Pordenone 2015.

It’s not hard to see why I keep on wheeling back to Pordenone. The organizers’ range of enthusiasms is a remarkably good match with my own - Maurice Elvey, Michael Curtiz, Ivan Mozjoukine, the complete David Wark Griffith and silent films from Victor Fleming. They even came up with 1924’s Serdsya i dollarri/ Hearts and Dollars, the first known film where Anatol(i) Litvak gets a credit (for editing), with him clearly visible among the comic clerks.  They were even going to do a retrospective on William Cameron Menzies but couldn’t put it together in time for this year, so there’s the prospect of another trip.

About three days in the Teatro Verdi, as the screen filled with another correct paced, tinted copy, forty foot across and backed by more of their exceptional live musicians, it hit me that there’s nowhere else in the world, certainly not in Australia, where I could be doing this and nowhere I could do it knowing whoever was in the seat next to me realized what a privilege it was, even if my chance of sharing my enthusiasm might be limited by them only speaking Bulgarian.

Best in show was Victor Fleming’s majestic To the Last Man. How unjust that a film, which should have established him as one of the world’s leading directors, has been lost for the better part of a hundred years. Unlike revered directors like John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, the work on show suggested that Victor Fleming’s silent period output was as impressive as his sound (Gone with the Wind) films and as neglected.

Of course we’ll never know about that as the greater part of his silents are lost, unlikely to be recovered. That’s it for his Lord Jim with Percy Marmont or Flemming’s then large scale 1927 The Rough Riders. We have to mentally composite his admired Emil Jannings vehicle Way of All Flesh from brief extracts on show and the Akim Tamiroff re-make. Fleming's Call of the Canyon was represented by short, washed-out clips of an opening  where Richard Dix (like Glenn Ford in  The Violent People) is told his chance of survival is the dry air of the Arizona desert.

In To the Last Man, Dix is totally in his element as the Rough Rider come back to his home valley to find the a blood feud (derived from the Grahams and the Tewksburys, not the Hatfields and McCoys this time) which he is reluctantly drawn into. The notion that the confrontation will continue to the last man is a great, sober plot dynamic. The film continually out guesses us. Normally jolly Eugene Pallette is a nasty who’s mean to heroine Lois Wilson’s pet lamb. The “frightful” bad man is the prototype of Shane. The shoot-out gets interrupted by the widow with the shovel who won’t leave her man’s body to be picked over by the critters.

Parallel with the great cowboy action material, we get a romance with Lois Wilson, who’s “good name”  as the only woman in the bad hat’s camp is a surprising, dominant plot theme. The kiss on the mountain peak with the western landscape spread out below the leads is an iconic image copied many time over but never equaled. The Tonto Basin avalanche is also the most impressive thing of it’s kind.

The film is a succession of great cowboy movie scenes rendered in great images (James Wong Howe on camera), which had no need for sound. The presentable 1933 Randolph Scott - Henry Hathaway re-make is obliterated in any comparison.

To the Last Man  slots in between The Covered Wagon, again starring Lois Wilson, and the Gary Cooper The Virginian, directed by Fleming, making the Paramount westerns one of the movies’ great cycles. Think The Vanishing American with Dix, Union Pacific, California, the Alan Ladd Whispering Smith and Shane.

I found a surprisingly large number of people who agreed it was the best film running at Pordenone.

Under the heading of hostile fate, note that, while To The Last Man was represented by a murky Russian copy with jumps, the other unfamiliar Fleming feature on show, the 1929 Wolf Song turned up in a sharp, full-range-of-tones print. Here Gary Cooper is one of those moving on heroes who eyes glamorous, mantilla wearing Lupe Velez. Her father, grandee Michael Vavich, takes a dim view of that, warning Coop “Speak to my daughter again and I will kill you. ” The titles by Julian Johnson (Wings, Docks of New York) are particularly adept. Lupe of course rides off double with Gary. The story is romance novel silly but you can see later Fleming lust-driven plots like Red Dust in it and there are a couple of brief, effective bursts of violence showing the director’s hand - Louis Wolheim taking advantage of the bottle on the bar in his fight scene and Cooper downing the two Indians. He also gets to do a bare assed scene, washing on the river bank.

The most significant thing about Wolf Song is that it shows Gary Cooper was a star personality before he ever said a word for the microphone.

Fleming was also represented by his first two credited films as director, the Doug Fairbanks When the Clouds Roll By and The Mollycoddle. A beautiful copy of the first made me up-grade my assessment as it became clear that what we were watching was the point where Fairbanks transitioned from athlete comedian to spectacle super hero. Plot has evil shrink Herbert Grimwood trying to make his point by psyching Doug into doing himself in, with digressions like shots of indigestible vegetables dancing in his stomach, human fly activity and the first (?) use of the rotating set we get again in The Navigator and Royal Wedding. The Buster Keaton connection is re-enforced by finding the word “saphead” in the titles (the name of the play with Fairbanks, redone as a movie by Keaton) and the ambitious flood finale clearly anticipating Steamboat Bill Jr.

The Mollycoddle was equally a departure, with Doug as the Europeanized Yankee restored to his pioneering ancestors tradition by work in the steamer stoke hold and foiling diamond smuggler Wallace Beery - a Fleming regular from this point on.

The director’s Mantrap had been seen before. Presentable enough, it’s trashy presentation of the Clara Bow character makes an interesting contrast with Frank Lloyd’s later, remarkable Hoopla.

Other program streams included the Russian Comedies, which Pordenone has been investigating. Hearts & Dollars was a bit on the incoherent side as a couple of those Americans lost in Russia (think Kulseshov‘s Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) are shuffled between the wrong relatives before finding romance and opportunity. Alexei Popov’s Dva Druga, Model I Podruga/ Two Friends, A Model & a Girl Friend is more approachable and an agreeable enough first run through for Volga Volga, when the evil box factory capitalist attempts to sabotage the young inventor duo as they take their prototype to the planner bureaucrats in the big city. Star Russian actors we don’t know featured.

 

Popov’s 1930 Krupnaia Nepriyatnost/ Big Trouble is more of the same with the Revolutionary Speaker sent to  the worker’s meeting getting switched with the priest arriving to address the Church across the square. The satire is surprisingly gentle if not particularly funny. Ivan Pryev, later to handle imposing Dostoievsky productions contributed Gosudstvennyi Cinovnik/The State Official 1930, a compromised morality where the clerk who hides a recovered a bag of state cash stolen from him, becomes a local hero and is elected to the Soviet only to achieve a comeuppance.

Victor Shestakov’s Nelzia Li Bez Menia/ Delicious Meals from still silent 1932 is more of the same, with the disgruntled husband going off to eat at the newly established state canteen, part of the first five year plan, and unwittingly becoming an element of it’s reform and triumph. Throw in the 1934 children’s film Razbudite Lenochku about late school attendance and we’ve more than filled our work quota on these.

The Japanese Chuji Tabonikki of 1927 was irritatingly fragmentary but did show the great Daisuke Ito making a striking effort to reproduces traditional painting in his three part account of warrior Denjiro Okochi’s rise and fall. A couple of German silents provided some curiosity value. William Wauer’s 1915 Der Tunnel proved to be an earlier filming of the Bernard Kellermann story with one Frederich Kayssler in the role in which we would later see Jean Gabin, Paul Hartmann and Richard Dix. The narrative content was pared down and uninvolving but, as in the later sound films, the scenes of panic and disaster had a striking, stark quality,  here anticipating Metropolis. It's early Herman Warm design. 1920’s  Romeo & Juliet im Schnee was a new (to me) Lubitsch comedy in the unappealing lumpen style of much of his already familiar work, shifting the familiar plot into the snowy Alps for a happy ending.

Complementing the Fleming material were several programs of early western shorts. I suppose I shouldn’t complain about the sessions of  lackluster silent city actuality movies, unremarkable even when issuing from the hands of people as diverse as Eugene Deslaw, animator Anson Dyer,  Boris Kaufman (later to shoot On the Waterfront) or celebrity Constructivist artist Moholy Nagy. Their admirers were also being subjected to this barrage of  primitive movie cowboys which I find intriguing. Nice to have endorsed the conviction that Broncho Billy Anderson was leading the pre- William S. Hart field. His films like A Mexican’s Gratitude (1909) Under Western Skies (1910) or A Pal’s Oath (1911) had stronger narratives and more connection to the western movie ethos to come.

You had to study the Catalogo when dealing with these or you’d miss the unrecognizable presences of Ben Turpin playing a Mexican for Anderson, J. Warren Kerrigan doing one for Alan Dwan, Tom Mix as a horse breaking express rider for Sellig or director to be George Melford as a variety of authority figures. Lots of noble red men and heroines in drag made up a couple of streams in this selection.

Such material was not to far from Enrique Rosas’ celebrated Mexican serial El Automovil Gris of 1919, though the use of real events separates the film from other contemporary serial movies. Like the French anarchist Bonnot gang, the criminals wearing military uniforms here pioneer the use of a motor vehicle in the robberies and kidnappings they commit. The film follows the exploits of individual gang members and characters, like a victim who joins law enforcement to pursue them, or real life Police Chief Juan Manuel Cabrera appearing and working on the script. Undercharacterised and short on action or dramatic highlights at a reconstructed fuzzy pink four hours, it remains an intriguing artifact when you consider it’s enduring popularity on it’s home turf. Companion piece Gabriel Garcia Moreno’s El Tren Fantasma from 1927 mimicked the form of the American B western (punch outs on moving trains etc.) haltingly.

One-off  Hollywood contributed a routine 1923 China-set Tod Browning called Drifting which only picked up when Wallace Beery and a plausibly teenage Anna Mae Wong were doing the drifting, Edwin Carewe’s by the numbers 1928 Ramona, with Dolores del Rio and Warner Baxter, and, rather better, Al Santell’s lively 1928 Dixie Dugan movie Show Girl, with Alice White at her peak, in its quite presentable mute version.

Pagano in Maciste Alpino

Another program stream dealt with Italian body builder heroes and featured the most famous in Luigi Maggi’s Maciste Alpino of 1916 where Bartolemeo Pagano still in his Cabiria spray tan gets involved in the war with the Austrians. At one point a sentry is about to shoot him and Pagano demands “Are you mad? I’m Maciste!” and presents his Torino Film business card. The film is better crafted and more entertaining than most of what was being done in it’s day and for some time after and leaves one hoping to see more of the burly hero’s series of adventures.

Several of these muscle men moved to Germany and Pordenone aired Luciano Albertini as Nunzio Malasomma’s Mister Radio, an eccentric electronics genius who does feats of daring in the Alps and Luciano Albertini in Max Obal’s Der Unuberwindliche as a Circus Rossi escapologist battling jewel thieves. These remain entertaining curiosities.

 More ambitious and much longer was Manfred Noa’s lavish Helena - Der Unterdang Trojas with Aldini among the shirtless leads that also included Wladimir Glaidarow, Carl de Vogt and Karel Lamac. Albert Basserman unrecognizable in crepe hair beard and Adele Sandrock also showed. The familiar plot line - Aldini/Achilles’ “I do not race for women’s flowers” - is undermined by the dated notion of beauty Edy Darclea’s Helen represented. Jokes about a face that couldn’t launch a row boat from all sides.

Similarly centering the film in Georgette Leblanc’s aging diva undermined any interest generated by the striking decors of the L’Herbier 1924 L’inhumaine, that kitschy cornerstone to French twenties culture, with its high art connections - Fernand Leger no less. Not hard to see where Marienbad came from.

Can’t help feeling that it belongs in the been there seen that basket along with Graham Cutts’ grotesque The Rat with Ivor Novello and Mae Marsh (“Just a couple of kids. They’re in a bad way”) and yet another run on Eisenstein's October in a copy that wasn’t even as good as the one that had our attention wandering fifty years ago. Pordenone is clearly showing that so called montage classics like this and Arsenal have already had more than their share of attention. Have we really run out of  Dita Parlo, Alan Crosland, Frtiz Rasp and Maria Jacobini to the point where these merit another go round?

The celebrated Bert Williams’ output couldn’t avoid evoking indignant Spike Lee and Melvin Van Peebles bristling at the depiction of black America in movies, not helped by the fact that the selection of his material on show just wasn’t funny.

Screenings of WW1 actuality material produced On the Firing Line with the Germans of 1915, where Henry Durghborough and Irving Ries (later to direct King of Chinatown & The Fourposter) can be seen as prototype imbedded journalists filming the war against the Russians. It’s a switch to see the German side of WW1 and the team were skillful, though the production is of specialized interest. More intriguingly however, the showing produced a background of the largely forgotten Peace Movement of the day and it’s delegates forbidden access to the Versailles Treaty discussions.

Pordenone tends to look after it’s own, inviting applause for members of the archive community and screening Tatiana Brandrup’s Cinema: a Public Affair about the ousting of the genial Naum Kleiman from the Russian film museum, with Nikita Mikhalkov in the real life role of villain. Paolo Cecchi Usai got a run on his sixties style abstract feature Picture and  Richard Williams aired his striking new short Prologue. One fun development was that the accompanists took to scoring Williams’ festival trailer in their sessions. The Japanese using wood blocks and flute was particularly arresting.

Gabrio

Attention focused on the restored seven hour 1925 Henri Fescourt Les Miserables surfacing in a beautiful tinted copy and backed for the entire event by Neil Brand with a side drummer. After seven hours I was on a music high but I couldn’t have hummed one of the motifs he had been using if my life depended on it.  Whether or not it’s a great film, this was a great show, with the audience spontaneously leaping to their feet to give Brand a sustained standing ovation. That’s not the first time I’ve seen that happen and I rate Brand as one of the great phenomena of the serious movie scene, even more so than the other gifted musicians that Pordenone attracts. His accompaniment turned the pedestrian Fred Niblo-Fairbanks Mark of Zorro, also on show, into a fun interlude.

Les Miserables itself is pretty impressive though the Harry Baur - Raymond Bernard version or even the Depardieu TV series are really better movies. Gabriel Gabrio is the stand out element,convincing in all the different Valjeans the story presents. The program book writes off Gabrio’s other work, ignoring his confrontation with Charles Vanel in Maurice Tourneur’s splendid Au nom de la loi, his Cesare Borgia and God knows what else among his inaccessible titles. The film’s kids are OK but of the rest only Sandra Milovanoff in her oppressed Fantine rather than her youthful Cosette, registered among all the wardrobe department outfits and crepe hair. Building tension on the barricades is particularly effective (a striking contrast to the growing tedium of similar material in October) and the film’s one departure from the more familiar versions rings, where Cosette/ Milovanoff sees the spitting condemned prisoners on their way to the galleys and asks “Are they still human?” to have Gabrio, now Fauchelevent, answer “Some of them.”

Even with further cut backs (the free computers have joined their magazine and full size movie market as happy memories) Pordenone remains the epi-center of  movie enthusiasm and we wait nervously to see what effect the departure of  respected twenty year director David Robinson will have.

It's kind of like making the Haj. You're not a true believer unless you've been.