Silent Witnesses.

It occurs to me that I’ve been giving the same introduction showing silent Hollywood for my entire adult life, telling the audience that the body of it’s output wasn’t either masterpieces or primitives. American studios produced the thousands of films which made the movies dominate entertainment in the Twentieth Century. The nearest thing the world ever had to a universal frame of reference was geared to the  neighborhood audiences who visited the theatres maybe twice or more a week and their definite expectations. These were established or adopted pretty much round the planet. 

The Conrad Veidts at home - for Long Hairs

What the mass audience saw was selected on the basis of stars and subject.

The occasional documentary was about African wild life with maybe the odd polar expedition. Arab and Asian cinema didn’t exist outside its home market. The anguished dramas from the Soviets or Germany were for some small band of longhairs.

This made the Hollywood film dismissable and trite to it’s critics. A lot of it was and is. However a sizable proportion retains the appeal it once had as popular entertainment, to which is now added its value as a record of it’s day, the first and best such documentation in history. It's a bit like Paddy Chayefsky has William Holden say in Network - they learned about life from Bugs Bunny.

So I pulled a couple of DVDs out of the silents stack, with hopes that have often been justified. 

Director Erle C. Kenton’s The Girl in the Pullman comes from 1927, the tail end of the mute era with Vitaphone already surfacing. There’s a hint of desperation in it.

It fields Marie Prevost and Harrison Ford (Mark I - Hawthorne of the U.S.A. & Rubber Tires) who had been the stars of the 1926 Up in Mabel’s Room, while support player Harry Myers had played lead in a Getting Gertie’s Garter short. This is another in that cycle of comedies with the same unfulfilled hint of raunchiness, a poor relative to the Reginald Denny vehicles of the day. 

Harrison Ford and Marie Prevost.

The piece starts off none too promisingly with successful Dr. Ford treating an aged customer for nerves with a dome sun lamp that drops over his head. Our medico also has that regular in twenties comedy, an electric (steam) cabinet. Lawyer Myers, who has an office in the same building, handled his divorce from Prevost. Ford’s new fiancée Kathryn McGuire (opposite Buster Keaton in The Navigator & Sherlock jr.) we are told is a gold digger and she brings along her mother - perennial frontier woman Ethel Wales, here got up in a sophisticate outfit with lamé and turban - for the couple’s lunch at the up-market Embassy Hotel. They decide to get married in California. To reassure us it’s a daring movie, we get a track along bare knees.

As Ford’s ex, a here subdued Prevost, takes a dim view of the new arrangement and, finding out that her divorce isn’t final till the next day, sets out to stop Harrison becoming a bigamist, taking Myers along when they join the same train. Porter Heinie Conklin, in plausible black face, has routines about looking after two brides.

Things pick up on the train where Myers gets to do the nice (prohibition era) mime inviting Prevost to join him for a drink and Wales is outraged to see Ford trying to conceal Prevost in the compartment down the corridor. They decide to give us too much of a good thing, when the Pullman car detaches from the train and goes rolling down the steep mountain tracks on it’s own, for a finale.

Ford struggles to be a farceur doing the sudden moves and double takes but is out matched by the talented support. Patient Franklin Pangborn on the other hand is totally in his element here. Marie Prevost was notably more conspicuous in the Lewis Milestone The Racket next year but her career lasted only a few years longer than Ford’s into the thirties.

The film is one of the Cecil B. De Mille productions of the day, so it is mounted well. Director Kenton slogged through a long career of which the Charles Laughton Island of Lost Souls is the highlight.

The Sunrise Silents disk is bearable.

1925’s The Mad Whirl is marginally better. It is one of a run of films on which director William A. Seiter used the talents of Lewis Milesone, who is credited as a writer. Their 1924 Listen Lester with Harry Myers & Louisa Fazenda is more fun.

The rich, philandering Herringtons, Alec B. Francis & Myrtle Stedman and their son Jack Mulhall, are into cheating on their partners and celebrate after dark with their jazz era friends, leaving the butler exhausted and legs of girl guests hanging out of trees. Their flapper life style contrasts with that of disapproving ice cream parlor owner and reformed saloon operator George Fawcett (Valentino’s dad in Son of the Sheik - imposing) whose daughter, May MacAvoy, Mulhall used to know in Sunday School. The appealing McAvoy was the lead in the silent Ben Hur and The Jazz Singer.

The Mad Whirl - McAvoy.

Mulhall’s roadster passes her horse and buggy on the road and he becomes interested in re-kindling their association. However Fawcett is not impressed - OK scene of him preparing a sundae (“That’s all we’ve got”) in the shop for Jack who slips it into the cuspidor only to have it refreshed because he “spilled” it.

Jack’s fast living set form a cordon round him in their bathers when he passes their beach outing and McAvoy escaping dismisses him as a playboy.

After one Saturday night blast, Jack’s squeeze Marie Astaire has passed out and he carries her back into her home. On his way home, his car radiator boils and he goes to get water from the church tap just as the congregation with McAvoy comes out, passing himself off as a parishioner.

A further deception follows when he stops next to the runaway horse cart where it pulls up after the animal, startled by a train whistle, has bolted leaving May swooned. Jack accepts her mistaken belief that he’s her savior.

However the lies weigh on him and he fesses up but is still rejected, kissing her roughly and having her cut his face with her riding crop. After her visit to the church for guidance, May accepts Jack, upsetting the snobby Harringtons who can’t admit the daughter of a saloon keeper and Fawcett, who refuses to let his child enter such a dissipated home.

The rich couple reform and turn back the night’s revelers, while the young leads head for Niagara Falls.

The film has a curious and disappointing form, starting off as comic depiction of flapper morals which switches to a tortured romance and, after some heavy praying, into a morality. The cast are adequate. Curious to see a young Mulhall in the lead.  His career would dwindle to unbilled bit parts though he did get to play Scientific Detective Craig Kennedy in a sound version of The Clutching Hand. Barbara Bedford, heroine of the Tourneur-Clarence Brown Last of the Mohicans, barely registers as Fancis’ cheating partner. Director Seiter hit his peak three decades later with One Touch of Venus, which threw Ava Gardner and Curt Weil together.

Mad Whirl is a curious item on which the names of King Vidor or Frank Borzage would not have been unexpected. Best element is the small town setting - leafy roads, Root Beer shop with urchin customers and the white timber church. They set this against the rich home where the butler serves the disinterested owners the cook’s elaborately prepared breakfast from the family room side board. It's not hard to see the distant shadow of Kings Row and Peyton Place approaching.

Craft aspects are assured but this one shows every evidence of its age. The Grapevine Video copy gets by and has an OK original piano score.

Barrie Pattison 2021