When the Clouds Roll By (1919)

Originally posted to Facebook on 11/17/2016

When the Clouds Roll By was our second film from 1919, and our third starring Douglas Fairbanks. This was also the first film we've seen directed by Victor Fleming, who directed many notable films up until his death in the late 1940s, but who is probably most famous as the primary director of both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind in 1939, the latter for which he won a Best Director Oscar. The plot of this film is a little complex, and begins with the unusual premise that Fairbanks’ doctor is attempting to drive him to suicide, and has enlisted a number of his friends and neighbors towards that end. However, after a while the movie changes course, and becomes more of a romantic comedy, with his boss enlisting him to help cheat his love interest’s father out of some land. Of course, he doesn’t know that he’s cheating her father, or even that he is her father, or that... Anyway, complications and misunderstandings ensue. I doubt anyone would contest that this is the strongest Fairbanks film of the three that we’ve seen so far; The Matrimaniac was enjoyable but slight, and Wild and Woolly was quite flawed in a number of ways, but particularly by its endless stereotypical depictions of Native Americans. (Sadly this film has a borderline racist joke near the end as well, but it is thankfully brief.) But by saying this film is an improvement over its two predecessors, I am not offering faint praise -- it is really significantly better, particularly in terms of stunts and production values, and is better written as well, with a more complex plot. There is one sequence, early in the movie, where Fairbanks walks up the walls and across the ceiling of a house in a manner so similar to Fred Astaire’s scene in Royal Wedding that it is hard to believe that the latter wasn’t quoting the former. In addition, Fairbanks and his love interest (Kathleen Clifford) have a little bit of chemistry, more so than usual in the romantic comedies we’ve seen to date, and actually seem to like each other for reasons other than the dictates of the plot. When you watch this film, and a few others we’ve seen recently, you begin to realize that somewhere along the line the resources available to make movies has increased drastically. Some of the features we’ve seen -- Gretchen the Greenhorn, for instance, or Romance of the Redwoods -- seem like they could have been made by a few dozen dedicated people. This isn’t universally true -- Intolerance and Cabiria were both massive undertakings, for instance. But those were essentially art films. When even a romantic comedy clearly requires the work of hundreds of people over months, something has clearly changed. Additionally, this movie also reflects changing times, specifically the dawning of the twenties. One clear marker is that a friend of the heroine is singled out for her bobbed hair, but more generally the dialog is slangier, and it seems more energetic and buoyant. I hesitate to outright recommend it, because it is paper thin, and very contrived, but it is high-spirited and amusing -- probably the best comedy feature we’ve seen to date.

Next we’ll watch our third film from 1919, called Hawthorne of the U.S.A.. It stars Wallace Reid, whom we last saw in a leading role in 1915’s Carmen. The list as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT