Delmer Daves and his westerns

It’s a curious experience - seeing Drumbeat again after a lifetime - and it’s reassuring to find it still recognisable as one of the films that then made going to the movies the most enjoyable part of my life, even if it still doesn't quite go the distance to make it great. 

When I watched this on its first run, I was already on Delmer Daves' case. I’d admired his 1947 Dark Passage and 1950 Broken Arrow, totally different but among the most distinctive work of their day and found a few of his sharp scripts spread through TV viewing - The Petrified Forest, Unexpected Uncle, Professor Beware. This one was a return to form after his uneasy shift from Warners to Zanuck’s Fox. 

Daves would go on to continue his string of superior  westerns and I’d get to meet him in London, when he introduced a screening of The Three Ten To Yuma at the London School of Film Technique. Like all their visiting firemen, he looked round the room at the forty wannabe (mainly Afro Asian) faces at the show and identified, saying he wished he could find a way to help them on their way. Unlike the others, he then had a flash of inspiration and suggested anyone interested should call him at the studio and they could come out and watch him shooting The Battle of Villa Fiorita. He got one taker...

  Delmer Daves

I got to travel on the channel ferry on the way out with him and the way back with Oswald Morris. I saw them have six handlers manipulate a ton of Panavision camera in place to get the shunting locomotive Del saw in the middle distance building up steam, in the time it took to cover the twenty yards between there and our position. I still rate that as one of  my all time best days.

I borrowed Daves' own Sixteen Millimeter copies of  his Warner films, that had been used in a Paris Cinematheque retrospective. Christopher Wicking (later to write Absolute Beginners) was getting married the same day as my screening and wanted to postpone the ceremony so he could come but his wife had already invited her relatives ... now I am getting nostalgic. 

To get back to Drumbeat, this was considered a milestone movie because Alan Ladd had made it initiating his own Jaguar Productions, using Warners personnel and handing it to them for distribution. Ladd and Daves had co-produced the film. There was much wailing about stars taking over productions and disrupting the business model. This had of course been happening for some time, notably on the westerns with Randolph Scott and James Stewart working with with Anthony Mann.

As it turned out, Daves cherished the time he had spent living with the Indians as a young man. Drumbeat was the point where he embraced the cycle of fifties A feature westerns, which was one of the major incentives to watch the movies of the day. It came as a disappointment to me to find that he, Anthony Mann and John Sturges hadn’t formed a little club of co-conspirators. Their contact had been casual.  “A few good lunches” Mann observed. They weren’t like the later Sergios - Leone, Corbucci and Solima bonding in their time as assistants.

At Fox, Zanuck’s new recruits, like Daves, Richard Sale and Robert Wise, discovered that he earmarked all his big pictures for the veterans he had been working with since the thirties. Del used to get tongue tied going into Henry King’s office and facing a photo of Lillian Gish in The White Sister. Him directing Broken Arrow had been a lucky accident. Zanuck ran it up for John Ford, who said “I’m going to take out all that love crap.”  Zanuck came back “I like all that love crap. I’ll give it to Del.” In some measure, we owe one of the all time most enjoyable cycles of films to his producer pulling a stroppy director back into line.

Drumbeat was still early in the days of the anamorphic pro -cess and a full screen title proclaims “Cinemascope” followed by “Warnercolor”, which was actually the old Agfacolor patents seized as war reparations to produce Eastmancolor and handled by the Warner house laboratory. Drumbeat was one of the films that took full advantage of the then new combination and is full of the great western panoramas that the cycle featured, here filmed by ex De Mille cameraman Pev Marley.

Opening titles proclaim that the events and people shown are actual and only part fictionalised for dramatic effect. The Modoc wars and Indian Fighter Johnny MacKay did exist. Canby, here played by Warner Anderson, was the war’s only Serving General to be killed in action. A close examination of the film reveals that the story has been twisted out of conventional shape to accommodate the facts.

Drumbeat - Anthony Caruso, Marisa Pavan, Richard Gaines, Warner Anderson, Ladd and Frank Ferguson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We don’t hear about the treaty placing the Modocs in the same space as traditional enemies and their progressive dispossession. That’s another picture.

Drumbeat - Charles Bronson

We kick off with Ladd’s MacKay presenting himself to sentry James Griffiths at the White House gates to see President Grant and told to stroll right in and announce himself, another detail lifted from the historical record. Hayden Rorke’s Grant wants Indian Wars veteran
MacKay to take over the Peace Process, something that Makay is allowed to appear ambivalent about, his family having been massacred by Indians. His background is in killing Indians but he knows personally some of the Modoc leaders, especially bloodthirsty Captain Jack, in which character we find a young, virile Charles Bronson, emerged from his bit parts under his real name, Charles Buchinsky, in the movies where he accused Andre De Toth of having hired him for his muscular build and needing to be constantly re-assured that he was there because of his acting skills - a pattern that would persist through Bronson’s career.

The stage coach trip west gives us a better look at Grant family friend, winning young Audrey Dalton, who gets a nice scene, in which we can hear Daves, where she outlines her ambition to be a frontier woman. This runs to an Indian attack setting us up for the exposition proper where the tribal Modocs walk the same desert town streets as the settlers, in front of Elisha Cook’s General Store, with it’s telegraph wire connection. Then star-prospect Peter Hansen has his bit where, as the only bachelor officer at the post, he wants Ladd to convey his interest to Dalton.

All this is played in width-of-screen panoramas, where the makers are showing their awareness of the new image dimensions. The sentry braves firing rifles from the bluff peaks to signal the arrival of Ladd’s parlay group and the newcomers breaking out of the circle of whooping hostiles to complete their mission, are particularly nice. Victor Young is in best form, his score telling us what we should think about the on screen action.

Rapidly we become aware of an approach that wouldn’t fly with today’s ethnic sensibilities. The Indians are murdering savages who have broken the treaty that gave them money and new lands better than the ones they were occupying. The settlers are faintly racist land grabbers and full on antagonistic over Indian attacks. In the rising, even the ones that were on meal sharing terms with the Indians are wiped off. Rather than the familiar white renegade outrage that provokes Indian violence in The Covered Wagon or Canyon Passage, it’s Bronson coveting the soldiers’ medals. The nearest we are going to get to this again is Robert Mulligan’s late cycle 1968 The Stalking Moon, where they go into some detail on why Gregory Peck has got to do what a man’s got to do. Of course there is a white profiteer with a good line in selling Winchesters to the hostiles and the “Good Indians” represented touchingly by Anthony Caruso and Marisa Pavan.

The redskins are an impressive line up of make up tanned Latins in this film. The only authentic Native American in sight is Bronson, who had Modoc blood, and Daves gets him under the skin of Captain Jack, where impressively we sympathise though he’s the movie’s bad guy. This was the film where I began to watch Bronson seriously.

Ladd, who was the moving force behind the film, is out acted on all sides. His romantic passages with Dalton are dead weight. He was a better 1947 Whispering Smith or Jim Bowie in Gordon Douglas’ 1952 The Iron Mistress and of course he was coming off Shane. This one does have it’s smart scenes like the preacher, the military and the negotiators confronting the fact that they will probably be killed in the false faith parlay that they can’t see any way to avoid.

Well, enough with all this scene setting. It’s time to get on with the business of the film with the Indians taking down those waves of blue belly cavalry kicking up dust in the sun against the red rock ranges. The action is rousingly staged on a large scale.

The film’s failure is, and always was, its inability to follow the scenes of wheeling lines of skirmishers repelled trying to take the pueblo fortress in the mountain with a hundred caves that lead to the center of the earth. The victory by attrition is rushed. Ladd (who appears to be doing his own stunts) going mano a mano with Bronson rolling down the white water cascade is pretty good (it’s the bit I remembered most clearly) but it’s an anti climax after those. 

Drumbeat is still good viewing and a marker in the parade of superior entertainment this cycle of westerns represents.

There’s again more. Del Daves loved making his westerns (Three Ten to Yuma, Cowboy, Jubal, The Hanging Tree, even The Badlanders that brought him and a fading Alan Ladd back together) and quite a few of us career movie-goers of the day loved watching them. However Jack Warner, his old boss, called him to say he was in a bind. He’d paid out a million dollars for the rights on Sloan Wilson’s best seller “A Summer Place” and a succession of writers including Wilson himself had failed to reduce it to a workable script. He appealed to Del, who delivered something suitably filmable. Warner decided that it was logical that Del should direct and sure enough he turned out a handsome block buster. 

The film made more money than all his westerns together and forever after, as its writer-director, Delmer Daves made soapy weepers of diminishing interest. This cost us however many other superior westerns and left Del, who was aware of the process, with a decline and fall. One of my colleagues was outraged that a fellow critic referred to Villa Fiorita as “maron glacé” but the guy wasn’t far off.

Hollywood could show case talent on an unparalleled scale but it could also fritter it away. It was disturbing to watch this happening.

The Bounty DVD of Drumbeat is passable. It can be manipulated into its correct proportions but the colour, which was one of it’s major assets, is washed out.

Barrie Pattison 2022.

SHOES AND MOVIES.

Luca Guadagnino's  2020 Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams is a handsome documentary which curiously is interesting on movies and shoes but dips out on bringing its subject to life.

Salvatore Ferragamo certainly had quite a life. One of a family of fourteen, he decided as a child, he wanted to be a shoemaker, though this was the lowest rung on the social ladder in Bonito his Sicilian home village, from which he moved to Florence, Naples and then to the 1907 USA where he rejected factory production by the thousands of shoes lacking the comfort of his own hand made work.  He studied anatomy in medical school for this. He participated in the shift from Santa Barbara to Hollywood by the now forgotten American Film Corporation.

Ferragamo's life provided the relevant quota of  drama - crossing the globe in his teens, a car accident which had him designing and patenting a splint for his smashed leg. (He ran up a series of notable patents - something alien to the sharing of knowledge in his origin culture). Ferragamo mixed with Valentino, Gloria Swanson and Cecil B. De Mille (“If cowboys had boots like these the West would have been settled much  quicker”), being wiped out in the Stock Market Crash and, with devoted staff entering into a potentially ruinous deal, while still bankrupt, to set up again in his historic building. He rolled through though the rise and fall of Mussolini and two world wars.

Thief of Bagdad - Fairbanks, with Sôjin

Fairbanks’ Pixie Boots from the Thief of Bagdad (most of which he did barefoot) and Swanson’s sex-worker bow foot wear for Sadie Thompson get special attention. There’s a surprisingly involving description of the construction of his arch supporting soles and the innovative use of undisguised nylon and cork materials. We don't get any mention of cost or durability. It's another look into into the Hollywood lives of the rich and famous. The  people who had their homes styled by Billy Haines walked round them in Ferrigamo shoes.

The documentary has a great range of source footage - the founders setting up United Artists where only Griffith is  taking interest in the surroundings, clips from The Covered Wagon, the silent 10 Commandments, Charles Mintz’ 1935 The Shoemaker & the Elves, Italian historical actuality, Ferragamo’s own grainy B&W 8mm. home movies, which they allow to jump frames or go out of rack, a Pez digital animation, along with stills of Ferragamo handling the feet of glamour stars or surrounded by the lasts of famous people's feet - Greta Garbo, Claire Booth Luce, Gloria Swanson, Ingrid Bergman Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren. He seems to have given up on men’s footwear

Salvatore Ferrigamo & Audrey Hepburn.

The interviews let it down, fashion pundits and family, even with glimpses of Martin Scorsese and Jay Weissberg to comment the movie connection. Adding echo to the track is an interesting piece of manipulation.

Curiously the high point is the artizanal hand making of a Ferrigamo shoe, which we’ve already seen in the opening, with the family material and digital shoe ballet coming as an
anti-climax. 

Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, the new Suspiria) has still shown a firmer grip on the documentary form than most fiction makers taking it on. His film has the variety and hints of significance (labor relations, the shoe maker in legend) that sustain it for most of  a hundred and sixteen minutes. However, possibly due to the involvement of his heirs in the production, Ferragamo himself remains irritatingly two dimensional.

 It would be interesting to know why the film has attracted more attention than other current non fiction.

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

The Saga of Billy Haines

William Haines had always existed on the periphery of my awareness - the nice young man who squired Marian Davies and Mary Pickford through silent comedies. His films were never re-issued or shown in Cinematheques and the copies included in the MGM bundle sold to TV were generally the ones not put to air. The fan magazines went silent. It came as a great surprise to find that in 1930 he had been the most popular male lead in Hollywood - which in 1930 meant he was the most popular actor in the world. 

 

Memory Lane - Haines and Frankie Darrow

 

This was even more inexplicable when I saw a few random titles from the Amalgamated collection and a few, more carefully selected, showed up on Warner Archive DVDs. Turned out that William Haines was the all time least appealing movie star. He pioneered the concept of the hero as a jerk.

Just a Gigolo - C.Aubrey Smith & Haines

In Ed Sedgwick’s 1927 West Point he fakes blindness to get Joan Crawford’s sympathy. Ernest Torrence, his alienated dad, nails it as “You’re a swell headed fool” in Harry Beaumont’s 1929 Speedway. In Sedgewick’s 1930 Remote Control he comes on as broadcaster "The Radio Raspberry" doing on-air bed time stories that scare kids and gets put on chill by Ann Doran "You're quite fresh aren't you?" In Fred Niblo’s 1930 Way out West, he’s a cheating carnival barker who the cowboys are about to lynch. Passing himself of as a professional dance partner in Jack Conway’s 1931 Just a Gigolo, Haines attempts to seduce the charming Irene Purcell, to show his contempt for women. 

However when sound added his jeering voice to the persona already evolving in silents, Haines’ wiseguy character became grating. This did not deter his fans, though increasingly obvious middle age made him harder to accept as a romantic hero.

There are elements of  Haines in later Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney vehicles but it peaks with the character that Alberto Sordi would use more effectively. Throughout the body of the film he would be insensitive and abusive, paying for his sins - and ironically in the case of Haines as it turns out - getting the girl in the last reel, a George Amberson Minifer.

Three years after his popularity peaked, Haines' star career came to an abrupt halt. There was a story there, in fact a number of  stories. In the current climate we are hearing about his falling out with Louis B. Mayer, who thought Haines’ openly gay life style could cause a scandal that would damage MGM and demanded he have a sham marriage that their publicity machine could use to hose down the situation. Haines told him he’d marry a woman and ditch long time companion Jimmy Sheilds, as long as Mayer would dispose of his wife. His contract was not renewed and he never made another film of any significance.

However, as in the auto sales commercials, there’s more! Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s documentary Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The Life of William Haines, narrated by Stockard Channing and dating from 2001, is an ambitious account of Haines’ life. It predictably features his homosexuality, treating sympathetically his lifetime relationship with Sheilds, nominated as one of the great Hollywood marriages.

Sally, Irene & Mary - Haines & friends

We learn that, popular as a wise cracking teenager, who never disguised his orientation, young Haines moved to Bohemian New York in the 1920s working as a model and  joined George Cukor, Cary Grant and Orry-Kelly in the Gay Community of Hollywood. As a fresh faced juvenile he was acceptable in films by major directors - Alan Crosland (Three Weeks), Victor Seastrom (the lost Tower of Lies) Edmund Goulding (Sally Irene & Mary) and King Vidor (Show People) becoming prominent after Tell It To the Marines and Brown of Harvard.

The second portion of the documentary, covering Haines post-MGM career as prestige interior decorator, is more interesting and suggests he had another, more plausible talent.

Craig's Wife - Rozalind Russel.

Haines decided that rich Americans craved Hollywood glamor and set up a business interior designing their homes like movie sets. He’d already taken over the art direction of Just a Gigolo, (see photo above) with department head Cedric Gibbons keeping his distance and, more significantly, and also uncredited, Haines would go on to design the 1936 Craig’s Wife, Dorothy Arzner’s best film and one centered on Hariet Craig’s fetishised home. 

 

Frequent co-star Joan Crawford got him decorating assignments (“She may have been a bad mother but she was a helluva good friend”) and he made a deal with Carol Lombard where he styled her house free, so that the celebrity guests she entertained would see his work.

Photos, looking like stills department studies, suggest his designs as accomplished. The hand crafted ornaments and furniture he created do impress and are now high price collector’s items. His younger business partner got to decorate the White House, with Nancy Reagan one of their devoted clients.

Haines claimed that decorating was a more honest living. He didn’t have to wear make up. It wasn’t all plain sailing though. An anti gay mob beat up Haines and Sheilds at their Manhattan Beach home in 1939. They did survive to a prosperous old age together.

However more intriguing for anyone with an interest in movie history remains how did someone achieve major star status by playing obnoxious in largely dreadful films? He wasn’t particularly handsome, unconvincing as the great lover. He didn’t have the skills of the acrobat comedians and no one would rate him a serious actor. With so many films still inaccessible, I’ve got to admit that I still haven’t sorted that one out but now that more material is finally surfacing there are some indicators.

John M. Stahl’s 1926 Memory Lane is one of the nicest pieces of Hollywood small town Americana common at the time from the hands of people like John Ford and Henry King. The script by Stahl and Benjamin Glazer starts on the night before dignified Eleanor Boardman’s wedding to local Conrad Nagel. Third billed Billy Haines shows up. Turns out that Boardman and Haines had been an item growing up together but he left town without asking her to wait for him and now she’s made her choice. Against her family’s wishes, she slips out and they walk the familiar streets, past the school house and the chorus practicing in the park, lyrics from their songs coming up as intertitles. The atmosphere is irresistible and the tension in the situation bristles.       

Plot complications worthy of a Keaton comedy and involving young tearaway Frankie Darro, place Haines at the wheel of the couple’s car outside the wedding and, after a further misunderstanding, he and Boardman find themselves stranded out of town together, with ‘phone gossip Kate Price stoking a scandal.   

Husband Nagel accepts that the incident was innocent and the newly married couple settle down. Some time later Haines re-appears in town wearing a loud check suit and bragging about his success in the big city. Invited to the house, he proves obnoxious company. At the end of the evening, Nagel drives him to the station. He sees through his pretense “Why the act?” Haines confesses that he was creating an objectionable image so that Boardman wouldn’t worry about her choice. Back home Eleanor says she wonders what she ever saw in Billy. Conrad disagrees. “I’m just getting to like him.”

The bitter sweet ending is impeccably handled by all concerned and should have made this film an enduring favorite. It is the most winning of the accessible early films by Stahl, foreshadowing the peak in his work at Universal in thirties sound with Side Street, Only Yesterday and Magnificent Obsession. It may have been the prototype to which later Haines characters were shaped.

By 1930, Haines was MGM’s big draw card. They seemed unable to capitalise on this with better films being mounted round their other former silent leading men Ramon Novarro and, despite received opinion, John Gilbert. Along with a run with James Cruze, Haines vehicles were shared out among undistinguished MGM contract directors like Jack Conway, Harry Beaumont and Edward Sedgewick.

 The Girl Said No - Leilia Hyams & Haines.

At the time sound arrived, Sam Wood was treated as another of these staff directors, only pulling away to major film status later in the decade with Night at the Opera and Goodbye Mr. Chips. There’s a June 7, 2016 piece on Wood’s early work in this blog. Wood did four of Haines' films and their The Girl Said No is cited, noting that under Wood’s direction Metro’s two grossly unappealing star personalities, Haines and Marie Dressler actually function as a focus for audience sympathy.

At the time I thought that was the end of the matter as their Tell the World (1928) A Tailor Made Man 1931, The Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford (1931) and  The Fast Life, on which Wood is uncredited, seemed lost with no one all that concerned.

Wallingford, we were told, was snared in some kind of rights bind. However while preparing this piece, I found it (without any Haines cross referencing) in a soso lift of the TCM copy on You Tube. I’d been looking for this one all my adult life and I was quite nervous about it being an anti-climax after the long wait.

Armetta, Haines (in chair) Torrence & Charles R. Moore.

In fact it proved a nice surpise, one of the more accomplished Hollywood features of its day, more assured and enjoyable than the  agreeable The Girl Said No, which had been the pick of the gappy list of accessible sound Haines films.

An adaptation of George Randolph Chester’s Cosmopolitan Magazine "The Wallingford Stories",  The New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford comes polished by a Fred Niblo - J.C. Williamson’s 1916 Australian (!) version, a George M. Cohan stage production and a 1921  film of that by Frank Borzage with Sam Hardy and Norman Kerry. (wouldn’t it be nice to see that one!) The 1931 film arrives in a neat adaptation by then regular Wood collaborator Charles MacArthur, of Hecht and MacArthur.

We get another one of those unnecessary ship board opening sequences of the day, this one showing the meeting between card sharps Haines and Ernest Torrence again, which sets up the nice personal and professional relationship between the pair, Haines demomstrating that a suspicious waiter won’t give him two dollars for the ten dollar note he offers and moving into flim-flamming captain Alfred Allen with the story that he’ll get a raise now that Billy’s new shipping company is taking over the line.

Wallingford - Haines & Hyams

There on the dock is detective Guy Kibbee determined that this time he’s going to nail con-man Wallingford/ Haines despite being forever thwarted by his never putting his name on any of his rip-off deals’ paper work. The Haines-Torrence team is soon joined by Jimmy Durante, beginning his long association with MGM, already doing the Schnozzla character and playing a fragment of his “Did You Ever Have the Feeling You Wanted to leave” number. It’s actually quite disconcerting to see him go on to do a scripted character in Victor Fleming’s 1932 The Wet Parade. Durante is a car thief, who keeps on making off with the local Police rifle squad vehicle.

As a hotel scam goes wrong, (the manager he claims to know is actually Edwin Maxwell who he’s talking to) Haines picks up on the reference to employee Leila Hyams’ father selling off the family plot of land and sets out for her small town home to accuse banker Hale Hamilton of cheating the family and concoct a mining company to exploit the deal, selling shares to the locals who are only too anxious to get in on the ground floor of a monstrously profitable enterprise, the news of which Haines spreads by discussing it with town barber Henry Armetta - yet another servile black character present, in Charles R. Moore’s Bootblack.

Suspense comes from the fate of Robert McWade’s bank draft, which Billy was forced to endorse and give to mother Clara Blandick to keep in her sugar bowl. The piece works surprisingly well, as sympathy stays with the con men, who appear so much more agreeable than the greedy respectable citizens and police officers they manipulate. Touches like Billy slipping elderly char lady Lucy Beaumont a thousand dollar “bonus” out of the proceeds, to the admiration of his partners in crime, help things out but it drives on Wood’s ability to keep things moving to the original’s increasingly desperate climax - Durante jumping out of frame and back to animate the dialogue, a train-motor chase, even Haines doing a none too convincing passionate embrace with Hyams.

 Wallingford - Kibee, Torrence & Haines.

Though it’s formula plot has become familiar now, seeing it in an early incarnation intrigues. Wood regulars Armetta and Blandick are part of the polished MGM package. The contributions of first rate studio technicians properly rescourced - editor Frank Sullivan, cameraman Oliver Marsh and designer Gibbons - help make this stand out in the studio’s then frequently machine-made product.

It may be that Hollywood homophobia, stoked by a religious revival in the Great Depression, was responsible for the end of Billy Haines movie career but, looking at pieces like Just a Gigolo, we can see that in obvious middle age, Haines had out grown his screen character, like Adam Sandler, but he lacked Sandlers’ range and intelligence to modify his act. Metro had the Roberts - Montgomery, Young and Taylor - who could all do that William Haines did better than he did. The more personable Ramon Novarro and John Gilbert would face falls from fame more disastrous than Billy Haines experienced at this point.

I find it more astounding that such a limited performer could achieve his prominence, than that he failed to sustain it, but I didn’t experience that period and I can’t get to the Haines films that are it’s record. Watching Memory Lane and the Sam Wood films does illuminate the Billy Haines phenomenon. I don’t think I’ve exhausted the topic yet.

Norma Shearer, William Haines - Tower of Lies.

Barrie Pattison 2022.

 

Stanwyck & Lanfield.

I’d thought the file on Sidney Lanfield had long since closed but he turns up as a reference in Ryan Murphy & Ian Brennan’s scandal raking 2021 Hollywood TV Mini Series and, then on You Tube, I discover a beautiful transfer of his hardly ever shown 1938 Barbara Stanwyck weepy Always Goodbye, which proves surprisingly involving.

Way back when I first started thinking about movies, it seemed the real criteria were not the ones I was hearing - preserving the county’s British heritage or whether they were works of art or artifacts or the contribution they made to the proletarian struggle or the employment they provided the noisy local industry lobby.

What appeared more relevant was that the same names, usually directors, kept on appearing on the films that I liked, not just the Cecil B. De Mille - Alexander Korda - John  Ford heavyweights but people who seemed to have no celebrity status. I didn’t realise it at the time but I was formulating my own crude auteur theory. Remember the auteur theory?

A few years later, I got to discuss this with some of those film makers - Jacques Tourneur, Delmer Daves, Cy Enfield - and I found that some had gone through the same process themselves a generation earlier. Andre de Toth admired Leo McCarey’s brother Ray McCarey. Michael Powell had been a fan of Roy Del Ruth.

My notion, not surprisingly, had drawn ridicule from my contemporaries, the Grierson documentary devotees, to be followed by the Sam Fuller adherents. Fuller himself threw confusion into the assembled French fan pack by stating his respect for Herbert Brennon - “Qu’est-ce que ce Herbert Brennon?”

Lemon Drop Kid - Bob Hope & Lanfield.

To the In-Crowd, one time jazz musician and gag man Sidney Lanfield had been way beyond respectability. I’d be surprised if the more purposeful had seen any of his work but he did the best of Bob Hope’s films. (seems that I and Woddy Allen are the only  admirers of Bob Hope left) I particularly enjoyed a couple of Paramount comedies Lanfield did with Paulette Godard - Standing Room Only and The Lady Has Plans. The university film group had a palace revolution, took my suggestion and slapped on The Lady Has Plans and that one proved a hit with what passed as a sophisticated audience in nineteen fifties Australia, which I felt made a point.

Well that was then and this is now, though Sidney Lanfield’s sustained association with popular entertainment meant he did keep on popping back into view. He did the first Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes and had Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth as leads. Even after he scaled down into series TV, he directed the 1960 The Man in the Pit episode of John Casavetes’ landmark Johnny Staccato, the series where the studio executive prompted “John, John, you don’t get the idea. Your program is just a twenty five minute interval between the commercials.” I handled a copy of Follow the Sun. (Glenn Ford as golfer Ben Hogan) which I’d thought of it as production line entertainment when I’d seen its first run, and was surprised to find how effective it remained.

So I dialed up Always Goodbye, which proved to be a remake of the Fanny (“Back Street”) Hurst story Gregory La Cava did as Gallant Lady with Ann Harding five years earlier - and to anticipate Now Voyager.

It also was unexpectedly touching for something so obviously synthetic. The plot is played out in studio settings that never convince us they are real streets, offices, homes or ocean liner and the support are painstakingly effaced to focus attention on Stanwyck’s noble suffering - which she manages impeccably - her performance is the film and everyone knew it.

Interestingly Cesar Romero and (surprise) Lynn Bari (“Women can’t fool women”) wouldn’t go along with the gag and manage to resist erasure.

Babs is found in the back projected N.Y. street, waiting outside city hall for her husband to be, who is promptly wiped out in an off screen traffic accident. That leaves her with the problem of the baby. Fortunately globe trotting Herbert Marshall happens to be sitting on the pier which she intends throwing herself off and whisks her to a spot in Binnie Barnes’ fashion house - where she thrives.

She has followed developments with adopted out young Johnny Russel (particularly bratty) whose new mum dies (off screen again) leaving new dad Ian Hunter (the men are so nice and so British) to raise the kid.

Always Goodbye - Stanwyck

On assignment in Paris, our heroine meets the boy at the Ritz and immediately signs up to ship on the Normandy on which he’s traveling back to the ‘States with admiring Italian (!) aristocrat Romero pursuing her - comic routines in the ship’s giant no sky pool and him chatting her with “You are more beautiful tonight than you were this afternoon” lines. She reads the kid “Little Black Sambo” which appears to grate with some modern sensibilities.

Marshall has taken a lab technician spot in New York to be near her but Hunter’s ambitious fiancée Bari admits she plans to ship the kid off to military school, making way for a kind of bitter sweet ending. Babs has the stars. Let’s not ask for the moon.

The saccharine material is spaced with passable comedy and lots of good living. Lanfield runs the show deftly even with peculiar touches like Hunter, who was the only one to show up on location, cycling up on back projection before we cut to doubles distant joining his character in his park-like grounds. It's like the two Bette Davises walking side by side on the process stage in Curtis Bernhardt’s 1947 A Stolen Life. It doesn’t convince but we admire the effort that went into that.

This one plays so well I kept on wondering why it was never re-issued. It made me curious about another Lanfield-Stanwyck collaboration which had been on You Tube as long as I can remember without my investigating it - Red Salute /  Her Enlisted Man Her / Her Uncle Sam, from Edward Small (The Donat Count of Monte Cristo, T-Men). This one was on the face of it more promising with its remarkable for 1935 Hollywood premise - General Purnell Pratt’s daughter Stanwyck engaged to Hardie Albright,  a radical on a visitor’s visa (freedom of speech, get it) outraging her dad who ships her South of the border, from which she plots her return to Washington, complicated when the roulette wheel swallows her last five dollars.

Serving soldier Robert Young finds himself involved in her schemes becoming A.W.O.L. when she commandeers Cliff Edwards' over-insured jalopy and trailer and runs the American border.

Best element gets to be Edwards enjoying finding himself in a chase with the border patrol, which provides the excitement he never had in the war and gets him away from wife, surprisingly strident Ruth Donnelly. He gets to sing “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” on back projection at the wheel.

Disappointingly the political content is limited to Babs parroting a few slogans and Bob sorts out the Albright problem by turning the student rally he is addressing into the Forum Scene from “Julius Caesar” for an ending. Hollywood was jittery about depicting left wingers at this stage, though I do like He Stayed for Breakfast, made in 1940 when the political climate had shifted and Loretta Young finds Bolshevik Melvin Douglas in her bedroom, demanding how he got there to be told “I once organised the locksmiths.” The relationship between General Pratt and Young is more interesting, switching mid scene from officer and subordinate to father and potential son in law and back.

It wasn’t till the the nineteen seventies and films like Bound for Glory and Reds that we’d see the 1930s Left treated convincingly.

Red Salute is more an It Happened One Night rip-off than serious argument and the two elements compete unsatisfactorily. Edward Small musters reasonable production values with Lanfield pushing it along relentlessly - going from something moving to something moving on the edits. A comparison with Always Goodbye shows how much Zanuck's massaging the elements before and after shooting determined the quality of Fox product. Sidney Lanfield, who associates dismissed as “a front office director” for calling the bosses for decisions, fitted into that scheme perfectly and they got superior results through collaboration. Few of his contemporaries could do that as well.

This was a model for "The Golden Years" of Hollywood and, while it was rarely going to create masterpieces, it did produce the flow of agreeable entertainment that distinguished the era. Talent more prestigious than Sidney Lanfield often fell below the standard of The Lady Has Plans and Follow the Sun. I'd enjoyed those and still do - but I'm not sure whether the Hollywood series reference was admiration or just picking out a name that was too obscure for anyone to worry about.

Wake Up and Live - Ben Bernie, Lanfield, Walter Winchell & Jack Haley.

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

 

Perverse.

Time was a movie was a story that you saw in a theater for around ninety minutes, made in or for Hollywood with a couple of recognisable stars speaking English. After more than a century, this basic film form has gone away or at least taken refuge on a streaming site - Clint Eastwood and Cry Macho.  It’s become quite a change of pace to watch a new theatrical release. I did two and both turned out to be attacks  on the traditional feature form.

Dominik (Seules les bêtes / Only The Animals) Moll’s new La nuit du 12 / The Night of the 12th. though it has familiar crime movie ingredients - a (grisly) murder followed by a police investigation, forensic examination, interrogation of suspects & disturbing revelations - aims at something more than the grown up variation on the cop movie that it appears to be. As it progresses, it becomes clear that we are  not watching even something like the apparently similar Arnaud Desplechin Roubaix, une lumière / Oh Mercy!

Capt. Bastien Bouillon’s police judiciaire move in, out ranking the small town Grenoble gendarmes, to investigate the night time burning alive of young Lula Cotton-Frapier. Catching sight of her photo with a kitten halts Bouillon in the middle of telling her parents about her death. Examining the girl’s phone and talking with friend Pauline Serieys, to whom she made her last call from the park where she died, leads to stories of promiscuity and sexual violence and tracking down old flames, several of whom end shackled in the interrogation room.

The Squad have problems of their own. They can’t keep the toilet clean and their printer keeps on breaking down. Roughing up suspects doesn’t present the expected outcomes. Bouillon works out his issues cycling on the velodrome track, like a hamster wheel as veteran Bouli Lanners, the film’s most familiar face, prompts and Lanners is sleeping on the lunch room couch after a marital break up.  Their investigations only produce shadowy figures. 

Three years later Judge Anouk Grinberg  (Bertrand Blier’s 1997 Mon homme and still looking good) digs the case out of the file-covered desk she inherited, injecting more funds, but the new stake-outs and hidden camera investigations don’t go as expected. Arab girl recruit Mouna Soualem’s dialogue with Bouillon shows an attitude that his more seasoned colleagues lack - a fascination with piecing together the facts of their investigations, more appealing to her than easy promotion.

La nuit du 12 - Grenoble memorial.

She and Grinberg are, as we might expect, the film’s most sympathetic characters. However this is not a re-run of current bloke bashing, despite indicators - “Most crimes are committed by men and most cops are men”, the squad ridiculing the young member’s belief in romance, Lanner’s disaster marriage or even Judge Grinberg’s dismissal of Bouillon’s jokey move on her - “Ne faites pas des bêtises!”  

Night of the 12th’s interrogations and cop conversations serve to illustrate  Grinberg’s assessment that current society is alarmingly distorting the way men and women relate -  violence endorsing rap songs, a lover who gets the giggles, sado-masochistic couplings and crazy idealisation. Even the loving family failed their daughter. When Grinberg’s character articulates this view, Moll is spelling it out for us - very bluntly German that - though the film is set in remote Grenoble and spoken in French.

Rather alarmingly, the published notices don’t seem to get it and they express dissatisfaction over the police procedural developments which we are shown, with deliberate emphasis, are not the point of the piece, even to the extent of a totally anti cop-movie conclusion.

Production values are modest - austere, effective film making and vivid performances. I’m not sure that Moll and his lot have completely solved the problems of going off tradition but Night of the 12 is still a class act.

The new English See How They Run is also a police investigation piece but it’s on the way to being polar opposite, jokey and with no pretense to realism. However a close reading proves it also is an attack on traditional form.

I homed in on this one because it shows the environment I shipped into. It is set in fifties London, still post war drab, where Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” is celebrating its hundredth live performance.

While there, I’d been cutting room junior on an Agatha Christie movie.  Writer (the novels that produced the Juliette Greco Whirlpool and the Jack Palance Ten Seconds to Hell) & films (the Dr. Kildares), Laurence P. Bachmann was studio head. He came back from a conference with the author where she had admired the cannon mounts being used as set decoration and asked for one for her garden. Larry Bachman observed “She must be tired of firing from the hip.” I was the only one who laughed.

With See How They Run the indicators are there from the start with a voice-over that uses what sound like one of those terrible American accents, RADA actors were proud of, until we realise it’s Adrian Brody as a blacklisted Hollywood director, nailing the voice perfectly. He’s been hired to adapt the play as a movie, though they can’t go into production till six months after the end of the first theatrical run. Pretty soon we get Haris Dickinson doing a mean take on Richard Attenborough, all chummy seriousness of purpose that doesn’t quite ring true, and Reece Shearsmith as John Wolf. The’re among the murder suspects that returned WW2 veteran Inspector Sam Rockwell and constable Saoirse Ronan (particularly winning at mixing gormless and conscientious) are investigating under the personal supervision of Commissioner Tim Key. Nice to find Shirley Henderson turning up unexpectedly and is that John Cleese unbilled, as one of the on-stage cast?

See How They Run - Rockwell & Ronan.

In with the farcical complications, the film has incidentals that give it surprise conviction. The shadow of WW2 hangs over it. There’s a glimpse of Rockwell as a separated dad hobbyist turning out a home jigsaw for his children. We get plausible period detail helped by shooting in locations like the Savoy and the real theater which were empty under Covid restrictions. This gets to be a distraction - where is that back street Soho pub? How come James Wolf’s office has posters for The African Queen and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman which the real Wolf produced, next to one for the Mankiewicz No Way Out with which he had no known connection. I never met Wolf and have no idea whether he was actually doing his black P.A. but there were only a couple of balcklisted directors working in England at that stage (Edward Dmytrick had purged his guilt and Sam Wanamaker was still acting) and it’s far fetched to imagine serious minded Joe Losey or Cy Enfield showing up with a story board of a car chase and shoot out they proposed to introduce into an adaptation of “The Mousetrap”. As here, Losey did work with a West Indian writer, though.

Brody’s original exposition had him expressing contempt for the Agatha Christie conventions he’s called upon to use, the same ones we see being played out as the film progresses, in all their fake intensity - finding the body, interviewing character actor suspects, the mystery woman in Brody’s little red book, a gathering at the country house with the realisation that suspects are now potential victims.  

I’ve always been uneasy with the notion of Agatha Christie, something that is at once simple minded and deeply perverse, as suitable mass entertainment. René Clair made the only Christie adaptation I enjoy, casting comedians playing the characters straight, which gave And Then There Were None just the right note of artificiality. I don’t think any of the people I was working with had ever seen that one - maybe star, the endearing Margaret Rutherford.

 

The substance of See How They Run is that it is a critique of the Christie industry, which is still with us in the Branagh adaptations, just like The Night of the 12th, hoeing into the policier conventions. I’d like to watch See How They Run double billed with the Michael Apted 1979 Agatha, offering Vanessa Redgrave as an unbalanced version of the writer.  

I'd guess it's no accident that two substantial new theatrical releases feature passages that dismiss the films that precede them - Grinberg's analysis and Brody's voice over. Both films are saying that a twenty First Century audience needs to be fed something more aware.

Barrie Pattison 2022.

PORDENONE 2022.

This year’s Pordenone gionate del cinema muto came down the wire right on message, airing silent movie material that would have been inaccessible without them and in presentations doing justice to the materials - a big tick for that. Only part of the schedule was put out on line and on-the spot participants describe pleasures denied us fifty dollar net viewers. That's actually a pretty good deal but I miss getting all the Norma Talmadge season, not to mention the gelato & pizza and the face to face with that informed audience a dozen of which could be glimpsed watching the live discussions without their Covid masks . 

Reports were particularly enthusiastic about the Talmadge event. I’ve been a fan for the sixty years plus since I located that nice original of Sidney Franklin’s The Safety Curtain in the local Kodascope Library and foisted it on the Sydney Film Society, which would have been much happier with something that got at least a page in “The Film Till Now”. (“Aw, come to the previews, folks!”) 

There she was lively and teenaged with Maurice Costello among the Costermongers in the 1912 Vitagraph one reeler Mrs. 'Enry 'Awkins. Her vehicles as star/producer were a different matter. 1920’s Yes or No turned out to be a formula morality telling it’s target audience that the path of virtue earns rewards for women despite dastardly seducers tempting them.

Blonde 5th Avenue society hostess Norma is neglected by stock broker husband Fred Burton,
facing a heart attack for all his efforts to keep her in luxury. She draws the attention of lounge lizard with black lip make up Lowell Sherman “a specialist in the art of entertaining neglected wives.”

Over on Third Avenue, brunette Norma struggles in a cramped flat while her husband Rockliffe Fellowes does overtime on the (real) factory floor. Brother in law, a young Ed Brophy, gives her kids lessons in table manners.  “Eat yer food. Don’t kiss it!” Lecherous border Gladden James eyes dark haired Norma who’s complaining “I ain't been outside for a month.” Lively (third) Talmadge sister Natalie, who married Buster Keaton, provides a link as the socialite’s maid and worker mum’s sister.

Rockliffe draws inspiration from his wife’s chores and invents a hand tumbler washing machine. Called to a sales meeting with his sister in law’s suitor Dudley Clements, he leaves Norma Mark II to James who takes the opportunity to put moves on her (inset close up of his hands turning and pocketing the door key) with Rockliffe coming home just as the screen is filling with “No” titles. He dumps the low-life over the banisters and the couple live happily ever after.

However Norma Mark One gives in to Sherman, causing her husband to succumb to his ailment. This leaves her in her dove infested country home, learning that Lowell will never marry her, and he foils her attempt to take him out with her boxed  pistol.

The film’s big question is “Which is worse - a woman who has love but no marriage or a woman who has marriage but no love?” Well, we’ll all ponder that one. The film’s one selling point is Talmadge’s attractive and nicely differentiated double role.

I saw it as a let down, when it’s the earliest accessible effort of director Roy William Neil, whose Sherlock Holmes and Boris Karloff movies enlivened the double features that were my first experience of the movies. Cameraman Ernie Haller (Gone With the Wind, Blues in the Night) is already on top of his game - even though that looks like back focus in one scene and the opening titles wobble.

Also starring Norma Talmadge, 1925’s The Lady just proved what a bad idea it was to turn Frank Borzage and Frances Marion loose on the same project, a Madam X rip off in the first place.

A gracefully aged Norma is recounting her hard life to forgotten Australian co-star Malcom McDermot (He Who Gets Slapped, The Torrent) in the seedy bar she owns, when drunken WW1 Tommy Walter Long (Birth of a Nation) is out to make trouble. We learn about her previous triumph in The Halls, where she spurns the top hat toffs at the stage door, for upper class suitor Wallace MacDonald, one of the first movie stars, later Buck Jones’ side kick and a producer at Columbia. His mean dad Brandon Hurst has tracked them down and disinherits Wallace after failing to buy off Norma, flourishing her little band of gold.

The Lady - Talmadge and McDonald

The young couple set off for Monte Carlo (shaky process sky) where Wallace rapidly burns his billfold of notes at the tables and encounters his former privileged class squeeze Paulette Duval. She now proves more alluring than “guttersnipe” Norma, who ends staggering round studio Marseilles, where she collapses in Emily (the Joseph Schildcraut Show Boat) Fitzroy’s sordid bar with all its multi racial vice girls. Emily takes her in to deliver her baby but disdainful Mudie arrives with a court order to remove his grandchild from this low life environment. Distraught, Norma ships the baby through the back door with adoring minister’s wife Margaret Seddon (also on show in Just Around the Corner) never to be seen again, rather than let Mudie ruin him the way he did her late husband McDonald.

Soon we find Norma become a flower lady in London (one Hansom cab, two bicycles) peering at boys who she suspects of being her lost son. Old Music Hall associates Doris Lloyd and later director Alf Goulding don’t recognise her. As years go by, she inherits Fitzroy’s bar where (is that an uncredited?) Mischa Auer’s Apache dance is the entertainment. Long gets out of hand and is shot by young British Tommy George Hackathorne. Finding his name tag, Norma recognises her lost child and takes the blame but the kid has too much backbone to let a woman pay for his actions.

The plot is unalloyed weepy and the distinguished participants can’t make it fly. William Cameron Menzies was a regular on producer Schenck’s films but his best effort here is one Marseilles street with curved steps. Tony Gaudio will later film the Errol Flynn Robin Hood and Editor Hal C. Kern will cut Rebecca. The film does show Talmadge doing her glamorous but tormented act impeccably and give a glimpse of all this big league Hollywood talent running up to speed but I’m left nostalgic for The Safety Curtain.

 

Frances Marion is always touted as an example of female success in silent Hollywood, a high priced screen writer who also directed two movies. With the current interest in that profile, her little seen 1921 William Randolph Hearst production of Fanny (“Back Street”) Hurst’s Just Around the Corner was offered.

“What bitter cruelty, what deep tenderness are hidden in the depths of a great city” Marion’s title assures us. Established by shots of those familiar New York street markets, we are shown that just around the corner, over a Chinese restaurant, single mother Margaret Seddon has raised her now adult children, bouncy uniformed messenger Lewis Sargent and his sister - Sigrid Holmquist, “the Swedish Mary Pickford" in her first US role. Her health failing, Seddon is tended by the children giving her castor oil.

Holmquist slaves away in a sweat shop turning out artificial flowers (close up of a real worker’s practiced hands) with take-home assignments to avoid labor laws. Sargent gets into an argument with the mean boss but Holmquist finds a new job with friend Peggy Parr as an usher at the Appollo Theatre - pity we don’t see more of that. This brings her into contact with Ticket Scalper Eddie Phillips, who takes her to a “Swell Sixty Cent Restaurant” but refuses to meet mother Seddon, causing alarm to at the prospect that the pair might kiss before setting a date for the wedding. 

In the winter night, it seems that Seddon will breathe her last and her one wish is to meet her daughter’s beau but Phillips claims an important business meeting. He can’t be dislodged from the pool hall. Struggling with no coat through the snow Holmquist attracts the attention of a passing stranger who is stirred by her plight and impersonates the missing boy friend.

It’s hard to relate this treacly effort to Marion’s great, realist The Big House script. It’s more like her tear jerking The Champ. Just Around the Corner could plausibly have been attributed to that film’s director, King Vidor with its polished handling and intense feel for setting. It has the location exteriors that Yes or No needed - market stalls, deep snow in the streets that a tram plows through, the siblings peering into the window of the flap jack cafe where the chef is at work while pavement activity continues behind them. There’s also a dance marathon. Marion had mastered the craft aspects of direction.

While this appears to be an unfamiliar cast piece, we can find Eddie Phillips in Lonesome, neighbor Rosa Rosanova in Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation and Lewis Sargent was a 1920 Huckleberry Finn. The benevolent stranger is no less than lay preacher Fred Thompson who Marion married and made over into one of the last great silent cowboy stars. This curiously is the one time I’ve seen him in a movie.

The copy was attractively tinted and Stehen Horne did a sterling job of synching the on screen restaurant piano player.

 

The event’s other program theme,  Ruritanian films, threw up Ubaldo Maria Del Colle’s 1912 Sui gradini del trono / On the Steps of the Throne with elements of frock coat melo, Prizoner of Zenda, Man in the Iron Mask  & Mayerling mashed up.

Heir to the throne of Silistria (read Ruritania) Prince Wadimiro / Alberto Capozzi has eyes for Countess Olga but the evil Regent wants the Royal to marry his daughter and, when that doesn’t work out, he dispatches Wadamiro to Paris. There he attends the cabaret where “the little dancer” Taïs, gets his attention with her Hall of Mirrors number. The regent’s Top Hat and black frock coat agent, given to silent movie gestures, locates the Crown Prince lookalike in the Tango outfit and lures Wadimiro into the room with the trap door trap under the mat, dropping him into the cellar where the mustachioed guard is to dispatch him with a barrel of gun powder. However Taïs relents and cuts our hero loose to overpower the guard and drop the villainous agent through the trap door into the blast.

Back in Silistria, the double is getting to enjoy the Prince part, shuns Countess Olga and disposes of her fencing master dad. The impostor is about to celebrate marriage to the Regent’s daughter when Wadimiro shows up and overcomes the dastard with the aid of loyal troops, claiming Olga. What happens to Taïs?

Film form is creeping into this mainly wide shot staging - the (one) foreground doorway, a few close ups - the photo of Olga, the giveaway scar on the wrist. Mainly however it’s over-decorated studio interior wide shots. Portly Capozzi is at first a rather unappealing leading man but he  differentiates the doubles nicely and has the striking quick change act where he exits the frame with the co star left to strike attitudes while he changes outfit and comes back as his second self from the other side. Reasonable ambition for its day, it all manages to hold attention. The tinted copy had frame line problems.

The baggy uniforms are notably less imposing than the ones for MGM’s Ruritanians, looking more like the outfits the real military wear in the 1912 Montenegrorian parade short Dalla Villa Reale DI Rjeka which accompanied the Pordenone showing and were probably turned out by the same military tailors.

I certainly more enjoyed inventive Hal Roach two reeler Rupert of Hee Haw burlesquing “Prisoner of Zender”, joke-credited to “The Prisoner of Zebra.”  

In the court, prince Stan Laurel borrows a sentry’s musket to shoot the bird in the cuckoo clock. When he sneezes the retainer’s hat lifts, comic uneven sword fight, the Our Gang kids line up to cheer his appearance and commoner Stan (no split screen) menaces his domination. Mrs. Stan is a Princess.

Drab settings, good pace. Clever gags keep coming at a faster rate than the later films with Oliver Hardy.

Profanazione, Eugenio Perego’s dis-spiriting 1924 weepy, goes some way towards filling the gap in our knowledge of Italian film in the mid twenties. Star Leda Gys otherwise got to play the Virgin Mary and marry producer Gustavo Lombardo. Here she suffers through implausible disasters in a variety of unbecoming hair styles.

Capozzi

Traveling for an overseas commitment, her diplomat husband Luciano, (Alberto Capozzi now back from On the Steps of the Throne mature) leaves Gys in the care of her brother, locking the money borrowed from the diner suit wearing financier in a box. Alberto however discovers that his creditor hungers after Gys and sends instructions that the debt be immediately repaid. However his brother in law has gambled it away. Selling Gys’ jewels will not raise the sum required.

When a messenger comes to collect, Gys goes to the lustful financier and, out of frame with implausible speed and no undressing, he has his way of her. The family doctor assures her that she is pregnant. She produces two girls, one  by Capozzi and one by “l’uomo odiato”(?) who is tortured by the need to see his child.

Returning husband Capozzi is unaware of the situation. We however get some ham fisted symbolism when the children’s pet bird returns to the open cage with a companion which the daughters can’t tell apart. Capozzi councils “By loving both you will certainly love your own.” (get it!)

Gys

Gys sets out to prevent the dastard’s visit and we cut to the two girls playing with a toy car which falls off the table at the moment their mum and her partner in shame crash down a slope. They are laid out in a cow shed with little hope that the seducer will regain consciousness. He however recovers and, with the encouragement of the attending nurse-nun (“Parla!”), misleads Luciano as to the parentages of the two girls, to ensure sympathetic treatment of his own offspring. The father buys it and rejects his own daughter while Gys fakes amnesia. The child throws a tantrum screaming “Volio babbino!” His rejection will kill her. Luciano takes the lesson of the two birds and all ends well.

This thin narrative is played out by the drab, middle aged cast in realistic rich home decors. It’s hard to understand how Signora Gys, got up in twenties fashions with a fish net veil, inspires such passion. The cuts sometimes don’t quite match and the technique is basic - one iris fade. Cameraman Victor Arménise later did Raoul Walsh’s Jump for Glory and Sascha Guitry’s Ils etaient neuf celibataires.

If you grew up with this one and its companion pieces, Ossessione must have seemed realistic and raunchy. The specter still hovers over the the Italian Yvonne Sanson - Amedeo Nazzari fifties weepies.

The Profanazione copy was a sharp restoration from a black and white print showing some wear. It was run marginally too fast.

It must have seemed like a nice idea to repeat the one silent film shown at the first Venice Film Festival, Karel Plicka’s documentary Po horach, po dolach / Over Mountains, Over Valleys but this proved a heavy sledding travelogue, kids games and National Dress, not enhanced by showing it had been reproduced through the wrong aperture at one stage.

 

Britain’s Anthony Asquith was privileged, charming and talented and his quarter century collaboration with Terence Rattigan made him the most respected figure in their film industry, as his competitors faded or shipped out in search of the Hollywood dollar. He even headed up the feared technician’s union but business dynamics meant he was continually slogging away on time fillers. He liked The Woman in Question but hated The Net - which I rather enjoyed.

This was happening as early as 1929’s The Runaway Princess, a film which I assumed had vanished. I didn’t catch it in the London NFT Asquith season or a Paris Cinémathèque tribute to British cinema, the pair of which incidentally both provided viewings on his Dance Pretty Lady, now allowed to vanish in the way Hindle Wakes had, though the films were their makers’ best work.

   Christians

A jerky tilt reveals a riverside castle where Princess Mady Christians (Ein Walzertraum, Letter from an Unknown Woman)  is celebrated by an all girl’s choir. Her bicycle careers down hill in the woods and she has to be rescued by a tweedy Paul Cavanaugh.

 Determined to escape a planned royal marriage, Mady flees with aged advisor Fred Rains (better trains in The Flying Scot and Manolescu) and sets up in bustling London, determined to get work. A misunderstanding has her doing a brief turn as a fashion model. However court life has left her unprepared for dealing with the outside world and she is soon scooped up in the forgery ring headed by Nora Baring (Cottage on Dartmore, Murder) who remain one step ahead of cop Claude Beerbohm. It’s Cavanaugh to the resue again before we get to the formula happy ending. 

Despite a split director credit, Pordenone’s researches indicated the film was in Asquith’s hands. He pushes it along briskly but we sit there waiting for the jokes which, when they arrive - Mady as a fashion mannequin on roller skates - are pretty feeble.

The film’s one real asset is the winning turn by Christians, with Baring’s contrasting fraudster the only other one to register as more than stock British support.    

 

Swindler George Manolescu’s memoirs seem to have proven irresistible to film makers with Conrad Veidt appearing in a 1920 Richard Oswald version, Iván Petrovich in a 1933 George Klaren - Willi Wolf film and Hans Quest's 1972 Manolescu - Die fast wahre Biographie eines Gauners. A couple of the scams we see perpetrated in Viktor Tourjansky’s 1929 Manolescu - Der König der Hochstapler on view here are genuinely ingenious.

This is a movie milestone, the one teaming of Ivan Mozjoukine and Brigitte Helm, both at the pinnacle of their star luster. The scenes where they get physical are arresting though the only nudity is Briggitte discretely revealed in her bath. It’s the last full silent for both, (we can spot the light up sign for the Vitaphone Noah’s Ark in it’s London night street shooting) and one of the first films to use process back projection, here ingeniously in a negative trial dream where only a panel with Mozjoukine is positive.

We kick off with the Eiffel tower fog bound, while the gendarmes roust a clochard trying to sleep on a bench and top hatted Ivan is introduced casually among the revelers exiting a night club. But it’s “Adieu Paris” now that our hero’s Blvd. Haussmann sports club has banned him for not repaying their loan.

Manolescu - Mozjoukine & Helm.

On the same train platform Brigitte is farewelling her low-life lover Heinrich George (Metropolis’ spanner waving foreman) who climbs into her carriage, when he spots the police waiting for him, but exits trackside, as the train pulls out. The cops institute a compartment search which will reveal Brigitte, who has already caught Ivan’s attention, though she gives him the cold (but glamorous) shoulder. To escape their interest she shelters in Ivan’s sleeping compartment - putting the forces of the law off but leading to a reluctant coupling.

At the Monte Carlo platform she sends our hero off to get the umbrella she left on the train but scarpers while he goes back for it. It's mix from the wheels of the cab to the roulette table and Ivan spots her in the foyer of the hotel where she plans on meeting Heinrich. Ivan buys an umbrella from the concession and offers it. Banished to the room's balcony, he notices the woman in the next suite, hiding her cash box in the dresser.

Brigitte tells our hero that he will not be able to support her in the manner to which she has become accustomed and he remembers the cash box, starting their troubled life of crime in European capitals, while her would-be admirers like Harry Hardt accumulate in luxury cafes or the theater where girls in baskets are lowered among streamers onto the stage.

The Paris police have collected a dossier of Ivan’s false identities - the photos happen to be characters from other Mozjoukine films.

Heinrich comes out of The Joint, where the warder patrols in the corridor between the prisoners & visitors. The former lover tries to reclaim his interest, leading to a “Canaille” exchange of insults and a soso punch out. Recovering in hospital, Ivan attracts attention, from Sister Dita Parlo no less! Brigitte takes a dim view of this and, when nurse and patient do a blissful alpine recuperation, Brigitte sends a couple of menacing pursuers, flashing the police badges under their lapels, to the chalet where the pair are celebrating Xmas. The stern faces soften when the representatives of the law see them and they allow Ivan a tearful final drink before carrying him off into the nocturnal blizard with Dita following under cranked, swearing to wait for him.

Brigitte tells Heirich she has betrayed her lover - her shadow on the wall doubling her gestures.

Helm and Mozjoukine are right on top of their game, expressions and body language conveying a barrage of emotions. Even the lustrous Dita Parlo is eclipsed. The playing and late silent film technique are so accomplished that we are left wishing for a stronger plot to house all these busy city-scapes, shadows & mirrors, conspicuous consumption and Brigitte flinging herself about in her cloche hats and sleeveless René Hubert outfits, as Karl Hoffman’s camera glides among the convincing Herlth & Röhrig studio constructions - even if they do have trouble keeping focus in the track-ins. A presentable copy did this justice.

My unreliable forty year old memory of being one of the single figure three o’clock mid week afternoon viewers at Langlois' Cinémathèque, is of a less physical train sequence playing the leads unedited in wide shot - the best thing in the production.

 

Ragnar Hyltén-Cavallius’ Swedish 1928 Majestät schneidet Bubiköpfe / Hans Kungl. Höghet shinglar / His Majesty the Barber started like it will be another Lubitsch rip-off. The treatment of Maria Paudler being bobbed, shingled and cropped to get barber Enrique Rivero’s attention is as cruel as the routines in Trouble in Paradise and That Uncertain Feeling. However this one develops into an original and rather winning rom com.

Newly graduated from Upsala-U, Enrique Rivero comes back to the small town, where his foster dad Hans Junkermann is the barber, in time for Midsummer’s Eve Festival. Count Julius Falkenstein is being pushed as a suitable suitor for young Brita Appelgren by her rich, overbearing mother Karin Swanström. The girl is dismissive, saying she won’t settle for anyone less than a king and is actually interested in Rivero though they keep on having comic misunderstandings - getting stranded when his row boat drifts away or her bogus ‘phone call to the Count exposed.

However a three master, from Tirania the old country, arrives sending coded lamp signals to Junkermann now believing his ward is their rightful king, who he has been sheltering since childhood, when there was a revolution among those scimitar waving guys in white skirts, the types we used to see dancing round trees in Greek movies. The ship brings operatives who promise a revolution to restore Rivero to the Thousand Year Iron Crown of Tirania. The trouble is that it takes one thing, “Pengar, pengar, pengar” and who has that kind of money but Swanström.

This looks like working out in the best musical comedy manner, except there’s no music. The design impresses with the locals dancing in circles for the festival, the windjammer where they have continuity problems on the sails unfurling or Swanström’s imposing German studio built staircase. The development is clever and the touch is light. His Majesty the Barber is a nice example of that superior twilight period of the silent film and leaves you wondering about the dismissed Swedish product of its day. It was generally considered a highlight of the event.

Majestät schneidet Bubiköpfe - Brita Appelgren

Rivero was the lead in Cocteau’s Sang d’un poét and Renoir’s Le bled and just about keeps up with the deft European comic players recruited to back him. Hans Junkermann was Polonius to Asta Neilsen‘s Hamlet. Albert Steinrück featured in Der golem and Asphalt. Cameraman Alex Linblom co-directed Den starkaste, Alf Sjöberg’s first movie. Spot Curt (Casablanca) Bois as a pretender to the Iron Crown.

Pordenone wound up nicely with director E. Mason Hopper’s long lost 1926 film of the once notorious Up in Mabel's Room. This starts, opened out for no particular reason, with the men passengers clustering round the steamer cabin of glamorous Marie Prevost, after a misunderstanding has made her divorce her architect husband Harrison Ford  (the original, refuse all imitations).

 Up in Mabel's Room - Ford and Prevost.

She determines to get him back despite his resolution never to divorce the same woman twice. After what suggests the remains of a first act set in Ford's city office, they find themselves invited to one of those week end parties like the one in Midnight, along with friends Harry Myers, Phyllis Haver, Paul Nicholson and Australia’s own Silvia Breamer (with William S. Hart in The Narrow Trail) and their retainers. Merry japes ensue as Ford attempt to recover the sentiment-embroidered camisole he gave Prevost, which could compromise his engagement to Haver, now wearing the glittery ring Ford borowed from rejected Mason, to stall Prevost.

Don’t expect any of this to make much sense as the characters in stages of undress scramble through windows, hide in a trunk, behind a screen or under a bed, all variously finding themselves ending up in Mabel’s room. Some of this is agilely staged with aged butler William Orlamond particularly doing routines which got him attention in the original reviews.

Prevost.

In a pattern which persists to the present, the women are chic and jazz-era appealing, while the men work at being dorky. The thick theatrical make up doesn’t help them. Production is quite drab, even with a lively night club interlude where musician Günter A. Buchwald tried to convince us the band was endlessly re-cycling “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” All the effort has gone into show casing the glamour leads and staging farcical developments at top speed and that works out pretty well.

This must have rocked 1926 audiences, coming after the hit theater run, where I suspect the unfamiliar support perfected their timing. It was followed by the De Mille/Erle C. Kenton rip-off Girl in the Pullman (same plot and leads on a train) and Alan Dwan’s forties re-make, which I always enjoyed. Now forgotten director E. Mason Hoppper was back to the well with the leads in his version of Getting Gertie’s Garter in 1927.

Well, I sat there reflecting on the fact that I was quite likely the only person in the country trying to psych myself into the frame of mind of the audience that fell about watching this one time success from scandal. The memory of The ABC’s Television program came back. They'd sent in one of the Willesees to do an item on my archive and he concluded that being interested in past its use by date entertainment was ridiculous and put a hatchet job to air. I thought it was dim then but I begin to feel how, without a serious movie community, that can get to be the default position. That's quite disturbing.

Barrie Pattison 2022.