Pordenone 2020

Forget about Donald Trump’s re-election and the Covid plague. 2020 is important as the year the Pordenone gionate del cinema muto reached the world's lounge rooms. Travel restrictions mean that management put the silent movie week on line ... and the lot for the price of one seat at the local multiplex. I certainly missed the forty foot screen and the company of a large slice of the world’s remaining movie enthusiasts - not to mention Twisters Pizza and all the gelaterias. However the video format offered unforseen advantages - being able to back up sections that called for closer examination and the chance to do instant research with the reference material spread around the front room computer as it ran.  Surprisingly in the long run this was as exhausting as trooping off to the other side of the planet to watch the films.

As an overview, the technical end was accomplished with the My Movies platform doing justice to the generally excellent restorations on show. Director Jay Weissberg became assured as he got used to fronting the sessions with a pitch for the “Gothic and Romantic porticos of Pordenone" shaped by sponsor the Friuli Venezia Giulia area tourist office.

The films arrived on schedule as advertised and the original scores were once again class acts - though I did turn one off because it clashed with the ambiance the film itself was able to generate. Some jumpy Laurel and Hardy (separately) shorts did break the run but what the heck - the organisers know their audience and it was interesting to hear from Fay Wray’s daughter commenting her mother’s teenage appearance in a Stan Laurel vehicle.

The zoom conversations were more problematic with consistent back focus, echo and the occasional loss of a participant. This is I guess is current state of the art. Those involved were determinedly talking up the event but they incidentally provided an unexpected window into the the world of top end film scholarship - singling out “unsung hero” cameraman Frank D. Williams, missing Thanhauser shorts being identified from the type face by a musician used to playing along with them, curators squabbling over whether Cecil B. De Mille deserved shelf space. The intense scrutiny given to pre WW1 films makes a break for Australians used to being told it’s all about Douglas Sirk and Jean Pierre Melville, the frame of reference that omits both the Harrison Fords.

Digital technology has made it possible to retrieve the pioneer Biograph filmlets produced on un-perforated 68 mm. stock, pressure marks from the film transport rollers visible as white patches on some. The wide gauge film provided a phenomenal sharpness. This material has gone into a program called Beautiful Biographs. The BFI mounted the event in that IMAX theater of theirs. The subject matter was random with an emphasis on travel - roving cameramen brought back New York 1911, Chinatown scenes, a black driver chauffeuring a rich family in one of the early motor cars that had to compete with horse traffic, Cairo and the Pyramids, Belgians frolicking in the surf in neck to knee bathers, Prague, Windsor Castle, the fleet at sea with the clouded sky added in double exposure, along with Pathé’s animated Un Voyage abracadabrant. A couple of these had been hand coloured and to be picky the London Southampton train journey shaded red the lower gantry warning signal that should have been yellow from the front and white behind.

Penrod and Sam Gertrude Messinger & Ben Alexander

First past the post feature Penrod and Sam of 1923 was directed by long toiling William Beaudine who managed to jam a few rewarding items into his sixty years of largely hack Hollywood work (1926’s The Canadian, the religious film Again Pioneers or the Roddy McDowall Kidnapped). Here he’s heading up one of the Kids Films of the day. Sidney and Chester Frankin were doing fairy tale movies with all child casts and the Our Gangs were on the horizon.

Booth “Magnificent Ambersons” Tarkington’s Penrod stories centered on pre-teener Penrod Schofield /Ben Alexander who forms a juvenile gang based in a shack on his dad Rockliffe Fellowes’ empty lot. He is determined to exclude Buddy Messinger the son of rich William V. Mong, which seems a bit mean until the kid reveals himself,  fabricating a story of rough handling by the gang.  Deacon Dad Mong buys the land and turns it over to his son and Mong himself proves to be a bad lot.

There’s some soso slapstick with black kids Joe McGray & Eugene Jackson but the film gains traction in the sub plot with Cameo the Dog. The cast is quite substantial offering a young Mary (Phantom of the Opera) Philbin and Gladys (Hunchback of Notre Dame) Brockwell making up the Schofield family and Penrod himself played by Alexander who was the boy snapped on the riser with Griffith filming Intolerance in the much reproduced photo and continued as a featured player stalwart, including being one of the platoon in All Quiet on the Western Front and a lead in a Joseph H. Lewis PRC cheapy, until he entered the collective memory as Sergeant Joe Friday’s side kick in the pioneer TV Dragnet series. He would have been a great interview subject.

The film’s major asset is it’s small American town atmosphere which Beaudine does capture nicely. The story was re-made in 1931 with Beaudine directing Leon Janney and  again in 1937 with Billy Mauch.

When I saw Zhu Shilin Zhu & Mingyou Luo’s 1935 Guo feng / Civil Wind/ National Style/ National Customs / Customs of a Nation at Pordenone 1997, it was about ten minutes shorter than the current showing, possibly due to a different projection rate but also, from memory, because it had less of the scenes of encroaching decadence. It was also free of the distributor’s disfiguring white watermark, not something to be expected at Pordenone. Spanish enthusiasts took their TV stations to court to get rid of those and Sidney Pollack flew in to support them. I drape a towel over the corner of the picture to eliminate SBS’ distracting World Movies logo.

Guo feng is one of the last pieces piece of silent Shanghai Mandarin film and, as the original titles comment, the legendary Ruan Lingu’s last film before her abrupt suicide age 25, after being hounded by gossip magazines.

Guo Feng : Ruan Lingu & Zhen Junli.

We still kick off with a montage of rural scenics leading to the shot of the school bell ringing for the graduation where sisters Lingu and Li Li Li (so good they named her thrice) are among the class getting their diplomas. (dissolve between Lingyu's coming off the top of the stack and Lili’s among the last few) Lingyu and her cousin, sometime director Zheng Junli (also in last year’s Fen dou /Striving), share an idyllic moment on the river bank but younger sister Lili wants him, smashing her mug with annoyance that she can’t have Zheng, so Lingyu sacrifices her love and (dissolve from wedding pictures) goes off to Shanghai to study at Teacher’s College. This again inspires Lili’s jealousy, with her demanding her new husband finance her own degree.

Once there (river steamer scenics) Lili is more interested in the social life and the brilliantined fellow student in a suit, son of rotund Liu Jiqui, the merchant from her home village, while Lingyu huddles over the books, chiding her sister about her use of make up and  patiently gathering up and sharpening the pencil that Lili throws away in their shared student study with it’s big thermos of tea. Ticked off, Lili spreads among the gossipy students (pan round close-ups) the story that Lingyu has asked Lili’s new squeeze to marry her. A cartoon representation is put up on a bulletin board.

The students form a gauntlet to direct Lingyu to this and she swoons - cue wobbly effects montage that does include the striking spinning image (shown with watermark) - and is put into the hospital.

Back in the village, the river steamer brings back Lili and the boy friend in their western gear and they cause a sensation among the drably dressed village girls they will be teaching, who note that his hair is more pampered than any of theirs. The girls’ head teacher mum (Florence) Lim Cho-cho reprimands them and takes her first vacation ever to visit her ill daughter ... and that’s the last we see of Lingyu until the finish, in the manner of later Chinese absentee movie stars.

Things get out of hand, with the girls copying Lili’s make up and clothing and neglecting their studies for chatter and games of cats cradle, while Liu Jiqui opens a new western Goods Emporium in the village where he makes 100% profit with his Paris Cafe and pinches the cheek of plump sales girls, till his fat wife shows up fresh from the new hair dresser. Lili demands a divorce.

Mum comes back and is fired for objecting to finding the new teachers reading glamour magazines while the students slack.

She addresses KMT meetings on the value of traditional values represented by the New Life movement, chastening and reforming, implausibly quickly, the delinquent teacher pair, who revert to the plain village style of dress. We are getting perilously close to the sending city sophisticates off to learn from the peasants which was to come. Lingyu returns to claim her now free true love but delays marriage to fulfill her teaching obligation and all is well.

Lingyu suffers plausibly in sustained close up, giving a restrained an appealing performance. A plain girl in repose, when she moves she immediately becomes the center of attention and Lili gets to do flighty, even scorning the amah’s lovingly prepared steamed buns. Her character seems a lot more fun than role model Lingyu.

Equating the two girls with the new and old China is simple minded but the contrast between the village and Westernised Shanghai registers, even with the limited art department budget.

The film making technique is adequate, offering scenes played mainly in small sparsely decorated sets with the odd badly matched action edit though they do run to a few tracking shots and pointy wipes. The PreWW2 Shanghai films remain the most interesting Chinese language films until the Shaw Brother surface in sixties Hong Kong.

Before Birth of a Nation, Denmark was considered a world leader in film making and director Holger-Madsen’s 1913 Ballettens Datter was one of the films that reflected that status.

Nordisk Film clearly thought of themselves as part of the high art scene and recruited hardly glamorous Rita Sacchetto, a ballet star contemporary of Ana Pavlova, Isadore Duncan and Loie Fuller. Her Pierette and the Butterfly routine is included as a single wide shot against a black background.

Balletans Datter :Aggerholm & Sacchetto.

Count Svend  Aggerholm is rapt and chats her up after the performance. He can’t forget her, seeing the dancer superimposed in costume on his racing magazine and, after watching the routine she does with a couple of children on stage, he takes her on a launch ride and proposes. He has one condition. “Promise to leave the theater forever.”

Rita however keeps in touch visiting the ballet school where students perform and children are in training. A newspaper clipping speaks of her audience missing her. She tries on her old costumes to Aggerholm’s disapproval. When his star quits on theater manager Torben Meyer, he calls her to fill in and she agrees, demanding that no one will ever know. She leaves, telling Aggerholm “I’m going to see my sick aunt.” At a loose end that night he goes to the theater and - shock horror - sees his wife on stage and spies as Meyer brings her back in his car.

Ahherholm recruits a uniformed aristocrat friend. “I want you to witness my insulting my wife’s lover” and proceeds to the theater office where he slaps the shocked Meyer who finds himself checking out dueling pistols. However he is fortunate in having pharmacist Christian Schrøder for an uncle. In the busy chemist’s shop, Meyer demands three pills one of which will counter-act the knock out effect of the others. Having choice of weapons he offers the indignant challenger the two pills of which he represents one as being lethal. The Count unhesitatingly takes one and passes out.

When he awakes at home, Meyer has left the jealous husband a letter pointing out the fact that his fears can be proved unjustified. Why he didn’t do it before the charade we don’t know. Despite it’s pretensions to sophistication, Ballettens Datter is simple minded.

The nearest thing to advanced film making is an early three way split screen phone call with the speakers in ovals either side of a vertical street scene panel. Plot and performance are unremarkable, over decorated studio  interiors are spaced by exterior locations. The handling is quite smooth and the piece has interest from showing ambitious work done in the conventions of the day - action played in “the American shot” full length, bottom of frame cutting at the ankles, no close ups, no camera movement (the duelists’ cars deliver them and then drive out out of the side of the static frame) The actors never perform with their backs to camera and there’s minimal editing within scene. The cut to the count watching from the theater box when he sees his wife remove her mask gains impact from being unexpected.

It’s interesting to see Torbin Meyer in a substantial part. We can assume he met Michael Curtiz while they worked together on Atlantis at this period, leading to his forty years of bit parts in Curtiz’ Hollywood movies.

My favorite Hayakawa fan photo.

Sessue Hayakawa remains a question mark to enthusiasts outside the ‘States. I’ve seen more of the sound films made when his star had dimmed than the work from his romantic lead zenith, so When Lights Are Low (“Chinatown, my Chinatown...”) is welcome. It turns out to be a rousing melodrama that would collapse under any standard of political correctness.

Jack (The Covered Wagon) Cunningham’s script tells us that in China Prince Sessue is enamored of Gloria Payton, the daughter of a gardener - despite the fact that the actress is obviously of sound Aryan stock  with her eyelids pulled back. His uncle packs him off to America to study and he leaves, promising her that they will be together soon.

Having abandoned traditional dress for a snappy straw skimmer hat and western suit and mastered the game of billiards, our hero and his new western friends visit the San Francisco Chinese markets “Where it is said women are sacrificed under our noses” recognisable from innumerable Hollywood movies (In Old San Francisco, I Cover Chinatown, The Hatchet Man, Walk Like a Dragon)  Of course a slave auction is in progress with his beloved going at five thousand dollars. Not being able to put his hands on that kind of money, our distraught hero sets up a three year lay away plan. (“Farewell, I will try not to lose hope”) and starts washing dishes, which is clearly not a goer with breakages and all. However he hits it big on the Chinese lottery of which there’s a brief, intriguing glimpse.

Meanwhile Miss Payton has come to the attention of effectively menacing Tôgô Yamamoto, with the auctioneer pleading to Sessue “I can’t give you the girl. It would be my death”, so Sessue has to take on impossible odds to fight off the heavies and free his bride to be.

Where Lights Are Low: Yamamoto & Hayakawa

This is presented efficiently without any hint of style or humor by Colin Campbell who made 1914‘s In the Days of the Thundering Herd. It holds attention better than it should, though Hayakawa’s presence outclasses the other elements. There was a good, lime tinted copy on show.

Italy has the Host Nation Advantage in this event. Though I do have a print of Gallone’s Gli ultimi giorni di pompeii gathering dust in the back room, my knowledge of Italian silent cinema (Didn’t anybody make silent films in Spain?) derives from Pordenone screenings and the pickings have been thin.

This year it turns out that Carlo Campogalliani, who would direct Steeve Reeves’ 1959 I terrore dei barbari / Goliarth and the Barbarians was, in the silent period, a Douglas Fairbanks imitator. Pordenone had on offer his version of When the Clouds Roll By, the 1921 comic La tempesta in un cranio / Kill or Cure where once again a hypochondriac discovers his fears subject of an elaborate fraud.

 

 

Tempesta in cranio : Campogallioni & Quaranta with spy cam.

 

A montage of historic scenes shows Carlo’s ancestors mixing in beheadings and similar merry japes. Present day Carlo is told that he needs to toughen up in gym  though he fails to lift the smallest dumbbell. However he finds himself racing across the countryside, climbing over roof tops and breaking jail -  having cliff hanger adventures to rescue Letizia Quaranta, Campogalliani’s real life wife. 

One exploit calls for him to move the giant millstone before the water wheel brings down the press on the distressed damsel and for a finale he has to tie a rat to a burning candle so that it will drag it under the rope that only goes half way down the tower from which our hero is making his escape.

His uncle eventually explains that all the villains he has been outwitting are friends recruited to strengthen our hero’s character. Mustached Campolgalliani turning and winking to the camera is finally an endearing lead but the film is more of a curiosity than a find.

A tinted copy did offer one four way split screen and a key hole matte before that began to appear in Hollywood films.

Dimitris Gaziadis’ 1930 Greek Oi apahides ton Athinon / Apaches of Athens is actually kind of a sound film, the disks of Nikos Hatziapostolou’s source operetta, which accompanied the piece on it’s first release, not having survived the years, though the current presentation was accompanied by scratchy recordings incorporating the sound of the needle being dropped on the record, matching an on-screen gramophone.

Oi apahides ton Athinon-Sagianou-Katseli & Epitropakis

The film contrasts the re-purposed summer palace, represented as a millionaire’s villa, with Athens’ run down Plaka quarter. There Petros Epitropakis, the son of a once noble family, lives in destitution with a couple of comic friends (Petros Kyriakos & the film's writer Ioannis Prineas) and seamstress Mery Sagianou-Katseli to share his poverty.

He pulls up the horse which has bolted with Stella Hristoforidou, the daughter of new moneyed Georgios Hristoforidis, and the two are attracted. However the rich man’s secretary desires Hristoforidou. His proposal is met by derision from her father, so he concocts a revenge plot where he will present vagrant Epitropakis as a visiting prince, humiliating his employer by the deception. In top hat and cloak Epitropakis, displaying his old familiarity with privilege, wows the nouveaux riches at the millionaire’s reception, with his two comic side kicks accepted as his friends for further hilarity.

The lovers are sorted out in the traditional operetta manner with just a hint of the sad fate of Hristoforidou losing out on Epitropakis as he re-unites with his penniless true love after a burst of good fortune.

The satire is toothless and the leads lack star glamour. Film making is basic and the film’s best element is it’s glimpses of the Athenian street-scapes with the Parthenon on the horizon. This one and Orestis Laskos’ equally lumpen 1931 Dafnis kai Hloi / Daphnis & Chloe make up my entire knowledge of pre WW2 Greek cinema, so I can’t complain. A 1950 remake was done by Ilias Paraskevas.

Through the nature of distribution and his vigorous self promotion, which rivaled Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. De Mille was the first director I gave any close scrutiny. I managed to become very familiar with his best period running from Sign of the Cross to Reap the Wild Wind and enjoyed that. He managed to give his films the status of events. Later the titles he'd produced dominated the Kodak libraries in my first silent film project and I caught James Card’s lecture on De Milles’s early experimental material. While there were some soft patches (include the religious spectacles and his Metro stint - it’s not hard to see why Sidney Lumet detested DeMille) there was always more to discover.

Now, after pretty much a lifetime I'm getting to see the early features which had evaded me though they circulate in the U.S. Last year Joan the Woman and this Year it's 1917's Romance of the Redwoods, another chance to watch ideas in his later work getting a first run though.

Union Pacific : McCrea, Stanwyck and Preston

Mary Pickford battles frontier house keeping the way Helen Burgess does in The Plainsman. We get mob rule along the lines of This Day & Age. The film’s roistering Strawberry Flats Saloon resembles the one where Max Davidson deals cards in the director's excellent 1938 Union Pacific and the climax in their cabin, where Pickford struggles to avert the violence, which will wipe off her man, anticipates Barbara Stanwyck in her stores carriage stalling Robert Preston’s henchmen ready to take down Joel McCrea in that film. That's characteristic of De Mille settings switching from welcoming to hostile - the prison in The Buccaneer or the flooded hold in Reap the  Wild Wind.

Redwoods : Ogle, Marshall, Pickford, Dexter, Long. 

 

Throw in The director’s taste for violence to women - Angela Lansbury’s death in Samson and Delilah, Mike Mazurki about to lash Paulette Goddard's naked back in Unconquered - here foreshadowed by Elliot Dexter discouraging the saloon floozie by brushing his lighted cigarette across her hand.

I’d always thought of Mary Pickford as a tall Shirley Temple and it’s agreeable to see her carry off an adult role. 

Like Randolph Scott in Lang's Western Union, co star Elliot Dexter is first seen fleeing the posse - shot of him putting his ear to the ground cut to close up of hooves trampling dust. Finding Winter Hall an arrow-pierced victim of an attack by circling Indians (the film’s one piece of action spectacle), he indulges in a bit of identity theft. Turns out that the dead man was the uncle into whose care her dying mother entrusted Mary.

When she shows up with a load of hat boxes, the deception becomes obvious. She has to be persuaded that Elliot didn’t off the uncle by the bundle of blood stained letters where he shows the impact of “arrow not bullet”. Her tiny four shot won’t work on him so he offers her his side iron (“try this. It’s loaded”). He takes her to town where he invites her to denounce him in the roistering saloon but no one gives a damn. The Chinese guy and the giant women eye her potential and Ray Hacket in buckskins drags her into the dance, from which she has to be rescued. This makes up the best section of the film.

After a night in the stable, (Dexter offered her the bed room but she backed off to be scared by the (studio inset) wolf howl and settle under a buffalo hide on the hay) Mary is lured back inside by the smell of breakfast bacon and biscuits cooked in the tripod pan. She starts her civlising by having him wash his hands and say grace. Charles Ogle (Edison's Frankenstein monster and Covered Wagon again) comes courting bringing flowers, to Dexter’s distrust. While cleaning up the place Mary finds his kerchief with eye holes face mask.

Mary Pickford is Covid safe.

In town, “a traveling auction” wagon gives Ogle that chance to buy her presents including the baby size doll, while Elliot of is off liberating the proceeds of the gold fields with the aid of a sinister Mexican side kick. The towns people decide they need a Vigilance Committee.

Mary reproaches Elliot and he agrees to go straight. Surviving is a matter of Mary taking in washing to do in the tubs among the red woods. The floozy is scornful. “Ask the wash lady in your cabin how much I owe her.”

We get a Mark Twain-Peter B. Kline ending where the Vigilantes invade Dexter’s hut (that De Mille inversion of setting) all set to string Elliot up but Mary brings in the doll’s clothes appealing to their gentler natures - until they find the deception.

The celebrity support get varied results. Tully Marshall and Walter Long are just set decoration but Hacket and Ogle have their best outings.

Alvin Wyckoff is not a cameraman who's scared of double shadows though he acquits himself admirably, as does designer Wilfrid Buckland with solid looking constructions and atmospheric properties - the pepper pot pistol, the tripod pan, the four holes bandana.

Their tinted copy was much better than the one on my De Mille shelf.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Abwege/ Crisis/ Desire/ The Devious Path from 1928 was easily the most sophisticated film on show. An old favorite (I’ve seen it at Pordenone before) it is the middle of Pabst’s three Brigitte Helm movies. She gets better as they go.

It begins with artist Jack Trevor sketching Brigitte. His studio will be revealed to be full of drawings of her (how often will we see that in later productions?) indicating his infatuation.

Plot proves to be about stoic, hard working husband Gustav Diessl in heavy make-up neglecting glamorous Brigitte who is falling in with the wrong crowd. Gustav kisses the proffered hand of demi-mondaine friend Herther Von Walther with clear distaste and tells his wife she shouldn’t spend time in her company.

Abwege - Trevor, Helm & Von Walther

Exasperated beyond limit, Brigitte agrees to leave town with admirer Trevor, but Gustav warns Jack off after the fade out, leaving her waiting for the artist, abandoned at the station with her suitcase.

Back at the smart, servant cared for flat, Gustav explains that even on this night he has to go to his club and leaves her now desperate, so she takes up the invitation to the decadent cabaret taking respectable councilor Fritz Odemar, with her in what is the film’s long set piece. The tangoing duo provide entertainment among the balloons and Hertha in her backless (inset close up to go with the middle aged business man’s stare) black dress is in her element, encouraging suitors to retrieve morsels of food that fall into her rear cleavage. Brigitte is aggravated by the streamers thrown from boxer Nico Turoff’s table and Ilse  Bachmann, trying to do the Helm range of gestures without the same effectiveness, as the wife of the suicide banker, gets cash from the partying councilor to give a pug ugly who slips her the paper packet she takes behind the curtain. Brigitte has spotted shame faced Trevor at the bar and when confronted he tells her he could never match her husband’s wealth.

Brigitte gets wide eyed after a trip behind the curtain with Bachmann, grabs the shabby guy with the ragged mustache and drags him round the dance floor startled. When she dumps him, he stands staring, confused, as Brigitte agrees to Turroff’s suggestion to visit Trevor’s flat.

Next day up at the artist’s studio Turnoff gets on with preparations to rape our heroine, only to be thwarted by Trevor’s arrival. Repentant Gustav shows, alerted by Von Walther to the fact that Brigitte is about to make a terrible mistake. The couple repair to the divorce court but waiting on the bench outside they reconcile, witnessed amused by the passing registrar and his clerk. Jay Weissberg compared the ending to the Leisen Midnight. That film’s writer Billy Wider might have been expected to know Abwege. The key scene in Karl Hartl’s agreeable, twice re-made 1932 Die Gräfin von Monte-Christo / Countess of Monte Christo also is played by Helm sitting on a public bench.

With Abwege’s cabaret and 1927's Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney / Loves of Jeanne Ney’s orgy, Pabst became our go to guy for displays of Weimar decadence. This story is not another Germanic study of the oppressed under-class. It’s about moral decay seething below the surface of respectable bourgeois society. The director is surrounded by his regulars - Helm, Diessel, Trevor and Von Walter included. The contrast between Walther (excellent) who is in her element as the party girl enjoying the attention of her middle class admirers and Brigitte disgusted and driven to desperation in the same setting, is the film’s best element with of course the Helm performance. She has now mastered her acting style - multiple emotions playing across her mask-features with her trademark feeling her way along the wall she is facing to use her whole body to show her state of mind. Those cloche hats outfits don’t do her justice but the white satin evening number is a knock out.

Abwege : Helm

In possibly the only interview she gave in retirement, Briggite Helm told author Peter de Herzog of her dissatisfaction with the films offered her. Pabst was one of the few directors she trusted.

Abwege shows silent film making at its absolute peak.  The images flow into one another. There is no need for a close up of a jangling bell to tell us a 'phone is ringing. A wide shot of the hand set is sufficient, with the actors turning towards it for emphasis. The decors seem solid and plausible. Playing offers just the right amount of exaggeration to carry the fanciful writing. The image has a sheen to it picking out the texture of skin and fabric. The tinting given this copy is particularly effective - not the bold colours we are used to from surviving nitrate originals but a gentle lime tone for interiors and yellow for out of doors which don't draw attention when cut together. We don't get a distracting change of tone when a light is turned on, as had been usual.

The film's weakness is the script with no explanation of Diessel's withdrawn nature or what had pulled the couple together. As in several of his other films, Jack Trevor emerges as a more plausible and rounded character than the star. This does limit the film's impact but these people often squandered their talents on material inferior to this. Here we can see them deployed as they deserved.

Apaches of Athens

 With a chance to draw an unprecedented public, (we’re assured the numbers were good) the organisers opted for oddities rather than master pieces, which was all right but misleading. There are masterpieces from the silent period not being circulated and there’s always the hope that one or more of those will show up at Pordenone. They have to deal with an audience part of which which takes for granted work that other participants don’t know and sometimes dream of finding. Throw in the competition of You Tube which the pros try to ignore. It can’t be easy.

We were repeatedly told that Pordenone would be back physically in it’s home base next year, again the great treat for the privileged enthusiast. No one knows whether that’s going to happen. Trying to read the future shape from this limited event is as intriguing as watching the  films. We are however promised that thus encouraged they plan to put some of their previous successes on line. 

Pickford : Romance of the Redwoods

 

Barrie Pattison 2020.

ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2020. 

 Well it’s our first national event to come back theatrically in the time of the plague which means Palace’s new Italian Film Festival carries more than it’s share of weight for one of these. The schedule is reduced and the seating spaced, so it’s something of a relief to find a couple of the sessions of Il Traditore at the Chauvel at capacity. It re-assures you that there’s a future for these. 

Some of the material that I’ve watched has been disappointing but  Odio l'estate / I Hate Summer was particularly welcome. One of the big ticks against the Italian Film Festivals has been that they revealed the Aldo (Baglio) Giacomo (Poretti) and Giovanni (Storti) comedy trio to us. Well the boys haven’t been doing so well lately, directing a film of their own or making solo ventures none of which seem to have been received with all that much enthusiasm. I did manage to find a couple of DVDs of their later output but a lack of translation defeats me. Here however they are working with director-writer Massimo Venier again, in an impeccable, sub-titled theatrical copy. 

 It turns out to be among their best work. One of the nice things about it is that they keep on nudging us with moments that say though they’ve been at it for twenty five years, they can still work variations. The film opens disturbingly with a shot of Aldo in a wheel chair. Even if it’s deceptive, it prepares us for an effective twist. The main plot is a more conventional situation where the three Milanese families take annual holidays at the same time and find that the booking agency has mistakenly let the nice beachside home to all of them simultaneously. Even with the intervention of benign silver fox Carabiniere Michele Placido (Michele Placido!) they can’t sort this out. Actually the agent calls in with alternative five star accommodation but Aldo’s teen age son, out on parole after heisting a motor bike, takes the call and, eyeing the co-tenant’s daughter in a bikini, tells them not to bother. 

New Movies are now knee deep in the Les Petits mouchoirs, Grown-Ups, Palm Beach cycle of films about people we don’t normally associate, playing characters going on holiday with people they grew up with but this is one about individuals we know actually have a long association, playing at meeting for the first time. It’s enough of a difference to throw our expectations out of kilter.

Odio l'estate / I Hate Summer :The boys with Millie Fortunato Asquini 

 

 

 

 

 

Giovanni’s shoe store is failing and dentist Giacomo runs into a disgruntled patient he left with a permanent leer. We get usual gags like Giovanni building a shack on the sand which collapses when a single stick is removed to throw for the dog. One of the kids runs off to be with his Danish family pen friend and the dog has to be tracked by satellite. 

This is all background to the remarkably appealing business of the three fathers growing together into the trio we remember from their earlier films, while an engaging trio of wives, Lucia Mascino, Carlotta Natoli, Maria Di Biase drink, exchange experience and go skinny dipping. The sting is in the tail when life-long Massimo Ranieri fan Aldo finds that their excursion has landed him up where his idol is going to give a concert that night and it turns out that Ranieri owes dentist Giacomo a favor which translates into best seats and an irresistible surprise. To me Massimo Ranieri had been the juvenile from Bubù and Metello but here he is in his seventies, with Aldo Baglio declaring “Massimo Ranieri revolutionised Italian music.” It’s a throwback to my first being drawn to movies because they were a way into unfamiliar worlds - inhabited by the likes of Wyatt Earp, Maxim Gorki or Chen pei pei.

 It may be that the appeal is lost on viewers not familiar with Aldo, Giacomo and Giovanni - include most programmers outside Italy - but the film strikes me as a great stands alone night at the movies as well as a welcome and unfortunately rare chance to see one of the most engaging movie teams. 

Jack London was an author who was much better writing about dogs than he was on people but film makers keep on struggling to get movies out of “Call of the Wild” and “The Sea Wolf” and there have been half a dozen movie Martin Edens including Glenn Ford and Hobart Bosworth - or even Michael O’Shea in the elements which were cannibalized for a London movie biography. The book has been described as the first best seller. This new Italian nominal adaptation gets thoroughly lost with it’s shift to Milan sawing off it’s comments on the American dream and the 1907 time frame, which offered relevance, destroyed by arbitrary anachronisms - manual typewriter, TVs and colour movie show, imposing stock shot of a windjammer in full sail sinking and black shirts giving hair cuts on the beach as war breaks out.

Luca Marinelli as Martin Eden.

 What we get is wild eyed Luca Marinelli as a sailor saving bourgeois kid Giustiniano Alpi from a beating and introduced to his well off family, being understandably taken with sister Jessica Cressy who speaks French to him and plants the idea that he can only better himself with education. He starts buying second hand books in the junk shop though the school ma’ams sorting candidates for mature age training tell him he’d have to go back to primary school. (stock shot of grinning gap toothed peasant in the class room) Marinelli becomes enamored of the social Darwinism of 19th Century philosopher Herbert Spencer and gets into conflict with the socialists. 

Ailing poet Carlo Cecchi takes him in hand while Marinelli’s manuscripts keep on coming back with rejection notices. Marinelli’s refusal to accept a respectable office job to create a home for them makes Cressy refuse him just before he turns into a successful writer. Cut to Marinelli become Oblomov (keep the references obscure), his new wealth causing him to reject the people who failed to support his ambitions while showering good fortune on the humble souls who looked after him, like single mum Carmen Pommella. The remains of the women in the book keep on turning up as the also fetching Denise Sardisco. 

This largely formless pastiche is filmed murkily in super sixteen with minimal shadow detail and lots of grain. The performances and some of the staging give the piece occasional dignity and build expectations which it is unable to fulfill. While it’s form is very different from the stylish costume art movies of the sixties Martin Eden is aimed at the same audience who want to believe they are absorbing something more substantial than popular entertainment. They are easily bluffed. 

 

It’s a major disappointment to find that the new Gianni Amelio film Hammamet is impenetrable to anyone not immersed in the Italian scene. I rate Amelio (Porte Aperte, Tenerezza) the most talented of the current Italian film makers and this is the first of his films that has failed to impress me.

 At the risk of over simplifying, in 1983 Bettino Craxi became the first socialist to become Prime Minister of Italy. His policies included rejecting Italy's prominent Communist party, opposing the USA on the Achille Lauro terrorists affair and supporting Arab Nationalists. He was driven out of office by a scandal which indicated that party funding had been obtained illegally and that he had lived luxuriously off it, fleeing from Italy to a villa at Hammamet in Tunisia. You’d think there was enough in there for a couple of major dramatic movies. 

Not all of this makes it’s way into Amelio’s film which features Pierfrancesco Favino as Craxi in an amazing make up job where you have to stare at the eyes to recognise Favino. Someone gets a credit for eye brows. He doesn’t look much like photos of Craxi either which makes you wonder why they bothered. The film has a thin plot where Luca Filippi as the son of a fellow politician breaks into the one time Prime Minister’s numerous scorta-protected Hammanet villa, bringing a letter from his father. Craxi/Favino embraces the boy found coated in sludge from sheltering in the near empty swimming pool and moves him in, to the concern of Craxi’s daughter, Livia Rossi from Amelio’s Intrepido: A Lonely Hero. 

Favino (!) and Amelio : Hammamet

The central character’s health deteriorates and he is visited by real or imaginary figures from his past. The only familiar face is Omero Antonutti as his father. There’s a nice dialogue conducted on what appears to be the roof of Milan Cathedral. Around this, suspect detail from the politician’s life is thrown into the mix. The Milanese doctors sent to operate on Craxi flee the grubby Tunisian facilities they are offered. The film is bookended by Craxi as a boy smashing Seminary windows with a catapult.

The opening impresses with a giant socialist rally where Favino’s figure on the rostrum is dwarfed by the triangular big screen images of his face being played to the audience. This is misleading with nothing as filmic to follow, not to say that the film lacks anything technically. Amelio’s son Luan is now on camera for his work. They did the short Passatempo together last year. There’s a formidable piece of operating with kids running behind the camera car as the titles are superimposed on the single take, ending exactly on its mark to get the best composed static image of the compound gates. Performances are also superior, so much so that it’s a major disappointment when all these interesting looking people just talk endlessly. Filippi buys a pistol and vanishes without taking it out of his ever present knapsack. 

 I’m not the best person to give an opinion on this one. Not only do I not know any of the background but I dosed off a couple of times during the two hours plus screening. 

 

Traditore :Favino

 

More later...
 

 

Barrie Pattison 2020

MARIO SOLDATI AND FRIENDS.

Our knowledge of Italian sound film tends to start when American movie critics like Arthur Knight were stationed there after the war. Perilous little Italian film from pre 1945 circulates abroad so I was pleased to find that You Tube, which is a bottomless well of untranslated Italian movies, had a run of the films of Mario Soldati with good English sub-titles.

Soldati (left) had a literary background and had spent some time teaching in the US before becoming one of that band of Italian movie directors whose careers begin in the thirties, go through the war and peter out in the wide screen era. The neo realists have already had their share of attention and some more, though the extent of Luigi Zampa’s continued output is a surprise. By and large I’m more interested in the later comers, people like Pietro Germi, Dario Argento, Sergio Corbucci, Damio Damiano and Gianni Amelio - if we reduce the country’s output to the work to a few directors.

Accordingly I’d never taken any real notice of Mario Soldati though a few titles had driffted my way. He worked on scripts for a couple of nice 1932 comedies, Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni... / What Scounrels Men Are and Alessandro Blasetti’s La tavola dei poveri / Poor People’s Table and continues through what we are assured is the White Telephone era to begin directing in 1938. In the fifties he managed a couple of British films, Her Favourite Husband and The Stranger’s Hand, ushered Sophia Loren, Gina Lllobrigida and Fernandel through unmemorable A features and fades away in the sixties.

I managed to score a VHS of his 1939 Dora Nelson a romantic comedy that is neither particularly romantic or particularly funny and we are assured, an example of the then celebrated caligraphist movement.

Like the contemporary Ohuls La Signora di tutti and rather better, it has a film making background. In the opening, star Dora Nelson (then celebrated Assia Noris) brings shooting on her historical movie to a stop because she considers her leading man not sufficiently aristocratic. She marches off the set, leaving the director in despair until crew members draw his attention to Pierina (Miss Norris again), the modiste who does a convincing Dora impression. The girl is whipped away from boxing hats and driven to the studio delighting all with the resemblance and her willingness, as she shoots in front of the process screen.

 Meanwhile the real Dora is expressing her allegiance to a Prince, announced by his flunky putting on a record of the National Anthem. He plans launching a coup from Cannes and Dora agrees to accompany his court in exile. Her absence casts a shadow on the daughter’s impending marriage and husband Carlo Ninchi begs Pierina to continue the impersonation through the ceremony. Her optician fiancé is bluffed by seeing the two Dora’s.

Ninchi is rapt and rides her round the markers in his sail boat. However in Cannes, the prince informs Dora that the revolution will fail because he can’t pay for the guns and she stomps up a 30,000 lire cheque. Scandal ensues.

The film is mounted on a large scale, with huge, modern sets, hoards of dress extras, sharp images, smooth editing. Noris differentiates the two characters expertly backed by ingenious cuts as to a double continuing her walk into the distance as the camera passes behind pillars, as well as good split screen. However the men are totally unimpressive, with the exception of chiseled featured Massimo Girotti as the fiancé, whose part could be given any juvenile.

What we got is polished, ordinary entertainment distinguished from routine Hollywood A features of the day by the occasional continental vista - the tree lined road with the comic’s car or the lights of Cannes. It’s nowhere near as winning as Signor Max an earlier De Sica starring doppelganger piece Soldati wrote for Camerini. It never seems to have been subtitled.

Our man and possibly his industry have matured by the time we get to Quartieri alti / In High Places, an A feature begun in 1943 and finished in 1944 after the fall of Rome and one of the subtitled You Tube features.

This one turns out to be accomplished, with strong leads and polished and quite imaginative production. Massimo Serato, (below right) the youngest I’ve seen him, is the con man gigolo who supports family and friends by his affair with a cheese heiress but aspires to romance with unspoiled student Adriana Benetti. He sets up an elaborate false identity to appeal to her but things aren’t going to plan on the night of their scheduled meeting.

The film is derived from the Jean Anouilh play "Le Rendez-Vous de Senlis" produced in the theatre by Andre Barsaq in 1941. This is both a strength and a weakness. The plot has considerable ingenuity and works up some tension over whether Serato’s schemes will come unravelled but the development, dialogue and relationships distractingly ring of the stage - the place put out at the rich peoples’ diners for an uninvited pauper, Alfredo Del Pelo’s chitarrista song at the Ulpia taverna. Soldati has attempted to deal with this by showing what we see as being observed by an audience - characters hidden in cupboards or outside windows and accounting for the theatricality of some of the older player performances by having the characters being former actors hired to boost the deception.

He has added cinematic flourishes - the opening title background of the Ecelsior Hotel revolving door runs till one of the character goes through and we follow him to the desk, the introductory glimpse of Serato hiding behind a door as the scene continues while a woman takes a bath in the next room, a cut to a spinning car wheel to account for a journey and showing both sides of the frequent ‘phone calls. However bits of undigested business are a give away.

The film remains quite modern in playing, pacing and setting but the theatrical feel does distract and the simple ending is particularly unsatisfactory after such a complex build up. Among the cast Jucci Kellerman, who did not have a great career, is particularly effective. (left -unhappy cheese heiress)

Two years later Eugenia Grandet is an ambitious costume movie, the last of (Alida) Valli’s Italian language movies before her launch into Hollywood and off-shore Hollywood. (below left) 

 

One of more than a dozen adaptations of the Balzac novel this one kicks off with the coach, carrying Paris based Giorgio De Lullo, delayed while he is attended by the Tours hairdresser. When they do set out (shot with the camera at road level among the wheels and hooves) they pass through the lands and properties which the driver identifies as belonging to De Lullo’s uncle and it is to his house in provincial Saumur where they carry the newcomer’s bags.

 

 There uncle Gualtiero Tumiati’s guests are in a Tombola card game which is abruptly terminated when the uncle takes their only candle to examine the letter the boy brings from his father. Tumiati’s sheltered daughter Eugenia, played rather passively by Valli at the peak of her European stardom, tries to make the new comer at home despite her father’s objection to the cost of a bed warmer and wax candles to replace his normal, smelly tallow ones. Middle aged peasant maid Pina Gallini is her accomplice, proving able to snap the firewood on her knee when the young man fails.

The film’s best scene proves to be Tumiati’s birthday present to Valli of a rare gold coin to add to her dowry. He radiates a contagious enthusiasm as he explains the history and purity of pieces in her little collection.

A newspaper from the capital tells them that the boy’s bankrupt father has suicided. Through the dining room window we see de Lullo on the garden bench struck down by the news. Tumiati only has sympathy for his brother’s defrauded creditors. At the same time he makes a killing from the Visiting Dutch wine merchant getting his order leaving the other local suppliers with nothing to do but sell Tumiati their stock at a favorable price. This he uses to make up his short fall on the Dutch order.

Drawn to the young man, Valli gives him her treasure to start his career in the Indies. He leaves with her a box with the portrait of his mother and the pair swear that, though they will be in different countries they will think of each other as they see the same evening star that they now watch from the bench in her garden - in the best Seventh Heaven Tradition.

We get a couple of brief glimpses of his life in the colonies as attention focuses on Saumur and Tumiati’s fury as he discovers his daughter has given the gold to the unworthy nephew. He locks Valli in her room permanently. However the health of his wife (Giuditta Rissone one time Mrs. Vittorio de Sica) fails and it becomes obvious that with her death he will have to pay levies and taxes in passing her share of the estate to his daughter. He brings Valli out and has her sign a document which will disadvantage her to avoid these. She complies.

Tumiati’s health fails too and he succumbs eyeing voraciously the precious metal of the crucifix held in front of him. Meanwhile De Lullo sets out from the Indies. On his way he encounters a Marchioness who puts forward a plan where he will marry her ugly daughter and be bought a title so he can be a functionary at court.

In Saumur, Valli looks longingly at the bench where she made her promise to her cousin only to have her dreams fulfilled as he appears there. He expresses his gratitude, pays back the money given him with market interest and asks for the return of the chest, uneasy at the prospect of her asserting his obligation to her. She lets him leave.

However De Lullo’s potential father in law puts an end to the scheme saying the son of a bankrupt could never be given a title. News of De Lullo’s fate reaches Valli and she buys up his father’s debts anonymously enabling the marriage to go ahead. Now she only has sixteen million instead of twenty one the Notary explains.

The film ends with Valli/ Eugenia at maid Gallini’s wedding in the church where De Lullo’s embroidered robe, which he had given her, now adorns the Virgin Statue. The novel’s coverage of her later years is notably missing.

The lead duo fail to involve and attention moves to the Grandet household grotesques. Tumiati’s pleasure in his trading is overwhelming while Gallini’s sympathetic peasant provides a balance. Opportunities for complexity are avoided beyond giving the unworthy cousin a rudimentary sense of obligation. There is no real comparison between the high price delights of Paris and provincial Saumur or comment on the legal and ecclesiastic structures. Despite Soldati’s flawlessly tasteful presentation there’s nothing as memorable as the walls of Miser Grandet’s counting room closing in on him in the Rex Ingram The Conquering Power.

Even lacking the florid decadence of Luchino Visconti’s best work or the flamboyance of the films of Vittorio Cottafavi, this one still remains very much a product of the European forties costume melo cycle, films like Christian Jacque’s Carmen or Cavalcanti’s Nicholas Nickleby, never approaching the standard of The Heiress or La Chartreuse de Parme.

Cesare Olivieri who plays President Cruchet here will become a long running Soldati associate directing second unit for his films in the fifties. Future directors Renato Castellani and Mario Girolami were also frequent collaborators.

 Two years later again in 1948 at the height of the realist cycle, we get Soldati’s Carlo Ponti production Fuga in Francia / Flight to France offering an unfamiliar view of post WW2 Italy. It centres on fugitive ex Mussolini government official Folco Lulli’s attempt to escape retribution. The structure, the flight of war criminals, recalls The 49th Parallel and may have been influenced by Michael Powell’s film.

When we first see Lulli, he’s wearing a priest’s cassock and entering a boarding school where head teacher, Cesare Olivieri again, reluctantly kits him out in civilian clothes, reminded of Lulli’s financial contributions to the institution. Lulli’s pre-teen son Enrico Olivieri is among the pupils and despite Lulli’s plan to leave him behind, he climbs into the seat next to him in the bus. Accompanied by itinerant migrants, ex-soldier Pietro Germi conspicuous among them, they travel to a border town stopping at the inn there.

Lulli’s one time maid Rosi Mirafiore, playing a character called Pierina (like Dora Nelson’s alter ego), is working there and recognises her former Ecelensia. Both fear the other. He begs her not to denounce him and promises a hefty payment. He has also pocketed his son’s clasp knife.  (Left Fuga in Francia Lulli and Cesare Olivieri)

Fearful she invites one of the traveler group to come to her room and they spend the night together. 

 When he goes, he leaves his striped scarf which she carefully folds and puts away but Lulli appears and murders her, placing the scarf to incriminate the itinerant.

Lulli then guides their group, taking them over the pass in the snow into France - the trip the migrants in Germi’s Il Camino della speranza will make. Avoiding the police ski patrol, they are overtaken by a snow storm and in the film’s best scene they shelter in a mountain hut where the troop’s accordionist recognises Lulli as the fugitive war criminal from his picture in a news paper on the floor and Lulli joins in his song desperately trying to recover the paper from under the musician’s feet.

He produces a pistol but Germi, the most embittered of the group, a soldier who had experienced reprisals against his town and been forced to join firing squads during the war, takes control intending to hold him for the police. Lulli wins over one of his captors but young Olivieri is injured in the the cold and pursuit is closing in.

This is one of the second wave of Post WW2 Realist Italian cinema, using real locations but now foregrounding them with professional actors. The school with it’s bullying, the maid’s sparse room, the unattended dam all suggest the country’s run down condition. The final scene’s ambulance is a made over baker’s van.

Folco Lulli had several leads in this period but is best known as the Italian driver in Le salaire de la peur / Wages of Fear. An effective enough character actor he doesn’t carry a starring role, particularly here one which lacks any sympathetic shading. Germi on the other hand emerges from the ensemble giving one of his best performances and the film is of a piece with his own serious dramas of post war anguish.

Best forties B&W production values don’t create the authenticity intended. An early Nino Rota score disappoints also.

It’s a bit much to expect a few films by a single director to stand in for a decade of Italian film making but these are a good match for the pattern of unsurprising craft skill that the few accessible films of this period reveal, more so than the description we get from contemporary English language critics - white telephones succeeded by unremitting veracity.

It seems unlikely that there is a masterpiece hidden away among the unknown Soldati work (Eugenia Grandet is his most often cited film) - or a carelessly made one. You could do worse than explore these easily available titles to get a handle on the Italian film of their day. I found it rewarding.

Barrie Pattison 2020.

PAUL MUNI : Only The Valiant.

The sound films of the twenties remain an interesting study. Generally they are dismissed
as terrible, which isn’t far from the truth, but they do have the unique fascination of
showing Hollywood, which pretty much had the monopoly, going through the greatest
re-tooling in its history.

With this in mind then celebrated Jewish theatre star Muni Wigsenfreund’s screen debut, 1929’s The Valiant is a must-see item. As with the bulk of these, the opening is the most filmic part where a title describes “A city street where laughter and tragedy rub elbows” and we get the first of the film’s many moving camera shots down an apartment corridor to a closed door. A shot rings out and after a pause a round-shouldered figure emerges. A second glance confirms that it’s a young Paul Muni in a crumpled hat. (Muni - Above)

He makes his way onto the pavement where the beat cop is excusing the priest for parking next to a fire plug, news boys are selling and ranks of uniformed police pass as Muni goes into the local station house and declares “I have killed a man” handing over a pistol. Well that’s as good as it gets.

The rest is the cast delivering awkward lines on cue to follow Muni’s progress as he tells the judicial system that he and his victim will face the same God for his vindication. He refuses to give his name though he’s told that countless families will be wondering if the anonymous killer hobo is actually their missing relative. Judge Henry Kolker sends him up state to burn and he is, of course, a model prisoner in Warden De Witt Jennings jail.

Meanwhile a thousand miles away in Pennington Ohio the rather fetching Marguerite
Churchill (The Big Trail below) is tending the livestock in her picturesque farm while frail
mother Edith Murgatroyd sits on the porch approving as Johny Mack Brown proposes to
Marguerite. You’ve got to worry about Southern Gentleman Johnny who joins in washing
the Collie dog while still in his freshly pressed city suit.

The only thing that clouds their happiness is the absence of Marguerite’s older brother - Oh Oh!

He used to do Romeo & Juliet’s balcony scene with her at bedtime each night in a fuzzy special effect. Reading about the anonymous drifter facing execution, Murgatroyd stares at the newsprint photo and feels it may be her missing son. The way to calm her is for Marguerite to take the train across the country and face the man.

Meanwhile, Muni’s newspaper articles from the Big House have earned a handsome bundle of war bonds. Jennings urges him to see the girl who has made the immense journey and she is ushered into his office to face Muni who disclaims any connection. The heart of the work is the sustained scene between the pair (“I've been everything but a success”) which still plays like the original piece of theater despite all director William K. Howard’s attempt to break it up into two shots and induce natural delivery.

It’s unlikely that this stretched probability item carried all that much conviction in the first production of Holworthy Hall & Robert Middlemass’ one act play and whatever it may have had has been drained away by our exposure to ninety years of more sophisticated drama. However this is Paul Muni who would soon be the world’s most respected performer and we wait for any justification of his enormous reputation. We do find ourselves watching with him for a hint that Churchill has bought his fabrication of seeing the brother’s heroic death at Vimy Ridge and when, as we know he’s going to, he drops his pretense of being an uneducated vagrant, his brief Shakespeare reading does ring. It’s not much to wade through all the stodge for but it is there.

It's easy to understand the critics of the day who deplored the disappearance of the silent film. About the only hint that this talk bound melodrama is from the company that had just made Sunrise is the ingenious three plane Vimy Ridge effect of the final scene. What is notable is not the clumsiness of these first talkies but the speed with which they were replaced by the accomplished films we still watch with enthusiasm.

Barrie Pattison 2020.

GEM of THE SEAS

I always thought of Columbia as the most anonymous of the Hollywood “Golden Era” studios. However the sudden accessibility of their thirties product has made me revise that idea. 

The film that brings things into focus is the 1932 Washington Merry-Go-Round / Invisible Power. It’s full of material which evokes later Columbia elements like The More the Merrier’s Washington, designer Lionel Banks notion of high society living, all vertical lines, Talk of the Town’s corrupt officials, The Big Heat’s influence maker card game, the sharp talking girl insider represented by Jean Artur in her films for the studio. Add Wallter Connolly who was their resident character actor, like Frank Morgan at MGM or John Carradine at Fox.

Starting yet again with a (model) train roaring through the night, this one launches into a Columbia rom com set up with congress freshman Lee Tracy playing against character an idealist (“all front and no back - wears star spangled underwear”) called on to produce the letter from his signatory of the Declaration of Independence ancestor folded in his pocket for the pair of stereotype comic porter darkies. The letter blows into glamorous Constance Cummings’ compartment and she rips it up only to be told that it was worth fifty grand. Aunt Jane Darwell finds them both under the bunk scrambling for the pieces. The fact that such a valuable document wasn’t more carefully handled is a detail that irritates.

Rapidly Washington Merry-Go-Round shapes up as a first sketch for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. When they get to D.C., the rail station has a Temperance Women’s group lined up and marching scouts milling about. Tracy pulls up to gawp in wonder at the (back projected) Capitol Dome - one tacky process shot rather than the Capra film’s stiring Vorkapich Montage followed by the saver gag of Jimmy Stewart realising that the imposing building he wants identified is a movie theater.

However the earlier film immediately gets down to business. Tracy comes upon the the Ex- Serviceman’s Tent City Camp, living in squalid conditions to demand their promised Bonus. His former army commander Arthur Vinton (“You never could peel potatoes”) is running the show. When introduced to the crowd, instead of feeding them comforting platitudes, Tracy tell them he was elected on bought votes and canvases the mob on how many of them sold theirs in the last election. He tells them to go back to their homes and root out the corruption. “You call yourselves ex-servicemen. Well why don’t you become servicemen?” This gets some antagonistic responses, notably from one of the wives sharing the camp. The script by frequent Capra collaborator Jo Swerling and Maxwell What Price Glory? Winterset Anderson has already got my attention.

Meanwhile conscience stricken prohibition official Wallis Clark is confronting boss Alan Dinehart, to be told that if he tries to go whistle blowing he’ll be the one that gets taken away leaving Dinehart in the clear. Dinehart, normally an inconspicuous performer (Jimmy the Gent’s “the biggest chisler since Michaelangelo”) asserts his menace without any dramatics, immediately lifting things. Clark is left with the open drawer containing a revolver (first time for this?) but uses Dinehart’s stationary, paying for the stamp, to drop a damning letter to Tracy in the mail chute before he offs himself - feet protruding from the elevator.

Tracy immediately faces hints of invasive corruption on the Washington Merry Go Round. “From the nickels in the street cars to the millions in the power trusts.” Congressmen have to use paper towels because defeated predecessors souvenired all the monogrammed linen ones. So-helpful Hotel manager Ernest Wood has already had temporary business cards printed for Tracy and all he wants in return is a Congressional page job for his nephew

Wood is whipped in to formally introduce Tracy to Cummings now sveltely glamorous in lamé at the hotel Dinner Dance. She’s with Dinehart and proves to be the grand daughter of amiable veteran Congressman Connolly who plays cards with the magnate. Facing Dinehart, Tracy shows him Clark’s letter. The South American Alcohol deal where they will have to send in U.S. Marines is in the air.

At the Congressional library, Tracy researches General Digger whose multi million dollar memorial bill is about to be passed and finds the man’s major accomplishment was stealing Indian land. Meeting Cummings he takes her to see the framed Declaration of Independence there, pointing out the name of his ancestor among the signatories. The group that gather applaud his comment that the men who signed were not afraid of losing re-election. There’s a nice balance between the pair. Tracy doesn’t buy her common people sympathies (”Why if you got in a covered wagon you’d ask for a chauffeur”) and she jokes about him having come to destroy the scribes & pharisees. The leads may be out gunned by Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur in a masterwork but they are still two of the most interesting players of the day here given substantial material to handle.

Constance Cummings

Tracy rehearses his maiden speech to Cummings (right), complete with a Lincoln quote, only for the film to cut to the House Floor with a pompous delegate voicing the same passage and when Tracy opposes the Digger Bill which is being passed without discussion, as a piece of blatant pork barrelling, he is not indulged by a sympathetic Chariman Harry Carey the way Jefferson Smith will be but thrown out by the constable on the instruction of dour Berton Churchill. A few of the members cheer him with big grins. A couple comment across the aisle, an incident to be repeated exactly in Mr. Smith. Afterward Cummings observes “Some of the applause was genuine.”

Similarly the power broker interactions between Alan Dinehart and Walter Connolly anticipate those between Ed Arnold and Claude Rains and, while we’re referencing Frank Capra, newbie politician Tracy’s orations can also be seen as a run-up for Walter Huston’s in American Madness which also features Constance Cummings, even if Connolly being bribed with his poker wins is less weighty than the Presidential nod being used to lure Claude Rains’ White Knight in Mr. Smith.

The Cummings socialite character is replaced (whatever became of Astrid Alwyn?) by Jean Arthur's girl reporter in Mr. Smith for a stand out Capra characterisation.

However, for Merry Go Round Dinehart is busily giving the big pitch to Cummings. “I have plans. Many plans. Never in the history of this country has there been a greater opportunity offered a strong man. Italy has her Mussolini, Russia her Stalin. Such a man will rise in America. A man, not a follower, but a leader. One strong enough to take the law into his own hands if necessary - a man of destiny.” This is the recuring, never realised leftist fantasy of an American dictator which is put forward with variation in Hollywood movies like Gabriel Over the White House, Meet John Doe, Keeper of the Flame or All the King’s Men - Columbia prominent in that list. However our ex-soldier hero confronts Dinehart precipitating an ending where the American Way is triumphant as it is in all of these films - count Mr. Smith, Mr. Deeds, Wild Boys of the Road, The Farmer’s Daughter on through The Best Man and All The President’s Men along with those other oval office features The President Vanishes, Gabriel Over the White House and the lighter The Phantom President, to produce a persuasive national self-image, one that many observers ridicule.  

 

Washington Merry Go Round, like David Harum or The Mating Call which I’ve previously commented, are all directed by James Cruze of Covered Wagon fame, whose sound career we’d all written off because the examples that were available were pretty punk - The Great Gabbo with Von Stroheim as a ventriloquist or Gangs of New York which they assure us is derived from the same piece as the Scorsese film and has Charles Bickford in a double role doing an early Sam Fuller script. As more of Cruze’s lost work bubbles to the surface, we start to sense a grossly under-estimated talent.

I was particularly aware of the Capra comparison having just watched that excellent 2 K restoration (James Stewart - right) of Mr. Smith,

the last film I’d seen theatrically before lockdown, a benchmark theatrical movie experience. While Washington Merry Go Round occasionally approaches the later film and, in a couple of places, excedes it (the veterans’ tent city exposition), it is finally overshadowed because Cruze’s technique has become limited (awkward cuts, reliance on studio and process) and the small scale ending is tame after this build-up. It’s high points, Tracy’s two orations, come early in the film where Jimmy Stewart’s is properly the finale of Mr. Smith. Both films rely on simplification and melodrama but Capra was a master film maker at the peak of his powers - not afraid to stage the re-energising of Jefferson Smith by the crusading girl reporter in the molded shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, where Cruze falls back on a straight forward presentation of the script content. Well that’s pretty good but...

You never get to the end of old Hollywood and that’s a big slice of what makes it rewarding. Researching these I was going to look at Constance Cummings in 1932’s Behind the Mask on YouTube but that proved (curses!) to be a second or so out of synch. 

 

Lee Tracy

For Lee Tracy I came across Power of the Press from 1940, one of the B Movies he was reduced to after his dismissal from Viva Villa ended his run as one of the most conspicuous and individual early sound Hollywood leads - think The Strange Love of Molly Louvaine, Hold All Wires Dr. X or Blessed Event. Well, the good news is that the copy on You Tube is excellent, probably lifted from the transfer used for the much admired Sam Fuller box set. Fuller gets story credited on Power of the Press which has no connection to the silent Capra movie of the same name. Hopes rise when we see it’s set in Fuller world of newspaper journalism throwing around the names of Horace Greeley, Henry Dana and Abraham Lincoln. 

 

We kick off with New York Gazette editor Minor Watson reading an editorial attacking the anti patriotic stance (“We are fighting England’s wars”) of his paper written by one time colleague jowly Guy Kibbee for his back water local sheet where businessmen pay for advertising space with sacks of unsprouted potatoes and the type-setter bangs the front page in by hand. Watson is about to denounce the un American interests of publisher and 45% shareholder Otto Kruger, yet another would be despot running “his own little private Gestapo” who has his hitman Victor Jory shoot Watson at the banquet microphone and manages to plant the blame on young “Radical” Larry Parkes, who Watson had fired leaving Parkes to struggle to look after his ailing mother.

Bottle blonde secretary Gloria Dixon (They Won't Forget) however has a letter from guilt- ridden Watson appointing Kibee the metropolitan paper’s editor and she waves a “photostatic copy” of it under Kruger’s nose. He steps back giving Guy enough rope but News Chief Lee Tracy has already plated a story about a dollar a year man hoarding wartime supplies, which runs. In the resulting riot and fire, stores intended for a secret government military operation are destroyed. Kibee is about to admit defeat but a Taxi Driver friend of Frank Yakonelli, who has been represented as jumping off the news building roof, shows up with the information that he had actually come to provide an alibi for Parkes and they deduce that Yaconelli too was a victim of Jory, only to find Vic. shot dead in his flat. The piece gains a little urgency when Tracy now conscience fired intervenes, giving this talk bound programmer a bit of a lift.

The piece keeps on pulling up short for propaganda harangues which is neither interesting or convincing. The phrase “fake news” is already being repeated. For a film extolling diversity all we get is Yaconelli with a fruit peddler accent doing an ethnic, along with endless WW2 references - “His son is with MacArthur in Australia.” Director Lew Landers often had a deft hand with these (Night Waitress, Under the Tonto Rim). His B Movie Seven Keys to Baldpate is best of four versions. Here he has no scope. The warehouse fire is done in shots of reporter Don Bedoe ‘calling it in from the drugstore pay ‘phone. Landers probably shrugged his shoulders and started preparing for the next of the eight films he made in 1943 never imagining that anyone would scrutinise his work three quarters of a century later as an example of his studio employer’s house style, while Sam Fuller used his pay packet to go on a bender before they shipped him to Europe.

Barrie Pattison 2020