The family that films together… The Cheaters (1929) with Cyrus Gabrysch, London Film Festival 2020

After Pordenone onto London for the next streaming festival and one that brought a collaboration from the Kennington Bioscope and the BFI. KBTV has been running since earlier in the lockdown and has garnered watchers from around the world to share their live experience with a combination of shorts and features accompanied by their team of expert accompanists as seen on the channel’s Piano Cam. It gives the collective “live” experience we’ve all been missing and is given added continuity by KB MC, Michelle Facey, who provides detailed introductions to the programme sat in her North London home surrounded by explosions of fresh flowers: silent films were never silent of course, and nor can they now be thought of as anything less than fragrant.

 

Today Michelle introduced along with the BFI’s Bryony Dixon who filled us in on the remarkable McDonagh Sisters, Paulette who directed this and seven other features, Isabel, the star, acting under the name Marie Lorraine and Phyllis who worked as art director. They even had their own set, using their splendid family home Drummoyne House as well as some stunning locations around Sydney.

Bryony explained how the film was converted into a sound film which was the only version given wide release. It fared badly and over the years became lost with only the silent elements remaining all of which has now been restored by Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive as one of their very few silent films to survive.

 

Handing over to the Bioscope contingent, Michelle showed part of Tony Saffrey’s documentary with Tony Fletcher interviewing the two surviving sons of Isabel McDonagh (professionally known as Marie Lorraine) and husband Charles Stewart, Alan and Charles both still tremendously proud of their mother and her position as Australia’s leading actress at the time.

BFI Bryony and KB Michelle

The Cheaters was the third of the McDonagh sister’s films and shows a remarkable consistency of tone and aesthetic; clearly the three worked very closely. Paulette had had an education in film in the cinema, religiously watching her favoured films as many times as possible. She was no less diligent in directing her own, often being so precise about camera settings, that he cinematographer Jack Fletcher just had to point and shoot.

 

The result is a very proficiently made melodrama with Hollywood level performances allied to a crispness of direction and that visual cohesion described by the National Film and Sound Archive as evidence of the McDonagh sisters' “understanding of mood and atmosphere.” They feel that this is one of Australia's major surviving silent and it was a delight even after a week spent on a virtual world tour at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.The story also has far more sustained drama than I expected and a moral twist that, some have commented, could only have come from three women. Without revealing spoilers, the film’s arc compares very favourably with Cecil B DeMille’s in Romance of the Redwoods (1917), streamed last Friday by Le Giornate.

 

The fatal decision: Arthur Greenaway and John Faulkner who are both very good!

The film starts with Three Fates, a cod mystical prelude that Michelle described as Griffith-esque, the sister had watched a lot of films but how many of them were older ones, at the end of the World-wide distribution? They were probably more likely to get DWG and DeMille than newer Pabst, Murnau, Gance or L’Herbier output. That said, any thoughts of straight-ahead post-Victorian moral fable are quickly dismissed when the film’s harder edge is soon revealed.

 

We open with Bill Marsh (Arthur Greenaway), begging for leniency from John Travers (John Faulkner) a man he has stolen from “Don’t you see? It was not for myself. My wife – she’s desperately ill… if you send me to jail, she’ll never come through.” Taylor’s not for turning and sees it a rather cowardly to hide behind a woman… so, off Bill goes to jail and soon after his wife does indeed die. Those Fates… could it be the sister’s feel there should be more compassion in the law and not just blind justice? We’re find out more on that later. A lot more.

 

“My God, Travers, you’ll pay for this! I’ll get even, if it takes me a lifetime!”

 

Isabel McDonagh also know as, Marie Lorraine

Twenty years later, Taylor’s richer than ever but so too is Marsh who, in the course of dedicating his life to revenge, has amassed his own fortune through criminal means. His gang includes his daughter Paula (Marie Lorraine aka Isabel), and we see her enacting a bold con job on the local jewellers, pretending to be a Lady and her daughter, borrowing “2,000 worth of necklace to make sure her Daddy – “Sir David” - likes it enough to buy it for her birthday. Soon after she leaves, the “police” arrive and arrest her accomplice “mother”, a Lady (Leal Douglas), but they are merely the escape committee allowing Paula to escape with the loot.

 

It’s a decent set-piece and something I’ll be considering for my daughter’s next round of student fees.

 

Marsh's big safe

Back at Marsh’s base we meet the rest of his gang, young Jan (Reg Quartly) his ward (?) as well as his crew of heavies. We also see the huge safe he stores his ill-gotten gains in, shades of master criminal Dr Mabuse so maybe the McDonagh’s had seen Lang’s work. The next job is going to involve Paula immersing herself further in the world of the Sydney super rich. She goes to stay at an expensive hotel and there she meets Lee Travers, adopted son of John and, as with Paula, unaware of their parent’s history. Lee is played by the athletically handsome Josef Bambach who, not for nothing, was known as the Australian Valentino according to MC Facey.

 

So much gorgeousness can not go to waste and Paula and Lee are soon very attractive and falling in love on long rides into the spectacular Sydney countryside with one sequence shot in a pink0tinted dusk and another showing Lee’s sportscar racing across the edge of a lake. The two are free and share such a pure connection but this is only outside the city, once they return Paula has to face up to her past and her suitability for this handsome but innocent man.

 

The Australian Valentino? Probably...

She meets Lee’s father who is concerned with her background, after all, “they are all sweet and charming until they prove otherwise…” to him, she has “seen life – she shows it”. But Lee sticks up for his love and he is right to… Then Paula, reluctantly agrees to do “one last job” and burgles the worst possible house… We’re in for a breathless final sequence as everything is revealed as not quite as simple as it might have been in a fairly audacious way.

 

Throughout Cyrus Gabrysch, played a gamelan of gorgeous rolling themes, matching the drama but also the thread of family and love. Occasionally I glanced down at his work on the famed Piano Cam but mostly, as John and Neil had said in last week’s masterclasses, the music was at the heart of the film and it felt exactly as if it was coming out of the screen!

Cyrus on the Piano Cam!

So, Bravo BFI and Bioscope! Let’s have some more collaborations like this! It’s good to see the silent film community standing so supportively together in these times and we’ll prove, just like the film, that blood is thicker than water!

 

If you’re quick, you can catch The Cheaters on the BFIPlayer, the link is here! Must finish 1PM, 14th October.