Sunday 9 December 2018

Brutish and short… Open All Night (1924), BFI with Meg Morley


“I hate him, he lets me do whatever I want! Why does marriage spoil men? It makes them just husbands… “

Viola Dana is another hugely successful silent film star who is not as widely recalled as her contemporary fame might have suggested. As with Mabel Normand, Norma Talmadge and even Lois Webber, she’s fallen from a collective memory dominated by those with longer – post-talkie – careers, better preserved archives and the twists of fashion. As with Pickford and Swanson, Dana was a post-Victorian waif – undernourished and frail in parts such as Children of Eve - and just about five feet in heels. But, as with Mary and Gloria she was also a very fine actress and highly adept at comedy.

In Open All Night she’s part of a splendid cast including two of the great gentlemen of sophisticated silent screwball, Raymond Griffith and Adolphe Menjou and the excellent Jetta Goudal who pretty much steals the show as Lea the aggressive lover of cycling champ Petit Mathieu (Maurice 'Lefty' Flynn). It’s an amusing rather than hilarious film, well made but with a conflicted message about love and physicality that won’t play well with most modern audiences and must have met with disapproval from some at the time: I can’t imagine my Nan putting up with any of this nonsense from any man she decided was worthy of her time… although this is a little balance at the end: big tough guys also need tough women.

“A woman may be fascinated by a brute but she can’t respect him…”

Adolphe Menjou
Set in Paris, the story is essentially about two couples at a cross-roads and we start with Mr and Mrs Duverne played by Menjou and Dana, in their splendid apartment on the Ile du France… He’s watching the couple across the way with his binoculars and she’s reading a romantic novel in an extensive scene in her bath tub. Edmund sees the attractive woman across the way being pushed around and shakes his head as he decides no man could keep a woman’s love if he treated her violently.

Meanwhile Therese, reading a book that equates rough-handling with ecstasy… goads her husband to smash the door down and force her to come out with him. Their friend Isabelle Fevre (Gale Henry) arrives with her latest escort, and American called Igor (Griffith) who is drunk and incapable… Griffith is intermittingly amusing in the film but is under-used.

Isabelle decides that her friend needs taking out of herself and that some sauce must be found for the gander with which to prick the conscience of the over-gallant goose… The conclusion of a marathon cycle race in the velodrome will provide the opportunity.

Viola Dana
At the race, local favourite Petit Mathieu is ahead of a world-class field including a continent (Africa), a country (United States) and a city (New York) … he’s a rangy fellow covered in grease who seems to tower over the rest. Director Paul Bern (yes, Jean Harlow’s tragic Paul…) films the velodrome well with Bert Glennon’s cameras at a low angle, tracking ahead or alongside the racers and generally putting the viewer in amongst it.

In the stands is his girl Lea who snarls her support and gives the films best performance with a swagger that subverts sexual/gender stereotypes mores than anything in the narrative. Hers is no cheap-shot like the reference to the sexuality of the Gendarme swooning over Igor’s signed photo, but a genuinely strong women who knows what she wants – and that is more attention from her man Mathieu.

Lea goes to the Café des Boulevards to drown her sorrows and there’s quite the scene as she downs glass after glass of Pernod or possibly Absinth while repulsing numerous polishes-but-dull men in evening suits. Edmund is impressed – he’d obviously prefer a tipsy lass with attitude to a demanding wife. The two get on and end up at the Velodrome.

“So, you want this pin-point of a woman, do you?!”

Adolphe Menjou and Jetta Goudal
By this time Therese has taken her own interest in the hunky cyclist – far taller, muscular and greasier than her husband and is applying more oils and leg massage between stages of the race. She’s not entirely sure that size matters until, inevitably, their other halves discover them… and, as Griffith valiantly attempts to squeeze out some slapstick laughs by drunkenly dancing with the arcing bikes on the track, the marriage square must resolve itself to a circle…

This was enjoyable if not hilarious as the reviews of the time seemed to suggest with  Film Daily saying: “The story is slight… Whilst the excellent characterisations and the skilful direction is important, it is a question whether or not the picture fans care sufficiently about this.”

Meg Morley’s accompaniment was a jazzed as you’d expect and she enlivened the narrative throughout with period-appropriate flourishes and the light-touch assurance you’d expect from a Kennington Bioscope alumnus!

All in all, a precious flicker for the so many now-familiar faces who starred in it.

Raymond Griffith
After the film, Viola decided to marry her cyclist “Lefty” – who was a former football player – at least up until 1929 after which she made the switch to golf with Jimmy Thomson with whom she was married to for 15 years.

Dana was not one of those who continued into sound but she was a star for twenty years and more. In January 1922, Screenland Magazine reported that she and Bebe Daniels were more popular in Japan than Mary Pickford and Mary Miles Minter. Now we have more of her films being rediscovered by modern audiences such as this one - us and it - and there’s also a new DVD for The Cossack Whip (1916) from a Kickstarter project initiated by Edward Lorusso.

Let's have more Viola (and Jetta too).


Viola Dana in The Cossack Whip (1916)

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