Marie Prevost is… Up in Mabel’s Room (1926), Günter A. Buchwald & Zerorchestra, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Streaming, Postscript...

Gary dearest, I thought you were so naughty but I’ve found you are so nice… 

Sounds just like a movie.

 

Oh, this was so much fun and with accompaniment recorded right at the start of this year’s festival at the screening in Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, it had that live energy some of the streaming films don’t always get, although, to be fair this was an ensemble, with the local group Zerorchestra improvising alongside Günter A. Buchwald’s piano and violin. I had planned to be there for the festival but a last-minute Covid infection put paid to all that leaving me to relish the Giornate’s online offering and imagine everything I was missing… the films, the gelato, the relaxed late night’s discussing the films and much more. This film was the perfect finale for the streaming version though, setting us up for a physical return in 1923, sorry, 2023!

 

Directed by E. Mason Hopper, this perfectly executed farce was based on the play by Wilson Collison and Otto Harbach from 1919, and like every successful comedy of this type it relies on perfectly executed performances and timing, whether from the performers and director or in the editing suite. There’s also some exceptionally pithy title cards courtesy of F. McGrew Willis’ script and Walter Graham’s text… and if a picture paints a thousand words, the expressions on Marie Prevost’s face are a British Library’s worth of inuendo!

 

Harrison Ford and Marie Prevost

Marie plays Mabel Ainsworth returning from Europe on a cruise-liner, who has just divorced her husband, architect Garry (The Original Harrison Ford) after finding him in a lingerie department buying what she presumed was a present for another woman. Big mistake Mabs, as young Garry was buying you a silky see-through with both your names on it… too late she decides that he’s a keeper not a creeper and she knows she must do right by him, whether he likes it or not. Remember that embroidered nightware though, it will be important later. Also important will be her meeting on board with man-about-town Carl Gerard (Arthur Walkers) and his rather less outgoing spinster sister, Henrietta (Maud Truax).

 

Among new friends Gary Ainsworth was posing as a bachelor. He figured his secret marriage in Paris was like a vaccination… it hadn’t taken.

 

To Garry’s office where we meet his neighbours, Insurance Broker Jimmy Larchmont (Harry Myers) and his fearsome wife, “his top-go signal”, Alicia (Sylvia Breamer) who announce a party to celebrate their six-month anniversary, as so many don’t make it to their first, cue wince from Garry. Next to them is Leonard Mason (Paul Nicholson), a gay bachelor who is in love with vivacious Sylvia Wells (Phyllis Haver) who rather takes a shine to Garry, even as the latter advises his pal Paul on how best to broach the subject of asking her on a date. 

Harrison and Phyllis Haver

These characters all have elements of a classic farce set-up, which is completed when Mabel arrives just in time to hear that Garry has clearly told them all he’s a bachelor… Information is power and we all know the young draughtsman hasn’t a chance, but at this point the poor sap doesn’t though and rebuffs his ex-wife’s advances when she pops into his office on the grounds that they’re no longer wed and kissing would just not be proper. All the same she catches him unaware winking at his office assistant Simpson (Arthur Hoyt) causing Garry to worry that he’ll gain a reputation as “a swivel-chair sheik…”

 

The El Rey Night club was one of those places where twenty dollars wouldn’t buy enough food to widen a worm’s waistline.

 

One celebration leads to another after Garry is shocked to see his secret ex arrive at the Larchmont's party at the El Rey club with the Gerards. Mabel has so successfully rubbished the good name of her previous husband that the men promise to exact revenge if they see the swine. Garry panics and proposes to Sylvia, using the engagement ring which his lovelorn pal his pal Leonard had given to him for safekeeping. As usual, Mabel is the quicker thinker and extracts the maximum torture from the “bachelor boy” as she talks of her unknown previous husband and the special gift he had given her; perhaps Sylvia would like it as a wedding gift? 

Arthur Walkers, Maud Truax, Sylvia Breamer, Phyllis, Paul Nicholson and Harry Myers 

From this comes an invite to the Mason’s for a weekend away, to celebrate the new couple's engagement and which will involve combinations of most couples in ways that I’d need a spreadsheet to fully transcribe. The misunderstandings fly thick and fast as Garry, aided by his valet, Hawkins (William Orlamond) set out to recover the incriminating lingerie – the “doo-dad” – from Mabel’s room before she uses it to blow his cover and his fresh and instantly regrettable, engagement.

 

You’ve been hanging on her door all day, you’re a regular doorknob!

 

Cue grown men hiding under beds, dancing as if wearing ladies’ lingerie (I know) and being assaulted by three women in search of imagined burglars… it’s a richly comedic closing segment that would have been hilarious to watch with an audience instead if on a laptop with my family checking I was OK after every few minutes of snorting. Sooner or later, everyone ends up in Mabel’s room…

Listen baby, I can explain everything so that even you can understand it!

  

It’s a classic farce and fascinating to see the Anglo-American tradition expressed so well in silent film. Hopper directs with precision and great timing which, as we all know, is the essence of good humour. He has a cast of great reactors; shock, stunned, outraged, surprised and even frightened all freely expressed and played as perfectly as the instruments in Günter and the Zerorchestra accompaniment.

 

Talking of which, the boys in the band were perfect and spirited and the fact they were improvising in front of an audience adds extra frisson and humour. The music is perfect in tone for this delightful comedy and also great for dancing… who wouldn’t want to cut a rug with Marie and Harrison.

 

A band not unlike Günter A. Buchwald & Zerorchestra

Prevost is, as every time I watch her, pitch perfect, full of sass and perky emotion, she’s not only the best winker in Hollywood but one of the most endearing comedians of her age. She’s the queen of emoting on clue, that perfect timing again, but also thoroughly likeable and believable. She should have gone on to be huge in the wise-cracking pre-codes and throughout the thirties but it wasn’t to be.

 

Still, with films as strong as this to display her wit, beauty and talent she won’t be forgotten and when she’s recalled it will be in the knowledge that, despite her early passing aged 40, she was capable of creating so much cinematic happiness.

 

Down and out in London and Marseille... The Lady (1925), Daan Van Der Hurk, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Streaming Day 8

Now we have it, Norma Talmadge’s finest dramatic performance and a story in which she gets through two or three times the amount of work for a normal film and probably even more for Heart of Wetona. Directed by Frank Borzage, it’s tempting to visualise him coaching her through some of the heaviest emotional lifting, which occasionally stretches her technique but she always comes through, sometimes with cheeks soaked in tears, a dewdrop on her retroussé nose, working at a pace with even Gish or Garbo. It’s a remarkable film and it gives her the opportunities she often missed, partly through her own choice.

For most of her career, Talmadge called the commercial shots and as Jay Weissberg pointed out in his introduction, The Lady was too louche for middle American audiences and did not perform that well. As Talmadge herself said, quoted by Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs in their notes on the Giornate site, she wasn’t going to follow up the film’s style “… I am not going to do any more like it for a time, anyway. Not that I don’t like to do characterizations – I love it. But what can we do? We must play to the box office… So, for a while I am going to do modern things. I think they want to see me in gowns, in style.”

To European audiences, there would have perhaps have been less of a negative reaction but maybe Norma was also typecast to a degree and the idea of her playing a character making a living as a prostitute, no matter how understated, was not the "Norma" her public loved.

Frank Borzage had already worked with Talmadge on the more successful Secrets (1924) and must have earned her trust for this bolder film. Adapted by Frances Marion from Martin Brown’s play of 1923, the narrative is unusually structured with an older Talmadge running The Brixton Bar, a “British” pub in Marseilles, during the Great War before a flashback which explains how she got there. Apparently, the play was the first in mainstream theatre in which the heroine announces she is pregnant, be that as it may, it’s less “announced” in the film and the child appears allowing inferences to be drawn.

Two Tommies wander, one a young private the other a rather drunken sergeant, very very arf’arf’an’arf, who staggers around before squirting the landlady, Polly Pearl (Talmadge) comically in the face. That ain’t no way to treat a lady she exclaims to general mirth from some of the regulars before settling down and talking with the kindly Mr. Wendover (Marc McDermott). Wendover comes from the same village as Polly although the pictures he shares are of Magdalen Bridge and the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, rather bigger than a village!

You wouldn’t believe that 24 years ago I was knockin’ them off their seats in a London music hall…

She recounts her history and how she came from England to this moment… the camera pulls across a swarming theatre floor and we meet Polly Pearl, the Girl with the Glad Eye, entertaining the throng with a song and a dance. Watching intently is Leonard St. Aubyns (Wallace MacDonald) a proper swell who, only has eyes for his Pearl as she arranges for a cigar-chomping stage boy to rebuff other visitors.

Soon the fantasy is rudely interrupted by the arrival of St. Aubyns, Sr. (Brandon Hurst, lovable as always) who offers her money to leave his son alone but it’s too late old chap, the couple have already married and, as quick as Senior can say “you’re disinherited” they’re off to Monte Carlo for an extended/belated honeymoon with fellow dancer Fannie Clair (Doris Lloyd) and her man Tom the Bookie (Alf Goulding). All seems fine until Leonard, unlucky at the tables, starts taking an interest in a Countess Adrienne (Paulette Duval) and, in front of her very eyes, Polly’s live crumbles. There are two moments in the film when Talmadge absolutely lets rip and here she attacks Duval’s character, knocking her swiftly to the ground. I’m not saying Borzage encouraged proto method but you don’t often see silent actresses engage in a proper Bank ‘oliday (c.f. your Cockney Music Hall Dictionary).

 

Polly is Friendzoned in the cruelest way...

Down and out on the Riviera, Polly finds herself in a bar run by one Mme. Blanche (Emily Fitzroy), completely unaware that it’s a bordello. It’s at this point that Polly’s baby appears and, out of options she finds friendship and a way to survive in the bar, whether by performing on stage or other means… you can see how some would have been displeased with Our Norma’s predicament.

 

Polly has her standards though and has the boy christened by preacher John Cairns (John Herdman) who, along with his wife (Margaret Seddon, as featured in Just Around the Corner elsewhere in this Giornate). Who turn out to be crucial when St. Aubyns, Sr. arrives with the news that his son has died and that he wants to take possession of his grandson. He has the legal papers to do so and Polly has no option but to hand her baby over to the Cairns. Talmadge is at full stretch during the sequence, misery piled on misery and injustice. She launches herself at St. Aubyns, Sr… echoing the wishes of the entire audience.

The only gig in town?

Polly heads back to London in a forlorn search for her son, at rock bottom she’s shown in blue darkness trying to sell flowers and hoping beyond all reason to chance upon her boy. It’s desperately sad and, Talmadge judges it just right and there’s not a dry eye in our house… We fast forward another two decades and her old friend Mme. Blanche has helped set her up in this bar where she can life out what remains of her wasted life in relative comfort.

 

Wendover urges her to not give up, even as she displays every sign of having done so. But… well, you really have to seek this out and marvel at her final flourish!

 

The Lady thoroughly deserves its reputation and this restoration has balanced the meaning as far as possible given the state of the surviving materials. Now we can all see for ourselves what the reviewers and audiences of the time could see in this remarkable actress and I would echo Jay Weisenberg’s hope that this is just the start of Norma’s wider rehabilitation.

Wit's end?

As he said, Talmadge is also so generous with her co-stars, allowing them to shine alongside her; it was her production company after all but she knew the value of teamwork and of honest artistic expression as well as crowd-pleasing box office fare.

Daan Van Der Hurk accompanied with some gorgeous lines and the full measure of Talmadge’s ambitions here. This was delicately nuanced playing that, just like the star, never dropped into melodrama or over-expression. Wonderful stuff that, again, I really wish I could have been there to see live! Next year Pordenone, I’ll be Covid free and ready to buy round after round of Aperol Spritz… just you wait!

Talmadge’s career dénouement has long been a puzzle with legend having Constance reminding her that Ma’s trust funds meant that they didn’t need to work again and Norma saying to fans, "Get away, dears. I don't need you anymore and you don't need me." as quoted by both Anthony Slide and Denise Lowe. Jay suggests the words of her second husband George Jessel in his book Elegy in Manhattan (1961, after Norma’s passing), offer a clue with his poem, told from her point of view explaining that she’d never been a stage actress, only a silent one, and it was just too late to learn another craft. She’d done enough and now it was time to just live.

 

Norma Talmadge

 

Fire and ice… Manolescu (1929), with John Sweeney, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Streaming, Day Seven

We belong to each other, I would never let anyone else have you…

Brigitte Helm stands to the right of the screen, a dark shadow receding behind her on the wall as gradually she lowers her right arm with a fisted hand slowly unclenched as she realisation saps the energy from her body. The game is up, devasted and all alone, she’s out of focus and for the first time, off balance… is this it, is there no way back? Don’t bet on it.

Ivan Mosjoukine’s eye’s well up, the most well-honed tear ducts in all silent film, febrile emotion twitching across his mouth and brow, as truth dawns and resolution nears. How do these people lay emotion so bare that we still feel it after almost a century of artifice and the endless replaying of trope and technique? This story was old even when it was first told but I’m still in bits.

This is Fantasy Silent Film, a game in which the combination of two of the best strikers in cinema muto both score hattrick after hattrick combining in ways that seemed impossible especially to this viewer who had no idea they had ever played together. Manolescu… Ivan “The Cat” Mosjoukine versus Brigitte “The Panther” Helm in a battle for our eyeballs, our attention… our love. Honestly, you could have taken the script for Carry on Cabby and given it to these two and we’d all be collapsed in a pool of utter distraction. You want engagement well here he and she are…

Brigitte Helm

Director Viktor Tourjansky, had previously worked with fellow emigree Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin/ Mosjoukine on Michel Strogoff (1926) and also assisted Abel Gance for Napoléon (1927) and boy does it show. This film shows every late silent period trick in the book, from audacious single take shots of Brigitte and Ivan getting out of a car, walking across through hotel revolving doors and through reception, to mixing positive and negative during a dream sequence and following every movement and expression of the performers with a camera so mobile you could pin a tail on it and call it Rover!

It’s a feast for the eyes and mine are welling up because I wasn’t able to see it on the big screen BUT at least we have the Giornate’s Silent Stream and I’ve no doubt this will get a screening in GB soon enough. In addition to the performers we also get exteriors including the Alps, Paris and Monte Carlo… all beautifully captured by cinematographer Carl Hoffmann, who had some form, including Fritz Lang’s epic Die Nibelungen and Murnau’s Faust.

The story was adapted by Robert Liebmann and inspired by the true story of the Romanian fraudster George Manolescu, a notorious fixture of the Berlin press at the turn of the century and source for three other films. In this version, Manolescu is inspired to raise his criminal game after fleeing his debtors in Paris and meeting a femme most fatale in the form of feline Cleo (Brigitte Helm) on route to Monte Carlo. Cleo is being kept in the manner to which she is accustomed by the plump gangster Jack (Heinrich George). The two meet on a train and share a night’s intimacy after Cleo sneaks into George’s compartment to avoid the police who are on Jack’s trail.

Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin/ Mosjoukine

Needless to say the combination of George/Ivan and Cleo/Brigitte is absolutely electric with the elder actor’s inherent delicacies balanced by the uncanny flexibility of Helm’s physicality. He touches her and she bends her back, forcing that unbelievable profile at an awkward angle against the cabin seat as she tries to avoid him. You sense that he respected his co-stars, just a hunch, because there seems absolute trust on show. How else to explain their ease in creating sexual tension? Fire and ice but (coolest) cat on (cooler) cat!

Cleo always follows the money and dumps George at the station in Monte Carlo before he spots her in the street and finds his way to her hotel room. Jack’s arrival forces him to action especially when the thug pulls a gun and Cleo’s cries alert the police who finally get their man. Jack out of the way, George has only one way to keep his new girl and that’s to steal jewels from the old lady next door in order to provide a viable economic and amorous alternative for Cleo and the two quickly become partners in love and crime. There’s a lovely sequence later on when George’s disguises for his crime-spree to come are lined up like a deck of cards… it’s the romance of Riviera robbery; everybody loves a con in the sun.

The two move on to Paris where Cleo’s an irresistible object to many a moveable man, flaunting her powers in front of George; the two are alike but so different and whilst he can manipulate and emotionally defraud, she cannot help herself or perhaps she is less controlled. She’s not a soulless vamp though as we shall see; these two are, of course, a tragedy waiting to happen.

Sure enough Jack, out of prison, tracks them down and in a face off with George, fractures his skull with a heavy ornament, leaving Cleo shouting murder.

The film changes course… George wakes up in hospital being cared for by nice Nurse Jeanette (Dita Parlo); it’s the calm after the storm and, almost too calm if I’m honest but, and Parlo can hold her own in this company and is the catalyst for a change in the relationship between the two leads. Can these two leopards change their spots?

 

I am only fulfilling my duty as a nurse… (yeah, right sister)

This is a truly exceptional film with a sparkling digital restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung which took over four years to combine as many original materials, in order to reconstruct the film according to the 1929 censorship certificate. All elements were scanned in 4K at L’Immagine Ritrovata as detailed in Luciano Palumbo’s notes on the Giornate site. What a job they did.

 

John Sweeney’s accompaniment wrapped itself around this film like the most luxurious of musical blankets, never strained but not just easy on the ear, as dynamic and quicksilver as the performers and the camerawork, duetting with Helm and Mosjoukine tonally, emotionally and stylistically. Oh to have been in the same room… Maybe not tomorrow but soon.

  

Jack of all trades, master too.

Priscilla, Queen of the Deserters… The Runaway Princess (1929) with Phil Carli, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Streaming, Day Six

Marry! How does a princess marry? Someone she’s never seen, who’s picked for her? I wouldn’t marry a prince for anybody!

Even before the royal escapees became hot news, there were others who dreamt of live without the constrictions of “duty”. It’s not for everyone, clearly, especially given the huge social spotlight of these days and the lack of freedom of choice earlier sensibilities brought. Australian-born novelist, Countess Elizabeth Russell certainly felt the pressure of expectation, living a life of suffocating duty only enlivened by lengthy country walks with her many dogs and her writing of “The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight” (1905) on which this film was based.  

This was an Anglo-German co-production between British Instructional Films and the German company Laender Film, with direction from Anthony Asquith for this English version and shotting split between Berlin and Hertfordshire Hollywood (Welwyn Studios). It’s an endearing fairy tale, entertaining without being that dramatically compelling or funny - not quite up there with Asquith’s Shooting Stars, Underground or A Cottage on Dartmoor – but a decent British film.

Mady and Paul Cavanagh

It does feature a winning performance from Austrian actress Mady Christians who’s Wilhelmina Marie Alexandra Victoria, Princess of Lothen-Kunitz, Grand Duchess of Gerstein… call her Princess Priscilla for short, is a bundle of innocence, energy and “Ruritanian” pluck! Natural charm combined with an ease of expression that covers the comedy and the drama with an earnestness that overcomes a rather predictable situation. She’s just turned 21 and decides to make a break for it when she is told she is to marry the Prince of Savonia, no doubt some old fuddy-duddy!

Accompanied only by her Professor (Fred Rains, father of Claude!), the two head off to London via Amsterdam for adventure and a normal life. Cycling on her estate Priscilla meets a Charming Man (Paul Cavanagh) who is immediately taken with this strange, pretty woman. He follows her as she makes her way on the train away from responsibility and towards the freedoms of London. She also has her first encounter with a group of forgers led by Norah Baring, who’s screen intensity instantly creates a new dynamic with knowing looks that could ignite celluloid with one glance from a hundred paces.

Norah Baring

The action picks up as Princess and the Prof change trains and the CM follows them along with a detective tasked with catching the forgers. The two only just make it into the baggage car and then exchange notes, with This Charming Man pretending to also be a detective, so that the two of them, Hand in Glove, can prevent the future Queen from being dead… (that’s enough Smith’s references, ed.).

The remainder of the film is a mixture of proto romcom and caper movie with some great shots of London especially when 'Cilla rides down Fleet Street up top on a double decker only to be kicked off with no ticket just yards from Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese and Devereux Arms public houses… The steam train crossing the old bridge with St Paul’s in the background is an iconic shot of the vestiges of steam punked London.

Claude H. Beerbohm and Paul Cavanagh

Goaded by the Handsome Man, ‘Cilla determines to get a job to show she’s independence and, after failing as a roller-skating mannequin/model, she gets a job as a delivery worker using the fake fiver given to her by Norah’s Forger, before her handsome fella sabotages her delivery of millinery to, guess who, the forgers. Head forger decides that she’s the perfect person to deliver their manufactured money as she’s so dopey and innocent. Besides… she just keeps turning up!

 

Now then, will Priscilla get caught up with the criminals and will she ever find out who the handsome man is? I suspect you can have a good guess but it’s fun finding out even if the forgery storyline is a little undercooked and you feel like an opportunity has been missed about the whole Runaway Princess situation.

Up top with St Paul's in the background

That said, Mady Christians is excellent as the innocent but resilient royal and there’s some great support from Norah and Paul Cavanagh, not to mention Claude H. Beerbohm as the detective. Generally, Asquith favours the humour and this is a satisfying romantic comedy, with almost zero dramatic tension, that would soon be christened screwball. All is never as it seems, but we know that!

I wonder if there was anything deeper about the royal desire for escape. Turns out you can’t really escape your responsibilities or your destiny as the sone of a man who was Prime Minister for eight years, perhaps Anthony knew this better than most.

A bird in the hand? Profanazione (1924-6), with Mauro Colombis, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Day Three

No, no, lo scandalo no! Per l’onore di Luciano! Per la sua felicita!

 

According to Angela Dalle Vacche, Lyda Gys “… specialised in positive female roles, playing naïve young women caught in evil webs and manipulated by family members and suitors…” * in which case this late-period vehicle certainly fits that bill! Gys was undoubtedly a diva if not quite of the premier league – Bertini, Borelli and Menichelli – but still a very popular actor from the classic Diva period through to the late twenties.

Produced by Lombardo Film** in Napoli – Lyda was married to owner Gustavo Lombardo - this interesting film, directed and written by Eugenio Perego – allows her to run through her operatic expressions by focusing as so many true Diva films, on an almost unresolvable moral issue. It’s no masterpiece by was part of a collaboration between the director and the Lombardos that led to the highly regarded Trappola (1922) screened at Pordenone in 2017 my first year at Le Giornate!

The film was actually begun in 1921 and suffered production hell with censors hacking some of the sense and length out of the film. It is a four-hander plus two children and a couple of birds, possibly three. Leda plays Giulia, the happily married wife of politician Luciano Quaranta (Alberto A. Capozzi) with whom she has a young child Mimi. Luciano gives her 100,000 Lira as he heads off to an important meeting and leaves her young brother, Alfredo (Silvio Orsini), to look after her and their baby.

Oh, Brother! Silvio Orsini

The following day, business partner Roberto Marelli (Eduardo Senatra) arrives with a letter instructing Giulia to give the money, immediately, to a man trying to do business with her husband who has been found to be dishonest. Unfortunately, when Giulia opens the safe, she finds the cupboard bare with her daft brother having blown the lot trying to recover gambling debts.

Buying time with a flimsy excuse, Giulia and Roberto try desperately to raise the money but no amount of credit is possible and it looks like Giulia will have to call in a favour with Marelli even though she knows he has strong feelings for her and that this may compromise her. As it turns out, he acts first so that when she arrives, he has already paid the debt off. But this has only led her into his realm and, overcome by that thing that men are overcome by, the financier has his violent way with her, brother Roberto arriving only to see the aftermath.

Marelli is ashamed, but Giulia prevents any violence wanting to avoid a ruinous scandal which would affect her husband’s standing. Ah Giulia… it’s not so easy to avoid these things in Naples… as a little while later she discovers that she is pregnant and soon Mimi is joined by a younger sister Marcella. Roberto pays of Marelli and Giulia, worried that he may exact revenge on her behalf, goes to Marelli’s house to have a few choice words.

There's a superb floral assault from Leda Gys here.

May you suffer in remorse as much as I have suffered in anguish!

To be fair to Marelli, he is shown to be ruined by regret over his sexual violence but this does not stop his growing desire to see his daughter. Meanwhile Luciano knows nothing and the Quaranta family enjoy the girl’s childhood. At one point the girl’s pet bird dies and their parents pretend that it flew off to find a friend, telling the girls that the only way to love the original bird is to love them both, that way ensuring that they love their own. It’s one of those foreshadows…

As they say a little further south in Sicily, three can keep a secret if two are dead and sooner or later Giulia’s going to get stranded after her car breaks down only to be given a lift by an entirely co-incidentally passing Mirelli before they plunge over a cliff leaving him clinging to life in a makeshift hospital and her waking up to find Luciano there with a lot of questions!

There’s a breathless final section where misunderstanding, lies and feelings fly red-hot and fast; will the truth win out and forgiveness take over? If you know Italian films of this period you know that all bets are off… you’ll have to watch and fine out.

Alberto A. Capozzi talks to the birds

There are good performances all round, even some sympathy for Mirelli and Roberto who works hard to improve himself. The star is undoubtedly Gys who is naturalistic within the bounds of convention and doesn’t actually overplay her expression. In Diva films emotion can be powerful and fatal, here Lyda extracts the tragedy out of almost normal circumstance…to that extent it's a "post-Diva" film (and on a number of other plot-revealing points!) which addresses external questions about love, trust and family.

Mauro Colombis accompanied with good grace as well, holding together an occasionally disjointed narrative and working with the mood to give a very satisfying presentation. Love, it seems, really is all you need.

 

* In Diva, Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, the essential tract on Diva Films!

** In 1904, the Neapolitan Gustavo Lombardo (1885-1951) founded "Monopolio" films, which would later become "Lombardo Film", then "Titanus", now the oldest film company in the World. His son with Gys ran the company as now does his grandson… a remarkable family film-firm!

 

Social insecurity... Just Around the Corner (1921), with Stephen Horne, Giornate del Cinema Muto, Streaming Day Two (Part Two)

 

Some films make you cry. This simple story addresses everyday heartbreak in ways that resonate with anyone who has lost someone dear and, whilst it has its melodramatic devices, it doesn’t overplay the central drama of ailing motherly concern for family and the future. Add the most sensitive of soulful accompaniments from Stephen Horne and you’re going to be sniffling at some point.

This was Frances Marion’s second film as sole director with the first being Pickford’s Love Light and the last being Song of Love (1923) featuring our festival darling, Norma Talmadge (featured on Kino Lorber’s fabulous Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers Bu-ray boxset). It was adapted by Marion from Superman, a short story by Fannie Hurst published in The Saturday Evening Post, 20^th June 1914 (24 years before Joe and Jerry debuted their, radically different, stories…), and on the face of it that’s an odd title for a story about a mother but all becomes clear.

Marion’s concerns were certainly to address working class life in contemporary New York and the few location shots are fascinating, helping to establish a strong sense of place. An opening shot of the skyline is followed by that of a bustling street market where, “around the corner” live the Birdsong family, Ma (lovely “veteran” Margaret Seddon, only 49 at the time!), son Jimmie (Lewis Sargent) and daughter/best friend Essie (Sigrid Holmquist, the “Swedish Mary Pickford” in her first American film).

Ma is ailing and her great wish is that she sees both her children in safe positions in life, Jimmie with a good job and Essie with a good man, a loving provider like her late husband. These were common concerns at the time when merely working hard couldn’t guarantee anyone of their class success. Essie is shown working in “a basement sweat shop, where youth grows old and beauty fades in making flowers for my lady’s hat.” Honestly Frances, that’d get you blacklisted three decades later…

Essie and the girls are shown working hard overseen by a hard-faced boss who turns his attention to one old woman whose fingers just won’t work fast enough for her anymore. Essie distracts him, but she’s only buying her frail colleague a little more time, no pension with this job or health insurance. Another peril is of unwanted male attention and, whilst the boss man makes them take work home at weekends to get round labour regulation, he also tries to get Essie to perform tasks outside of her job description. Brother Jimmie arrives to interrupt but there’s no doubt the threat and the power.

Essie leaves the job, her only recourse, and her flighty friend, Lulu (Peggy Parr), encourages her to take a job as an usherette at the theatre where she works – “eight dollars a week!” – which despite Ma’s misgivings – late nights, lots of men - she accepts. Lulu, true to the coding of her name, duly introduces Essie to a ticket tout (strictly illegal) called Joe (Eddie [Edward] Phillips) who has the gift of the gab a wandering eye and an absolute devotion to himself and no one else.

Sigrid Holmquist

Time after time Essie invites Joe back to meet his mother, only for him to find a last-minute excuse so that he can go and hustle, play pool and do what he wilt. He’s wasting Essie’s time but she is desperate to show her mother that she has a good man. Jimmie can see this as can a tall handsome fella, who puts Joe in his place – pushing him into a phone booth – after he sold him two dud tickets. This guy, played by Marion’s husband Fred Thomson, is entitled The Real Man in the cast list, and he carries the air of moral certainty Joe lacks: there’s an instant dislike for the weaselly schemer.

 

Time and again Joe lets Essie down, and Ma who, despite her ailing health, always prepares a meal for them, and things come to the most painfully dramatic end in a heart-melting final segment in which Ma is ill in bed, nursed by Jimmie who waits in vain for Joe to bring Essie back from a night out at a dancing competition. Many things need to happen in dramatic terms over that sequence and Marion directs with care and efficiency… there’s an especially impressive scene where er camera, or rather that of Henry Cronjager, follows a distraught Essie as she runs along snowy streets looking for Joe…

The Real Man and Joe the Liar

It does leave the question of just why Frances Marion only directed three films, but the “mysteries” of male dominance have long been examined. Here she gets some super performances from her group of players and the results are emotionally satisfying as well as convincing.

In her notes, film historian Anke Brouwers notes the socially conservative attitudes on display but even I can remember my grandparent’s generation – married all in the 1920s – talking in similar terms. As Anke says, this may not be a feminist story but it is a feminine one with the focus on Ma and Essie and their struggle for the only security and validation they, and many of their audience, could hope for.

The film, apparently, did not perform well, but as an historical document it is worth discovering. Maybe Frances had more to say… we all know why she might have been prevented from saying it.

 

One of a number of superb shots, Jimmie and Essie looking in from snowbound streets...

Everywoman … Yes or No (1920), with José María Serralde Ruiz, Giornate del Cinema Muto, Streaming Day Two

 

Which is worse? A woman who has love and no marriage or a woman who has marriage and no love?

This year’s festival has a welcome strand on the great but otherwise slightly neglected, Norma Talmadge. Norma’s star does not burnish quite as bright in comparison with some of her peers, Mary, Lillian, Gloria and Mabel and they were all born between 1892 and 1894. Talmadge started at about the same time, with her first film in 1909, aged 15, and made hundreds of shorts before establishing her own production company with husband, producer Joseph M. Schenck in 1917 and going on to greater heights. A poll of picture exhibitors named Norma the number-one box office star in 1923 and the following year she starred in Frank Borzage’s Secrets, perhaps her best film alongside The Lady (1925) with the same director - and screening later this week! – Sidney Franklin’s Smiling Through (1922) and the comedy Kiki (1926) directed by Clarence Brown.

Perhaps she is too associated with Schenck in some minds and, for one reason or another, her career declined after their split in 1926, after she’d fallen for Gilbert Roland, even though Joe kept on supporting her commercially even as the ticket sales slowed and talkies loomed. New York Nights (1929) showed she could have cut it, there’s little of her Brooklyn accent, but when you’ve spent two thirds of your life acting, and you don’t ever need to work again, you can imagine why she would walk away.

Norma as the wealthy socialite

On her day I would contend that she was technically as good as anyone in terms of controlled screen emoting, beautiful and believable and just very, very competent without the intensity of Gish, the universality of Pickford or the quirks and comedy of Swanson or Normand. She was a kind of everywoman who excelled in melodramas, a big hit performer but one more of her time (oh, how I hate that phrase) in terms of style and fashion. As a screen phenomenon she’s up there though and worthy of study and respect; historically important, a wizard and a true star!

So, what we have is what we have and it’s great to see the two films streamed today, one a punchy short from early in her career, Mrs. 'Enry 'Awkins (1912) and the other a typical hit from her imperial period, Yes or No (1920). Based on an interesting stage experiment written by Arthur Goodrich, which featured a split stage showing a rich and poor wife as they reach a crisis in their marriage, it allows Talmadge to play two characters, in the manner of say Mary Pickford in Stella Maris (1918) and, indeed, herself in The Forbidden City (1918) and Smilin’ Through, whilst she doesn’t match Pickford’s physicality, she does convince in both roles.

“Miss Talmadge wears a wig and some fine clothes in the one character, and her own tresses and calico in the other role, with equal grace.” J.S. Dickerson in Motion Picture News (17.07.1920)

Natalie Talmadge giving screen brother some stick.

Directed by R. William Neill, this Yes or No, splits the action between the two worlds with the emphasis more on the less predictable and more dramatically rewarding “poor story”. It’s a century old morality play and you really have to take that for what it’s worth.

We start in the spacious boudoir of the rich Margaret Vane who is fretting over a party she wants to have knowing that her businessman husband, Donald (Frederick Burton) is unlikely to be free to attend. Donald has health issues but he works his failing heart out for his wife to keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed to. It’s a miscommunication of almost Antonionian proportions and the harder he tries for her the more she feels ignored.

Margaret’s maid is Emma Martin played by Natalie, Talmadge Sister No. 3, as a feisty character who gives far better than she gets with the mostly useless men, whist also providing steadfast service for Margaret Vane. It’s good to see this most neglected of Talmadges in a dramatic role, she’s not got Constance’s pep nor Norma’s beautiful range but she’s no slouch as I’m pretty certain Mr Keaton discovered… Peg Talmadge didn’t raise any pushovers.

Gladden James up to no good...

Emma, appropriately enough, is sister to Minnie Berry (Norma again) who is the hardest-working mother in the bowery, feeding her two kids, husband, Jack (the always upstanding Rockcliffe Fellowes), and their lodger, Ted Leach (Gladden James who, lets be honest, is always trouble). Jack works all the hours God sends and studies in the evenings, desperate to make a better future for his family but this leaves Minnie at home and just a little bored. This Ted notices and he has plans to split the marriage just as, uptown, the sleazy Paul Derreck (Lowell Sherman), aims to woo Margaret away from her all work and no play hubbie.

Remembering the film’s called Yes or No, the women may have different answers to these propositions and to find out… you’ll have to seek this film out. Certainly, this is an impressive example of Peak Norma and you can fully understand how her millions of female fans would have responded to this fundamental answer to eternal questioning. Maybe because we’ve moved on so much as a society, we can be too complacent about the moral implications but not always and not all the time. No means no, means no.

Norma's character is very unsure of Paul...

Almost a decade before, a teenage Norma was playing her part in Mrs. 'Enry 'Awkins (1912) a light comedy about a feuding family with father Noah (Van Dyke Brooke) who prefers the rough charms of bullying pugilist (Bill Brown) to his daughter Liza’s favourite ‘Enry (Maurice Costello). It’s knockabout fun and Norma stands out for having more about her than anyone else amongst the chaos. This was how to make your way in pictures; keep on top of the brief and get noticed.

José María Serralde Ruiz played along with suitable gusto and in that way the best players do, minded the viewer of 1920 emotionally as well as musically.

Talking of which, we also had maestro Stephen Horne streaming on Day Two… more on that later.

Larks in Mrs. 'Enry 'Awkins 

Il trono di spade … On the Steps of the Throne (1912), with Günter A. Buchwald, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Streaming Day One

Before the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia, there was the equally daft Ruritania, a mythical substitute for all things Balkan, semi-feudal states still run by kings and queens, nestling somewhere in the vanishing borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but still locked in time, a home for heroes and their distressed damsels. In Italy this land was Silistria or Silistrie, described by one critic as “the promised land of cinematic heroes… It is a kind of barracks in which resides a king, a crown prince, great generals, captains, officers, a few soldiers, many spies and a few diplomats… “

That quote of from Festival Director Jay Weissberg’s notes on this film and, given that Ruritania is one of this year’s themes, it’s fitting that we kicked off the virtual Giornate with what was one of the earliest and most influential of Italian Silistrie films, Ubaldo Maria Del Colle’s Sui gradini del trono (1912); all the finery, gallantry and nobility you could possibly wish for, accompanied by suitably grand gestures on the piano from Günter A. Buchwald.

As with much Italian cinema of this year, the action is mostly fixed camera shots of tableau with some gorgeous, layered mise en scene and lavish exterior shots that Del Colle intermingles with reaction shots – players inside looking out as a parade assembles. As always, it’s so interesting to see the film makers working within the constraints of their craft and pushing the limits. There are so many shots in this film, it’s a rich visual treat with characters moving across the spaces drawing the eye and creating a dynamism potentially lacking in studio-based productions.

Dynamic tableaux

Any resemblance to The Prisoner of Zenda is purely coincidental but the plot did make me worry that, given current circumstances, somebody might bump into a criminal who looks exactly like Charles Windsor and install the doppelgänger on the British throne in order to fulfil a dastardly power grab… stranger things are clearly happening anyway.

110 years ago, though, all seems much more normal, with the young Prince Wladimir (Alberto A. Capozzi) all set to be King once he comes of age, even though he’s a very mature-looking teen. Until then he has to do as he’s told by the wicked Regent Backine (Giovanni Enrico Vidali). Backine has his eyes on marrying his daughter to the Prince but our hero only loves Princess Olga (Maria Gandini) and even the promise of undying loyalty from his sneaky mentor isn’t enough to convince him.

You accompany the Prince to Paris and try and make him forget all about his kingdom and more particularly Princess Olga…

Backine works up a plan and sends Wladimir to Paris accompanied by his henchman, Sobieski (the wonderfully featured Giovanni Ciusa, who’d give Daisy Doodad a run for her money in the gurning stakes…). The plan is to distract the Prince and he needs little help, soon falling for a dancer called Camilla, sorry, Thaïs, who gives a very impressive performance in a hall of mirrors at a nightclub, a superb invention from Del Colle and one of the most satisfying scenes in the film.

Thaïs dances with the mirrors

Worse is to come for our royal rotter though – poor Olga! – as Sobieski spots a young man, Chichito, who is the absolute spitting image of Wladimir give or take a criminal swagger and some low-rent facial hair. Backine is summoned to France and soon gets Chichito involved in a plot to replace the Prince. Chichito shows Thaïs his double’s love letters to Olga and, her heart broken, she agrees to entrap Wladimir by luring him to a country mansion he just happens to have spare, and a trap door to a basement prison.

 

Wladimir securely out of the way, can anything stop the rotten Regent replacing the rightful ruler?!

The story was written by Renzo Chiosso, who, as Jay Weissberg notes, specialized in Silistrian stories contributing to some of the 65 or more films made in Italy set in mythical Balkan kingdoms. The fascination with this area may have been sparked by the marriage of the Montenegrin princess Queen Elena, to the Italian crown prince, Vittorio Emanuele, in 1896, who became queen of Italy from 1900 to 1946. In Britain, there was a similar fascination with Royal cousins and when Queen Elisabeth of Romania stayed in the Welsh resort of Llandudno for five weeks in 1890, the town renamed streets in her honour, there’s a Roumania Drive, a Princess Drive as well as a Carmen Sylva Road, a nod to her pen name used in novels and poems.

At the same time these figures were being romanticized they were also under political threat; change was coming and perhaps that added to the mythical appeal. There’s further visits to Silistria/Ruritania in Pordenone and we shall find out more, much more...

Characterful baddies...

Interior view of exterior scene

Rich design

Plotting

And this is the real me.