded in two feet of water.
Meanwhile the Germans are planning their attack, and interestingly Chaplin refuses to dehumanise them, portraying the rank-and-file as reluctant and unfortunate as himself. Only their bullying little officer is the butt of his hostility as he drinks a big tankard of beer as a toast to the coming victory, and doesn't share it with his men. A few minutes later, Charlie's squad has gone over the top and, cutting past potentially unpleasant battle scenes, Charlie captures the whole platoon. His own officer congratulates him. ("How did you capture 13 men?" "I surrounded them.") He offers the Germans cigarettes but the little officer rudely declines. Charlie then puts him over his knee and gives him a good spanking, much to the delight of the German platoon.
Charlie then gets sent on a mission behind the lines, and after an assortment of comic sequences, inevitably resulting in meeting Edna Purviance in a bombed-out house, he ends up capturing the Kaiser himself and delivering him to the allies. (Edna gets to disguise herself as a German soldier in this bit, no doubt the inspiration for Blackadder's "Driver Parkhurst".)
Sadly though, after what looks like a triumphant ending, Charlie wakes up back in training camp. The whole thing has been a dream, and the battle is still to come.
Early signs here of the political views that would get Chaplin into trouble in later years, and finally kicked out of the country in the McCarthy era. Chaplin had no time for patriotism but was very much a champion of the little man, whatever his nationality. I think that was the key to his popularity. Sadly there's never been a shortage of people who can relate to being downtrodden.
   
           

1917: The Immigrant

In 1914, Chaplin made 36 films for Keystone. In 1915, he made 13 for Essanay. In 1916 he made 9 - one for Essanay and the rest for Mutual - and in 1917 he only made 4, all for Mutual. He was quite rapidly acquiring more control, more time, and more money to make his films.
I wasn't planning to cover the most obvious films from each year, and "The Immigrant" is possibly Chaplin's most iconic short, if not the most famous short comedy of the whole silent era, but never mind.
The story has already become a regular one of Chaplin's: Tramp meets girl, tramp sees off ruffians, tramp and girl live happily ever after. This one's a bit different in that it's a film of two halves - in the first half, Chaplin is on a ship bringing immigrants to America. Here he meets - once again - Edna Purviance. Events throw them together but they say goodbye as they leave the ship to be processed through immigration.
Later, Charlie is penniless and hungry but finds a coin and goes into a cafe, where he meets Edna again by chance. After some comedy business about losing the money and dodging Eric Campbell's scary waiter, they are rescued by a rich artist who wants to paint their portrait. In the final scene the pair are in the rain outside a registry office. Charlie wants Edna to come in with him but she's shy and embarrassed. Finally he picks her up and carries her through the door. It's very sweet but I hope she didn't want a bit a bit more time to think about it.
Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's series "Unknown Chaplin" from 1983 reveals a lot about Chaplin's working methods. The standard method of making films was probably already well established - you write the script, THEN you shoot the film. It seems that Chaplin just needed the germ of an idea before getting his sets built and setting up the camera. He'd start filming, improvise, stop, refine it, film it again, and so on, then decide what happens next and start the process again from there. This accounts for the unstructured narrative of a lot of his films. It also means he shot an awful lot of film - much of the discarded material ended up in the hands of collectors, and a tiny fraction of that - clips of abandoned sequences and alternative versions with different cast members - found its way into "Unknown Chaplin". The whole sequence on board ship seems to have been a late addition to an idea that was initially just about a tramp meeting a girl in a cafe. He shot more footage for this two-reel short than D W Griffith did for his three-hour epic "Intolerance". It pays off though as the film is polished to perfection, with more detail that you're likely to pick up on one viewing. Hardly a frame is wasted. For instance, after Charlie has spent ten minutes worrying about how to pay his bill after losing his money, the artist comes over to talk to them. He offers to pay but Charlie graciously refuses once too often and is lumbered again. While the artist is talking to Charlie and Edna, he pays his own bill. The waiter takes it and returns the change - one large coin. The artist, still in conversation, dismisses it with a wave of the hand, meaning the waiter to keep it as a tip, but the waiter misses this, and returns a moment later with Charlie's bill. Still talking to the artist, Charlie steals a glance at the camera and nonchalantly pays his bill with the artist's change, tipping the waiter with the tiny coin that is his own change.
When the three leave, the waiter fawns over the artist, obviously expecting a huge tip, but receives none and glares angrily at the departing artist, who of course thinks he has already tipped him handsomely. We wonder for a moment what sort of service he'll get on his next visit.
All this action is very low-key and easily missed if you're not giving the film your full attention - which is why, since you'd be hard pressed to find them in a cinema, I'd encourage you to watch these films on blu-ray or DVD on your big HD TV, rather than on a tiny YouTube window.