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.