Marie jewel recovered and Lon finds his charm… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026, Day Four

There’s an incredible story behind the finding of Seven Sinners (1925), which was long considered a lost film until May 2015 when film hunter Joel Archer located it in Queensland, Australia in the hands of a film projectionist Ron West who had been given it by a cinema-owning family based in Melbourne and kept it along with other treasures – on nitrate 35mm – in his farm shed. The seven reels were 80% salvageable and after restoration by the Academy Film Archive gaps have been filled and whilst there are some compromised areas it is a wonder, in parts looking as fresh as the carnation in Clive Brook’s buttonhole.

 

As Michelle Facey writes in the catalogue entry, this was from a period when the film’s star, Marie Prevost was Warners’ “Queen of the Screen”, described in their ad for this film as “a feminine character of alluring charm… an actress whose spontaneous art mirrors every human emotion…” And Marie does not disappoint in this smart crime caper with a heart of gold and delightful performances all round. It has a script as precise as a safe-breakers touch and a cast who never miss: it’s a real Spritz of a film!

Marie Prevost and Clive Brook

 

Marie is Molly Brian who breaks into a rich house with her partner in crime, “Handsome Joe” Hagney (John Patrick), they’re surprised by what appears to be a resident in a dressing gown and firing a pistol. Joe escapes but the man, who turns out to be Jerry Winters (Cool Clive Brook), also turns out to be a crook intent on robbing the jewels from the same safe, one that Molly opens with alacrity much to his delight. They’ll go halves only they won’t go anywhere because in walks an elder couple, Pious Joe McDowell (Claude Gillingwater) and wife Aimie (Mathilde Brundage) who say that they’re minding the house for the owners only they’re not, they’re in the same profession as the other three.

 

Those of you good with figures will have worked out we have five sinners although though not all of that number knows the truth and, with two more sinners to add plus an actual policeman, I’ll leave the narrative summary there.

 

Accompaniment was provided by John Sweeney in full flight. Delighting in every twist and turn from a cast who like many from this period, you can almost hear talking. This is a must watch when you get the chance.

 

Joel is at Le Giornate and got a round of applause when his part in the recovery came up on screen. Imagine if we all still thought that this film didn’t exist? “Go, you good thing!” is, I believe, the saying in Brisbane!

 

Sheffield 1902, then, as now, a city divided by football...

Tram Ride of the Day: The award has to go to the elegantly entitled Tram Ride Through the City of Sheffield as recorded by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon in 1902 when, as I’m sure you all know, Sheffield United FC finished tenth in the First Division just behind their rivals Sheffield Wednesday. So, any extra glum fizzogs on view must have been Blades fans.

 

Sheffield still has the trams but they’re not as much fun and neither are Wednesday or t’ Blades… but they’ll be back. In 1902 Steel City was very much a hub of industrial activity and trams revolutionised peoples access to work.

 

BREAKING: The TRotD Award has now been shared with the extraordinary A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire (US 1906), directed by Miles Brothers just before the San Francisco Earthquake on 18^th April which destroyed many of the buildings we see with the exception of the ferry terminal according to Dr Lawrence Napper of Kings College London. There’s more detail to be found on these events and the activities of the film makers in the programme and online.

 

Tom Santschi and Edward Hearn

Saddle up and ride! Also, “don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys… Part 675”

 

No trams out west only trains but all we saw were horses in the two short westerns in the Rediscoveries strand.

 

Robert N. Bradbury’s Beyond the Trail (US 1921) was a punchy tale of two brothers one good Clem (Tom Santschi) and the other, Bud, wayward (Edward Hearn). It’s amazing how much of the generic tropes of westerns are not only already in place but expressed in this half hour film but it’s no doubt all true up to a point. Clem takes the rap for his brother killing a man during a robbery and in exile comes across a lone woman (Patricia Palmer) and her baby who had been deserted by the father… Bud! Cue a return to the hometown and final showdown.

  

Marshall Neilan’s The Country That God Forgot (US 1916) had some excellent cinematography and the look of classic westerns to follow with one especially impactful shot of Mary Charleson silhouetted against the endless prairie beyond the doorframe of their homestead. We once again have Tom Santchi as the hero, this time a miner called Steve who finally strikes it rich only for his wife to desert him for another man called Craig (which is not very Rough and Rowdy as a name is it?). Steve’s a determined man though and sets off to put things right…

  

Asta und Connie genießen nach Feierabend ein Getränk im Posta...

Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar award:

 

Weimar Uncensored should have been entitled TOTALLY uncensored as it’s hard to know whether Conrad Veidt was just carrying on from the long nights before when filming Der Reigen (1920) or just very much in character. There are so many lounges lacking their lizards with this man at this stage but perhaps even he felt the pressure or keeping pace with Die Asta so much his senior at this point.

 

Seeing Nielsen acting on a screen this size is always a treat because you can see her face working the emotions with expression that is beyond thought. It’s a rare gift to be able to convey so much with so little deliberate effort – think Isabelle Huppert of Stephan Audran (I’ve overdosed on Claude Chabrol this autumn – thanks BFI!) – but here we see it in one of the very first screen actors and the first European star.

 

Directed by Richard Oswald and adapted from the 1897 play, La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler, the film shows Nielsen’s character Elena and her various relationships with men who either lack moral courage or morals in the case of Veidt’s vampiric Peter Karvan. She marries Albert Peters (Eduard von Winterstein) for status and security, preferring his brother Fritz (Theodor Loos), but happy enough to look after her step-daughter until Karvan re-emerges to blackmail her.

 

It's episodic and overwrought but whilst it might try your patience in some parts you’re rewarded by Asta in particular as well as the faint smell of absinth every time Connie walks onto screen and smooths his reptilian gaze across the screen.

 

Gabriel Thibaudeau accompanied the cabaret in style proving that there’s no good in sitting alone in your room, and we saw Willi Schaeffers dance too in the nightclub scenes!

 

Female Madness Programme Two was a more coherent session than the first consisting of dramas not documentaries all of which included portrayals of female hysteria and the ways it was perceived by the industry and audience in these early stages. Mario Caserini’s Amleto (IT 1908) drew on Shakespeare’s conception of Ophelia (and Hamlet’s) madness and it did make you wonder how far the view of women’s hysterics had advanced over three hundred years?

 

There was also Albert Capellani’s Pauvre Mere! (FR 1906) and Léonce Perret’s L'Angélus de la Victoire (FR 1916) which centred on a young couple from different classes being prevented from marriage by their fathers. The war begins and in the end they wonder what all the fuss was about… apart from Fabienne Fabrèges who gives a disturbing depiction of the young Jacqueline driven mad by news of her love’s demise on the front. And still we fight.

 

Fabienne Fabrèges 

Riccardo Tolentino’s Le memorie di una istitutrice (IT 1917) has Valentina Frascaroli as Jane Eyre in what must now be considered the definitive version even though it’s only 33'47 long… It’s like a speed read and a lot of fun!

 

Meg Morley and Elisabeth-Jane Baldry accompanied with a wonderful mix of piano, harp and vocals with E-J’s song for the forlorn Jacqueline after she learns of her lovers fate in the war. Haunting.

 

 

And for desert: Tell It to the Marines (1926) accompanied by Neil Brand and Frank Boclkius

 

This has long been one of my favourites not just for Lon Chaney being given the chance to act against type and using just his own face but also because it includes those two Goldwyn “New Faces” selectees of 1922 and lifelong buddies in spite of everything: Eleanor Boardman and William Haines. Three of the very best Hollywood people.

 

Directed by George W Hill, Tell it to the Marines is very well drilled with, quick changes in pace and excellent cinematography: silent Hollywood at its peak. There is some superb hand-held camerawork during the fight on the island not to mention stirring shots of the navy at sea – huge battleships rolling with the waves. Indomitable and not far away from being used in earnest.

Lon Chaney and Eleanor Bordman

 

It’s a meaty role for William Haines as he gets to play the shallow raw recruit who’s only in it for himself. He falls for Eleanor Boardman’s nurse mainly as she’s the prettiest thing in sight and it’s only later that he learns how much he really means it. An excellent performer, it’s no surprise he was so popular: he has an easy way and always seems to throw in the odd realistic gesture like…picking his nose! Boardman does her usual top-notch job with not a lot to play with. It’s good to see her as always on the big screen and on such a fantastic print - she is as ethereal as ever and it’s noteworthy that her best scenes are with Chaney – she rises to his level.

 

Without doubt it is Chaney’s film with his Postlethwaite complexion, iron jaw and smiling eyes. I’ve heard that he gained such expressiveness as the son of deaf and mute parents. This may have been the case but he’s also emotionally intelligent and able to submerge himself completely in character. So much so that his actions and gradual shift in concerns continue to surprise you throughout the film… he only reveals the decent heart when he wants us to see it.

 

Married to the navy, loyal to all his charges, selfless to a flaw… Chaney’s portrayal struck so true with the marines themselves that he became the first actor to be awarded an honorary membership in the Corps.

 

Neil Brand and Frank Bockius’s accompaniment was disciplined, powerful and playful all at the same time, as if they had absorbed the characters of Chaney and Haines and the spirit of a film which, when you've stripped all the flags away, is about love, sacrifice and togetherness. Neil had the music Frank had the rhythm, who could ask for anything more?

 

What goes around, finally comes around… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 42, Day Three

 

Monday night and it’s time for something mighty begun by Erich von Stroheim and completed by Rupert Julien as the studio system clamped down on all that trust, creativity and budget abuse… not to mention Erich's "...flagrant disregard of the principles of censorship”. Lewis Milestone later claimed this as the moment when “the age of the director” was superseded by the producer system. Maybe Merry-go-Round (1923) is also then, the first example of a film that suffered as a result of no single vision?

 

It's certainly a film with many powerful moments, not least the finest performance I’ve ever seen from Mary Philbin as Agnes the poor fairground worker who is romanced by a Prince incognito played by Norman Kerry. There’s part of the problem as Norman is better at the confident Prince than the lovelorn warrior and the segment after WWI could have done with some trimming, re-editing. There’s also some issues with tone with the unremitting cruelty of the demon Merry-go-Round owner, played by George Siegmann who terrorises his staff, doesn’t care of they live or die and tries to sexually assault, feels very von Stroheim whilst the more romantic interludes, perhaps Julien – accounts vary.

 

But all this said, the film is dramatic and keeps you guessing right until the far from Hollywood ending – it’s not all joyous. It was a smash hit and tonight it looked as fabulous as is possible. It is the most complete version to date and the restorers of this new version spent 20 years conducting a worldwide search, comparing each of the elements shot by shot, to restore tints and scenes in order to reconstruct the whole film in its original form. It's a Hollywood classic with excellent support from Cesare Gravina as Agnes' Punch and Judy man father, George Hackathorne as the steadfast "hunchback" Bartholomew, Edith Yorke (Ursula Urban), the fab Dale Fuller as the wicked fairground owner's terrified wife and Dorothy Wallace as the Countess Kerry's Count is contratually obliged to.

 

Their efforts were supported further by two hours of finely wrought accompaniment from Mauro Colombis, Romano Todesco and Frank Bockius – currently the hardest working drummer in show business! The three combined as a tightly together as with the film and for the second night running my arms hurt from too much clapping: just stop it guys!

 

Ludwig Trautmann

Getting to know almost forgotten German, actor, director, writer, producer… Harry Piel’s tricks and flicks. Not for nothing was he known as "the dynamite director" as cars and illicit diamond factories blew up in today’s first film, Das Teufelsauge (The Devil’s Eye) (1914), a breathless adventure spinning at a Paul Auster level of coincidence much like yesterday’s Das Abenteuer Eines Journalisten (1914) whilst also featuring two drops from bridges into water, one more than Erblich Belastet (1913). It was clearly a winning formula although there were gasps when a horse appeared to fall off a bridge and certainly there was a high risk of equine injury when our hero and his pursuers are chased down a very steep sandbank on horseback.

 

Ludwig Trautmann plays François Rennée, an attaché) who is romancing Countess Rita Pignatelli (Anny [Anni] Timm) but, dressed as a Pierrot at one of her parties, gets accused of stealing her crown jewel, The Devil’s Eye… Even though she’s a woman of influence he has to go on the run, and charges off a clown on horseback, jumping of bridges into moving cars, performing a kind of pierotte parkour, a clown in constant motion off to prove his innocence. It’s inventive, comic-book fun and an improbable story well told by Piel.

 

The other Piel film was Das Rollende Hotel (The Rolling Hotel) (1918) was altogether gentler with a young private detective trying to help his friend Editor Tom marry the girl he loves rather than the suitor her father prefers on financial grounds. Even this took us into a wild chase with scenes high in the snow and of a portable hotel/caravan which, as you’d expect, crashed off a bridge and into the waters below! This was a very entertaining film with a lively cast including Heinrich Schroth as Detective Joe Deebs, Josef Ewald as Tom and the girl he wants to marry is Addy played by Käthe Haack who, in reality, chose Heinrich Schroth.

Italia Vitaliani

La Madre (1917), featuring Italia Vitaliani, an almost forgotten Italian Diva from the great age and who was first cousin once removed of Eleonora Duse, who was considered as her rival on stage for technique and naturalistic playing. La Duse influenced everyone from Bertini and Borelli to Asta and it’s rare to see her cousin on screen. Giuseppe Sterni’s film was only recently found and restored in the Netherlands and allows the actress to run through her expressive repertoire as the mother of a would-be artist who finds the wrong muse… she preservers to save him from himself and in her anguish provides him with the perfect portrait.

 

Diva film are perfect little arias that make sense unto themselves, every time I watch I relax and float down stream suspended entirely by belief.

Alternative title

The programme had this next section as Slapstick – Prog 2 "Clowns and Cretins"? I understand why this subtitle was chosen but “cretins” is now an ableist slur used to cover a whole range of neuro-atypical conditions. Yes, André Deed used a number of screen names but Cretinetti Che Bello! was made in 1909, we’re all historian enough to understand the title but we shouldn’t be reducing the significance of this word which, as the father of an ASD son I find uncomfortable.

 

On the bright side Deed is on fine form, with a typically surreal adventure – whatever his name he was anarchic and innovative, tearing himself apart and pulling himself together again.

 

As for the clowns, the famous Fratellini Brothers, François, Paul and Albert, get a chance to show parts of their act and then to fill out the thinnest of plots as they try and work out why Dolorès Braga (Yane Odoni) is the only person in the tent not laughing at their jokes. Dolorès, I’m with you babe, I was traumatised as a small child at Blackpool Tower Circus and I now can’t look at a clown without crying…

Madeline Hurlock, Ben Turpin and Dave Morris

In the battle of two mythical mid-European states Ben Turpin emerged as a surprise winner on account of laughs per minute and the coherence of his ideas in When a Man’s a Prince (1926) leaving Elinor Glyn’s project, The Only Thing (1925) in it’s wake as a confusion of anti-royalist/anti-revolutionary/pro-glamour. Ben’s on top form and the timing is impeccable throughout with a great supporting cast including Madeline Hurlock as a flirty lady-in-waiting, Dave Morris as Grand Duke Ludwig and Blanche Payson Hilda, The Princess of Amazonia!

 

On the plus side, having seen Eleanor Boardman in the deliberately “unglamourous” The Crowd, last month at the BFI, it’s great to see her on the big screen showcasing the kind of style she was famous for. She doesn’t have much to work with but does have good chemistry with the equally decorative Conrad Nagel and the two form a classy bubble in a story also full of Glyn’s entitlement and exploitative cruelty.

 

Boardman is Thyra, Princess of Svendborg, politically forced into a marriage with the ageing King of Chekia (Edward Connelly) and there’s a running joke about how he has ‘orrible big ears as do all of his family, even the one working with the revolutionaries. Its hardly a prospect that would delight and carries uncomfortable echoes of royal marriages before and since. Anyway, she fancies the British noble, he fancies her and yet what could stop her fulfilling her duty? A revolution perhaps, and one involving perhaps a bit too much tortured female flesh and outlandish cruelty for my liking. Mildly grumpy on Day Three... 

 

King Charles, Eleanor Boardman and Conrad Nagel

Another fine day in Pordenone, feels like Wednesday but it’s still barely Tuesday. Weds is Hindle Wakes Day, in fact it’s Wakes Week in so many ways… (niche Yorkshire/Lancashire reference that will make sense come the day!!

Don't dream of clowns...

Standing out… The Crowd (1928) with Stephen Horne, BFI

 

"When John was twenty-one, he became one of the seven million that believe New York depends on them.”

In her introduction, the BFI’s Bryony Dixon pondered why this special film, undoubtedly a mainstay of the American cinematic canon, is not screened more often and, indeed, the last time I saw it was in Pordenone back in 2017 with the late Carl Davis conducting his own score and the orchestra at the Teatro Verdi. This aside, the film is not available on home media and hasn’t been restored in some time despite director King Vidor’s Big Parade being on Blu-ray and in crisp condition, a great film but not of the same standard.

The Crowd undoubtedly breaks a number of golden rules for Hollywood and indeed, as Bryony pointed out, a full seven different endings were filmed and tested reflecting MGM’s concerns about the more realistic style deployed and their audience proved them wrong by preferring Vidor’s take. Vidor’s wife, the glamourous and divinely elegant Eleanor Boardman, threw herself into the project with one of the most selfless performances of the twenties; hair tangled, dowdy-clothed and make-up free all along way from the glittering gowns of Proud Flesh. She’s far from proud here subjugating her star-status to play the long-suffering but steadfast lower-middle class wife and thereby enabling her surprise leading man to excel.

James Murray was far from Boardman’s level and had been pulled from the ranks of the extras after being spotted by Vidor. According to Bryony, Murray at first didn’t believe Vidor’s offer, he thought it was a joke and didn’t turn up for his audition and, when he finally saw it was a genuine offer, requested the director covered his bus fare… Perhaps there was something of The Crowd’s John Sims about Murray, it’s hardly fair to suggest he was playing himself and Murray, certainly nearer failure than success at this point, acts his heart out in the film a good-looking guy with natural charisma and yet who might not have that extra drive and/or skill to really stand out from the crowd.

In a packed NFT3 we saw how Vidor used these assets to maximum affect in a film that is as universal as it is timeless and with a style and subject matter far from the dreamy magic realism of studio films now as then. Hollywood hates standing apart from the crowd whether its remaking, filming yet more people in capes or turning cartoons into live action.

As Eleanor Boardman put it: “The Crowd was to be the first picture without glamour…” Vidor simply wanted to tell the tale of an ordinary man: one of the crowd, as he faces the challenges of daily life without supernatural heroics or an excess of good fortune.

The film was to be a prosaic The March of Life, a title John Gilbert suggested when discussing Vidor’s desire to follow up The Big Parade with a Big Parade of Peace. The project would undergo many changes in title but it was always going to be a very personal one for King Vidor as he had the chance to make the film he wanted in the wake of TBP’s massive success... Irving Thalberg happy to let him experiment so long as it helped him forget that 20% stake he’d had in the former film.

“I made pictures as a good employee and pictures that came out if my insides. This is one that came out of my guts. There was a lot of hypocrisy in early films and I wanted to get away from it.” King Vidor explained to Jordan R Young in 1978. Whilst casting Boardman to play against type, the director looked for an unknown so the film would present a “documentary flavour” with “…. a young, good-looking man who looks like he really might be a clerk…” No chance for John Gilbert then. Murray proved to be inspired casting with any technical limitations simply under-pinning his character’s self-deceptions as he moves forwards gradually after every devastating reversal.

 

As if to reinforce the everyman theme the film begins on 4th July in 1900 with the birth of “…a little man the world is going to hear from all right…” Father has high hopes and everything is indeed possible. Flick on to 1912 as John (an uncredited Johnny Downs) sits with the other kids asking each other what they’re going to do when they grow up. “My Dad says I’m goin’ to be somebody big!” he says but – at the same time - Father dies – and there’s a terrific shot of young John climbing the stairs to realise he has gone… the first major defeat in the march of life reinforced by expressionistic forced perspective.

James Murray

“You’ve gotta be good in that town if you want to beat the crowd.”

The years pass and John goes to find his fortune in New York City. Hi arrival is followed by superb camera work from Henry Sharp showing the press in the city: thousands of people flowing along sidewalks, mingling with the traffic at cross-roads in a double exposure showing the lifeblood of the concrete and commerce. The camera angles on tall buildings, shifting to a model shot as it rises ever higher pulling back to focus on a window through which it fades into a giant room of endless regularity: desks into infinity.

Somewhere near the middle sits our John: one of the many in at desk 137, he scratches his head, seemingly intent on his work but he’s trying to think of an answer to a newspaper quiz: “Name our new motor fuel and win one hundred dollars” … a dreamer passing time and hoping for a long shot… He clock-watches and preens himself for real life to begin after five o’clock.

He plans to study but Pal Bert (Bert Roach) has an offer he can’t refuse “I’ve got a pair of wrens dated up for Coney Island. Want to make it a four-some?” All the while there are people filling the streets and corridors… the Metropolis is teeming. Bert and John run from out of the shadowy crowd to greet their wrens: Mary and Joan (Estelle Clark). Joan is bouncy and Mary is a little shy – Boardman almost dowdy, gauche, chewing gun and head bowed – an Oscar performance, in my book, for 1928.

Boardman herself, was always such a sharp commentator and recognised the value of this work saying later that Mary Sims was simply “a job I had to do, I didn’t like to be so drab and unattractive, the hair hanging down, no makeup on…. I had confidence in Vidor; I knew he knew what he was doing…” and no doubt vice versa.

Eleanor Boardman

Bert and John both catch admiring glances at the girls’ legs as they climb the steps on a double-decker tram but whilst the former is pantomime leery, the latter has a deeper feeling: this girl is offering more than just a glimpse of stocking. The couples sit at the front of the bus as they drive down the avenue and the thousand calculations and connections of early courtship are made. “Look at that crowd! The poor boobs…  all in the same rut!” says John to a shocked Mary and then he sees a men dressed as a clown advertising for shoes… a “poor sap” whose father probably wanted him to be president. You just know that’s going to come home to bite.

Onto Coney Island where the light-hearted tone is maintained – this is how life can be as we play and romance – survival put to one side. The Crowd plays with both concepts equally well and, the mood is superbly balanced by Vidor, despite his apparently relaxed approach to the performers he controls their context and he casts for character: Murray was a natural whereas Boardman could truly act.

 

John proposes on their ride home and we switch to the wedding where Bert gives them “a year or two” … Funny scenes on the honeymoon train as the couple ready themselves for their first night and then some stunning shots from Niagara Falls where James pledges his love will never stop for the most beautiful girl in the world.

Back to life and “home sweet home” where good humour enables them to rise above the compromises of location and affordability… But the cracks are there: Mary’s family Mother (Lucy Beaumont) and brothers Jim (Daniel G Tomlinson) and Dick (Dell Henderson) are less than impressed with her husband’s ability to provide. John doesn’t even have any hooch left for Christmas and heads off to Bert’s for a bottle only to be caught up in a party as his weak will crumbles at the mixture of girls and gin…

 

The cracks begin to show...

We begin to lose confidence in John as his career drifts and he falls into a routine of careless marital bickering: he dreams while Mary cleans … and cooks and washes. Their arguing intensifies - she must carry the blame for his failure to progress with every culinary accident counting against her. But as he storms out, she calls down from the window: there’s something she hasn’t told him… Family life moves them onward but five years later they’re still in their assigned roles on the beach. As with Junior (Freddie Burke Frederick) and their daughter (Alice Mildred Puter) run in the sand, John plays a ukulele as Mary cooks… doing exactly what she’d normally be doing at home.

It was at this point that my daughter elbowed me and gave me a look… in fairness I had been thinking the same thought!

The couple’s luck changes twice in the space of a few minutes: John finally wins a caption competition and a life-changing $500. He returns home laden with presents yet the most unbearable tragedy is about to happen, one which completely changes the tone of the film – we’ve been lulled into a false sense of insecurity by Vidor and now we pay as John and Mary’s lives unwind.

“Except for The Crowd, I really am not proud of anything I did.” said Eleanor Boardman to film historian William Drew and you can see why as she pulls Mary through every emotional gear in the closing segments in a magnificent display of technique and conviction. Murray also excels as misery piles on misery and he loses direction almost to the point of self-oblivion. Out of pace with the crowd he’s on his uppers losing job after job and deluding himself that a new “break” is only around the corner… he’s as real a man as Hollywood gets.

Murray and Boardman aged up for one of ten alternative endings... 

Vidor’s brilliance is in not giving the audience an easy way out and we’re left wishing and hoping long after the end title card pops up, a film that leaves a mark and one you don’t simply walk away from.

All of which makes it frustrating that, in addition to being rarely screened, this major film is not available on home media although the 1981 restored version from Brownlow and Gill, featuring Carl Davis’ lovely orchestral score has been shown on TCM in the past. We have Wings, Sunrise and The Big Parade on Blu-ray; come on MGM or whoever you are these days.

Stephen Horne played a few of Carl’s lines in tribute to the late composer and filled the room with sympathetic lines that soon merged with the action on screen. I wonder how the quality of story, direction and performance impacts the improvisation, certainly with a film at this level if feels as if Stephen raises his game to the same level, duetting seamlessly with Vidor, Boardman and Murray.

One of the screenings of the year and a reminder of the power of the BFI archive and it’s role in our cinematic lives. Not just the usual crowd…

 

Reading list:

 

King Vidor’s The Crowd, The Making of a Silent Classic by Jordan R Young is a fascinating account of the film featuring interviews with Boardman and Vidor as well as an introduction from Kevin Brownlow. It’s available from Amazon in paper and on Kindle.

 

King Vidor, American by Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon is a high-content, well-researched biography from the early nineties and still to be found on Amazon too.

Boardman talks in colour… Mamba (1930)

Things you never expected to see… on several levels. This film was considered mostly lost for a long time until a nearly complete 35mm nitrate copy was located in Australia in 2009. This has subsequently been fully restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation in 2016, but what I watched was a rather fuzzy copy on YouTube… sometimes you must take what you can find. How could I resist seeing elegant Eleanor Boardman, silent star of The Crowd, Bardleys the Magnificent and Souls for Sale, in Technicolor and, talking too?

On the face of it, Boardman could be seen as one of those who’s career stalled after sound but she made seven talkies including the fascinating part-talkie She Goes to War (1929) enough of which survives to show how she was more than capable of sustaining her career, should she have really wanted to. Now in her early thirties, Boardman was married to and having children with King Vidor and, film fans, that’s an activity which doesn’t always sit well with the Hollywood sausage machine especially if you are, famously, “the most outspoken girl in Hollywood”! She liked Redemption (1929), the picture she made with John Gilbert, which didn’t enhance his (or her) prospects but gave her a gorgeous wardrobe, and then got loaned out by MGM to Tiffany Studios for Mamba.

Her last Hollywood film was de Mille’s remake of his own The Squaw Man (1931) and, as family duties and her increasingly unhappy marriage began to pre-occupy her, she refused to dance to the studio’s tune and return from an Hawaiian make-or-break with Vidor, to be loaned again this time to Paramount. By 1933 she had divorced King and taken her children off to Europe where she eventually met and married writer/director Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast for whom she starred in her last film, The Three Cornered Hat (1935) made in Italy. She appeared in Kevin Brownlow’s Hollywood series interviewed in 1977, still strikingly sharp and eloquent, comfortable with her life and perhaps slightly dismissive of most of her films, save The Crowd.

Jean Hersholt

Here she’s perfectly fine, good at the grander emotions, dressed like a clothes horse if a little under-powered in some scenes in which she’s outshone, as everyone else, by a perfectly nasty turn from Jean Hersholt. Jean’s upbringing in Denmark, enabled him to nail the German accent required for the part of the titular snake, August Bolte (Mambo), a German opportunist who doesn’t care who he exploits as long as there’s profit in it. Born Jean Pierre Carl Buron, he started acting in short films in 1906 but emigrated for New York in 1913 aged 27 and established himself quickly, making films, most notably in Greed (1924) into the 1950s. He also translated 160 of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales into English and ended up as Leslie Nielsen’s paternal half-uncle… fact fans!

The film is one of those exhibiting a considerable amount of silent style especially when it begins with an extraordinary single take – some 90 seconds long – during which director Albert S. Rogell’s camera moves down and through a number of street scenes on an African reservation, showing us the local colour, and the nature of the place we are about to experience: Neu Posen in German East Africa, sometime in 1913. Like many other “pre-code” films of the period it comes with heavy doses of language and actions reflecting “the attitudes of the time” … Your honour, may I refer you to the statement made by one English officer to a German one: “… too many blacks to run after and too few of us whites to ever be able to hold them in line…” a sentence that is followed by the artful suggestion that those civilised whites of Britain and Germany would never be caught fighting amongst themselves. The audience knew and of course we still know, what this means.

Bolte arrives and is immediately confronted by a local woman (Hazel Jones) who claims he is the father of her child; the other Europeans look on is disgust as he pushes her away. He goes for a drink in a bar full of singing German and British officers only to be given the coldest of shoulders and to be told to his face that he’s not invited to Colonel Cromwell’s party. Bolte sings alone and throws his beer away ordering a champagne…

Bolte reviews his options...

“With more land und money than anyone else in East Africa… I could buy und sell the whole army!

A begging letter from a nobleman in debt back in Germany, offers the hand of his daughter Helen (Eleanor Boardman) in marriage in exchange for Bolte paying his creditors off. After reviewing Helen’s photograph, Bolte decides that this is the way to gain proper respect from society; married to a Lady, his snobbish detractors will have no option but to pay her their respects. He goes back to Germany and brings back his already traumatised new wife back with him. As his cockney manservant (a lively Will Stanton) says: “Blimey sir! But she’s a real aristocrat… she’s got quality!”

On the ocean journey she meets a handsome German officer, Karl von Reiden (Ralph Forbes) who is certainly more along the lines of the kind of man she’d hoped to wed. They connect but are soon separated by Bolte who demonstrates a grotesque mix of jealousy and pride. Back in Neu Posen in Bolte’s grubby mansion, Helen is holding out as long as she can, her honour still at stake as her contractual-obliged partner invites his former enemies to a party in her honour to which everyone is invited and duty bound to attend for her sake. Before the party begins, the native woman pays Bolte another visit and, after an altercation, she falls over his balcony and to her death.

Initially his grand party goes well but when news of the death breaks out the mood turns sour and the faint-hearted merrymaking stops, leaving Helen at the mercy of her husband until, that is, she is rescued by von Reiden who takes her off to see the local natives’ “Moon Dance” - perhaps it will help you forget… He delivers her back to her predatory partner just as he receives news that way has been declared between Germany and Great Britain. Now things reach a peak as Bolte tries to avoid the draft and to hold onto his ill-gotten gains…

Eleanor Boardman and Ralph Forbes

Mambo is alleged to have cost over $500,000 to produce and appears to have been well received with the colour photography impressing. It’s more than just a novelty though with the colonial questions raised and the moral dangers presented by Bolte and then the War. Hersholt makes the picture though and seems able to raise sympathy for his misbegotten creation of Bolte who very rarely, if ever, does the right thing but still presents as a victim in comparison to the taller and more handsome officers, just about to fight the War to End all Wars.

This would look amazing on the big screen and I look forward to a 35mm screening at some point and somewhere…

Tailor-made woman… Souls for Sale (1923) with Meg Morley, Kennington Bioscope Silent Weekender Day 2

Would you like to sin. With Elinor Glyn On a tiger skin? 
Or would you prefer. To err. With her. On some other fur?

Rupert Hughes (as quoted by Mr K Brownlow, on the occasion of his 81^st birthday)

This was one of the first silent DVDs I bought partly because of its cameos of Hollywood stars but mainly because of a fascination with Eleanor Boardman who was later to star in The Crowd and to feature so elegantly in Kevin Brownlow’s Hollywood series. Yes, there’s something about Eleanor and she’s also caught up in the William Haynes legend, with them both winning a contract through Goldwyn Pictures "New Faces of 1921" and maintaining a friendship through the years of their success and beyond: you got the feeling that they both rose above the daily Hollywood grind from the get go.

Souls for Sale is pretty light fare but it’s well made and does give a playful insight into the business of show people with Boardman’s character accidentally falling into the movies after escaping the clutches of her Bluebeard of a husband…

Charlie, Erich and Jean

The glimpses behind the scenes are, of course, precious, with Erich von Stroheim seen directing Greed, giving Jean Hersholt instructions, and Charlie Chaplin playing along by over-actively directing Mem/Eleanor in a “scene” from Woman of Paris. Elsewhere you can glimpse Hobart Bosworth, Barbara Bedford, Chester Conklin, Raymond Griffith, June Mathis, Marshall Neilan, Claire Windsor & many more! William Haines is also in there, his first credited appearance, as Pinky (!) the assistant director to Richard Dix’s square-jawed Frank Claymore.

Kevin Brownlow introduced on his birthday – no better treat for him than sharing in his passion – and explained that the film was partly a PR exercise to show that after numerous scandals, Hollywood wasn’t a bad place, full of upstanding professionals.

The film was based on a novel by a man named Rupert Hughes – Howard’s Uncle – who produced and adapted the screenplay and directed it. Mostly known as an historian and writer, Hughes couldn’t understand why a film company would buy an author’s work and then change so much. Here he made sure his work would see the screen as intended and the rigour of his research pays off in the detailed background to the film process.

Eleanor Boardman

Boardman was already famous as the Kodak Girl model and had already made three films but this was her first time as the main female star and so, just like her character she was in at the deep end. She’d tried to make a success on the stage in New York and made some head way but this, at 24, was her biggest break yet in the movies.

She doesn’t flunk it and, for me, gives a very relaxed and confident performance as Remember “Mem” Steddon (trips off the tongue doesn’t it…) who falls into film work as a refuge from her psychopathic husband (Lew Cody) and, against the wishes of her strictly-Christian parents – an echo of Boardman’s own folks’ disapproval. Boardman was perhaps a natural, very interesting to watch on camera and varied not only in her expression but her looks. She can handle comedy as well as drama and gives a taste of her dowdy desperation in The Crowd when watching her disastrous screen test: hands pulling her hair to a mess, tears running red down a face of real misery.

Less regal Garbo?!

She reminds me of a less regal Garbo, more down-to-earth and not quite the force or presence but still very watchable and adaptable, he relatively tall frame (over 5 feet 6… a giant in 1923!) making her both a graceful clothes horse as well as the equal of the men.

The film starts off with a shot of Mem in the back of a railway carriage with her husband Owen Scudder (Lew Cody), who is already starting to frighten her with his weird intensity – first example of Boardman’s ability to show unease. She’s desperate and jumps train at the first opportunity, landing in the middle of a desert.

Not a real sheik... Frank Mayo, Eleanor B and Richard Dix

She wanders for days and finally is saved by a Sheik on a camel… or rather handsome actor Tom Holby (Frank Mayo) who is on a location shoot for a film being made by director, Frank Claymore (Richard Dix). The crew rescue Mem with stars Leva Lamaire (Barbara La Marr… see what they did?) and Robina Teele (a feisty, Mae Busch) making sure the kid gets a break as well as medical attention. Snitz Edwards is also on hand as the lovelorn Komical Kale, who is unrequitedly in love with Leva who still mourns for her lost lover, Jim, who died as his plane was engulfed in flames.

Meanwhile Scudder with a history of marriage and murder behind him, manages to evade the cops at a railway station and then gets lucky and a little richer by taking advantage of Abigail Tweedy (Dale Fuller) who he convinces, cons and almost chokes before escaping. Of course, he’s not finished with Mem just yet…

After finding work in a hotel, the end of season forces Mem to try her hand in Hollywood and, we see her trying to sell her soul, to get into a picture, any picture… there’s a great casting session with even Eve Southern as Miss Velma Slade being told she’s only beautiful and there’s a pile of those in this town (the film was also intended to discourage people from the film business… ).

Billy Haines!

In addition to Chaplin and von Stroheim, Mem gets a tiny part in Fred Niblo’s The Famous Mrs. Fair and sees Marshall Neilan directing The Eternal Three with Raymond Griffith, Hobart Bosworth, and Claire Windsor. Star-spotting is half the fun although Kevin spoiled this by reading out the names of a table full at one point: including Barbara Bedford, Chester Conklin, William H. Crane, Elliott Dexter, June Mathis and ZaSu Pitts.

After a disastrous screen test with Frank Claymore and the crew, he realises that she’s made more for drama than comedy and gradually she starts to make her way with bigger and bigger parts. Eventually she gets her big chance in a circus film after Robina gets injured. By this stage Scudder is back on her trail and has decided that he’s in love with the now successful actor…

But, it’s a stormy night over the circus set and there’s not many places more dangerous than a film set based in a tent!

The ending is a tour de force as the storm hits and the flames rise higher – all tinted yellow in the Warner Archive/TCM restoration. One of the extras told Brownlow that the circus tent was soaked in paraffin for the fire… which Hughes didn’t let people know there were horses inside as he didn’t want them to clear a path for them; the result is chaotic but undeniably dangerous with a least one injury to a dancer.

As a defence of the film industry, that doesn’t show the health and safety standards in a good light but I guess the audience took it all as part of the drama.

Meg Morley accompanied in fine style matching the epic with the intimate in a film of many contrasting moods. There may have been a snatch of Liszt at one point but as ever Meg melds these themes into an overall improvisation that is unique to the moment and the setting.

Big productions!

The Old Swimmin’ Hole (1921) with Meg Morley

Talking of William Haines, the next film starred Charles Ray who bears more than a passing resemblance to the former. Based on a poem by James Whitcomb Riley, the film was essentially a series of backwoods episodes all told without intertitles. Directed by Joe De Grasse it was charming if a little ambient, but like all poetry, something you had to just relax and focus on. Meg Morley accompanied again and in a quite different manner; lots of light tones and energetically reiterated figures that played so well along with the “children” on screen.

I spotted Laura La Plante in Pickford curls as Charles’ love interest, so different from her close-cropped platinum bob of later years.

Another exceptional collection of films overall for the weekend and I was sorry to miss the final parts of the second day. All credit to the programmers, players, projectionists and volunteers who make the Bioscope happen and happen so very well!

Bellissimo! The Crowd (1928), Carl Davis, Pordenone Prima Parte

My first time at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto after years of promising myself… and finally I’m home or at least hotel. I started the day admiring the sunrise over Piazza San Marco in Venice and finished it watching one of silent film’s greatest natural wonders. King Vidor’s The Crowd was projected in a packed Teatro Verdi with Carl Davis conducting his own music as played by the Orchestra San Marco di Pordenone. Saturdays get that much better than these.

The Crowd never disappoints and to see it on the Verdi’s huge screen brought out the best from this film of so many flavours. James Murray’s John Sim has never appeared so desperate: childlike, lazy, living in the moment with a promise for tomorrow, he is an everyman to whom life happens whilst he’s busy doing – or not doing – other things. This is perhaps one of Christian Scientist King Vidor’s most overtly didactic pictures.

Tragedy strikes and there was a collective groan of shock at the moment that changes the picture’s mood. John falls apart just as he was in bits when his wife gives birth, or when asked to just buckle down at his day job. Some may find Sim annoying but he’s in all of us.

He is right to – finally – recognise his reliance on his wife Mary and, as I’ve said before in a previous raves, Eleanor Boardman gives the performance of her career as the woman who understands Jimmy Sim enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. Boardman dresses down, wears little make-up and otherwise goes the full-Gish in a performance of subtle power. A natural sophisticate, Boardman’s repeated self-conscious clutching of hands to her teeth, is a marker of her character’s gauche innocence, an element of her fine sense of detail in a technically intricate performance which, for me, anchors the film. She’s the believable one.

Believable Boardman

Mary is also the audience representative in John’s fantasy world, just like her we see his potential and his natural goodness but there are moments when we feel like Jane on the beach; cooking and looking after the children whilst James larks about on his ukulele. It’s funny but we’re not the ones wiping the sand off the cake and chasing him to do his bit but we are waiting for him to turn the corner.

But that moment is not inevitable and just as John hits the jackpot with his catchy phrase the family descent begins.

For its immaculate portrait of married and other life, The Crowd is one of the high points of cinema as art and Carl Davis’ score pays respect to its source. It is all too easy for orchestra to overwhelm images and for composition to foreshadow narrative but we are in safe hands with Mr Davis. This score is a soulful and richly toned as the film and the booming strings rose up through the core of the auditorium as our spirits lifted and our hearts sank. Hard to believe it was only his second silent score.  

Completamente simpatici, I believe the locals say!

I know it's 1924 but really...

We also watched: Three Days to Live (1924) in which a racially stereotyped baddie used badly-drawn tigers to drive American business men to suicide whilst also manipulating the stock market like a proper Wall Street wolf. Mauro Colombis accompanied on piano.

Various Euro westerns followed, mostly French and with one British entry, Edwin J. Collins’ The Scapegrace (1913) actually being filmed at the Cricks studio the near Wild West Croydon – which makes sense as Way Out East Croydon looks nothing like the Yukon.

Then we were in the air with a series of real and pretend aviatrices culminating in the stylish, interesting but confusing L’Autre Aile (1924), directed by Henri Andréani. John Sweeney played a blinder on this one with some soaring and swooping of his own, fingers fleet and feather light.

We were brought down to earth by Roscoe Arbuckle’s flying bags of flour as all manner of comedy exploded in The Butcher Boy (1917) including a fresh-faced, stone-face performing a perfect headstand pratfall. At one point the agile Roscoe upends a bad guy in one deft move planting him dazed on a bed… reader that was me. Donald Sosin and Romano Todesco made musical sense of this madness: a riot was going on!

The long day closed and there is so much more to come. Day Two is even better!

Here's how my day began...