Salt Mines & Garages

Public domain is catching up with movies and Hollywood movies in particular. This is not a new development. Glitches in copyright procedures have made many titles like It's a Wonderful Life or Night of the Living Dead skid in and out of protection for years, to the delight of fringe operators and the frustration of corporates who considered them their property. However the assumption that the first all-talking motion pictures are now fair game is now widespread and films with 1929 or 1930 on the credits are beginning to proliferate in streaming and legacy media. 

Victor Sjöström's Tower of Lies -  Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney, William Haines.

I can't say my sympathies are divided on this matter. The studios have been indifferent to the fate of vintage material too often. MGM appear to have lost three of Victor Sjöström's films - the equivalent of burning three Picassos and hardly a sound business proposition. The lack of value in vintage film has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as titles that were not being shown never develop the new fan base that would create demand. Film Museums have a patchy record here, with horror stories about nitrate masters being burned as a fire hazard after making inferior dupes. Particularly series comics were considered to be beneath their dignity. That's you Bob Hope, Ossi Oswalder, Pierre Laquey and Jack Hulbert, on down through Adam Sandler. There were notable exceptions. Think London films or Agnes Varda with their impressive re-issue records. 

Well, there is some good news as a combination of profit seeking and serious scholarship is producing a current restricted demand for vintage film. Titles that we thought were gone forever are being re-printed from laboratory masters that have been entombed in salt mines or garages for a century, a heroically random process. We may have lost Victor Sjöström but Ben Stoloff is still with us.

 I rate Strictly Dishonorable a find. I can only attribute its low profile to the long term slackness of Universal’s re-issue mechanism and the laziness of the viewer community. That leaves us with the copy on You Tube, a TCM rip-off  - not ideal.

This one is Preston Sturges’ first screen credit, a barely adapted 1931 film version of the hit among his prolific Broadway offerings of the day. Even more significantly, it ushers in the succession of John Stahl sound melodramas, which are among the great pleasures of that early period - Back Street, Only Yesterday, Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life - less raucous than the Warner output, less ossified than the MGM prestige product. Stahl had been a significant figure during the silents, both as director (Memory Lane) and producer, heading up the Tiffany operation. Unfortunately, it is his later, largely machine-made Fox films (Leave Her to Heaven, Oh You Beautiful Doll!) which viewers are now likely to encounter.

Strictly Dishonorable opens not all that promisingly in a process screen car, with an argument between engaged couple Sidney Fox and George Meeker who are at the point where, having landed her, he doesn’t feel the need to be gallant any more, a message-heavy exchange (“marriage - it’s like going to jail”) It’s also the only sustained part of the film occuring outside the studio-built Speak Easy below apartments, which presumably takes the place of the original stage setting. There is a disconnect finding Meeker, a familiar face heavy in post war westerns and serials, charming the leading ladies of the Stahl films. He and ethnic comic William Ricciardi playing the manager, we are told were in the stage original.

Strictly Dishonorable - Ricciardi & Stone.

The bar decor, with the characters making entrances and departures and the vocal delivery af a cast not allowing pauses for laughs, lacking the clue of live audience feedback, suggest that we are in for one of those inadequately adapted theatre pieces as which early sound films were dismissed. Upstairs resident Lewis Stone drops by the bar, coming in for the night, and is persuaded to take a drink before turning in. Stone is the one who proves to be most in his element here, the star of several of Stahl’s silents he manages to provide the film’s most nuanced character and do it while becoming inebriated and recovering as the film runs.

Like the bickering couple in Merven Le Roy’s contemporary First National Playing Around (an interesting comparison), Fox and Meeker drop in but are about to blow the joint when she takes an interest in the arrival of fellow tenant, fresh from his opera singer gig, top billed Paul Lukas. He doesn’t actually kiss any hands but you get the idea. The body of the film is a comparison between the lives offered down home Mississsippi girl Fox by the contrasting potential partners. One of the more interesting dynamics is her Pre-Code willingness to be corrupted by the glittering urbanite, with upright ex-Judge Stone trying to protect the virtue she is losing interest in. I’m not the only one to be struck by the comparison with The Moon Is Blue.

Strictly Dishonorable - Lukas & Fox.

Another surprise casting touch is Sidney (my favorite Charlie Chan) Toler’s Irish (!) beat cop, manipulated by Judge Stone to provide further complications. We get a single inset of Meeker in a cell. That’s better than their other tries for film form, shots of the characters on the stairs linking the bar and the flats, conversations between the rear windows, the glimpse of the moon or jarring sound motivated close-ups of a phonograph disk or a ringing ‘phone. Actually more effective is the dialogue’s suggestion of a teaming Manhattan just outside the doors - Fox’s joyful visits to the Met, buying rail tickets ar Pen Station a block away, Lukas’ professional engagements. These possibly unconsciously linger from the Broadway origins. 

The film's strength is in the performances. Charm was Stahl’s stock in trade and the leads deliver that by the bucketful. Fox, made even more sympathetic by our knowledge of her short life, is irresistible, even if she comes on a bit decolette for the sweet thing character and Lukas nails the lady killer who is really a softie. It’s a delight to watch them come together despite Stone’s protective instinct. The film making (Karl Freund on camera, Jack Pierce make up) is in the hands of master craftsmen even if they haven’t quite figured sound out yet. The imperfections actually give it a kind of patina. The shonky but sharp copy still shows that. It might be an idea to catch this one fast. These tend to vanish.

The piece was remade in 1951 with Janet Leigh and Ezio Pinza. I remember that as agreeable but the only point in common I recall is the actual “strictly dishonorable” exchange.

The Devil's Holiday, from previous year 1930, looked even more promising, an ambitious Paramount talkie with a celebrity cast, coming from the accomplished Edmund Goulding

Effective opening in a featureless Chicago Grand Hotel switch room with operator Zazu Pitts, of whom we could have seen more, and sharpy Ned Sparks. His stone-faced interpretation effectively insulates him from the excesses the rest get lured into. Resident and hotel manicurist business owner Nancy Carroll is not taking calls and Zazu has Ned admitted to her suite, while Hotel security Wade Boteler sees off Nancy’s insistent “fiancé” Morgan Farley. Turns out that Ned has a business proposition. He wants Nancy to vamp a country visitor to sew up an agriculture machinery deal with a big-time Wheat Farmer (“He’s got so much money the bank won’t take it. They don’t have the room. They’d have to pay storage.”) where it looks like Ned’s time is being beaten by competitor Jed Prouty. 

Phillips Holmes, Jed Prouty, Nancy Carroll

Nancy pushes up his offered commission with an eye on financing her proposed trip to Paris and soon callow heir Phillip(s) Holmes is in the barber shop with Nancy dipping his fingers into her bowl. Phillip(s)’s stern brother James Kirkwood takes a dim view and has one of the film’s strongest scenes telling Nancy she’s predatory. She comes back “I’ve got people in this town that would cut your tongue out for half what you said to me, see?” 

Sure enough, there’s a fakey montage of wheat stems in front of a back cloth and Holmes is introducing new wife Nancy to stern dad (eminent silent actor and producer with a speciality in Jack London) Hobart Bosworth. (“His home, his church and his books - that’s father”) who, despite Kirkwood’s warning, is pondering that there must be some good in the girl if his son has married her. About now we O.D. on sin and redemption. Conviction wilts.

Director(producer-writer-composer) Edmund Goulding was one of the Hollywood greats, first for silent film scripts, including Tol’able David. His writing the Swedish En Kvinnas morgondag contains elements of The Devil’s Holiday plot. As a director, he headed up three decades of major studio productions, including multiples with Garbo and Bette Davis. Joan Crawford said she’d have gone on dancing on tables if it hadn’t been for Eddie Goulding. A lot of his work was ordinary (Sam Fuller wouldn’t believe Goulding had made Down Among the Sheltering Palms when they were both at Zanuck’s Fox) but Goulding hit substantial peaks with Sally Irene & Mary, Grand Hotel, Jezebel, The Old Maid, the Errol Flynn The Dawn Patrol and the Tyrone Power Nightmare Alley. Try and draw a straight line through that lot. His versatility made him the opposite of the auteur filmmaker model.

  Devil's Holiday - Kirkwood & Caroll

Goulding had planned on filming Devil’s Holiday with Jean Eagles in the lead but her substance abuse death prevented that. Gloria Swanson had headed up his previous and more accomplished The Tresspasser and was considered. That would have been a major re-write. His eventual production has a camera technique with trackings and selection of angles equal or superior to the work around him and his picture of the Grand Hotel as a busy enclosed world intrigues, anticipating his major MGM success but the rural community only gets near token delineation - Bosworth discussing threshers with Prouty or dismissing the urban idea of a Sunday off as the Devil’s Holiday. The interiors are particularly cheesy. The structure contrasting the two settings is submerged in the hysterics. Even the physical insertion of Viennese shrink, Paul Lukas again, into the final confrontation - his restraining hand coming into edge of frame when the leads emote, doesn’t provide a significantly sophisticated presence and of course the Marriage Bond is sacred.

This one does have all manner of interesting features but is still bogged in the early sound plot conventions that the front-runners were already shedding. It is one for the curious and a whole lot more are piling in behind it as copyrights become shaky. It's a good time to be a movie completist.

 

Devil's Holiday - Sparks & Carroll.

Strictly Dishonorable - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfrUDWTA6UI

Devil's Holiday - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkYdQcGmrzg

also Playing Around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6YYDHHcPS4

Barrie Pattison 2026

Film 2025

Thought I'd do a films of the year list again. Way back when I started these, I felt confident that I was considering the whole menu.  It was possible for someone determined to look at everything likely - particularly everything likely that made it to Australia. Anything else was merely commercial or local consumption product. Of course, Asian, South American and Arab material only got a look in by accident.  Moving out, I ran into people who felt that their access to film festivals meant that they had it nailed down.  This of course excluded trash movies/ cinéma bis and "third world" efforts. Physical media and now Streaming have buried this illusion. Without doubt, there is now more material being produced and more material made accessible than any one person can hope to do justice.

It's tempting to just view legacy theatrical exhibition or the material mentioned in the press - or what meets your ideological criteria - and there are people who do that, offering a suitable amount of scorn for anything else. I've been around long enough to know any of those standards will eliminate most of what I'm looking for. It will take another five/ten years for a lot of what I value to reach me. Kinugasa's An Actor's Revenge was made ninety-one years ago and I only this year caught it in a Cinémathèque event -  severely mutilated at that.

The best I can do is nominate titles which I saw for the first time this year and impressed me. I enjoy doing that and it would be nice if it encouraged anyone to seek them out.

Let's have La Grazia Paolo Sorrentino Italy, One Battle After Another Paul Thomas Anderson USA, Histoire de Souleymane Boris Lojkine France, Anora Sean Baker USA, Yukinojô henge: Kaiketsu-hen / An Actor’s Revenge Teinosuke Kinugasa Japan (1936), Straume / Flow Gints Zilbalodis Latavia,  Xiang yang Hua/We Girls Feng Xiaogang China, Les trois mousquetaires: I D'Artagnan & II Milady/The Three Musketeers Martin Bourboulon France, Sinners Ryan Coohler U.S.A. Amance en Samana Rafa Cortés, Spain, 

La grazia - Tony Servillo, Anna Ferzetti






Barrie Pattison 2026

New Wave

Nouvelle Vague, the new Richard Linklater film, has arrived. It is an Academy frame black and white effort, in English sub-titled French, claiming to present the break out film-making of the sixties as we follow Jean Luc Godard putting together À bout de souffle/ Breathless.

Lookalikes appear as the celebrities of the French film making scene - Jean Cocteau, (“Art is not a business. It’s a priesthood”) Jean Pierre Melville in his cowboy hat or Roberto Rossellini hitting up his driver for a loan. They are filmed in the original locations in the Paris of Linklater’s After Midnight. There's Guillaume Marbeck / Godard’s contemporaries grouped outside the Le Champo display with a Jerry Lewis poster prominent, a script conference on a bench in Richelieu-Drouot Metro, wheeling Matthieu Penchinat/Raoul Coutard’s camera concealed as a baby carriage  down the Champs Elysées following Zoey Deutch  in her Jean Seberg Herald-Tribune T-Shirt or the unit playing pin ball in (is that?) the bar where they launched into spontaneous dance in Bande à part. Visitors on the nude scene shoot include Georges de Beauregard because he’s the producer and José Bénazeraf because he’s a letch.  There is a nice moment where Benjamin Clery, their Pierre Rissient, has a camera set up calculated to film the Latin Quarter street lights coming on. 

Aubry Dullin & Zoey Deutch at Arc de Triomphe

Linklater was clearly aiming at evoking Godard’s free-wheeling style, which was so electrifying to those sixties audiences I saw sit stony faced through the earlier, master-crafted classic French films which I absorbed with such enthusiasm.

 Linklater is likely to bluff viewers who didn’t live through that era but I’m continually distracted by departures from narratives with which I’m familiar. The story was that Godard made off with Cahiers du Cinéma’s petty cash to bankroll his first attempt at filmmaking, while here he uses it to get to the Cannes festival. We heard Truffaut’s credited original story for A bout de soufle was a handwritten page which he scribbled to provide his name prestige from the bonanza success of 400 coups to fund raising. I haven’t handled a film print but wide screen was firmly established by 1959 and the film's projections that I watched all seemed to fit comfortably on that.  We heard that Godard’s first cut was stunning boring, so he just went through and lopped out the bits he didn’t like, joining up what was left and claiming to have invented the jump cut, which incidentally was already part of the classic film vocabulary. Look at William Wyler’s 1958 achetypically traditional The Big Country! What about the nose job Belmondo got before his Godard short? Throw in an inexplicable glimpse of Françoise Arnoul’s birthday party.  What did credited colorist Yov Moor do on a monochrome picture?

History is repeating itself here when unknown Aubry Dullin and lively visiting U.S. starlet Zoey Deutch get to animate the original movie star characters. 

Guillaume Marbeck & Richard Liklater

I’m a fan of Linklater and I can see the appeal of his version to the director of Dazed & Confused or Boyhood but personally I’m getting over-familiar with the Godard narrative - the Richard Gere Breathless, Kristen Stewart in Seberg. By and large, I find Michel Hazanavicius’ 2017 Godard mon amor, with Lou Garrel as a  cantankerous Jean Luc, battling middle-aged celebrity, more convincing. He always struck me as someone disturbingly undisciplined, who lucked out because he recruited talented people like Seberg and Belmondo, Raoul Coutard and Michel Legrand and I don’t know that we need two Godard bios, while Agnes Varda’s beautiful study of Jaques Demy,  Jacquot de Nantes, is all but unknown.

Maybe I’d have regarded the uneven JLG output with more sympathy if he hadn’t been unable to come up with the names of any of the Monogram movies he’d dedicated  À bout de souffle to, when called on, a plausible test of poltroonhood.

Barrie Pattison 2026