Our first film from 1930 was the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers. The kids had, years ago, seen 1933's Duck Soup, so they had some sort of idea of the type of humor they were about to see. This was the Marx Brothers' second movie, and, like 1929's The Cocoanuts (their first), Animal Crackers was based on a stage play in which they'd earlier appeared -- which is immediately apparent, since the movie is presented very much like a play, with actors facing forward and often speaking less to each other and more to an unseen notional audience. As with all of the sound pictures we've seen to date, the technology is a little creaky and the audio muddy, making subtitles occasionally helpful. The stage version was written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, though only the latter received credit for the screenplay. One of the strengths of the movie is that beneath the Marx Brothers' anarchism is a decently well-plotted farce, which one could imagine being staged straight-forwardly. It involves a famous painting to be exhibited by Arabella Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont.) Meanwhile her daughter (Lillian Roth) and an aspiring painter (Hal Thompson) want to replace the painting with a copy to prove his talent, while two other women want to replace the painting simply to embarrass Dumont. Of course, the Marx Brothers engage with the plot only as a launching-off point, and rarely do much to service it -- but the fact that it exists provides a certain structure to the movie, and helps keep it from being a series of unrelated comedic bits.
The Marx Brothers play four of the attendees at the party at which the painting is to be unveiled. Their comedic characteristics are so well known that it seems absurd to detail them, but the twin poles of Harpo and Groucho are established early on for an audience for whom their comedy was still relatively new. Immediately upon Groucho's first appearance, he begins his barrage of insults, wordplay, and non-sequiturs. Similarly shortly after Harpo arrives, he grabs a gun and begins shooting at people, not maliciously, but simply as an unpredictable agent of chaos. Chico is somewhere in between these two poles, more closely aligned with Harpo plot-wise, though his comedy is more verbal, like Groucho, but less hostile and more passive-aggressive. Margaret Dumont truly nails the thankless role of straight woman, both in setting up jokes and keeping the plot moving. It also occurred to me on this watching that she does a great deal of work in normalizing the brothers' behavior -- reacting and queuing the audience to react as if the brothers have said something slightly rude or off-putting, rather than completely crazy. At this point in the Marx brothers' film career, Zeppo was also present. A decade younger than the other three, and without as distinctive a persona, he still has some strong scenes, including the dictation scene with Groucho late in the movie.
It is a cliché that comedy dates badly, and the vast majority of comedy from this era either isn't to my taste at all (e.g. the Laurel and Hardy shorts from last week,) or is, from my perspective, pleasant and borderline amusing, but not actually laugh-inducing (e.g. much of Harold Lloyd.) The Marx Brothers, for me, are in another category; though a lot of the material is old-fashioned, or at times even incomprehensible due to then-current references, there are also moments that genuinely make me laugh. The rapid pace and variety of jokes is part of what I like, and additionally there is a lot of fourth-wall breaking and contention with the structure of the movie, which seems to anticipate Monty Python and a type of comedy that became more popular decades later (on which I'm sure the Marx Brothers were a direct influence.) I also like the lack of sentimentality and neediness, which is in contrast to Chaplin, for instance.
It is definitely true that this film is quite dated however. One of the reasons that the pace of jokes is so important is that many of them fall flat. (Groucho in fact explicitly acknowledges this, saying directly to the camera at one point, "Well, all the jokes can't be good. You've got to expect that once in a while.") In addition to the technology issues mentioned above, there are a number of not-so-great musical numbers, including one about an hour in, between Roth and Thompson, followed by Harpo playing the harp, which together nearly kill the momentum of the movie. Additionally Groucho's nominal character is an "African explorer," who arrives in a palanquin carried by black actors in ostensibly traditional African dress, which is followed by some jokes on the same subject that exhibit approximately the same level of sensitivity.
So in short, I wouldn't fault anyone who found this film too alien or off-putting to truly enjoy, but for me the Marx Brothers, particularly as represented in this film, are among the very few comedians of this era that I find genuinely funny.
Next week we'll skip ahead to our first film from 1932, the Marx Brothers fourth film Horse Feathers. This happened to be showing at the Alamo in Ashburn shortly after we saw Animal Crackers, so we decided to see it slightly out of sequence.
Monday, January 20, 2020
Thursday, December 26, 2019
Shorts (1923-1929)
During our second week of shorts from the 1920s, we watched a Chaplin film, an experimental French film, three Disney shorts, and two silent shorts from Laurel and Hardy.
In The Pilgrim (1923) -- which at 47 minutes I've rather arbitrarily classed as a short -- Chaplin plays an ex-convict who disguises himself as a priest, and is taken in by a community who mistakes him for another priest. This is complicated by the fact that one of his friends from prison is in the same town and recognizes him. Chaplin reliably plays his normal persona, and has many of his typical cast-mates present: Edna Purviance, Mack Swain, and his brother Sydney Chaplin. Like many of his films, it's divided into a sequence of set pieces, but it's one of his more muted outings -- comedically, visually, and from a story perspective.
Ménilmontant (1926) came in a DVD set called "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s," an imposing title. The film itself is relatively accessible though, its most "experimental" feature being its lack of title cards. This makes it occasionally opaque; however we have seen a number of commercial films that used few or no title cards (including notably 1924's The Last Laugh.) It tells the story of two sisters played by Nadia Sibirskaia and Yolande Beaulieu, who are orphaned early in the film, and their subsequent lives in the city. It was written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, a Russian working in France. The film begins and ends with violence, a jarring framing device -- though what occurs during the main body of the movie could potentially have worked independently. In addition to the lack of title cards, another technique which felt innovative was the use of a few striking images of characters fading in and out, showing elapsed time. I expect there are earlier precedents for this, but it was used effectively, and was less clichéd than showing clock hands turning, or using more conventional cuts.
Steamboat Willie (1928) is the most iconic short that we watched during this session, having introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and having been excerpted and parodied extensively. The short's events are fairly random, but the through-line is Mickey, Minnie, and Pete traveling on a boat, making music using various on-board animals. Although this film has synced sound, there is little if any dialog; the sound is confined mostly to music tracking the on-screen action, with some additional interspersed muttering. I should remark, too, that the gracious and thoughtful Mickey Mouse of which I got a lifetime's supply on the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse animated TV show when the kids were growing up -- had not yet emerged. This Mickey Mouse is rather less benevolent, particularly to the other animals that don't seem to have been granted Mickey's mysterious ability for abstract thought.
That carries through to Plane Crazy (1928) in which Mickey builds a plane, looking with admiration at an image of Lindbergh (before he became disillusioned by Lindbergh's politics during WWII.) In his drive to become an aviator, he again uses animals in various cavalier ways. At one point, while airborne, Mickey terrifies Minnie by recklessly steering the plane in an attempt to get her to consent to a kiss. When she still refuses, he kisses her anyway, and in response she jumps out of the plane. Dark stuff. As with the previous film, there's very little dialog; I believe Minnie says "Who me?" at one point.
The third Disney film The Skeleton Dance (1929) doesn't feature any of Disney's famous characters, but is pretty well described by its title, and is basically five and half minutes of skeletons dancing around and making music -- as well as some black cats and owls.
It's hard to judge how innovative or impactful any of these Disney films were at the time. It's certainly true that we haven't seen anything like them previously in this project, and that within a few years Mickey Mouse had attained an iconic status that persists to this day. But it is also true that we didn't find any of these cartoons particularly funny. This may in part because we were brought up with their superior successors, including the Looney Tunes cartoons that became popular in the next decade -- but I find it hard to believe that even by the standards of the time a lot of the gags in these shorts weren't a bit limp and repetitive.
Along similar lines, Big Business (1929) was the first of two Laurel and Hardy shorts we saw, both silent, and although Laurel and Hardy became more famous in the sound era, their act, with its barbed friendship, already appeared to be largely in place. It involves them as two traveling salesman -- selling Christmas trees -- and particularly their feud with a hostile customer, played by James Finlayson. This particular short was not on the same level as the canonical silent comedians that we saw last week, with much less visual imagination, but it did have a certain sense of escalating destructiveness which was well-executed.
The second short of theirs that we watched -- Liberty (1929) -- was not quite as focused. They play prison escapees, and a huge chunk of the film involves them trying to rectify having earlier put on each other's pants. Also a live crab somehow winds up in one of the pairs of pants. This is all exactly as clever and high-brow as it sounds. James Finlayson from Big Business shows up again, as the owner or employee of a music store outside of which Laurel and Hardy wreak havoc. Eventually they end up on supposedly elevated girders of an in-construction building -- a situation both contrived and derivative, echoing the last week's Harold Lloyd short Never Weaken, except a decade later. However, on the plus side, and in a bit of continuity from Ménilmontant, this short has very few title cards -- and the ones that it does have could easily have been eliminated (e.g. "What did you do that for?")
That completes our sampling of short films from the 1920s, and our survey of the 1920s in general. I plan to summarize that experience in another post at some point, but next week we're moving on the 1930s with our first feature from 1930, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers.
In The Pilgrim (1923) -- which at 47 minutes I've rather arbitrarily classed as a short -- Chaplin plays an ex-convict who disguises himself as a priest, and is taken in by a community who mistakes him for another priest. This is complicated by the fact that one of his friends from prison is in the same town and recognizes him. Chaplin reliably plays his normal persona, and has many of his typical cast-mates present: Edna Purviance, Mack Swain, and his brother Sydney Chaplin. Like many of his films, it's divided into a sequence of set pieces, but it's one of his more muted outings -- comedically, visually, and from a story perspective.
Ménilmontant (1926) came in a DVD set called "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s," an imposing title. The film itself is relatively accessible though, its most "experimental" feature being its lack of title cards. This makes it occasionally opaque; however we have seen a number of commercial films that used few or no title cards (including notably 1924's The Last Laugh.) It tells the story of two sisters played by Nadia Sibirskaia and Yolande Beaulieu, who are orphaned early in the film, and their subsequent lives in the city. It was written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, a Russian working in France. The film begins and ends with violence, a jarring framing device -- though what occurs during the main body of the movie could potentially have worked independently. In addition to the lack of title cards, another technique which felt innovative was the use of a few striking images of characters fading in and out, showing elapsed time. I expect there are earlier precedents for this, but it was used effectively, and was less clichéd than showing clock hands turning, or using more conventional cuts.
Steamboat Willie (1928) is the most iconic short that we watched during this session, having introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and having been excerpted and parodied extensively. The short's events are fairly random, but the through-line is Mickey, Minnie, and Pete traveling on a boat, making music using various on-board animals. Although this film has synced sound, there is little if any dialog; the sound is confined mostly to music tracking the on-screen action, with some additional interspersed muttering. I should remark, too, that the gracious and thoughtful Mickey Mouse of which I got a lifetime's supply on the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse animated TV show when the kids were growing up -- had not yet emerged. This Mickey Mouse is rather less benevolent, particularly to the other animals that don't seem to have been granted Mickey's mysterious ability for abstract thought.
That carries through to Plane Crazy (1928) in which Mickey builds a plane, looking with admiration at an image of Lindbergh (before he became disillusioned by Lindbergh's politics during WWII.) In his drive to become an aviator, he again uses animals in various cavalier ways. At one point, while airborne, Mickey terrifies Minnie by recklessly steering the plane in an attempt to get her to consent to a kiss. When she still refuses, he kisses her anyway, and in response she jumps out of the plane. Dark stuff. As with the previous film, there's very little dialog; I believe Minnie says "Who me?" at one point.
The third Disney film The Skeleton Dance (1929) doesn't feature any of Disney's famous characters, but is pretty well described by its title, and is basically five and half minutes of skeletons dancing around and making music -- as well as some black cats and owls.
It's hard to judge how innovative or impactful any of these Disney films were at the time. It's certainly true that we haven't seen anything like them previously in this project, and that within a few years Mickey Mouse had attained an iconic status that persists to this day. But it is also true that we didn't find any of these cartoons particularly funny. This may in part because we were brought up with their superior successors, including the Looney Tunes cartoons that became popular in the next decade -- but I find it hard to believe that even by the standards of the time a lot of the gags in these shorts weren't a bit limp and repetitive.
Along similar lines, Big Business (1929) was the first of two Laurel and Hardy shorts we saw, both silent, and although Laurel and Hardy became more famous in the sound era, their act, with its barbed friendship, already appeared to be largely in place. It involves them as two traveling salesman -- selling Christmas trees -- and particularly their feud with a hostile customer, played by James Finlayson. This particular short was not on the same level as the canonical silent comedians that we saw last week, with much less visual imagination, but it did have a certain sense of escalating destructiveness which was well-executed.
The second short of theirs that we watched -- Liberty (1929) -- was not quite as focused. They play prison escapees, and a huge chunk of the film involves them trying to rectify having earlier put on each other's pants. Also a live crab somehow winds up in one of the pairs of pants. This is all exactly as clever and high-brow as it sounds. James Finlayson from Big Business shows up again, as the owner or employee of a music store outside of which Laurel and Hardy wreak havoc. Eventually they end up on supposedly elevated girders of an in-construction building -- a situation both contrived and derivative, echoing the last week's Harold Lloyd short Never Weaken, except a decade later. However, on the plus side, and in a bit of continuity from Ménilmontant, this short has very few title cards -- and the ones that it does have could easily have been eliminated (e.g. "What did you do that for?")
That completes our sampling of short films from the 1920s, and our survey of the 1920s in general. I plan to summarize that experience in another post at some point, but next week we're moving on the 1930s with our first feature from 1930, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Shorts (1920-1922)
For our penultimate week covering the 1920s, we watched six shorts from 1920-1922. All six were in the 18-26 minute range, and all were from the three canonical film comedians of the 1920s: Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd.
In the first short, One Week (1920), Buster Keaton and his new wife (played by Sybil Seely) struggle to build a mail-order house. Having the house as the focus of most of the bits makes this one of the more focused comedy shorts we've seen, although, like a Road Runner cartoon, people are injured and things are broken that are completely fine in the next scene. It is solid and consistent and amusing, and strikes me as a good portal into Buster Keaton for a newcomer.
In Neighbors (1920) Keaton courts a woman (Virginia Fox) who lives in the house behind his. Both sets of parents forbid them from seeing each other. Keaton's father in the film is played by his real-life father Joe Keaton, and Fox's father is played by Joe Roberts, who is in all three of the Keaton films we saw this week. The short unfortunately features a quasi-blackface sequence, which seems for a second as if it is going to be a bit of social commentary -- as a policeman only pursues Keaton when his face is blackened. But that tack is never really developed, and there is additionally another racist scene in which a black family is scared of Keaton under a sheet, believing him to be a ghost. This material is particularly disappointing because there are some really astounding sequences with three men (including Keaton) standing on each other's shoulders in order to reach the upper stories of Fox's house.
The last of the three Keaton shorts we saw was The Goat (1921), and it was the most scatter-shot of the three. The first half is dominated by Keaton trying to evade the police, eventually fleeing to another town. (It is a little strange how police were such consistent punching-bags in silent film; if someone made a comedy today where the main character spent an entire film knocking policemen down and throwing things at them, it would probably be remarked upon.) The second half is kicked off by the iconic scene of Keaton sitting on the front of a train as it pulls in very close to the camera. In the new town, however, he is mistaken for a wanted criminal, and also falls in love with the police chief's daughter (Fox again), while trying to avoid her father (Roberts again.) None of this makes much sense, but it ends strongly, with a solid last five minutes in which Keaton's creativity and athleticism are on full display.
The next two films we saw starred Harold Lloyd. High and Dizzy (1920) was the first, and mostly involved Lloyd and a friend (played by Roy Brooks) wandering around drunk. Mildred Davis, Lloyd's frequent co-star and future wife, appears briefly at the beginning where it is established that she is a sleepwalker -- so that it is only slightly random when she shows up in the last third and sleepwalks along ledges that through fake perspective appear high above a city -- in an early iteration of the famous Safety First scenes. The movie was agreeable and didn't wear out its welcome, but didn't aspire to be much more than a collection of middling gags.
Fake perspective also featured in the second Lloyd film, Never Weaken (1921), in which Lloyd spends the last third navigating a series of ostensibly high-up girders -- for no particularly good reason. His co-star in this film is again Davis, and he spends the first third trying to scare up business for the osteopath for whom she works, and then the second third trying to kill himself (in what seems like an extreme overreaction) after misapprehending that she is going to marry someone else. This film is much of a piece with the previous one -- in that it is essentially a string of gags -- with nothing particularly distinctive besides the perspective trick.
The last film was a Chaplin short named Pay Day (1922), the first portion of which chronicles his working day, and the last portion of which shows him trying to enjoy his evening after work while avoiding his wife, played in a thankless role by Phyllis Allen -- who was 28 years his senior (though she doesn't look it.) His regular co-star during this period, Edna Purviance, shows up as well, but in only a minor role as his foreman's daughter during the first and most enjoyable section of the film. That portion also has one memorable sequence with workers throwing bricks up to Chaplin perched above, and him catching them acrobatically. This is transparently accomplished by running the film backwards, but it nonetheless has a striking effect. The second section is marred by the ugly stereotype of the shrewish wife, but is otherwise a typical sequence of visual jokes -- in this case revolving around him going out and getting drunk, trying to get home, and, as above, trying to avoid his wife's wrath. It also is the source of the meme of Chaplin looking at a passing young woman while his wife glowers at him.
Next week we'll watch another selection of shorts from the 1920s, and then move on to the features of the 1930s.
The ongoing list of films remains at https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT.
In the first short, One Week (1920), Buster Keaton and his new wife (played by Sybil Seely) struggle to build a mail-order house. Having the house as the focus of most of the bits makes this one of the more focused comedy shorts we've seen, although, like a Road Runner cartoon, people are injured and things are broken that are completely fine in the next scene. It is solid and consistent and amusing, and strikes me as a good portal into Buster Keaton for a newcomer.
In Neighbors (1920) Keaton courts a woman (Virginia Fox) who lives in the house behind his. Both sets of parents forbid them from seeing each other. Keaton's father in the film is played by his real-life father Joe Keaton, and Fox's father is played by Joe Roberts, who is in all three of the Keaton films we saw this week. The short unfortunately features a quasi-blackface sequence, which seems for a second as if it is going to be a bit of social commentary -- as a policeman only pursues Keaton when his face is blackened. But that tack is never really developed, and there is additionally another racist scene in which a black family is scared of Keaton under a sheet, believing him to be a ghost. This material is particularly disappointing because there are some really astounding sequences with three men (including Keaton) standing on each other's shoulders in order to reach the upper stories of Fox's house.
The last of the three Keaton shorts we saw was The Goat (1921), and it was the most scatter-shot of the three. The first half is dominated by Keaton trying to evade the police, eventually fleeing to another town. (It is a little strange how police were such consistent punching-bags in silent film; if someone made a comedy today where the main character spent an entire film knocking policemen down and throwing things at them, it would probably be remarked upon.) The second half is kicked off by the iconic scene of Keaton sitting on the front of a train as it pulls in very close to the camera. In the new town, however, he is mistaken for a wanted criminal, and also falls in love with the police chief's daughter (Fox again), while trying to avoid her father (Roberts again.) None of this makes much sense, but it ends strongly, with a solid last five minutes in which Keaton's creativity and athleticism are on full display.
The next two films we saw starred Harold Lloyd. High and Dizzy (1920) was the first, and mostly involved Lloyd and a friend (played by Roy Brooks) wandering around drunk. Mildred Davis, Lloyd's frequent co-star and future wife, appears briefly at the beginning where it is established that she is a sleepwalker -- so that it is only slightly random when she shows up in the last third and sleepwalks along ledges that through fake perspective appear high above a city -- in an early iteration of the famous Safety First scenes. The movie was agreeable and didn't wear out its welcome, but didn't aspire to be much more than a collection of middling gags.
Fake perspective also featured in the second Lloyd film, Never Weaken (1921), in which Lloyd spends the last third navigating a series of ostensibly high-up girders -- for no particularly good reason. His co-star in this film is again Davis, and he spends the first third trying to scare up business for the osteopath for whom she works, and then the second third trying to kill himself (in what seems like an extreme overreaction) after misapprehending that she is going to marry someone else. This film is much of a piece with the previous one -- in that it is essentially a string of gags -- with nothing particularly distinctive besides the perspective trick.
The last film was a Chaplin short named Pay Day (1922), the first portion of which chronicles his working day, and the last portion of which shows him trying to enjoy his evening after work while avoiding his wife, played in a thankless role by Phyllis Allen -- who was 28 years his senior (though she doesn't look it.) His regular co-star during this period, Edna Purviance, shows up as well, but in only a minor role as his foreman's daughter during the first and most enjoyable section of the film. That portion also has one memorable sequence with workers throwing bricks up to Chaplin perched above, and him catching them acrobatically. This is transparently accomplished by running the film backwards, but it nonetheless has a striking effect. The second section is marred by the ugly stereotype of the shrewish wife, but is otherwise a typical sequence of visual jokes -- in this case revolving around him going out and getting drunk, trying to get home, and, as above, trying to avoid his wife's wrath. It also is the source of the meme of Chaplin looking at a passing young woman while his wife glowers at him.
Next week we'll watch another selection of shorts from the 1920s, and then move on to the features of the 1930s.
The ongoing list of films remains at https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT.
Sunday, September 1, 2019
A Throw of Dice (1929)
A Throw of Dice was our ninth and last feature from 1929, and our last planned feature from the 1920s. It is also our first Indian film, but that comes with the caveat that the director, Franz Osten, and some unknown fraction of the crew, were European. The cast, however, was Indian, as was the producer, Himanshu Rai -- who also played one of the leads, and later (in 1934) co-founded Bombay Talkies.
Osten himself was from Germany, where he began his career before shifting to Indian films in the late twenties and through the thirties. The film stars Rai and Charu Roy as rival kings. Rai is determined to steal Roy's kingdom by one means or another, and is additionally vying with him for the same woman (Seeta Devi), who has been raised in relative isolation by her father (played by Sarada Gupta), a former court official.
The film has been preserved or restored remarkably well, with a very clear print. It appears to have had a significant budget, with sophisticated camera-work and sets, a large number of extras, as well as tigers, elephants, camels, and cobras. One of the latter is used as a means of murder, and is shown crawling, hooded, over a sleeping man; presumably it had been defanged -- though given the 1920s' lackadaisical approach to workplace safety, who knows? The film has a mythic feel, and bears some resemblance to 1924's Siegfried -- though it has a lighter touch, and nothing explicitly supernatural occurs. (At 74 minutes it also has a much brisker running time.)
With this film we are finally done with the 1920s. It was by far the most comprehensive diet of films from this period that I (and obviously the kids) had ever embarked upon, and at some point soon I'll try to summarize the experience. For the next two weeks, however, we will watch various shorts made during the twenties -- and then move on to the features of the 1930s.
The ongoing list of films is at https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT.
Osten himself was from Germany, where he began his career before shifting to Indian films in the late twenties and through the thirties. The film stars Rai and Charu Roy as rival kings. Rai is determined to steal Roy's kingdom by one means or another, and is additionally vying with him for the same woman (Seeta Devi), who has been raised in relative isolation by her father (played by Sarada Gupta), a former court official.
The film has been preserved or restored remarkably well, with a very clear print. It appears to have had a significant budget, with sophisticated camera-work and sets, a large number of extras, as well as tigers, elephants, camels, and cobras. One of the latter is used as a means of murder, and is shown crawling, hooded, over a sleeping man; presumably it had been defanged -- though given the 1920s' lackadaisical approach to workplace safety, who knows? The film has a mythic feel, and bears some resemblance to 1924's Siegfried -- though it has a lighter touch, and nothing explicitly supernatural occurs. (At 74 minutes it also has a much brisker running time.)
With this film we are finally done with the 1920s. It was by far the most comprehensive diet of films from this period that I (and obviously the kids) had ever embarked upon, and at some point soon I'll try to summarize the experience. For the next two weeks, however, we will watch various shorts made during the twenties -- and then move on to the features of the 1930s.
The ongoing list of films is at https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT.
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Linda (1929)
Originally posted to Facebook on 6/9/2019
Linda was our eighth film from 1929, and our first silent after three straight talkies or partial talkies. It stars Helen Foster, whom we saw in 1928's Road to Ruin, and is directed by Dorothy Davenport, or "Mrs. Wallace Reid" as she is billed, who -- along with Dorothy Arzner from last week -- was one of the very few prominent woman directors of the time. She was the widow of Wallace Reid, whom we saw in 1915's Carmen and 1919's Hawthorne of the U.S.A., and who had died in 1923 as a result of a drug addiction.
Foster plays Linda, a girl from a poverty-stricken family, living in the mountains. Bess Flowers plays a visiting teacher who sees promise in Foster, and tries to convince her to expand her horizons. At the same time, her father, played by Mitchell Lewis, tries to marry her off to the local mill boss, played by Noah Beery -- the older brother of Wallace Beery (whom we've seen several times) and the father of Noah Beery Jr., known for playing James Garner's father on Rockford Files. Linda, however, is more interested in a doctor played by Warner Baxter.
Various plot developments ensue -- nothing very surprising, excepting maybe the final scene. The film seems old-fashioned for 1929, and could have been made a decade earlier with only minor modifications. It is a bit condescending to its rural characters and their lack of sophistication. The title cards, for instance, attempt to capture the dialect of the area, a device which ends up being distracting and unnecessary. However the film is not cynical; if anything it is overly earnest. It also has a certain humane spirit running through it; with the exception of Linda's father (who is portrayed as a violent alcoholic), and one other minor character, everyone is portrayed as reasonably good-hearted, or at least redeemable. The film is warm-spirited without completely shying away from some harsh realities, even if in the end it was not sharp or stylish enough for my tastes.
Our next film is A Throw of Dice, our ninth and last film from 1929, and our first Indian film. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
Linda was our eighth film from 1929, and our first silent after three straight talkies or partial talkies. It stars Helen Foster, whom we saw in 1928's Road to Ruin, and is directed by Dorothy Davenport, or "Mrs. Wallace Reid" as she is billed, who -- along with Dorothy Arzner from last week -- was one of the very few prominent woman directors of the time. She was the widow of Wallace Reid, whom we saw in 1915's Carmen and 1919's Hawthorne of the U.S.A., and who had died in 1923 as a result of a drug addiction.
Foster plays Linda, a girl from a poverty-stricken family, living in the mountains. Bess Flowers plays a visiting teacher who sees promise in Foster, and tries to convince her to expand her horizons. At the same time, her father, played by Mitchell Lewis, tries to marry her off to the local mill boss, played by Noah Beery -- the older brother of Wallace Beery (whom we've seen several times) and the father of Noah Beery Jr., known for playing James Garner's father on Rockford Files. Linda, however, is more interested in a doctor played by Warner Baxter.
Various plot developments ensue -- nothing very surprising, excepting maybe the final scene. The film seems old-fashioned for 1929, and could have been made a decade earlier with only minor modifications. It is a bit condescending to its rural characters and their lack of sophistication. The title cards, for instance, attempt to capture the dialect of the area, a device which ends up being distracting and unnecessary. However the film is not cynical; if anything it is overly earnest. It also has a certain humane spirit running through it; with the exception of Linda's father (who is portrayed as a violent alcoholic), and one other minor character, everyone is portrayed as reasonably good-hearted, or at least redeemable. The film is warm-spirited without completely shying away from some harsh realities, even if in the end it was not sharp or stylish enough for my tastes.
Our next film is A Throw of Dice, our ninth and last film from 1929, and our first Indian film. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
The Wild Party (1929)
Originally posted to Facebook on 6/1/2019
The Wild Party was our seventh film from 1929, the second time we've seen Clara Bow, and our second true sound film. It is also the first time we've seen Fredric March, and the first movie we've seen directed by Dorothy Arzner -- one of the very few woman directors of this time.
Clara Bow plays a student at a women's college, and Fredric March plays one of the professors. They become romantically involved, contrary to college rules. This film has some of the content that one would guess from its title -- drinking and dancing by reckless, carefree young people, very much evoking the received image of the 1920s -- but there are also a fair amount of plot machinations revolving around the progress of March and Bow's relationship, and their efforts to keep it secret. Though I've seen performances by March elsewhere that I enjoyed, here he is rather unappealing; in addition to the inappropriate nature of his interest in Bow, he is also a misanthrope, calling other students "morons" -- and he treats Bow badly, sometimes ignoring her, other times scolding. Bow, on the other hand, displays the same high-spirited charisma that she did in Wings -- and although it turned out that at just 24 she was already on the back-end of her career, I think this movie makes a good case that this wasn't due to a lack of ability. She occasionally mugs or gestures a hair too much, but no more than one would expect from a silent veteran in her first sound film.
In the end the relationship between March and Bow is so flawed that it is hard to recommend this film -- and the ending unfortunately adds a sour little coda. The acting too is a bit off, with odd pauses and word emphases -- the result no doubt of everyone's initial foray into sound acting on film. The creaky technology doesn't help matters; the sound is muddy, and we missed snatches of dialog here and there. The bare-bones DVD we watched would definitely have benefited from an option for subtitles.
Our next film is Linda, our eighth from 1929, starring Helen Foster, whom we last saw in 1928's terrible The Road to Ruin. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
The Wild Party was our seventh film from 1929, the second time we've seen Clara Bow, and our second true sound film. It is also the first time we've seen Fredric March, and the first movie we've seen directed by Dorothy Arzner -- one of the very few woman directors of this time.
Clara Bow plays a student at a women's college, and Fredric March plays one of the professors. They become romantically involved, contrary to college rules. This film has some of the content that one would guess from its title -- drinking and dancing by reckless, carefree young people, very much evoking the received image of the 1920s -- but there are also a fair amount of plot machinations revolving around the progress of March and Bow's relationship, and their efforts to keep it secret. Though I've seen performances by March elsewhere that I enjoyed, here he is rather unappealing; in addition to the inappropriate nature of his interest in Bow, he is also a misanthrope, calling other students "morons" -- and he treats Bow badly, sometimes ignoring her, other times scolding. Bow, on the other hand, displays the same high-spirited charisma that she did in Wings -- and although it turned out that at just 24 she was already on the back-end of her career, I think this movie makes a good case that this wasn't due to a lack of ability. She occasionally mugs or gestures a hair too much, but no more than one would expect from a silent veteran in her first sound film.
In the end the relationship between March and Bow is so flawed that it is hard to recommend this film -- and the ending unfortunately adds a sour little coda. The acting too is a bit off, with odd pauses and word emphases -- the result no doubt of everyone's initial foray into sound acting on film. The creaky technology doesn't help matters; the sound is muddy, and we missed snatches of dialog here and there. The bare-bones DVD we watched would definitely have benefited from an option for subtitles.
Our next film is Linda, our eighth from 1929, starring Helen Foster, whom we last saw in 1928's terrible The Road to Ruin. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
Hallelujah (1929)
Originally posted to Facebook on 3/31/2019
Hallelujah was our sixth film from 1929, and our first true sound film after a couple of partial talkies. It was also the fourth film we've seen directed by King Vidor, and our second film with an African American cast, after 1926's The Flying Ace.
Interestingly the movie opens with the MGM lion silently roaring, even though we've heard it audibly roar for earlier Movietone silents. It is a musical -- our first, obviously -- and stars Daniel L. Haynes, a farm-worker who is pulled away from his presumably virtuous rural world by Nina Mae McKinney, whom he meets while in town to sell his family's harvest. It is difficult to assess a film like this, both because of its questionable approach to portraying African-American life, and because of its technical limitations. The former point is called out right away by a pre-title screen on the DVD, which assures us that the film does not reflect the current values of Warner Brothers -- in case anyone was wondering. And it is immediately clear why that insert was added; the main characters are all portrayed either two-dimensionally or with major pathologies, and almost always in stereotypical fashion. During this era in film history it was a remarkable and positive development to see black protagonists on the screen at all, particularly in a major studio film with a star director, but the particular reflection of life shown in this film turns it into a distinctly mixed blessing.
The performances are also uneven; Haynes acquits himself not too badly, but much of the other acting is either flat or stilted or over-the-top. McKinney is particularly bad, with weird and unconvincing line readings. I'm not sure if this is entirely her fault, given the lines she's reading, and the primitive state of the recording technology, and also the fact that her role is so thankless and arbitrary.
On a technical level, the audio is quite muddy -- not too surprising considering given its status as an early talkie, but certainly not the best state of affairs for a musical. The songs themselves are a mixed bag. "Waiting at the End of the Road" which Haynes sings as he arrives in town to sell crops is one of the high points, and there is also the beginning of what seems like an interesting montage of the song "Going Home" near the end, as Haynes is traveling back home to see his family -- a few shots of Haynes singing on the back of a wagon, on a train, and walking along the road -- but that ends nearly as soon as it starts. The film has a few other memorable sequences -- such as a scene of mounting intensity in which Haynes chases someone through the swamp, knee deep in water -- but there are just as many scenes that fall flat or come across as amateurish.
In short this is neither a good film, nor simply a bad one, nor a forgettable misfire; it is an interesting historical curiosity, still worth viewing, but not mainly for its entertainment value.
Next week we'll see our seventh film from 1929, The Wild Party -- our second sound film, and our second film starring Clara Bow. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
Hallelujah was our sixth film from 1929, and our first true sound film after a couple of partial talkies. It was also the fourth film we've seen directed by King Vidor, and our second film with an African American cast, after 1926's The Flying Ace.
Interestingly the movie opens with the MGM lion silently roaring, even though we've heard it audibly roar for earlier Movietone silents. It is a musical -- our first, obviously -- and stars Daniel L. Haynes, a farm-worker who is pulled away from his presumably virtuous rural world by Nina Mae McKinney, whom he meets while in town to sell his family's harvest. It is difficult to assess a film like this, both because of its questionable approach to portraying African-American life, and because of its technical limitations. The former point is called out right away by a pre-title screen on the DVD, which assures us that the film does not reflect the current values of Warner Brothers -- in case anyone was wondering. And it is immediately clear why that insert was added; the main characters are all portrayed either two-dimensionally or with major pathologies, and almost always in stereotypical fashion. During this era in film history it was a remarkable and positive development to see black protagonists on the screen at all, particularly in a major studio film with a star director, but the particular reflection of life shown in this film turns it into a distinctly mixed blessing.
The performances are also uneven; Haynes acquits himself not too badly, but much of the other acting is either flat or stilted or over-the-top. McKinney is particularly bad, with weird and unconvincing line readings. I'm not sure if this is entirely her fault, given the lines she's reading, and the primitive state of the recording technology, and also the fact that her role is so thankless and arbitrary.
On a technical level, the audio is quite muddy -- not too surprising considering given its status as an early talkie, but certainly not the best state of affairs for a musical. The songs themselves are a mixed bag. "Waiting at the End of the Road" which Haynes sings as he arrives in town to sell crops is one of the high points, and there is also the beginning of what seems like an interesting montage of the song "Going Home" near the end, as Haynes is traveling back home to see his family -- a few shots of Haynes singing on the back of a wagon, on a train, and walking along the road -- but that ends nearly as soon as it starts. The film has a few other memorable sequences -- such as a scene of mounting intensity in which Haynes chases someone through the swamp, knee deep in water -- but there are just as many scenes that fall flat or come across as amateurish.
In short this is neither a good film, nor simply a bad one, nor a forgettable misfire; it is an interesting historical curiosity, still worth viewing, but not mainly for its entertainment value.
Next week we'll see our seventh film from 1929, The Wild Party -- our second sound film, and our second film starring Clara Bow. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
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