All around the World… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day One

 

After the rain-sodden beauty of Venice, the ancient charms of the altogether dryer Treviso waterways I finally arrived in Pordenone to find it filled with friends from countries too numerous to mention. On days like this, “Pords” is indeed the centre of the silent cinematic world and as we renewed acquaintances we were also to be treated to a world-wide series of screenings, all united, also, by their silence. Now, as much as ever, we can only appreciate any opportunity to bring people, places and creative expression together. One medium, one mind… sympatico!

 

Early Cinema – The Biograph Project with Donald Sosin

 

We begin with everyone’s favourite early film director based on opinion polls from 1952. We’re less tolerant of David Wark Griffith’s beliefs and convictions these days but there’s no doubting his part in the history of film even if that is endlessly contested in terms of politics and technique: you can’t divide those two things as easily as might be hoped. Still, the people he worked with, the things he did do to popularise films, we are probably more certain of these in his early period than after 1915…

 

Film Preservation Society is currently working to preserve and restore all Biograph films directed by D. W. Griffith between 1908 and 1913 – around 460! and here were the results of their work from the Griffith get-go. We had three shorts from 1908 each around twelve minutes and each displaying the prevailing views of some folk at the time and how. Children were stolen by “gypsies” in Griffith’s debut The Adventures of Dollie and also by native Americans in his fifth film (the third surviving?) The Redman and the Child although the child is then rescued by another.

 

Griffith’s second film was Fight for Freedom (1908) and this involves a Mexican murderer called Pedro and his attempts to evade capture after a card game turns violent… These are the very beginnings for Griffith, Victorian melodramas told with technical flair aided by the brilliant cameraman Billy Bitzer. There’s more to come every morning and it’s an education for those of us who have only seen his features screened.

 

Dollie gets hidden in a barrel by naughty people

Sicilia Landscapes with Stephen Horne

 

Travel broadens the mind… that’s why I’m here! This year’s Festival is focusing on Sicily which is a place I really must visit having fallen short previously, how it looks now compared to Arturo Ambrosio’s Sicilia Illustrata (1907) would be fascinating to see. This was a dreamy way to cover the subject with films from 1907 to 1929 often covering the same locations showing the island’s rich antiquity and pushing Palermo high up my bucket list – it has to be warmer than Venice right?

 

Stephen Horne accompanied with lyrical wafts from piano and flute across this most un-Italianate environment and helped us share in the wonder of a past revealed. My grandparents were alive when these films were made, how different their lives in North Western England… almost like a different continent, and a different century.

 

Ivan Koval-Samborsky and Ada Vojtsik

The Forty-First (1926), Mauro Colombis, DCP

 

Yakov Protazanov directed before and after the Russian Revolution and I’ve watched quite a number of his films from the Departure of a Grand Old Man (1912) – about Leo Tolstoy - The Queen of Spades (1916), Father Sergius (1918) to, of course, Aelita (1924) and it’s interesting to see him address the Russian Civil War in this film. The war lasted from just after the October revolution to October 1922 and involved the new Bolshevik government’s Red Army fighting anti-revolutionary White Russians, supported by the US, UK and twelve other countries, as well as a third set of separatist forces from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and others. One of the most complex conflicts of the century estimates of the causalities range from seven to twelve million with millions more displaced.

The story here is set in Central Asia with a Red Army troop being pursued under the most hostile of conditions by a detachment of whites… it’s essentially a story of love versus duty with the Red Army sniper Maryutka (Ada Vojtsik) only slightly wounding her intended 41^st kill, a White lieutenant aristocrat Govorukha-Otrok played by the dashing Ivan Koval-Samborsky. He’s taken capture and the Reds have to decide how to extract the information he is holding, he’s sent off to their headquarters but ends up abandoned on an island with just Maryutka as their feelings ebb and flow.

 

It's a stark film which feels politically vague – certainly four years after the war ended – and very focused on the two main characters, often in close up or, in one memorable shot, sitting side by side stripped to the waist as their clothes dry on the fire. Filmed in the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan and the Apsheron peninsular of Azerbaijan, it has stunning locations and as Peter Bagrov says in his catalogue essay, it may be the only soviet-era film of the silent period to portray the civil war as tragedy rather than victory. And so it goes.

Zítari

Latin American shorts with José María Serralde Ruiz

We travelled again with some glorious fragments including nitrate preserved fireworks in a collection of fragments from Salvador Toscano including the celebrations in 1910 of Mexican independence and the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, alive and gruesomely dead. Sergei Eisenstein’s El Desastre en Oaxaca showed the deadly results of a Mexican earthquake in 1931 and then we had a wordless mystery called Abismos (1931) with Salvador Pruneda prefiguring David Lynch in terms of narrative strangeness.

 

Miguel Contreras Torres, Zítari (The Temple of the Thousand Serpents) (1931) concluded the section with a mix of silent and sound examinations of the unknowable history of Mayans, Aztecs and Toltec ruins. I was reminded of the early works of Erik von Daniken who suggested that these alien artefacts were actually constructed by extra-terrestrials but nothing is more mysterious than the earthly mysteries of these cultures.

 

Dinty (1920) with John Sweeney

This was nominally a vehicle for the remarkable young performer Wesley Barry it is also notable for providing one of Colleen Moore’s biggest breaks. Moore’s extraordinary energy comes through as she plays a young “colleen” (how many times?) who leaves Ireland for America where her new husband is making a new life. She’s striking and vibrant in these scenes but when fate takes a nasty twist and she falls ill with tuberculosis, she offers up one of the most believable performances in her sick bed. There’s a stillness to her expression, hardly the energy or will to even smile at her son and there’s no flicker of hope in her drained eyes. That’s acting and that’s range; and there’d be far more to come.

 

At the time 13-year-old Wesley was the star and he’s also very good, displaying a winning youthful pluck that would lead to a string of “our gang” type successes throughout the twenties. He was one of the leading freckled performers of the age, Marshall Neilan being one of the first to deploy them to full effect in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – no grease paint and no credit in Mary Pickford’s film, but it got him noticed! Barry grew up and directed films with his most notable effort was The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), apparently Andy Warhol’s favourite film, depicting a future society in which robots are persecuted by the fanatical humans of The Order of Flesh and Blood. I think we know who they are now, don’t we?

 

Anna May Wong, Walter Chung and Aaron Mitchell

Anna May Wong was only two years older than Barry, yet she gets to play Half Moon, not the public house in Putney, but the wife of Wong Tai (an improbable Noah Beery) an opium smuggler and head of a Tong gang. “Different times” yet still uncomfortable to watch. I do however, like Dinty’s multi-ethnic band of younger brothers and paperboys with African American Aaron Mitchell as Alexander Horatius Jones and the Chinese American Walter Chung as Sui Lung. They still have racist epithets mind. Times have changed.

 

John Sweeney, still fresh after playing last night in London – do silent accompanists have warm-up gigs before touring? – and provided thunderous accompaniment to match this film’s shifts in tone.

  

Opening Event 3 Bad Men (1926), Timothy Brock, the Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone

 

Thus we came to the biggest of finishes with a restored 3 Bad Men and a chance for those George O’Brien fans who saw his – very physical - performance in the screening of The Iron Horse at the Kennington Bioscope to appreciate his style all over again. For me this made for a nice connection with Ford having watched The Searchers in 70mm on the big screen in Piazza Maggiore this summer in Bologna – what an extraordinary filmmaker he was and how well did he capture the beauty and brutality of the old West?

 

This is a true Ford epic, produced over a 15-month period out in the desert near Victorville, California and around Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It must have been like a military operation and it was tough with three of the leading actresses hospitalised with paratyphoid fever. Horses and stuntmen may well have been injured in the making of this film especially the huge reconstruction of an actual gold rush as hundreds of horses and waggons race across the desert mirroring the Cherokee Strip land rush of 1893 in King Baggot’s Tumbleweeds (1925) starring William S. Hart and screened here a few years back.

 

I was also reminded of Hell’s Hinges as the bad guys torched a church and the townsfolk burned their bar. It’s a genuinely thrilling film and all of the Western tropes are here connecting to The Searchers and way beyond. The three bad men are "Bull" Stanley (Tom Santschi), "Spade" Allen (Frank Campeau) and Mike Costigan (J. Farrell MacDonald) who are long in the tooth outsiders and gunmen, they begin to change their perspective when they meet a young woman Lee Carlton (Olive Borden looking very modern I have to say) who’s father has just been killed by the gang of local really bad Sheriff Layne Hunter (Lou Tellegen who has electric blue eyes that still shine through the screen).

 

Hearts of gold?

Lee’s love interest is a beefy cowboy Dan O'Malley (smiley George O'Brien who, thankfully keeps his top on) but the real focus is on the three unwise men and their voyage to redemption. Surprisingly the film failed to be a hit at the time with audiences growing tired of epic westerns. What we see now looks like a template but it’s the perfection of existing styles and tropes done as well as they have ever been done though. It stands the test of time.

 

Playing no small part in this was Timothy Brock who conducted the Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone in playing his own new score and it swept us up and back to 1926 and then the 1870s… You can never tire of the new connections and excitement in forging a new musical alliance with these stories and filmmakers and the ghost of John Ford, cast and crew could be heard cheering high up in the rafters along with the rest of us! I was especially thrilled by the powerful brass sections and hints of western musical conventions, all brought through so subtly and coherently in ways that had me moist of eye and on the edge of my seat for the closing section. A magnificent 27 players, or there abouts!

 

I also surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying Babby Peggy rounding up bootleggers as Peg O’ The Mounted (1924), she’s an expressive marvel and more than cheeky if you’re a criminal. Daan van den Hurk rode side-saddle-piano in delight.

 

Everything under the Sun was in tune and the Sun was eclipsed by the Moon... More prog references tomorrow. Probably.

 

Olive winks at George

I also liked Dukken (FR?, 1909-1913)) an amusing short about a young girl trying to avoid doing her chores by outsourcing them to a friend... smart! 

The gang’s all here… Dinty (1920), Edward Lorusso Kickstarter DVD

This was a vehicle for the remarkable young performer Wesley Barry and yet, it is perhaps more historically notable for providing one of Colleen Moore’s biggest breaks. Moore’s extraordinary energy comes through as she plays a young “colleen” (how many times? Etc…) who leaves Ireland for America where her new husband is making a new life. She’s striking and vibrant in these scenes but when fate takes a nasty twist and she falls ill with tuberculosis, she offers up one of the most believable performances in her sick bed. There’s a stillness to her expression, hardly the energy or will to even smile at her son and there’s no flicker of hope in her drained eyes. That’s acting and that’s range; and there’d be far more to come.

 

At the time 13-year-old Wesley was the star and he’s also very good, displaying a winning youthful pluck that would lead to a string of “our gang” type successes throughout the twenties. He was one of the leading freckled performers of the age, Marshall Neilan being one of the first to deploy them to full effect in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – no grease paint and no credit in Mary Pickford’s film, but it got him noticed! Wesley grown up was less of a proposition for Hollywood and after the films dried up in the thirties he went behind the camera and was assistant director for a number of films including Roger Corman's 1967 film The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Barry also directed films and his most notable effort was The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), apparently Andy Warhol’s favourite film, depicting a future society in which robots are persecuted by the fanatical humans of The Order of Flesh and Blood (1962) that’s gone straight to the top of my watch list!

Wesley Barry contemplates what he must do to impress Andy Warhol

Such things were probably far from Wesley’s mind in 1920 and he’s very engaging in a film that packs a lot of action and simple fun in with the melodramatic. Marshall Neilan created the film for his freckled friend with a script co-written by Marion Fairfax which allows the lad to show his own range.

 

Not quite knowing what to expect the early scenes in Ireland lead me to expect a romance in the old country as good catholic girl Doreen Adair (Colleen Moore), falls for protestant Danny O'Sullivan (Tom Gallery). Whilst her father disapproves of the Orangeman, he’s got plenty of get up and go and after getting approval marries Doreen and sets off to America, the land of Irish opportunity.

 

Colleen Moore knows the score

But as Doreen and their baby, Dinty, follow months later, she arrives in San Francisco just in time to find that her love has died in a car accident. Doreen works all the hours at menial jobs and brings up Dinty in a poor but decent way and we move forward twelve years we see her painfully ill in bed whilst the spunk kid is out selling newspapers as their breadwinner.

 

There’s a rival paper gang trying to muscle Dinty’s boys out of their corners but Dinty’s a determined lad and sets about the bigger bullies as you’d expect with superior vim and strategy. It’s all good fun and presages a more adult battle between local mobsters and the police. I do like Dinty’s multi-ethnic band of younger brothers with African American Aaron Mitchell as Alexander Horatius Jones and the Chinese American Walter Chung as Sui Lung, and, whilst it’s a precursor of Our Gang (1922–44), it also reminded me of the gang in Penfold and Sam (1923), itself a follow up to the now lost Penrod (1922) which starred Barry. It’s so interesting that the good guys are multi-racial whilst the bad guys are all bigger and white? Hollywood liberals eh? Hold on…

Noah Beery... bloomin' 'eck!!

Anna May Wong was just 15 and only two years older than Wesley Barry, yet she gets to play Half Moon, not the public house in Putney, but the wife of Wong Tai (an improbable Noah Beery) an opium smuggler and head of a Tong gang. Wong Tai – that leery, Beery look in his eye – is cruel and ruthless, employing a sharp-edged pendulum in his secret den to torture and otherwise ensure compliance with his commands. He can do nothing though when his son (Young Hipp) is sent down by Judge Whitely (J. Barney Sherry) but kidnaps his daughter (see-saw Marjorie Daw, … one of the great silent film stage names) with the intention of freeing his boy.

 

The police are involved but they need the help of Dinty’s newsboy legion who, through their work and cultural diversity have an insight into the workings of the Chinese underworld. It’s one thing for the baddies to take on the men in blue but when the youngsters get involved… things move too fast.

 

Anna May Wong was two years older than Wesley Barry

It’s "feel good" in excelsis and everything works out through collaboration and trust just the kind of message families and children most wanted to here in the land of second chances. Unsurprisingly Dinty was a success and one of the films of the year according to Photoplay magazine and box office returns. It also provides some excellent shots of contemporary San Francisco all of which add an element of realism to the film as well as glimpses of the city 100-years past.

 

This is Edward Lorusso’s tenth Kickstarter funded presentation and the source film came from a private collector. The print quality is very good and the experience is enriched by Ben Model’s practiced piano accompaniment which matches the flow of the film’s pace and tone to a tea.

 

Aaron Mitchell is ace too!

The production is now available from Grapevine Video on Blu-ray and DVD and you can buy direct from their site here. It comes with the comedy short A Two-Cylinder Courtship with Billie Rhodes and Edward Lorusso providing accompaniment.

 

Mr Lorusso is also on another project now, Marion Davies in Zander the Great, a new scan of the original 35mm nitrate print by Library of Congress. There’s still time to support this very worthwhile project and the link is right here… please support if you can!