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.