Into the Archive.

Lockdown and what better time to look at hundred year old movies? I just jammed in two.

In 1920 Humoresque was Frank Borzage’s first major film, the foundation of his great Hollywood career. The opening (“New York a sample of all the civilisations of history”)  is frequently considered it’s major asset, with “stolen” actuality of the Albert St. Ghetto market and Jewish stall holders and customers, prefiguring hundreds of films like Frank Capra's 1929 The Younger Generation or The Jazz Singer.

A crowded tenement flat holds the Kantor family including the first appearance of mother, stage star Vera Gordon, along with dad Dore Davidson, who is in the business of "turning new brass into Russian antiquities", and  retarded son Sidney Carlyle, a mind that never developed after an incident fleeing the Tsar. 

Humoresque - Connelly & Gordon

On his birthday, then child star Bobby Connelly in his freakish new suit, is duffed up by the street kids but he comes to the aid of young Miriam Battista, getting all the endearing camera work when she cradles a dead cat on which she lays the potted flower’s blossom - nice bright light circle close up of young Connelly.

Dad Davidson offers Bobby a Harmonica toy gift but his heart is set on the shop’s violin. Mother Gordon is elated, her prayers for a musician in the family answered, but Davidson scoffs. “Couldn’t you have prayed for a businessman.” Archivist Robert Gitt thought he was onto something when he found this one but disillusion set in about this point.

 We dissolve from Connoly to Gaston Glass as his grown self, the concert star. Davidson is impressed by the medal they have given his son which he could sell for a tidy sum. Our hero gives a concert for the poor people of the ghetto in the huge theatre. “The Kol Nider played as if his very blood were weeping” one of Frances Marion’s flowery titles announces and Glass is offered a four figure contract by a celebrity producer. However he eyes the recruiter’s stand in the street below.  Remembering the injury inflicted on his brother, he has to take a stand against autocracy and with freedom. “Father I’ve just signed a contract with Uncle Sam.”

About now top billed Alma Rubens shows up as the neighbor girl Battista grown to be his
sweetheart. She is appealing before her tragic addictions took hold. The protracted family farewell is the film’s big tear-jerker scene.

We never see any combat footage but a cable announces Glass’ return and a car pulls up only to deliver his army comrade come to say he’s in hospital, injured. Glass’ recovery is hindered by his fear, which makes it impossible for him to play, but when he has to reach out to stop Alma from falling, he overcomes this and finds his skill (immediately) restored. Gordon has been praying again. This wind up is rapid and unconvincing.

Today Borzage’s film  hasn’t lasted well into the era of concern over race stereotypes and  “getting an operation so I can play the violin again” jokes  Dramatically unremarkable, the weak ending pretty much does in any conviction but in its day Humoresque was a whopping success for producer William Randolph Hearst and it’s WW1 and concert hall subject matter indicate directions Borzage will take in his more mature work. 

Humoresque - Ann Wallack, Vera Gordon, Alma Rubens, Gaston Glass, Sidney Carlyle.

The film is the root of two major Hollywood ventures - Borzage’s Seventh Heaven with it’s lovers divided by WW1 and the forties supposed re-make to which Clifford Oddets added elements of his “Golden Boy” in his adaptation for Joan Crawford and John Garfield. 

William S. Hart in 1920's The Cradle of Courage seemed a better prospect. Not without interest, this turned out to be one of the lesser Hart films.  Take Hart out of his westerner character and turn him into into a cloth cap workman, an Aztec Indian or a city cop, and he loses his legendary status.

Doughboys, “men who had faced Boche steel” are  disembarking at San Francisco after WW1 and among them we spot Hart as Sgt. Square Kelly of the 91st, one time burglar, and his officer friend who happens to be the son of the Police Lieutenant who had encountered our hero in his professional capacity. Bill hurries back to his white haired mother. She (switch)  happens to be a cop hating Irish criminal matriarch. She’s saved his burglar tools for his return. He puts them with the Luger he captured grenading a German dug out in a flashback.

While he’s celebrating with his old gang, including his brother, at Tom Santschi’s Tierney’s Bar, Bill gets a call from his war buddy inviting him to diner with the folks. Soon our hero is faced with a choice - go back to crime or joining the force now that the Policeman father has made him an offer on the strength of his distinguished military service. “As a Bull?” “As a police officer!” Santschi’s ward Anne Little (co-star of Broncho Billy Anderson and the second De Mille Squaw Man) slips him a note saying the stripes on his sleeve are better than the ones he’ll get from a judge.

Sgt. Hart with captured Luger.

A convincing punch out with Santschi (also duking it out in the 1914 Colin Campbell The Spoilers) resolves the matter and mum throws Bill out of the family home.

The gang has their eye on a mansion in his patrolman beat and Little goes there to alert him but he thinks she’s casing the joint for them and their kiss in the bar's family entrance was an idle gesture.

He interrupts the robbery and in the exchange of gun fire his brother is killed with Hart’s old pistol. Bill prizes the name of the heavy his mum sold it to out of her, though told “A Kelly never squeals to a cop.” Out of uniform, he confronts the dastard. Getting shot with the under the counter pistol lands our hero in hospital and, sunning himself on the roof,  he resolves his romance and family dilemmas which is kind of a lame ending.

When the tension between Hart’s up bringing and his new righteous way of life has been settled, Cradle of Courage is less involving. Instead of an Old Testament God, it’s the hallowed US Army that stirs his reverence here. The San Francisco setting, also featured in Hart’s The Narrow Trail, is an effective background, an intriguing comparison to the same locales used a quarter century later in Dark Passage.

I hate to say it, because his B films made up a slice of my movie education, but Hart’s old associate Lambert Hillyer was never a major talent and his script and direction don’t make this one of his star’s best efforts. Cameraman Joe August (later to shoot The Informer and  the Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame), on the other hand, covers himself with glory, capturing Hart in the Bay City panoramas and filming the shoot-out in the dark room illuminated by muzzle flashes - is this the first time? We get that again in George Bancroft’s  superior The Mighty ten years later, which this film intriguingly anticipates and - among many others - the Hopalong Cassidy Mystery Man eg.

Hart - Cradle of Courage

 

 

Barbara Bedford, Cora of the Tourneur-Brown Last of the Mohicans, debuts briefly as the officer’s sister.

There’s some bad matching on the cuts closer to medium shots of the leads, almost certainly not the fault of  Mr. Le Roy Stone who gets an editor credit, still unusual at this period. The Grapevine disk is passable. 

This pair of movies confirm my view that, while some outstanding films were made before the twenties, it took a couple more years before presentable entertainment became the norm.

 

Barrie Pattison - 2021