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Festival Reviews
Topic Started: Jul 20 2010, 07:26 AM (552 Views)
panzer the great & terrible
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Rather than do extended reviews of every movie in the San Fran Silent Fest, I'm going to sprinkle them into a day-by-day narrative for those who wonder what such an event is like if you spring for a pass into every show. What it is, is exhausting. First a few conclusions:

1.) Would I do it again? Sure would. I got to see things I never thought I'd see and meet people I never thought I'd meet (Hi, Chandu!). Four days worth.

2.) Is Metropolis better in the new long version? Yes, it's much more entertaining and a lot of peripheral things finally do make sense. Is it still a silly movie? Yes, even more so.

3.) Did any "new" masterpieces turn up? Three. Two. Two and a half. I dunno; there were three films I'd love to have on DVD

4.) What was it like to see several Melies pictures spread out over three days? It made a convert of me. I went and bought Dave Shepard's huge Melies set and am enjoying it at home.

5.) Did I starve? No, no, a thousand times no. The Castro is a good food neighborhood, with seafood, pizza, pasta, Thai food and normal American food at a reasonable price.

6.) Where was Pa Stark? Can't answer that. He may have caught Metropolis, but it was sold out and quite a crush -- not a lot of meeting and greeting. I scoured the line at every show and never saw him.

This was the festival's fifteenth year, and perhaps the most rewarding thing was the quality of music and musicians. It was never a question of some guy pounding out early jazz riffs on an untuned piano. Instead there were scores thoughtfully prepared, with some arrangements in place, then intelligently embellished in close coordination with what was on screen: for example, the Alloy Orchestra's written score for Metropolis is all of three pages, but with it they create the best score that picture ever had. It must be a little spooky to collaborate with dead folks, but that's essentially what goes on. The musicians' enthusiasm for the films caught fire and the audience became involved in the creative process -- something that doesn't happen every day except to true blue jazz fans.

Cast of Characters:

Paul: Debonair, Devil-May-Care Balconeer.
Dave: Top silent film restorer and promoter.
Eli: One of Jonesboro, Tennessee's two gifts to the world, a silent film fanatic since the age of 15 (now 20).
Taylor: Jonestown's other gift to the world, a saftig redhead who can sing, dance and act, but is fairly new to appreciating silent movies (and is, I'm not supposed to tell you, 19).
Dorothy: Owner of the house where all four stayed, a successful chemist who devotes infinite time and resources to the Niles Museum, located in the old Essenay Studio headquarters, which shows silent films every Saturday, mostly from Dave's immense collection...well, every Saturday except one a year during the San Fran Silent Fest.

Episode #1 -- Working on the Railroad.

After a tussle with public transportation, Paul arrives at the BART Station in Union City, California, only an hour late. Dave picks him up and soon they are on their way to San Francisco. They get off at Civic Center and transfer to a trolley which wends its way slowly uphill, passing the trolley yard. San Francisco has collected trolley cars from all over the world -- ours was from Milan -- and some are a hundred years old or more. The differences in design and paint are fascinating, but the two adventurers can't stop and stare because they must press on to The Castro.

The Castro District is the heart of gay America, and is everything that implies. Naked men stride down the streets past Harvey Milk's old camera shop. Cookies shaped like genitalia abound and the Lord only knows what goes on after dark, but for the rest of us, the Castro Theater is where the action is. It holds about 2,000 people, and tonight about 1,500 attend the festival's opening night to see John Ford's epic western from 1925, The Iron Horse. It was billed as the American Version, which was exciting because the U.K. version, usually shown, is considerably shorter and composed of B takes.

The music was to be provided by Mighty Wurlitzer virtuoso Dennis James, who ignored the advertising and supplied his own print, which was the U.K. version, the one he has played to for years, and to hell with the rest of us. OK, Mr. James, as a tribute to your extraordinary talent Panzer will forgive, but he won't forget. (Fortunately, the American Version is included in the Ford at Fox set and I'm watching it tonight, by God -- note inserted by Jon Hildreth, who is more disappointed than Panzer at missing his one opportunity of seeing it with live musical accompaniment)

At the concession stand Panzer literally rubs elbows with Leonard Maltin (first asking permission), buys frozen Junior Mints (highly recommended), and settles into Fifteenth Row Center. This was Panzer's third viewing of this version of The Iron Horse, and he is here to tell you that on the big screen with a live crowd whipped into a frenzy by an extremely emotional score, the film is entertainment on a grand scale. Panzer had never felt such a powerful emotional response to a silent. He had never before noticed George O'Brien's iconic performance in the lead. For a silent star, he's naturalistic and brings off his big effects without fanfare, making them doubly strong. Maybe Ford's direction of John Wayne in later films would have been less effective if he hadn't first learned the power of understatement with O'Brien. The hero is orphaned in childhood and has become one of Ford's homeless wanderers when he finds a home in the railroad crew. That, and the fact that he loved the boss's daughter, makes him the railroad's most ardent defender. The path of true love winds as crookedly as usual, though; the heroine is engaged to a slimy double-dealer, and complications ensue.

Ford's direction is poetic and even epic, but does suffer from the occasional Ford-ism. There is a listless heroine and funny Irish drunks who don't make you laugh; but that can't diminish the impact of a huge cast portraying the building of the Continental railroad, no less -- a defining moment in American history. The photography falls a little short of his own standards a few years later, after he has absorbed the Murnau influence, but is still ahead of the 1925 domestic competition.

A splendid night; a splendid film. Panzer got so wound up that he talked for hours and didn't sleep a lot.

Stay tuned for Episode 2 -- "Upstaging a Robot."

APPENDIX:

It's not widely known that often the best shots, or A takes, were used for the American prints of silents, while foreign versions were constructed from the B, or second best takes. What's worse, not every shot had an acceptable B take, so foreign versions were usually shorter. Just another irksome little thing that makes film preservation and restoration so tricky.

A rare foray into actual film criticism even though some folks get all hot and bothered when I do it around here:

In The Iron Horse, the hero loses his home and then loses his father. All that remains to him is the memory of a little girl, and then when he finds her, she's committed to another guy. Ford heroes tend to be dispossessed that way. He finds himself by committing to the job at hand, building the railroad; in other Ford pictures he finds his home in the cavalry or in some other pursuit that benefits all humanity. In Liberty Valance Tom Donophan sacrifices his own wishes to help Rance Stoddard bring civilization across the Picketwire River. The heroine of Seven Women gives her life for the others' safety. Tom Joad becomes an outlaw to offer mystic inspiration to the poor. In the usual case the character loses everything, then gives even more. In Iron Horse, Twenties optimism prevails and the hero gets the girl in the usual Hollywood manner; but one of the things that increasingly characterizes Ford pictures as he went along is that the hero ends up with nothing, as in The Searchers. Of course, the comedies are exceptions, but in them the lead character is not so much a hero as a blowhard.

My next big project is to work on Ford, starting with the Ford At Fox box, one of the greatest home video releases of all time. Hey, it might be a little late for a review, but I feel a need to show Fox that they should reactivate their classics division under more practical leadership. There are still plenty of Raoul Walsh pictures that need reissue.

Oh, by the way, news flash: Dave tells me a DVD of the silent What Price Glory is coming soon. No word yet about extras.
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jul 24 2010, 02:38 PM.
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Chandu
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panzer the great & terrible
Jul 20 2010, 07:26 AM

1.) Would I do it again? Sure would. I got to see things I never thought I'd see and meet people I never thought I'd meet (Hi, Chandu!).
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panzer the great & terrible
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Oh. I meant, "Hi, Mr Caplin". Brain heck. You oughta be flattered, Chandy.
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Chandu
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Posted Image Just funnin'. Thanks Mr. P.
Edited by Chandu, Jul 21 2010, 10:57 AM.
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panzer the great & terrible
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Last night I watched the American Version of The Iron Horse. It is a little longer, but the main difference is that the A shots show Madge Bellamy to best advantage. Apparently Fox was building her up; she actually looks alive in some scenes. In the souvenir program for the movie it says: "Selected by Penrhyn Stanlaws as most beautiful girl in America, Madge Bellamy laughed and was happy about it, but did not let the judgment go to her head." She may have been waiting to find out who the hell Penrhyn Stanlaws was. If I was going to name an axe murderer, that's just the sort of name I'd pick.

The American version also features longer and more exciting Indian attacks, with Indians played by Indians. Ford treats the Native Americans respectfully, which led to big things for him in the long run.

The souvenir program also says that George O'Brien was the son of "the beloved Police Chief of San Francisco." My, how times do change.
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jul 23 2010, 05:19 PM.
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JazzGuyy
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Never mind.

I wish this Forum had an option to delete posts.
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mort bakaprevski
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Jul 21 2010, 12:23 PM
I wish this Forum had an option to delete posts.
Been there. Wished that!!
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panzer the great & terrible
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Oh, Lord, me too. I can't count the number of times I've posted the same thing twice. It makes it quite clear that the post was silly in the first place. There's something humbling about the Internet.
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panzer the great & terrible
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The next day Panzer wakes up in the upper floor of a carriage house in a sleepy old California town called Niles, plunked down in the middle of modern Union City. Dave is still sawing logs, so Paul wanders downstairs, where, behind a door just like the one to Mrs' Bates' fruit cellar, lies Movie Nut Heaven. 35mm prints of silent classics, including The Kid Brother, The Last Laugh, The Cat and the Canary, and Steamboat Bill, Jr. 16 mm. prints, including the very print of Intolerance that taught Panzer film grammar half a century ago. A huge collection of LaserDiscs includes almost every silent release in the format; and DVDs galore, including unexpected things like Darned Good Westerns and Looney Tunes boxes.

A lazy, leisurely morning follows. The first screening won't be until 2 p.m., and Panzer finds it hard to summon up much enthusiasm as it will be a Chinese movie with the stultifying title, A Spray of Plum Blossoms. Little did he know.

China's first movie house opened in 1908, in the bustling port city of Shanghai, where about half of China's film production took place before sound (which, as in Japan, came in the mid-30's). This movie was made in 1931, when Shanghai's passion for all things Western was so intense that the intertitles are in English as well as Mandarin, despite the fact that few Chinese outside of Shanghai could read them. Very loosely based on Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, it was directed by Bu Wancang, who a few years later made the movie on which Disney's Mulan is based. Here, too, we have something of a warrior princess theme, but, despite a lot of independent female behavior, including cross-dressing, this particular warrior princess spends much of the second half of the picture threatened with rape by by one evil male or another, and even the people who save her have designs on her until we get to the hero, a Robin Hood type known as the "Plum Flower Bandit." In any case, no opportunity for slam-bang action is ignored, and the resulting film isn't at all what the title would suggest.

Ruan Lingyu, who plays the heroine, enjoyed popularity beyond anything a Chinese woman had ever experienced until she took her own life at 24, leaving a note that read "Gossip is a terrible thing."

Donald Sosin provides a richly varied, and tasteful piano accompaniment, which enhances each dramatic moment without calling attention to itself -- the polar opposite of what Dennis James did the night before.

Panzer rates this B+. It's an entertaining movie with beautiful costumes and art direction, ably shot and edited, with attractive stars, but there is even better to come.



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panzer the great & terrible
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Rotaaie (1928) was the hit of the festival. Its director, Mario Camerini, has been neglected because he made pictures during Mussollini's regime, and it's no accident that the big directors in Italian cinema were on the other side of the fence -- most Italian intellectuals have been Communists for the last sixty years -- that includes film critics, and how. Rotaie proves that even though his father was a National Socialist bigwig, Camerini himself was no Fascist.

A poor, despairing young couple check into a seedy hotel to commit double suicide but then, finding the hotel room too vermin-infested to die in, go to the train station, where the hero finds a wallet stuffed with money, so they're off on a train trip to the Riviera, where they buy fancy clothes, dance, drink cocktails and gamble. It was at this point in the story that I realized that the famous Antonioni wasn't anything like as original as everybody thought he was during the Sixties. In movies like L'Avventurra and La Notte he imitated this film again and again until boredom set in.

To put the story in context, Italy had little part in the Industrial Revolution of the Nineteenth Century, remaining a mostly agrarian economy until Mussollini took the reins with his movement of nationalistic industrialization. In 1928 many young couples who didn't really know where they fit in society, and this movie deals with their problems. Despite the glamorous setting, the film operates in a realist way, and I don't hear anybody deny that it represented the beginning of neorealism, using nonprofessional actors in real settings. DeSica admitted that he was influenced by this movie, saying that it taught him to be "truthful and sincere" in making films.

If I were to keep on with the plot we'd get into major spoilers, so let's just say that the couple does eventually find a way to live.

Despite its tilt towards realism, the film's also influenced by the German Expressionists, especially in the high-contrast, "chiaroscuro" lighting, and by the Soviets in montage sequences of industrial symbols like locomotives.

Panzer gives it a straight A. It would be A+, but there's a roulette sequence that gets a little long, and Panzer doesn't like roulette ... just a personal quirk. A major find, the film only exists in one archive, and even though many at the festival rate it as high as Sunrise, nobody seems willing to gamble on putting out a DVD. What we need here is an American director with enough money and enthusiasm to get this forgotten Italian masterpiece before the world public, perhaps in a region-free DVD.

I just feel lucky that I saw it, and especially lucky that I heard Stephen Horne's wonderful score, including a lovely dance tune I can't get out of my head.

Next up -- Metropolis. What an astonishing day at the movies!
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jul 23 2010, 08:30 AM.
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panzer the great & terrible
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The screening of the famous restoration of Metropolis started an hour late because they had to shoehorn a sold out house into a theater where people perversely put an empty seat between them and their neighbors. The atmosphere was electric, to say the least, and the film began to wild applause, which continued as the Blu-Ray print continued to reveal detail and depth and, yes, beauty never seen since the initial release. Make no mistake about it; this is the most gorgeous Metropolis we've seen. The restored version is not just a lot of new shots of water rushing around, as one balconeer claimed a while back: it actually features a whole subplot featuring the big, sinister lug who stood beside Freder's dad in the final reels of the old version, doing nothing much at all. Turns out he's a scary enforcer out to make life miserable for the guy who got fired in the first part of the movie. He is the most sinister bad guy in any Lang picture, and his presence in the plot tilts the argument a good deal more in favor of the workers and against the capitalists -- which makes the ending even sillier than it was.

But Metropolis never has been judged solely by its ending. In design and art direction it remains a triumph, so far ahead of its time that its initial boxoffice failure seems understandable. Just bear in mind that in the long run it became the most popular of all silent movies, with incalculable influence on all fantasy cinema that came after (once a small byway of film, fantasy is, after all, a dominant factor in mainstream cinema these days, and therefore so is Metropolis).

The live accompaniment by the world-famous Alloy Orchestra did wonders to enhance the film, giving it a coherence it needs. On the DVD release, the buyer will be able to choose between their scroe and the orchestral score from the original release. Sounds like an excellent excuse to watch the whole thing twice.

Panzer declines to rate this film: that would be as dumb as rating Chaucer. But Kino's DVD? A++; the restoration cost more than a million, and the DVD gives you a choice between Alloy's brilliant score and the score used at the film's 1927 premiere in Berlin. An absolute must for any collection.

What with one thing and another we didn't get home until one A.M.

Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jul 25 2010, 11:06 AM.
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Thanks for the review, Mr P. I knew this would be more than just "extra shots of rushing water", with all that has been put into this restoration. Can't wait to get the Blu.



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panzer the great & terrible
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Saturday was a slow day at the festival; after Friday anything would seem slow. I ate a bang-up lunch at the Anchor Oyster Bar, oysters and stuffed Petrale sole, and did some record shopping in the afternoon, completely missing one feature.

The day started off with three short comedies accompanied by the Mighty Wurlitzer.

First up was the last film Keaton And Arbuckle made togther, "The Cook." It was considered lost until a decomposed print turned up in Oslo, in 1998. Parts are irretrievably gone, but the story still hangs together. The Keaton-Arbuckle films require a different sense of humor than mine, and that's all I've got to say.

Next was "Pass the Gravy," a Max Davidson food-fight short from the Hal Roach Studios, set on an urban chicken farm. You heard me. Somebody told me this isn't out on DVD, but Gravy might tell me different. Anyway, it has a lot of laughs and the audience loved it.

The last two-reeler was "Big Business," a strong contender for best Laurel and Hardy movie ever, which had me in stitches for about the twentieth time. It was such a moviewise crowd that when he first appeared Jimmy Finlayson got a bigger hand than Stan and Ollie.

Audience applauded long and loud at the end for Wurlitzer whiz Dennis James, who is at his best with two-reelers.

The early afternoon show was The Flying Ace, a 1926 production of the Richard Norman Studios in Jacksonville, Fla. Norman was a white guy who made a few movies and finally had a successful one with an all-African-American cast, and continued with a string of upbeat pictures showing blacks in positions of respect and leadership to battle the Jim Crow attitudes and stereotypes of the time.

In actual fact, there were no black airplane pilots in WWI, but in this movie Captain Billy Stokes returns home from the war to his civilian job as a railroad detective, without taking off his Army Air Force uniform. The film has no aerial footage. I went AWOL and missed it all. People who know music said that Donald Soisin's piano accompaniment was dramatic, inventive and true to the period.

Kenneth Brownlow's contribution to the festival was a gorgeous print of The Strong Man, Harry Langdon's second feature, gracefully directed by Frank Capra. I've never been a huge fan of this movie -- prefer Tramp, Tramp, Tramp! -- but Stephen Horne's brilliant piano accompaniment plus the delighted reactions of a big crowd made a difference. Reading Capra's autobiography, I became aware that a lot of this movie comes from the director's own experiences as a immigrant -- probably why people say it's more a Capra movie than a Langdon movie. I give the movie a B after today's performance, which is way, way up from my initial rating.

Diary of a Lost Girl is a masterpiece, and was immeasurably enhanced by the contributions of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. G.W. Pabst's all-out attack on conventional morality starred Louise Brooks as an upper middle class girl whose father marries the housekeeper and salts his own daughter away in a reformatory right out of Dickens. She escapes, becomes a high-class prostitute, and then the father dies, and that's spoiler enough, though you'll never, ever guess what happens next. This movie had the audience on the edge of their seats, and I give it an A+ despite the fact that it was no big hit in its day; but then, neither was Metropolis.

The evening concluded with Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, which, despite fine accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble, taught me to sleep sitting up. Though some compelling shots make for intriguing stills, this film is so dull dramatically that quite a few walked out. I myself gave up after the first hour, and had a great time in the lobby talking to Dorothy about the Niles Film Museum, where you can see silent movies every Saturday night of the year except this one.

Only one more day!
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Aug 4 2010, 08:13 AM.
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Great stuff, Mr P. That DIARY OF A LOST GIRL sounds quite intriguing. Is it available on DVD?

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panzer the great & terrible
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Yes, Mr Bat, Diary is available from Kino. They also have the other Brooks-Pabst flick, Pandora's Box, which is just as much fun. Amazon can fix you up.
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