“… 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.
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| 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 4th April. There’s
also a collection of some previous restorations and the promise of more to
come. Full details are on their website here.
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