BOB HOPE & ARTHUR FREED.

  J. Stuart Blackton’s creaky 1933 March of the Movies, Cavalcanti’s mamoth 1942 Film & Realism and Boris Sagal’s 1953 De Mille film, The World’s Greatest Showman were once events in our film going. We dozed through Cinesound review’s ship launchings so we could see the Robert Youngston shorts in the News Theatre programs. Now material which is more polished and thoughtful is available at the touch of a keyboard. New participants don’t realise how lucky they are. In the Public Broadcasting - YouTube age we are spoiled for these. Part of Sheldon Epps' 1996 “Great Performances” series,  Musicals Great Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM is a cheer-worthy attempt to highlight the success of MGM’s Freed Unit working from the thirties to the sixties. 

Singing in the Rain - Kelly, Mitchell, O'Connor

Director David M. Thompson's film acknowledges that other producers were on the lot. Jack Cummings did Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Viennese-leaning Joe Pasternak, whose idea of classical music they note with some derision, did The Great Caruso. Not all of the films used-to-be songwriter Freed produced were musicals - The Clock, Richard Brooks’ debut, Crisis, The Subterraneans - and not all of them were brilliant. I recall squirming through Little Nelly Kelly, Till The Clouds Roll By and Show Boat with only a packet of Jaffas as compensation. However from 1943’s Cabin in the Sky onwards, Freed’s policy of recruiting Broadway’s brightest increasingly paid off, particularly in deploying the talents of Vincente Minelli, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.  From Take Me Out to the Ball Game to Gigi, the MGM musical bloomed, defining the high entertainment scene of the day. Poor Busby Berkely was lost in the rush.

The documentary explains that, while other units were shunted around the bungalows, Freed occupied a wing of the Admin. Building with his office butted onto his associate’s, complete, with permanent piano disgorging the tunes that we still recall with such delight. This  comes spaced with survivor interviews -  Cyd Charisse, Biographer Hugh Fordin, Stanley Donen barely recognisable as the lithe young man in the off-set stills, André Previn, Comden & Green, Michael Kidd, Mickey Rooney, and with welcome extracts well reproduced. Collaborators like arranger Conrad Salinger are not ignored

Arthur Freed

In all this, Freed himself remains shadowy. Associates recall his avoiding the decisions he would leave to them, with the Millard Mitchell character in Singing in the Rain unable to visualise the Mickey Spillane ballet, a thinly disguised portrait - though they swear he is not. The Shirley Temple exploit is not mentioned.

Thompson’s film struggles to document the circumstances that produced the Freed musicals and pretty much gives up on explaining their disappearance in the wide screen era. It’s still a great pleasure to find so many participants sharing recollections that we also cherish. Possibly its most telling moment is Donen, whose break with Gene Kelly became acrimonious, saying that to produce such extraordinary results, extraordinary stresses were inevitable. We could have done a lot worse for a record of one of the high points in film production. Weeks after watching Musicals Great Musicals, I've got those long familiar numbers running round in my head again.

This one is accessible on the Singing in the Rain double disk.

 John Scheinfeld’s 2017 This Is Bob Hope is a top of the range two hour TV special in PBS’ American Masters series. I find it particularly rewarding because this one revives the enthusiasm I'd had for its subject, which had been eroded by slack observers and a notion of political correctness that sees Hope as part of a detested Right-Wing Establishment.

 Hope was one of the first movie personalities whose work I followed. I’ve been on his case for seven decades but this film told me things I didn’t know and explained some that had puzzled me - notably his declining popularity, by comparison with say Jerry Lewis - Jerry Lewis!

Hope arrives endorsed by people who know their subject firsthand. Associates and observers include Dick Cavett, Margaret Cho, Leonard Maltin, Conan O'Brien, Robert L. Mills, Brooke Shields, Richard Zoglin and Kermit the Frog. Woody Allen affirms his allegiance to a mentor who created the craven comic character Woody would develop and Allen generously shows that, where he needs dialogue, Hope got laughs with body language,  And in case you are about to interject, let me repeat Bill Maher's spontaneous observation  “Woody Allen isn’t guilty of anything.  Two trials found him innocent.  This is a country of laws!"

The film offers brief childhood material (“Bob hated his Youth”) that includes his being a “Movie Teller”, describing pictures he'd seen as in the Béatrice Bejo film.  Early on-stage photos (including his double act with George Burns) go with film of his first performances. Billy Crystal’s adept narration over mute footage describes Hope’s injecting topical material into Burlesque, making him, they claim, the originator of stand-up comedy.

With John Banks and Ralph Sanford

 There's coverage of his Broadway period (“Ballyhoo of 1932”) five shows in five years, moving to radio where instead of doing a script for six months he would do five scripts a week, recruiting one of the first writers’ rooms.  The Chesterfield Show set him up as a number one Radio star through the forties. It was this, rather than his two-reel comedies, that created a place for him in movies. The analysis of his signature “Thanks for the Memory” duet with Shirley Ross is touching. The film excerpts are generally impeccably chosen and reproduced. The films were and are the things that I was drawn to.

However parallel with these, Came Pearl Harbour and the continuing USO tours which have a resonance that doesn’t always come down the years. ”It wasn’t clear that D-Day was going to be a success.”  Hope went on with these into the Vietnam era where we see Richard Nixon telling him “We can’t lose South East Asia” and it was uncertain how his inspirational speaker material would play with that era's forces. “I’ve been in both combat zones - Vietnam and Berkley” The story of him turning to Connie Stevens and asking her to sing to the hostile audience, where she broke out in “Silent Night” and at the back a few voices joined in till the thousands of troops were singing, is irresistible - like the soldier at Hope's Life Time Award Presentation saying that he’d been one of the wheelchair cases that Hope had cleared officers out of the front of his show to place for a performance.

Rather as I did,  the film loses interest in his film career about there. They do include the touching Sorrowful Jones dialogue with young Mary Jane Saunders, a set piece in serious acting which I’d forgotten (well it has been seventy years!) and the routine with Jimmy Cagney in Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys, where Hope matches the veteran dancer step for step. I wouldn’t have minded a nod to the nice I’ll Take Sweden.

Seven Little Foys.

There’s as much as we need of Hope's sixty-year “model marriage” adopting four  children, where his wife came to terms with his philandering, and a TV career, successful while a lot of his contemporaries burned out in the Saturday Night Live era. We could have heard about the 1963-5 Bob Hope presents the Chrystler Theatre with episodes developed into the Eddy Foy Film and one by Sidney Pollack anticipating Von Richtofen & Brown or his superior turn as narrator on Project 20:Comedy in America.

Let's be grateful however. This Is Bob Hope does return Hope to the center of American Culture, prominent in a line between Mark Twain and John Stewart.  The program has a special resonance for me because it endorses a judgment I’d made unconsciously, way back at the point when I started to value this material. It’s really nice when that happens.

Reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDSbQo2KMhg

Nothing But the Truth. Bob Hope in his element, with Paulette Goddard

Barrie Pattison - 2024

Toon Time

Fringe animation is one more area, where our access blows out with the arrival of YouTube. Cartoon material which might have been known only to a handful of specialists and marginal VHS bootlegger customers is now available with a few computer keystrokes. When the workload is getting oppressive I find myself searching Oscar nominees or the contemporaries of Paul Grimault. A random selection might include this lot.

1929's Hell's Bells is directed & designed by Ub Iwerks with music by Carl W. Stalling and uncle Walt doing uncredited voice work as Cerberus. Skeleton Dance is well known making it into most every compilation and documentary on animation. Hardly noticed is the studio's follow-up which is slicker livelier and funnier, having the work done on the prototype to sharpen skills.  The crew, has lifted its game - perceptibly smoother and more bizarre animation. 

Among the infernal creatures, a pair of calf demons bring blazing milk to Satan who feeds one of them to this three head pet (each face reacting) triggering a chase after the sibling. Early B&W design is at a peak and we get the studio's characteristic use of classical music coming into play with "Dance of the Marionettes" and "Hall of the Mountain King" in the score.

Not to be left out, Third Reich studios had Kurt Stordel turn out animation including the twelve-minute Agfacolor A Fairy Tale in 1939 Germany.

In this unfamiliar toon. the bee, the dwarf and the frog go walking to the tree inn where they are served nectar in a flower. However, a snake menaces them and has to be scared off by a hedgehog. Further perils include a spider wrapping a pair of the team in cocoons, which a fairy shows the dwarf how to unwind that night on a bird call cue and a king who wants to lock them up for failing to entertain him till the dwarf and frog meet a fairy bride with whom they can fill their promise to him – kind of sadistic for its target kiddie audience.

One of the attempts to break the Disney monopoly repeats the picture book subject matter but is fairly crude and strong on repeats, as well as outstaying its welcome. While inferior to the American model this one is not without novelty value and even charm.

When we get to WW2, Hugh Harmon made the 1945 Personal Cleanliness for the troops. Here slovenly private McGillicuddy, voiced by Mel Blanc, ignores washing & other hygiene messages. His socks are revolting - disturbing shots of critters stabbing and sawing at his toes. Finally, cannibals carry him off to the cook pot, not to eat him but to give him a bath.

Low cost black and white production would still connect with its target audience and remains entertaining for current viewing.

The big shake-up came with limited animation, popularised by TV, and United Productions of America hit their stride with a run of relishable one reelers like 1951's now classic Rooty Toot Toot involving all their usual suspects - Stephen Bostoutov, John Hubley, Art Babbitt, Paul Julian - in a Frankie and Johnny up-date represented by a nice copy.

By the nineteen sixties the Disney model was well out of fashion and, when we get to Roberto Gavioli's Festival aimed La lunga calza verde/ The Long Green Glove, advertising art was dominant. This one is a highly stylised history of Italy - war with Austria, industrialisation, unification. - backed by its popular music.

I had a special connection with that one having scoured Rome's Porte Portese market and come up with  a solitary reel of what I thought would be a travel movie, only to find I had part one of this state of the art animation. I got forty years out of using that in survey programs until its Ferraniacolor went orange, that's without ever seeing the second reel till now.

Is it really twenty years since Bill Plimpton made Footprints, which would have been a world-beater if it had a smarter ending? Plimpton man (dumpy, bald, glasses) wakes to the sound of shattering glass and picks up his gun to investigate,  searching the barren landscape with wide angle drawn changes of viewpoint, imagining the monsters which left foot prints outside his door. 

While Plimpton was out here giving a sixteen millimeter frame of one of his movies mounted in a viewer to anyone who participated in his Q&A, he claimed to be the only person who had ever drawn a feature film.

And currently, we get the work of English animator Steve Cutts, who has taken on the lessons the generation of Raoul Servais, Phill Mulloy and the rest, to produce work with his own surreal bitter vision.

His exceptional short (very) 2020 The Turning Point is a glimpse of a world engulfed by pollution. The first shock is an elephant in a bus shelter and we follow a bottle (Cutts did work for Coca-Cola) down the drain to the wasteland where locals are choking on plastic. TV monitors and posters warn that people are an endangered species and there are only 10,000 left. Animal eco-protestors face dog police while we see survivors freezing on ice flows or choking on waste.

The drawn imagery is striking enough to be really disturbing. A small masterpiece.

Barrie Pattison 2024

Jannings' Desdemona

Baccarat / Le Souris d'hôtel, a lesser 1929 silent from France's Films Albatros, has turned up on Le Cinémathèque Française' Henri site. This one is a curiosity which deserves some attention as the last film of Ica von Lenkeffy, talented star of the twenties Hungarian film & theatre and Desdemona to Jannings' Othello in Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy's lumpen 1922 production. The production's major assets are her winning performance and Art Nouveau decors, complete with glass matte ceilings and paintings in the style of Fernand Leger. Larzere Meerson assisted with the decoration.

  Lenkeffy, Pusey & decor

In an opening missing from the version restored by the Cinémathèque, privileged youth Arthur Pusey cleans up at the Cannes Baccarat tables and glamorous Ica insinuates herself into his hotel room to hide till he goes to sleep and she can work on the locked cabinet there, dressed in an overall black satin manteau, which proves to have the edge on the one Musidora's Irma Vip used to get about in. Underneath hers, Ica has a flashlight belt, short skirt and see-through top.

When his burglar/Souris d'hôtel is caught in the act, Pusey is smitten, fobs off hotel security and takes her home to the chateau to meet mother Elmire Vautier, who implausibly welcomes her as Daughter-in-law material, despite the fact that the women look to be the same age, while Pusey had just played the boy in an early version of "The Blue Lagoon." After a bath in one of those curtained alcoves with a sunken tub, supper on the terrace defeats Ica, so she abandons the implements and eats with her fingers and, rather than embarrass her, Mum joins in. The servants are not impressed, the butler shocking young Pusey by proposing a wolf trap to deal with food thefts in the kitchen.

   Ica Lenkeffy

The promising liaison is undermined when a telegram is intercepted, proving to be from Ica's dad Yvonneck (Chapeau de paille d'Italie – Albatros had handled René Clair silents) In the low dive, where she connects with him, he breaks a bottle over the head of one of the pug-uglies who criticises his daughter. The father (an imposing performance) has a plan to deal with a financial crisis Ica has brought about and, in a false beard, obtains employment as a dealer at the tables, ensuring that his daughter's intended wins. Manager Isaure Douvan calls young Pusey aside and assures him that his irreproachable family connections mean that no action will be taken against him and the boy immediately undertakes to repay the fraudulent losses.

In Dieppe a year later, Ica's Charleston wows the customers. The young heir follows her ("le coeur est ireconsilable") and, like Mozjoukine in Manolescu, the only way to support the relation with the demi monde is for him to join in the thievery – comic scene of Pusey in the black outfit and visions of facing a firing squad.

Pusey & Lenkeffy

The film is minor, cobbling together then familiar society comedy plot lines. It's chiefly valuable as another chance to observe the Albatros house style. Direction & script by Argentinian some-time star (the Curtiz Moon of Israel) Adelqui Migliar/Milar can best be described as functional, though they do run a couple of camera flourishes – the dancer reflected in the pupils of two eyes, stress shown by wobbling one of Henri Crétien's anamorphic lenses, as in the Feyder Cranquebille.

The incomplete copy gets by, though blue-tinted night scenes dropped into a monochrome print are just distracting. There are French captions but the synopsis above should get anyone through.

Barrie Pattison 2024

Pordenone 2024

The Lubitsch Three Women

 I've now spent a lifetime on film - watching them, buying & selling them, documenting and making them. I'm often told that I've neglected most everything else to do that but, by and large, one lifetime has not proved enough. Silent movies are particularly elusive. Most sound material was still circulating when I was active. Not all of it reached me but the bulk of what was significant did come to my attention. However, the silents looked like vanishing.  That had provided the incentive to set up the French Cinémathèque. I had to rely on chance to deal with those first three decades of movie activity.  The Pordenone Silent Film Week comes in there. It's the problem they set out to solve and they proved to have a set of priorities remarkably close to mine - seasons on Michael Curtiz, William Cameron Menzies, Ivan Mozjoukine, William S. Hart, Victor Fleming and my old mentor Maurice Elvey. They even homed in on Anatol Litvak's first steps in the movies. It's like they were reading over my shoulder.

Gish and Gilbert - La Boheme.

Checking the current event online - quality new copies of the first year of D. W. Griffith, Ben Carré's designs, Anna Mae Wong - it's frustrating not to have been there, though I already knew a lot of the material they featured. The Mating of Barbara Worth is as dull as Henry King's other westerns (Chad Hannah I enjoy) Robert Wiene's Raskolnikov, the Ford Three Bad Men, Protezanov's Sorok pervvy/The Forty-First, Charles Burguetand's La sultana dell’amore, King Vidor's so-nice La Boheme which I once backed with Morricone's Alonsanfan music. It would have been good to see Victor Schertzinger's Forgotten Faces or the Gerlach Vanina. The YouTube copy on that one is foul. 

Of course over the forty years Pordenone has been about, the game has changed. Priorities have shifted. Home Video has retrieved material that might have molded away in attics or archives. Pordenone's audience is generally determined enough to have found those.  Now this one and the Silent Movie Festivals, which have appeared in its wake, have to compete and are under pressure to air restorations that suppliers have invested in. This of course ignores material which has been hidden in plain sight down the years. Think the superior Herbert Brennon - Ronald Colman Beau Geste which has, to my knowledge, had only one screening in Australia, on a bootleg 16 mm., since its first release. The (second) Elvey Hindle Wakes sat on the shelf unloved for decades, until the discovery of The Life of David Lloyd George fired up interest in its creator. His excellent 1926  A Woman Tempted is still there.

The material chosen to stream this year was mainly unfamiliar, possibly selected on that basis. 

First up  Louis Mercanton's 1919 L'apel du Sang / The Call of the Blood, an adaptation of the novel by Robert Hitchins who wrote "The Garden of Allah" & "Bella Donna", was an immediate reminder of what this was all about. The film itself was a curiosity but the tinted copy was breath catching,  (outside of brief Nitrate rot) a demonstration of advances in restoration techniques. 

The production's major claim to fame was as Ivor Novello's screen debut. Unfortunately, it is a formula infidelity melodrama and the film adaptation's appeal is pretty much limited to movie history enthusiasts. By those standards, it rates respectable.

White-haired novelist Charles Le Bargy has formed a bond with younger Phyllis Neilson-Terry (an early Trilby). Her Rome flat overlooks the Colosseum. The privileged characters are not short of change in this film. While Nelson-Terry holidays in her St. Almo Sicilian villa with shepherds playing the bagpipes to their flocks and the Taormina festival offering donkey races and tarantella dancing ("the Englishman pays for all"), More age-appropriate suitor Novello wins her hand before LeBargy, off in Africa, can declare an interest.

The Call of the Blood - Novello

After sharing target practice, nocturnal spear fishing (effective scarlet tint) and other interests, Ivor befriends servant Gabriel de Gravone, who warns him about unpopular local fisherman Fortunio Lo Turco, the light from whose island home can be seen from the manor. (think Gatsby) Neilson-Terry races to Africa to care for her ill old friend, who is deeply grateful that new groom Ivor accepts her departure. 

 However in his wife's absence, Ivor had discovered the fleshly charms of Lo Turco's big-haired daughter Desdemona Mazza – some enthusiastic making out and praying to the madonna. Locking the girl in the house, Lo Turco plots revenge at the foot of stairs cut into the cliff face. After finding letters sent by the guilty pair (he compares copies shown as inset titles – very post-WW1 movie) Le Bargy has to sort out the imbroglio in the best interests of Neilson-Terry. The piece has historical value but it's still hard to become involved in something with such a dim-witted plot line.

The technical work is assured. – an argument at the villa gate can be seen continuing in the background of a wider shot from the house, a kiss is silhouetted in the cave mouth, a body floats in the ocean, the ending fades in on a two-tint sunset. - matching edits and lots of Folklorico. Director Louis Mercanton occasionally surfaced on later duel language productions and is up with the filmmaking of his day.

Clara Kimball Young was ranked Hollywood’s leading female star in 1914 but, after decades of raking over this material, if you ignore the B movie bit parts from the end of her career, the only time I’d seen her was in husband James Young’s forgettable Hearts in Exile of the next year, so I dialed up Pordenone’s 1918 For the Love of Rafael with some anticipation

This is a reasonably substantial effort by Harry Garson another of the husband-directors who dotted her declining career. Garson delivers the formula scenario without flourishes.

We open with convent girl Clara, who looks every day of forty, out West “when the only songs of old California were songs of Spain.” As the other novitiates ply Clara with birthday presents, dying Eugenie Besserer has her vow to marry her scapegrace nephew Bertram Grassby, in the hope of making him straighten up and fly right. Grassby gives the film’s most animated performance and is rewarded with the most colorful costumes.

Uninteresting additional characters pile in with uninteresting subplots. Implausible Redskin retainer Paula Merrit, sporting an obvious tan line, takes Clara to a tribal ceremony, where they are about to do in roving cowboy J. Frank Glendon. He has already taken an arrow hit. Clara rescues him with her Indian friendship ring, a piece of indigenous lore I hadn’t previously encountered. The pair become an item but she has the problem of affianced Grassby who is busily staging his bachelor revel orgy at the family hacienda, so Besserer palms off Clara with the story that Glendon has died. Gassby is plagued by a local girl clutching a baby and a Zorro bandit who passes himself off as an itinerant monk but is actually Grassby’s cousin who he has never met. Meanwhile, Glendon shows up again in the company of rapacious British widow Helene Sullivan, who pairs with Grassby, having an eye on the Ortega family jewels, which our heroine generously shares with her. Throw in a fiesta with cockfighting and a confrontation at prayers in the private chapel. Titles like “I swear by the cross on this dagger to send your soul to judgment if you ever come to me like this again!” Got all that?

Young suffers nobly, clutching bundles of flowers to her bosom as she faces the camera. She occasionally manages a bit of business that suggests the qualities her fans must have admired but the material is beyond redemption. Master cameraman Arthur Edeson (Frankenstein, Mutiny on the Bounty and Casablanca) gets the odd striking shadow out of Ben Carré’s curved iron window bars.

For the Soul of Rafael makes it into this event as part of a study of designer Carré whose work is better showcased in the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera or as head of MGM's backcloth division – think Night at the Opera. Programmer Thomas A. Walsh was up to speed on his subject studying Carré's unpublished journal and continuing the research past acknowledged credits, including work on The Wizard of Oz and  An American in Paris. 1909's fixed camera short  Le mort de Mozart on show, offered Carré’s canvas cut-out scenery while anticipating Amadeus strikingly. Similarly the Feuillade-era comedy La course aux potirons takes on more significance when we notice that its cumulative chase follows runaway pumpkins through a sewer that anticipates Phantom and the ingenious reverse action and jump-cut staging uses wicker vegetables (presumably loaded with ball bearings) which prefigure the boulders that chase Buster Keaton in 7 Chances and do service again in the gag Keaton re-cycled for Red Skelton in the nice but now forgotten A Southern Yankee.

Extensive Ben Carré screenings included The Pride of the Clan, Stronger Than Death and The Red Dancer all new to me though I've always been interested in his work. It made me even more sorry not to be there in person 

Santa - Valenzuela

More authentic and right on mission, Pordenone homed in on South American pre-sound film - something known from a few Mexican titles - if at all.  They aired Luis Peredo's 1918 Santa. One of the first Mexican feature films. The direction of the country's cinema to come is already visible in this scaled-down "Carmen" or "Blood & Sand", the first of four filmings of Federico Gamboa's then scandalous novel, presented if you get the idea, in episodes labeled Purity, Vice, Martyrdon and Epilogue, originally introduced by ballerina Norka Rouskaya, who is only glimpsed in the cut down surviving copy.

The elements pile on – fallen woman, arrogant officer seducer, low life setting, bullfighter, and tearful finale. Disgraced Chimalistac village girl Elena Sánchez Valenzuela is thrown out of the family home by her mother and brothers, with much arm waving. Making her way to a Chaputlepec brothel she bonds with Alfonso Busson, their blind black pianist with white contact lenses. ("I know neither light nor my father") He's guided by his small boy keeper who occasionally turns and grins at the camera. Dissolution advances in an affair with Matador Ricardo Beltri ("The voluptuous attraction that danger exercises on the female temperament") His botched corrida means Beltri gets back early and finds her deceiving him with understandably alarmed lover Adolfo Fernández Bustamante, who abandons her to the crazed, knife-wielding bullfighter. She now has only the devoted Busson to turn to, though she longs for "her family, the flowers, the birds." Devine retribution shows up in the form of a rare cancer requiring an expensive (and passably convincing) operation. Faithful Busson is reduced to having her name cut deep in the grave marker, where he can trace it with his fingers – like Lesley Howard in Berkley Square.

Santa - Valenzuela, Busson & friend

The piece is not without ambition and Valenzuela is already a presentable lead, beginning a star career which continued into her organising Filmoteca Nacional, the country's first film archive. However the performers are nowhere to be seen in the Mexico City locating scenics and these never match the canvas flat studio interiors. Even for the WW1 Era, this one lacks sophistication (why does a blind man have pictures on his wall?) with an uneven cast further undermining impact. Verbose intertitles and a restoration, funded by Brett Ratner, that shows visible shrinkage and multiple frame lines, doesn't help. 

Latin America was also represented by Ramón Peón's 1930 La  virgen de la caridad/The Virgin of Charity, the last and sole surviving Cuban silent movie. It starts as if it will provide a lively picture of the Island’s life but finally settles into a formula devotional melo.

Filming in the El Mundo newspaper building introduces a narrative which won their short story competition. At Bijirita farm, Gran is dusting the picture of her son, who was killed fighting in the revolutionary war (flashbacks) to hang below the one of the Virgin of Charity, when grandson Miguel Santos gets back, cheered at the prospect of the upcoming picnic because wealthy landowner Francisco Muñoz’s daughter Diana Marde will attend.

There the fat comic is plucking chickens in boiling water but fortunately we don’t see much more of him. The idea for entertainment is “Let’s watch them herd cattle.” That's an excuse to introduce some more local colour before dancing to a gramophone record.

However brilliantined heir Guillermo de la Torre soon comes back from the city and not only does he have eyes for Marde but a sidekick prompts that records of the purchase of Santos’ farm will have been destroyed in the fire that wiped out the Municipal building and de la Torre can claim that his dad never parted with it. A visit to a pliable notary provides bogus documentation. Unaware, Muñoz sees de la Torre as suitable son-in-law material and Marde has to accept the dastard's ring. However when all seems lost, with Santos and his gran evicted and having to move in with a neighbor, hammering a nail into the wall causes the framed picture of the virgin to fall, revealing the legal documents concealed behind it.

The engaged couple are already at the Zugalo Mucipal to make their union official when Santos bursts in proving the would-be groom to be a swindler. That’s for the law to settle but the only thing that will stop the marriage is the girl’s father withdrawing his permission – which he promptly does, recognising his error. “I will not have a scoundrel in my family.” Clearly not fate but divine intervention! The film ends with the couple kissing as the camera films into the sun.

The film’s look is more 1930s Hollywood than silent movie – fluid groupings, frequent dissolves suggesting an optical printer and diffusion on shots favoring heroine Marde. Even at this stage, it's possible to see satellite national film industries taking on the shape of their more powerful neighbors. In this way, Soviet influence showed up in the Uzbek films in Pordenone's program.  

Vyacheslav Viskovsky's 1925 Minaret Smerti /The Minaret of Death from the Bukhara Republic has genuine novelty value. It's the first Uzbek silent movie I ever encountered. That is a point in its favor along with its large-scale staging and Sixteenth Century folklorico detail, generated we are told by looting the holdings of a deposed Sultan. Direction has characterisation come in second to the costumed crowds and exotic locales. Another dupey looking copy.

In this one, people keep on abducting Nadezhda Vendelin's hair-platted Dzhemal. The caravan with which she is traveling is attacked by Kur Bashi "the Terror of Bukhara" and she's carried off   – disappointing wide-shot coverage. The Terror lays gifts at her feet but a jealous woman from his entourage enables our heroine and her handmaiden to escape, trading the horses provided for camels. The pursuit is unforgiving. "Kill her and let the jackals celebrate today!" However, Knight Oleg Frelikh comes to her rescue, returning her to her home.

Even so, it's not long before Alexei Bogdanovsky's emir of Bukhara is lowering the girls in a basket into the cellar of his palace to be the prize in the goat throwing contest, another of the film's spectacles. Though victorious, the knight is sewn in a bag and dragged off behind the horses at the orders of heir Iona Talanov, who has eyes for Vendelin, which is rather surprising when the court entertainment runs an extensive bikini girl contortionist chorus, along with its sword dancer and a few other local specialty acts. Talanov tires of The Emir, disposing of him with the comment "Your place in paradise has been awaiting for some time" and propositions his caged prisoner "You will become the jewel of my harem – flies die without sun and women without love." Despite his penchant for flowery language and precious stone gifts, Vendelin rejects the low life, pinning her hopes on the recovered knight who, outraged at Talanov's conduct, has fomented a revolution among his fellows. In his stronghold, new ruler Talanov is contemptuous. "I am a great Emir. I will not be sent off by some poor farmers" and flings a defiant peace emissary off the minaret - with an iris to black. However Vendelin's servant lowers ropes from the battlement enabling the outraged knight to storm the palace and, facing defeat, Talanov hustles our heroine off to the minaret (cf, Cairo Conspiracy) only to meet his own doom at the hands of her admirer - "As a flock of eagles take flight." The action here is spectacular and sustained, payback for the skimpy opening raid.

This one suggests that the state of Uzbek filmmaking was advanced but unsophisticated. Soviet authorities finding Minaret Smerti popular, allowed this one through to the keeper but the nationalistic content or possibly its promotion of insurrection were not well received and no further production in this tradition was permitted.

Director Viskovsky made some sixty films, including a couple of Boccacio adaptations but his dream of a Hollywood career got no further than staging a Maurice Swartz "The Inspector General" for Jewish theatre audiences in the 'States.

All Pordenone's scores were excellent but I was particularly impressed by Günter Buchwald's work on this one.

Oleg Frelikh, the hero of Minaret of Death, was back, directing this time, on 1928's Moxov Qiz/ Prokazhennaia/The Leper, showing the advance of filmmaking and great earnestness, surprisingly skewering both the Russian occupation of Chechnia and Muslim values, complete with a ridiculous Sharia Law trial.

The Leper kicks off with one of the film's Soviet-style montages - nature in a small Chechnian town,  birds and flowers, men doze in the shade and children fly a kite which becomes snagged in a tree. Grigol Chechelashvili, the local translator's daughter, who will become the heroine, frees it drawing the attention of a well-off local in a town where they believe "Allah divided the people into poor and rich." Her life of playfully gathering flowers with her mother, in the garden with its peacock, is about to end.

Having the support of Russian Colonel V. Lyubshkin and the matchmaker mullah, along with the groom's family wealth, the wedding goes ahead (coins montage) Fade in on a cat among the next morning's leftovers. The women  beating cotton intone  "What else can a young girl bring to the home but children."

However things don't go well. The groom, who dresses in the Russian (westernised) manner considers his new wife's attempt to follow his lead as sluttish ("Have you forgotten you are a Muslim?") and beats her. She daubs a protest on a cloth which she sends to the officer and this, instead of aiding her, is seen as a come-on. ("Ah, a bird has been caught in the net") Faking an injury in the Ruskie mounted column's falconing day, a seducer doubles back and has his will of the girl while her husband is away.

The seasons change and the Russian leaves our heroine to be beaten with the tongs used to put hot coals in the coffee maker. Her loving father, who quotes the Koran's "Your women are your garden" appeals to the mullahs who reproach him and return the girl to his house, making him a pariah. He has to leave the village and, in his new position as an estate overseer, he is ridiculed over his wayward daughter by the workers, when he tries to arrest one of them for diverting water.

Our heroine's mum dead, her father's new wife turns out to be an evil stepmother and the now-married officer ignores her, leaving her only the leper village as refuge – and when she flees this, the passing riders drive her off with whips, as a leper.

The film has all the techniques of mature Soviet silent film, effective tempo, well-chosen angles and vivid characters. It is clearly a work of high seriousness, juxtaposing idyllic nature with venomous scorpions and the advance of (Russian) order with the superstition of the locals.  It adds conviction with disturbing actuality (falconing, the leper community) Atmosphere is exceptionally vivid as agony and indignity are piled on the appealing heroine without respite. The Soviets appear to have been full bottle on the status of women. However the message content that they put forward with such force, now needs more vigorous contextualisation so far from its original time and place. This would have been a good spot to come up with the early actuality shorts featured in other programs.

The copy was a bit dim but sharp and   had a good range of tones. Oleg Frelikh's actor career also included playing Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Stalin era Padenie Berlina.

1924's The Folly of Vanity is notable as the first movie Maurice Elvey, then Britain's leading filmmaker, made in Hollywood at Fox during the twenties downturn in English production. Pordenone didn't offer any insights into the Elvey connection and without the British setting that he explores determinedly in his best work, the film is dispiritingly impersonal.  

It starts off like one of those Reginald Denny domestic comedies of the day but soon subsides into moralising, endorsed by Henry Oto's inserted underwater dream sequence with cliff divers and decorously filmed mermaids.

The Folly of Vanity - Mulhall, Blythe, St. Polis

The fetching Billy Dove is in the bath with coy staging of new husband Jack Mullhall fetching the soap and kissing her round the door - discord when he finds she's spent the profits of selling off household items on a string of false pearls. This is intensified when celebrity jewelry collector John St. Polis is their guest and she insists on wearing the necklace. St. Polis invites them to his yacht party. Jack has heard about those – the misleading possibility of risqué comedy or De Maupassant complications when St Polis lends Billie real pearls and the marrieds are given separate cabins. Once Theda Bara competitor Betty Blythe swans about among the revelers who offer champagne toasts. Jack knew what he was on about "Do you see what the lust for jewels turns these women into?"

Complications introduce Dove into the vision of The Temple of the Winds in Neptune's kingdom. The aquatic royal takes a dim view of the necklace too "It's a symbol of vanity!"

The film is brisker than Elvey's English work and has good production values but he's still shooting square-on to the back wall of the no-roof sets. A shortage of exteriors also disturbs and the disapproving stance on the Jazz Age is no fun. Finally, the film's only serviceable asset is Dove being winning, though publicity emphasises the Betty Blythe Connection

Another stream featured Anna May/Mae Wong, become trendy six decades after her death. Hope centered on 1928's Schmutziges Geld /Song (UK) /May Song /The Shanghai Doll/ Show Life /Wasted Love, a film featuring Wong and Heinrich George, evoking the now forgotten pre-WW2 esthetic of the UFA circuit, 9.5 libraries and The Film Society.

European silent filmmakers saw Wong as the one Chinese film star recognisable to their public, her value neglected in Hollywood, partly through censorship constraints or plain old prejudice. Producer-Director Richard Eichberg placed her in this substantial production opposite George, the bulky leading tragedian pretender to the throne of Emile Jannings. 

In Istambul ("the ancient beauty of the mosques and palaces is reflected in the quiet waters of the eastern harbor") the wind blows Heinrich's cap down the beach to where Anna is getting stuck into the raw lobster she's caught spearfishing. A couple of toughs attempt to take advantage of her and after the nicely staged brawl, where her joining in evens the odds, he sees them off, producing the clasp knife which he drops. She follows him to his studio-built back alley lodgings to return this and he sees her potential as a target in his bar knife thrower act. Anna is not too keen on that but becomes devoted, imagining bulky Heirick's face reflected when she polishes his boot (think The Sentimental Bloke visualising his Doreen in a cut market cabbage).

Anna fights the street kids for a mounted "Tourné Gloria Lee" poster advertising the visiting ballerina and who should she turn out to be but our hero's lost love Mary Kidd, (previously leading lady of Michael Curtiz' Austrian unit) whose function here is mainly to be pale skinned - which she does rather well. Bored, Mary has companion Hans Adalbert (von) Schlettow (Cottage on Dartmoor, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler) take her to a low dive and ("Of all the gin joints...") who should be performing there but Heinrich and Anna – flashback to the drowning that set our hero on the run.

Turns out that Heinrich still has the hots for Mary and the only way he can aspire to the riches needed to compete with Hans is to rob a (gleaming black steam locomotive) train in the company of Paul Hörbiger's gang  - great cast!

His eyes blinded by steam ("a light, a light!") Heinrich needs another one of the event's surgeries and the Karl (The Blue Angel) Vollmöller story needs an assist from Fool's Paradise to sustain sagging interest. Things limp along to a tragic conclusion as Anna performs her sexy dance in Von Schlettow's society nightclub – lights dim to show the silhouette profile.

The film is handsomely mounted, with designer Willi Herrmann's contrasted studio slum back streets and luxury world, spaced by location insets. Performances are superior to the material. Anna Mae never looked better and she pounces on chances that her American films never offered. Technically the work is as good as silent cinema got, even with the shonky effects of the drowning and the train passing over George. Both his knife throwing and Kidd's ballet are doubled. Eichberg however was, like Richard Oswald, someone who had gained prestige by association, working with the greats of the Erich Pommer era without producing results that were as impressive. George would have a better innings opposite Betty Arman in the similar Schleppzug M 17/ Tugboat 17. 

The copy in simulated sepia is splendid. It's worth tracking this one down and the other Ana Mae movies on YouTube, though the German films there are not subtitled.

When Pordenone did their Karel Lamac retrospective I felt they stopped just when things were getting interesting and that idea is confirmed by 1929's Suzy Saxophone/Saxophone Susi which bubbles along showcasing Mrs. Lamac, Anny Ondra with bee-stung lips in a character whose ebullience here overshadows her straight played Hitchcock leads.

Theatre janitor Paul Biensfeldt's showgirl daughter Mary Parker craves the education that her family can't afford to give her, while titled Anny is stage-struck. Why not? Her dad, Duvivier regular Baron Gaston Jacquet, spends all that time backstage with chorus girls. When both young women ship for England, they compare notes and switch identities as with "Naughty Marietta" or "Die Fledermaus" which Lamac also filmed. Mary goes off to the expensive finishing school while Anny joins the Tiller Girls Dance troop as Susi Saxophone. Meanwhile, Lord Malcolm Tod, egged on by his fellow stage door Johnies puts moves on Anny, driving her on a round trip of London when they disembark from Southampton - passing the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square and the other landmarks animated on their map.

Saxophone Susi - Ondra & Tiller girls

Trouble looms when severe manager Mira Dore has a doorman, experienced in seeing off bogus deliverymen and relatives trying to reach the girls, and Tod is sent on his way, while it looks like the fake Susi will be exposed when Dore demands she perform her Vienna chorus routine. The film takes off after her initial awkward moves, with Anny/Susi picking up the music and going into a great comic dance routine catching the school and the audience by surprise.

Following some ballet training and plotting by Tod, the characters converge on dim stock footage Piccadilly, where Anny partners tuxedo-wearing eccentric dancer John Franklyn in his impressive monkey routine and dances on the seat cushions held by the toffs. However she overhears that Tod has won a bet by getting her there and won't have a bar of him – until the happy ending of course. Proving to be the daughter of the lecherous baron removes the social barrier that Tod's hapless friend bet would destroy their union, after some bad taste byplay with Tod cultivating Mary's working-class mother while still believing the substitution. The surviving copy is minus a half hour so we never do see what becomes of Mary. Big chorus number with Anny among the girls in black rim glasses and top hats before she establishes her bona fides. 

This one is a surprise, a silent movie in which the musical numbers are the highlights. Lamac had now hit form, along with his regular cameraman fellow Czech Otto Heller, who was later to notch up an extraordinary German, French and British filmography including I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name and the dreaded Peeping Tom. Spot Hans Albers in black lip rouge doing a top hat playboy with enough energy to disguise the insignificance of the part.

This one was widely accepted as the highlight at Pordenone. The Lamacs did it over as Baby in 1932 with sound and Anton Walbrook. There's a copy on YouTube. Watch this space.

The event's big finale was the Harold Lloyd Girl Shy backed by a live orchestra. The film is a nice reminder of the level of accomplishment already visible in Lloyd’s work by 1924. He makes his stuttering bumpkin wholly admirable and charming Jobyna Ralston (out of luck to be upstaged by Clara Bow in Wings) matches him step for step.

Harold’s a Stuttering tailor’s assistant in rural Little Bend, where they hold the Saturday night dance in the open and the train to the city runs at the end of Main Street. Though he’s tongue-tied in the presence of local girls, he’s put all his effort into writing a seducer’s manual. Small-town boy (Harold was already a bit middle-aged for that) is too much of a boob to court the girl but rushes to the city to save her from one of those already-married bounders who inhabit these films.

Girl Shy

The great gag of saving her little dog by scooping it up with a walking stick from the departing train observation platform sets the tone nicely and the final dash to prevent Ralston's wedding is full of great pieces of comic stunt staging - Harold chasing a train down the wrong track, leaping into a succession of cars with one full of cork popping bootleg hooch chased by the cops and traded for a black man’s jalopy facing him on a one-way road. He crashes this immediately without anyone worried about its owner. Soon Harold or stuntman Harvey Parry does a car-to-horse transfer with a wagon pulled by a racing pair through the LA streets until one of the animals breaks away and our hero rides a fire truck hanging onto the unraveling hose, (Parry without glasses clearly visible)  We get Harold on the purloined trolley car's roof when the power connection comes away.

Finally bursting into the church just as the minister is about to pronounce the couple married, our hero halted by his stammer, throws the girl over his shoulder and exits - very The Graduate. 

Though this was Lloyd’s most elaborate work at the time, the contrast between bustling twenties L.A. and the sleepy town could have been sharper and Lloyd hasn’t hit the right balance between stupid and smart yet.  His character will evolve. By the time we get to 1934's The Cat's Paw, the plot nicely pivots on local people failing to recognise the skill set he developed in China, which will save the day.  However here filmmaking is already assured and the leads are sufficiently characterised to involve, with the inventiveness of the gags more than adequate to carry action forward.  

Running Girl Shy was recognisably an attempt to bolster the audience. It's a disappointment that, after forty years, the established Hollywood comics remain the drawcard in this epicenter of movie history enthusiasm. The event is changing. Maybe it needed to. Their magazine and free internet are history and the no repeats policy seems to have gone. Besides the Griffith shorts, I've seen Abwege there twice now. I notice that, since I’ve been following Pordenone, this is the first of their events that didn’t feature an effort from their poster boy Ivan Mozjoukine. I know we’re canceling Russian culture now but there is still all his German-French material to re-cycle. I didn't catch anything that impressed me as much as previous hits like The Life of David Lloyd George, To the Last Man, the Henri Fescout Les Miserables, Alf Sjöberg's Den starkaste. John Stahl's Memory Lane or the Shanghai Wild Rose and I must wonder whether that's a matter of taste (theirs or mine) or the well running dry. In an era dominated by streaming increasingly disposable entertainment, this is a genuine issue. 

Barrie Pattison 2024

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