It’s oil rush time on the Mexican border at El Paso. ”Frenzied hope and Black Despair unheadlingly brush elbows ... Love, life and derricks are for sale cheap!” You’ve got to love those inset titles. A sustained wide shot shows bustling main street activity and we get returned WW1 veteran Nagel “his eye sight injured by Shrapnel - his money sunk in worthless oil lands - his heart with a girl in France who has forgotten his existence.” He encounters a chauffeured car with the black family of his former washer woman and bootblack who have struck it rich. A girl drives up with a baby in her motorbike side car and a Red Indian couple are having a piano wheeled into their tent as the wife breaks out her tobacco pipe. Hear the indignation of the worthy already.
A sign poster is putting up cards for the three day performance at the local theater of Nagel’s dream girl, dancer Rosa Duchene/ Mildred Harrris whose stolen hankie he still treasures from her visit to the veterans' hospital.
Back in his packing case and crushed tin can shack, eye shade wearing Conrad hoards her memorabilia. Contrast Roderiguez’ Casino, one of those teaming De Mille pleasure palaces. Theodore Kosloff is dipping the tip of his cigar in cognac and (nice trick) catching the tossed fruit on the point of his mean looking knife, “a persuasive gentleman who never needs to speak twice.” His floozy, Dorothy Dalton spots a customer taking a girl into the back room and tells Theo “I won’t stand for that sort of stuff.” She barges in and throws the table cloth over the masher, sending the girl out through the window. “Ten jumps will put you in the USA & don’t stop to pick the daisies.”
On the run Dorothy shelters in Conrad’s shack, lighting a friction match on his treasured Rosa Duchene ceramic ornament, to his shock, and blowing the smoke into his weak eyes. He sets his dog on the pair of “Greasers” sent after her. (I did warn you.) Impressed by Conrad, she gets honest work but goes along with the gag of giving him an exploding cigar.
Waiting in the rain at the stage door of Mildred’s “The Snow Queen” show, he lights the cigar which ruins his already damaged vision. The last thing he sees is the grotesque performance complete with frozen heart which lights up, flying carpet effect, performing bear and dancers on roller skates. “As the light fades from Arthur’s eyes, the storm becomes the turmoil in his heart."
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Mildred Harris
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Dot discovers the truth and, her pity stirred, takes care of him assuming the Rosa character. “Arthur, believing he’s marrying the woman he loves, marries the woman he hates.” Well, it’s only a movie, Ingrid.
Undertaking her domestic chores has Kossloff remarking on Dot’s washerwoman hands and she has to send for a cook book. This conveniently arrives in the same mail delivery as another rejection of the poems that Conrad has dedicated to his actress love. Dot tells him the “nothing of merit” letter is the news that the publisher’s announcing their printing and the cook book is a copy. He carries it round tenderly.
However as would happen, a famous war surgeon is in town and he can restore Conrad’s sight. Dot is torn but has Conrad operated, leaving the room as his bandages are removed. Star & director are rising to the moment here. Nagel bathed in diffused light sees his own hands with wonder and gradually penetrates the deception - the buffalo head replacing the graffitti’d “Snow Queen” poster, the cook book, feeling Dot’s face. Our man is delivering a career best performance.
After a gusher he is able to pursue his lost love. “You poor boob” Dot comments. The shack burns with her doubling back to rescue the tweety bird - familiar De Mille reversal of setting.
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| Fools Paradise - Conrad Nagel in Siam. | | | | | | | |
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Meanwhile Mildred has headed off to Siam to study temple dancers in Natascha Rambova outfits. There she has caught the attention of feather hat wearing Prince Jon Davidson. You may remember him re-birthed as Tetsu Komai in The Adventures of Captain Marvel serial. His Chief Wife is played by De Mille’s friend Julia Faye, who is about as convincing as Mike Mazurki would be in the part but we don’t get much of her.
Nigel arrives and the rivalry between the suitors is resolved at the Living Sacrifice ceremonial. Conrad being (one) white and (two) the hero rescues his injured rival. Things sort themselves out.
As well as the large scale settings filled with costume extras - frontier atmosphere that shifts to the exotic finale, the unashamed melodrama of the plot twists and Nagel’s stand-out performance (the women less so), this one runs to some cool camerawork - Dalton dissolving impeccably to Harris in Nagel’s arms, the spectral claw reaching out to blind him or the restored sight effects. It’s got the qualities that obliterate the faults in De Mille’s work, with ridiculing Nagel's awful poems, Harris' grotesque "Snow Queen" show or or Dalton needing a cook book to follow through on her noble urges, all grounding the piece's more flamboyant moments.
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| Fools Paradise |
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I wish I’d been there to see that one with it's exemplary Neil Brand score live.
As an opening treat we got the Danish-German-British co-production Jokeren/ Der Faschingskönig/ Joker from the tail end of the silents, an impeccably made A feature potboiler filmed in Copenhagen and Berlin at a time when Nordisk Film was on the point of selling up.
In this one, it’s carnival in Nice - huge parade floats, streets full of fancy dress revelers and draped with streamers, a setting we know from the work of the Russian emigré film makers.
After a night of partying in his office (with velvet covered doors), lawyer Australia’s own Miles Mander is woken up with his current flame. Costumed passers by from the street are pounding on the door to have him come and take down the last deposition of the victim of an (off screen) car crash. The dying man presents Miles with a locket with a picture of titled Renée Héribel and a billfold of her love letters. Don’t ask why.
As Miles has just had a visit from a trustee demanding return of his funds which had him gesture putting a pistol to his head, the dastard sees a golden opportunity for blackmail. Meanwhile Henry Edwards (Maurice Elvey’s The Flag Lieutenant) is got up in a Joker outfit to match his reputation as unbeatable at cards. This is convenient because he gets to pluck the heart stitched on his sleeve and present it to the then current Mrs. Jacoby, Elga Brinck when he becomes interested.
She’s the sister of Renée, now Lady Powder through her marriage to barely recognisable aristocrat the great Gabriel Gabrio (Tourneur’s Au nom de la loi, Pagnol’s Regain) who conveniently is obsessed with avoiding having his family name dragged through the filth.
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Jokeren - Gabrio
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His interest in Miss Brink has Edwards intervene in the Savoy Hotel card game, breaking Miles and have Renée’s pearls (which the bounder demanded as the price of the locket) lifted from him, and dropped in the casino reading room where she can find them when Gabrio notices they are missing.
Miles now sees the stakes raised and demands Elga’s hand to provide him entry to the nobility.
Henry’s intervention is halted when henchmen tie him up in the garage but he uses his conveniently pocketed cigarette lighter to burn through the ropes, backs the car through the garage door and frustrates Mander’s schemes, winning Elgar in the process. The torn letters end trampled with fallen streamers.
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Jokeren - Brink, Edwards & revelers.
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Director Jacoby’s career stretches from the teens to 1960 including the Emil Jannings Quo Vadis and a string of musicals with his second wife Marika Rökk. The handling is impeccable - constant movement, good choice of angles smoothly edited together. Silent movie mime performance is at its peak. It takes a while to adjust to Edwards in lip rouge as a smooth man of affairs but the women are charmers and mustache curling Mander gets the most out of the dastard role. His career was peaking at this point with him having directed his own The First Born script. All this said, The Joker is unfortunately still a cliché heavy melodrama that even the Drury Lane Audience in whose terms it was conceived would have found creaky.
The restoration was a marvel, sharp and blemish-free with most printed in an agreeable simulation of the amber tint with blue for night exteriors and the familiar cut between them on switching on a light. The Pordenone live score was admirable.
My new look at Snowy Baker’s 1920 The Man from Kangaroo now comes after I’ve seen more of his U.S. silent cowboy contemporaries. Our man’s still on the elderly side for one of these, though he’s impressively fit and can hold his own with competition like Leo Maloney or Jack Hoxie.
Dissatisfied with the standards of his home industry, Baker brought back from Hollywood D. W. Griffith actor Wilfred Lukas (Man’s Genesis, Enoch Arden) to direct and his script writer wife Bess Meredyth, later to star in a detective series of her own and marry again to Michel Curtiz. The advance on the star’s two year earlier Enemy Within is striking.
Appealing heroine Brownie Vernon is first found playing with kittens, like Linda Darnell in The Mark of Zorro which Meredyth will script. She and reverend-to-be Snowy do Phyramus and Thisby on the wall dividing their gardens.
Snowy stops the kids fighting over lollies and teaches them the manly art of fisticuffs (flashback to his triumphs in the ring where he looks quite plausible) and he gives a diving exhibition to their delight. He warns off business man Charles Villiers, who happens to be Brownie’s guardian, over his running the evil Black Swan pub (which we never see) and so the bad hat contrives to have the parents take a dim view of pugilism for their children and get Snowy transferred to the tough district.
There the pug uglies wait behind the street corner to club a passer-by but reject Snowy because clerics never have any dough, only to find they have to deal with him when they cosh the businessman who follows and lift his wallet.
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Bess Meredyth and Wilfred Lukas
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The victim gratefully has Snowy assigned to the town near his cattle station. This, coincidentally, is next to the property owned by Brownie, who shows up when Snowy sets up services in the main street hall. The anti-wowser nasties are headed by threatening bad hat director Wilf doing double duty. Parson Snowy shuts down, worried for the women and children in his congregation.
Another of Sid (Fatty Finn) Nichols’ art titles tells us that disillusioned Snowy has taken up the life of a station hand where he’s told by the black tracker that stolen cattle tracks lead to the adjacent property and that’s the last we hear about rustling. However fearing for Brownie’s safety, our hero vaults into the saddle and rides off to arrive when the low life guardian has decided to force the girl into marriage so that, as his wife, she can’t testify against him.
More action with Snowy follows - lollies all round. Happy end.
Baker’s stunting is showcased effectively, as well staged as the U.S. western films of the day and later - a chase through urban blight includes the jump off the Paddington overpass onto a passing van and then a car, taking command of the running canvas coach which the bad guys have commandeered at gunpoint and leaping off the Northbridge suspension bridge (dummies falling filmed from a distance). Snowy actually does the drop into the saddle from the verandah roof that they send up in Hearts Of The West.
This is a transplanted cowboy movie, complete with W.S. Hart style punch up sky pilot, cattle rustlers, stage hold-up and wide frontier main street with buildings on a single side (nice establishing shot with the dog barking at the coach wheels), along with minimal characterisation. It makes Man From Kangaroo slight but it is quite entertaining and easily superior to the work being done around it in Australia.
Certainly the oddity of the event, Dae-Ryong Yoon’s Geomsa-wa yeoseonsaeng / A Public Prosecutor and a Teacher was a 1948 Korean film from a period after WW2 when the country's production was reduced to making black & white 16mm. mute drama. A lack of sound equipment, including projectors, meant relying on the live byeonsa, their equivalent of the narrator-benshi to talk the audience through the action.
The result could have been a lot worse. This one, largely by accident, caught school assemblies on snow covered playgrounds, streets with their trams and shop fronts, court officials in Asian silk robes and suburban houses with sliding doors that opened into their pocket handkerchief front yards, separated from the pavement by wooden six foot fences.
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| Public Prosecutor - Lee Yeong-ae |
Filming also showed a basic sense of form, with cameraman Park Hu-yeong creating iris opening and closings in camera and taking well chosen angles which could be cut together without jarring, to tell the story. The front of the court house provided elementary
establishing shots and they get to use the wall clock as cutaways. Even the steam occasionally visible on the actors’ breath contributed.
The plot was pretty much predictable from the title. The school boy is spared nothing, His parents dead, he spends the winter looking after his bed ridden Nana. Though the local baker slips him bread rolls on his paper round, the kid faints from hunger in class and his compassionate teacher Lee Yeong-ae takes an interest, giving him her shawl and, when she is transferred and he carries her bag to the rail station, slipping him her bank book and stamp with her savings.
The boy is met by the neighbor Nam Ga-seoi in tears, the grandmother having died. In a nice touch, the mean landlord, who the kid represented as kind-hearted to the teacher, joins in, paying for the funeral.
We see our hero’s rise from delivery boy as he studies law. Meanwhile his one time teacher has married and set up home in her new location. She meets a weeping child who has lost her father and who she (surprise!) befriends and invites to her home. Our heroine’s husband has to leave town for work.
However escaped prisoner Lee Up-Dong (we never find his crime) avoids police pursuit by climbing over the roofs into her yard and our heroine lectures him into giving himself up after he’s found his daughter, who happens by accident to be the lost girl now hammering on the door. The reconciliation is halted by the police (using the short length of rope cuffs we see in Japanese pre-war films, like the Tomu Uchida Keisatsukan / Policeman) taking the escapee away.
Events take a melodramatic turns and Lee Yeong-ae finds herself in jail for murder. The prosecutor on the case is - you’ll never guess. The one time pupil now graduated law school declines to plead, Happy end and thank you Madam X.
Not great cinema art, this one had novelty value and its struggle to create real film shape
intrigues. I enjoyed it.
The copy sourced showed some projection wear, maybe only one was made, and it spent it’s commercial life with byeonsa Sin Chul sitting cross legged narrating over the noise of the projector. The then old man’s voice track was added to the copy effectively.
Of the Maciste films which were springboarded off Bartolemeo Pagano’s first appearance as the character in Pastone’s celebrated 1914 Cabiria, 1925’s Maciste all'inferno is is the most often seen. The new copy of is again half an hour longer than the one we knew and clarifies the reason for it’s fame.
Pagano’s Maciste is here a middle aged country gentleman growing cabages in his garden next to rather mature but virginal Pauline Polaire. However Umberto Guarracino, as Pluto king of Hades, is upset by Maciste’s habit of pounding evil-doers to hell leaving a puff of smoke as they descend (via the top of an upside down frame). He sends Franz Sala’s Barbariccia, his defeated rival in the election for his throne, to sort out our strong man hero.
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Maciste all'inferno
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Sala and his devils arrive from the infernal region, their cloaks and tails dissolving into stove pipe hats, frock coat and heavy make up. When confronted by a gale, Maciste reprimands “You could have at least rung the bell.” Stop motion petals fall off the cut flower. He’s reproached for “Your foolish passion for good.”
The newly arrived demons set about infamy including having Domenico Serra thrown from his horse in front of Polaire’s front fence in a storm. Being a fount of compassion she takes him in and nurses him with the usual consequences.
While Maciste is advising elegant Serra in the evil of having abandoned Polaire with a baby, the demons steal the child and tell her it’s dead, causing her to blaspheme and fall into their clutches. She is however absolved by a passing monk, while Pagano has found the baby and put it in the hands of the spinning wheel grannies who welcome her.
A title tells us “abandon all hope...” and Maciste is whisked off to Hades where he helps the tormented souls, shoving demons back into their fiery pits, attracting the attention of King Pluto who invites him to look about (all you’ll see are sympathetic smiles) knowing that a mortal can’t be retained more than three days in the underworld. Pluto’s wife Elna Sangara (said to be Colette’s lover) has been watching events on an infernal camera obscura guarded by a dragon that’s not as good as the one in Seigfreid. Pluto’s daughter Lucia Zanussi, who gets about in a scooter-wheel bikini, is smitten but refuses the kiss that will turn our hero into a demon.
The wife is not so scrupulous and her embrace transforms him, adding horns, tail and hair piece chest wig, preventing his return to earth. However his strength has increased a thousand fold so that when Sala mounts a revolt against the king, his demons are overcome by Maciste, who immobilizes Sala by pitchforks impaling his hands and feet. In gratitude, Pluto restores our hero’s humanity but Sangara crucifies him on a rock, as he strides forth giving off smoke, and presses her lips to his, making him revert to demon form. He is however released by the now infant’s Xmas eve prayer back on earth.
The film’s highlight is the descent, with striking images (vintage de Segondo de Chomon this) Charon takes souls on a one way trip while bat devils circle above. A giant squid fills the sky. The damned get to roll boulders up hill and be nailed crucified to the ground by the the circles of pitchfork-Pan demons who scurry out of burrows, the giant lifts Pagano from one level to the next, a detached plastimation head expands in his hands, the snake restrains him by circling his button up boot and the flying fairies scramble on the ceiling - all simple but effective but I still can’t figure how they did the burning spiral transition with the techniques of the day.
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Pagano & Zanussi
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A mash-up of Faust, Orpheus, Catholicism and Dante, the piece still does not have the narrative drive of the best movies, remaining a succession of sketches and arresting images. The set piece battle of our hero and the demons never gets to be the big action climax.
The fantasy imagery of the German silents is more stylish. Still the peculiar mix fascinates - high art references and resourceful use of film form cross cutting earth and hell.
Throw in half naked lady demons. These last are said to have held up the film’s release for years and stills indicate that shots of topless women have been deleted - though they did miss one of them.
Director Guido Brigone made three more of these Pagano spectacles - Maciste imperatore (1924) Maciste nella gabbia dei leoni (1926) and Il gigante delle Dolomiti (1927) and came back to to the cycle in the fifties co-signing Nel segno di Roma (1959) with one Michaelangelo Antonioni.
It’s hard enough to see any of the work of once celebrated movie bumpkin juvenile Charles Ray or his mogul producer Thomas Ince, so An Old Fashioned Boy directed in 1920 by one Jerome Storm, who made their hit The Busher, was a curiosity.
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Charles Ray
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Unfortunately the film was lackluster. An attempt to turn Ray into another resourceful contemporary comic hero, it showed him lacking the appeal or invention that Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd brought to their renditions of the character.
Ray is sparking Ethel Shannon in the parlor of couple Grace Morse and Wade Boteler and their impatient kids. Her gets to kiss the girl so he thinks it’s time to tell her that he’s already bought and furnished a home in the suburbs (complete with house keeper) and takes her there, demonstrating fold up furniture and the rest. Her reaction is “It’s really cute but I’d hate to live in it.”
This triggers a falling out, with determined bachelor Hal Cooley (“The perfect marriage is always to have divorce papers ready”) moving on Shannon. Complications when Morse leaves husband Boteler and dumps the kids on Charley in the new house, generating unfunny comic routines, when he poisons them with a failed taffee pull and finds himself driven to climbing over the furniture. Doctor Alfred Allen colludes with Charles to have the house quarantined for “Black Measles” so Shannon will have to look after the kids. Implausibly they get to the expected happy end.
Curious also to see familiar movie cop/reporter Boteler getting more space than usual. One of the Pordenone event's featured women writers, Agnes Christine Johnston went on to further champion the suburban life style in the Hardy Family and Janie films. I did like the spots which invade the title introducing the ailment and seeing the National Board of Review shield on the end, the precursor of the famed Production Code. It claims freedom of expression for film makers. The digitised sixteen mil. was murky.
Oscar Apfel had already been directing for eight years, including collaborations with Cecil B. De Mille and Raoul Walsh, when he got around to Phil for Short in 1919, this male impersonation piece.
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Oscar Apfel
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Evelyn Greeley (opposite Carlyle Blackwell in Apfel’s 1922 Bulldog Drummond movie), is raised by a professor father who is long on Greek but short on cash, as the elaborate captions tell us. He named her Damophilia which she contracted to Phil because she thought it was better than Dam. Local wowser couple Jack Drumier and Ann Eggleston consider her getting about in farmer’s pants or a Greek dance tunic to both be immodest.
When her father dies, “Horrid old man” Drumier is her guardian and he decides to dismiss family serviter and fiddler James A. Furey for standing up for her and marry the girl. Hey, didn’t we have this plot yesterday in The Man from Kangaroo? With Furey, Evelyn hits the open road in boy gear and comes upon lecturer Hugh Thompson (in the William Gillette Sherlock Holmes) reading Sappho on the river bank. They are twin souls of course, though it’s going to take the whole picture for them to work that out. Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett anyone?
Thompson’s been unlucky in love so he drops the posey his girl students give him in the bin. He finds their interest intolerable, telling College President Henry Hallam he’d rather quit than teach women. Evelyn shows up in a dress and is wheeled in as his associate. She has a sideline in teaching her Greek Dance routines to girl students. The local peeper watches from behind a tree and is told “You were shocked but you kept on looking.”
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| Phil for Short - Greeley with nitrate decomposition. | | | |
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At this point Drumier arrives to claim his bride and Thompson tells her “It would be the best thing to do, to have a strong man to control you.” Evelyn does a runner back in her Phil outfit, taking shelter in his rustic cabin. She hides his pince-nez so he can’t check her out thoroughly.
When all catch up with the pair, it’s “Good heavens, a girl!” and
“You’ve got to marry me.” That looks like the end of the picture - but
no. These lives have a second act.
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Phil for Short - Thompson, Adrizani & Arnold.
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Thompson takes his new bride to meet his Boston parents and a fresh set of characters appears, including (thank heavens for a familiar face) Edward Arnold, later in sound with Frank Capra and an MGM stalwart (excellent in Johnny Eager).
There’s some more Greek dancing. “The greatest violinist of his age” Johnn Adrizani grey at the temples, is coming on for Thompson’s sister and there’s a mysterious woman hovering. Evelyn lures Adrizani to the cabin, with her agitated husband speeding to the scene by car when the last train has gone.
Arriving in the morning, his indignation is suitably fired up but Evelyn has been playing him to cement their union. “It’s the nature of a woman to make a fool of a man.”
Whatever message this meant to impart is highly suspect. You've got to wonder about this season of women writers. As a dramatic entertainment, Phil For Short just gets by. A piece of social history, maybe. The copy begins sharp but severely deteriorated and ends, probably when they move to the 28mm. original, less sharp and less eaten away. Miss Greeley manages to make her lead appeal and we can see that Arnold barely aged over his forty year career.
Moral of 1928 is a surviving example of the completely forgotten career of Ellen Richter who worked with her husband-director Willi Wolff alongside the ranks of famous German film makers of the twenties and thirties. A number of her associates here figure regularly in their mainstream cinema. Writer Robert Liebman and designer Ernst Stern both appear on the credits of Der Kongreß Tantz.
Nice rail station opening. Archetypal fat businessman Jakob Tiedtke has a first class compartment to himself while Richter in her cloche hat has to stand in the corridor and complains. He takes off his wedding ring, buys a supplement for her ticket, shows her his saucy “Uhu” magazine and pulls the compartment curtain closed. She excuses herself and slips out, giving her place to a woman still standing who Tiedke jumps on in the dark, creating an incident.
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Moral - Tango Tango.
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Ellen is in town to star in the “Tango Tango” revue which features the then famous Tiller Girls chorus. Tiedke is one of the Emilsburg Sittlichkeitsvereins town Morality Committee, meeting in the Blue Whale tavern. They condemn the show as smutty, after banning the book “Everything You Need to Know About Marriage” till they find out it’s more recipes. Their using noisemakers disrupts the performance and the pierot is injured by fruit flung from the stalls. The manager is told “If that girl dances, we will ruin you.”
