Viewing Single Post From: The Griffith Project

Viewing Single Post From: The Griffith Project
panzer the great & terrible	Jun 27 2009, 07:47 PM
Mouth Breather Posts: 10,326 Group: Members Member #13 Joined: September 3, 2005	This section of the boards has been dead as the Charleston, so, having just gotten a stack of silents from Grapevine, I'm going to try to restart it. In April of the year seven I started to collect the Grapevine releases of D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts, which chronicle the invention of storytelling in the movies. Somehow inertia set in and I got bogged down in the second DVD. Well, the sixth one just arrived and if don't get on with it I never will, so I'm going to strive for one short per day until I catch up. I'm going to post capsule reviews here because I need motivation to wade through all this, and I hope somebody will give me a hard time if I don't. The up side is, the movies are sure to get better as I go along. 1.) "The Adventures of Dollie." Griffith's first film, made in 1908, and damn poor by the standards he set a few years later; look at it this way, not only had he never made a movie before, but nobody else had either (despite how French critics rave about their boring early flicks). A little girl gets kidnapped by an evil Gypsy and put in a barrel with three X's on it. He loads the barrel into his covered wagon, but when he crosses the river it falls out and she floats downstream until a guy fishing at the very place she got kidnapped rescues her with the help of her father, who is there because...well, because the fisherman can't handle the barrel alone. This movie is about as interesting as it sounds. What IS interesting is the way it was restored. In the old days some genius at the Library of Congress figured out that they didn't want inflammable nitrate prints around the place -- good thinking so far -- and insisted on having a photo of each frame of each movie on one card per frame, never mind how much space they take up -- but no title cards, just the images. Thanks to this harebrained idea restorationists were able to re-photograph each frame and we now have an approximation of Griffith's first movie, which isn't really worth watching. Ain't technology the nuts? 2,) "A Calamitous Elopement" was made three weeks later. The story, told in four shots, is that the girl's father catches her hugging her boyfriend and has a litter of cows (shot 1), so the boyfriend comes to her balcony and presumably asks her to elope (the titles are gone, if there were any). She throws her suitcase down to him, and he goes off to find a ladder. A thief shows up, rigs his rope ladder to the balcony. The girl appears again, so he hides the suitcase and himself right under the balcony where everybody can see them. The boyfriend comes with his own wooden ladder and the girl slides a huge trunk down to him. He goes away for some reason, the thief gets in the trunk for some reason, which is empty for some reason, and then a cop shows up and seems to arrest the couple (shot 2). OK, so we're in the courtroom, right? The lovers appear before the judge and the trunk gets carried in by a cop and another guy. Everybody smiles and shakes the judge's hand; the couple walk. Huh? (shot 3) So now we're in the boyfriend's apartment. The trunk gets delivered and the couple is just thrilled so they leave the room, the thief gets out of the trunk, dresses up in the boyfriend's best clothes, and steals everything in sight. Just side-splitting. We never learn what happened to the suitcase. Billy Bitzer shares cinematography honors with Arthur Marvin. 3.) "Balked At the Alter" (sic). The worst yet. Made three weeks after the last, it's another comedy (never Griffith's strong suit). I don't want to go into detail. An ugly guy in a shotgun wedding to an ugly old maid flees the church, is pursued by the wedding party, and is brought back to the church where he appears to say he doesn't want her. Or something. Ignatz, there is a drunk who passes out and gets trampled by each and every pursuer, but I don't know if that qualifies for your drunk encyclopedia. It's hard to imagine movies like this ever captured public imagination, but when I compare them to Thanhousers of the same period they are better-photographed, and even if the acting is stagey, it's still acting, sort of. So yeah, I guess Griffith was on to something. 4.) "Betrayed By a Handprint" was made a week later. I don't expect a lot from these early pictures, but this one tells its story so poorly that I'm not at all sure what happens. Jealousy drives a young woman to extreme overacting, jewel theft, and I dunno, maybe sloth. In a close-up which looks startlingly modern (as Griffith shots sometimes do), she conceals the stolen necklace in a bar of soap, which does no good whatever as the lady who owns the necklace wakes up, goes straight to the girl's room because of that there handprint in the title, and finds the necklace right away. I guess the handprint said bar of soap in code. Then the next day, the lady I think forgives the girl and tries to give her money, which the girl refuses. I don't know what to make of it except that I sure miss the title cards, which probably means I'm still watching rephotographed stills. Besides the fine close-up, which is a real close-up, not a medium shot as in The Great Train Robbery, there's a trace of almost creative editing here. The shot count is up to about 20. Despite the flaws, progress: we're still only two months into the guy's career, and remember, there was nobody to show him the way. He was once my favorite director, and I'm beginning to remember why. 5.) "Father Gets Into the Game" sounds pretty dire, doesn't it? It does, and it is. Mack Sennett plays father and he tries real hard to be funny, and maybe he was, in 1908, but I doubt it. The whole family goes out but nobody will take father along, so a guy shows up and cuts off father's beard and dyes his hair, mustache and eyebrows with his back to the camera. Ho hum. Now a young guy, he proceeds to Central Park where he picks up a girl at the fountain and takes her to a private room at a restaurant that for some reason employs a really, really clumsy waiter. I may have gone to sleep or something about here, because the next thing I knew the movie was over and I'm not watching it again no matter what. From a tech point of view, another advance: the earliest example of intercutting I've seen. The whole first half of the film is just two shots, but we go back and forth between them several times (not just once as in Life of an American Fireman) so things don't get as dull as they could have. A small breakthrough, but we're starting to make progress. Too bad the movie's such a bore -- you couldn't show it to a film class. Ignatz, champagne is served but nobody drinks any. This is the first film in the collection entirely shot by the great Billy Bitzer, but he wasn't great yet. In any case, Arthur Marvin is out of the picture from here on. 6.) "The Romance of a Jewess," starring Florence Lawrence, aka the Biograph girl (later known as the IMP girl). No masterpiece, but the first that tells a coherent story in a somewhat movielike way, and only 13 weeks after Griffith started. My admiration for him grows; that's a damn good learning curve. There's this girl. Her mother dies, so she's working for her Dad in a pawnshop, and a guy comes courting. The Dad ain't having any of him, so she runs off. Next shot, they have a six year old girl and own a bookstore. I hate to tell you this, but he falls off a ladder and dies, so she has to sell the store. Next thing you know they're poor, so she sends the little girl to pawn the watch the mother left her, and where do you reckon the kid goes? Right the first time. Father and daughter are reunited but too late -- she dies. At least the kid has a granddad to take care of her. So much better than the earlier movies, you wouldn't believe it. I didn't find myself thinking about tech stuff or director stuff, I was just caught up in the story. Oh, and there were titles, which helped. 7.) "Song of the Shirt," from a poem by Thomas Hood I know I'll never read. It's 11/17/08, Griffith's been making a movie every week for four months and he's starting to feel his oats, so what should he try his hand at? Social criticism. The "story" of this little movie is, Linda Arvidson is dying, and Florence Lawrence desperately needs money to save her life, I guess, so she goes to, well, maybe it's some kind of shirt repair place, gets a shirt, takes it home and repairs it with her sewing machine, then takes it back but they reject it. In the meantime Griffith intercuts this with shots of the rich people who own the repair place living it up, toasting each other in restaurants. The point is forcefully made: rich people are rich and poor people are poor. I kid Griffith, but here we have a radical departure: intercutting to make a specific point that isn't in either shot, but is in the relationship between the shots, if that makes any sense. Put it this way: Shot A + Shot B = Idea C. We take this for granted today. I'm sure Griffith was just filming the poem as written, but in the process he accidentally discovered montage and was smart enough to know he had something. The language of film begins, and it's cool that we can watch the exact moment where it does. 8.) "Money Mad" starts off unpromisingly. An old man is begging on the street; Griffith himself walks by and throws money in his hat. Then I'm not sure exactly what happens, but the old guy seems to steal a young woman's wallet; then he goes home, and in a shot that seems to last forever, puts the money he stole in with a bunch more money in a bag and gloats over it. A miser, he is. So then he goes to a bank and withdraws a lot more money, but alas, two bad guys see him do it and follow him home in a fairly-well-paced if silly sequence. So he's at home, gloating some more, and the bad guys bust in, kill him and take the money home with them. They divide the money and go to sleep -- not! -- because one has a gun and the other has a knife. To make a short story even shorter, they kill each other, and the landlady comes in, somehow starts a fire while she finds the money, and everybody burns up. Whew! Money Mad is right! This one's a little smoother that all that has gone before, but you still have that three-minute take of the miser gloating, with about as much dramatic interest as a dead fish. So I dunno. Three steps forward, two steps back. 9.) "Those Awful Hats" isn't really a story, more like a Public Service Announcement. If the ladies don't take their great big hats off, a giant metal crane will come and lift them to the skies. I am not making this up; Gravy has seen it too. We get the only use of a traveling matte in any Griffith Biograph: the film used is "At the Crossroads of Life." The whole stock company is in this one, plus the famous stage comedienne Flora Finch, but we only see their backs so who cares? An oddity, but when projected on a big screen at the Silent Film Festival at the Capri Theater in Sacramento, the audience loved it, so who am I to carp? 10.) The Cord of Life. There's a couple that has a little tiny girl kid, and this furrin guy shows up at their apartment, and I'm not at why, but the Daddy throws him out, and boy, is that there furriner mad! The Daddy leaves, and the Mommy leaves too. Wouldn't you leave you arpartment unlocked if you just hecked off some sinister guy in a Chico Marx hat? The bad guy gets back in, puts the kid in a basket, ties the basket to a cord and puts it out the window and then shuts the window so the cord will be released if anybody opens the window again and the kid in the basket will plummet like a mad thing. Got that? So of course the Evil One follows the Daddy into the wilds of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Tells Him That He Did It! No heck! The Daddy races back to town in the first-ever example of a Griffith last minute rescue, pursued by two cops. In the meantime, there's an extraordinarily tedious sequence where the Mom almost opens the window a zillion times. Finally she burns a roast so she really has to open the window or die, but the husband rushes in at the last second followed by the two cops, he explains the situation so they dangle him by his ankles out of the top half of the window and he rescues the kid, the cops leave, and everybody crosses themselves again and again. I near about wet my pants. 11.) The Curtain Pole. Bet that title pulled 'em in! If Griffith made anything worse I haven't seen it. Mack Sennett, with a ball on the end of his nose, is drunk and breaks a curtain rod at a party, so he goes to find a new one. At a hardware store he buys a pole abot twice as long and four times as thick as he needs, and he then goes around town bopping people with it accidentally, and they chase him. When he finally gets back to the party they've already replaced the curtain rod. How jolly is that? OK. folks, that's the end of Volume 1 and I'll start a new post tomorrow. Lucky you. Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jun 29 2009, 08:41 PM.
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