Take one cinema museum, add five accompanists, ten films and a museum full of silent film enthusiasts, gently simmer on one of the hottest weekends of the year and keep hydrated with fine coffee until brought to the boil by Catherine Hessling dancing the Charleston, Bebe Daniels attacking a houseful of rum runners and Fritz Rasp trying to get away with murder! And that was just the first day of the annual Kennington Bioscope weekend.
Programme 1:
Comedy Starter
Are Parents People?
(1925) with Cyrus Gabrysch
Kevin Brownlow – a man without whom this weekend and our
silent film viewing in general, would simply not be the same – got things underway
with the bombshell (to me at least…) that Adolphe Menjou was actually half
Irish and could speak Gaelic and the more I looked at Adolphe the more I could
“hear” that brogue… Co-star Florence Vidor later told Kevin that Menjou fell
apart with success, unable to cope with too much good fortune he fell to
self-medicating with a bottle. But all we can judge is what we see of his
excellence in front of camera.
Kevin explained the influence of Chaplin’s Woman of Paris on director Malcolm St.
Clair’s style with the latter eschewing flamboyant camerawork in favour of a
focus on character development. A supposedly simpler approach but the narrative was
still driven by silky editing and some touches that might even be described as
Lubitsch-esque; a pair of impatient feet here, a door opened just for slamming
and the flicking of peanut shells off an armchair in tribute to a habit of Mabel Normands…
This was an original print from the Kodascope Library and
looked as fresh as the proverbial. It was my first exposure to the sparkling
brilliance of Betty Bronson who’s quicksilver emoting persuaded JM Barrie to
select her to play Peter Pan. Here she’s Lita, a teenager torn between two parents,
Menjou and the elegant Florence Vidor, who are so in love they hate each other.
Unable to see beyond their mutual inflexibility they
divorce leaving their daughter in a boarding school trying to figure out a way
to reunite them. She hatches a plot involving a movie star – an hilarious turn
from George Beranger – expulsion and handsome Doctor Dacer (Lawrence Gray).
It’s a hoot and Betty shines bright but not without
skilful support from Adolfe and Florence.
Cyrus Gabrysch accompanied and delicately added extra
punch to this charmer.
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| Merian C Cooper (left) and Ernest B Schoedsack (right) |
Grass (1925) with
Lillian Henley
And so to the remarkable human being called Merian C
Cooper: fearless film-maker, bomber pilot and explorer who was embodied as
Robert Armstrong’s ruthless go-getting Carl Denham in the director’s King Kong
(1933). Kevin Brownlow showed an excerpt from a documentary which revealed
Cooper’s uncompromising and courageous approach to life – his bomber was once
shot down and he was injured in the neck yet still, with his burnt hands useless,
he managed to land his plane, steering with his elbows and knees. After the war
he fought with the anti-revolutionary forces against the Bolsheviks where his
life was saved by those scarred hands – they wouldn’t kill him because they
thought he was a peasant – and also by an Amercian reporter, Marguerite
Harrison.
Harrison was part of the package when seeking funding
with cameraman Ernest B Schoedsack for an exhibition to film the “forgotten”
Bakhtiari Tribe in southern Persia in what is now Iran. The tribe lived a
precarious existence and had to move with the seasons in order to keep
livestock fed.
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| Just one more mountain to go... |
And then… they had to climb the whole lot over a 12,000
foot mountain…
Programme 3: The
First French New Wave
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| Erik and Francis jump for the camera |
John Davies talked us through the post-war revival of the
French film industry after impact of the Great War with the influx of creative talent from the arts and the
avant garde.
Charleston
(1927) with Daan van den Hurk
Jean Renoir was a potter and the son of Auguste who
famously married one of his father’s models, Catherine Hessling. He tried to
turn Catherine into an actress but, charming though she was, she was limited.
What she could do though was dance and in this mad mash-up of science fiction and
jazz-age syncopation she slashes the rug to pieces with non-stop Charleston as
she teaches the dance to an explorer from civilized Africa (American dancer Johnny
Huggins who can also move!) who lands in primitive Europe in a floating sphere
in "post-war" 2028.
The way things are going this looks like a pretty accurate representation of the near future; it is going to happen!
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| Catherine Hessling greets Johnny Hudgins |
Entr’Acte (1924) with Daan van den Hurk
The next two films I’ve already covered elsewhere but
needless to say it’s always a pure joy to see Erik Satie jumping up and down in
slow motion as he and Francis Picabia fire cannon over Paris. Guest accompanist
Daan van den Hurk played Satie’s original score and it was a beautiful thing
for I do heart Satie.
Smiling Madame
Beudet (La Souriante Madame Beudet)
(1922) with John Sweeney
If you’re losing an argument with your wife it’s never a
good idea to pretend to put a gun to your head. Germaine Dulac’s film makes
this point as subtely as it can aided by the director’s cutting edge technique
and Germaine Dermoz’ poignant expressiveness in the face of her idiot spouse played by Alexandre Arquillière. I hope her character took up
tennis in the end…
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| Alexandre Arquillière... funny man |
Programme 4: Bebe
Daniels
Spring Fever
(1919)
No chance of the sublime Bebe Daniel’s ending up with a
wrong ‘un and to prove it here she was finding love with Harold Lloyd in one of
a number of shorts the two made together (and yes, they also dated). It’s a high-energy romp from start to finish
with Lloyd’s inventiveness matched by Daniel’s ability to hold the funniest of
straightfaces.
Feel My Pulse
(1926) with Daan van den Hurk
Daniels was half-Spanish and half-Scottish which accounts
for the looks and, indeed, the look: a kind of “ya wanna say that again pal?”
So it’s amusing to see her as pampered rich kid Barbara Manning who’s been
kept in anti-septic cotton wool for the first 21 years of her life according to
the terms of her inheritance. She’s frightened of everything and especially the
thought of anything surprising happening and what it might do to her heart.
Luckily she’s inherited a sanitarium and heads off to
find peace and calm only to find it’s been taken over by rum-runners led by
no-good weasel William Powell and his right hand man, played by Richard Arlen,
who may not be all he seems. Taking everything a face value Babs wanders
through almost the whole con but you just know that at some point the Latin
lassie is going to find her feet and kick back!
A fun film... it’s hard not to be bowled over by Bebe and Bill!
Sands of Destiny
(Sables) (1927) with Lillian Henley
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| Nadia Sibirskaia so much older in Menilmontant |
Lilliam Henley accompanied with some dreamy desert songs
and brought out the best of Kirsanoff’s eye for shifting sandy sentiments.
Programme 6:
A Centenary Tribute
to Philippe de Lacy by David Robinson
In which David took us through the short but stellar
career of this child actor or rather actor who just happened to be a child and
capable of matching Garbo emotion for emotion in Love, a section of which was
screened leaving few unmoved.
The Loves of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe Der Jeanne Ney) (1927) with
Costas Fotopoulos
GW Pabst’s controversial film was the meatiest offering
of the day and I enjoyed seeing a 35mm print on screen with Costas Foutopoulos’
muscular accompaniment: of all the films I’d already seen this was the one that
had the most added value as a live experience.
Pabst puts so much detail in his film and brings out the
best in such fine performers as Fritz Rasp (oh, how I hate him: such a great
baddy!), Brigitte Helm (so method in playing blind she almost was blind, nearly
being knocked down by a car as Pabst later related), the ethereal Edith Jehanne and Uno
Henning, another fascinating “interior” actor.
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| Uno Henning |
The author of the book launched a campaign against
Pabst’s film but he did everything he could to carry through the original focus
on Russian politics into the film under pressure from UFA’s new owners for more
“commercial” fare… It remains a powerful, emotional work that has you on the
edge of your seat and has the kind of quick-wrap ending you’d expect of later
Hitchcock.
A thrilling end to a full day of silent cinema. Half-time.
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| Edith Jehanne and Uno Henning |
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