Rare Mary… Heart o' the Hills (1919), Kennington Bioscope with Colin Sell

I remember [Pickford] telling me that she couldn't bear the way [D. W. Griffith] directed adolescent girls. She said, "Oh, he directed them so they ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. And I would not do that sort of thing..." She already saw that naturalism was terribly important, even more than Griffith did. 

Kevin Brownlow

 

For the first time since the Pandemic, it was time to play Six Degrees of Kevin Brownlow and, as usual, the answer was two; Kevin had met and interviewed Mary Pickford on a number of occasions. This direct relationship with the “source material”, one of the major players, one of the three of four, who really made the cinema of Hollywood in the 1910s, predating even Kennington’s own Charlie and her husband Doug, even outshining her director on so many occasions, David Wark, distancing herself in a way Lillian didn’t as she set up her own production company in 1918 and took charge of her intellectual property as well as her career.

 

Kevin’s introduction focused on fellow film collector Bert Langdon and his own meetings with Heart o' the Hills’ cinematographer, Londoner Charles Rosher, who shot all of Pickford’s films from 1918 to 1927, became the first cameraman to win an Oscar for Sunrise and grabbed a second for The Yearling (1946). Kevin’s friend was able to screen his original 35m nitrate original not just of this film but also My Best Girl (1927) neither of which Rosher had seen in years.

 

Heart o' the Hills impressed Kevin in terms of its technique but also Pickford’s range; “characters no sooner look at each other, than they exchange blows…” The hillbilly dance is “a classic sequence” featuring the ethnic authenticity director Sidney Franklin was looking for. Kevin also singled out art director Max Parker for his creation of the backwoods locations and living spaces; as he says, there was nothing “cutsie” or sentimental about this endeavour and the producer herself also has to take great credit for that… Kevin concluded by saying: If anyone needs to be converted to Pickford, this picture should do the trick!

 

Pickford's character shows her scars from maternal beatings...

I suspect Kevin was preaching to the already converted but this is indeed a wonderfully spirited film and one that treats its audience with respect, another key element of Pickford’s approach. After all, she was a working-class women just like most of her audience, her agenda was to deliver the kind of stories they understood and morality they would agree with in a tough environment they would recognise. We don’t talk enough about silent film stars and class, except to note that they “escaped”, but I don’t think Mary, or Charlie and many others, pulled the ladder up.

 

Here Mary is Mavis, who’s father was shot in the back when she was young and whose mother Martha (Claire McDowell) has been worn down over time, fighting to keep going in their ram shackled homestead. Her best pal is young Jason Honeycutt (Harold Goodwin) who takes her out on fishing trips – some worms were sadly harmed in the making of this film – and other larks.

 

Jason’s father Steve (Sam De Grasse) is the opposite of fun and, as we quickly learn, many other things including honesty, fairness and virtue. He’s hard on his boy and Mavis while targeting Martha, her hand and, her land which, as Mavis shows Jason, is rich in coal, surprising for such an elevated location but there you go.

Hootenanny show-down! John Gilbert on the left.

Money comes to town in the form of “forrigns” Colonel Pendleton (W.H. Bainbridge) and his entourage including son Gray (a surprise appearance by young John Gilbert, just 22 here and on the brink of stardom) and his intended Marjorie Lee (Betty Bouton). Also with them is the scheming Morton Sanders (Henry Hebert) who is plotting with Steve Honeycutt to grab Martha’s land and swindle as much of the community as possible.

 

There’s a great confrontation between the two at the local hop, where Gray, who has caught the eye of Mavis and vice-versa, joins the dance only for Jason to try and out-manoeuvre him in a kind of strictly-come-country dance-off. In the end Mavis joins in and a proper scrap is narrowly averted.

Soon though she has worse to come as Steve pushes Martha to marry him and orders her to leave home. She takes her issue to the locals, led by her wise Granpap Jason Hawn (Fred Huntley) and they decide that dressing up in white hoods and costumes to confront the land-grabbers is the way to resolve this. 

Don't mess with Mary...

Now I’m not sure why it is that certain Americans like wearing their sheets in this way but I’m also not convinced it’s a Ku Klux Klan moment – although it might well be. It ends badly though as someone shoots Sanders and, of course, given motive, opportunity and her outspokenness, Mavis is soon standing trial accused of his murder.

 

As Kevin Brownlow points out, this film doesn’t pull its punches and the stakes are high. Mavis’ character also stays true to herself and the resolution is worth the wait. It’s an entertaining film with that mix of humour and grit our great grand parents knew and loved to see on screen. Pickford is mighty as you’d expect and Rosher packs as many glorious head shots in as possible as we watch her unconscious naturalism lead the emotional charge!

 

We were watching a 35mm print made from an original copy at the Mary Pickford Foundation and it was full of rich textures and stunning depth of field. This is one of the real pleasures of the Bioscope, the connection between the audience, the celluloid and the general ambience of this unique venue. The atmospherics are also heavily informed by the subtlety of the accompanist and in this case it was Colin Sell who not only as Kevin predicted, showed his powers of controlled syncopation for the dancing sequence but also played along so sympathetically with Pickford and the rest of the players.

 

The British version of the sheet music

We were also treated to a wonderful performance of the song released to accompany the film from Colin and the Bioscope’s MC Michelle Facey. On BBC programmes you sometimes witness “experimental” archaeologists attempting to recreate certain processes to illustrate and find out more about the techniques and the “taste” of the period. The Bioscope is a working example of this experimentalism and Facey and Sell recreated another key element of the spirit of this film and the emotional reaction this song would have brought. Glenn Mitchell had a copy of both the US and UK version of the sheet music and naturally we went with the British copy. Loveliness ensued… and the film was set up!

 

Early Mary…

 

White Roses (1910) directed by Frank Powell was screened first on a 16mm from Chris Bird’s collection and, whilst its plot was a little outlandish, it was all good fun with Mary’s character Betty for some reason in love with a very shy man called Harry (Edward Dillon). Harry hasn’t the courage to ask her directly so her arranges to send three colours of flowers to her and a note saying that she should wear red for yes and white for no… Sounds simple but he gives the task to a young lad (Jack Pickfor, who’s other sister, Lottie is also involved), who promptly gets robbed of note and flowers.

 

A well meaning man steps into help and buys replacements but there’s no note and so Betty wears white forcing Harry to propose to his cook in retaliation… That’s not the end of things but you really have to watch this to believe it! John Sweeney accompanied and suspended all our disbelief in the process.

Mary and Elmer wait for the law...

The Narrow Road (1912) directed by D. W. Griffith on rare and possibly singular* 16mm print made from a nitrate original by legendary collector John Cunningham, now from Chris Bird’s collection, the film is only otherwise preserved in the Library of Congress paper-print collection as a paper copy of the celluloid made for copyright purposes. It was another of the unique Bioscope occasions, watching Mary married to ex-convict played by the great Elmer Booth, who is torn between going straight at a wood merchants and his loyalty to fellow con and recidivist forger, Charles Hill Mailes.

 

Ashley Valentine accompanied with lovely lines and in tune with this short but powerful tale. As Michelle said in her introduction, some say DW was at his best for these Biograph shorts and on the evidence of this and others, I’d have to agree but part of that is down to the contribution of players like Pickford who would eventually fall out with him and others, such as Booth who would die tragically early in a car, driven by an inebriated Tod Browning.

 

 

 *According to Movies Silently, the film is featured on the Image Entertainment, Origins of Film DVD set, now deleted. This may come from another source although it doesn't - as featured above - look like anything like as clear as what we saw.

 

Live Cinema lives… It (1927) with Cyrus Gabrysch, Kennington Bioscope 10th Anniversary

This was the Kennington Bioscope’s 10^th Anniversary edition and the package was so sweetly wrapped it even had a Bow on it. Cyrus Gabrysch is, he said, often accused of starting the whole thing but what he and then John Sweeney thought would be a connoisseurs-only cinema club was transformed by a brave dog fighting his way up the stairs of a lighthouse to relight the beacon. Kevin Brownlow’s copy of a Rin Tin Tin film provided the moment when the audience erupted with applause for the heroic hound and Cyrus realised something special was happening.

Michelle Facey quoted Pamela Hutchinson’s famous description of the KB as a silent speakeasy and, Cyrus felt it was also like the Left Bank cinema groups that inspired Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer; maybe the Cinema Museum screenings will also assume an historic position as the place where silent film – film always on film – was resurgent through the Teens and the new Twenties that began not with a bang but with a fever as all cinemas we closed and the Bioscope moved fearlessly online with MC Facey becoming the face and voice of the silent resistance on KB TV.

The Bioscope has always dealt with the material issue of cinema and tonight was no different with a first half dedicated to 28mm films introduced by Chris Bird, projecting 101-111 year old celluloid on 107-year-old equipment: film as history, history as film… moving history, it moves and it flickers even the hand-cranked 28mm projector Chris demonstrated on stage to audience applause. We should all be so functional after so long in the dark.

The Pathé-Frères 28mm KOK Cine Projector and Camera

We began with a couple of Pathé films, demonstrating French ingenuity in animation, Émile Cohl, one of the fathers of animation and then Méliès style trickery with Wonderful Armour?, as a devil and two women knights defied all logic and the evidence of our own eyes, as they detached body parts with a smile. Colin Sell did well to keep his head but, with the elegant Samantha looking on in silent support, he followed the action with all the concentrated control of a man who worked with Barry Cryer for decades.

Then to the USA for Lest We Forget a Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew film, in which the flowers of romance get very tangled and, as Chris stressed, the only copy, in the World, of Episode 30 (of 119) of the Hazards of Helen a very tightly wrought drama in which Helen Holmes appeared to swing off bridges, jump on to moving trains and dive into turbulent waters to retrieve stolen goods. We wondered if she used a stunt double, and John Sweeney too, who accompanied with fast-flowing lines and cliff-hanging drama all with no visible safety net.

Follow that Clara Bow. And, of course, she did.

Clara in a business meeting with Antonio Moreno

This was a 35mm print from Photoplay – company by-line “Live Cinema” - which had the natural warmth of a pre-digital restoration and looked stunning on the big screen. I say stunning and I mean Clara Bow who, despite a cameraman buddy complaining how difficult her kineticism made her to catch on film, featured in close-up after close-up that left the watched hanging on her every smile. The discussion pre-screening with my neighbour was who would be a modern-day equivalent of Clara and we struggled to come up with anyone as naturally powerful and so exuberantly un-mannered on screen.

If ever an actress has transcended the sum of her parts and if ever a star has been completely under-estimated then that must be Clara Bow. In her career from a 17-year-old in Down to the Sea in Ships in 1922 to a wise-cracking, talkie comedienne in Hoop-la in 1932… Clara made only a few classic films, although relatively few were preserved as Michelle pointed out. She never had something like The Crowd, Pandora’s Box or The Wind, to show what she could do dramatically but, in every one of the films she did make, there is ample evidence that she was an actor of considerable ability. And this is true for It made in a period in which she made some 16 films in about a year, Paramount making as much as they could from their asset. 

 

There was indeed something about Clara, more than just acting; something genuine and heartfelt that, coupled with her looks, earned her the respect of a large part of the cinema-going audience through these years. Watching It years later, her eldest son Rex Bell Jnr, remarked that he could see all the expressions and feeling he had seen from “mom” on a daily basis: she wasn’t just acting she was giving part of herself to the watcher. When called on to cry she would call on a childhood memory of one of her friends dying in her arms after being consumed in a house fire: those huge shining eyes would well up with genuine tears of sorrow.

If It is one of the great films it is because it perfectly captures the essence of Clara. Clarence Badger directs well enough and makes the most of his star and story, you can’t take your eyes off her and this is not just the compulsion of trying to find new angles on that prettiness but because she’s radiating so much joy. She is It and she’s supposed to be. It’s a tough role when you think about it, no one ever had to live up to a billing founded on such an uncompromising premise: there’s no “it or miss” you just have to be on target with the casting. Tag, you’re it!!

Based on Elinor Glyn’s story, they paid the English writer some $50,000 to appear in one scene in order to clarify exactly what “it” meant and, needless to say, this was considerably more than the vastly underpaid main star had accumulated from her previous half dozen features.

Events are based in the large family-run Waltham’s department store where the heir to the business, Cyrus Waltham (Antonio Moreno), is about to take over following his father’s departure to spend more time with his gun. Junior’s best friend, Monty (William Austin), is reading an excerpt from “It” in Cosmopolitan and trying to interest his friend in this new conception of humanity although in his case he’s more “what?!” than “It!”. Talking of which there’s a young Gary Cooper flashing by as a journalist… Clara noticed him too.

Sweet Santa…

My second trip to Coney Island this week after The Crowd at the BFI...

Whilst Cyrus focuses on his new responsibilities, his pal scans the store looking for an assistant with “it”. His eyes alight on Clara’s character, Betty Lou, and he knows he’s found his woman but, try as he might, he cannot get Cyrus’ attention even though Betty already has him in her sights. She’s not about to let him out of her grasp though and this begins a game of It! and mouse as confusion and comedy mix with the odd dash of pathos and anything that gives Clara the chance to run through her extraordinary emotional gears.

It’s an absolute blast and Clara is well-supported by William Austin, nostrils flared like a Jazz-Age Kenneth Williams and Antonio Moreno who just about convinces as her love interest even though there’s no way he had the same amount of “it”! But who has?

Cyrus Gabrysch’s anniversary accompaniment was suitably celebratory, running wild with Clara and holding us aloft with the film’s dazzle and comic drama; that rare Wednesday evening atmosphere we’ve all come to treasure. Ten years after Cyrus and John started playing and Rin-Tin-Tin single-doggedly saved that lighthouse, so many others continue to create these magical evenings, I than you all and raise a glass to the next ten years of history being watched and being made!

Chris Bird demonstrates the kit

Cyrus Gabrysch explains the Rin Tin Tin connection

Michelle Facey introduces It.

Clara in colour, a precious glimpse of Red Hair one of many Paramount carelessly did not preserve.

The KB is a little bit like this... 

Gratuitous extra Clara...

Are you being served?

When Connie met Johnnie… The Beloved Rogue (1927), John Sweeney, Kennington Bioscope

Michelle Facey’s well-researched introductions are a major feature of this temple of film ephemera, and she also turns a good phrase which is why I just have to steal her quip about the two main stars of tonight’s main feature. It truly was the meeting of two different cinematic cultures and Michelle showed a shot of Mr Barrymore, in costume, greeting Herr Veidt with a collection of some of Hollywood’s finest including script writer of this film, Paul Bern (the future, tragically short-lived, Mr Jean Harlow), Ernst Lubitsch and others.

 

I’d watched the Kino DVD of The Beloved Rogue some time ago but tonight we were treated to a 16mm copy that, as all the talk of the BFI’s Film on Film Festival reinforced, was a completely different experience, especially with this venue, this crowd and the wonderful improvisations of John Sweeney’s accompaniment. The source for the 16mm was different to that of the Kino version, no tints and missing the final chapter – a DVD transfer or the same generation print was used to close out the film – and, it looked and felt different, with the Bioscope’s projector whirring away at the back of the auditorium, there were new or newly-imagined details. The only true photographic memory is, of course, celluloid, a physical interaction with what has happened, light’s traces changing chemical compounds in ways digital is deluded if it imagines its impersonations are anything other than a facsimile.

 

John Barrymore’s attempt to out-Fairbanks Douglas has met with mixed reviews over the years, not least from himself (he described himself as a “ham” after the premier) and whilst his fan Orson Welles who liked the film but felt his idol was “not at his best”. But, whilst Barrymore felt he missed the mark by over-playing the colourful lead, François Villon: poet, womaniser and drinker who somehow also embodies the spirit of France, it’s not the easiest of briefs.

Jane Winton looks admiringly at John Barrymore

Based on an actual 13th century poet, The Beloved Rogue includes many florid moments invented (or over-invented) to add zest to this camp fantasy. It’s an all-too-easy target and yet… there’s an extraordinary energy around the crowd scenes in particular and Alan Crosland directs with style and free-running energy. The superb Conrad Veidt all but steals the show as a greasily ambiguous Louis XI and Marceline Day uses her clear, open expression to swoon-inducing effect as his beautiful ward Charlotte de Vauxcelles.

If there’s something about Johnnie and definitely Connie, it has to be repeated that there’s something about Marceline too, she has a very modern face and physique, and her wide eyes express something familiar and grounded. One of the great silent straight women, for Buster, for Harry Langdon, for Clara (Dorothy Arzner’s The Wild Party) and here for the good, the bad and the downright ugly. But that’s no way to talk about Conrad Veidt but here this most protean of silent performers seems to be inhabited by Richard III, doubled over in unctuous concern, turning his 6 feet 2 ½ inches frame into something frail and uncertain, deliberately allowing the 5 feet 10-inch Barrymore the higher ground. Veidt is morally ambiguous in effortlessly European ways and maybe John felt the pressure, just a bit…

Barrymore certainly shows a different side to his style as he throws the kitchen sink at creating a character big enough to fill William Cameron Menzies’ immense sets, rightly highlighted by Michelle as a stunning contribution to the film’s enjoyment. John certainly prepared well for the role and for a 45-year-old he’s rather ripped in the slightly odd torture scenes after he is captured by the film’s real baddie, the Duke of Burgundy. John’s in his shorts and gets beaten, flogged, dipped into flames and then winched high, before being selected as brutal entertainment for the wedding of the day…

Conrad Veidt

Set after Joan of Arc’s execution in 1431 (she came back strong after that didn’t she?) the film starts in a most un-funny way with the burning of Villon’s father at the stake… He was a patriot and fought in the name of a united France against the English and their Burgundian allies. His wife (Lucy Beaumont) prays that their son will inherit his spirit but, fully grown sadly he seems more concerned with spirits… Is this a redemptive story of fool to hero or does Villon play the fool to bide time?

Francoise’s roguish tendencies are fully developed as he gleefully steals wine to get drunk with his friends and leads the All Fools Day street celebration as the King of Fools. This section is very well realised by Crosland who generates a visceral charge by moving his camera through the celebrating hordes as snow swirls across the city. Snow in April: Paris in the Snow-time? Just what we need after a week of high temperatures.

Amongst the revellers is the striking Jane Winton as The Abbess, Mack Swain, striking in a different way, and Slim Summerville as Villon’s buddies Nicholas and Jehan as well as Angelo Rossitto (later to star in Tod Browning’s Freaks) as Beppo the Dwarf. As the party gets started Francoise is in pursuit of one of his favourite things as he evades the constabulary and comes down the rooftops to cheat an innkeeper of some wine. He heads of linking arms and skipping with Nicholas and Jehan – there’s a lot of skipping. Jigging and general dancing for joy: how else to convey energetic adventurism to scale?

William Cameron Menzies' sets are stunning

Having been crowned King of Fools, Francoise regales his rapt audience with a poem and them mounts a statue of the King just as the Duke of Burgundy arrives for an audience with his cousin. Francoise makes merry at Burgundy’s expense, knowing him as a man of ambition who wants the crown for himself. But King Louis, a “slave to the stars” has his judgement clouded by the advice of his astrologer and is loath to confront his rival. He comes out of the palace and has no option to support Burgundy against the crowd and ends up banishing Villon from Paris – “his life”.

Riding with him is his ward Charlotte who is appalled to finally see the reality of the poet she idolises: is the most inspiring wordsmith in France really an uncouth drunken fool? But things are about to get worse as she is promised in marriage to Burgundy’s lieutenant, Thibault d'Aussigny (Henry Victor), part of Burgundy’s plot to gain quick access to Paris.

In exile, Villon turns into a gallic Robin Hood as he hijacks the King’s gifts to Burgundy and climbs the walls to use the King’s catapult to fire the food and drink at the city in order to feed the poor. He ends up catapulting himself to avoid capture and crash lands, of course, into the rooms of Charlotte de Vauxcelles, what are the odds eh? This sequence features a stuntman diving against foreground scenery with the camera at a right angle; the result turned vertical into horizontal and adds further momentum to the film’s relentless pace.

Every day's a Marceline Day

The young noblewoman soon learns that this surprise invader is the Francoise Villon, a man whose words have touched her like no other but, again not pausing for breath, they are rudely interrupted by Thibault and his troops, there follows an altercation involving bears in barrels, recently deceased poultry and a heavyweight chandelier. Francoise escapes and takes Charlotte with him over the rooftops he knows so well to the safety of his mother’s house. Queue emotional reunion and the sadness of a mother deceived by her own hope: will her son ever amount to the man she wants him to be?

The route forward accelerates as the King finds it expedient to order Francoise death but the poet saves his skin by convincing Louis that their lives and death are inter-dependent: with this swift turn of phrase, he guarantees his life as courtier. Now able to influence events in the way his mother always wished, he is still a commoner which means he can never marry Charlotte, but all are soon overtaken by events as Burgundy kidnaps her and is intent on completing her marriage to his cause.

Villon and his friends, plus an army from the goodly poor of the Cour des miracles, the slum districts of Paris, as also featured in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, borrowed here in strictly un-historical manner natch. But there must be swash and there will be buckle and it’s a rip-roaring finale with the cast of thousands are moved so well among the towering sets.

The film was believed lost until Mary Pickford revealed she had one in her archive and I wonder again how would we feel about The Beloved Rogue if it were still a lost film? As ever we need to count our blessings and thank the collectors, the restorers and the historians for preserving film in all its forms.

The rug stays cut when Josephine cuts it

Talking of which, the first half of the show combined a series of contemporary trailers for silent films including Ben Hur (1925) – which I’ve still to see on the big screen – a Marie Prevost film (it does exist but only on celluloid and with Serbo-Croat intertitles, one day maybe…) and others including King Cowboy (1928) starring Tom Mix and a-lot of Josephine Baker in Siren of the Tropics (1927)… oh my, there was steam coming off the screen! The art of the trailer is a valuable sub-genre all its own, cinematic striptease perhaps, revealing just enough, not too much and it provided quite the challenge for the accompanying Colin Sell who, of course, dealt with the flurry of action, emotion and revelation, with customary flair and sang froid! Grace under pressure these pianists!

It's been a great first half year for the Bioscope and my thanks and admiration goes as usual to all those involved in making these celluloid adventures possible. See you in September for more quiche, conversations and classic, rare, film!

  

The Cinema Museum where resides the Kennington Bioscope

A 35mm film projector, yesterday at the Museum.

The music of chance... Strolling Players (1925), with Cyrus Gabrysch, Kennington Bioscope

 

Sex and silent film, it’s full of objectification and attitudes that today we frown upon and yet… here we find four men sizing up young Lya de Putti, whose heads transform into pig’s as they imagine our heroine with no clothes on. OK, those clothes do seem to disappear but I think Karl Grune was making a point, wasn’t he? To put this even further in context, Felix Salten, the writer of the film later went on to write Bambi; so, make of that what you will.

The sexist pig-heads was one of a number of striking visual set pieces that illustrate Grune’s story of a star being born, a tale as old as time indeed, as young actress meets successful player, Axel Swinborne (Eugen Klopfet), and we all know the rest… or do we, for this film ends in a way that, whilst I obviously can’t reveal, does leave the audience surprised.

We were watching the BFI’s 35mm print of Strolling Players (Komödianten or Comedians, certainly more Max Wall than Jimmy Tarbuck!) and this is, possibly, the only celluloid copy left in the World, yet another reminder of the rarities on view at the Kennington Bioscope and the vital role played by our national film archive. Why travel a thousand miles when you can see these treats in Lambeth? Blessed are the hobbyists, the collectors, the projectors, the historians and the programmers!

The story spins on coincidence – we are all after all merely players on the stage and there’s more than one reference to Shakespeare – starting with the arrival of a group of strolling players at makeshift theatre/public house in the village of Gotten. They’re performing Faust and it’s fair to say that the locals aren’t giving the cast the respect they might possibly deserve despite the presence of a looming Fritz Rasp looking almost cherubic in blonde curls and a striking leading lady (Lya De Putti), listed just as “The Sentimental”.

The director of the troupe (Viktor Schwanneke) knows this rejection well and as he’s always done and no doubt always will do, rouses his weary gang for a morale-boosting meal.

Miles away in the big city, we see Swinborne’s latest triumph and his determination to take a holiday on the completion of this run. He duly heads off on a train only, and what does this say about the safety of German trains at this point, to catch the train door handle on his waistcoat and fall out at high speed. Rescued by railwaymen, he’s taken to the inn where the players are staying and Lya volunteers to tend to him after he’s unceremoniously dumped on an upstairs bed.

The next morning the great actor is remarkably unscathed – what a lucky break as he remarks… and going down stairs to find out where he is, catches the players in rehearsal, in the very play he has just starred in, right at the moment for his cue to rush in and find his faithless lover and then shoot her dead. Maybe it’s the new lease of life or just the look on Lya’s face, he offers to join them for the evening’s performance and, unlike the previous evening’s Geothe, tonight is a huge hit and he raises everyone’s game.

His faithful dresser (Hermann Picha) comes to collect him the next day and just as he thanks the director for his generosity, he tells Lya that she could be a successful actress if she lets him guide her career. She’s persuaded and heads of to, of course, guaranteed success.

Lya de Putti, a World-class slinker!

In the cut and thrust of theatricality there’s always complications and, just as Swinborne comes to love his protégé so do others, including a handsome young prince (Owen Gorin) and no wonder given the stunning fashions on display for the Austro-Hungarian aristocrat de Puti. She has to choose between her loyalty to Swinborne and her primal attraction to the younger man… it’s a tough call and this emotional maze confounds our expectations in a denouement that dodges and dives in every effort to avoid the predictable.

Lya’s magnetic presence does much to elevate the film, she may be posh but she’s got a look that connects in a very earthy way and as she was to show in Variety and many more, she knows how to play the camera and to pull the watcher in with earnest, raw expression. She’s part Pola, neo-Nazimova - that hair! - with a hint of a more virtuous Valeska Gert - a Euro-pudding of the most adult-deco proportions. 

Cyrus Gabrysch underpinned this emotional commitment with improvisations that captured the emotional storms and romantic sweep of this tug of love. This was a fiercely committed approach that was buoyed by clusters of muscular chords and lilting lines; I haven’t seen Cyrus play for sometime but he was lost in music and completely plugged in to the action on screen. Stirred and shaken.

 

Ralph Lewis and Norma Talmadge

Going Straight (1916) with Colin Sell

As if this BFI gem wasn’t rare enough, we were also treated to another early Norma Talmadge film, following on from last time’s stunning 16mm copy of A Helpful Sisterhood (1914). As with that film, I’d already seen Going Straight (1916) but never like this 35mm versions, which whilst showing its age, which I like, was full of gorgeous texture and tints showing Norma in fabulous close up as the 21 year-old showed the growing confidence in her craft.

 

Norma featured in hundreds of short films for the Vitagraph Company from 1910 to 1915. Then, having joined Triangle Pictures, she made longer form films of which Going Straight, was one of the first. Directed by Chester M. Franklin and Sidney Franklin the picture clearly shows the guiding influence of DW Griffith who oversaw a lot of the production at Triangle. There are expert intercuts and parallel scenes, close ups reminiscent of Pig Alley and the action is tightly marshalled throughout.

Talmadge is superb, acting naturalistically and given ample close ups to demonstrate her restrained playing which has more in common with Gish and Pickford than some of the more dramatic queens of the era. She plays Grace the wife of successful businessman, John Remington, played by Ralph Lewis. The two live in wedded bliss with their young family in one of those sizable wooden properties we brick-bound Brits envy. However, despite this apparent normality, both Grace and John were once part of a group of professional criminals known as the Higgins gang. Grace finds a clipping about their trial and a flashback explains their violent past.

Eugene menaces

Higgins/Remington’s second in command was Jimmy Briggs, played by the excellent Eugene Pallette, full of violent menace, who, after doing his time spots John, who offers to help him on the straight and narrow. Unwilling to change his greasy spots, Briggs threatens to reveal Grace’s criminal past and John has little option but to join him on one last robbery. He goes to commit the crime with Briggs whilst Grace stays over at a well-healed friend’s house after a card party. As it turns out – in a coincidence not too uncommon at the time – Briggs and John are burgling the same house.

What could possibly go wrong?

It is undeniably melodramatic but Talmadge is believable and understated even in the most fraught moments. She has a number of close ups that allow her to illustrate the emotional shifts in the story and her facial transitions are quite the special effect and as viewed on this wonderful 35mm copy, stunning. She’s another whose looks appear to be almost “out of time” and could have made her successful in any period of screen acting. It’s a face you enjoy reading on many levels and has a fascination and a depth that would grow to place her in the upper echelons by the early Twenties.

Colin Sell’s fingers danced along creating a sprightly symphony to accompany the players’ hard work and as with all good accompaniment the sound and vision blurred into a deliciously satisfying whole – sorry, the new range of home-made catering at the Bioscope naturally encourages such comparisons!

Another special occasion in Kennington, introduced majestically and expertly by Michelle Facey as we have come to expect!

 

 

 

Triple Talmadge… The Love Expert (1920), Helpful Sisterhood (1914), Colin Sell, John Sweeney, Kennington Bioscope

Constance Talmadge

Blessed are the collectors, the archivists and the programmers, the people with a bee in their bonnet about preservation, the completists and those for whom quality goes with rarity. I’d seen The Helpful (?) Sisterhood (1914), the first of tonight’s films on a semi-legal DVD collection of early Norma Talmadge Vitagraph shorts but what we saw projected tonight was something else. A 16mm copy made from a 35mm nitrate print, replete with all the original tints and, as its owner Chris Bird pointed out, a lot of the sparkle you’d expect from the original. It’s the difference between a bootleg and a surround sound remix, something almost as good as the original experience and who knows how many other copies exist to this standard out in the world.

 

The Talmadges have so often been over-looked in the modern “canon” of silent film possibly as Anita Loos suggested in her biography, because they barely ventured into sound films but also because, famously, they didn’t need to. Whether Norma’s Brooklyn accent could ever have been tempered enough to earn her the plaudits of the other Norma in the thirties or Joan, Greta and Lillian, we’ll never know but she didn’t need to prove herself anymore, even if her fans would have wanted her to.

 

I came across Norma early in my silent film journey (ooh, it’s like Strictly!!) thanks to The Parade’s Gone By and in, her entertaining and informative introduction, KB’s MC Michelle Facey, quoted Kevin Brownlow who regards her as one of the finest actors of the era able to show restraint even in the most unlikely scenarios along with Clarence Brown’s appreciation of one of the finest pantomimists.

Norma Talmadge

Well, here she is aged around 18, showing some of the range and instinctive skill she would gradually develop in Van Dyke Brooke’s tidy two-reel morality play about the dangers of peer group pressure and those who place style over study at what turns out to be Talmadge’s actual alma mater in Brooklyn. The story was written by one Margaree P. Dryden, and features Norma as the poor but bright Mary who, living at her Gran’s (Mary Maurice) humble home, gets to join a sorority group at college led by the daughters of wealthy men played by Marie Tener, Mary Anderson and her younger sister Constance aged just 16 and with bags of the pep we’ll be covering in a moment.

 

Mary is delighted to find herself with these new peers and stretches to keep in with them but when money comes into the picture, to buy fancy clothes she resorts to stealing. Is it worth the moral compromise and will lessons be learned by Mary but also her new friends, all of whom probably failed the entrance exam for Columbia. It’s a near perfect example of what Norma was doing as she raced towards over 100 films made between 1910 and 1915 and the start of longer features such as The Social Secretary, The Devil’s Needle and Going Straight. She would marry Joseph Schenck and together they would build the family with production companies for both Norma and Constance. Smart, smart women!

 

John Sweeney accompanied this gem with diligence and finesse; and also eased into the spirit for footage of Constance Talmadge wearing a drawn-on moustache and larking about with Roscoe Arbuckle and others. Then there was film of the actress with her second husband, Alastair Mackintosh in Scotland in 1926, one of the last places you’d expect to find her and, indeed, she divorced him the following year after he committed adultery. She was married four times, Norma three and Natalie once.

The Sisterhood with Norma in the foreground and Constance second from right 

I’m always struck by the differences between Norma and Constance with Natalie a delicate mix of both. Norma was elegant, certainly more controlled and with Big Sisterly behaviours – trust me, I know! – whilst Constance aka “Dutch”, was a hyper energised ball of energy who, as with Doug Fairbanks, was described by Loos as not so much an actor as an incredibly likeable personality. Hyper likeability goes with the job description I suppose and the energy levels are something to behold in the BFI’s 35mm print of The Love Expert.

 

The Love Expert is not, I would venture, Anita Loos’ finest work nor that of her co-writer John Emerson but what it is is the perfect vehicle for her friend Constance to not only act and react but to slay the audience. To watch this film is to be assailed by close up after close up of Connie, majoring on profiles, semi profiles – lovely both left and right – and wide-eyed smiles that melt the cynical grey of a working day all away. Yes! I have certain feelings for Constance Talmadge and this film has completely disarmed me in ways that the script could barely suggest. OK, maybe I’ve OD’d on the 35mm freshness that reveals the freckled freshness of our star’s face and the depths in those huge eyes, but this is some mighty powerful potion, a screen to audience transfer of pure star power.

 

Constance T: love is all you need.

Director David Kirkland is the man to blame, as he’s used his main asset to devastating effect and, to be fair, he had been given a story that begins in Wendy Goes to College territory showing three types of university student, the athletic woman, the scientific one – wearing glasses naturally – and one who is determined to become expert in the emotions and the science of love. Back in my college days this was all classed as extracurricular activity like, rowing, sports and membership of the Everton Supporters Club (there wasn’t a Liverpool one and well… I missed the accent!).

 

Constance plays Babs who has learned the signs of love – blushing and heart palpitations when holding hands or in close proximity and all of the rest, all scientifically tested, presumably emotionally as well. The original film came with spot tints to illustrate the blushes of certain characters but all that remains on the BFI print are the written instructions for the tinting which flicker past every so often.

 

Unfortunately for Babs, at least in academic terms, her subject a. isn’t really recognised as such and b. is distracting from her proper studies and so she is asked to leave which delights her as she can now really push on with the field work her theories require. Her mean old Dad John Hardcastle (Arnold Lucy) is equally of the opinion that her “subject” is a frivolous one and nixes her planned trip to Palm Springs when she attempts to establish A Love Connection with his colleague Thompson (James Spottswood) but no signs are present.

 

Middle sister Natalie Talmadge in The Love Expert.

Kicked off the Palm Springs junket, Babs gets sent to her Aunt Cornelia (Nellie P. Spaulding) in Boston and who is engaged to a moderately handsome man (it’s my blog) named Jim Winthrop (John Halliday). Their engagement has been for six years and counting as Jim won’t wed until the rest of his family is taken care of: sister Dorcas (sister Natalie Talmadge) a clearly good-looking woman in glasses worn to prevent her getting short-sighted and, of course for comedic affect. Men rarely make passes at ladies who wear glasses and even fewer would risk a conversation with Jim’s other sister, Matilda (Fannie Bourke) who is far more believably eccentric than Natalie T is plain.

 

The real fly in the ointment is Aunt Emily (Marion Sitgreave) who is convinced her end is nigh even as she threatens to go on for years. All of these things matter to Babs as her own test has revealed that she is in love with Jim, their faces blushing, their hearts fluttering and their pulse rate increasing. Now, apart from the fact that Jim is engaged to her aunt, Babs has decided that he is The One and she hatches a plan to settle the others down so she can get her man…

 

Do you need to know the plan? I don’t think so but safe to say there’s a lot of daft fun to be had when Babs engineers a trip to Palm Springs where she uses every bit of her “expertise” in love.

 

"Think what it means to find your mate?!"

It’s not a great movie, and that can be said for a fair few Talmadge films, but it is a very impressive demonstration of Constance’s screen presence and her ability to hold not just your attention but an entire film together. Colin Sell played along with style, debonair digits delivering the elegant bon mots this film deserved, celebrating not the epic or the groundbreaking but the sheer entertainment and helping to restore the love for one of the brightest stars of the silent era.

 

So, another evening of film that is pretty much impossible to see anywhere else. Come to the Kennington Cabaret old chums, it’s his and her stories featuring gobbets of first and secondary sources like no other.

 

If you want to find out more about Norma Talmadge then I would heartily recommend the website put together by Greta de Groat from Stanford University. It’s the most comprehensive source of all things Talmadge and full of rigorous analysis.

Bit of an over-sell on this ad...

Girls will be boys… I Don’t Want to be a Man (1919)/Beverly of Graustark (1926), Kennington Bioscope and Vito Project

 

This was a glorious collaboration between the Kennington Bioscope and the Vito Project, a film club aimed at exploring cinema through a queer perspective, both meeting in elegant harmony with two silent films featuring two of the finest comedians of the period doing what they did best; challenging norms and making people laugh. This had to be one of the most celebratory atmospheres ever at the Cinema Museum with a meeting of minds from the two passion projects finding new aspects of appreciation, fresh angles to adore. There is always respect here for the context of century old cinema but there were new laughs to be had as the audience spotted patterns in the humour that some of us may have previously missed.

That said, some of us are clearly not that observant as I had completely forgotten the spectacular two-strip colour finale for Beverly despite having seen this restoration in Pordenone in 2019 with Mr Sweeney also accompanying. At the time I wrote about the importance of watching comedy with an audience and tonight this was proven once again with delicious new connections within the nuanced daftness that hold us all together in front of the world.

Marion’s a tonic and, as I put it in 2019, clearly hungover and heavily caffeinated, “…there’s no better sight than Marion’s look straight to camera eyes twinkling with the latest daftness. Mabel started it and Stan followed but Marion took it to another jazz-age level; her face bubbling and alive, as knowing as anyone, with perfectly timed beauty, an irresistible smile.”

Marion in colour!!

Vito supremo, Matheus Carvalho introduced and gave us an overview of Marion’s once misunderstood career…. Davis never made a seriously revered film (although Show People comes close: it is loved) but it doesn’t matter as she was the queen of romantic comedy drama for much of the Twenties producing a string of major hits that allowed audiences to laugh themselves out of the day-to-day and onto the screen in sympathy from When Knighthood was in Flower (1922), to Little  Old New York (1923) and onto this film. In all three, Marion dresses as a man to save the day and she does so in a manner, as Matheus quoting from Jeanine Bassinger in Silent Stars, aims at “comic androgyny”: she creates the physical sense of the male in her movements and attitude, with a grow-up, very meta sense, that anyone as feminine as she could every get away with really fooling anyone…

To this extent, Marion in drag is just an extension of her look to the camera and the audience, its’ a look of comic collaboration, we know and she knows but, strangely the rest of the cast don’t. We’re in on the joke and we can’t help but love her for it!

The story is brief on set-up and long on the situation. She plays a New York socialite, Beverly, called upon to impersonate her cousin, Prince Oscar of Graustark (Creighton Hale) after he injures himself in a skiing accident. If the Prince doesn’t make it to the Graustark coronation on time the deals off and the nasty General Marlanax (Roy D’Arcy once again fits the role of moustache twirling baddie to an evil T).

Marion just about a boy (screenshot from Movies Silently)

So, we literally have a Prince formerly known as Beverly having to dress as a man and convince the cabinet and court to save the throne and she does such a splendid job that even politically active and military-trained goatherd Danton (Antonio Moreno) can’t see that, with that skin, those eyes and all the rest, that she’s less of a man than he’ll ever be.

 

It’s exquisitely daft and the timing is absolutely perfect throughout and, this was reinforced by another masterclass in sympathetic accompaniment from John Sweeney on piano; the accompanist is the fourth element of the perfect silent mix: after film, location and crowd. Tonight, we were blessed with all round excellence from John and from Colin Sell on the first feature, an all-together more riotous affair.

Things getting out of hand...

The evening was also special one at the Bioscope as it was Michelle Facey’s birthday and, inundated with flowers, cards and gifts she celebrated her gift from Ernst Lubitsch and Ossi Oswalda in her introduction for the film. Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don't Want to be a Man) (1918) was one of the director’s last long-shorts made just before his first feature with Pola Negri, Die Augen der Mumie Ma (1918).  Oswalda is every inch as energetic as Negri and far more anarchic than Davies, or almost any American actor.

This was Weimar Germany and an initial post-war period that saw a flourishing of frank expression and, with no censorship for a year or two, some of the most forward-thinking sexual statements including, of course, Different from the Others (1919). Watching this film again there’s no doubt that the film does more than tease us with the implications of the cross-dressing; Ossi’s erstwhile counsellor Herr Brockmüller (Ferry Sikla) who she meets in a cabaret, dressed as a man, is in no doubt that he is kissing a he even if it’s a she. As he says later on about his new pal’s sister, “she’s a looker too…” Of course, what’s so great, what’s so free, is that Lubitsch makes very little of this… he leaves that to the audience in a tragically short lived permissive society.

Ossi is a rebellious tomboy, gambling, drinking and doing all manner of grown-up male things from which her uncle (Kurt Götz) and governess (Margarete Kupfer) forbid her if only to allow themselves to indulge. Lubitsch highlights the comic hypocrisy of both as she carries on smoking Ossi’s cigarette and he grabs a bigger glass to increase the rate of alcoholic intake.

Ossi’s like Iggy with a Lust for Life… or at least for eating cherries and gobbling candies in her window whilst a crowd of young men pleads to be fed like hungry penguins. She obliges only for Uncle to chase them away... what the girl surely needs is some discipline or maybe an adventure! Uncle is called away for the comically un-specific fact that “the institute he has set up is ready for him” but before he goes, he recruits a stern governor to make sure his ward is properly looked after: Herr Counsellor Brockmüller.

Brockmüller almost immediately brings Ossi to heel with his startling natural authority – he’s also a bit of a looker boys and girls! But Ossi is not so easily curtailed and she vows to resist whilst he promises to cut her down to size. The game is afoot! Ossi decides to play men at their own game and goes off to the gentlemen’s outfitters to order a dinner suit. The assistants fight over measuring her up and decide on splitting the work limb by limb. Men lust after Ossi in groups and make horrible obvious play of their intentions: but she’s in charge.

Kitted up in starched collar, bow tie, top hat and tails, Ossi sets off to have fun at the dance hall, catching the eye of a number of young women as she takes her pretty-boy swagger to the dance. She chances across someone familiar: Herr Brockmüller and tries to attract away his favoured escort and once she’s distracted by another man, the two get to know each other in the time-honoured rituals of male bonding: they get smashed.

 

Governess Margarete Kupfer enjoying forbidden fruit...

It’s a long night and by the time the two fall out onto the pavement it’s the morning and they’re struggling to think or walk straight, putting on each other's overcoats which happen to include their address cards. Confused by the cards, their driver takes them to each other’s houses but not before the above-mentioned drunken smooching. Cheekily subversive. the kissing has the audience running through the permutations: Ossi knows what she’s doing but Brockmüller is clearly a man of broad tastes…

Colin Sell accompanied with wit and the practices ease of a man who has worked with Graeme Garden and played up the storm Ossi’s anarchy deserved. In Germany as elsewhere, the War left an opportunity for gender equality and Ossi was here to grab that chance with both hands either in a suit or in a dress… for the continuation of the film’s title is clearly: I want to be a woman!

Back to Marion, Matheus quoted Cordelia D. "Delight" Evans writing in Screenland in July 1926 “…ninety years from now, when all the war pictures and propaganda films and arty productions have been forgotten, some old white beard is sure to mumble, ‘There was a girl named Marion who looked awfully cute in boy’s clothes.’”

Well, there were two awfully cute girls in boy's clothes here tonight, Miss Evans, it’s 2023 and my beard is indeed, mostly, white.

Antonio and Marion, he has no clue the sap!

 

Here's to more collaboration between the KB and Vito, a splendid time was had by all.

 

For further details of the Vito Film Club visit their Facebook page.

Bioscope details are to be found on the Cinema Museum website.