Pordenone 2019

PORDENONE 2019.

 

The 2019 Gionate del cinema muto was not one of their finest hours. There were no

discoveries which turned round our idea of early film the way their showing Maurice Elvey’s The Life of David LLoyd George or Victor Fleming’s To the Last Man did. That said, any Pordenone carries the charge of expanding our knowledge of the great era of silent film which is slipping away from us and brings together people who are sufficiently involved with movies to want to do something about it.

Interestingly a few Australians showed up this year. I’d like to think that was because of sites like this one.

I’ve  already covered the William S. Hart films which proved to be the highlight - my first viewing on his The Narrow Trail and The Aryan but plenty more was happening.

Also featured was star Reginald Denny represented by a couple of surviving episodes of his The Leather Pushers serial and three features. These revise our knowledge of a performer now better known  supporting in sound films like the Metro Romeo & Juliet or Cat Balou.

1925’s Oh Doctor is early Denny and a little rough round the edges. His make up is obvious and the characterisation is broader - closer to two reeler comics.

As a child, Denny’s character becomes a determined hypochondriac. If he dies before the age for his inheritance, the money will go elsewhere.

Alerted by Dr. Clarence Gedart that he’s actually healthy, three sharp operators, regular second banana Otis Harlan included, advance Reginald a fraction of the total against his eventual inheritance,  However when nurse eighteen year old Mary Astor, playing in a more relaxed and natural manner than the rest, shows up, Reg. imagines his Faun & Nymph painting come to life with him in pursuit with a stubby tail enthusiastically wagging and determines to change her opinion of him as a wimp. He takes on life threatening activities.

Reg finds a racing driver who has him in a Stutz Torpedo Speedster on the then new L.A. Legion Ascot Speedway track. He rides a motor bike and determines to overcome his fear of heights by painting the ball on the top of a sky scraper flag pole which sways over the street visible way below - very Harold Lloyd.

Mary determines to get his three quarters of a million back out of the aged speculators, who are now desperately trying to sell their interest.

Happy ending of course. Competent handling in the style of the day. This one survives in a passable copy.

Wanting to move away from the slapstick comedies that Keaton and Harold Lloyd were doing and toward the then current run of quasi bawdy stage comedies like “Up In Mabel’s Room”, “Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath” and “Getting Gertie's Garter”, Denny swapped  director Budd Pollard for William A Seiter.

In What Happened to Jones Denny’s about to marry the appealing Marian Nixon but the night before, his pals including her dad Harlan, lure him into a poker game at this flat.

The cops spot this through a window with the lead duo escaping down the fire escape and involved in farcical complications which take them into the neighbouring reducing parlour where the presence of men creates outrage among the female customers.

Going down to their underwear in the steam cabinet leaves the pair stealing women’s clothing to escape, attracting mashers on the streets.

These complications have Nixon’s family urging pompous old flame William Austin to be the groom in the next day’s wedding. They expect a relative now a bishop and when Denny and Harlan arrive in a stolen milk float, our hero finds himself kitted out in the Bishop’s robes. (compare the bishop finale in Guitry’s Je l'ai été 3 fois!) Though the family have bought the deception, the milkman, come to retrieve his vehicle, is not convinced and the cops are suspicious.

The real bishop is locked in a closet and Reginald is conducting the service with Nixon and Austin when she backs off and (cf. The Graduate)  Marian and Reg. bolt down the aisle for the door and pile into the car that has brought the bishop, persuaded to marry them while they drive.

Zazu Pitts scores in the bit part as the maid constantly bribed not to give the guys away. You can almost hear her voice as she mouths her “I saw nothing” title. The film was re-made with Edward Everett Horton in 1937.

Denny’s already circulating Skinner’s Dress Suit  is ordinary but not disagreeable The work horse plot has clerk Skinner / Denny urged by his wife Honey / Laura La Plante, envious of the neighbors, to ask for a rise. It’s the day the company has lost the Jackson Nuts and Bolts account. Reg gets a zoomed up "No" when he finally works up the nerve but isn't game to tell Honey, claiming a ten dollar pay hike - a week! She orders up big for the town’s celebration of the new minister and his wife, bit parting Hedda Hopper. With his new dress suit and Honey's party dress running up the tailor bills, they've soon spent the non existent increase for a year.

 

Denny & Laura la Plante

The pair are a hit in society, teaching the office secretary's new dance to the nobs - without acknowledging the source. Denny's boss joins in. However disaster is looming and the furniture repo man shows up while Honey is entertaining her new society friends. Reg stalls them claiming to be the millionaire's chum but William H. Strauss, the (very) Jewish tailor gets the "soot" and has to be talked into giving it back for the Arab motif soiree that night, with the promise of payment.

This event is looked upon enviously by Nuts and Bolt man Jackson's frumpy wife Lucille Ward, the day before he's going to sign with the firm's competitors. The ambivalence to Society (cf. Honor Among Lovers) is there with the rich couple spotting disconsolate Denny ("I bet he's a big wig in Society. Look how bored he is.") and then telling him "Young man you're in a position to do me a big favor" and they all get together prompting a partnership offer by the old boss, who finds the tailor sleeping at the Skinner door to rush off when the suit is handed to him ("That's the kind of service I demand.")

Denny

It’s more suburban sitcom in detailed studio interiors - the Skinner home with its oval frame Laughing Cavalier and monster new radio - intriguingly foreshadowing the adventures of Blondie & Dagwood in Denny's morning dash for the (giant steam loco drawn) train, that the old idlers bet on, and having sound film’s Dagwood, Arthur Lake as the office boy.

Agreeable enough, with our hero's plight never catching up with him and the lively dance interludes. The leads are pleasant though neither sparkle in the best Clara Bow - Bessie Love manner. Denny is more an Eddie Bracken or Chevy Chase than a silent movie clown. Handling is very ordinary, with the scenes filmed straight on.

A welcome one-off was Dongshan Shi’s still silent in 1932 Fen dou / Struggling /Striving /The Romance of Tiger & Sparrow, a Shanghai Lianhua Film Company morality that has re-surfaced in a near impeccable copy.

The content relates to the K.M.T’s New Life movement with it’s two worker leads first seen in their overalls servicing the imposing machines in the spotless factory. They share a boarding house room and both fall for fetching sixteen year old Chen Yan Yan getting rough treatment from a guardian. The guys protect her, fall in love and  come to blows over her, landing in jail. However, when the war with Japan breaks out, Zhen Junli, the chosen admirer, shames his old  friend Congmei Yaun into joining him in enlisting and Yuan is killed in a fixed bayonet battle.

Yan Yan joins the crowds at the station welcoming  troops returning in glory but her beloved is not among them. Just as despair overtakes her, there standing in the prow of an approaching small boat he appears a returning war hero - stirring end.

Not over sophisticated, this is one of the later and better Shanghai films with good production values and that Borzage rip-off double flight of stairs for the camera to crane up again. Marxist director Donshan tries to dramatise class structure with devices like the three levels of the rooming house.

                       

I’ve always enjoyed Cecil B. de Mille’s work, particularly films from the mid thirties on and there’s a buzz in finally getting to see the 1916 Joan the Woman possibly his first film relatable to the later productions. It is an extraordinary advance on its director’s work of only a couple of years before and already has many of the qualities (and flaws) we recognise alternating impressive and risible.

Like the Sign of the Cross re-issue, we kick off with a modern (WW1) story where British Officer Wallace Reid discovers a Joan of Arc relic in the excavation of his front line dug out. This gets us into the historic back story with matronly Opera Diva Geraldine Farrar introduced against a cruciform Fleur de lys. There she is, playing with kittens and tending the sheep. The English are coming and, as the villagers flee, she reproaches a French deserter “No sword once drawn for France - shall be thrown down!”

Joan the Woman - Farrar

Wally, in one of those tin hats that stayed in service till the Katzman serials, leads the Burgundians and he and Farrar soon have a thing going, keeping on saving one another from their own forces.

We get obligatory scenes like Joan recognising King Charles the seventh / Raymond Hatton or Bishop Theo Roberts with a black robe monk spy - an interesting twist when he turns on his master who wants Joan burned rather than to save her soul. Farrar gets into (not very) male gear for for the battle for the tower - the film’s highlight, impressively staged with hoards of extras - one imposing charge and some convincing men at arms hacking away at one another.

The film takes off at this point.

Second half concentrates on Joan’s capture by Wally who gets a title for his perfidy. He tries to ransom her but Roberts just keeps on producing more gold from his trunk to bid against him. There’s the scene of sending Reid’s most debauched ruffian to her cell, while the heavies watch through the ceiling, anticipating Spartacus. King Ray can’t get funds out of his sponsor and settles for an orgy where they serve stuffed swan.

It’s Reid who holds the cross in front of Geraldine/Joan as they set fire to the bundles of kindling in front of her, before he goes to his WW1 doom blowing up an enemy trench on a suicide mission.

The film still asserts itself today - mainly through action spectacle. Performance is not bad for 1916 and the handling is stolid but functional.

Walter Forde’s English films have always been marginal in any study of the movies but a couple of titles have recently reappeared, over-shadowing Forde’s stodgy previously known   thirties dramas like Rome Express and Brown on Resolution / Forever England / Born for Glory. A dodgy copy of Forde’s celebrated 1930 The Ghost Train, long thought lost, has surfaced (it’s on You Tube) and it proves to be the best of a slew of versions including a silent that Michael Curtiz may have had a hand in and Forde’s own Arthur Askey remake. The 1930 film fields Jack Hulbert totally in his element, Cicely Courtnedge, who gets a nice piece getting drunk on Jack’s hip flask, and Ann Todd.

Pordenone came up with the 1928 feature Wait and See where Forde directs and stars. This late British silent proved entertaining even if it lacks any great style.

Forde figures as a klutz youth without any obvious comic persona. His assembly line work

Forde

mates ridicule his day dreaming and one of them produces a fake solicitor’s letter saying he’s inherited a half million. Delighted Walter quits his job, offering to buy the factory as a souvenir, and sets out for the lawyer’s office in a building where the sign reads “No solicitors. We only have honest people.”

Meanwhile factory manager Sam Livesey is facing a crisis with the board threatening to withdraw their capital if he can’t get a needed injection of cash and the story of Walter’s legacy has circulated in figures inflating at each telling. It reaches the press who pursue him to his lodgings. Sidekick Frank Stanmore uses the samples hopeful suppliers have sent to kit out our hero to show up at the Livesey home, putting out of joint the nose of Charles Dormer, long hair rival for boss’ fetching daughter Pauline Johnson.

There’s a bit missing but we find Walter getting held up on his way to her wedding in a race with Dormer in open cars, buses, taxis, bikes and a plane, each calamity forcing Walter back to the cut price clothing store for another dodgy outfit.

The film is quite engaging, an agreeably jaunty rendering of working class reality and the handling is competent. Its plot echoes Skinner’s Dress Suit, Brewster’s Millions and Car of Dreams among others and is re-cycled for the 1933 Zoltan Korda If I Were Rich / Cash.

There’s a sudden rush of director Edmund Goulding around now - more on this later. Pordenone aired his 1925 Metro Sally Irene & Mary, an early collaboration with  Joan Crawford anticipating their work together on Grand Hotel. Joan said she’d still be dancing on tables if Eddie Goulding hadn’t shown up.

Here she’s a show girl sharing the lead with glamorous blonde Constance Bennet (“a flame skilled in the ways and wants of men”) and spunky young Sally O’Neil who has pushy plumber Billly Haines to fall back on. It’s an early example of the plot that rolls on through 42nd Street, the Gold Diggers movies and Ziegfield Girl and is still with us in Bombshell with the fate of the older glamor girls as a warning to a new comer.

Sally Irene & Mary - Bennet, O'Neil, Goulding & Crawford.

High point is the dressing room scene with the chorus celebrating Crawford’s marrying rich only to have the stage manager blurt out “She’s dead!” and the show going on as the girls do a listless presentation spooked by the double exposure of Joan‘s Charleston.

There’s little in the way of show business detail, no rehearsal, lots of half naked cuties making up at the mirrors and a bit of cracking wise “You practicing for jiu jitsu?” “Is that the Japanese word for it?”

Rather than a strong narrative it’s a film already showcasing MGM glamor, particularly the Erté decor and costumes. It develops a grip on attention through craft skill and setting up an anticipation of something racy that never actually arrives. This one has minimal connection to the thirties Fox film distantly derived from the play of the same name.

Pordenone also aired 1926's Beverly of Graustark another early Metro exercise in lush artificiality, this time it's Marion Davies in Ruritania delivered briskly on a large budget - closer to a Metro Forbidden Paradise than Anthony Hope. There was also a static 1914 version of this with Linda Arvidson, D.W. Griffith’s wife.

Davies is totally in her element  emerging as a a comedy star. She is winning and the others are just there to show case her. Normally sedate director Sidney Franklin is surprisingly at ease here giving proceedings just the right amount of ridicule and high gloss.

In the USA, Davies’ cousin Creighton Hale (weakest element) learns that he has become heir to to the throne of Graustark. Marion joins him on the trip to his new kingdom but he is injured, meaning he may miss the inauguration banquet enabling mean, scenery chewing General Roy d’Arcy (who else) to claim the throne.

Beverly of Graustark : D'Arcy's arm round Davies.

 

 

 

 

Her hair cut short, Marion can pass for the new ruler that no one has ever seen. Her escort prove to be the General’s men but dashing, uniformed goat herd Antonio Moreno is on hand to rescue her and make sure she gets to the crucial banquet where she is called upon to drain enormous horn flasks of beer, ho ho!

The cousin rides in at the appropriate moment to sort things out.  We get the usual cross dressing gags. Beverly is actually a boy. The goat herd is actually a prince. This is a competent, modest effort where Metro’s already evident Cedric Gibbons fantasy land is the attraction.

Davies wanted to do “Twelth Night” but that didn’t happen.

1916’s The  Moment Before had a special interest being the work of Italian born Robert G. Vignola who Pordenone regard as a native son and partly being set (they try to convince us) in Australia, “the land of oblivion.” I can see where they are coming from there.

This far fetched melo opens with the aged Duchess of Maldon (made up Pauline Frederick) collapsing in the family estate church after doing her Good Works there. A gypsy’s curse told her that she would die on the sound of the steeple bell. She treats bishop Henry Hallam to a long flash back of her past life as a (tempestuous, chain smoking) beauty who had been won by gypsy Jack W. Johnson in a fight with a rival. She captivates Thomas Holding, son of Duke Frank Losee, thus outraging his older brother heir to title.

Frederick’s gypsy lover kills the heir and has Holding blamed. The gypsy couple flee to Australia where Johnson keeps Frederick in outback servitude until fugitive Holding locates them and gives up his successful mine to carry her away

Evil Johnson sees this as a way to dispose of Holding the way he did his brother and they pace out a duel with revolvers which is ended by Frederick snatching up one fallen on the ground and offing the dastard with it. She and Holding, exonerated of his bother’s murder, then return to England to reclaim his title and live exemplary lives on the manor.

The performances are uninteresting and the film craft only just gets by for the day, never redeeming the simple minded sub “Beau Geste” plot.

Also uninvolving was once celebrated Alberto Carlo Lolli’s 1918 Italian Frock Coat melo La morte che assolve, the only surviving work of multi skilled film maker Elettra Raggio who was a star of the day in films and in her stage work with Ermete Novelli.

 

Elettra Raggio

Tubercular Raggio’s child is abandoned by her loan shark father Novelli, then under the protection of Count Ettore Piergiovanni she's placed with an American foster mother to grow up to be Raggio back again. The count has taken in Novelli as game keeper, giving him a chance to stride about in knee pants carrying  a shot gun

When the benevolent Count comes on for Raggio Mark II, dead beat dad Novelli has to step in (“Io sono tuo padre”), getting shot by the now villainous (!) Count.

Pordenone is however committed to raking over Italian cinema and has also come up with busy Mario Bonnard whose eighty five movie career never filled me with admiration. 

Pordenone fielded his appearance in a tinted 1909 Othello and his 1920  Il Fauno di marmo / The Marble Faun. The then celebrated Hawthorne novel original was once in the best “Da Vinci Code” manner responsible for tourist interest in it’s Roman (and Vitebo) locations - the Catacombs of St. Domitilla, the Colosseum and St. Peters’ basilica - used to background the story where star Elena Sangro, one of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s muses and an established costume melodrama star, is involved in the plot which costs her anti-government husband Duke Giorgio Bazzini his life. Count Carlo Gualandri urges “You must help me save the state” and uses the knife she gave him in the killing.

Years later Sangro has left her convent and married and Gualandri become a monk still desires her. Sangro persuades her lover to kill him.

This undistinguished melodrama comes early in Bonnard’s directing career. It’s already old fashioned for 1920.  The surviving copy is mainly notable for the reproduction of Stencil color.

However the big picture was Bonnard’s assured 1928 Seymor Nebenzal production Das Letze souper / Theatre / The Last Performance, an elaborate and not uninteresting theater melodrama turning into a murder mystery, a high point in the career of director Bonnard where the skills of the final period of silent film making push along a pedestrian script. 

George

Heinrich George, the mechanic from Metropolis, goes full bore as Impresario Stroganoff (!) heading up an opera company where he hires dancer Marcella Albani (Volkoff’s Geheimnisse des Orients) for his prestigious new production. She’s been looking after baritone Jean Bradin (Dupont’s Moulin Rouge & Hitchcock’s Champagne) who doesn’t get all that much to do here.

Tensions grow during rehearsal till we get the actual performance - set piece with on stage action, musicians and George conducting, all montaged from elaborate filming to the score which we of course can’t hear.

After a shooting, police inspector Otto Kronburger extracts confessions from Bradin and Albani which he doesn’t buy because he can count a full load of bullets in their unfired pistol. Chorus girl, bit parting Slovak star-to-be Ita Rini, finds the murder weapon and the Inspector has a tape run out along the path of the shot till it comes to the guilty party - nice piece of staging.

More under clad chorus girls and ambitious production values are well served by expert technicians. Unfortunately George gives the only strong performance.

Ita Rina’s career peaked at this point with a re-make of Scherben, Machaty’s Erotikon  and films by Manfred Noa and Richard Oswald. Pordenone gave us a chance to see her as the heroine of Wladimir Gajdarov’s 1930’s Estonian  Kire Lained  / Wellen der Leidenschaft / Waves of Passion the only film to be directed by actor Gajdarov (Jules Verne in the 1924 Mozjoukine Michael Strogoff)

He features as as an undercover cop battling smugglers in a simple minded action adventure.

Our hero is on a passenger boat to Estonia, claiming to be a journalist collecting

Gajdarov

background for a book about smuggling liquor across the Baltic into alcohol free Finland. However he gets into a fight with fellow passenger Ernst Falkenberg. This convinces boss smuggler Fritz Greiner (in the pre-Hitchcock Number 17) that Wladimir should be taken into their operation. The newcomer meets inn keeper (?) Raimondo Von Riel and becomes romantically involved with his blond daughter Ita Rina - though dark haired Jutta Jol, who he dances with in the father’s bar, shows more life.

There’s a shoot out with the border control over the liquor containers tins and an informer tries to frustrate forces of law and order by steering their ship into neutral waters.

Made in 1930, this one looks like a talkie that has lost its track. The handling is competent but the content is too formulaic to be involving. Gajdarov makes an imposing, good looking lead.

They also managed to show Juku the Dog in Kutsu-juku seiklusi the country’s first cartoon film - basic but an agreeable novelty.

One of Pordenone’s core functions is to give substance to names we’ve always seen in film history documentation without ever getting to catch their work. This year they hit the less than appealing Mistinguett and the team of Suzanne Grandais and writer-director-star Léonce Perret working in France in the teens.

That duo intrigued with oddities like 1912’s Le Christhanthème Rouge (suitor Perret uses his blood to stain the flowers the color love object Grandais demands) or Le Homard /A Lucky Lobster from 1913 where Léonce fakes a trip as trawler man to get her the delicacy.

Quite impressive was their three quarter hour 1912 Le mystère des roches de Kador / In the Grip of the Vampire, a suspense melodrama shown in a beautiful tinted copy,

Evil guardian Perret takes a dim view of Captain Max Dhartigny sending Susanne love letters. If they get together that will deprive Perret of her inheritance which he needs in order to to placate an indignant associate ready to prosecute and expose Leonce’s scurrilous dealings. He plots to drown her and her lover in a sea shore cave but the officer manages to save them.

Most interesting element has Head of the Sureté Louis Leubas drag in a therapist who stages a filmed re-enactment on the original stretch of Brittany shore line using Dhartigny and a stand-in for Susanne. She is shown this - the frame within the frame people note in  the director’s output - a remarkably steady image on the black half screen.

Shocked into recovery, she confronts Léonce at a masked ball (elaborate costumes but shot from a single angle where a curtain frames the participants. Perret denies all but the Sureté uses his incriminating note and he cracks and confesses. 

Filmed mainly in in full figure shots cutting at the ankle, not exactly great drama but advanced as frock coat melo goes and having Grandais and Perret on form. Plausible setting and costumes add to a smooth finish. This one did intrigue.

They also rounded out last year’s season of the John M. Stahl silents which had been thought lost, with Florence Reed in The Woman Under the Oath and a couple of reels of The Wanters with Marie Prevost. Time for a Stahl re-assesment. I’ll have a stab at that later. 

I passed on the live music accompanied runs of The Kid, Fragment of an Empire and (more reluctantly) Neil Brand doing The Lodger.

Linder

This quite lengthy coverage ends up being a highlights reel. It doesn’t do justice to the collections of oddities jammed in around the features - Fred Guiol’s 1927 Duck Soup a pre teaming of Laurel and Hardy along with Cocl Als Hauser, a 1913 Austrian version of the same sketch which was written by Stan Laurel’s uncle, Weimar short films, Scandinavian advertising filmlets, movies about film making (and handling) complete with Adrien Brunel’s feeble Cut It Out : a Day in the Life of a Film Censor and another look at the amiable Coleen Moore Ella Cinders and Max Linder in Raymond Bernard’s 1919 Le Petite Café filmed again a decade later in Hollywood with Maurice Chevalier.

Surprise connections appear in this seemingly random selection. Costuming acquires unexpected importance, with Susanne Grandais’ vertical striped outfit or Chen Yan Yan’s one piece spotted dress directing attention to their wearers. Silk hats take on significance with Max Linder demonstrating that he can stand on a pillar of them or those of the factory board members lined up in  front of them on the table, making one of the best gags in Wait and See. Without such styling, Joseph A Golden’s rediscovered 1919 U.S. serial The Great Gamble came over as drab at the length it was shown, even with leading man Charles Huchison’s neck-risking stunts. You can't win 'em all.

The Great Gamble - you can't win'em all.

Throw in the event's remarkably well produced Catologo. Even after a lifetime of hard scrabble movie going, Pordenone still has the ability to surprise and to make me re-assess my notion of  cinema. I come away thinking I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that - even if they did cancel the last program (print still in Moscow) without a replacement, just when I was working up a movie high too.