Train kept a rollin’… The Signal Tower (1924), Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne, San Francisco Silent Film Festival Streaming

“… so, remember… never think of anything but your duty, until the track’s clear and your train’s safe!”

I’d previously seen a screening of Kevin Brownlow’s own copy of this film with Cyrus Gabrysch accompanying ferociously at a breathless evening at the Kennington Bioscope and this was a chance to see the restored film Kevin had played a major role in constructing with the SFSFF. There were no 35mm copies and so Robert Byrne of the SFSFF, Patrick Stanbury and Mr Brownlow worked with surviving 16mm elements, scanning materials at 4k, digitally repairing and creating a new 35mm negative from which prints were struck that were then dye tinted by specialist chemists in Prague.

The results were screened at the 2019 SFSFF and are astonishingly good, crystal clear with the beauty of the Californian forests fully enhanced and the locomotives as impressively highlighted as the actors. What is it about boys and steam trains? The accompaniment from Stephen Horne, aided by Martin Pyne/Frank on percussion, brought out the full majesty of the setting and the mechanics as well as one of the most febrile of conclusions in silent film.

Virginia Valli wrote a letter to Picture Play magazine from location in Mendocino County “I’m… just about as deep into the wilds of Northern California as any picture player has ever ventured. It’s beautiful; great redwoods, the bluest sky I have ever seen and brown and yellow maple leaves lending a dash of colour to the deep green of the firs. It’s so beautiful it’s actually awe-inspiring.”

This restoration certainly confirms that former and emphasises the “awe” in terms of Clarence Brown’s setting – the entire movie was shot in situ with sets built near the railway tracks – but also his treatment of the locos. In his introduction the Bioscope event and his essay for the SFSFF festival, Brownlow emphasised Brown’s fascination with trains. Brown was an engineer by training and clearly relished filming these steam-powered giants, getting up at the crack of dawn with his cameraman, Ben F. Reynolds, to record the trains powering through the pines with steam billowing above them and into the narrow sunlight.

The company hade rented a stretch of track which had only one service a day and so were able to take their time in presenting the life of this remote outpost and, with plenty of time to stage the most explosive of life-sized stunts: no scale models were damaged in the making of this film.

You can understand Brownlow’s passion for this is a film to make the rail enthusiast’s pulse race that bit faster as this is a film to increase everyone’s BPM as Brown winds the tension to almost unbearable levels: a runaway train speeding down towards a defenceless passenger train, a signal man fighting the elements and time to dislodge the tracks and faced with the horrific dilemma of having to save the many whilst his wife is under imminent threat from a boozed-up Wallace Beery with only one thing on his mind; a very vulnerable Virginia Valli.

Rockliffe Fellows watches an actual train steam by in a signal towerpurpose built on location

Those misty Mendocino Mountains contain a signal box vital to the effective running of the railroads and manned by just two men each working twelve hour shifts. The always upstanding Rockliffe Fellowes plays one of these “Tower Men”, Dave Taylor, whose wife Sally (Virginia Valli of Wild Oranges and The Pleasure Garden fame) and young lad Sonny (Frankie Darro) live in an idyllic wooden house near the tower – three miles from the nearest town.

Dave’s partner Old Bill (James O. Barrows) is indeed old and one-handed and so is replaced by Joe Standish (Wallace Beery) a man who’s flash suit and polished shoes mark him out as self-obsessed from the start and who is referred to as a “railroad Sheik” by one of the company’s engineers.

Dave lets Joe take over old Bill’s old room and he soon sets his sights on Sally even though her cousin Gertie (Dot Farley) initially acts as a kind of shield for his unabashed “sheik-ness”. Sally sends Gertie away to pay more attention to her fiancé unwittingly removing her own last line of defence… Joe soon makes his move and Dave kicks him out.

Wallace Beery and Virginia Valli

A storm is brewing though and as events take a serious turn on the mountain, Joe arrives late and, drunk in the heart of a crisis, forces Dave to take over and, once again kick him out. But that’s not the end of Joe’s nuisance as Dave sees him heading towards his home through the wind and rain… As disaster looms he must choose between Sally’s safety and his responsibilities to protect the passengers.

Beery does his usual top-notch job – his intensity belying his lighter, more likeable edge whilst Valli was the perfect complement, with a vulnerability running alongside her desperate resolution to resist the demon in her house; the film would not work as well without her imbuing Sally with so much depth and without Beery’s ability to kid us that he’s just not going to be as bad this time. Rockliffe Fellowes meanwhile, is the perfect heroic straight man to the descending chaos, a natural straight-backed affability informing his character.

Full marks to young Darro as well, aided and abetted by Jitney the Dog.

The family under threat

Biographer Gwenda Young describes The Signal Tower as one of Brown’s most personal films and he even made an appearance as a switchman trying to stop the runaway train as well as being “Conductor Brown” the addressee of a telegram. The “home invasion” represented by Beery’s character cuts to the heart of every relationship and powerfully contrasts with the accelerating disaster without. For the many or for the crucial few?

It’s a dramatic scenario and one that required a great deal of precision musical engineering from accompanists Stephen Horne and percussionist Martin Pyne with the latter providing the locomotive power to the former’s heat and steam. Brown’s film is full of controlled rhythms and contrasts from the towering bucolic surrounds to the dynamic force of the locomotion and the wayward intensity of the human drama and the score successfully navigated this triple track escalation to the film’s pulsating closure.

For the musician, every note’s a dead man’s handle – for the train driver, everything stops if you release your grip but the music is dependent on the continuation of a thousand stabs of precise pressure: all the right notes and all in the right order with Beery’s leery menace as much a threat as the speed of those locomotives. Stephen’s themes were as strong as you’d expect and the rhythmic requirements brought out the forces pushing the ultimate dramas of family, lives and morality under threat.

So, now is exactly the right time to join the SFSFF and to experience this film which is online until the 4^th April. There’s also a collection of some previous restorations and the promise of more to come. Full details are on their website here.

The haunted queen… Prix de Beauté (1930), with Stephen Horne, 10th Hippfest Silent Film Festival

Don’t think I’m untrue, my only love is you… Don’t be demanding, be understanding… My only love is you.

In the post-screening Q&A, Stephen Horne revealed the moments when he could “hear” Louise Brooks’ voice in his head as he played for Pandora’s Box, piano screen right in NFT2 at the BFI lost in music, film and this vision with unexpected sound. Brooksie is indeed one of cinema’s greatest naturally occurring special effects and as Pamela Hutchinson said in the Q&A, the sheer physicality of her dancer’s control, coupled with extreme intelligence and beauty draws the audience towards her on so many levels. Acting as hypnotism, but also as Stephen says, cinema as a haunting.

Prix de Beauté goes from strength to strength every time I see it especially with Mr Horne’s uncanny sympathy with a film he first accompanied in Bristol in 2006. This was the 2012 Cineteca di Bologna’s restoration based on the sole surviving silent copy with muted sections included from the French sound version filling gaps here and there. It’s a far cry from the “talkie” version I first experienced and runs at 113 minutes versus the former’s 98; largely due to a normalised, slower pace. I did attempt to watch both versions at once for comparison but I soon got too engaged to bother. The two versions are different though as they were filmed separately with the sound version presenting a smaller frame as space was given over to the soundtrack so we not only see more get a longer film, we also see more in it!

The film’s development involved both René Clair and Brooks’ mentor G.W. Pabst – the former developing the script from the latter’s story with moments of pure cinema originating from both under the eventual direction of Augusto Genina. Clair’s brilliant closing sequence was envisaged as a silent and it’s impossible to imagine it working any other way now. Overall, Genina presents his own “cut”, a visually coherent film and one that has never looked better, highlighting the work of his ace cameraman, Rudolph Maté who had worked on Dreyer’s Joan and would go on to collaborate on Vampyr too.

Louise Brooks attracting attention

The opening section in the public pools has a documentary quality like People on a Sunday and Brooks is introduced feet – or rather feet, calf and thighs – first before blowing the audience away with vivacity and a smile to brighten even the darkest metropolitan day. There’s more exceptional footage at a fairground as Brooks’ character suddenly starts to regret passing up her chance to become separate from the common men pressing all around her. Amidst the smiles and tom-foolery Brooks’ face is a mask of despair as realisation drives even the faintest smile from her lips.

It’s hard to resist drawing parallels with the star’s own situation in this film: she’s followed onto a train by press and paparazzi after winning the chance to represent France at the Miss Europe pageant and subjected to male attention at every stage. Her big break finds her conflicted between opportunity and loyalty to her man, Andre (Georges Charlia), a choice that made the actress burn a fair number of bridges, in actuality. Lucienne gets and accepts a chance in a talking picture whilst in real life America Brooks was turning down offers from Wild Bill Wellman to star in a thing called The Public Enemy (Jean went with that one…). Louise was just 23 when she made this film and it was to be her last starring role in a feature: mid-life redemption and eternal fame all lay ahead, but first she had to get lost for a while.

Brooks once described herself as an actor who largely just played herself and that’s enough if you’re picked for the right roles and well directed. But she does have to work a bit harder than Lulu as Lucienne Garnier, a sweet secretary who dreams of bettering herself through her beauty: you can’t imagine LB being so naive. She larks with her modest boyfriend – a typesetter at the newspaper where she works as a typist – and he is already jealous of the attention she attracts from other men at the pool and everywhere else. Andre doesn’t like beauty contests and Lucienne can’t even bring herself to tell him that she’s entering.

Standing by her man Andre

Executive types look at pictures of the contestants and one stands out: no one’s going to complete with that hair, those eyes… Whisked away to San Sebastien in Spain, Lucienne is soon competing in the beauty contest (actually filmed in Paris with thousands of extras). The documentary feel is again present with candid shots of the public mixed in with key players from high society (and low morality) including a maharajah (Yves Glad) and Prince Adolphe de Grabovsky (Jean Bradin).

Naturally applause is loudest and longest for Lucienne who easily beats Miss Germany and Miss England to take the crown. Now its cocktail parties and offers of jewels and riches from her betters – Lucienne sails through as if it’s one childlike adventure: never has the Brooks smile been so much in evidence. But Andre has been in pursuit and unwilling to upset him more, Lucienne decides to go back to Paris.

Prince Adolphe advises that Andre will never understand her and we get the feeling he has a point. Shadowy days in a meagre apartment lie ahead for Lucienne and she is as imprisoned as their pet budgie ironing and cooking for Andre. He tears up her fan mail and bans all talk of Miss Europe but the fresh Prince tracks her down and makes her a fateful offer.

Jealousy

Then comes the funfair and those moments of doubt all leading to a change of heart and that stunning closing sequence. That may be the best part of the film but Louise Brooks is so much more powerful in silence and without the clumsy dubbing; she’s a spectacular – haunting - vision and one that is almost hard to watch… and ultimately, she just doesn’t need words.

Stephen Horne’s experience with the film showed with a subtle and forceful score featuring piano, flute and accordion. It’s fascinating to hear him play for a film he knows this well and to hear him maintain the freshness of improvisation with such practiced and hard-hitting emotional content. No musical spoilers: but you really must hear this show yourself and a closing sequence that is so perfectly timed as the piano brings dark discord and the flute lifts us high with Lucienne’s light and laughter as she watches herself on screen singing the lines above... 

Clair’s next film was to be the excellent Under the Roofs of Paris whilst Pabst went on to film The Threepenny Opera and a remake of L'Atlantide (featuring Brigitte Helm) the restoration of which is due a release.

For Brooks, this was to be her last major role. For those in the business who she hadn’t already alienated, she served out a few more roles, most notably in God’s Gift to Women but blew her last major chance with Public Enemy… Would she have made more of the opportunity than Jean Harlow? Hard to say; there was a potentially great actor in Brooks but as Pamela Hutchinson indicated, she just wasn’t going to sacrifice herself to this career. During filming Brooks infuriated her director by staying out late and having too good a time. Genina was convinced that this was preventing her from becoming “the ultimate actress” and he was probably right but, I doubt anyone could make Louise Brooks do much she didn’t want to do.

Festival director Alison Strauss pointed out that the French title contains a pun; it is not only the prize for beauty but the price. 

Alison's introductions have been a great feature of Hippfest Online as she highlights some of the many attractions of this part of Scotland. For this film she was at the futuristic Falkirk Wheel, the world's only rotating boatlift; something else I have to see in 2022!

The Q&A with Alison, Stephen and Pamela is available to watch on the Falkland Community Trust YouTube channel and it's an excellent mix of silent film musicology, scholarly Brooksology and unexpected hauntology...

 

This restored version of Prix de Beauté is out now on a two DVD set featuring three more of Genina's films, Goodbye youth! (1918) and it's remake from 1927, as well as The Mask and the Face (1919). You can order it through Amazon of direct from the Cineteca Bologna’s CineStore.

Cultural exchange… A Kiss from Mary Pickford (1927), with John Sweeney, 10th Hippodrome Silent Film Festival

 

Why aren’t you a star?

 

As plans go, Sergei Komarov’s was pretty good and it says something that the writer/director’s game was – according to some - only fully up some years later when someone handed his titular star a copy of this film in the 40’s or 70’s depending on your source. Either way, I’ve no idea what Mary Pickford thought of the finished film, I’d hope it would have brought back some very happy memories of her time in Europe with Douglas Fairbanks and also that it would remind her how absolutely loved she was by millions. It would have made her laugh no doubt and at her own expense and the sheer ludicrous nature of the fame she experienced in a uniquely successful way in over twenty years of filmmaking and beyond.

 

In 1926 Mary and Douglas came to Moscow as part of a grand European tour and seeing how rapturously they were greeted, how fetishized they were as something beyond ordinary humanity, Komarov devised a means of using this to both shine a light on the nature of this ultra-fame and to lampoon it. He had no special access to Pickford and Fairbanks just a collection of newsreels and one crucial sequence in which Mary agreed to perform a short skit with Igor Ilyinsky at the end of which she kisses him on the cheek; the moment which makes this film transcend its sources, from meta to better.

 

As a standalone comedy, A Kiss from Mary Pickford works as a kind of Russia cousin of the lost Merton of the Movies or Souls for Sale, Show People and so many films that are about films. Its humour is slapstick and pointedly surreal, revelling in the magic whilst at the same time making vicious fun of Pickfair mania and the need to not just see stars but to own anything connected to them, a kind of amoral materialism reflective of  the current state of capitalist decline... 

Igor Ilyinsky takes it all in

It begins with our hero, Goga Palkin (Ilyinsky), a ticket collector at a cinema, being rejected by his “actress” girlfriend, Dusya Galkina (the striking Anel Sudakevich) for not being able to hold a candle to her hero, Douglas Fairbanks. Come back to me when you’re a star she demands unreasonably, not revealing the auditions she herself failed that morning. Their quarrel comes after watching Zorro – itself a reminder of Valentino’s The Eagle, screened earlier in the festival – and Goga makes plaintive Fairbanks faces, as he wonders how he can possibly compare.

 

Luckily, even Soviet Moscow has an industry prepared to train would be film stars and Goga enlists on a programme to test his suitability to be a star. This course is perhaps unnecessarily rigorous as the latest reject is hauled out unconscious by an aggressive looking man. Stardom is clearly not for everyone and clearly makes demands that the average citizen finds hard to bear… Then he appears before three white coated old men who, naturally, get him to stand under a cold shower in a swimming costume. He pulls out the picture of his love to remind himself why this ordeal will be worth it and then strikes an exhausted Fairbanks pose and smile… is that all there is?

 

He passes the first test perfectly although he’s only just keeping it together… then he’s spun around until he disappears, the men worry he may have been disintegrated and then he has to stand on his head for long minutes – he cheats by putting his shoes on his hands. The result? A pass with flying colours – Genuine Certification of Cinematic Ability (Stunts)… Russia’s Buster Keaton is born… or is he?

 

One for Zorro, Anel Sudakevich

The pace is unrelenting and there’s some excellent funny business with the glass of water Goga slips into his pocket… he forgets and sits down only to realise that there’s water running down his leg. For a few horrible moments he relives childhood torment.

 

Soon Goga wanders onto his first film set which, conveniently enough, seems to be situated right next to the cinema. There is a superb overhead shot of a studio at work, with two separate scenes being filmed, the actors dwarfed by the scenery and the technology. The studio was Mezhrabpom-Rus, now the Gorky Film Studio, where over 20 films, including Aelita, Queen of Mars were shot.

 

Goga looks dumb enough to do stunt work and so it transpires as he’s hefted high up to the rafters for an especially dangerous stunt, promptly falling asleep 100 feet in the air after the cast and crew below are distracted by the imminent arrival of two American superstars…

 

What if we make a Russian Harry Piel out of him?

 

Show people at the Mezhrabpom-Rus

The producers decide that Goga is a natural comic and that they can make him into “a Russian Harry Piel”. Who’s that, I hear you cry – me too – well, Harry was a hugely successful comic actor and director who made over a hundred films, 72 of which were lost, including most of his silent, in an allied air raid during the war. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and paid the price with post-war imprisonment never recovering his popularity. He was known for his explosive comic style and for allegedly doing all his own stunts (spoiler: he didn’t) but would have been closer to the dafter version of early Keaton/Chaplin that Ilyinsky presents here.

 

Mary and Doug arrive and within the film, even watching now, there’s a thrill in seeing such candid shots of them. Mary’s beautiful smile is if anything more marked than on screen whilst suntanned Doug looks as fit as a butcher’s dog as the saying used to go in Stalingrad… Star power shines out as they wave from a train window, from their hotel and as they arrive as the film studios. I’m reminded of the time when Doug had to carry his wife on his shoulders among one crush in London on their honeymoon, even though they are protected, they feel much closer to the crowds than you’d expect; reality about to crash their fragile fame.

 

But Goga walks into the reception and is only concerned about seeing his love who is far too intent on viewing the royal couple to pay him any heed. Dusya has been one of a group pursuing the Americans with wide-eyed fanaticism, moving forward en masse like a plague of cineaste zombies; the undead, avoiding the light and staring, always staring, in search of a screen…

 

Douglas and Mary

When it comes to love scenes, I’m always ready.

 

Who is that funny little man? Asks Miss Pickford, clearly with an eye for style. The studio execs ask him to do his stunt for her but he hides in fear of falling only to reveal himself when Miss Pickford asks if she can do a love scene with him instead. After seeing only, the fiction and the newsreel footage it is indeed as surprise to see the two actors together and it must have caused a sensation in Russia. If Mary wanted to show her support for Russian film it worked.

  

And how it works in the film too as Goga himself becomes a superstar with eager fans chasing him everywhere for just a strip of shirt or grab from his wig. It’s like George Harrison running from fans in A Hard Day’s Night or, more pointedly, David Hemmings fighting for Jeff Beck’s guitar in the 100 Club in Antonioni’s Blow Up; you maybe saw it here first Michelangelo? Is Goga now too good for Dusya or will he get over himself and his legions of fans?

 

As Steven Morrissey once said: Fame, fame, fatal fame, It can play hideous tricks on the brain…

 

John Sweeney provided accompaniment and delighted in every comedic twist and turn in this joyful film that is as much a celebration of the Muscovite sense of humour as its cinema. John tracked the full range with accompaniment that was as in tune with Sergei Komarov’s larger purpose as it was Ilyinsky’s every gurn and pratfall. It is, as John said in his introduction, the kind of film you fall for… one that is largely unseen but is further evidence of the strength of Russian comedy and cinematic ideas during the Twenties.

John Sweeney on piano cam!

 

Mary and Doug also met with Sergei Eisenstein on their Moscow trip having helped get his Battleship Potyomkin released in the US. Fluent in English, Eisenstein took them on a tour of the city and gave them its history cinematically and otherwise. Mary’s kiss was her contribution to a film industry that fascinated them and which they hoped to encourage; a glimpse of the contemporary view of fellow creatives at a time when the Soviet project was very much in the balance.

 

You can still catch the weekend programme via the Hippfest site and Q&As are on the Falkirk Community Trust YouTube channel.

 

You can still catch up on the weekend programme until tomorrow so better be quick, especially for Louise Brooks in a restored silent Prix De Beauté (1930) with Stephen Horne score, Marlene in The Woman Men Yearn For (1929) and Mary Pickford in the above film and the brilliant southern gothic of Sparrows (1926).

 

It’s been a joy and I look forward to attending next year’s festival in person!

 

 

 

 

Rudy can't fail... The Eagle (1925), with Neil Brand, 10th Hippodrome Silent Film Festival

 

Back when Arthur was young, I went to watch Kevin Brownlow introduce this film at East Finchley’s ultimate picture palace, the Phoenix Cinema, and he shared his coversations with one of the silent era’s most calmly professional directors along with clips from films I just had to see. Since then, I’ve watched them on the big screen; Flesh and the Devil (1926), The Signal Tower (1924) and The Goose Woman (1925). Brown never disappoints and brings out the best in his actors; a real warmth of performance amongst the smoothly worked narratives.

 

Watching first time my focus was on Rudolph Valentino as this was the first of his films I’d seen (and I still haven’t seen either The Sheik or The Son of the Sheik…) but now I was watching as much for Louise Dresser, who was so heart-breaking in The Goose Woman and is grand again here playing Csarina Catherine the Great as passionate and impetuous with a penchant for young officers and for executing those who don’t please her.

 

Her scenes with Valentino as the dashing Lt. Vladimir Dubrovsky, are wry – if conflicting - with sexual role-reversal as the predatory monarch tries to get her man tipsy, offers him a career path based on favour and generally behaves like a man. Dubrovsky has enlisted to be a fighter and not a lover and absents himself even though he knows this will seriously affect his prospects both in military life and, well, just life.

Louise Dresser and Rudolph Valentino

 

This isn’t any man Catherine is sexually harassing though, it’s one played by Rudolph Valentino. No other silent actor comes with quite so much baggage as the Latin lover, the man who broke so many hearts that people seemingly took their own lives rather than face up to life without him… Surely, he had to take himself that seriously too? But no, what we find is a very handsome man who can act and who has a deliciously inclusive sense of humour to prick the bubble of heroic pomposity: think Antonio Banderas in an Aldomorvar film: a little camp but in that masculine way only the most “secure” can carry off.

 

Valentino’s Dubrovsky is one of the bravest officers in the imperial elite and arrives at a parade for the Csarina at the film’s start full of promise. He’s a man of action and spotting a runaway carriage he leaps onto the Csarina’s favourite horse, and she did like her horses… (“not true…” says History) and sets off in pursuit – Brown’s cameraman fast behind – pulling level, jumping on and pulling the horses to a halt in classic cowboy style.

 

The party he rescues includes a beautiful young noblewoman, Mascha Troekouroff, played by the delectable Vilma Bánky, who has great chemistry with Valentino and pretty much every single thing around her. She would star with him again in Son of the Sheik, her beauty and intelligence matching his own with a challenge that his persona needs; she’s not being swept off her feet by anyone.

Rudolph and Vilma

 

Pleasantries are exchanged and there’s an instant connection but Mascha ‘s head is not easily turned and her Aunt Aurelia (Carrie Clark Ward) is the one waving enthusiastically after Dubrovsky as their carriage pulls away. He laughs but his quick thinking has earned him that awkward appointment with his Czarina who is more than happy to see her horse returned unharmed…

 

It’s not a good day on balance for Dubrovsky as he receives the news that his father is seriously ill because of his estate and fortune being stolen by the by the villainous Kyrilla Troekouroff (James A. Marcus on fine form). Dubrovsky won’t take this lying down and soon turns himself into a Robin Hood figure – The Black Eagle – who leads his father’s remaining loyal staff into an escalating set of countermeasures aimed at over-throwing the usurper.

 

Encountering a man who has been employed to teach French (incidentally, the language of the Tsarist court even up to the pre-revolutionary period…) to Kyrilla’s daughter, Dubrovsky takes his place as a means of breaking in and causing chaos. Yet, when he arrives, he sees that his student is to be the beautiful girl he rescued in the runaway carriage.

James A. Marcus as the Fearless Kyrilla!

 

Thus, things go as rom-coms go with enough will-they/won’t-they to keep you guessing as Bánky and Valentino work their humorous rapport as far as they can without popping the dramatic bubble. Kyrilla is revealed as more bullying buffoon than despot as the threats of imminent retribution from the Black Eagle un-nerve him more and more: you do wonder how he ever managed to take control of the Dubrovsky estate… still, he does have a bear chained in his wine cellar for playing “jokes” on guests.

 

Brown directs with deceptive efficiency and with more than the odd flourish. Not for nothing was he “blind-tasted” as Lubitsch by one Hollywood insider according to Kevin Brownlow, with some innovative shots including an amazing dolly shot along the full length of Kyrilla’s banquet table. It’s a very well-made film with sumptious sets from the legendary William Cameron Menzies, and the restored print is in superb condition; watching it is indeed, as Mr Brownlow said at the Phoenix, “…seeing silent film as it really was”.

 

Accompaniment was provided by Mr Neil Brand who had dressed for the occasion and entered his music room in colour before sitting down to accompany in back and white. His themes went well beyond those chromatic limitations though and he gave us the rich romance and visceral daring the film deserved. As festival director Alison Strauss put it in her introduction, we were watching “together, alone” and the improvised music gives the immediacy that binds us as viewers, sat in front of screens from Worthing to the Winter Palace.

  

Who is The Black Eagle?! 

The Eagle is now available on spruced up Blu-Ray from Kino and is well worth filing between Camile and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse if you like your Latin Lover in alpha order or, Monsieur Beaucaire and Cobra if you’re going by date.

 

The Hipp-fun carries on and you can still catch up on most of films, intros and Q&As via the festival website and the Falkirk Community Trust YouTube channel.

Hearts and minds... Body and Soul (1925), with Wycliffe Gordon, 10th Hippodrome Silent Film Festival

I’d previously seen the world premiere of this restored version of Oscar Micheaux’s major work at the BFI with Peter Edwards and Nu Civilisation Ensemble whipping up a storm and this screening, complete with jazz composer Wycliffe Gordon’s soul-pleasing ensemble score, was the perfect entrée to the tenth Hippfest! It’s hard to believe that a year ago we were all waiting, hotel booked, tickets at the ready, for our trip to Bo'ness and the start of the most perfectly formed silent film festival in Scotland’s first purpose-built cinema. Covid had come though and the show couldn’t go on but gradually it resumed with streaming shows and thousands online connected in virtual silent communion with Clara Bow and John Barrymore.

 

Restrictions still in place this year’s festival is online only but features fulsome introductions, inspired new music and after show Q&As utilising the benefits of the medium in much the same way as last autumns Giornate: digital is different but there are ways in which it allows more detailed examination of the content as well as maintaining the engagement of communal viewing. Flexible Hippfest also allows you to schedule your viewing around work, family and lockdown exercise whilst still making you feel involved in a unique, well-curated experience. You simply have to take a seat, chose between say Laphroaig and Glenlivet, click your clicks and watch away…

 

According to Charles Musser in Race Cinema and the Colour Line – an essay in the BFI’s Pioneers of African American Cinema box set – Paul Robeson disowned this film, which is a shame as he is superb playing two characters: utterly convincing as the homicidal pretend priest Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins as well as his decent “twin” Sylvester. Robeson felt he had been duped by director and writer Oscar Micheaux who used this film to humorously critique tropes from plays about black culture written by white writers and in which he had featured.

Paul Robeson

Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones along with the now obscure Nan Bagby Stephens’s Roseanne had all featured Robeson and helped establish him as a stage force. But the actor seemed unaware of Micheaux’s agenda until after the film was made or possibly unaware of the impact it would have on his future prospects. Maybe the lure of cinematic popularity was too great to resist or at least the potential profit share, especially at a time, as Professor Charles Musser pointed out in his introduction, when theatre was still considered the more legitimate art.

 

Robeson is so very watchable though, a handsome and energetic presence who switches from the good brother Sylvester to the bad seed Isaiah with ease. He’s an escaped convict who makes a living fleecing his deluded flock in order to support his gambling and drinking. Robeson even makes a good drunk, staggering around his house in the early hours applying ice to his temples with the urgency of lived experience.

 

Micheaux has form in terms of spoofing organised religion with the boorish, Uncle Tom preacher of Within Our Gates pre-dating Robeson’s “Reverend” Jenkins’ drunk sermonising in this film. He also paints the congregation as either bored or complicit in the ecstatic distractions of the Holy rolling… in his view perhaps not so different from the bars and gambling dens the gangsters inhabit. He hits his targets over the head but his sense of humour is there throughout and you can see it in the performance of his actors who look so relaxed and unafraid to push the emotional boat out.

Mercedes Gilbert

Mercedes Gilbert is an example as Sister Martha Jane in many ways the story’s centre as the mother who falls prey to the Reverend’s lies and criminality. There’s a lot of swooning but there’s also a glint in the eye as she addresses the audience through the most outrageous elements – tragedy and comedy so closely aligned. Her daughter, Isabelle, is well played by Julia Theresa Russell who is both frail and brave refusing to buckle under the physical domination of the rotten Reverend.

 

Lawrence Chenault provides a suitably twisted turn as 'Yello-Curley' Hinds, Jenkins’ former cellmate who spies his pal preaching with his beady, evil eyes. Chenault has a good deal of stage make-up prompting my daughter to suggest he may even be in white face… now, that’d be a turn up wouldn’t it!

 

Other caricatures echo earlier Micheaux films with Marshall Rogers as a sleazy speakeasy proprietor and with a delightful double act of Lillian Johnson as "Sis" Caline and Madame Robinson as "Sis" Lucy, two Pious Ladies of excitable disposition. The clichés were no doubt all true – they always are - and these folk would have been recognizably real to their audience.

 

Julia Theresa Russell

It’s Robeson’s show though as the “Reverend” Jenkins slips further and further down the slope to eternal damnation as his booze-funding church con runs into extortion, sexual violence and ultimately murder. It’s an emotionally controlled as well as physically dominant performance as he towers over his victims whilst ultimately succumbing to his own ability to wield force; his body never enough to save his soul.

 

This restoration remains far shorter than the original nine reeler and something has been lost in parts of Micheaux’s complicated story which, according to Musser, many felt was the fault of cuts made by white censors. That said, he suggests that this does the director a discredit as he is narratively ambitious, cross-cutting throughout whilst also working his story backwards and forwards through flashbacks and dreams. Is the story one great flashback leading up to the headline at the start of the film regarding Jenkin’s arrest or is it more likely that that was what happened to him before these events… a drunken recidivist, doomed to forever repeat the same mistakes?

 

Wycliffe Gordon is an experienced composer, educator and band leader and here he deploys sixteen musicians on a score that moved dramatically with and around the action. It really was a Micheaux-mix of muscular jazz styles that, whilst occasionally appearing to run ahead of the game, was very forcefully bound to the spirit on screen. The director cuts very quickly and Gordon wisely decided to stick to his themes across Oscar’s multiple lines with deliciously sleezy smooth modern jazz indicating Jenkin’s intentions whilst gospel themes reflected his religious “mask” and his audience’s willingness to believe.

Methodists don't drink

The music was always in flow, morphing without losing purpose with disjointedly judgemental New Orleans’ trad as the Reverend experienced his stumbling hangover, which suddenly softened as Sylvester meets his sweetheart, then tightened up as we switched to 'Yello-Curley' playing cards in the speakeasy. This film is a challenge for any composer and I loved Gordon’s sweet energy and cohesive orchestration; if he were still alive it would get the Oscar approval, I’m sure!

 

This is just the start of a festival that features only high-quality films, today there’s Merian C. Cooper’s classic documentary, Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925), as well as what promises to be a sobering and fascinating talk on Scottish Cinema and the Flu Pandemic of 1918-19. There’s nothing new save for that which has been forgotten and we’re here to – collectively – recall and celebrate.

 

Full details are on the festival website; it’s a snip at twenty notes. There’s Scottish pricing for you!

 

You can also catch up on Body and Soul via this link.

A tale of two movies… Mädchen in Uniform (1931), BFI Dual Format, Out Now!

“What you call sin, I call the great spirit of love in all its forms…”

 

First time viewer here and I have to say that this film is more complex than I expected and absolutely all the more intriguing for that. As wily producer Carl Froelich had intended, the relationship between the two leading actors is your main expectation and yet the narrative runs far deeper than even that, ground-breaking though it is. This is a film about girls in uniform and by that I mean the discipline of the Prussian military hierarchy, children marching, being trained in denial and traditional Junker strengths; books are forbidden, graven images of film stars, letters home, compassion… all love is seemingly denied, not to mention that between a girl and a woman. The school is there to make the “mothers of soldiers”, to feed the Prussian/German military machine.

 

Bibi Berki, who provides a superb essay in the booklet accompanying this set and also excerpts from her brilliant podcast, The Kiss, about the making of this film, suggests that there were essentially two films being made during production of Mädchen in Uniform. There’s the populist drama Froelich aimed to connect with developing sensitivities about female sexuality post Marlene, and homosexuality after earlier films such as Anders als die Andern (1919) and Sex in Chains (1928) subtitled Die Sexualnot der Strafgefangenen – the sexual distress of prisoners - giving it a passing link to the institutionalised characters in Mädchen. Then there was the film that the director Leontine Sagan and the writer Christa Winsloe wanted; one with equal daring but deeper intellectual roots. What’s more, Christa not only wrote this story, she lived it… falling in love with one of her female teachers who ended up having to leave the school.

Dorothea Wieck and Hertha Thiele

Berki covers all of these incredible personalities with so much depth and eloquence, providing the finest of audio essays covering their backstories and the making of the film with the help of primary and secondary sources from crew and cast. Hertha Thiele provides a lot of the detail for the filming and she had firm opinions even during the making of her first film. Thiele had a long and interesting career and I chiefly know her for the left wing questioning of Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World? (1932) after which she refused to work for the Nazis and ended up in East Germany after the war, resuming her career there.

 

Thiele – 22 at the time of filming - had played the part of 14-year-old “half-orphan”, Manuela in one of Leontine Sagan’s stage productions of Winsloe’s play – a lot of the same cast were used and this helps explain how the first-time director was able to complete the shoot in just three weeks. Interviewed when she was 71-72 in 1980 (by Karola Gramman and Heide Schlüpmann), the actress was quite sure which film she’d been making: “I really don't want to make a great deal of [...] or account for a film about lesbianism here. That's far from my mind, because the whole thing of course is also a revolt against the cruel Prussian education system."

Dorothea's exacted emoting

Surprisingly, given their chemistry on screen, she considered her co-star Dorothea Wieck too “restrained” but, as Berki suggests, this is the difference between a stage actor and an experienced screen one. Wieck is the best performer on screen with nuanced expression that remains poignant – she is the heart of “both” films; her unknowable affection for her pupil part of the continuum of love referred to in the above quote. She loves all of her girls and does not see her compassion undermining either authority or leadership; she’s an inspiration to the students in more than romantic ways. In her later interviews, Thiele also felt Leontine Sagan was too intellectual so I’m not sure we have the definitive voice on intent but there is so much rich context to work with.

 

Leontine certainly had a defined agenda and insisted that the location “must be saturated in Prussianism…” and they found the perfect place in Potsdam which is where Christa Winsloe had gone to school. It was a military orphanage which had the right atmosphere and the perfect six storey staircase around which many of the film's key moments occur.

 

You’re struck by Leontine’s “intellectual” ambition for the film from the opening montage of Prussian statues and militaristic music and the shifting from the sound of soldier’s feet to the schoolgirls marching. Her direction is remarkable, but she had plenty of skilled support from Froelich, his cinematographers, Reimar Kuntze and Franz Weihmayr as well as editor Oswald Hafenrichter, who later worked on The Third Man. That said, it’s hard to take too many plaudits away from Leontine for this vibrant and visually coherent first "go".

Emilia Unda inspects

The other pupils are used dynamically throughout the film, flowing around the action and providing bubbling adolescent energy - the raw material that needs taming. Against this is the upright and tense headmistress, Mother Fräulein von Nordeck zur Nidden (the imposing character actress Emilia Unda), as rigid as any Oberst, who believes that little girls should be seen and only heard when instructed to make a noise. She represents an entire class structure based on emotional discipline as evidenced by her Excellency von Ehrenhardt, Manuela's aunt (Gertrud de Lalsky) who describes her late sister’s daughter in disparaging terms and her soldier father as having “no idea” how to educate her.

 

Manuela is vulnerable having not long lost her mother and, as she enters the darkened school, her spirits are gradually lifted as she meets the girls who will come to make her life bearable. There’s the welcoming Marga (Ilse Winter), Lilli (Erika Biebrach), Ilse von Treischke (Charlotte Witthauer) but most of all there’s the rebellious Ilse von Westhagen (Ellen Schwanneke) who from her first appearance in the school choir strikes you as a source of passionate honesty.

 

Almost all the girls here have a crush on Miss von Bernburg... 'Tell me, is it true that she kisses you at night?'

 

Ellen Schwanneke in rapture

Ilse it is who has posters of Hans Albers on the inside of her locker – strictly forbidden – as she asks the other girls what it is that films stars have, Mia von Wollin (Barabara Pirk) replies “sex appeal, nicht?” This is the first overt reference to sex but it follows on from a startling exchange featuring Ilse discussing the crush many of the girls have on Governess Fräulein von Bernburg (Wieck), who breaks the code of von Nordeck zur Nidden, by providing something of the kindness her students are missing.

 

This battle between the gifted and highly effective "liberal" and the Head, plus her acolytes, runs throughout the film with the former wanting to be “a friend to the children” she leads and the others ignoring emotional intelligence and focusing only on authority and repression.

 

The most famous sequence in the whole film features von Bernburg walking around the dorm at bedtime, slowly kissing each girl on the head, each one eagerly awaiting her touch in a very ambiguous way. Finally she arrives at the new girl and as Manuella throws herself at her in an embrace, she very deliberately kisses her full on the lips. It’s startling all these years later and apparently the distributors at the time wanted a lot more kissing (!?) but what is really passing between pupil and teacher?

 

First meeting on the stairs

Von Bernburg has already talked to Manuella about the death of her mother and she recognises her grief and need for affection. This provocative kiss is certainly more than maternal and for Leontine is surely transgressive in the context of a militaristic school whilst for writer Christa, there’s wish fulfilment and recognition of her romantic experience. We know what Hertha Thiele felt but I really wish we had Dorothea Wieck’s take.

It’s a tribute to the film and these makers that there is still much to discuss in terms of the significance of their work. There’s enough here for many times the normal length of my blog posts, suffice to say that this is a major film that is thoroughly deserving of the restoration it has received and this superb package from BFI.

 

The critique of Prussian education and society would still be there without the homosexuality but the love between the women is vital to the film’s power both as a motivator of the major characters but also as a recognition of not just Christa’s lived and loved experience but that of millions of women in Germany and beyond. A sexual relationship between a teenage student and her teacher would of course be wrong; Manuella is a child after all, but love – in all its forms - is love at any age.

The (school) play's the thing...

In addition to the excellent work from Bibi Berki, Episodes 7 to 10 of Tempest Productions’ 14-part podcast The Kiss and an essay on Christa Winsloe, there are essays from So Mayer on the film’s place in the queer canon, Chrystel Oloukoï on its remarkable director and Henry K Miller on the British cinema that helped promote the film. Chrystel also provides a video essay on Women and Sexuality in Weimar Cinema. Feature commentary for the main feature is from film historian Jenni Olson.

 

As is traditional, the BFI also fill out the disc with some wonders from their archive under the heading: How to be a Woman and with an explanatory essay form film historian Sarah Wood. These include the magnificent Tilly and the Fire Engines (1911) featuring everyone’s favourite nasty women, Tilly as played by Alma Taylor and Sally played by Chrissie White, who  made comedic trouble in so many films. It’s a hoot especially with a smashing accompaniment from Bioscope allumni Lillian Henley – a modern day member of Tilly’s gang!!

Alma Taylor and Chrissie White

There’s also Hints and Hobbies No.11 – ‘Hints to the Ladies on Jiu-Jitsu’ (1926), A Day at St Christopher’s College and School (1920s) and 4 and 20 Fit Girls (1940), sponsored by the National Fitness Council for England and Wales.

 

Thank you, Bibi, BFI and the original film makers. ***** all round.

 

1.      You can order the set for a very reasonable rate at the BFI’s online shop, link right here.

 

2.     Bibi Berki’s podcast is highly recommended and you can find all the episodes of her 14-part podcast, The Kiss, here on Spotify.

 

3.      Hertha Thiele’s interviews with Schlüpmann and Gramman of Johan Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, can be read here. As always with Thiele and others on the left, it’s sobering to hear of what happened in the years following this film and others.