Oscarvations

Van der Veer, Rucker, With Byrd at the South Pole

2009-09-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

With Byrd at the South Pole (1930)
WON: Best Cinematography (Joseph T. Rucker, Willard Van der Veer)

The first World War was over, and it was an exciting time in America. The modern age was quickly coming upon Us. We were quickly conquering the skies and the seas, and it wouldn't be too long before every stretch of Earth would be explored. Fortunately, film had been created the very last moments of the exploration age, when guys who traveled great distances were considered national heroes.

Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd was one such hero, and With Byrd at the South Pole chronicles his 1928 expedition to the South Pole, with the goal to be the first man ever to fly an airplane over the very pole itself. Byrd, who claimed to have flown over the North Pole and who was one of the first people to fly a plane from New York to France nonstop, was quickly becoming one of the most famous explorers of the 20th century. He was considered very brave and patriotic.

He was not, however, a very good actor.

The film opens with a near-five minute scene of Byrd introducing the film. He's clearly uncomfortable, and we can't help but laugh as we watch his eyes move as he reads from cue cards.

Fortunately, the rest of the film fairs better, but overall it's an odd and slight docudrama that's valuable as a historical document then an actual movie. It's main problem is an overall lack of focus, switching between moods and goals rather quickly. At times, the film is a dramatic adventure...

...is a picturesque look at an alien landscape...

...is a technical documentary examining all the small details...

...is a naked guy in a bucket...

This is largely the work of the editor, though. The thing the film won an Academy Award for, cinematography, is really very good. Two cameramen went along with the expedition, and even got to be characters in the film. Willard Van der Veer...

And Joseph T. Rucker.

Between the two, they produced a lot of great, dramatic footage of the Antarctic landscape and managed to great down and personal with the small details at the same time, and a lot of these shots, like ones high in the sails of the ships used to get to the South Pole or shots along the edges of icy cliffs, appear to have been downright life threaten to have taken.

It's impossible to figure out who shot what, so for all we know, all the dangerous stuff could have been the work of one of them and the other could have been a total puss, but however it worked out, you can't help but appreciate the work that went into it.

That brings up an interesting question: Why don't more documentaries get cinematography nominations? Surely, most documentaries depend on having the best damn cinematography possible.

Maybe the Academy is just, I don't know, stupid.

Ronald Colman and Bulldog Drummond

2009-08-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

Bulldog Drummond (1929)
DIRECTED BY: F. Richard Jones
STARRING: Ronald Colman, Claud Allister, Joan Bennett
NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Ronald Colman)
Best Art Direction (William Cameron Menzies)

The transition from silent films to sound was perhaps most dangerous for the actors. If an actor didn't have a voice to match the physical persona they had built up in their silent career, they might never find work again. The most famous case of this was the career of John Gilbert, though his unexpected (but not bad) voice really only played a small part in his steep decline.

British actor Ronald Colman was one of the few stars that not survived the transition, but flourished in it. He had a great voice, and thanks to a side career in radio, knew how to use it. He had a natural charisma that he put in most of his roles, and found success in all kinds of films, be they action, comedy or romance, of which Bulldog Drummond is all three.

The character Bulldog Drummond was created by British author Herman Cyril McNeile as sort of an answer to the rise of American pulp novels. Unfortunately, like a lot of British writing in the early 20th century, McNeile's stories contained a lot of racism and general thugishness that would make the character an unacceptable hero today.

Fortunately, both Ronald Colman's and Bulldog Drummond's first foray into sound exorcised these negative elements, and what you're left with is a cool actor playing a character who's just simply BETTER then everybody else.

Throughout the film, the character of Bulldog Drummond, a retired World War I captain living in the British high life, goes around with a smirk on his face. He knows he's so much better then the people around him, and he's loving it. We're introduced to him reading in a gentleman's club full of old farts. A servant accidentally drops a spoon, upsetting the silence, and the old farts get cranky, and all Bulldog Drummond can do is laugh at how stuck up these people are. Then he starts whistling.

Because he's just simply BETTER then them.

The character of Bulldog Drummond is a bit unique, because he's not a professional crime solver, just a guy who's bored and looking for adventure. He's not even looking to help people, as his classified ad suggests.

And he does find adventure in the form of a girl's kidnapped uncle, but even on the case, he never starts taking anything seriously, even around the girl who hired him.

And most people would take this situation VERY seriously, because once Bulldog agrees to try and free the girl's uncle, he finds himself transplanted into a rather dark and very dangerous pulp world.

In a world with mad scientists, murderers in the shadows and secret passages, you'd expect a hero to stay focused and serious, but Bulldog Drummond is just so much BETTER then everybody.

And that's ultimately where the film's entertain value comes from, Bulldog Drummond smirking and easily outwitting all these dangerous criminals who want to cause him serious harm. I didn't smile during the action scenes, I smiled at small moments like Drummond playing a little tune on his car horn to mock the crooks he just escaped from.

In many ways, Bulldog Drummond is the grandfather to the wisecracking antiheroes who throw around one-liners with each victory, guys like Bruce Willis' character in Die Hard, but perhaps Drummond's nearest relative is this guy:

That's what Drummond is. A cartoon. Just like Bugs Bunny sticking his fingers into Elmer Fudd's gun barrel and having it backfire, the rules just don't apply to Drummond, and he always ends up on top. Part of that comes from the script, but a lot of the credit needs to go to Ronald Colman, who's light smirk and general body language really sells the character's superiority over everyone else.

Perhaps it's because it's such a rarity for a hero to go through no hardships at all that makes the film as enjoyable as it is, a contrast to the struggle of the heroes of every other film. I'm sure it'd get boring really fast if more good guys had it this easy. Bulldog Drummond would probably trump any of those guys, though. Bulldog Drummond is just BETTER then everyone else.

Oscar Lagerstrom and Raffles

2009-07-28T02:31:00.000-07:00

Raffles (1930)
DIRECTED BY: Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, George Fitzmaurice
STARRING: Ronald Colman, Kay Francis, Bramwell Fletcher
NOMINATED FOR: Best Sound, Recording (Oscar Lagerstrom)

I've said many negative things towards the introduction of sound in the film industry, but this is not so much a distaste in sound itself as it is a mourning of the lose of what COULD have been. The only point to that is to warn people of how future technological advances can impede on art.

Now that we've had the large clunk of transitioning between silents and talkies and are in the first Academy Awards to give out awards for sound, it's time to stop looking back and instead look forward to the artistic and technical advances sound will offer films as they begin to grow again.

Raffles belongs to the technical side of things. The film and it's sound can be both described in one word: functional. The film is a largely no-brainer light comedy that serves as a Ronald Colman vehicle (of whom I'll have much more to say about in my review following this one). Neither groundbreaking nor insulting, just functional.

The sound design on the film is equally so. Now that sound was no longer a novelty, it had to be made both unobtrusive when it wasn't needed (unlike scenes pausing to showcase their sound effects like in In Old Arizona) as well as technically sound (unlike the horrible sound levels in Coquette).

Which is not to say the sound design doesn't occasionally have fun with itself. The very first scene is that of three police officers sipping soup.

Right off the bat we're shown how dysfunctional the police force in this film are, because the sounds of biological functions are funny, and it wouldn't have been appropriate in 1930 to open a film with three police officers farting.

However, beyond this and two other unimportant moments, the sound never really brings attention to itself. The only recurring motif in the sound design is that of chiming clocks, none the least being Big Ben, since the film takes place in London. Even these barely register though, merely a way to fill the gap of silence as Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, pulls off his little heists.

Very rarely do sounds in this film overlap. When a character walks through a room, we hear his footsteps or the floor creaking. However, when a character walks through a room while talking, we only hear the dialogue.

This sounds like no big deal in today's film world, but barely a year ago filmmakers found themselves obligated to include every single sound they could to display the novelty of it all, so it's nice to start seeing restraint in these films. The only time sounds overlap is when there's just no other way around it, like when two characters chat while in a dance club.

In many ways, Raffles may be a more important film in terms of the use of sound then some of the more artistic attempts at the time like Alibi because Raffle displays control. All the artistic talent of a painter isn't worth a damn if he has a twitchy arm, and while Raffles may be artistically uninteresting, it's at least dominate of it's functions, so much so that they finally got the camera to move again.

Remember, cameras during that time were so loud that they had to be encased in sound-proof booths so they wouldn't be picked up on the microphone. So imagine my surprise to see not one, but several scenes of characters to and away from the camera while the camera follows, complete with sound!

I really don't know how they did it. Maybe they invented a quieter camera or a more selective microphone or they dubbed the sounds and dialogue in later (and if it is a dub, it's a really, really good one). Whatever they did didn't catch on with everyone, and a lot of the films during that time still had the nailed-down camera thing going against them.

Sound is not and has never been an enemy to film, it's merely it's misuse that caused so many filmmakers and film viewers headaches. While Raffles the film is ultimately unmemorable, it does show a lot of control of it's functions, and now that the tools have been used properly, we can finally see what we can make with them.

November 5, 1930

2009-07-20T23:52:00.000-07:00

The third Academy Awards ceremony was the second of 1930, done so to get the Academy aligned with the calender year. Awards were given away for eight categories, including a brand new category for sound production.

Thomas A. Edison was presented an honorary Academy membership and gave a post-dinner talk. George Eastman was also presented an honorary membership.

For the third and last time, the statuettes are made of bronze castings with 24k gold plating. Later statuettes are all made of britannium.

Sound was finding it's ground at this point, and would eventually lead film into many interesting directions.

I've managed to find many, many more films from these Academy Awards then I did for the 2nd, so hopefully we'll get a good look of the film industry in 1930.

Welcome to the 3rd Academy Awards.

Index: 2nd Academy Awards

2009-07-14T00:33:00.000-07:00

Best Picture
Winner: The Broadway Melody (1929) - M-G-M
Other Nominees:
- Alibi (1929) - Feature Productions
- In Old Arizona (1928) - Fox
- The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929) - M-G-M
- The Patriot (1928) - Paramount Famous Lasky

Best Actor in a Leading Role
Winner: In Old Arizona (1928) - Warner Baxter
Other Nominees:
- Alibi (1929) - Chester Morris
- The Patriot (1928) - Lewis Stone
- The Valiant (1929) - Paul Muni
- Thunderbolt (1929) - George Bancroft

Best Actress in a Leading Role
Winner: Coquette (1929) - Mary Pickford
Other Nominees:
- Madame X (1929) - Ruth Chatterton
- The Barker (1928) - Betty Compson
- The Broadway Melody (1929) - Bessie Love
- The Divine Lady (1929) - Corinne Griffith
- The Letter (1929) - Jeanne Eagels

Best Director
Winner: The Divine Lady (1929) - Frank Lloyd
Other Nominees:
- Drag (1929) - Frank Lloyd
- In Old Arizona (1928) - Irving Cummings
- Madame X (1929) - Lionel Barrymore
- The Broadway Melody (1929) - Harry Beaumont
- The Patriot (1928) - Ernst Lubitsch
- Weary River (1929) - Frank Lloyd

Best Writing, Achievement
Winner: The Patriot (1928) - Hanns Kräly
Other Nominees:
- A Woman of Affairs (1928) - Bess Meredyth
- In Old Arizona (1928) - Tom Barry
- Our Dancing Daughters (1928) - Josephine Lovett
- Sal of Singapore (1928) - Elliott J. Clawson
- Skyscraper (1928) - Elliott J. Clawson
- The Cop (1928) - Elliott J. Clawson
- The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1929) - Hanns Kräly
- The Leatherneck (1929) - Elliott J. Clawson
- The Valiant (1929) - Tom Barry
- Wonder of Women (1929) - Bess Meredyth

Best Cinematography
Winner: White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) - Clyde De Vinna
Other Nominees:
- 4 Devils (1928) - Ernest Palmer
- In Old Arizona (1928) - Arthur Edeson
- Our Dancing Daughters (1928) - George Barnes
- Street Angel (1928) - Ernest Palmer
- The Divine Lady (1929) - John F. Seitz

Best Art Direction
Winner: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929) - Cedric Gibbons
Other Nominees:
- Alibi (1929) - William Cameron Menzies
- Dynamite (1929) - Mitchell Leisen
- Street Angel (1928) - Harry Oliver
- The Awakening (1928) - William Cameron Menzies
- The Patriot (1928) - Hans Dreier

The Lost Films: 2nd Academy Awards

2009-07-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

In the days before television, VHS and DVD, not a lot of thought was given to film preservation. As such, the further you go back, the harder it is to find copies of certain films. There were a lot of films nominated during the 2nd Academy Awards that are either completely lost or unavailable in any consumable format.

Should any of these films become available, I promise to go back and review them.

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4 Devils (1928)
Nominated For: Best Cinematography (Ernest Palmer)

According to Wikipedia:

"The plot concerns four orphans (Anders Randolf, Barry Norton, Charles Morton, and Gaynor) who become a high wire act, and centers around sinister goings-on at a circus."

The film is sadly lost. Details are available on the DVD of Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans.

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The Awakening (1928)
Nominated For: Best Art Direction (William Cameron Menzies)

Can't find much information on it, besides that it takes place in World War I. No known copy exists.

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The Barker (1928)
Nominated For: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Betty Compson)

Plot according to Turner Classic Movies:

"Nifty Miller, the greatest carnival barker in the world, sends his son, Chris, to law school in the hope that the boy will find in professional life a more settled and prosperous life than that of the sideshow. During one of his summer vacations, Chris finds work with the carnival, and Nifty breaks off his relationship with Carrie, a hula dancer who, seeking revenge for this slight, pays another carnival girl, Lou, to vamp the innocent boy; Lou, however, genuinely falls in love with Chris. When his father finds out that they are in love, Chris defiantly announces his intention to marry the girl. Seeing his ambitious plans for his son seemingly collapse, Nifty quits the carnival and turns to drink. He later finds out that Chris has returned to law school at Lou's urging. Offered a partnership in the carnival, Nifty returns to his former life as a barker."

Prints exist, but no VHS or DVDs

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The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929)
Won: Best Art Direction (Cedric Gibbons)

Wikipedia on the novel the film was adapted from:

"It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope-fiber suspension bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar who has witnessed the tragic accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die."

A part-talkie, part-silent film. The talkie portions are lost, and the remaining parts of the film are in storage and are unavailable.

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The Cop (1928)
Nominated For: Best Writing, Achievement (Elliott J. Clawson)

Not much information on this film, a print might exist at the Library of Congress.

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The Divine Lady (1929)
Won: Best Director (Frank Lloyd)
Nominated For: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Corinne Griffith)
Best Cinematography (John F. Seitz)

The plot according to IMDb:

"A partly fictionalized account of history begins with the arrival of slatternly Emma Hart, a cook's daughter, at the home of Charles Greville. Greville takes her as his lover and grooms her until their relationship becomes an inconvenience. Greville then dupes Emma into traveling to Naples to live with his uncle, Lord Hamilton, ambassador to the court at Naples. Realizing that Greville has abandoned her, Emma agrees to marry Lord Hamilton. Soon, however, she meets Admiral Horatio Nelson of the British Navy. Emma plays a crucial role in convincing Naples to open its ports to Nelson during his campaign against Napoleon's French fleet. Soon, Emma and the married Nelson become romantically involved -- a relationship which will have consequences for them both."

Prints exist, and it's aired on Turner Classic Movies a few times. Possible review in the future.

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Drag (1929)
Nominated For: Best Director (Frank Lloyd)

Plot according to Turner Classic Movies:

"Young David Carroll takes over the publication of a local Vermont newspaper. Although he is attracted to Dot, "the most sophisticated girl in town," he marries Allie Parker, daughter of the couple who run the boardinghouse where he lives. Inseparable from her parents, Allie remains at home when David goes to New York City to sell a musical he has written. There, Dot, now a successful costume designer, uses her influence to get David's play produced. David and Dot fall in love, but she leaves for Paris when David indicates he will remain true to Allie. He sends for Allie; but when she arrives with her whole family, he decides to follow Dot to Paris."

Prints seem to exist, not much information beyond that.

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Dynamite (1929)
Nominated For: Best Art Direction (Mitchell Leisen)

The plot, according to IMDb:

"Wealthy Cynthia is in love with not-so-wealthy Roger, who is married to Marcia. The threesome is terribly modern about the situation, and Marcia will gladly divorce Roger if Cynthia agrees to a financial settlement. But Cynthia's wealth is in jeopardy because her trust fund will expire if she is not married by a certain date. To satisfy that condition, Cynthia arranges to marry Hagon Derk, who is condemned to die for a crime he didn't commit. She pays him so he can provide for his little sister. But at the last minute, Derk is freed when the true criminal is discovered. Expecting to be a rich widow, Cynthia finds herself married to a man she doesn't know and doesn't want to."

The film is in rotation on Turner Classic Movies, but no VHS or DVD is available. A possible review coming in the future.

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The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1929)
Nominated For: Best Writing, Achievement (Hanns Kräly)

The plot according to IMDb:

"There is a big charity function at the house of Mrs. Cheyney and a lot of society is present. With her rich husband, deceased, rich old Lord Elton and playboy Lord Arthur Dilling are both very interested in the mysterious Fay. Invited to the house of Mrs. Webley, Fay is again the center of attention for Arthur and Elton with her leaning towards stuffy old Elton. When Arthur sees Charles, Fay's Butler, lurking in the gardens, he remembers that Charles was a thief caught in Monte Carlo and he figures that Fay may be more interested in the pearls of Mrs. Webley, which she is. After Fay takes the pearls, but before she can toss them out the window, she is caught by Arthur who is very disappointed in how things are turning out."

Prints seem to be available, but no VHS or DVD copies.

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The Leatherneck (1929)
Nominated For: Best Writing, Achievement (Elliott J. Clawson)

Can't find much information. If prints are available, there isn't any VHS or DVD copies.

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Madame X (1929)
Nominated For: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Ruth Chatterton)
Best Director (Lionel Barrymore)

Plot according to IMDb:

"Thrown out of her home by a jealous husband, a woman sinks into degradation. Twenty years later, she is charged with killing a man bent on harming her son. The son, unaware of who the woman is, takes the assignment to defend her in court."

Prints exist, will probably review in the future.

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The Patriot (1928)
Won: Best Writing, Achievement (Hanns Kräly)
Nominated For: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Lewis Stone)
Best Art Direction (Hans Dreier)
Best Director (Wrnst Lubitsch)
Best Picture

The tag line according to IMDb:

"These Characters Will Fascinate You! EMIL JANNINGS - Cruel, brutal, but also pathetic. The mad Czar who holds all Russia in his tyrannical grasp. FLORENCE VIDOR - An exotic beauty of the court. The Czar's favorite! Betrayed by her lover, she becomes a thorn in the hands of the conspirators! LEWIS STONE - Prime Minister and trusted friend of the mad Czar, who conspires against the monster ruler of Russia. NEIL HAMILTON - Heir to the throne. Worshipped by the Russians. The only man who can hold the government from self-destruction."

This film is very, very lost. Chances of finding it are 0 to nil. It is the only Best Picture nominee for which no complete or near-complete copy exists.

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Sal of Singapore (1928)
Nominated For: Best Writing, Achievement (Elliott J. Clawson)

Not much information. A print supposedly exists at UCLA.

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Skyscraper (1928)
Nominated For: Best Writing, Achievement (Elliott J. Clawson)

The plot according to Turner Classic Movies:

"Blondy and Slim, buddies, are high steel workers. Blondy falls and is seriously injured while attempting to rescue Slim. As a result of his injury he can no longer work, and he falls into a reclusive depression. Only after his friend pretends to be interested in his sweetheart does he recover his spirit and become well again."

Not much information on availablity.

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Thunderbolt (1929)
Nominated For: Best Actor in a Leading Role (George Bancroft)

Plot according to IMDb:

"A criminal known as Thunderbolt is imprisoned and facing execution. Into the next cell is placed Bob Morgan, an innocent man who has been framed and who is in love with Thunderbolt's girl, without knowing of their relationship. Thunderbolt hopes to stave off the execution long enough to kill young Morgan for romancing his girl."

Not much information on availability.

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The Valiant (1929)
Nominated For: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Paul Muni)
Best Writing, Achievement (Tom Barry)

The plot according to Wikipedia:

"The play's plot is actually quite convoluted. The basic story of the plot is that a half an hour before a murderer's execution, the Warden and the Prison Chaplain attempt to discern the prisoner's identity. He meets his long lost sister, although the end is slightly ambiguous if one is not paying attention. The play ends with the exit of the murderer, the Chaplain and the Warden."

Prints exist only in private collections.

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Weary River (1929)
Nominated For: Best Director (Frank Lloyd)

Plot according to Turner Classic Movies:

"Bootlegger Jerry Larrabee is framed by a rival gangster and is sent to prison, where he comes under the kindly influence of the warden. Jerry turns to music and forms a prison band, broadcasting over the radio. Radio listeners are deeply moved by his singing, and Jerry wins an early parole. He goes into vaudeville and quickly flops; he then moves from job to job, haunted by the past. Forced at last to return to his old gang, Jerry takes up with his former sweetheart, Alice. She gets in touch with the warden, who arrives on the scene in time to keep Jerry on the straight and narrow path. Jerry eventually becomes a radio star and marries Alice."

Prints exist, may review in the future.

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Wonder of Women (1929)
Nominated For: Best Writing, Achievement (Bess Meredyth)

The really short synopsis from IMDb:

"A German pianist is going to break up with his unfaithful wife, when he receives the message that his favourite stepchild has died."

Despite a rumor of a laserdisc existing at UCLA, this film is pretty lost.

Hollywood and The Broadway Melody

2009-07-13T06:36:00.000-07:00

The Broadway Melody (1929)
DIRECTED BY: Harry Beaumont
STARRING: Anita Page, Bessie Love, Charles King
WON: Best Picture
NOMINATED FOR: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Bessie Love)
Best Director (Harry Beaumont)

The 2nd Best Picture winner opens big, with a vast shot of New York City as filmed from an airplane.

We spend about half a minute to absorb the setting. Similar shots were used in The Crowd to reveal the city as a massive machine, impossible for any individual to conquer, where as Speedy took the same kind of shots to create a poem celebrating the city for it's communities and quirks.
The Broadway Melody shares neither of those ambitions. The film mearly shows New York for the sake of showing New York, and then confines the rest of the film into tiny sound stages. That sums up the film perfectly: A film that by every right should have been ambitious and interesting, but decided to confine itself in trite and confusing plot points.

The film holds the distinction of being one of the first musicals ever, and the first musical to win Best Picture. That doesn't mean anything, though. The songs are just songs. They are not used to tell the story, they aren't related to the actual plot, the film is put on hold so that the actors can sing them. I'm not even sure if you could call that a musical.

And is it really that smart to make a musical this early into the history of talkies? People could barely figure out microphones, let alone sound editing, and scenes involving more then one person talking or making noise turned the scenes into clustered messes. Here's a scene near the beginning that's the perfect example of what I'm talking about, which also follows into the film's first song:

Hope you like that song, because it's not the last time we hear it.

Beyond bad sound and quaint songs, the film doesn't offer anything beyond a by-the-numbers struggle-for-success story, only now in sound for the first time. Two small town girls, Hank and Queenie Mahoney, make a new home in a New York hotel, trying to break into Broadway. They have a friend named Eddie on the inside, the big wig star you saw singing earlier, who is also Hank's boyfriend. They haven't seen Eddie for a while, so when Eddie sees how much Queenie has blossomed...

...he IMMEDIATELY jumps ship.

Queenie isn't the smartest apple, and Eddie is shallow as all hell, but you're not going to believe this, but these two are the characters we're supposed to attach ourselves to. By the end of the film, Eddie will have cheated on Hank, Queenie will have turned down the advances of a rich but really really nice producer (who everybody in the film hates for no reason I can see), and then the two get married and we're supposed to treat this like a happy ending. I'm not sure if this is just an example of old-school 1920s values or some clunky attempt at a sad ending.

What the hell is this movie supposed to be?

If I was to say anything nice about this film, it'd probably be that it provides a decent look at the behind-the-scenes of the Broadway variety shows of the time, and boy, do they seem like totally unappealing places. Nobody gets along, both the performers and producers are there just to make money... well, I guess that's pretty accurate t0 any job.

The Broadway performances themselves are standard fare and unimaginative, but even if they were amazing, we could barely see them anyway.

I suppose the filmmakers wanted to give us the feeling of being at an actual Broadway show, sitting in a decent middle row seat. This was an unfortunate attitude, and it makes the performances little and insignificant.

There's nothing really beyond this. Once again, I find myself with fewer things to say about the Best Picture winner then I do with the other nominees. The Broadway Melody isn't an awful film, it's just uninteresting and uninventive in a time where films really needed both.

Hollywood and The Hollywood Revue of 1929

2009-05-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)
DIRECTED BY: Charles Reisner
NOMINATED FOR: Best Picture

I don't normally look at films I haven't seen in full. My excuse is that The Hollywood Revue of 1929 is not a film, it's a television special in the days before television.

All this "film" is is a collection of sketches performed on a stage by then-famous Hollywood stars. There's no narrative, no story, just some comedy bits and some singing, stretched out to two hours. You could randomly shuffle the sketches up and still come out with the same movie.

And that doesn't offer anything worth talking about. I guess it gave the people the same kind of Seeing Famous People Do Stuff thrill that we now get from Dancing With the Stars and such shows, but if you really need that kind of thrill, you probably have nothing to do with this blog.

Since there's no substance to speak of, I'll just post the available clips on Youtube and show you what was entertainment in 1929:

Host Jack Benny getting his clothes torn off by William Haines...

Marie Dressler having a royal fantasy...

Buster Keaton dancing in drag...

Laurel & Hardy doing magic, kinda (my personal favorite bit from those I've seen)...

John Gilbert & Norma Shearer doing a classic scene from Romeo & Juliet (IN COLOR!)...

And them again, doing a more up to date scene from Romeo & Juliet (IN COLOR!)...

And to close things out, the entire cast performing "Singing in the Rain," which I should point out debuted with this film.

No, I have no desire to hunt the rest of the film down. What's the point? It's mostly Hollywood patting itself on the back, and I already get enough of that with the Academy Awards.

Warner Baxter and In Old Arizona

2009-05-23T05:59:00.000-07:00

In Old Arizona (1928)
DIRECTED BY: Irving Cummings
STARRING: Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, Dorothy Burgess
WON: Best Actor (Warner Baxter)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Cinematography (Arthur Edeson)
Best Director (Irving Cummings)
Best Writing, Achievement (Tom Barry)
Best Picture

There was a reason the early sound films were called "talkies." Most shoots were limited to a single microphone, and that was usually reserved for the dialogue. It was hard to pick up sounds that weren't within a few feet of it, so films were enclosed on sets to allow for easier sound pick-up.

This is what gives In Old Arizona it's claim to fame: Along with being the first sound western, it's the first sound film that largely takes place outdoors.

Unfortunately, this isn't as big of a deal as it sounds. The microphones barely picked up anything beyond a few feet, so for a ten second shot of a man riding a horse, you might hear the hoof beats for about two seconds, followed by eight seconds of total silence. More minor sounds that would create atmosphere, like the wind, weren't picked up.

The locations in Arizona were certianly photogenic, but with such weak sound sources, it would have been a lot more satisfying to just give the non-dialogue portions of the film to a foley artist. Not that there's a lot of those. This is a "talkie," and it earns that title. This film will NOT SHUT UP! It's wall-to-wall boring conversations between three bad actors, and it's enough to drive you bonkers.

Let's start with Baxter.

Warner Baxter, who won the Academy Award for acting somehow, plays the Cisco Kid, #1 outlaw of the west, and oversized hat connoisseur! This is my first film with Warner Baxter, and I'm not sure what his acting strengths are (or if he even has any). He's never allowed to physically act throughout the entire film, he just stands there with a smile and reads off his lines.
And he keeps talking, and talking, AND TALKING. He never stops talking. There are a lot of scenes where he's alone, and he just talks to himself. He sees a wanted poster for him, and he laughs and gives a monologue about how awesome he is. He monologues about everything: about how awesome his girl is, about how awesome babies are (seriously), about how awesome his wine is, etc.

And despite all this talking-and-nothing-else, Warner Baxter isn't very good at it. Maybe it's his faux-Mexican accent (even though the character is Portuguese, figure that one out). Maybe Baxter couldn't play young (the character was 25 and Baxter was 39). Maybe he just couldn't get over how goofy and large his hat was.

In any case, Baxter was bad, and the Cisco Kid was uninteresting. The description of the film I read compared the Cisco Kid to a wild west version of Robin Hood, which is nothing but a complete misunderstanding on what Robin Hood was about. Robin Hood didn't just "steal from the rich and gave to the poor," he fought a corrupt government that squeezed money unfairly from it's citizens. The Cisco Kid just stole stuff.

The opening of the film shows the Cisco Kid stealing a box of money from a carriage, and then leaving. The people the Kid steals from aren't rich or corrupt or anything, they were just passing through, and the Kid never has any intention though the film to do anything with the money but buy things for him and his girl. What an asshole.

It should be noted that in this classic western story of law makers and law breakers, there's hardly any action in it. The carriage stickup is just the Cisco Kid pointing a gun at a few people, them giving him the money, and him leaving. No shots fired, no hasty escapes, just routine.

There's only one scene in the movie that would qualify as an action scene. About two-thirds of the way through, three random guys spot the Cisco Kid and try to take him down for the reward on his head, but the Cisco Kid makes quick work of them. It's a quick moment, shot from a distance, and has nothing to do with what little plot there is in the film. So, with those two short moments out of the way, what left for the remaining 60+ minutes of film?

Talking, talking, talking, talking, TALKING.

And then we have Edmund Lowe and his character Sgt. Dunn. Despite being the Cisco Kid's main foil, Dunn comes off even worse of a character. He's a gambler and a womanizer who cheats on his wife, and he's only really after the Kid for the money, not because it's the right thing to do. The main problem with this is that Edmund Lowe must not have gotten the memo and thought he was playing the good guy, because despite what this character does, Lowe always plays the character as an aw-shucks-boy scout that ends every sentence with "geez".

And then we have Dorothy Burgess and her character, the feisty Mexican Tonia Maria. Tonia is a gold digger, and sleeps with other men behind the Kid's back. She's easily the least-likable character in the film, and it doesn't help that Burgess' performance is damn near racist.

Eventually, Tonia gets with Dunn, and we realize that the only reason we're even rooting for the Cisco Kid, a selfish bandit, is because everybody else is WORSE. What we end up with is an hour and a half film where three totally unlikeable characters do nothing but talk to each other about nothing, all while being played by three bad actors. This is what Hollywood wanted to pretend was entertainment back then.

Roland West and Alibi

2009-05-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Finally! An interesting movie!

Alibi (1929)
DIRECTED BY: Roland West
STARRING: Chester Morris, Harry Stubbs, Mae Busch
NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Chester Morris)
Best Art Direction (William Cameron Menzies)
Best Picture

It's kind of heartwarming to discover that SOMEBODY was trying to use sound artistically this early in it's history. Most sound films at the time were just stationary cameras filming people talking. Sound was just that, sound. A gunshot was a gunshot, a footstep was a footstep, and a scream was a scream. There was very few attempts to bring symbolization into sound this early in the game.

Alibi is a dated, creaky film now, but put into context, and it's pretty amazing. The very opening scene is a montage of simple sounds. A prison guard twirls his baton, creating a beat.

A bell is rung to the same beat.

Prisoners drag their feet.

Another prison guard beats his baton against a wall.

This is the earliest musical moment I've seen in sound pictures. The film is not a musical, but the simple beat and the poetic images suggest the opening moments of a modern music video. Most musicals at that time were simply Broadway performances put in front of a camera, usually involving dancing girls with glittery costumes.

Alibi has those too, though.

This is the main problem with Alibi, it has split personalities. The film was originally conceived as a silent film, but the success of talkies forced director Roland West to transform it into a sound film.

What we end up with is a film where half the scenes are like the one at the beginning, filmed silent with sound dubbed in later, and the other half falling into the same claptrap of all the other early sound films, with glittery flow-stopping musical numbers and people standing in rooms talking while the camera doesn't move.

The plot is at least interesting, so we have that to get us through the exposition scenes. The film revolves around the relationship between ex-con Chick Williams and the police. For the first half of the film, we learn that the police planted a gun on Chick which resulted in him going to prison. When Chick gets out, he connects with the daughter of the police sergeant that framed him, much to the father's dismay.

If the film has anything to say, it's that, sure, criminals are bad, but the police are not much better. Chick's framing is the big off-screen example of the police's questionable tactics, but that's not enough for us. We have to see these guys do their dirty laundry themselves.

During a heist, a police officer is shot, and the police are going to get answers no matter what. They bring in a two-bit thug and start questioning him, demanding a name out of him even though he claims an alibi.

This scene is my favorite in the entire film. Roland West did a lot of experimenting with sound in the film, and he may have been one of the first directors to discover that with sound comes silence. Silent films never had the luxury of silence, with live music always being played. With a sound film, when the sound goes away, you pay attention, you get tense. So, when a mysterious face appears in a door...

...and one officer goes to stand by the window...

...and the other officer wipes the fingerprints off a gun...

...and there's no sound to explain it all, no sound to comfort you, then your heart really starts to race.

It's amazing how hopeful I get when I see someone trying to regain the artistic freedom lost by technology. As CGI continues to take over films, I hope we get more and more directors who try and implement it in new and artistic ways.

Again, the film is still a mixed bag, and that goes for it's other elements. It was nominated for it's art direction by our old friend William Cameron Menzies. Some descriptions of the film has dubbed it "inspired by German expressionism," but I don't agree. However, the slightly off-beat art deco is something to enjoy.

So while Menzies' production design is a hit, the acting is a big, big miss. It seems most of the actors involved were still suffering from the jitters of converting to silent style to talkie style. Chester Morris, nominated for Best Actor for his role as Chick Williams, always seems like he's trying to squeeze his skull out of his head.

However, the worst offender is Regis Toomey, playing an undercover detective named Danny McGann. His cover? Drunken Wall Street broker.

Danny's drunk character is so over the top it's laughable. At first I thought the character of Danny was a bad actor, but when Danny's cover is blown and we see the real character, I realized that it was Regis that was the bad actor. Every scene with Danny is sooooo drawn out and annoying, and it makes sense that his most drawn out and annoying scene is when he dies.

It takes minutes for him to finally go. He tells everyone his regrets, makes his finally wishes, etc., all with twenty second pauses between each line. And finally, right before he dies, UKULELE MUSIC STARTS PLAYING! What is this crap!?!

*sigh* Such is the nature of this film. If you want the good, you got to take the bad. It's certainly the best film from the 2nd Academy Awards I've looked at so far, and in this sea of dead weights, you take what you can get.

Mary Pickford and Coquette

2009-05-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

Coquette (1929)
DIRECTED BY: Sam Taylor
STARRING: Mary Pickford, Johnny Mack Brown, Matt Moore
WON: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Mary Pickford)

I have to admit, I really miss the 1st Academy Awards. There was the questionable win and nomination here and there, but for the most part the films were interesting and deserved the accolades they received.

However, it took merely a year for the Academy to fall into controversy. That year, the award for Best Actress was expected to go to Ruth Chatterton for her role in Madame X (a film I sadly haven't been able to find). Instead, it went to Mary Pickford for Coquette. Why the controversy? Two reasons:

1) Mary Pickford was arguable the most powerful woman in Hollywood at the time. She began starring in movies in the 1910s, starring in 52 of them overall. Her youthful appearance and trademark curly hair made her on of the biggest stars of the silent era. Some say there was a point where she was more famous then Chaplin. Appearances in public were known to cause riots. One of her curls sold for $15,000 in auction. She was a superstar.

And she used that superstar status to change the film industry from the inside. She became her own producer after three years of starring in films. Pickford's films were distributed through their own distribution unit. In 1919, she founded her own studio, United Artists, along with Chaplin, director D.W. Griffith and soon-to-be husband Douglas Fairbanks Sr. The company became a much-needed home for independent film producers at the time.

And most importantly, she was one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group behind the Academy Awards. She was the only female member at the time, and even if Pickford HAD given the best performance that year, people would still have cried favoritism.

2) Mary Pickford did not give the best performance that year. Coquette is an awful, awful film.

This film is the first all-talkie picture reviewed on this site. While The Jazz Singer had a synced soundtrack, actual dialogue was reduced to a few songs and one brief monologue. This film is wall-to-wall conversations, and since microphones weren't mobile at the time, that meant everyone had to stay in the same area with little movement.

See this chair?

The microphone is somewhere around that chair, so most of the movie is people awkwardly standing around the chair chatting. That chair gets more screen time then any of the actors.

The film takes place in some Southern state, where a rich doctor deals with her teenage daughter Norma (Pickford was in her 30s at the time) and the suitors that come to her door. Yes, for the third time in the 2nd Academy Awards, we're dealing with a Rich Person Melodrama. Anyway, Norma shows interest in a poor man from the mountains, and her father won't hear of it, and tries to hook Norma up with his dull rich friend. EXCITING!

Again, Mary Pickford was almost twice the age of the character she was playing, and I guess she got it into her head that she had to exaggerate the youthful aspect of the character, and she really comes off annoying and fake. Remember, acting for silent films or for stage were different, and one had to be more subtle for sound films.

You know, here. Here's a seven-minute clip from the film to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

"Ooh. Aren't they just.... adorable?"

The entire film is this. People standing in rooms, giving comically bad line readings and corny gestures. Mary Pickford is the queen of corny gestures.

Coquette might as well be the flagship of the horrible films made at the beginning of the sound era. I should point out that I think Mary Pickford was a good silent actress, so it's not like she was untalented, but it's clear that sound was her undoing. The film was a critical failure and didn't make money, and Pickford quickly lost the fame she spent twenty years gaining. She only made two more films after this before retiring to the role of producer only.

But even with the troubles she had, I don't feel too forgiving. Her win in this category was pure politics. With sound destroying the industry and the Academy already patting itself on the back, it's clear just how dark of a time for movies it was.

Legs and Our Dancing Daughters

2009-05-05T02:13:00.000-07:00

Our Dancing Daughters (1928)
DIRECTED BY: Harry Beaumont
STARRING: Joan Crawford, Anita Page, Dorothy Sebastian
NOMINATED FOR: Best Cinematography (George Barnes)
Best Writing, Achievement (Josephine Lovett)

I find I have a bad habit of pretending I know something about culture and the history of culture. For some years I ran a pop culture website where I feign expertise on what people used to do and why they do it. However, I've come to realize I can't even grasp my own culture, which is completely different to the culture of ten years ago, which is different to the etc etc etc.

But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that in the 20s, it was all about the legs!

Our Dancing Daughters is a boring love story made in the heyday of the Jazz Age (the stupid white people jazz, not the awesome New Orleans jazz). It's not funny or exciting or emotional, it's just sleep inducing, and I see no real reason to return to it. However, it did bring to light something that I never realized. In the 20s, when a lustful man gazed at a woman, it was usually directed at her legs.

I'm not saying legs aren't still sexualized, but in these old films, they're the ONLY thing that's sexualized. As far as Hollywood was concerned, even pre-code Hollywood, breasts and other womanly curves just didn't exist. I have no idea why, really. I can assume it has something to do with the religious influence that was leading into the 50s, but I'm simply not qualified to say for certain. All I know is that Our Dancing Daughters is about sexuality, and sexuality is all about legs.

Our three main female character are all introduced BY their legs. First, Diana, a woman who takes a party girl persona in public, but inside is really romantic and wants to settle down:

She's introduced in the movie as a pair of dancing legs in front of the mirror, getting ready for the big party.

And then we have Beatrice, a woman who insists on not fooling around and really can't be bothered to party.

We meet here from behind, standing still as her overprotective parents give her a stern talking to.

And finally, we have Ann, a gold digger, a woman who's only interested in marrying a rich man for his money.

She only has interest in nice things, so when we meet her legs, we find her tearing and discarding some worn-out stockings.

Our female characters are characterized by their legs, which proves that shallow characterization has been present as long as film's been around. It's like when female characters in modern day action movies are characterized by hair color and cup size. To pound this point home, Ben, the man for our characters to swoon over, is introduced LOOKING at legs.

When people think back to the golden days of cinema, it's hard to imagine that there were shallow sexual films. What was "shallow" and "sexual" back in the 20s are alien to us now, and it makes trying to understand these times seem kinda futile.

If you're really interested in Our Dancing Daughters, you can find it on Youtube HERE.

Bess Meredyth Vs. William H. Daniels: A Woman of Affairs

2009-04-22T05:12:00.000-07:00

A Woman of Affairs (1928)
DIRECTED BY: Clarence Brown
STARRING: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Lewis Stone
NOMINATED FOR: Best Writing, Achievement (Bess Meredyth)

"In the old silent days, [William H.] Daniels had been the best of them all. His camera work was so close to art that producers and directors and cameramen used to sit in private projection rooms, not to judge a picture, but to see what new tricks of lighting and effects Daniels had achieved. The industry acknowledged that Daniels' work was so fine that other cameramen were never censured for shamelessly stealing it".
-Mark Hellinger, producer

Every year, when the Academy Awards role around, there's always something to complain about. How in the world did such-and-such get nominated? Why was this nominated over that? Why was this aspect of the film nominated but not this aspect? These strange choices, the result of both ballot voting and inner-politics, have been consistent with the Academy since the beginning, and A Woman of Affairs is an early example of it.

The film was nominated for it's writing, but it's story is muddled, it's dialogue is over-dramatic, and it's pace is uneven.

The film was NOT nominated for it's cinematography, even though it has some great dramatic lighting, it uses it's space well, and its tracking shots are mind blowing for a film this old.

Cinematographer William H. Daniels was been nominated four times for his work, winning once. He made over 150 films from the 20s to the 60s. Bess Meredyth wrote some Zorro movies. Ok, maybe I'm being disingenuous, one's success does not directly reflect one's quality and character, but seeing a film praised for it's weakest quality and having it's strongest quality ignored just seems so typical of the Academy these days.

This is the film's opening shot:

Our main character, Diana Merrick, goes all CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER and haphazardly drives her car into puddles, avoiding other drivers by a fraction of an inch, and finally nearly decapitating half a dozen road workers.

It's a typical screwball comedy gag, and it's high energy suggests we're in for a wild and zany ride! Problem is, this scene is in no way related with the rest of the movie. Nowhere else in the film do we get off-the-wall physical comedy or any general goofiness. It's not even consistent with the character. We see Diana drive several times after this scene, and she does so safely and calmly.

It's almost as if they started writing one film and suddenly changed their minds. This isn't the first time we'll have this type of shift of tone, but it is the most jarring.

So, now that those meaningless gags are out of the way, it's storytime. Diana is a young British aristocrat in love with slightly-less aristocratic Neville Holderness. Through flashback, we see that they've known each since childhood, and Diana, still an overgrown child, clings to the "strong male sweeps her away" fantasy of her youth, and Neville thinks she's cute, so hey, win-win.

Meanwhile, Diana's brother Jeffry (right) drinks away his sorrows (though what those sorrows are, we never find out) while his best friend David Furness (left) tries to talk him out of the booze.

Neither of these two are well-written characters. Jeffry does two things throughout the film: mope around and act angry for no defined reason, and show a damn-near homosexual amount of admiration to David. David's role in the film is simply to react to Jeffry. Both these characters are empty shells that simply offer plot devices when the story needs them to.

So, after some short meaningless scenes of Jeffry and Diana fighting and then making up, we cut to the next day, where we're introduced to two more characters. First, Dr. Hugh Trevelyan:

An old friend of Diana and Jeffry. HE'S NICE!

And then there's Sir Morton Holderness:

Neville's father. HE'S NOT SO NICE!

In case you couldn't tell already, the biggest flaw in this film is that the characters are totally depthless with one possible exception, but we won't meet her till much later in the film. All these characters do is allow the plot to move forward, and we never spend anytime learning their reasons for doing these things.

So, Diana and Neville talk for a bit, and we learn that Diana is richer then Neville, and Neville, with his outdated masculinity, can't stand the idea of her supporting him. He suggests the idea of him leaving for a few years to start business in Egypt, but is only deterred when Diana threatens to leave him.

I really need to point out there is no dramatic difference between Diana's and Neville's fortunes. I mean, look at Neville's house!

TWO PEOPLE LIVE IN THIS HOUSE! This isn't some fish-out-of-water love relationship, this is a story about a guy who feels less like a man because he has ten million dollars and she has eleven million. This film is "the rich and restless," and who wants to watch that? Sorry guys, I'd love to hear about your petty struggles, but I gotta go work at WAL-MART!

Anyway, Neville does end up going to Egypt after a long off-screen talk with his father, who acts as the makeshift villain in this film. Diana learns of this, and as an act of petty revenge, marries Jeffry's friend David instead.

Of course, Diana doesn't love David, but David is too blissful to be aware of these. In any case, David has other things to worry about, because on their honeymoon, there's a mysterious knock at the door.

Up to this point, the cinematography is pretty standard, but this moment, which also acts as a tonal shift in the film, is when it really starts to shine. David, with an expression of total terror on his face, slowly approaches the door, and we follow him with a long, tension-building tracking shot through two rooms.

This is the first of nearly a dozen tracking shots in the film, and they're all done really, really well, and brings forth the main theme in the cinematography: these people live in empty space, which could reflect the emptiness in each of the characters if I believed the film was trying to be that deep.

Later, the film seems to switch to more natural lighting and frames the characters from far away, allowing the characters to get lost in dark voids. Take these shots from later in the film for example:

One scene much later in the film takes place in a hospital, which is brightly lit, but the empty space is still overwhelming.

This emptiness is made even more pronounced by how far apart the characters are from each other.

There's a lot of shots I could analysis for you, but these are the basic tricks used throughout the second half of the film, and they really give the film a much-needed flavor boost. There really isn't much more to add to that: The story is pointless and shallow and the cinematography makes me giddy. End review.

But wait, who was knocking on the door? Will Diana and Neville get back together? I'll leave that for you to find out, because you can watch A Woman of Affairs on Youtube HERE.

April 3, 1930

2009-03-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

There were many changes between the first and second Academy Awards. The number of categories were reduced from twelve to seven, while the number of nominees allowed in each category was increased from three to five.

Not that that mattered, because the nominees were never announced, just the winners.

It was the first Academy Award ceremony broadcast by radio.

Finally, it was the first of two Academy Award ceremonies to be held that year, so that it might fix itself so that it awarded films that fell in the calender year.

The film world was in a state of trying to find itself again. The introduction of sound crippled the silent industry (though a number of silent films still got nominated that year). People were leaving and entering the film industry at an alarming rate, and what was once box office gold was now ignored while a whole new wave of films began to be noticed.

I'm not sure how much of this chaos effected film availability from that year, but I cannot find any more then six nominees from the 2nd Academy Awards, and I don't know, but that might be for the best. The earliest of sound films were not pretty.

Welcome to the 2nd Academy Awards. What's left of it, anyways.

Index: 1st Academy Awards

2009-03-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production
Winner: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) - Fox
Other Nominees:
-Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) - Paramount Famous Lasky
-Crowd, The (1928) - M-G-M

Best Picture, Production
Winner: Wings (1927) - Paramount Famous Lasky
Other Nominees:
-7th Heaven (1927) - Fox
-Racket, The (1928) - The Caddo Company

Best Actor in a Leading Role
Winner: The Way of All Flesh (1927)/The Last Command (1928) - Emil Jannings
Other Nominees:
-The Patent Leather Kid(1927)/The Noose (1928) - Richard Barthelmess

Best Actress in a Leading Role
Winner: 7th Heaven (1927)/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)/Street Angel (1928) - Janet Gaynor (I)
Other Nominees:
-Sadie Thompson (1928) - Gloria Swanson
-A Ship Comes In (1928) - Louise Dresser

Best Director, Comedy Picture
Winner: Two Arabian Knights (1927) - Lewis Milestone
Other Nominees:
-Speedy (1928) - Ted Wilde (I)

Best Director, Dramatic Picture
Winner: 7th Heaven (1927) - Frank Borzage
Other Nominees:
-The Crowd (1928) - King Vidor
-Sorrell and Son (1927) - Herbert Brenon

Best Writing, Original Story
Winner: Underworld (1927) - Ben Hecht (I)
Other Nominees:
-The Last Command (1928) - Lajos Biró

Best Writing, Adaptation
Winner: 7th Heaven (1927) - Benjamin Glazer
Other Nominees:
-Glorious Betsy (1928) - Anthony Coldeway
-The Jazz Singer (1927) - Alfred A. Cohn

Best Writing, Title Writing
Winner: Joseph Farnham
Other Nominees:
-George Marion Jr.
-The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927) - Gerald C. Duffy

Best Cinematography
Winner: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) - Charles Rosher; Karl Struss
Other Nominees:
-The Devil Dancer (1927)/The Magic Flame (1927)/Sadie Thompson (1928) - George Barnes

Best Art Direction
Winners: The Dove (1927)/Tempest (1928) - William Cameron Menzies
Other Nominees:
-7th Heaven (1927) - Harry Oliver
-Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) - Rochus Gliese

Best Effects, Engineering Effects
Winner: Wings (1927) - Roy Pomeroy
Other Nominees:
-Ralph Hammeras
-Nugent Slaughter

Honorary Award
Awarded to: The Circus (1928) - Charles Chaplin
- For versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus.

The Jazz Singer (1927) - Warner Bros.
- For producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry.

The Lost Films: 1st Academy Awards

2009-03-25T01:39:00.001-07:00

Gilbert Roland as Johnny Powell in "The Dove"

The Dove (1927)
WON: Best Art Direction (William Cameron Menzies)

Only four reels out of nine of this film exist. You can find them at the Library of Congress. According to Wikipedia:

"Based on a play by Willard Mack, the original story is about a Mexican despot (played by [Noah] Beery), who falls in love with a dancing girl (played by [Norma] Talmadge), who rejects him. Due to the political repercussions of condemning Mexico, it was decided to relocate the plot to some anonymous Mediterranean country."

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Glorious Betsy (1928)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Writing, Adaptation (Anthony Coldeway)

A partial sound film. Prints exist at Library of Congress, but some of the sound is missing. According to Wikipedia:

"The film is a semi-historical narrative and depicts the real-life courtship, marriage, and forced breakup of Jérôme Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, and his wife from the American south, Elizabeth Patterson. Napoleon did not approve of the union (despite the fact that her family was one of the wealthiest in America) and the marriage was annulled. Jerome was subsequently forced to marry Catharina of Württemberg. They had one child, depicted in the movie, Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte. In order to provide a "happy ending", Jerome in the film leaves France to be with his wife. However, in historical fact he remained in Europe."

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Vilma Banky as Bianca in The Magic Flame (1927)

The Magic Flame (1927)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Cinematography (George Barnes)

Only five of the original eleven reels exist, and they're stored in the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House Archives. Here's the plot via TCM:

"Bianca, the aerial star of Baretti's circus, loves Tito, the clown, and resents the advances of the handsome Crown Prince of Illyria, who poses as Count Cassati. The prince pursues the wife of a neighboring squire and kills her husband when he discovers them together. Maddened by Bianca's refusals, the prince lures her to his hotel with a forged letter, but she drops from the window, using her gymnastic skill to escape. Tito comes to her aid and in a struggle with the prince casts him from the window into the sea. Bearing a striking resemblance to the prince, Tito assumes his identity and thus evades prosecution. Believing Tito to have been killed by the prince, Bianca leaves the circus to seek vengeance. During the coronation, she is about to assassinate the "prince" when he reveals his identity, and together they escape to the circus."

Here's a copy of the New York Times review of the film that goes into more detail, via a Vilma Bank fansite.

And if you want to go even MORE into detail, here's a novelization of the film, translated from a French magazine.

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The Noose (1928)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Richard Barthelmess)

Prints exist, one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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Richard Barthelmess in The Patent Leather Kid

The Patent Leather Kid (1927)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Richard Barthelmess)

Prints exist. According to Wikipedia:

"[The film] tells the story of a boxer who scoffs at fighting outside the ring... particularly for the United States once it enters World War I. Eventually, he is drafted, is shipped overseas, and performs a heroic act, which results in his being severely wounded."

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Lewis Stone and Maria Corda in The Private Life of Helen of Troy

The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Writing, Title Writing (Gerald C. Duffy)

About a half hour of this film exists at British Film Institute archives. Based on the novel by John Erskine.

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A Ship Comes In (1928)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Louise Dresser)

Very little information. Prints seem to exist, but I have no idea where.

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Sorrell and Son (1927)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Director, Dramatic Picture (Herbert Brenon)

Long thought lost, a partially restored can be found at Academy Film Archive. The film was remade twice, once in 1934 and again in 1984. The plot according to IMDb:

"Stephen Sorrell, a decorated war hero, raises his son Kit alone after Kit's mother deserts husband and child in the boy's infancy. Sorrell loses a promising job offer and is forced to take work as a menial. Both his dignity and his health are damaged as he suffers under the exhausting labor and harsh treatment he receives as a hotel porter. But Sorrell thrives in the knowledge that his son will benefit from his labors. Sorrell has allowed the boy to believe his mother dead, but when the mother shows up, wanting to re-enter the young man's life, Sorrell must make hard decisions."

---

William Boyd, Mary Astor and Louis Wolheim in Two Arabian Knights

Two Arabian Knights (1927)
WON: Best Director, Comedy Picture (Lewis Milestone)

Long considered lost, a complete print was recently found and aired on Turner Classic Movies. There's a good chance I'll get to review this one in the future. Plot according to IMDb:

"Two American soldiers are captured by the Germans on the Western Front during World War One and escape a POW camp only to stumble into further life-threatening adventures when they come across an Arabian king's daughter while on the lam."

---

Evelyn Brent and George Bancroft in Underworld

Underworld (1927)
WON: Best Writing, Original Story (Ben Hecht)

This film still exists, but isn't available on DVD, and I haven't been able to find a copy of the VHS. It still gets screened at museums occasionally. I'll probably be able to review this in the near future. The plot according to IMDb:

"'Nobody helps me -- I help them!' boasts open-handed gangster Bull Weed, handing over what will prove to be the best investment in his high-spending career: a thousand dollars that will put the literate 'Rolls Royce' of vagrants back on his feet. Living it up in the Twenties with the aid of cool but smouldering moll Feathers, the Bull lords it over the law and his rivals alike -- specifically big Buck Mulligan, whose floral-tributes business echoes that of a certain real-life Chicago gangster... Yet Feathers, prize possession and object of envy, proves his weak point; and in the end, Bull Weed will indeed come to need help from others, and more than he has ever needed it before. But can Rolls Royce and Feathers still give it to him? And will the Bull accept?"

---

The Way of All Flesh (1927)
WON: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Emil Jannings)

This film is lost. It was remade in 1940. Here's the plot of the 1940 version according to IMDb:

"Paul Kriza is a cashier of a bank in a small town, and the happy husband of Anna and the father of four children. He is sent to New York to deliver some securities for the bank. There, he is tagged as easy-pickings by a con-game gang and Mary Brown, gang accomplice, proves he is. Waking up in the morning he discovers he has been robbed of the securities and, when he confronts the gang, he is hit on the head and taken out to be left on a railroad track. He comes to, struggles with the henchman and the man is killed when a train comes roaring by. Paul escapes but his watch is found and he is reported as the dead man. But he can't go home again."

Here is my review of The Last Command, the other film that won Emil Jannings the Oscar.

REWIND, FAST-FORWARD and INTERMISSION

2009-03-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

For future reference:

REWIND: Should I review a film from a past Academy Award that wasn't available at the time but has become available.

FAST-FORWARD: Should I review a film from a future Academy Award for some reason.

INTERMISSION: Posts that have nothing to do with Academy Award nominated films.

Hollywood and The Jazz Singer

2009-03-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

The Jazz Singer (1927)
DIRECTED BY: Alan Crosland
STARRING: Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland
WON: Honorary Award (For producing The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized the industry)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Writing, Adaptation (Alfred A. Cohn)

Lately, I've been blind-sided by the state of life. At this time last year, I was far less concerned about my economic status, far less concerned about if my car was functioning correctly, far less concerned about the policy changes at my job. The things I was more concerned about I've almost completely forgotten.

I've been in so many good places in my life, and inside I'd beg for things to stay this way. Change is almost nothing but destructive. Change kills many great things.

The Jazz Singer carries the stench of death...

*snicker*

Sorry, I'm being corny. As much as I want to make The Jazz Singer out as a Hollywood serial killer who killed the era of silent films and more then half of the people involved, it'd be closer to the truth to call it some mentally handicapped guy who accidentally ran over the silent film industry with his parent's car. It's fame and infamy are purely by chance, and not at all earned.

The Jazz Singer was not the first sound film. Thomas Edison managed to sync sound almost right after inventing film, and the twenty years before The Jazz Singer led to dozens of examples.

The Jazz Singer was not the first full-length film with sound. Don Juan came out a year earlier with a synced music soundtrack and sound effects. Sunrise came out a month earlier, also with music and soundtrack, and even background dialogue.

The Jazz Singer was not the first full-length film with synced dialogue. For the most part, it's a silent film, intertitles and all, with dialogue only popping up in two scenes. The first "talkie" wouldn't come for another year, in the form of Lights of New York.

The Jazz Singer was not made with the most innovative technology available. Fox Studio's sound-on-film system surpasses Warner Bros' sound-on-disk system in just about every way. Sound-on-film didn't get unsynchronized, it didn't wear out nearly as fast, and it allowed for more portable cameras.

The Jazz Singer was not a good film. Not in the slightest. Some people are still rolling their eyes over it's high melodrama and over the top acting. It's the worse film I've reviewed thus far.

The Jazz Singer is not a comfortable film. Even ignoring it's history as a silent film killer. I don't care how often you say "that was just how things worked back then," the famous blackface scenes make my stomach turn. Less talked about is the film's strong Jewish stereotype. There isn't as many numbers on just how offensive Jew stereotypes are, but this film like two kinds of uncomfort sandwiching some cheesy old musical numbers.

The Jazz Singer was merely the first successful film with some sound in it. And, I guess, that's all it took to kill silent pictures.

And with this, we finish the 1st Academy Awards. The film industry would recover eventually. It's like a phoenix, it becomes reborn in it's own ashes. Unfortunately, ashes are all we have to look at as we enter the 2nd Academy Awards...

Hollywood and Wings

2009-03-13T08:57:00.000-07:00

And so it comes to this.

Wings (1927)
DIRECTED BY: William A. Wellman
STARRING: Clara Bow, Charles 'Buddy' Rogers, Richard Arlen
WON: Best Picture, Production
Best Effects, Engineering Effects (Roy Pomeroy)

I feel that I should have something more engrossing to say about this film. After all, it's a "first," and society loves firsts for some reasons. Thing is, first never means special, and first never means best. For their to be a first, there must be a second to best it, and a third and a fourth. There are many Best Picture winners that are better then Wings. In fact, most of them are, and being first doesn't change that one bit.

Wings isn't a bad film, don't get me wrong. It's just... standard. Even the films I've given generally negative reviews have had several interesting elements to them that make them stand out. Wings has some technical innovations, but it's story and "message" come off as a-typical Hollywood plodding.

We got a boy...

He's got a dream, see. He wants to fly in dem new spangled air-o-planes!

We got a girl...

~~She's a scary clown with boobs~~

She's the girl next door, and she's got a big ol' crush on the boy! But the boy, he loves another girl...

But this other girl is in love with the local rich kid, also pictured. We get some standard push-me-pull-you dinking around that would probably continue forever, if not interrupted by...

GOOD GOD!

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

So, the boy and the rich kid go off to war, where they meet Goofy Comical Relief...

While he's a citizen, he comes from a German family, so nobody trusts him! Until he waves around his tattoo, that is!

So, our trio go to boot camp. Cue boot camp hijinks.

They even have an always-angry drill sergeant!

Ok, I'm starting to sound demeaning, but we've all been here before, dozens of times. I'm not sure how fresh all these tropes were at the time, I'm not that well versed in film history (yet), but I do know they were done to death afterwards, and almost never done by classy films. I'm talking about Pearl Harbor and Top Gun kind of unclassy.

It amazing how, right off the bat, the Academy gave the award to something standard and boring over fresher and more artistic films. The people may have changed, some of the categories may have changed, but the Academy? The Academy is forever.

Another thing about this film being the "first" is that it's talked about to death, so everything I'm about to praise this film for has been talked about to death. When people talk about Wings, they always talk about Gary Cooper.

Cooper plays a fellow pilot who bunks with our main characters for all of two minutes. During that time, he delivers a bit of wisdom about how good luck charms don't really mean anything, that when death is knocking at your door you're gonna answer no matter what. Then Cooper's character leaves for a training mission, has an accident, and dies off-screen.

It's a fleeting moment, and the only real time the film transcends itself. Despite still being wet behind the ears at this point, Gary Cooper is clearly a subtle and talented actor, which gives the moment much more weight. It gives the scenes that follow an eerie feeling to them. Unfortunately, the movie goes on too long after, with too many scenes unrelated to the war (including a horrible set of scenes where one of our main characters chases imaginary bubbles... uh, don't ask), so by the final moments of the film, when Cooper's words would have resonated the hardest, they're all but forgotten.

The film's other big plus is the flying.

There were no models, so CGI, no stop motion, simply no special effects that could simulate flight at that time. So, when you see airplanes take off...

Airplanes in the air...

And even airplanes crashing...

You're seeing the real thing! These moments are really what make Wings worth watching. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded just how sedated on computer generated images were are, and just how thrilling the real thing actually is.

I really wish I had more to say, I really do. I wanted to do a huge, perhaps multi-article breakdown of the film, but I came up with nothing besides what I've just shown you. Wings is standard, that's all there is to say.

Firsts aren't always that important, I guess.

However, We're still not done with the 1st Academy Awards yet. There's one more film to look at, one that changed the face of film more then all the films reviewed so far put together, even if it didn't win the top prize.

You ain't heard nothing yet.

The Fairbanks/Pickford/Chaplin/Griffith Connection

2009-03-03T00:38:00.000-08:00

Over at The Film Experience, Nathaniel R is asking us bloggers what old candid celebrity photos we wish we could have audio tracks to, and almost everything I thought of came from the silent period. I guess that's not too big of a surprise, considering I've been watching almost nothing but silents for the last two months.

From left to right: Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, around the time they founded United Artists in 1919. What did these four talk about on their off time?

Was D.W. Griffith the alpha male in the group? His hat says yes.

By the way, for those who like their Oscars (and if you're here, that's probably what you came for), Nathaniel has teamed up with Mike from Goatdog's Movies and Nick from Nick's Flick Picks have been running a feature comparing the Academy Award winners for Best Picture from the outside in, aptly titled Best Pictures From the Outside In.

Check it out, and check out the Film Experience blog in all it's nifty photoshoped glory. Though, considering my first audience will probably come from there for this picture challenge, I think I just created a mobius strip. Enjoy clicking links forever! HAHAHA!

Where can I get one of those alpha male hats?

Let's Talk Intertitles

2009-03-02T08:58:00.000-08:00

When talking about the 1st Academy Awards, people often talk about the "Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production" award, which went to Sunrise. At that time, two Best Picture awards were given, one for production merit, and one for artistic merit. This was the only time that separate awards were given, and "Unique and Artistic Production" became a piece of Oscar lore.

However, little attention is given to the OTHER award that was only given out at the 1st Academy Awards: Best Writing, Title Writing, awarded to Joseph Farnham, for no film in particular. 1929 officially marked the end of silent pictures. A demand for sound forced Hollywood and filmmakers to start from square one, 20+ of progress tossed in the trash by a humble blackfaced jazz singer. They had find new ways to shoot, new ways to act, and new ways to be artistic. And intertitles disappeared for good.

It's hard to imagine what films would look like if the silent era had been allowed another ten or twenty years to itself. Silent television, now that would have been something.

People rarely talk about intertitles, even when talking about silent films, but they were developing along with the rest of the film industry. Many great films didn't just have their intertitles reveal dialogue. They used artistic language to set moods that couldn't have been found with simple lighting and sets. And the actual intertitles, the screens themselves, began exploring new ways to present themselves.

Not all intertitles were simply white text on a black background. Take a look at some of these, from 1921's The Sheik:

That's what we lost people. Awesome stuff like this.

Another artistic aspect intertitles had were their physical relation to the film itself. My favorite use of intertitles in all the films I've reviewed so far comes Sunrise. The film's story is simple and the acting is a bit blunt and direct, but Murnau's use of images adds subtextual layers in the film in ways you wouldn't see anywhere else. That goes for the film's intertitles as well, which are used in a very unique way.

Take this scene. Neighbors to the husband and wife characters are discussing the two's marital problems. One of the the neighbors says this:

Then, we fade into a flashback of happier times...

Fine enough. Usually we'd cut to the next scene, probably back to the neighbors, but instead...

We fade back to the same intertitle. What we just witnessed was the thoughts and memories behind this dialogue, encased completely in it, and it works great. Also, it's an idea you couldn't pull off in sound. Imagine if someone was talking, and in the middle of their sentence we fade to a flashback for a minute, then fade back to see the original speaker finish their sentence. It would seem awkward at best, bad editing at worst.

When the husband and the woman from the city are making near the lake, the intertitles take on the devilish qualities of the surrounding mist.

My favorite intertitle moment ever comes in this scene. The woman from the city offers a suggestion to the husband about what to do with his wife.

We hold on this for a moment, unsure of what evil thing our antagonist is going to suggest. Then, it fades in.

This thought then literally sinks into the husband's mind...

After sinking it, the idea plays out in the husband's head, words turned into actions...

Intertitles had only just started getting used in these unique and interesting ways when sound showed up and ruined all of that.

So, please, when you go to bed tonight, say a little prayer for intertitles.

To close, here's a collection of some of my favorite intertitles from films previously reviewed. Can you guess which film goes to which?

Janet Gaynor Triple Feature Part 3: Sunrise

2009-03-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
DIRECTED BY: F.W. Murnau
STARRING: Janet Gaynor, George O'Brien, Margaret Livingston
WON: Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production
Best Actress in a Leading Role (Janet Gaynor)
Best Cinematography (Charles Rosher, Karl Struss)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Art Direction (Rochus Gliese)

And so we reach Sunrise. It's hard to find new things about this film to talk about. If you know anything about the film, then you know about it's groundbreaking moving cameras, it's double/triple/quadruple exposures, and it's unique intertitles (which I'll a bit in an upcoming post). I'm sure that since it's now out on a Netflix-available DVD that every scene, every frame will be pawed over and cut apart with an exacto knife to find something new.

Let me be the first. Exacto knife in hand.

Since these last few articles have been focused on the role of Janet Gaynor, on this viewing of Sunrise (my second), I focused on the acting, which turned out to be very different then the two Frank Borzage films we covered, Street Angel and 7th Heaven. Borzage's acting felt more modern. Smaller movements, more focus on the face, and flow. When a character's mood changes in a Borzage film, it appears. When a character's pose changes in Sunrise, it happens dramatically and quickly. It's the poses that are important, not the movements.

For example, the film opens with the husband character played by George O'Brien (none of the characters have names) waits impatiently for the woman from the city, whom he's having an affair with.

Note his dramatic, disheveled, slightly hunchback stance. Now, the Gaynor character, who walks around the scene, acting oblivious to her husband's behavior, being a goody-good house wife. Finally, the husband gets a chance to escape. The wife returns, realizes he isn't there anymore, and collapses into a chair.

We take notice of two poses in this little moment: One of her looking at the door, with a look of shock on her face, realizing that her husband is gone, and then quickly she slips into the above, one of sudden sadness when she realizes just where, and to whom, he's gone to.

The more I watch it, the more I realize that the film is told in the language of postures. There are two key moments to this idea, this first happening early on, when the wife cradles her child while she cries over her cheating husband.

It's a tender moment, when BAM

We cut to a similar pose, of the husband and and woman from the city making love in the nearby wetlands. It's a hard cut, not a fade, so it jumps at you suddenly, and since they're positioned directly where the wife and her child were, they're directly in your line of sight. A moment of family tenderness invaded by a moment of family destruction.

The second moment happens much later, near the end of the second act. The husband and wife, after a traumatic morning, rebond and basically restart their relationship. While in the city, they decide to take a photograph. They pose for the photographer:

It's stiff and fake, of course. After some banter with the photographer, the husband and wife have a good laugh, and kiss.

It's a much more honest pose, and it's this that the photographer takes and the couple buy. Both these moments ask us to look at the various postures throughout the film and determine their meaning.

This means that many of the poses in the film end up being very exaggerated and sometimes goofy-looking.

These are not action shots, people. The characters hold these poses for a nice chunk of time. The pose in the top picture? She holds that for more then a minute. I tried to do that, it hurts.

I guess it sounds silly with stills. It works a lot better while watching the film. These poses and gestures act as the most direct way to show the audience just what's going on in each character's head. In that bottom picture, where the husband looks like he's a vampire reacting to a cross, is from a scene where he battles his inner demons, and it's quite powerful stuff.

There are occasional exceptions to this big gesture stuff. Take a small moment in which the husband tells his wife that he's taken her to the city on a date.

It's a long shot on just her face, and there's a lot of facial movement and a lot of subtleties. It's classic Gaynor, finally put forward, and it acts as a nice contrast to most of the film.

Speaking of Gaynor, even with her more subtle acting style put on hold, she's more physical in this film then any of her films that we've reviewed so far. There's a long foot chase in the middle of the film, and later we get a nicely choreographed dance scene.

She does some stunt work too. She's right in the middle of the action during a terrible storm while the couple are out on the lake.

Thrown overboard, we get long extended shots of her floating in the water, barely clinging to a makeshift life preserver made of reeds.

Sunrise is a film to see, so I won't spoil anymore. I'd rather you solve Murnau's posture code yourself.

Janet Gaynor Triple Feature Part 2: 7th Heaven

2009-02-23T08:40:00.000-08:00

7th Heaven (1927)
DIRECTED BY: Frank Borzage
STARRING: Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Ben Bard
WON: Best Director, Dramatic Picture (Frank Borzage)
Best Actress in a Leading Role (Janet Gaynor)
Best Writing, Adaptation (Benjamin Glazer)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Art Direction (Harry Oliver)
Best Picture, Production

I didn't like Street Angel. The first half of the film had little to do with the second half, and it's dated politics didn't help much. Lead actress Janet Gaynor was good with what she had, but she didn't have much.

So now, we go back in time, with 7th Heaven. It has most of the same cast and crew. The same director, the same two lead actors, the same studio, and a year less experience for all of them. You could say that I was dubious going into it.

HOLY CRAP 7TH HEAVEN IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF STREET ANGEL!

Whereas Street Angel moved too quickly through it's timeline and gave us little character development, 7th Heaven takes it's time and allows our characters to simmer. Whereas Street Angel pulls the old "love at first sight" trope, 7th Heaven allow the characters to fall for each other naturally. Whereas Street Angel's main character found love despite her disposition, 7th Heaven's main character found love by overcoming her disposition.

It's just an all-around better movie, and it's hard to believe that Street Angel is its follow up.

Our film opens in Paris, on the cusp of World War I. We're introduced to Chico, played by Charles Farrell, a city sewer cleaner who dreams of moving up the next rung in the ladder: from sewer cleaner to street cleaner.

This begins the theme of people striving to move up. In Chico's case, literally, from deep underneath to the city to it's streets, where he can be seen and his work more appreciated. Diane, played by Janet Gaynor, is also striving, but her journey is emotional, not literal.

Diane lives under the whip of her older sister, Nana, both Paris prostitutes. Diane is an honest and good girl, but she doesn't have any guts. She won't stand up for herself, and she won't take the necessary steps to pull herself out of her hellhole.

A long-lost uncle shows up, and agrees to take the two girls away with him if they've been "good." Diane can't lie, and the uncle leaves with a huff. Nana is furious, and chases her out into the street and nearly beats her to death. Fortunately, Chico happens to be working right underneath them, so he climbs out and chases Nana off.

As much of a bitch as she was, Nana was Diane's only grounding, and without her, Diane finds herself adrift emotionally. There's no goals to strive for, nothing to look forward to. These scenes of Diane sitting there, her eyes blank, her face expressionless, are juxtaposed by Chico and his coworkers eating their lunch, talking big and mighty and talking down to Diane's profession. Diane attempts suicide, but Chico prevents it.

Chico is an atheist, and loud about it. He gave God several shots to make his dreams come true, to give him the street cleaning job and to give him a blond-haired wife, and God was silent on both of them. And if he doesn't grant wishes, there's just not much point in believing him, right? (For the record, I'm an atheist, and this film makes a far better case against it then any Christian I've talked to)

This conversation catches the ear of a wandering priest, who just happens to have the power to give Chico his street cleaning job! At almost the same time, Nana returns with the police, accusing Diane of prostitution, but Chico, out of his character, steps in and claims Diane as his wife. The police says that they'll send an officer to Chico's place to confirm this. Chico finds he has no choice but to let this... woman stay at his place for the next few days.

So Chico takes Diane to his apartment. As a dreamer of big things, he naturally tries to live as close to the stars are possible. In the film's most famous scene, we watch, without any cuts, Chico and Diane ascend seven flights of stairs, straight up.

Inside his apartment, up in the sky, in his element, Chico begins to transform for the audience from something of a loud mouth to just a big guy with big dreams that he wants to share with everyone. In a bit of irony, he almost begins to sound like a passionate preacher.

There's a wide wooden plank between his apartment and his next door neighbor's, with the street down below. Chico begs Diane to cross with him, showing her that if she wants to escape her trap, she needs courage. Diane would rather just sit by the large window, look at the stars and listen to Chico talk.

Janet Gaynor is just wonderful in this. Her character is allowed to naturally grow and progress, and Gaynor makes it work wonderfully. There's an immediacy about her. You always know what she's feeling and what she's thinking by just her eyes alone.

She does these cute little twitch movements to express a build up of emotion. With any other actress, this would look corny, but I don't know, Gaynor controls it just right that it works perfectly. Things get so emotional that there are times in the film where you just want to jump into the movie and hug her in happiness, like in the scene where Chico agrees to let Diane stay with him even after the cop leaves.

It really is wonderful. So, the two become a couple, and their journey towards the stars become one. Diane gains confidence and a strong will. Eventually, she can cross the plank without fear.

There's a lot more to this film, including a third act taking place on the battlefields of WWI, but I'll stop the review here. That's the task of the reviewer I guess, to decide how information to give and how much to leave for the viewer to discover for themselves. And I DO guess, I've only been trying to "writing about movies" thing for a few months now, and I still have a lot to learn. But I'll figure it out as I go along. And, maybe these reviews will lead me to the place I want to go.

After all, even us that don't believe in God look to the heavens.

Janet Gaynor Triple Feature Part 1: Street Angel

2009-02-17T10:36:00.000-08:00

"Naturally, I was thrilled but being the first year, the Academy Awards had no background or tradition, and it naturally didn't mean what it does now. Had I known then what it would come to mean in the next few years, I'm sure I'd have been overwhelmed. At the time, I think I was more thrilled over meeting Douglas Fairbanks."
-Janet Gaynor

As I've gone throughout the nominees and winners of the first Academy Awards, I haven't made a big deal about "firsts." In this context, being first doesn't mean anything. Had the awards been given out a year earlier or a year later, the "firsts" would be different but the movies and performances would have been the same.

However, there was one unique aspect to the first Academy Awards. Actors were nominated not for one specific role, but for their entire output during a certain period of time, in this case 1927 through 1928. Emil Jannings did not just win for one role that year, in The Last Command, he also won for The Way of the Flesh. It makes the award itself feel more special

This special feeling seems to have come back for a one-time-only reunion tour, as Kate Winslet has been getting bunches and bunches of awards for her entire 2008 output. Regardless of what you (and I) actually think about the actual films, Revolutionary Road or The Reader, it's hard to think of another time an actress as pulled such a one-two punch.

Janet Gaynor pulled a one-two-three punch. She's half-Goro.

Janet Gaynor released three huge successful films in that 27/28 time period, and was awarded for all three of them. Were they deserved? Was the award really given for the combined output of her films, or was it given for one performance and the rest just added to the nomination for technical reasons? The only way to really tell is to watch all three.

Street Angel (1928)
DIRECTED BY: Frank Borzage
STARRING: Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Guido Trento
WON: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Janet Gaynor) (1st Academy Awards)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Cinematography (Ernest Palmer) (2nd Academy Awards)
Best Art Direction (Harry Oliver) (2nd Academy Awards)

Yeah, you read that right. For some technical reason I haven't been able to pinpoint yet, Street Angel was nominated in two different Academy Awards. There isn't much to say beyond that.

Our film opens in 19th century Naples, though we spend very little time focusing on it, or anywhere else for that matter. Spending hardly three minutes to set up setting and mood, we go straight to our main character, Angela (which is kind of a groaner of a name-title connection).

Angela's mother is deathly sick and Angela can't afford medicine. Gaynor plays Angela with the right amount of youthful confusion and worry. In fact, I'll say this right out, Gaynor plays all of her roles in this film with the right amount of ingredients without doing the whole "this is a silent film so I have to do greater gestures and exaggerate expressions" style of acting. It's pretty rare to find pitch-perfect acting without either dialogue or wide gestures.

I say "all her roles" because even though Gaynor technically plays the same character throughout the film, there are large leaps in time and the audience is not allowed to see any real character growth. So every time we come back to Angela, she's a completely different character. I'll explain more as we go along.

So Angela, desperate for money, becomes a "street angel," a prostitute. A really bad one, too. Inexperienced at just about everything, Angela fails several times, and after trying to steal some food, she's captured by the police and sent to court.

I want to point out this shot in the court scene, in which all the men in the room dwarf little Angela. The camera remains at eye level to the men in the court, so the only thing we can see of Angela is from the eyes up. It's a kind of cleverness you don't see too often these days.

So, Angela is sentenced to a year in the workhouse, but manages to escape. Returning to her home to find her mother dead, she ends up fleeing to a circus that's passing through, and convinced the ringleader to allow her to join.

Time passes, and we meet Angela again, doing balancing tricks for the traveling performers, stunts with stilts and all that. We're not told how much time as passed, but Angela is completely different now, with loads of confidence and a bratty attitude. Remember, all we know is that her mother died and she joined the circus, we are never given any clues as to why Angela ended up like this. It's a completely different character.

Which, again, Gaynor plays perfectly, and she isn't to blame for these clunky character transitions at all.

Angela meets starving artist Gino (played by Charles Farrell), who falls in love with her and pleads that he paint a portrait of her. Angela grudgingly agrees. Gino paints, and Angela is impressed, but not smitten.

A few weeks later, Angela takes a fall and breaks her ankle, forcing her to leave the show. She and Gino leave for Naples, and the two fall in love.

Again, we have a really dramatic shift in character. By a mere broken ankle, Angela is transformed into a snot-nosed brat into a loving, playful partner.

This transition is even worse. At least last time there was a significant amount of off-screen time for Angela to change. Here, one broken ankle and she's a completely different person. AGAIN, no fault to Gaynor, she keeps playing the role pitch perfect.

Finally, a third into the movie, we have a characterization of Angela that sticks. The rest of the movie is her spending her days with Gino, both madly in love with each other, trying to make the rent.

I kind of wished we started the film at this point, since all the circuses and dead mothers amounted to almost nothing. It's OK to make a movie about two people in love, you don't always need Giant Dramatic Events.

The final half of the film is great, if a bit out-of-date in this post-PC world. Angela's past finally catches up to her and the police officer that originally arrested her catches up with her. Gees, it's been years and her crime wasn't that serious to begin with, that's dedication to his work.

The officer does allow Angela one more hour with Gino though. This is the best part of the film, as Angela tries to come up with a way to tell Gino, but they both just end up drunk and goof off for an hour.

So, Angela goes to jail and Gino wanders around aimlessly, not knowing where's she's gone, assuming she's run off. Time passes. A woman shares a cell with Angela, and when this woman's time is up, she finds Gino and tells him that his girl is locked up and was once a former prostitute. Oh sure, a prostitute for only about twenty minutes, and just to save her mother when all other options had run out, but still, former prostitute. And then we learn that Gino HATES prostitutes.

Eventually, Angela and Gino cross paths again, but it's not a happy reunion, but a violent one.

Again, the film suffers from some poor characterizations in the first half, but Janet Gaynor did the best with what she was given. Let's see if she can keep it up for part two of our triple feature.

Harold Lloyd and Speedy

2009-02-13T08:51:00.000-08:00

Speedy (1928)
DIRECTED BY: Ted Wilde
STARRING: Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff
NOMINATED FOR: Best Director, Comedy Picture

Harold Lloyd often seems to get the bronze medal in the great "who was the greatest silent comedian" debate, with Chaplin and Keaton duking it out for the gold. Of the Lloyd films I've seen, I can sort of see why. Lloyd was the least "silenty" of the three. His stunts, even prior to his accident in 1919 that resulted in the lose of two of his fingers, were rarely as big as his contemporaries. Which is not to say he wasn't athletic. He was fast and had great balance, but his films seemed to have many more smaller, simpler gags.

Harold Lloyd's films also don't hit the same emotional heights that most of Chaplin's films (I'll keep my opinion of Keaton to myself for the time being). They tend to be more popcorn entertainment then anything else, but nobody can popcorn entertain better then Harold Lloyd.

Speedy was both Harold Lloyd's last silent film as well as his only film to get an Oscar nomination. There actually isn't much to talk about, because going into the film in any great detail would just be listing gags, and comedies work best when you don't know what's happening. This film does have one great value to it that I will touch upon, a value that probably makes this one of the most important films for historians that I've looked at so far.

This film IS New York City!

No silent film I've seen thus far shows the Big Apple in the 1920s in so much detail. Most of Harold Lloyd's films were shot in LA, but the exception of a few pickup shots, Speedy was shot entirely on location in NYC. They used mostly hidden cameras to film, and they went everywhere. Uptown, downtown, even into the subways, and what we get are a lot of little details, such as the combination scale-and-fortune-telling machine at the entrance of the subway, or the drive-in horse-shoers, or my favorite:

An updated play-by-play score board in a shop window. One shop owner gets updates over the phone while another operates lights and symbols to show what's going on in the game. This was prior to television, and radio hadn't gotten in to the whole sports broadcasting thing yet, so this was one of the main ways of getting the scores.

Baseball and the Yankees are huge cultural things in Speedy. Everyone in the film, as just everyone in that time period, is a big fan of the game, and their schedules are determined by the game schedules. Lloyd's character only gets jobs if there's an easy way to get updates on the game. A lot of the film acts as a love letter to the game and to the team, and it all peaks when Babe Ruth himself makes a cameo.

And this is big-but-athletic Babe Ruth, not old-and-a-bit-dumpy Babe Ruth you see in all the sound clips. At one point, Lloyd's character becomes a cab driver, and by pure chance ends up picking up Ruth to take to Yankee Stadium. Lloyd is so overwhelmed that he can barely pay attention to the road, and keeps glancing over to sing Ruth praises. Ruth's reaction is priceless.

The centerpiece of the film is a trip to 1920s Coney Island, which may well have been the most dangerous place in the world!

To be honest, if I ended up going back in time to the 1920s, I'd stay as far away from amusement park rides as possible.

Well, except the spinning disk. I've always wanted to try the spinning disk.

These moments of where old school New York really shine through are what make the movie for me, more so then any of the gags and storyline. And they're good gags and story lines, don't get me wrong, this is a very enjoyable if simple film. But when you get me nostalgic for a time that even my GRANDPA wasn't around for, then you got something special going on.

Plus, Harold Lloyd flips himself off.

Cooper, Schoedsack and Chang

2009-02-11T07:33:00.000-08:00

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927)
DIRECTED BY: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
STARRING: Kru, Chantui, Bimbo the Monkey
NOMINATED FOR: Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production

I've been having a hard time coming up with a proper opening for this review. I first started writing a history of documentary films, then tried defining documentary films, but it wasn't coming out the way I wanted. When I think about it, I realize that what I was trying to do was to find some justification for Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness. The fact is, Chang is not a documentary, and for that fact more then anything else, I didn't like it.

It's not like directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack didn't know it's not a documentary. They advertised it as a "jungle melodrama" and never once claimed it as actual fact. Almost all the events in the film are staged, those not being just filler shots of monkeys running around trees. This idea of staged foreign drama found it's start in Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North from 1922, in which Flaherty filmed actual Eskimos performing more ancient forms of fishing and hunting (for example, the film showed Eskimos using spears, when they would normally use guns).

Chang is only slightly better. It too uses locals to recreate events, but the events are ones that could actually happen at that time period, but were staged for the film. Now, this in itself is not my problem, particularly since it's not officially advertised as a documentary.

My main problem is all the fucking animal killing.

I know, I know, "it was a different time," a pre-"no animal was harmed during the making of his film" time. It would be another twelve years before the American Humane Association became involved in the film business. I accept this, and I can still recognize the impact of the film, but none of that doesn't mean I have to like it. I also recognize the impact of The Birth of a Nation, but I'll be damned if I have to like that racist piece of shit.

Ok, Chang ain't The Birth of a Nation bad.

The film takes place in Siam (now Thailand), where a group of natives live a dangerous kill-or-be-killed life in the jungle. The film likens it to to the covered wagon migrations of the United States, promoting a Western man-vs-nature tone throughout the film. Our main character is Kru (played by an actual man named Kru), a humble jungle citizen. He lives with his wife and his three children (his actual children, though not his actual wife) in a small, almost-suburban jungle house.

They even have a family pet, Bimbo the monkey, who's easily the best character of the film.

His has more dialogue then any other character in the film, thanks to the intertitles. His character is greedy and cowardly and funny, starting a tradition of comedy relief animal sidekicks you know find in just about every film made by Disney.

However, the film doesn't focus a great deal on the family life. The majority of it fallows Kru and his fellow villagers as they deal with a series of dangerous jungle animals, the king of which being the "bloodthirsty" tiger.

The film presents the carnivores in this film almost in an evil light, to further heighten the drama. Steve Irwin would not approve. The tiger, while the most dangerous animal in the film, was a rare creator for the filmmakers to encounter, so the majority of the film was focused on leopards.

Leopards are the stormtroopers of this film: they never stop showing up, and they never stop dying.

In the middle of the film, the villagers set up a large number of traps for the leopards, ranging from pitfalls to snares to nets.

These are all fine and good, but they all pale in comparison to THE DEATH SLAB!

HOOOOL-EEEEE SHIT!

Fortunately, we never see any animal get trapped by that thing in the film. We do see plenty of leopards and tigers get caught in the other traps though, which result in the villagers running up and shooting the animals to death. We see the bullet impacts, we see the animal's death twitches, and I have to stop the film for a while.

It's this point where the film not being a for-real documentary becomes a problem. If this had merely been the recording of actual events, then I could say nothing about it except "welp, dem's the breaks." But the events are staged and the animals killed for entertainment. You could say that the events would have happened on their own, but that just makes it worse. If these things would have happened on their own, then why the hell couldn't Cooper and Schoedsack not film them HAPPENING ON THEIR OWN!?!

I think I've said my piece.

Charles Chaplin and The Circus

2009-02-06T07:49:00.000-08:00

THE CIRCUS (1928)
DIRECTED BY: Charles Chaplin
STARRING: Charles Chaplin, Merna Kennedy, Al Ernest Garcia
WON: Honorary Award (Charles Chaplin, for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus)

The Circus is an oft-ignored entry in Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp canon. Released between two of Chaplin's most successful and talked-about films, The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931), it's easy to miss it. It's not even mentioned in Chaplin's official biography.

Yet, for everyone interested in Chaplin, this is much more of a required viewing then any either of the films that sandwich it. Out of all the Chaplin films I've seen (which is fewer then I care to admit), The Circus is the most personal of his works, the Tramp mirroring Chaplin's own hardships and ambitions.

Chaplin grew up in the music halls of London, which shared many elements of the classic circus. Clowns, mostly. In fact, most classic clown gags were formed in the music halls, and had become stale by 1928. Chaplin was more then aware of this, so unlike the clowns in The Crowd, nobody laughs at these clowns' old gags, and the clowns ain't laughing either.

Chaplin created a purpose for himself: to take apart the old gags he learned in those music halls and rejuvenate them into something new.

Though a series of misunderstanding and chase scenes, the Tramp ends up running into the circus and starts messing up the acts, but the crowd loves it. The ringleader offers the Tramp a job, and he goes through a series of auditions performing classic gags, but can't pull them off.

One of the old gags is called the "William Tell gag," in which an archer attempts to shoot an apple off his partner's head, but the partner keeps taking bites out of the apple and unbalancing it. It's an old, old gag. It fact, it was filmed as far back as 1900.

Chaplin began playing with this gag long before The Circus, including filming (but not finishing) a version ten years earlier with the bow replaced with a colt 45.

Chaplin finally returned to the gag, but instead of replacing the weapon, he replaced the fruit.

And with that, an old gag was made anew.

Chaplin not only revised old gags with the film, but also revised old Chaplin. The Circus has a similar plot to that of his 1916 short film The Vagabond. Both have the Tramp falling for a woman under the control of an abusive father figure.

And in both films, the girl eventually falls in love with a dark handsome stranger, much to the Tramp's dismay.

I can't say for sure, but I imagine that all this looking back was tough for Chaplin at the time. Remember when I said the film wasn't mentioned in his official biography? That's because it was one of the most difficult movies Chaplin ever made. First, a large storm destroyed part of the set. Then, chemical treatment destroyed the first two weeks worth of film and they had to start all over again. Then a fire broke out and destroyed the entire set. This photo was taken that day:

Things only got worse. Through the production of the film, Chaplin was going through a bitter and very public divorce with his second wife Lita Grey. Fearing that his film would be taken away from him, Chaplin shut down production for almost a year and hid the film negatives. And finally, to top it all off, there were claims of back taxes by the IRS.

In many ways, this makes the centerpiece of the film, where the Tramp is forced to perform in a high wire act, all the more metaphorical.

When the act begins, the Tramp is wearing a harness and is in full control. However, after losing the harness and then being attacked by a pack of monkeys, the Tramp is in a pretty spot.

But he never falls off the wire! It's almost too perfect of a representation of Chaplin's turbulent months working on the film.

The film was award the first "Honorary Award" at the Academy Awards. It was originally up for an acting and directing award too, but the Academy pulled him from the competition and gave him his own special award instead. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe they thought it'd be too unfair for the other nominees? Maybe they thought there'd be a public uproar if Chaplin didn't win the awards? Or maybe they really saw the importance that The Circus was to Chaplin's filmography.

Whatever the case, Chaplin deserved this special award.

Emil Jannings and The Last Command

2009-02-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

THE LAST COMMAND (1928)
DIRECTED BY: Josef von Sternberg
STARRING: Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell
WON: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Emil Jannings)
NOMINATED FOR: Best Writing, Original Story (Lajos Biró)

It seems very fitting that the first film to win Best Actor would be a film entirely about acting, and very ironic that the man who won the award, Emil Jannings, won the award for playing the only man in the film who isn't acting.

The film opens in 1920s Hollywood, "The Magic Empire of the Twentieth Century" as the titles tell us. Director Leo Andreyev (played by William Powell) scans through a pile of headshots of Russian actors, looking for just the right extra for his film. He stumbles on this one.

It's not a very flattering photo, and the description on the back says the man has very little acting experience (which turns out to be true more ways then one). However, the director MUST have him for some mysterious reason, so they call him at his apartment.

Here we offically meet Sergius Alexander, an old broken Russian man living alone. A nasty twitch keeps his head shaking, as if to say "NO" to everything he encounters.

It's a really convincing twitch too, I thought for a moment that they actually got a damaged man to play the part. Instead, they got Emil Jannings, our Best Actor winner. A Swiss actor born in 1884, Jannings became a powerful silent star throughout the 1920s, particularly in the works of F. W. Murnau. His 1928 acting nomination was for two films (something the Academy only did that year), the other being the sadly lost The Way of the Flesh.

1928 was a great year for Emil Jannings. 1929, not so much, but we'll get to that later.

So Alexander is summoned to the film studios, where he's assigned the role of general. His fellow extras waltz around and pose and curse and fight with each other, but Alexander simply sits quietly as his pulls out a medal that's not part of the costume. One of the extras asks him about it, and Alexander tells him that he used to BE a general in the Russian army. The extras laugh at the old man's claims, play a bit of keep-away with the medal and then leaves him alone, giving him some time to reflect on who he is and who he was.

The flashback is brought by mirror.

The Alexander of "now" is a much different man then the Gen. Alexander of the Russian Revolution. Ten years younger, with a load of confidence and an Orson Welles smirk, and no twitch in sight. Alexander, cousin of the Czar, is the leading general of the Russian army, who is currently in the middle of battle with the Bolsheviks.

The film is directed by Josef von Sternberg, which came as a surprise when I learned it. The film looks nothing like Sternberg's later works (and not just because Marlene Dietrich isn't in it). It's clear that Sternberg hadn't developed his strong sense of mise-en-scene yet. Take a look at the Russian settings in The Last Command.

Fairly standard stuff. Now, compare these to the Russian settings in Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress, which he made only six years later.

Night and day, practically! Granted, The Scarlet Empress takes place in the 1700s while The Last Command takes place in the 1910s, but I doubt 18th century Russia were THAT fond of creepy statues.

Back in the flashback, Gen. Alexander is looking over the troops while two mysterious persons plot in an empty room... Hey, wait a minute? Isn't that Andreyev, the director? Well, it seems back then that he was actually a Bolshevik spy. His companion is fellow spy Natalie Dabrova, played by Evelyn Brent. They need to get close to Gen. Alexander, but how?

But before they can finish plotting, they're captured and taken to prison. After his examinations, Gen. Alexander returns to his office and starts looking through the passports of captured spies.

We're starting to get into the meat of this film. A lot of comparisons are made between 1910s Russia and 1920s Hollywood, not the least being the class system of both. The leaders/directors are pampered, while the citizens/extras wait silently in the background for their own chance.

It turns out that Andreyev and Dabrova are pretending to be theater actors. Gen. Alexander, though knowing she's a spy, is very taken by Dabrova. Pretending to be convinced that she actually is an actress, Gen. Alexander asks that she come with him to have dinner with a number of high-ranked officers, and she agrees. No way she can turn down a chance like this.

Dabrova hates Gen. Alexander not because of what she knows of HIM, but because he symbolizes Russia. However, during the party, she starts to get a sense of his true character. He's nice and funny and a bit clownish, but the real moment of his redemption is when officers call him during the party. They tell him that the Czar will be coming to the battlefield in a few days, and that Gen. Alexander should start a battle to impress him.

Gen. Alexander, however, has no interest in wasting lives just to put on a show, even if it means displeasing the Czar. It becomes clear that in this world of spies and diplomats, Gen. Alexander is the only truely honest person in the film. Every other character is acting. We even get a scene where Debrova, in a rare moment alone, rehearses murdering the general.

Eventually though, she falls for the man. Of course, almost all movie relationships have bad timing, because mere minutes after the two offically get together, the Russian base is attacked by the Bolsheviks. After a long brutal battle scene, the Bolsheviks finally get to Gen. Alexander...

...and start beating the crap out of him...

...but what really breaks him is when Debrova seems to betray him and gives the Bolsheviks the idea of having Gen. Alexander work for them as a servant, forcing him to shovel coal on a train.

However, this proves to be another act, this time to save Gen. Alexander's life. After a long series of scenes of Alexander suffering one humiliation after another, Debrova finally gets a moment alone with him, and assists his escape.

After knocking out a guard, Alexander jumps from the train and lands hard in the snow. AND THEN THE TRAIN CRASHES FOR NO REAL REASON.

The train crash comes out of nowhere. There was no build up for it, it was just a random act of destruction, one last ultimate tragedy for Alexander as he watches his love sink into the icy river. I had to admit it, but I laughed.

And with that final chaotic moment, the flashback ends, and we return to the broken, twitchy Alexander we were introduced to. He and director Andreyev finally meet, and Alexander realizes what is going on. Andreyev recognized him from his headshot, and now Alexander is to suffer one more humiliation. Once again dressed as a Russian general, Andreyev directs Alexander to give one last desperate speech to the extras playing his soldiers. And Alexander delivers.

Emil Jannings became a star in the silent period, which more or less ended with 1928 and the release of The Jazz Singer (which we'll get to in due time). As sadly was the case with many actors and actresses at this time, Jannings's thick accent prevented him from continuing work in the USA. He moved to Germany to act in films and theater there, and during that time become a huge Nazi supporter, dismissing any fans he had left.

So in a haunting way, Alexander's last command is also Jannings'. And when Alexander dies of a heart attack mere moments later, Jannings' career goes with it.

Let's see him act his way out of that.

King Vidor and The Crowd

2008-12-17T02:13:00.000-08:00

THE CROWD (1928)
DIRECTED BY: King Vidor
STARRING: James Murray, Eleanor Boardman, Bert Roach
NOMINATED FOR: Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production
Best Director, Dramatic Picture (King Vidor)

An intersting question is posed in Preston Sturges's 1941 film Sullivan's Travels: What film better serves the people, the tragedy or the comedy? Realism or escapism? Do people want to see their world reflected back at them, or see a fantasy with a happy ending?

Why not both? Why not laugh at our tragic world?

Maybe I'm a sick, twisted person, but I laughed more at King Vidor's The Crowd then I cried. The Crowd is not a comedy, it's 100% tragic drama. People lose their jobs, children die, parents die, and by the end all seems hopeless. AND I COULDN'T STOP LAUGHING.

This might just be because I see so much of my own personal history in the film. The actual events of the film aren't even close to what have happened to me and my family, but the same feelings of half-assed enthusiasm, of "waiting for my ship to come in" ring true of many different moments in life. Maybe I'm just laughing at myself.

The film opens on the 4th of July, 1900. While everyone else is celebrating, Mr. Sims impatiently waits for the birth of his son, John Sims, who comes out of the womb rather clean. Mr. Sims glows, and promises to give his son every opportunity.

Twelve years pass. John Sims is now a young boy, and he and his friends sit on a fence and discuss what they want to be when they grow up. I've seen this film three times, and on the third time I think I figured what King Vidor was doing here. The boys on the fence are acting as a scale of sorts, measuring the childrens' future plans from the most expected of them to the most absurd.

On the far left, we see the group's one black friend, who aims to become a preacher, submitting to his own racial stereotype.

On the far right, a wimpy nerd child wishes to become a cowboy, which is of course impossible, because a) a cowboy isn't an actual occupation, and b) this kid's got Wet Willie written all over him.

And smack dab in the middle is John Sims, who doesn't have a clue what he wants to be, but echoing the words of his father, he thinks he's going to be something big.

However, the scene is cut short when a horse-drawn ambulance pulls up to John's house. It turns out that John's father died for an undisclosed reason, leaving John alone to face the world.

This moment of John having his support system ripped away from him is symbolized by an amazing shot of John slowly walking up the stairs to his father's body. King Vidor takes a riff from German expressionism, shooting the stairs so it looks like the walls are expanding outward, giving the illusion of space expanding as one goes up the stairs. The crowd of friends and loved ones remain below while John walks into this big new world, all alone with no one to guide him.

Now, for many films, a parent dying might just be used as a throw-away tragedy, but once again, on my third viewing, I realized just how important this moment is to the rest of the film. John's father wasn't rich. but based on the size of their house, Mr. Sims was pretty well off and knew how to make it in the world. With this life compass taken away from him, John Sims can't grow up anymore.

So, when we see John at the age of 21 on a boat to New York City, we find he's basically a giant man-child. Wearing big man clothes and a goofy smile, carrying a suitcase with his name on it in big bold letters, and dreaming of his future with the same unspecified optimism he had at the age of 12, it's clear that without his father's guidance, John hasn't grown up much these past nine years.

John's arrival to New York City triggers the film's most famous moment: a montage of city scenes, which Vidor filmed candidly. The montage is in three parts. The first part scenes of crowds racing around, a sea of people for John to get lost in:

In one scene, a window reflects a crowd on top of another, the crowd losing itself in itself.

The second part of the montage gives us a bird eye view of different parts of the city, showing us just how big the city really is:

The final part of the montage shows us skyscrapers from the ground, giving us the same view as the crowd, showing off just how big the buildings are. In effect, the entire montage has given us three means to measure the size of this city (the population and both the horizontal and vertical scope of the city) and how small one person is in comparison.

The montage ends with a shot of a model building. In a wonderful bit of early special effects, we pan up the building and zoom into one window, slowly enter the building to find a sea of workers at their desks, and slowly zoom in to one desk to find John Sims now hard to work as one of the crowd.

The film makes the point that very few people stick out in the crowd. In a scene where John uses the washroom, he encounters three people who repeat the same bad joke, and John comments on how they all talk alike. The washroom itself reflects this conformaty literally, as two walls of mirrors multiple the same people to infinite.

In fact, when we're introduced to John's friend Bert, the film has to go so far as breaking the fourth wall by having Bert look directly into the camera, as a way of saying, "Hey audience, you should pay attention to this character."

Bert drags John into a blind-double-date, where he gets paired with plain-Jane office girl Mary.

This scene really shows how dated the film is. John and Mary's date shows a lot of pre-feminism behavior, with John teasing Mary's womanhood, touching her without asking, and being generally invasive. If a guy acted like that on a first date these days, he'd get cuffed faster then the Roadrunner. Oh well, you can't change history.

While riding on top of a double-decker bus, John and Mary spot a clown advertising a shoe store. While this is the build up for a payoff much later in the film, this scene works on it's own by showing us the extreme a person has to go to get noticed in the crowd.

So, after a long night at the local fair, John and Mary take the bus home, with Mary snoozing on John's shoulder. John sees a housing advertisment on the wall, which inspires him to ask the drowzy Mary to marry him. She nods and then goes back to sleep.

And so they get married, and take a typical honeymoon at Niagra Falls. This theme of "life dictated by advertisment" is recurring throughout the film, sort of an early anti-commercial backdrop seen in a lot of modern-day films. We learn early in the film that one of John's hobbies is coming up with ad slogans, and whilst riding the train to their honeymoon, John and Mary plan out their lives by using newspaper ads as guides.

Reminds me of when I was a little kid. My dad used to collect architecture magazines, and I spent a lot of time constructing a dream house by picking and choosing different parts from different houses from different magazines.

Anyway, after discovering their dream home in news print, they turn the page.

Considering how caught up they both are in the fantasy, Mary's reaction is understandable.

The honeymoon ends, and after a few months, John and Mary settles down in a small apartment next to some railroad tracks (which, if we've learned anything from Se7en, is one of the worst things in the world). These apartment scenes hold the "Leave it to Beaver" distinction of showing the first toilet on film.

The couple are at first happy, though it's clear that John is a bit of a slacker. While Mary cooks meals and calls fix-it-men and other pre-feminism house wife stuff, John sits around with a ukulele and sings about how his big break is coming, yes sir.

As sadly is the case with many couples (including my recently now-ex roommates), things get worse. Small problems with the apartment build up, and John blames Mary for every single one of them ("Why didn't you call the plumber? Why didn't you tell me this was broken?"). After a long, painful breakfest scene, Mary decides she can't take it anymore and starts packing. We later learn that she's really just acting out and waiting for John to stop her.

But he doesn't. He just yells at her and leaves. Mary is shocked. What comes next is a great moment in pantomime as Mary cries over her situation, and then realizes that she forget to tell John a little something...

Awesome.

Mary's pregnancy puts life back into their marriage, and nine months later, Mary gives birth to a baby boy. The scene in the hospital, with John playing the pacing, fidgety father-to-be, is pretty funny, but it also includes this shot, which I again really only noticed the third time of watching it.

Compare it to the earlier scene of young John going up the stairs.

With the angle of the walls and the direction John is facing in each picture, it's almost as if they're mirror images of each other. If this were a different film, you could succesfully cut these scenes together to show a boy, losing his father, quickly growing into a man, becoming a father.

Years pass (time flies quickly in this film), and two things happen, Mary and John have a daughter, and John gets a small raise. It's clear at this point that John has no chance of moving up in the world. All John does is play his little guitar and write slogans. One day, Mary suggests John submit one of his slogans, and he finally does.

And I guess years of practice pay off, cause John earns 500 dollars. In a moment of consumer glee, John and Mary spend the whole thing on clothes and toys as opposed to anything they actually need. Mary and John gleefully tell their children, who are playing on the other side of the street, to come home.

Happiness never lasts.

The pain of this scene is stretched for a while, cause John and Mary's daughter doesn't die right away. While the doctor attends to her inside the apartment, we get a sad scene of John trying to tell the world to be quiet so his child can get some rest.

Sadly, John's daughter passes away, and John enters a long depression. He becomes less active at work, and his bosses (which now include Bert) are starting to notice. In one great scene, we see John's thoughts play out on his forhead as he tries to crunch numbers.

Why don't we get neat visual moments like this anymore?

When his bosses bring up his work performance, John gets so upset that he violently quits his job, tossing around desks and papers as he goes out the door. Mary doesn't take the news too well, but being the level-headed on in the family, she encourages John to go job hunting.

And he finds a surprising large amount of jobs for that time period, including a door-to-door vacuum salesman. He just quits them all. Being without employment has made John realize just how hopeless of a case he is, so he slinks further and further into depression and uselessness.

Finally, after months of moving around, with no money, Mary can live with the man she married anymore, and packs up to leave. John, about as depressed as he could possibly be, decides to take one last walk with his son.

Assuming that there's nothing left going in his life, he throws a ball down a bridge for his son to catch. With his son distracted, John decides now is the time.

Sadly/luckily (depending on your point of view), John is too much of a coward to take his own life. When his son returns with the ball, he tells John how much he loves him. This somehow puts some spark back in John, so he runs to the city in search for a job.

However, this movie was made right before the Great Depression, and even though things hadn't fully collapsed, jobs were still hard to come by. The only thing available, in a moment of cosmic irony, is as an advertising clown.

John comes home with a pocket of change and a smile on his face. Mary is about to leave. John, with a tiny bit of confidence back, tells her he won't stop her. Oh, and can she find someone to go to the circus with her and their son? He bought three circus tickets and he wants his son to have a fun time.

Oh, how could you not love that lug?

And so we come to the end of our film with a moment of temporary happiness as the entire family enjoys the circus.

What an amazing film, and rare for it's time. It's very much an early art house film. It lacks a solid plot, it stars a bunch of unknowns, and has many multi-layered themes, many of which I haven't even touched. I could really write a book on this film, each time I watch it I learn something new. Fews films do that for me.

Say good-bye, Mary and John have to leave you now. They have to get lost in the crowd.

Gloria Swanson and Sadie Thompson

2008-09-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

SADIE THOMPSON (1928)
DIRECTED BY: Raoul Walsh
STARRING: Gloria Swanson, Lionel Barrymore, Raoul Walsh
NOMINATED FOR: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Gloria Swanson)
Best Cinematography (George Barnes)

Gloria Swanson is mostly remembered, in a totally ironic way, of her role as fallen movie star Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. Ironic in that Swanson was just as huge in the silent era and just as small in the talkies. She was very much a self-made woman, moving up from Mack Sennet's Keystone slapstick comedies (which she reportedly hated)into the costume dramas of Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Wood, where she became a fashion, a self-proclaimed "clothes horse."

She eventually built such a celebrity of herself that she gained control of her own roles, something only the likes of Chaplin could do at the time. And in 1929, Gloria Swanson wanted Sadie Thompson.

In 1921, W. Somerset Maugham's short story "Miss Thompson" was serialised and published. Based on a real life trip Maugham took to Pago Pago and his passing encounter with a San Francisco prostitute and a zealous preacher, it was later adapted into a highly succesful play entitled simply "Rain."

It was a controversial move on Swanson's part for many reasons. The Hayes code was mear months away from making it's impact, but making a movie that made a prostitue the protagonist and a preacher the antagonist at any point in history is a risky move. Yet, Swanson took the reigns as both star and producer and went ahead and did it anyway.

This film also brings back two familiar names. First, cinematographer George Barnes. We explored his earlier work in which we discovered his love affair with hands, but hand shots like those hardly show up in Sadie Thompson, and I wouldn't have known this was a George Barnes film had his name not been in the credits.

The other is production designer William Cameron Menzies. We already know that Menzies likes exotic locations, so Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, is right up his alley.

But we also know that Menzies prefers to keep things simple and don't make fantasy versions of foreign lands, like so many films do. There aren't any crazy samoans running around in face paints, beating drums, going Umaga crazy. In fact, there are hardly any natives at all. Pago Pago was a repair station for the U.S. Navy, so instead there's a bunch of horny white sailors hanging around.

In fact, there's only one samoan character in the entire film: the cigar-smoking wife of the local inn.

Not exactly the best image of the samoan people, but then, her husband isn't exactly a catch either.

That's him on the right, played by James A. Marcus, who played the villian in previously review The Eagle. On the left is tourist Dr. Angus McPhail, played by Charles Lane. Early on in the film these two become good buddies, and act as the (almost) silent observers to the events of the film, only popping in once and be the film's Statler and Waldorf.

So, our story begins with a ship from San Francisco arriving at Pago Pago. The marines, bored out of their minds, wait excitedly to see what San Fran has to offer. It offers Sadie Thompson.

I should tell you, I am a 21st century man, and as such, my concepts of beauty are different from those common in the 1920s. The stars that were considered glamorous in the silent era had weird oval faces and distracting saucer eyes and were filmed in annoying soft glow and it does nothing for me.

But Gloria Swanson? She's cute.

All the marines flock to Sadie, and she gets them all wrapped around her finger. They trail her everywhere, including her hotel room, where they help set up her things.

All these merry times quickly end however. Another person was on that boat, and he's got a hair up his ass.

Alfred Davidson is now the island's resident reformer, focusing on bringing the natives to Christianity. He's the same kind of religous extermist that's played the bad guy in a vast number of films, the most recent example I can think of being The Mist. I'm actually kind of tired of this type of character myself. Very few people are like this in real life, and don't really represent their respective religons on a whole. There's a lot to be said against Christianity, but displaying these kind of characters and going "Eh, look at that, I told you they were crazy" is not the best way to go about doing that.

Davidson is played by Lionel Barrymore, who's best remembers as playing Henry Potter in It's a Wonderful Life. Now, I like the guy, but in Sadie Thompson, he doesn't really add any depth to his character. His gestures are wide and theatrical, and his face is always that of menace. Still, it maybe a 2D character, but Lionel really does know how to strike a pose.

So, how does Gloria Swanson's acting fair? A lot better. Where as Barrymore plays most of his role with his arms and his stance, Swanson plays her's with her face. It seems like Film Acting 101, but consider that most actors from the silent era were stage veterans, where you didn't have any closeups. To be able to communicate without words and to do it so detailed within your own facial expressions wasn't so common back then.

The film really only has two characters, Sadie Thompson and Alfred Davidson. Sadie is an ex-prostitute on the run from the law for a crime she says she didn't commit, and Davidson holds enough power over the island to ship Sadie back to San Francisco. Most of the film consists of their conversations, her trying to convince him to just leave her alone, him trying to convince her to atone for her sins.

Davidson is a dangerous man, and while Sadie is able to keep herself happy by being entertained by the marines, the moment the fun stops, her mind returns to Davidson.

Finally, Davidson convinces the govener to ship Sadie back to San Fran, back to the police. This results in a great scene where Sadie starts cursing Davidson out.

We can't hear the words, of course, but we can see how people react to them.

Davidson then goes on the offense, telling her that her fate is certian, that the only way she can stand her time in jail is to turn to God, literally beating her into a corner.

Now I feel like a sports announcer.

In one last ditch effort, Sadie pulls the "throw a fit like a five-year old" play.

The rest would be spoilers. Not that I haven't given away plenty of spoilers before, but so far, out of all the films I've seen for this project, this film is my favorite so far, and I'd prefer you just see it yourself.

Plus, um, I'm busy.

Go away.

William Cameron Menzies, The Dove, and Tempest

2008-09-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

William Cameron Menzies was one of the most interesting visual artists and directors of Hollywood's golden age, bringing exotic settings to the big screen from the romantic silents of the 20s to the colorful epics of the 50s. He worked mostly as an art director and was the very first person to be credited as "Production Designer" in 1938. We'll get to that film eventually.

In the 1st Academy Awards, he was nominated and won the award for Best Art Direction (though then called "Interior Decoration") for two films. Like oh so many in these first couple of Academy Awards, one of the films is lost. Luckily, one isn't, and we can finally review our first official Academy Award winner.

As for what we don't get to see:

THE DOVE (1927)
DIRECTED BY: Roland West
STARRING: Norma Talmadge, Noah Beery, Gilbert Roland
WON: Best Art Direction (William Cameron Menzies)

Almost all of Menzies' work took place in foreign locations. The Dove takes us to Hollywood's romantic Mexic... wait, what? Oh sorry, it's in some unnamed location. It was GOING to be Mexico, but for some hazy political reasons that I'm still trying to research, it wasn't allowed for any movie at the time to say anything bad about the place.

Gilbert Roland as Gilbert Roland in "The Dove"

The plot is the classic boy-meets-girl-but-other-boy-wants-girl-and-there-is-a-bit-of-kidnapping. Sadly, I can't say any more then that. Only four of it's nine reels survive at the Library of Congress, and I'm a bit too broke right now for air travel.

So, let's go ahead and move on to the movie we CAN watch.

TEMPEST (1927)
DIRECTED BY: Sam Taylor
STARRING: John Barrymore, Camilla Horn, Louis Wolheim
WON: Best Art Direction (William Cameron Menzies)

Tempest, not to be confused with the Shakespeare play of the same name, takes place in Russia in the early 1910s, during the Russian Revolution that resulted in the Soviet Union. Now, Russia was always a favorite location of the silent era. All the curvy doorways and roofs were visually more interesting then our dumb ol' box houses. Many films in Russia tend to take it over the top. Take Josef von Sternberg's 1934 The Scarlet Empress. Sternberg's Russia is one full of melting gargoyles, bell towers and secret passages. It's almost cartoonish (though it works for that film).

So, imagine my surprise when I found that Menzies, the man who did Things to Come and Invaders from Mars, played Russia like it was a real place. Oh, sure, there's plenty classic examples of Russian architecture...

But the movie takes the time to explore the dirtier, more down to earth, more human parts of Russia, like this shower thingy:

And here's the home of our film's hero, Lieutenant Ivan Markov:

God, it's hard to imagine a day before kitty posters.

Ivan Markov is a man who believes Russia is whatever the guy in charge tells him it is. A peasant going up ranks in the army, he just wants to prove himself. Markov is played by John Barrymore, who could cut cheese with his profile.

However, things fall apart when he falls in love with the General's daughter, played by Camilla Horn and her giant anime eyes.

Unfortunately, the princess (daughter of a general=princess?) isn't all that taken by him. In fact, she hates him purely for his past as a peasant. Depressed by his rejection, Markov decides to get REALLY drunk.

Anyone who knows their silent film star history might flinch at this. John Barrymore's career was ruined in the 30s by alcoholism, and died of liver disease. Still, this film sets up the best shot of the entire picture, in which a drunken Markov watches his fellow dancers from the bottom of his glass.

Talkies almost killed moments like this.

This film has a great deal of old school special effects. The film opens with a model of the Russian city the army is stationed in.

We pan across it one way, and start panning and zooming the other, and the cut to a real set is pretty damn seamless.

In another great scene, Markov, his passion for the princess discovered, is thrown into a jail cell to rot. After several months, Markov starts to go slightly mad, first hallucinating the war, and then the princess' mocking face.

It's not perfect. You can see the edges of the screen the images are projected on pretty easily, but the scene has it's effect.

Ok, so Russia is realistic and there are great scenes. Is there anywhere where the film falls flat in the visual department? Well, kind of. The costuming just seems to fall flat... but it doesn't.

Ok, here's the deal. There's a lot of emphasise put on the clothes the characters where. The clothes in this movie are supposed to tell people what your social status and rank are. They're so important in the story, when Markov is removed from the army, they hold a demonstration of ripping off his uniform to symbolize his fall. The demonstration seems more like death by firing squad.

Later in the film, the general is captured by the new Red Terror, he's publicly humiliated by having his clothes ripped apart.

So, as much as a metaphor clothes are used in the film, the clothes seem to be rather bland. If there was one part of the film to go overboard on the production design, it should have been wardrobe, if nothing then to even it out.

I don't want to end the film on a low note, though, so I saved one last great scene for last. The Red Terror have taken over, and are executing members of the old army. It's the general's turn to face his fate.

We see the firing squad. Behind them is a propaganda poster with a caricature of the general, looking evil and menacing. The general these people have been symbolically fighting this entire time.

Then we cut to the real general, alone, small.

Waiting.

The Devil Dancer, The Magic Flame and George Barnes... kinda

2008-08-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

George Barnes, right, with George Pal on the set of War of the Worlds (1953).

George Barnes, born October 16th, 1892, began work as a cinematographer at the age of 26, becoming a mainstay at Thomas H. Ince Studios, doing work for 14 of the studio's 107 films. After the studio's closing in 1920, he hopped around between studios, doing work on all different types of film, and became a highly demanded cinematographer for Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille, and Leo McCarey.

In 1929, George Barnes was the first man to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. In the early days of the Academy, someone could get nominated for multiple works within that year. In the very first Academy Awards, George Barnes was nominated for three. Two of them where The Devil Dancer (1927) and The Magic Flame (1927).

Sadly, both these films are unavailabe.

THE DEVIL DANCER (1927)
DIRECTED BY: Fred Niblo
STARRING: Gilda Gray, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong
NOMINATED FOR: Best Cinematography (George Barnes)

According to TCM, here's the plot:

"Takla, a white orphan brought up and kept captive in a Himalayan monastery, is rescued by Althestan, an adventurous Englishman who falls in love with her. His sister, displeased with her brother's choice, arranges to have Takla kidnaped. Althestan searches for her and eventually finds her with a troupe of itinerant Muslim entertainers."

Not much more info exists beyond that. It's thought that this film is lost for good, along with 80-90% of the output during the silent era. Film preservation wasn't really on anyone's mind back in the 1920s. And what of The Magic Flame?

THE MAGIC FLAME (1927)
DIRECTED BY: Henry King
STARRING: Ronald Colman, Vilma Bánky, Agostino Borgato
NOMINATED FOR: Best Cinematography (George Barnes)

Well, it fairs a tad bit better, but don't expect to ever see it. Only five of the original eleven reels exist, and they're stored in the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House Archives. Here's the plot via TCM:

"Bianca, the aerial star of Baretti's circus, loves Tito, the clown, and resents the advances of the handsome Crown Prince of Illyria, who poses as Count Cassati. The prince pursues the wife of a neighboring squire and kills her husband when he discovers them together. Maddened by Bianca's refusals, the prince lures her to his hotel with a forged letter, but she drops from the window, using her gymnastic skill to escape. Tito comes to her aid and in a struggle with the prince casts him from the window into the sea. Bearing a striking resemblance to the prince, Tito assumes his identity and thus evades prosecution. Believing Tito to have been killed by the prince, Bianca leaves the circus to seek vengeance. During the coronation, she is about to assassinate the "prince" when he reveals his identity, and together they escape to the circus."

Vilma Banky as Bianca in The Magic Flame (1927)

Here's a copy of the New York Times review of the film that goes into more detail, via a Vilma Bank fansite.
And if you want to go even MORE into detail, here's a novilization of the film, translated from a French magazine.

Now, that's just frustrating, to have so many clues to what this film was like and not being able to see it. Eh, who knows, maybe the other six reels will show up someday. Look at what happened with Metropolis.

Now, it seems unfair to leave it at that, so to make up for these two lost treasures, we'll look at two other films made by George Barnes made shortly before the Academy Awards took place.

THE EAGLE (1925)
DIRECTED BY: Clarence Brown
STARRING: Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Bánky, Louise Dresser

For many, The Eagle was the comeback of young star Rudolph Valentino, who would become one of film's first heartthrobs until his untimely death in 1926 at the age of 31. In this film, he stars as Vladimir Dubrovsky, a soldier in the Russian army who goes rogue in order to don a mask, take the name "The Black Eagle" and get revenge at the man who stole his father's home. It's sort of a new take on the whole Robin Hood/Zorro thing, only the Black Eagle has a mask shaped like a bird.

But we're not here to talk about the film itself, we're here to look at the cinematography. There's a lot of great technical stuff going here. For one, we get several chase scene with some solid early tracking shots, with things both moving away from the camera...

...And to the camera...

...Most of these are impressive for their time. Bumpy, but they work. However, these are just teasers for THE tracking shot of the movie. In one scene, Kyrilla (the baddie) is having a huge feast with all his baddie buddies. We cut to Kyrilla at one end of the table...

..and we start pulling back...

...and we pull back...

...and we KEEP PULLING BACK!

These days, we'd put a camera on a crane for this kind of tracking shot. Back in 1925, they had to construct a special table that came apart to let the camera through! I don't know how much of that was George Barnes' work, but it's a great effect and my favorite shot of the entire film.

Something I noticed about George Barnes films, at least the ones I've seen before, is that he loves closeup of hands. Don't ask me why.

Well he loved his hands, Barnes didn't seem have too many closeups of the face in this film. The photo of The Eagle in his mask above is the closest he ever got to a face in the film. Here's the second closest:

In fact, our hero is more often then not seen at a distance.

This, I think, is mostly director Clarence Brown's idea, because in our next George Barnes/Rudolph Valentino film, there are closeups galore.

SON OF THE SHEIK (1926)
DIRECTED BY: George Fitzmaurice
STARRING: Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Bánky, George Fawcett

A sequel to 1921's The Sheik, this film follows the Ahmed, the Sheik's son (Valentino) as he tries to woo (and then rape(like father like son)) a young dancer. Like I mentioned, there are a lot more closeups, in part because Valentino had really hit the big time at this point, and you can't NOT have closeups of the latest sex symbol. It's also in part that many of the actors in this film have very expressive faces. For example, Montagu Love has one of the best bad guy faces of the silent era.

But that face isn't nearly as creepy as Karl Dane's. If someone had made a Batman movie during the silent era, Karl Dane would play the Joker.

And to think, his character is one of the GOOD GUYS!

The entire film takes place in the desert, and George Barnes does a good job showing the emptiness of it.

Things take a different tone when we get to set shots. In one scene, Ahmed and the dancer are hanging around a ruined building. Unknown to them, the baddies are slowly creeping in from the shadows. These darker shots are very effective, but almost seem like they belong in another movie. They're almost Fritz Lang-ish.

Oh, did I mention that Valentino plays two roles? He plays both Ahmed and Ahmed's father, the original Sheik. There's one scene near the end where the two cross paths, and we get some nifty old school split screening.

It's an effect we've seen dozens of times before now, but I can imagine it was pretty neat back in 26. Still, pretty old school, it's not like their physical interacting or anythiOH MY GOD HE JUST REACHED OUT AND TOUCHED HIMSELF!!!

The effect is actually kind of obvious in motion, but it's still a gutsy move that most people wouldn't try today.

Oh, as for hands?

Yeah, it's got them.

So, there you have it, two films for two films lost. Don't worry, we haven't seen the last of George Barnes.

May 16, 1929

2008-08-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

Time Magazine, People section, May. 27, 1929:

"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

John Pierpont Morgan, yachtsman, has made his last voyage on his huge, black-hulled Corsair. Last week the Corsair beat United Cigar Store Tycoon George J. Whalen's Warrior across the Atlantic. In Manhattan the Corsair's officers announced that she would be turned over to the U. S. Geodetic Survey. Mr. Morgan will not stop yachting. A two-million-dollar successor to the Corsair is being built in Bath, Me.

In 1929, my great-grandfather was living with his family in a mud hut out in the Mojave Desert. They owned a car, but it didn't work. Legend says Great-Grand spent a long time tinkering with it, even inventing a new part that wouldn't require you to crank the car to start it. I've seen pictures of this device, it's real. Had Great-Grand decided to patent it, we might be billionares.

John Coolidge once bought a saxophone for $230, tooted it in the White House. His father objected. Son John sold the horn. Last week one Arnold Zahn of Brookline, Mass., obtained what was represented as being the Coolidge saxophone, at a Boston pawnshop, for $15.

While we never got rich, his tinkering did start a chain reaction that resulted in a whole bunch of mechanics. He got a job as a mechanic, and all his sons became mechanics. My Dad and his brothers all became mechanics. Never owned a shop, mind you. That would have been too ambitious for my relatives. They liked to play it safe.

Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, grandson of the onetime Kaiser, lately engaged to German Cinemactress Lili Damita, is listed as "Louis Ferdinand," student-laborer, in the Ford assembly plant in Los Angeles. He eats his lunches from paper bags. Last week he said he liked his job. Said he: "I'm just goofy—you understand that?—about it, although I do not know what my parents will do when they find out."

My Dad, however, didn't care about passing it on. He didn't want his kids to be trapped by family tradition. If I had a question about cars, he'd tell me, he'd show me the insides and talked about how they worked, but only if I asked. He never went "Here, take this screwdriver and come with me."

William Marion Jardine of Washington & Kansas, onetime Secretary of Agriculture, was last week elected board chairman of Investment Corp. of North America, succeeding the late Lyman B. Kendall.

And I still don't really care about cars. I never ooed and awed over the classic hotrods and the latest in minivan technology. I'm happy as can be with my beat-up 80s Taurus. And as a kid, the mechanics of it all just bored me to death.

Mrs. Harry Ford Sinclair neared a nervous breakdown last week, was taken from Washington to a sanatorium at Battle Creek, Mich.

No. What I was interested in was movies.

Edsel Ford dug the first turf last week for a new Ford plant in Degenham, Essex, England. So manfully dug he that he bent his silver spade. The factory, to be finished in less than three years, will employ 15,000, make 300,000 Fords yearly.

The most I ever wanted to know about cars was how they got the time machine to fly in Back to the Future Part II.

Edward Gordon Craig, famed British stage designer, son of the late Actress Ellen Terry, announced last week that next fall he would make an extensive U. S. lecture tour. His last U. S. visit was in 1885.

I made my first movie at the age of five. It was five minutes long and was a mock news report about things going on around the house. I later made fan-scripts for episodes of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and did comics adaptions of my favorite Mickey Mouse cartoons. My favorite movie was Escape From Witch Mountain.

Thomas Tunney, Manhattan detective, brother of retired fisticuffer James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney, went last week to squelch a conference of policy game promoters, scuffled with a large Negro, wrested a revolver from his hand.

When I was 12, I experimented with stop-motion. I did several one-man Christmas plays (Please don't ask how I made Frosty The Snowman into a one-man play. That was a nightmare) and I got other kids from around town to do plays with me too. I shot most of my family's vacation videos with a huge clunky VHS camera that weighed ten pounds. My favorite movie was Jurassic Park.

James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney, has been twanging a harp during his stay on the Adriatic isle of Brioni. Last week he was in no mood for twanging. Reason: it was reported that Mrs. Tunney, convalescent from an appendicitis operation (TIME, May 20) must soon undergo another for stomach trouble.

In high school, my senior project was a documentary on the private life of teachers. I also did docs for science class on the stages of matter and of the different types of rocks. My favorite movie was Memento.

At Yale's annual Tap Day (senior society elections), held last week, the first man chosen by Scroll & Key was Woodruff R. Tappen, junior varsity stroke oar, tapped by Paul Mellon, son of the Secretary of the Treasury. The seventh man chosen by Skull & Bones was Waldo W. Green, football captain-elect, tapped by George Harris Crile, son of Dr. George W. Crile, famed Cleveland physician whose clinic was last week a scene of catastrophe (see p. 15).

I took one film school class. We watched the South Park movie. My favorite movie was The 400 Blows.

Paul Louis Charles Claudel, poet, novelist, French Ambassador to the U.S., spoke in Manhattan last week to the Catholic Actors Guild. Said he: "I am sure [you] are all good Catholics and very good actors. As for myself, if I try to be a good Catholic I am not at all sure to be a good actor on that very catholic scene of Washington diplomacy, where ambassadors have to play their part in a kind of international revue and all-day performance before a tolerant but slightly bored public."

I'm currently making a documentary on the churchs around town. My favorite movie is F For Fake.

The late Melville Elijah Stone, longtime Associated Press General Manager, gave, like the late great John Wanamaker, most of his money to his family before he died. Last week, it was announced he left an estate of "not more than $2,000."

And now, god help me, I'm watching every movie possible that was nominated for an Academy Award.

Douglas Fairbanks, President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, presided in Los Angeles last week when the Academy's annual prizes were awarded. Among the winners : Acting — Janet Gaynor (Seventh Heaven) ; Emil Jannings (The Way of All Flesh, The Last Command) ; Directing — Frank Borzage (Seventh Heaven) ; Engineering Effects — Roy Pomeroy (Wings) ; Outstanding Picture — Paramount Famous Lasky Corp. (Wings). Charles Chaplin was specially rewarded for being writer, actor, director, producer of The Circus.

Oscarvations: Mission Statement

2008-08-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

Like it or not, Hollywood has been the largest, most important force in the world of films. Not necessarily the location itself, nor the studios or the filmmakers stationed there. The closest thing to what Hollywood is now is what NASA once was. It has become an idea, an idea that drives both filmmakers and film viewers, an idea that says "there are frontiers on the silver screen, and we want you to discover them."

...Wow, sorry, got a little sappy, don't know what came over me. Anyway, the crowning jewel of the Hollywood system is the Academy Awards, beginning in 1928. Once you get beyond the politics and the showbiz, the Awards are like little time capsules, a glimpse into what movies where watched and who was making them back in the day. Perhaps, by observing the Academy Awards in order, we can observe the growing and ever-changing state of the Hollywood system.

So, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to watch every possible movie nominated for an Oscar, and record my observations. These aren't all going to be simple movie reviews. I'll focus mostly on the things these films were nominated. For example, when I get to The Bourne Ultimatum, I'm most likely not going to focus on the story or the acting, but for the things it was nominated for, the editing and sound. This should hopefully give us a good idea as to WHAT and WHO was valued in film making during these times.

Now, I should point out that, for these early years, a lot of the films are unavailable in any format. Whenever this is the case, I'll do the best I can to make it up. For example, for the 1st Academy Awards, two of the films George Barnes was nominated for for cinematography, The Devil Dancer and The Magic Flame, no longer exist, so instead, I'll focus on other films the Barnes worked on at the time to give us an idea on what we missed. Or maybe I'll come up with a better idea and do that. We'll see.

So, Oscarvations will ultimately be a collection of my thoughts as I work my way through these films. Some of the reviews will be long, some will be short. Some may be played straight, some may be offbeat, and some may not even talk about the movie at all. I'll I know is, I got 80 years of movies to watch, and many more coming, so I better get at it.