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

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Fortunately, the rest of the film fairs better, but overall it's an odd and slight docudrama that's valuable as a historical document then an actual movie.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.

Warner Baxter and In Old Arizona

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.

Legs and Our Dancing Daughters

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.

Janet Gaynor Triple Feature Part 3: Sunrise

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.