Rider Hagard Sued

The Secret Spring - musician

The arrival of a nice tinted copy of Léonce Perret’s three hour 1923 Koenigsmark / The Secret Spring on La Cinémathèque Française’s Henri streaming site fired up my deja vus. It brought back the nineteen fifties week end when I threaded that dupey 16mm. of the silent Jaques Feyder L’atalantide on ABC TVs new Steenbeck editing table, the copy the Federation of Film Archives stiffed the National Library with, to sustain the illusion that they were looking after them and get them to subscribe. The Sunday shift gathered round, intrigued by an already decades old movie.  

I remember thinking that was a testimony to vintage popular film. These were people who would have ignored Un chien Andalou.  

Koenigsmark and L’atalantide are both derived from novels by Academie Française member Pierre Benoît. He and his work inhabit a long past era. Rider Hagard once sued him for copyright infringement over the resemblances between “She” and “L’atalantide.” You could make a case for the Benoît plots as accounts of women in power, currently topical, but watching the The Secret Spring did seem like a chore, mandated to fill in that gap in knowledge of French film between Louis Feuillade and René Clair. However, as sixty years ago, I found myself sucked in.

I’ve already discussed the plot in my July 1st 2020 coverage of the 1937 Pierre Fresnay - Elissa Landi version Crimson Dynasty, which carries a credit to Perret for scenario, a holdover from his work preparing the sound re-make, halted by Perret’s death.

Koenigsmark 1923 / The Secret Spring: Huguette Duflos, Marcya Capri in decor.

 The silent Secret Spring clocks in nearly half an hour longer giving time to adjust to it’s tempo and frame of reference - extended stag hunt and and a more convincing fire sequence, without the obvious model work of the thirties film, and it contains the same peculiarities, notably the fleeting appearance of the Duke’s son. Clara Tambour shows up briefly as an exotic dancer for no particular reason. The hint of lesbian attraction to lady in waiting Mélusine de Graffenfried is clearer in the sound film, which was taken over by Maurice Tourneur no less.

There are a couple more later adaptations, one by Solange Térac with Silvana Pampanini in 1953 and a TV film by Jean Kerchbron in 1968.

In 1923 however, it was Comedie Française star Huguette Duflos (notable in the Marcel L’Herbier early sound  versions of Gaston Leroux'  Le mystère de la chambre jaune and Le Parfum de la dame in noir) here  forced into the mariage blanc with Henry Houry’s Grand-duc Rodolphe de Lautenbourg. This places her in the succession for head of state, putting out of joint the nose of Georges Vaultier’s ambitious Grand Duke Frederick. We get the hunt injury, a royal wedding and Houry’s leading an expedition to the Cameroun accompanied Vaultier's co-plotter Paul Vermoyal.  Poet Jaque Catelain is brought to the Lautenbourg palace as one of those commoner-tutors that front up these films - think the heroes of multiple versions of The Swan.  He is smitten with Duflos.  

Now forgotten, Catelain was a recurring face in twenties French melodramas and, here younger, he is a more convincing focus for our sympathies - though those plucked eye brows are still a bit much.

 Secret Spring - Duflos

Duflos’ glamor is more plausible as she displays the transition from the earlier decades’ ugly high fashion to the more presentable styles found in the French haute couture film cycle then beginning. She even has a miroir à trois faces.

Catelain’s midnight investigation of the “Hall of Armor” unearths the secret of Koenigsmark, complete with safe cracking and false identities. The bad hats resolve to burn down the East Wing of the Castle to cover their misdeeds, while a duel has Iván Petrovich, lead of Michael Curtiz silents, facing Catelain with pistols at dawn until Hugette reminds him that she bought Petrovich's honor as an officer along with his gambling debts. 

There’s still space for an eve of WW1 nocturnal flight in the white “Torpedo” car, flourishing dodgey safe conducts to border guards and a climax at the Arc de Triomphe - or not - depending on whether you get the happy end. These flamboyant plot complications work better here than in the sound films.

First off is the fact that Secret Spring, not unlike the Twentieth Century B westerns, is set in that curious period where mounted cavalry occupy the same world as electric light, telephones and automobiles. A more appropriate comparison is with the long lived costume melodrama esthetic of MGM efforts like "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "The Merry Widow", with which the French film more than holds its own. Performances are uniformly well judged.

Secret Spring - Duflos with toned feux d'artifice.

Perret’s Secret Spring is a big production with hoards of parading, uniformed troops, extensive location shooting and huge, elaborately decorated sets to fill out it’s three hours. Also, the Henri copy makes some of the best use of hand coloring I’ve seen - the multi toned cascades of Roman candles, the swerving car head lights red in the dark night. Along with the use of iris fades and the victims' montage which disposes of the aristo villain, these represent the technique of the day at it’s most polished and the copy, a reasonable dupe, show cases the work.

Until Pordenone mounted a season of his early work with muse Susanne Grandais, I knew Perret’s name only from obscure literature - an actor in Feuillade movies and a two reel comic, though there actually prove to be a couple of pages of his clips and shorts on You Tube. His touch, when a seasoned director, remains sure, after all this time.

We can understand why he returned to Secret Spring, which appears to be a center piece in his work. It runs to an on screen movie show, like the one in his 1912 Le mystère des roches de Kador, and the fireworks display repeats in his 1926 La femme nue with Petrovich. 

            Secret Spring -The wonder of 35mm. home movies - Capri & Duflos.

 A hundred year old, three hour movie with untranslated French language captions is not for everyone but, to a motivated viewer, it is one of the best ways to be transported back into the idiom of its film making and the mind set of it’s day. I’m delighted to find I can still enjoy that.

Jaque Catelain in Le vertige.

Barrie Pattison - 2023

More John Ford.

 Time was John Ford stood in for the entire American Cinema. Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, René Clair and John Ford, and you were sweet. The rest was national local consumption or mere commercial product. It was a simpler era but vapors of sanctity still swirl about the great man. I must admit that my own admiration was second to none and was boosted as the films of the early thirties escaped the vaults.

However, though he’s on the way to being the most documented figure in film, the John Ford cult sweeps a lot of his work under the mat, his military moral boosters which include a sex hygiene movie, his silent cowboy two-reelers and his stumbling first ventures in sound. 

One of these, Born Reckless of 1930, another William Fox Company early talkie production, has bubbled to the surface of the U-Tube swamp in a just about watchable copy.

This was obviously an A feature with a decent budget and using the Fox company’s best personnel. At this stage it’s hard to tell whether they were Fox people or Ford regulars. Jack Penneck and Ward Bond show up briefly as noncom. Doughboys.

The plot  reads like a first draft of next year’s much better John Cromwell film The Mighty - gangster is drafted and, after distinguished service comes back home to sort out the mob. Dudley Nichols, who would become Hollywood’s most respected writer, largely through his collaboration with Ford, is responsible.

The opening is a good clue, with a striking silhouette shot of a team of safe breakers at work, framed by stilted dialogue and filming in a cramped studio street setting. The background noise comes & goes on edits.

The bulls arrive for star Edmund Lowe and, at headquarters, it looks as if the gang will be sent up the river until reporter (again) Lee Tracy suggests the mayor can win votes by having the members join up. “You  let these guys go to France and the whole East Side will be proud of you.”

Ed pals with fresh faced Frank Albertson with an eye on his sister Catharine Dale Owen but she’s got Randolph Scott lined up, in possibly his first speaking part. His couple of scenes are filmed to favor the other players but he comes across effectively as a well-spoken and dignified disposable consort. 

D'Avril & Lowe

There's labored military comedy with the fat corporal given the bat after a baseball has startled the officer’s horse or Ed working his way into the good graces of village girl Yola d'Avril with a bag of stores sugar. To remind us this is a talkie, the military keeps on breaking out in song. Things pick up briefly when the Boche bomb the column but we get back civy-side uncomfortably rapidly.

There our hero is torn between his old loyalties to Big Shot Waren Hymer and the gang and his clean record new start. A "Two Years Later" title dissolves to the awning with Ed’s name and he’s running an up market night club. However the mob kidnaps Dale Owen’s baby and outraged Ed goes into action rescuing the kid and facing off the low-lifes. He and Hymer stand hands in the pockets of their overcoats - exchange of shots in the dark, (briefer  than The Mighty but quite effective) and Ed staggers on like Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy or Jean Servais in Rififi. 

Hymer & Loew

Though this one is “A John Ford Production” it has a credit for staging and The Faithful attribute its shortcomings to Andrew Bennison who would quickly disappear from the scene. The comedy is feeble and attractive Marguerite Churchill wasted. The family material with Ma and Pa Ferike Boros and Paul Porcasi is particularly cringeworthy.

The shadow of Sunrise can still be seen with shooting on that film's swamp set and the occasional piece of Germanic lighting, as in the robbery and gunman shadow falling across the bar’s center opening doors but these fail to redeem the general clumsiness. Still it’s better than Ford’s   The Black Watch and his next film Up the River would be quite presentable. Our man was on a steep learning curve.

    

I see Ford's recently uncovered 1918 Hell Bent as altogether more rewarding. It's his number five feature as director and is full of things that we will find in his mature work. 

Remington

Ford

They even sing “Genevieve” (mute). This one makes explicit the connection with Frederick Remington by starting with the failing writer drawing inspiration from the Remington painting “The Misdeal” which they re-stage and bring to life. Throw in having an extended male rivalry horseplay section and featuring picturesque western vistas - the bad hats signaling from increasingly scenic peaks before they join up, Duke Lee and the Indian guide (one feather) against the sunset.

 We kick off with Cheyenne Harry Carey, presumably fresh from the incidents in the painting, producing the cards concealed all over him, on the run from a posse blazing away till he’s safe across the river in Gil county. Arriving in Rawhide Town he rides his horse onto the The Last Bet Saloon and Dance Hall floor and demands a room only to be told all the beds already have three men in them, except for the one occupied by Cimmaron Bill / Lee who won’t share, so Harry rides on into his room, where Harry’s horse munches on the hay in the mattress while its rider ejects the tenant out the window at gunpoint, into the muck heap below. Lee comes back and it’s Harry out the window but, before they shoot it out, they discover a mutual enthusiasm for song and buddy up.

Harry Carey

Meanwhile things are tough with serial queen, winning Neva Gerber and her no good brother Vester Pegg, whose ailing mother appears to have been cut out of this copy. Pegg tells Neva she's squeamish about taking the only jobs on offer as saloon girl. When she appears in her floozie outfit, she is terrified at being mobbed but Harry recognises her distress and comes to her aid before putting moves on her himself. Being a gentleman beneath his rough exterior, he  backs off.

Slicker Joe Harris recruits Pegg into his stage robber gang and, when Harry bails them up, he un-masks Pegg, making our hero retreat, to protect Gerber.

The gang is holed up in familiar locale, Beale’s Cut Newall County (the one they run the stage coach race through in the Tom Mix The Last Trail) where Harry sets out to rescue the girl and he and Harris end up taking rounds in a shoot-out in the desert (“you’ll cook with me”) leaving the one horse for Gerber to escape. Harris doesn’t survive the dust storm but Harry is rescued by Lee and his Indian guide and presumably lives happily ever after.

This one is not just a start point for the development of John Ford but in itself a lively depiction of frontier life, with cheated card games, rough saloons, stage bandits, pelting rain storms and the Pony Express rider racing through the main street with a delivery. Add a struggle through the desert that anticipates Greed. The cast inhabit their stock characters effectively.

Hell Bent - Duke Lee & friend

The film is better and more characteristic than the other circulating early John Fords and I enjoyed it. It gives the impression of being the work of people who liked competing with their great cowboy film maker contemporaries - with William S. Hart, Tom Mix and company. It's a quality that leached out of the bloated films of Ford's last years.

There are two copies on You Tube, an un-restored print up of an original tinted Czech copy with an awful organ score or a cleaned up B&W that runs too fast. You choose.

Barrie Pattison 2023

BABYLON

  Dominic Chazelle’s new Babylon offers something more intense, wilder and more probing than we are used to. You could see it as a ferocious response to the threat of streaming devouring the movie business,

They start as they mean to go. In the peak days of the Hollywood silent film, an elephant defecates over its driver on its way to the Hills mansion where a passed out starlet is found with the naked fat man movie comic in a side room to the full blast orgy. The camera races through a hoard of fornicating, coked-up, naked party goers, with Margot Robbie flinging herself into the action in her scarlet body-baring outfit, backed by Jovan Adepo’s black jazz musicians. Eat your heart out Gaspar Noé or for that matter the best efforts of the porno industry.

Trying to keep a lid on all this is movie-struck Mexican gopher Diego Calva (Narcos), who falls in with superstar Brad Pitt, come through the excesses of the night raring to get on with the next day’s shooting, and motoring onto the location past picketing sign holders and side by side movie sets. This is a career best performance for Pitt. 

Robbie has been recruited there looking confused until, faced with the camera, she snaps into action, dominating the moment and generating her tears on cue. (Morris Elvey was proud of his ability to do that) Olivia Hamilton as the movie's composite of the era’s several woman directors, who all but vanished at that point, is sharp enough to go with this.

Pitt & Calva

Calva has to pull a gun on knife-wielding skid row extras and the breath-catching hundred riders charge smashes the cameras, leaving him to steal an ambulance to race a replacement to the scene before they lose the fading light and capture a vista of crowd activity behind Pitt’s big romantic moment - embrace against the last rays of the sun rimming hundreds of costumed extras and exploding pyrotechnics.  The three hour plus film has hardly started.

Babylon is an evolved kind of animal. It clearly wants to extend the on going self referencing history of the movies, invoking Gloria Swanson star of Sunset Boulevard, pivoting on Singing in the Rain, fronting the stars of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and ending, a bit anti-climactically, with a sustained classic images montage. Gianni Amelio’s compilation on the history of the Italian silent film for the Turin museum is better than that one.

Calva and Smart in hat.

Even without considering the content, Babylon is an extraordinary looking film.  Shot on thirty five millimeter film by Chazelle's regular cameraman Linus Sandgren, Babylon comes full of complex single take travellings and period tableaux. Jean Smart singled out her authenic recycled Erté-era fanned feather head piece among the fifteen hundred costumes Mary Zophres provided the film. Shots of charging warriors or vintage luxury cars running level with the camera pump up attention. I’d have had a buzz out of seeing a tinted twenties Paramount mountain on the front, if  the Wings restoration team hadn’t done that already. All this (include the final montage) must have strained the schedule and the budget.

Babylon centers on the late nineteen twenties arrival of sound, sidestepping the format of the familiar Star Is Borns in favor of a narrative coloured by the versions in the sixties Hollywood TV series from David Wolper, Kevin Brownlow and the BBC. 

Though "serious" critics are one of the few groups they don't find space for, this is one of the rare times that anyone probes the relationship between high art and movies, with Twelve Tone music, Bauhaus, Alexander Scriabin and Eugene O’Neil dropped into the dialogue and silent film star Brad Pitt turning on his theater actress current wife and extolling the movies that, from the Nickelodeons to the picture palaces, have enriched the lives of people who couldn’t afford her work - let alone understand it. This is something different to that line of putting up a competition between American popular entertainment and European art. For a more relevant comparison look at l998’s Leap of Faith with evangelist Steve Martin touting his tent show as offering the entertainment value of the up-market Broadway productions his hick town audience will never see.

We do get the film’s vivid representation of melting pot America - Calvo ”crossing the border at twelve”. There are effective hints of the Great Depression in the margin - a Forgotten Man with a “Will work” sign, murderous hobos or the run down homes the protagonists escape into their world of luxury. 

Li Jun Li

The leads are camouflaged versions of Clara Bow, John Gilbert and Bugsy Siegal, (along with that hint of Roscoe Arbuckle). Li Jun Li, their slinky-glamorous bisexual Anna Mae Wong character has been composited with her Shanghai Express co star Marlene Dietrich, getting to do Dietrich’s Morocco number. There’s no evidence to confirm that the personable Anna actually wrote intertitles for her films and was the only one around who knew how to handle being rattler bit but one of their nicest touches is a cut to Li acting as a star’s dialogue coach.  Similarly, being a Twenty First Century production, Adepo’s  black musician character (“I think you’re pointing the camera the wrong way”) gets developed in welcome depth. He is the one to survive the story's events with the least damage.

I recognise an urge like the one behind the Spielberg Ready Player One, a compulsion to explore the mechanism of movie enthusiasts. Babylon reacts against the fake euphoria of fandom and awards. Celebrities destroyed by excess are familiar but here we also get the scene of desperation as the characters adapt to the new disciplines of recording with sustained panic - Robbie repeatedly struggling with memorising her lines and missing the one mark that will accommodate the microphone, the tyranny of the sound man over-riding the director and lethal working conditions. Compare the similar footage in 1934's gentler It Happened in Hollywood.

Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons weren’t about yet, so Jean Smart’s gossip writer is near to called Adela Rogers St. John. Publicity assures us she is supposed to be Eleanor Glynn. People who they actually name - Garbo, Irving Thalberg, mainly represented by a business card - are largely off screen presences. Figures who coasted through that transition without the cloud of substance abuse - Ronald Coleman, Loretta Young, Wally Beery - don’t figure.

As substantial as the panoramas of excess, which book end the film, is once supremely confident Pitt’s despairing “why did they laugh?”, coming with Smart’s cockroaches monologue about the pictures that will linger for audiences who will be born and die after the filmmakers. “We’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.” The writing and the actress’ delivery of it should enshrine that next to “We had faces then” or "Film is truth 24 times a second." The argument is taken further when we get Singing in the Rain set dismissively against the incidents we have seen Calvo experience first hand. I never did like that one as much as the other Kelly-Donen musicals, a collection on which writer-director Dominic Sayre Chazelle clearly fixates. 

Damien Chazelle & Olivia Hamilton.

Coming from a family of academics and being a one time drummer,  Chazelle looks frighteningly youthful. He took the status of all time youngest recipient of the director Oscar from Norman Taurog.  He has snuck up on us. There was nothing in his First Man and Whiplash to suggest he’d become a major film maker and he has been lying dogo since the extra-ordinary success of  La La Land came complete with Oscar night live drama over its award - possibly Warren Beaty’s greatest performance. Chazelle’s pilot eps. for The Eddy don’t register but Babylon can’t be ignored. There’s very little that is as resonant and attention getting, even with some dodgy choices. Did we really need to see Clara Bow throw up over Marion Davies and William Randolph Hurst?

The film flirts with the past the footlights space in a way that most viewers may miss. There’s a Harvey Weinstein lookalike.  Spike Jonze figures in a bit part as a director and the movie’s producer Mark Platt plays a producer. The composite female director is performed nicely by Chazelle’s own wife.    

One good question is how those sustained take sequences of hedonistic excess, which book end the film, are going to effect it’s future, with shifts in taste and censorship (here represented only by one forlorn sign holder picketing the location gate).  Notice that Margot Robbie gets plenty physical but, just as in films like Dusan Makajevec's W.R.History of the Organism, the leads never go bare assed, leaving that to the extras. Robbie has mentioned that. While we see a stunt man impaled in the battle scene, I didn’t spot any dead horses either.

When the makers make such effort to get things right. It’s irritating to spot when they don’t. It’s particularly grating that their re-staging of the Hollywood Revue of 1929 chorus is done in the shades of orange of surviving faded copies and not the original two color Technicolor palette. One of the things that gave Scorsese’s Hugo its charge was seeing Meliés lobster men and fairies against their backgrounds in the full range of tones, not those of the inferior copies we’ve been looking at for so long.

Jovan Adepo's accompaniment - "The camera's pointing the wrong way"

Gentleman's Fate - Gilbert, Marie Prevost & Louis Wolheim 

 I’ve just read a review that repeats the Furphy of John Gilbert’s career destroyed by sabotaged films. Gilbert’s sound movies were in fact mounted with all the know how that a major studio could bring to them, like those of his peer group, Antonio Moreno, Ramon Novarro - and Buster Keaton. Gilbert wrote one, as he always wanted to, and the excellent Gentleman’s Fate was the proto-type for the mammoth Godfather franchise. The owners of  His Glorious Night, the Gilbert film, which supposedly provoked the audience laughter we see simulated here, keep that big part of the puzzle out of sight. I’ve always been curious about it. Gilbert’s fall was more plausibly brought about by insecurity and the inability of MGM to incorporate the Depression era changes of taste to which Zanuck at Warners had proved more alert. Babylon’s adding a God-is-not-mocked response brings a fresh dimension.  

 So far most of this is sailing past public and press. The returns in the 'States have been miserable and reviews often negative, an alarming response for what must be the most ambitious attempt yet to make sense of cinema as phenomenon, eclipsing written criticism, documentaries and previous dramatisations. Maybe people just don't care anymore. I'd find that scary.

Barrie Pattison - 2023.