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Program Notes -- First Chico Silent Film Fest; runnin' 'em up the flagpole!
Topic Started: Jan 21 2012, 06:51 PM (442 Views)
panzer the great & terrible
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Welcome to the First Chico Silent Film Festival!

The recent films Hugo and The Artist have led to revived interest in silent pictures, and I envy those who will meet them here, on the big screen with live music, for the first time. Silent films were not made to be seen on television, and there’s nothing like the real thing. I saw my first silent at 18, and since then exploring that unique medium has been one of my life’s great pleasures.

Silent pictures, I’ve learned, are not just movies without sound. In the first place, they always had musical accompaniment, as brilliantly given us by the phenomenal Dr. Frederick Hodges; but also silent film directors developed their own subtle and nuanced visual language, making it possible to convey complex emotional information by gestures, often no more than the flutter of an eyelash. The resulting movies are absorbing in a way that talkies rarely are. The viewer is almost hypnotized by the images on the screen, but with a mind free to roam anywhere, everywhere. It can be a powerful experience.

Silent films came in at roughly the turn of the Twentieth Century and were, all but a few stragglers, gone by 1930. In just 30 years a spectacular art form was born, changed the world, and died. It’s been 50 years since I first came to that realization, but I still find it astonishing.

We dedicate this event to the support of Bidwell Mansion, and if you’re interested in volunteering to help with the festival’s second edition next year please let us know.

Laugh Show

In “Cops” Buster Keaton pulls off what may be the most physical and balletic of all his pictures, a perfect example of silent film comedy technique. Again and again an ingenious gag gets topped by one even more ingenious, and then comes another gag that tops the topper, and it’s all done with no show of effort or emotion. He has been called the most modern of all silent comics and this effortless quality is what puts him on that level.

He was ambivalent about women, frequently presenting them as ineffectual, capricious and even cruel, as at the end of this short: he has finally defeated the cops, and is ready to get the girl, but she unexpectedly turns him down so he, in effect, commits suicide. That’s an odd thing in a comedy.

I once had a print of Cops, and my roommate and I ran it using a lugubrious modern composition as accompaniment. It worked just as well as ever, but had somehow turned into a tragedy. That was the moment when I learned how thin the line between happy and sad can be.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was the reigning king of silent comedy from 1914 up through Modern Times in 1935, and “Behind the Screen,” the seventh short under his $670,000 contract with Mutual, came half a year after the beginning of what most commentators call his greatest period (I would say it began a couple of years earlier with the first film he personally directed for Keystone, but why quibble?). This was his third year in the movie business, and at that time he was the highest-paid entertainer in history. Was he worth it? Well, the movies are 95 years old and still going strong!

In any case “Behind the Screen” demonstrates Chaplin’s trademark visual punning in full flower. In his hands objects are magically transformed. He uses two beer bottles as binoculars; lathers, towels, currys, manicures and grooms the head and paws of a bearskin rug; and perhaps most memorably plays an improvised xylophone made of pie tins with a pair of hambones. This sort of thing belongs exclusively to silent comedy. With sound, it couldn’t work.

“Wrong Again,” one of the less-known Laurel and Hardy silents, takes us into different territory, comedy based on situation and character rather than wild invention; Hal Roach Studio comedy. We know Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy; we know how they react; and the laughs come because they do what we expect. But not right away.

Suppose that a stranger comes up to Mr. Hardy (or for that matter Mr. Laurel) and slowly but firmly rips the lapel from his jacket. Mr. Hardy (or Laurel) would not fly into a rage and fling himself violently into the fray. Never! He would stare into the camera, blankly musing on the cruelty of fate. The ripper, his initial assault not achieving enough effect, would rip the other lapel off. Now, the victim’s silent face asks the camera, isn’t that just what you’d expect in this wicked world? Then, and only then, does he retaliate, slowly, methodically, concluding with a satisfied nod of his head. What would have been mere violence is now funny. It’s the pauses, the delays, that make these pictures work.

“Lizzies of the Field.” Because Henry Ford understood that interchangeable parts were the secret to auto manufacture, his inexpensive cars, derisively known as “Tin Lizzies,” popped up like mushrooms on early Twentieth Century American roads, and this cheerfully frantic Mack Sennett short celebrated their interchangeability by treating them as implements of destruction, easily replaced. The Sennett style was the opposite of Roach’s: broadly played, character not a major consideration, the Sennetts raced along with no thought of subtlety.

Blackmail

This must be the best British film of the late silent period. Blackmail came from a fairly successful English play that starred Tallulah Bankhead. Alfred Hitchcock had already completed it as a silent when sound arrived. He was told to redo it as a talkie, and he did. But silent film technique was perfected by 1929, and talkies were a new, unexplored medium, so which do you think was the better movie? We have that superb silent version for you tonight, a film so rarely screened that, even though it’s been around for a while, some still think is lost.

It has more setups than the talkie, more camera movement, and more fluid cutting; in other words, it tells the story more stylishly. Not that the sound version is bad -- in fact, it was good for the time, with several innovations like the famous "shock cut" in which a woman's scream carries over the cut from Alice's view of what looks like a knifed body to the landlady's discovery of the murdered artist's corpse; but the dialogue sequences are jarring and wreck the film’s flow. The silent, though, is a winner in every way; each shot holds significance and moves the story inexorably on.

Dozens of writers and documentarians dwell on the knife scene, but just look at the first 7 minutes of the film, from the close-up of the wheel of the flying squad van to the cell door slamming shut on the villain they set out to arrest. Composition, choice of angle, low-key lighting, set design and detail, all are perfect: the villain watches the policemen steal up to the door sideways in a mirror; simultaneously, they see the villain's hand creep towards his gun in silhouette on the wall, with the reverse shot showing their faces shadowed by the slats of the bedroom blind. The effect is of consummate skill, though the story itself is simple -- a lively young girl engaged to a rather stuffy policeman is enticed up to an artist's studio and there stabs him to death to avoid what we might now call date-rape. The consequences of her actions play out with mounting tension in more or less real time (which creates the suspense), as her copper boyfriend plays cat and mouse with an opportunistic blackmailer to save her from the awful fate that befell the villain in the opening minutes. In the final reel, Hitchcock sets up the first of his trademark set-piece chases -- in this case, over the dome of the British Museum.

Cowboys and Communists

V. I. Pudovkin came from the amazing Russian avant garde, already in place when the Soviets took over – Prokofiev and Shostakovitch being prominent examples. These and many others experienced countless humiliations, or could have, when Stalin and his minions turned the Russian Revolution into a murderous dictatorship and Russian art into trash; but this wondrous film came before Stalinism. It’s usually cited as a triumph of editing, but there’s more to it than that.

It’s a polemic like most Soviet cinema of the period, but with the usual 'tyrants vs proles' plot transplanted to the far eastern steppes; the proles here are indigenous Mongols, caught between antiquated, superstitious religion and a cruel ruling elite financed by unethical capitalists.

Pudovkin intercuts the military aristocrats being pampered and groomed for an occasion with the Buddhist priests being helped into their ceremonial attire to receive them. The meeting of these two sets of oppressors is marked with chaotic dances. Inside the temple, the all-knowing, all-wise high lama turns out to be just a child; he looks intimidated though everyone shows him the highest respect. These scenes are difficult today because we know what the Buddhists will soon suffer at the hands of Chairman Mao and his comrades.

For a time there’s not much incident; vast dusty landscapes, human cruelties, wars; but then we settle into a plot about a humble Mongol fur trapper being mistaken for the heir of Genghis Khan and groomed by the military to be the puppet ruler of a new government.

The ending is one of the most exciting of all sequences in the silents: a fight that starts indoors, spills outside and escalates into a revolutionary apocalypse that scatters a whole army across the steppes like leaves in the wind. Trees, dust, crops, dirt rush past the camera in a hailstorm of fractured images. It’s a call for revolution, but what it adds up to in the end is a broad metaphor about releasing the world’s energies in a positive way.

The Dog Who Saved a Studio

Our next feature stars a dog who could act. No, really. Rin Tin Tin was one of a litter of puppies found in a trench abandoned by the German Army during World War One. He was infinitely trainable and, to make a long story short, wound up in Hollywood, where his pictures saved Warner Brothers Studios at a time when closing its gates forever was a possibility. It says something about Hollywood that Time/Warner, which might not exist at all except for this dog, has never released a single Rin Tin Tin film to DVD.

The Night Cry is unusual because it features the world’s first and probably last trained California condor, who was known as Baldy. Our pal Rinty is suspected of Baldy’s sheep killings, and even his own humans think he’s to blame. Watch the dog as he goes from person to person in the family, seeking acceptance, and getting none because they are convinced he is a bad dog. Watch his face. Is he acting or what? If this scene doesn’t melt your heart, you don’t have one. This doggie can act. Really.




The Canadian

The name of William Beaudine is a joke to monster movie fans because in the early Sixties he made pictures with titles like Billy the Kid Meets Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter that were every bit as bad as their titles suggest, but in the silent era he was a master comedy director; he did some of Mary Pickford’s best pictures, and that’s saying something. He fell on evil days after the coming of sound. Who knows why that sort of thing happens? Alcohol may have been involved, but it’s equally possible that he made some pompous but powerful person angry (why else would he have made pictures in England?), or he may have just run out of steam. I’d have loved to be the first to write about this wonderful picture, but Oscar-winning silent film historian/documentarian/restorationist Kevin Brownlow beat me to it, and here’s some of what he wrote:

“William Beaudine (1892-1970) is remembered today chiefly for his many comedy films, made both in America and Great Britain, and for his extended work on the television series Lassie. He began as a property boy at Biograph, and by the 1920’s he was directing such silent classics as Little Annie Rooney, Sparrows, Penrod and Sam, and The Canadian, adapted from a play by Somerset Maugham, a most uncharacteristic film for the director.

“We’re in the Canadian wheat fields. Robbed of her security by the death of her aunt, Nora Marsh (played by Mona Palma) arrives from London to stay on her brother’s farm. Abroad for Nora has meant Paris and the Riviera; she has no notion of frontier life, and doesn’t hide her distaste for her raw surroundings. She quickly makes enemies of her brother’s wife Gertie (Dale Fuller) and homesteader Frank Taylor (Thomas Meighan), especially after she wipes her knife and fork on her napkin – a faux pas subtly conveyed by surreptitious glances and brief gestures. The clash of wills and what we now call ‘lifestyles’ leads Nora to seek a desperate solution to get away: marriage to Taylor and a life on his wheat farm. ‘You said you needed a wife to cook and sew. Would I do?’

“The rest of the film studies the strife between these two, married unsuitably, barely civil to each other. It’s a tough kind of picture to make – pretty much two people in one room.

“Beaudine does not resort to imposed drama or glossy style. He sets his camera in close, and says everything through facial expression and gesture. Not for a moment are the performances exaggerated: the actors behave like human beings.

“Production took Beaudine from California to New York, to Calgary, the Canadian Rockies, then back to New York: ‘We saw all the World Series games – nobody worked those days – and came back to California, all expenses paid,’ Beaudine told me when I interviewed him after The Canadian (was) rediscovered in 1969. I asked him why he was given such a serious dramatic subject. ‘I was a comedy director essentially. I was getting to the end of my contract with Warners, and they were renting me out at $2,500 a week, with nothing for me to do. They sent me back to New York to do a comedy with Richard Dix. On the way back Paramount changed their minds, and since they were stuck with the contract, put me on The Canadian, an entirely different kind of thing from what I’d been doing. Bill LeBaron was running it back in New York, and he was quite a nice guy. We got along fine, I did a fairly good picture, and they were satisfied.’

“Did you ever work on a farm in your life?” I asked. ‘No.’

“He told me he’d never seen the completed film even in the 1920s, due to pressure of work. So when a print was due to be screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Art in February 1970 as part of a season of early films, we tried to persuade him to come. He arrived in a wheelchair shortly before the film was due to start. Would he say a few words? ‘Not on your life,’ said Beaudine, ‘I’ll wait till I’ve seen it.’

“The Canadian was the hit of the evening. The audience applauded during the picture, and applauded at the end. Only then did Beaudine agree to talk. ‘ I’m very surprised,’ he said. ‘Why – I was quite a good director in spots.’ The audience gave him a standing ovation. He died a few weeks later.”

(The above is adapted from a recent adaptation of Brownlow’s original article in The American Film Heritage, Acropolis Books, 1972)

Chicago

“Roxie" Hart first appeared in the 1926 play Chicago written by reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, who was inspired by the real-life unrelated 1924 murder trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, which she covered for the Chicago Tribune. Annan was the basis for Roxie. Both women were acquitted. The show hit Broadway in 1926 and played 172 performances, a good run for those days. Gaertner actually had the nerve to attend the Chicago opening. Later adaptations include: Chicago, our 1927 silent film, with Phyllis Haver, Roxie Hart, a 1942 movie starring Ginger Rogers, Chicago, the scintillating 1975 Bob Fosse Broadway musical with Gwen Verdon, which had an augmented 1996 revival; and, most famous of all, Chicago, the Oscar-winning 2002 film adapted from the 1975 musical (and the revival), starring Renée Zellweger as Roxie, Catherine Zeta-Jones as her rival Velma Kelly and Richard Gere as defense attorney Billy Flynn. Performers who have portrayed Roxie on stage include Anne Reinking, Brooke Shields, Ruthie Henshall, Melora Hardin, Ashlee Simpson, Melanie Griffith, Samantha Harris, Michelle Williams and Christie Brinkley. Henshall, Simpson, Shields, and Williams have portrayed the character both on Broadway and The West End. Bebe Neuwirth who won a Tony Award for the role of Velma Kelly in 1997 also portrayed Roxie in the same production in 2006.

But that’s not all! Our silent version was actually directed by Cecil B. DeMille, who took no screen credit -- not because he was ashamed of the film, exactly, but because he made The King of Kings the same year and shrewdly concluded that his now-canonized name shouldn’t be associated with such raffish material. But financial considerations being what they always have been, he went back to the racy stuff soon thereafter, as in the unforgettably campy early talkie Madame Satan, which concludes with revelers in fancy dress parachuting from a burning dirigible.

DeMille did take care to preserve Chicago, and our print is a copy of his. There are those, me among them, who think this the most entertaining version and the funniest. The sets and costumes are as authentic as could be, only natural considering that they were actually made when this story happens. The pace is brisk even for DeMille, and the performers born to play their parts. There’s a moment near the end – I won’t spoil it – that’s as funny as anything in movies, and which, oddly, is done differently, and falls flat, in all other versions.

Lon Chaney Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out

The Unholy Three (1925), became old hat when the talkie remake came out in 1930, but for my money this silent version is the better movie. Chaney did some fancy acting here, and this picture has done more for his reputation than some of his better-known films. Apparently Raymond Chandler was impressed by the film and used one of its plot devices in The Lady In the Lake.

Director Tod (originally Charles) Browning was some character. Coming from a well-heeled Louisville, Kentucky, family, at age 16 he fell for circus dancer. Following her started him on a path with many curious twists and turns. He worked as a clown, a jockey and the director of a variety theater. All that ended when he met D.W. Griffith and became an actor. He made his debut in Griffith’s monumental Intolerance (1916). Working later on as a director, he had his first success with our film The Unholy Three (1925) (after about 25 unimportant pictures), made in his typical style, mixing fantasy, mystery and horror.

This is the oft-told tale of a ventriloquist, a midget and a strong man who team up to commit burglaries, culminating in a murder. The picture belongs to an even more fateful team-up: Chaney’s collaboration with Browning, who had made at least three films together before, and would do seven more. Then Chaney died and Browning made Sound Era horror history with Dracula and Freaks.

We start in a carnival, putting Browning in familiar territory. The Unholy Three are Professor Echo (Lon Chaney), a ventriloquist; the dreadful midget Tweedledee (Harry Earles); and Hercules the strongman (Victor McLaglen in early form). A girl "who broke the Sultan's thermometer" entices patrons into the tent. While the three outcasts perform, Echo's girl Rosie O’Grady, played by the ‘ever-popular’ Mae Busch, picks pockets. Mid-show, Tweedledee spots a young boy laughing at him and brutally kicks the lad in the mouth, splattering the boy's shirt with blood. All these years later, this scene is still shocking. A brawl ensues and Hercules saves Tweedledee, but the local constabulary arrives to close down the show.

A visually compelling scene shows the shadowed Chaney, huddled with his cohorts, planning a life of crime. Echo dons old lady drag to become Grannie O'Grady. With Tweedledee, Hercules and "granddaughter" Rosie, the four open a pet store, which on the surface, specializes in talking parrots. The parrots can’t actually talk, but just appear to when Echo the ventriloquist throws his voice to make it look like they speak (their voices depicted in balloons). Once sold, the parrots lead the Unholy Three into the homes of diamond-owning customers. Tweedledee, disguised as an infant, accompanies Grannie to help with the heists.

Browning treats this idiotic plot seriously. He also treats Chaney’s drag persona with depth of feeling; the actor doesn’t camp and delivers a multifaceted performance. As powerful as Chaney may be, he is nearly eclipsed by Earles. Tweedledee malevolently taunts and manipulates Hercules, threatens Rosie, and plots mutiny against Echo. We’re in John Waters country here, folks.

It’s interesting that such a histrionic actor as Chaney has retained his force. Most of the stagy actors of his era are quite forgotten, yet he remains iconic because he was the first movie monster, chiefly remembered today for The Phantom of the Opera, now available on a handsome Blu-Ray including the 1930 re-release with two-color Technicolor scenes intact and a music soundtrack.

For DVD Collectors

The Chico Silent Film Festival shows actual film, not DVDs -- silent films were not projected at a given speed, as sound films must be, or the sound wouldn’t be right. With silents the projectionist must vary the speed at which the film passes through the projector’s gate to make the motion look natural, and we have a projectionist who knows all about this stuff. For years, silent films were shown too fast, at sound speed, 24 frames per second, on TV, even in certain film archives, which gave rise to the notion that silents were jerky and primitive. We don’t have that problem here.

Still, many may want to collect some or all of these pictures on DVD. Alas, the news is not all good.

The silent Laurel and Hardys have been unavailable in this country for decades. I would suggest getting a PAL version from Europe (the German one is better than the English one because the English one for some stupid reason includes colorized versions of all the talkies, and the German one includes a number of other Roach silents not easily available elsewhere). But. You have to get a player that can deal with the PAL format, which is not not as hard or expensive as it sounds. If you’re a hardcore Luddite, you might be able to find the Lost Laurel and Hardy VCR tapes on eBay or in a pawnshop. The good news is that there is finally a splendid release of all the Laurel and Hardy talkies at a reasonable price in this country.

For Keaton’s shorts, my best advice is, skip the recent reissue and seek out the older Keaton set from KINO. It’s not Blu-Ray, but the soundtracks are the same, and considering the poor quality of some of the source material, why buy HD versions?

The Felix the Cat pictures require a little searching, but be warned -- a little Felix goes a long way.

“Lizzies of the Field” is in the 5 DVD Slapstick Encyclopedia, one of the great bargains in silent film home video.

“For His Son” is included in Image Entertainment’s invaluable 2-DVD set of Griffith’s Biograph Shorts.

Storm Over Asia, a Dave Shepard product, can be found at Amazon and Netflix.

The Night Cry is supposedly available on DVD: try Amazon. I don’t vouch for the quality.

As far as I know The Canadian can’t be found at all, legally or illegally. Bummer. It’s a picture I would cheerfully break the law to own.

Chicago is available on a fine DVD with some nifty extras, also produced by our own David Shepard.

“Behind the Screen” can be found along with 11 other great films in a splendid 4-DVD set of the Chaplin Mutuals, with one documentary on Chaplin and another, equally choice, on his heavy, Eric Campbell, who died just after the Mutuals were done.

You can get The Unholy Three at the TCM store, or at Amazon. There is also a sound version, and it’s fun to compare the two; the talkie has one shot superior to the silent, simply because of Chaney’s voice, but the film does make the viewer wish the actor had lived longer: alas, he died young.

Notes by Jon Hildreth except where Kevin Brownlow is cited.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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