Forget about Donald Trump’s re-election and the Covid plague. 2020 is important as the year the Pordenone gionate del cinema muto reached the world's lounge rooms. Travel restrictions mean that management put the silent movie week on line ... and the lot for the price of one seat at the local multiplex. I certainly missed the forty foot screen and the company of a large slice of the world’s remaining movie enthusiasts - not to mention Twisters Pizza and all the gelaterias. However the video format offered unforseen advantages - being able to back up sections that called for closer examination and the chance to do instant research with the reference material spread around the front room computer as it ran. Surprisingly in the long run this was as exhausting as trooping off to the other side of the planet to watch the films.
As an overview, the technical end was accomplished with the My Movies platform doing justice to the generally excellent restorations on show. Director Jay Weissberg became assured as he got used to fronting the sessions with a pitch for the “Gothic and Romantic porticos of Pordenone" shaped by sponsor the Friuli Venezia Giulia area tourist office.
The films arrived on schedule as advertised and the original scores were once again class acts - though I did turn one off because it clashed with the ambiance the film itself was able to generate. Some jumpy Laurel and Hardy (separately) shorts did break the run but what the heck - the organisers know their audience and it was interesting to hear from Fay Wray’s daughter commenting her mother’s teenage appearance in a Stan Laurel vehicle.
theater of theirs. The subject matter was random with an emphasis on travel - roving cameramen brought back New York 1911, Chinatown scenes, a black driver chauffeuring a rich family in one of the early motor cars that had to compete with horse traffic, Cairo and the Pyramids, Belgians frolicking in the surf in neck to knee bathers, Prague, Windsor Castle, the fleet at sea with the clouded sky added in double exposure, along with Pathé’s animated Un Voyage abracadabrant. A couple of these had been hand coloured and to be picky the London Southampton train journey shaded red the lower gantry warning signal that should have been yellow from the front and white behind. |
| Penrod and Sam Gertrude Messinger & Ben Alexander |
First past the post feature Penrod and Sam of 1923 was directed by long toiling William Beaudine who managed to jam a few rewarding items into his sixty years of largely hack Hollywood work (1926’s The Canadian, the religious film Again Pioneers or the Roddy McDowall Kidnapped). Here he’s heading up one of the Kids Films of the day. Sidney and Chester Frankin were doing fairy tale movies with all child casts and the Our Gangs were on the horizon.
Booth “Magnificent Ambersons” Tarkington’s Penrod stories centered on pre-teener Penrod Schofield /Ben Alexander who forms a juvenile gang based in a shack on his dad Rockliffe Fellowes’ empty lot. He is determined to exclude Buddy Messinger the son of rich William V. Mong, which seems a bit mean until the kid reveals himself, fabricating a story of rough handling by the gang. Deacon Dad Mong buys the land and turns it over to his son and Mong himself proves to be a bad lot.
There’s some soso slapstick with black kids Joe McGray & Eugene Jackson but the film gains traction in the sub plot with Cameo the Dog. The cast is quite substantial offering a young Mary (Phantom of the Opera) Philbin and Gladys (Hunchback of Notre Dame) Brockwell making up the Schofield family and Penrod himself played by Alexander who was the boy snapped on the riser with Griffith filming Intolerance in the much reproduced photo and continued as a featured player stalwart, including being one of the platoon in All Quiet on the Western Front and a lead in a Joseph H. Lewis PRC cheapy, until he entered the collective memory as Sergeant Joe Friday’s side kick in the pioneer TV Dragnet series. He would have been a great interview subject.
The film’s major asset is it’s small American town atmosphere which Beaudine does capture nicely. The story was re-made in 1931 with Beaudine directing Leon Janney and again in 1937 with Billy Mauch.
When I saw Zhu Shilin Zhu & Mingyou Luo’s 1935 Guo feng / Civil Wind/ National Style/ National Customs / Customs of a Nation at Pordenone 1997, it was about ten minutes shorter than the current showing, possibly due to a different projection rate but also, from memory, because it had less of the scenes of encroaching decadence. It was also free of the distributor’s disfiguring white watermark, not something to be expected at Pordenone. Spanish enthusiasts took their TV stations to court to get rid of those and Sidney Pollack flew in to support them. I drape a towel over the corner of the picture to eliminate SBS’ distracting World Movies logo.
Guo feng is one of the last pieces piece of silent Shanghai Mandarin film and, as the original titles comment, the legendary Ruan Lingu’s last film before her abrupt suicide age 25, after being hounded by gossip magazines.
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| Guo Feng : Ruan Lingu & Zhen Junli. |
We still kick off with a montage of rural scenics leading to the shot of the school bell ringing for the graduation where sisters Lingu and Li Li Li (so good they named her thrice) are among the class getting their diplomas. (dissolve between Lingyu's coming off the top of the stack and Lili’s among the last few) Lingyu and her cousin, sometime director Zheng Junli (also in last year’s Fen dou /Striving), share an idyllic moment on the river bank but younger sister Lili wants him, smashing her mug with annoyance that she can’t have Zheng, so Lingyu sacrifices her love and (dissolve from wedding pictures) goes off to Shanghai to study at Teacher’s College. This again inspires Lili’s jealousy, with her demanding her new husband finance her own degree.
Once there (river steamer scenics) Lili is more interested in the social life and the brilliantined fellow student in a suit, son of rotund Liu Jiqui, the merchant from her home village, while Lingyu huddles over the books, chiding her sister about her use of make up and patiently gathering up and sharpening the pencil that Lili throws away in their shared student study with it’s big thermos of tea. Ticked off, Lili spreads among the gossipy students (pan round close-ups) the story that Lingyu has asked Lili’s new squeeze to marry her. A cartoon representation is put up on a bulletin board.
The students form a gauntlet to direct Lingyu to this and she swoons - cue wobbly effects montage that does include the striking spinning image (shown with watermark) - and is put into the hospital.Back in the village, the river steamer brings back Lili and the boy friend in their western gear and they cause a sensation among the drably dressed village girls they will be teaching, who note that his hair is more pampered than any of theirs. The girls’ head teacher mum (Florence) Lim Cho-cho reprimands them and takes her first vacation ever to visit her ill daughter ... and that’s the last we see of Lingyu until the finish, in the manner of later Chinese absentee movie stars.
Things get out of hand, with the girls copying Lili’s make up and clothing and neglecting their studies for chatter and games of cats cradle, while Liu Jiqui opens a new western Goods Emporium in the village where he makes 100% profit with his Paris Cafe and pinches the cheek of plump sales girls, till his fat wife shows up fresh from the new hair dresser. Lili demands a divorce.
Mum comes back and is fired for objecting to finding the new teachers reading glamour magazines while the students slack.
She addresses KMT meetings on the value of traditional values represented by the New Life movement, chastening and reforming, implausibly quickly, the delinquent teacher pair, who revert to the plain village style of dress. We are getting perilously close to the sending city sophisticates off to learn from the peasants which was to come. Lingyu returns to claim her now free true love but delays marriage to fulfill her teaching obligation and all is well.
Lingyu suffers plausibly in sustained close up, giving a restrained an appealing performance. A plain girl in repose, when she moves she immediately becomes the center of attention and Lili gets to do flighty, even scorning the amah’s lovingly prepared steamed buns. Her character seems a lot more fun than role model Lingyu.
Equating the two girls with the new and old China is simple minded but the contrast between the village and Westernised Shanghai registers, even with the limited art department budget.
The film making technique is adequate, offering scenes played mainly in small sparsely decorated sets with the odd badly matched action edit though they do run to a few tracking shots and pointy wipes. The PreWW2 Shanghai films remain the most interesting Chinese language films until the Shaw Brother surface in sixties Hong Kong.
Before Birth of a Nation, Denmark was considered a world leader in film making and director Holger-Madsen’s 1913 Ballettens Datter was one of the films that reflected that status.
Nordisk Film clearly thought of themselves as part of the high art scene and recruited hardly glamorous Rita Sacchetto, a ballet star contemporary of Ana Pavlova, Isadore Duncan and Loie Fuller. Her Pierette and the Butterfly routine is included as a single wide shot against a black background.
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| Balletans Datter :Aggerholm & Sacchetto. |
Rita however keeps in touch visiting the ballet school where students perform and children are in training. A newspaper clipping speaks of her audience missing her. She tries on her old costumes to Aggerholm’s disapproval. When his star quits on theater manager Torben Meyer, he calls her to fill in and she agrees, demanding that no one will ever know. She leaves, telling Aggerholm “I’m going to see my sick aunt.” At a loose end that night he goes to the theater and - shock horror - sees his wife on stage and spies as Meyer brings her back in his car.
It’s interesting to see Torbin Meyer in a substantial part. We can assume he met Michael Curtiz while they worked together on Atlantis at this period, leading to his forty years of bit parts in Curtiz’ Hollywood movies.
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| My favorite Hayakawa fan photo. |
Jack (The Covered Wagon) Cunningham’s script tells us that in China Prince Sessue is enamored of Gloria Payton, the daughter of a gardener - despite the fact that the actress is obviously of sound Aryan stock with her eyelids pulled back. His uncle packs him off to America to study and he leaves, promising her that they will be together soon.
Having abandoned traditional dress for a snappy straw skimmer hat and western suit and mastered the game of billiards, our hero and his new western friends visit the San Francisco Chinese markets “Where it is said women are sacrificed under our noses” recognisable from innumerable Hollywood movies (In Old San Francisco, I Cover Chinatown, The Hatchet Man, Walk Like a Dragon) Of course a slave auction is in progress with his beloved going at five thousand dollars. Not being able to put his hands on that kind of money, our distraught hero sets up a three year lay away plan. (“Farewell, I will try not to lose hope”) and starts washing dishes, which is clearly not a goer with breakages and all. However he hits it big on the Chinese lottery of which there’s a brief, intriguing glimpse.
Meanwhile Miss Payton has come to the attention of effectively menacing Tôgô Yamamoto, with the auctioneer pleading to Sessue “I can’t give you the girl. It would be my death”, so Sessue has to take on impossible odds to fight off the heavies and free his bride to be.
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| Where Lights Are Low: Yamamoto & Hayakawa |
This is presented efficiently without any hint of style or humor by Colin Campbell who made 1914‘s In the Days of the Thundering Herd. It holds attention better than it should, though Hayakawa’s presence outclasses the other elements. There was a good, lime tinted copy on show.
Italy has the Host Nation Advantage in this event. Though I do have a print of Gallone’s Gli ultimi giorni di pompeii gathering dust in the back room, my knowledge of Italian silent cinema (Didn’t anybody make silent films in Spain?) derives from Pordenone screenings and the pickings have been thin.
This year it turns out that Carlo Campogalliani, who would direct Steeve Reeves’ 1959 I terrore dei barbari / Goliarth and the Barbarians was, in the silent period, a Douglas Fairbanks imitator. Pordenone had on offer his version of When the Clouds Roll By, the 1921 comic La tempesta in un cranio / Kill or Cure where once again a hypochondriac discovers his fears subject of an elaborate fraud.
 Tempesta in cranio : Campogallioni & Quaranta with spy cam. |
A montage of historic scenes shows Carlo’s ancestors mixing in beheadings and similar merry japes. Present day Carlo is told that he needs to toughen up in gym though he fails to lift the smallest dumbbell. However he finds himself racing across the countryside, climbing over roof tops and breaking jail - having cliff hanger adventures to rescue Letizia Quaranta, Campogalliani’s real life wife.
One exploit calls for him to move the giant millstone before the water wheel brings down the press on the distressed damsel and for a finale he has to tie a rat to a burning candle so that it will drag it under the rope that only goes half way down the tower from which our hero is making his escape.
His uncle eventually explains that all the villains he has been outwitting are friends recruited to strengthen our hero’s character. Mustached Campolgalliani turning and winking to the camera is finally an endearing lead but the film is more of a curiosity than a find.
A tinted copy did offer one four way split screen and a key hole matte before that began to appear in Hollywood films.
Dimitris Gaziadis’ 1930 Greek Oi apahides ton Athinon / Apaches of Athens is actually kind of a sound film, the disks of Nikos Hatziapostolou’s source operetta, which accompanied the piece on it’s first release, not having survived the years, though the current presentation was accompanied by scratchy recordings incorporating the sound of the needle being dropped on the record, matching an on-screen gramophone.
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| Oi apahides ton Athinon-Sagianou-Katseli & Epitropakis |
The film contrasts the re-purposed summer palace, represented as a millionaire’s villa, with Athens’ run down Plaka quarter. There Petros Epitropakis, the son of a once noble family, lives in destitution with a couple of comic friends (Petros Kyriakos & the film's writer Ioannis Prineas) and seamstress Mery Sagianou-Katseli to share his poverty.
He pulls up the horse which has bolted with Stella Hristoforidou, the daughter of new moneyed Georgios Hristoforidis, and the two are attracted. However the rich man’s secretary desires Hristoforidou. His proposal is met by derision from her father, so he concocts a revenge plot where he will present vagrant Epitropakis as a visiting prince, humiliating his employer by the deception. In top hat and cloak Epitropakis, displaying his old familiarity with privilege, wows the nouveaux riches at the millionaire’s reception, with his two comic side kicks accepted as his friends for further hilarity.
The lovers are sorted out in the traditional operetta manner with just a hint of the sad fate of Hristoforidou losing out on Epitropakis as he re-unites with his penniless true love after a burst of good fortune.
The satire is toothless and the leads lack star glamour. Film making is basic and the film’s best element is it’s glimpses of the Athenian street-scapes with the Parthenon on the horizon. This one and Orestis Laskos’ equally lumpen 1931 Dafnis kai Hloi / Daphnis & Chloe make up my entire knowledge of pre WW2 Greek cinema, so I can’t complain. A 1950 remake was done by Ilias Paraskevas.
Through the nature of distribution and his vigorous self promotion, which rivaled Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. De Mille was the first director I gave any close scrutiny. I managed to become very familiar with his best period running from Sign of the Cross to Reap the Wild Wind and enjoyed that. He managed to give his films the status of events. Later the titles he'd produced dominated the Kodak libraries in my first silent film project and I caught James Card’s lecture on De Milles’s early experimental material. While there were some soft patches (include the religious spectacles and his Metro stint - it’s not hard to see why Sidney Lumet detested DeMille) there was always more to discover.
Now, after pretty much a lifetime I'm getting to see the early features which had evaded me though they circulate in the U.S. Last year Joan the Woman and this Year it's 1917's Romance of the Redwoods, another chance to watch ideas in his later work getting a first run though.
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| Union Pacific : McCrea, Stanwyck and Preston |
Mary Pickford battles frontier house keeping the way Helen Burgess does in The Plainsman. We get mob rule along the lines of This Day & Age. The film’s roistering Strawberry Flats Saloon resembles the one where Max Davidson deals cards in the director's excellent 1938 Union Pacific and the climax in their cabin, where Pickford struggles to avert the violence, which will wipe off her man, anticipates Barbara Stanwyck in her stores carriage stalling Robert Preston’s henchmen ready to take down Joel McCrea in that film. That's characteristic of De Mille settings switching from welcoming to hostile - the prison in The Buccaneer or the flooded hold
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| Redwoods : Ogle,Marshall,Pickford,Dexter, Long. |
in Reap the Wild Wind. Throw in The director’s taste for violence to women - Angela Lansbury’s death in Samson and Delilah, Mike Mazurki about to lash Paulette Goddard's naked back in Unconquered - here foreshadowed by Elliot Dexter discouraging the saloon floozie by brushing his lighted cigarette across her hand.
I’d always thought of Mary Pickford as a tall Shirley Temple and it’s agreeable to see her carry off an adult role.
Like Randolph Scott in Lang's Western Union, co star Elliot Dexter is first seen fleeing the posse - shot of him putting his ear to the ground cut to close up of hooves trampling dust. Finding Winter Hall an arrow-pierced victim of an attack by circling Indians (the film’s one piece of action spectacle), he indulges in a bit of identity theft. Turns out that the dead man was the uncle into whose care her dying mother entrusted Mary.
When she shows up with a load of hat boxes, the deception becomes obvious. She has to be persuaded that Elliot didn’t off the uncle by the bundle of blood stained letters where he shows the impact of “arrow not bullet”. Her tiny four shot won’t work on him so he offers her his side iron (“try this. It’s loaded”). He takes her to town where he invites her to denounce him in the roistering saloon but no one gives a damn. The Chinese guy and the giant women eye her potential and Ray Hacket in buckskins drags her into the dance, from which she has to be rescued. This makes up the best section of the film.
After a night in the stable, (Dexter offered her the bed room but she backed off to be scared by the (studio inset) wolf howl and settle under a buffalo hide on the hay) Mary is lured back inside by the smell of breakfast bacon and biscuits cooked in the tripod pan. She starts her civlising by having him wash his hands and say grace. Charles Ogle (Edison's Frankenstein monster and Covered Wagon again) comes courting bringing flowers, to Dexter’s distrust. While cleaning up the place Mary finds his kerchief with eye holes face mask.
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| Mary Pickford is Covid safe. |
In town, “a traveling auction” wagon gives Ogle that chance to buy her presents including the baby size doll, while Elliot of is off liberating the proceeds of the gold fields with the aid of a sinister Mexican side kick. The towns people decide they need a Vigilance Committee.
Mary reproaches Elliot and he agrees to go straight. Surviving is a matter of Mary taking in washing to do in the tubs among the red woods. The floozy is scornful. “Ask the wash lady in your cabin how much I owe her.”
We get a Mark Twain-Peter B. Kline ending where the Vigilantes invade Dexter’s hut (that De Mille inversion of setting) all set to string Elliot up but Mary brings in the doll’s clothes appealing to their gentler natures - until they find the deception.
The celebrity support get varied results. Tully Marshall and Walter Long are just set decoration but Hacket and Ogle have their best outings.
Alvin Wyckoff is not a cameraman who's scared of double shadows though he acquits himself admirably, as does designer Wilfrid Buckland with solid looking constructions and atmospheric properties - the pepper pot pistol, the tripod pan, the four holes bandana.
Their tinted copy was much better than the one on my De Mille shelf.
Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Abwege/ Crisis/ Desire/ The Devious Path from 1928 was easily the most sophisticated film on show. An old favorite (I’ve seen it at Pordenone before) it is the middle of Pabst’s three Brigitte Helm movies. She gets better as they go.
It begins with artist Jack Trevor sketching Brigitte. His studio will be revealed to be full of drawings of her (how often will we see that in later productions?) indicating his infatuation.
Plot proves to be about stoic, hard working husband Gustav Diessl in heavy make-up neglecting glamorous Brigitte who is falling in with the wrong crowd. Gustav kisses the proffered hand of demi-mondaine friend Herther Von Walther with clear distaste and tells his wife she shouldn’t spend time in her company.
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| Abwege - Trevor, Helm & Von Walther |
Exasperated beyond limit, Brigitte agrees to leave town with admirer Trevor, but Gustav warns Jack off after the fade out, leaving her waiting for the artist, abandoned at the station with her suitcase.
Back at the smart, servant cared for flat, Gustav explains that even on this night he has to go to his club and leaves her now desperate, so she takes up the invitation to the decadent cabaret taking respectable councilor Fritz Odemar, with her in what is the film’s long set piece. The tangoing duo provide entertainment among the balloons and Hertha in her backless (inset close up to go with the middle aged business man’s stare) black dress is in her element, encouraging suitors to retrieve morsels of food that fall into her rear cleavage. Brigitte is aggravated by the streamers thrown from boxer Nico Turoff’s table and Ilse Bachmann, trying to do the Helm range of gestures without the same effectiveness, as the wife of the suicide banker, gets cash from the partying councilor to give a pug ugly who slips her the paper packet she takes behind the curtain. Brigitte has spotted shame faced Trevor at the bar and when confronted he tells her he could never match her husband’s wealth.
Brigitte gets wide eyed after a trip behind the curtain with Bachmann, grabs the shabby guy with the ragged mustache and drags him round the dance floor startled. When she dumps him, he stands staring, confused, as Brigitte agrees to Turroff’s suggestion to visit Trevor’s flat.
Next day up at the artist’s studio Turnoff gets on with preparations to rape our heroine, only to be thwarted by Trevor’s arrival. Repentant Gustav shows, alerted by Von Walther to the fact that Brigitte is about to make a terrible mistake. The couple repair to the divorce court but waiting on the bench outside they reconcile, witnessed amused by the passing registrar and his clerk. Jay Weissberg compared the ending to the Leisen Midnight. That film’s writer Billy Wider might have been expected to know Abwege. The key scene in Karl Hartl’s agreeable, twice re-made 1932 Die Gräfin von Monte-Christo / Countess of Monte Christo also is played by Helm sitting on a public bench.
With Abwege’s cabaret and 1927's Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney / Loves of Jeanne Ney’s orgy, Pabst became our go to guy for displays of Weimar decadence. This story is not another Germanic study of the oppressed under-class. It’s about moral decay seething below the surface of respectable bourgeois society. The director is surrounded by his regulars - Helm, Diessel, Trevor and Von Walter included. The contrast between Walther (excellent) who is in her element as the party girl enjoying the attention of her middle class admirers and Brigitte disgusted and driven to desperation in the same setting, is the film’s best element with of course the Helm performance. She has now mastered her acting style - multiple emotions playing across her mask-features with her trademark feeling her way along the wall she is facing to use her whole body to show her state of mind. Those cloche hats outfits don’t do her justice but the white satin evening number is a knock out.
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| Abwege : Helm |
In possibly the only interview she gave in retirement, Briggite Helm told author Peter de Herzog of her dissatisfaction with the films offered her. Pabst was one of the few directors she trusted.
Abwege shows silent film making at its absolute peak. The images flow into one another. There is no need for a close up of a jangling bell to tell us a 'phone is ringing. A wide shot of the hand set is sufficient, with the actors turning towards it for emphasis. The decors seem solid and plausible. Playing offers just the right amount of exaggeration to carry the fanciful writing. The image has a sheen to it picking out the texture of skin and fabric. The tinting given this copy is particularly effective - not the bold colours we are used to from surviving nitrate originals but a gentle lime tone for interiors and yellow for out of doors which don't draw attention when cut together. We don't get a distracting change of tone when a light is turned on, as had been usual.
The film's weakness is the script with no explanation of Diessel's withdrawn nature or what had pulled the couple together. As in several of his other films, Jack Trevor emerges as a more plausible and rounded character than the star. This does limit the film's impact but these people often squandered their talents on material inferior to this. Here we can see them deployed as they deserved.
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| Apaches of Athens |
With a chance to draw an unprecedented public, (we’re assured the numbers were good) the organisers opted for oddities rather than master pieces, which was all right but misleading. There are masterpieces from the silent period not being circulated and there’s always the hope that one or more of those will show up at Pordenone. They have to deal with an audience part of which which takes for granted work that other participants don’t know and sometimes dream of finding. Throw in the competition of You Tube which the pros try to ignore. It can’t be easy.
We were repeatedly told that Pordenone would be back physically in it’s home base next year, again the great treat for the privileged enthusiast. No one knows whether that’s going to happen. Trying to read the future shape from this limited event is as intriguing as watching the films. We are however promised that thus encouraged they plan to put some of their previous successes on line.
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| Pickford : Romance of the Redwoods |
Barrie Pattison 2020.
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