RW Paul the 2nd & Adolphe the 1st... The King on Main Street (1925), Kennington Bioscope with Colin Sell

"Yes, yes, by all means sure-fire box office values ... the Menjou fans will eat this up ... it is mighty fine entertainment, and they will like it!" Film Daily

Mr Kevin Brownlow was rather incredulously reading out some of the notices for The King on Main Street with one paper claiming it was up there with Valentino in The Eagle and The Big Parade as one of the best releases of the month although the King’s budget could barely have covered a week of Vidor’s epic. We were seeing Kevin’s 16mm print and this has some parts missing, namely the starting reel and the saucier aspects of Greta Nissen’s role, excised for the home market and, rightly so judging by the way the actress was wearing silk in her Paris boudoir.

In truth the film is a modest effort but it does feature superb playing from Adolphe Menjou as the runaway King Serge IV of Molvania who, on a business trip to America nips out from the confines of royal duty for a day of adventure at Coney Island. Here he meets a young kid who shows him the ropes vis-à-vis hot dogs and the business of fun including a memorable roller coaster ride filmed with the camera close-up on Menjou as he acts his way up and down and, indeed, around Coney’s biggest dipper.

Gotta love Bessie 

He is also reacquainted with the excessively lovely Bessie Love as the all-American Gladys Humphreys who has already thrown her iced bun at him in Paris overcome with the sight of royalty. As Kevin explained the film was cashing in on the royal fad sparked by the handsome Prince of Wales, Edward the Abdicator, albeit a few years before our King ran for his life.

Love’s always a treat and here she absolutely rips the floor up as, ukulele in hand she Charlestons the heck out of the carpet at small-town Little Falls reception for the King arranged by her beau John Rockland (the disturbingly Ford Sterling-esque Oscar Shaw). Wikiparently, Love’s rip-roaring helped popularise the dance in the US and strictly speaking, she’s 10+ in comparison with the Saturday night kids we get from the BBC’s dance show.

Theatre Magazine was definitely impressed "... Bessie Love gives a perfect exhibition of the Charleston, proving that it can be danced with extreme grace and agility, and yet without a single hint of wriggling vulgarity. We hereby award Miss Love the palm as the greatest Charleston expert on the screen if not on the stage -- which is by way of being a miracle, for ordinarily a film dance looks as silly as the capering of goats".

There’s some business involving selling oil to unscrupulous American Arthur Trent (Joseph Kilgour) – how little things change – and the King may even be forced to betray his country’s best interests in order to protect Gladys’ honour but, y’know, it’s probably a “great deal” when you look at it closely. The King also finds a way to smuggle Greta’s saucy Therese Manix by getting her to marry his butler Hugo (Londoner Edgar Norton) and it makes a man of him in scenes largely cut to preserve our frail morality.

Monta Bell directs with straightforward efficiency influenced, as Kevin pointed out, by his time working alongside Chaplin on A Woman of Paris a couple of years earlier – Adolfe was also in that too. Other existing elements of The King on Main Street include two sequences filmed in early two-strip Technicolor which might explain its success along with the charm of the King and his women. Lois Wilson is also an uncredited "guest" extra in a hotel lobby scene – I think I spotted her but I do see her everywhere I go.

Colin Sell accompanied and riffed in divine style on By the Light of the Silvery Moon as well as launching into a spirited Yes, We Have No Bananas as the jazz band at the reception tried to find something that would pass as the Molvania national anthem.

Is Spiritualism A Fraud? (1906) 

The first half of the evening had featured Professor Ian Christie continuing his birthday tribute to RW Paul with some films he hadn’t shown at the BFI last month. One particular delight was A Soldier’s Courtship (1896, repeat 1896!) which has a good deal of performance and plot as a young couple on a bench are disturbed by an old woman as they canoodle leading the titular soldier to upend the seat and the bothersome intruder. Made the same year as Edison’s The Kiss, this film is far ahead in style and entertainment.

Edison’s failure to extend the patent for his Kinematograph to Europe was, possibly, because he was wary of a legal wrangle with William Friese-Greene’s very similar machine and there is another major step up the Ladder of Recovery currently being climbed by Bristol’s finest “father of cinema”.

This laid the way open for Paul to manufacture his own version and to advance the design and implementation of the technology. His wife Ellen, featured in heavy disguise as the annoying old lady in the first film, introduced Paul to more theatrical ideas and collaborations and the first couple of British film became established as both innovators and commercial hits.

A Soldier’s Courtship... well, they'll have to get wed after *that*!

Paul’s illustrated catalogues make it clear that his film’s were colourised even from 1896 and exhibitors would pay a pretty penny to see the likes of Comic Costume Race (1896), The Twins' Tea Party (1896) and – Christie’s suggestion for the first two-act film - Come Along, Do! (1898) recently completed with an animation based on just two frames by his son. A further four frames have now been found by the BFI and so there is more to be done.

Christie is hopeful that there will be a lot more to come as archives around the world begin to re-evaluate their possible-Pauls.What we have is fascinating and, as at the BFI, it was interesting to see how the filmmaking developed into longer-form with trick camerawork as in Artistic Creation (1901), the bizarre The Magic Sword (1901) – knight loses girl to giant devil and wins her back thanks to Fairy and Sword (I think) – up to Is Spiritualism A Fraud? (1906) a rather violent take down of the fad for communication with the dead.

The Magic Sword (1901)

Once again Paul’s documentary work was also covered including two films he made of the tragic events around the launch of HMS Albion in 1898 – 34 people were drowned when the huge wash smashed into the pontoon on which they were standing. Though criticised by former collaborator Birt Acres for exhibiting the films, Paul gave them away for free and a fund was set up to help the families who had suffered. Paul was using an electric camera which kept on running and the proof of the pudding is in the striking close-up of Ellen on the boat approaching the launch.

John Sweeney accompanied these cinematic gobbets with his uncanny period feel and sense of dramatic timing; many of the films are missing starts and ends and could catch out the unwary. Nothing got past the safe hands and quicksilver thematic inventions of Mr Sweeney though!

Jeanne and John… Man, Woman and Sin (1927)

“The popular opinion that Miss Eagels is highly temperamental and is hard to work with has no foundation in fact, I know of no other actress I would rather have working under me than Miss Eagels.”

Monta Bell clearly believed in Jeanne Eagels who seems to have been one of those charged characters whose startling expressiveness drew heavily on an inner turmoil. A major star on Broadway, when her creative energy would tune with the live audience, she apparently doubted herself more in front of the camera and as a result, this film took a little longer than expected to make.

Jeanne also had problems with drink and drugs or rather her self-medication in response to stress-induced anxiety we can only guess at. She deserves the utmost respect for what she achieved all in spite of those personal odds.

Joining her in body and the spirits was of course John Gilbert – maniacally handsome and a winsome performer again in this film, top-billed, co-writer and giving an outstanding performance not only against type but also one of genuine pathos and subtlety. JG's a man as much sinned against as sinning and one whose only crime was to love the wrong woman (in fact and fiction...).

Jeanne Eagels and John Gilbert

Only a few of Jeanne Eagels films survive, including Man, Woman and Sin and The Letter – an early talkie also produced by Bell, for which she would receive a posthumous Oscar nomination. She died aged 39 in October 1929.

Having starred for four years on stage in Rain she was more than ready to play Vera Worth a street smart, society editor who just happens to be having a relationship with her paper’s owner Mr Bancroft (Marc McDermott). She’s a tough-talking hot-metal vet whose heart beats pure ink and which has healed over so many times it’s unlikely to ever break again.

Into her life walks Al Whitcomb (Gilbert) a cub reporter so green and trusting in the nobility of female spirit that surely she’ll just find him a laugh, toy with him and cast him away once boredom and the need for her expensive treats-in-kind kicks in.

Jeanne Eagels strikes a pose for the film's publicity team

We first see Al as a child (played by Philip Anderson) who lives in very humble circumstances down an alley where his mother earns a crust by ironing. The alley is mixed race and, strikingly for a film of this vintage, little is made of this: the neighbours just get on.

Out in front is the big house where rich folks live. Al takes the laundry round for the mother and falls for her pretty and completely unattainable daughter. One house in the street is said to be haunted and one day Al goes in and emerges as cool as he can, impressing the whole gang but especially the girl. One kid remarks that gangsters probably hid out there whilst the girl above his station drops her candy in admiration.

She’s already on a pedestal and her mother will make sure that Al never pulls her down.

Al at work

Fast forward and Al is now John Gilbert, still attached to his mother and still very earnest. He gets a job packing newspapers for delivery and starts to make his way.

Shockingly, aroused by pictures of movie stars in the paper, he decides to visit a brothel where, before things can develop too far, he has to come to the aid of one of his journalistic colleagues who has gotten too drunk and opinionated for house rules to accept. Sobered up and grateful he tells Al to report for a junior reporter’s job the next day.

Now things start to move, and Al is asked to attend the Presidential Ball with Vera. Kevin Brownlow has said that parts of the film had been cut because originally Gilbert was to be seen interviewing President Calvin Coolidge and locations were filmed around the White House. Eventually the politicians got cold feet and pulled these intriguing scenes... which is a shame as they would have lent considerably more depth to this broadsheet morality tale.

The presidential ball

John Gilbert, who co-wrote and partially directed said that the film “…could have been great but it wasn’t…” quoting “private reasons” which may have been Jeanne Eagel’s challenging working practices or, more likely, this interference from the Executive.

Al’s coverage of the Ball goes down a treat and Kevin Brownlow has described the sequence when he returns to the Bull Pen eyes glazed with the story he now has to write, as silent film at its best. There are no title cards just close-ups of Gilbert’s intensity: he has found his forte and maybe more…

Al in the newsroom

Even Vera, whom he describes as the most beautiful woman at the Ball, is starting to be won over by his puppy dog presence and, tiring of Bancroft’s variable enthusiasm, she starts to encourage his affections.

But can it last and once Bancroft discovers the two alone in her apartment – provided by him naturally – Vera tries to protect him by saying he’s been pestering her, but Al won’t have it and keeps on wanting to say the truth. Tempers flare and Bancroft lifts up a heavy lamp… the camera drops to focus on the men’s flailing legs as they battle for the weapon only for the older man to fall, dead, to the floor.

No spoilers!

This much the film’s promotional posters give away, but the question is now about consequences and whether Vera will work with Bancroft’s men to cover up and push the blame on Al – or will she finally commit to her own truth and save him…

Man, Woman and Sin is an unusual film for the period in its handling of relationships, leading men, smoking – Vera’s intake is mentioned a number of times – and race. Politics would have been on that list too… no doubt Louis B. Mayer would have hated it!

John Gilbert gives an outstanding performance – up to The Big Parade standards, whilst Jeanne Eagels shows what a strong performer she was: it was a privilege to see one of her few films and good to find a new, old name to remember.

Man, Woman and Sin is officially hard to find but I was lucky enough to attend a private screening on 35mm: maybe one day it will be shown again?

Buy two Normas get Joan free... Lady of the Night (1925)

Norma and Norma

There’s a moment in this film when Norma Shearer leans over and embraces Norma Shearer. She’s playing two roles and in a critical scene her characters meet and make fateful decisions in the back of a limousine. We all think we know how it’s done: split screens and double exposure but that moment… you can’t quiet explain it away. Well, not until you realise that a double has been used briefly to play the more heavily made-up character: an uncredited actress named Joan Crawford.

Back in 1925 viewers wouldn’t have been able to freeze the frame and roll back the action to reveal the truth to the vague delight of their wife and daughter… nor would they have been able to recognise one of the most famous faces in cinema history... but I could, so there you go.

Norma and Joan

This snippet aside Lady of the Night’s major revelation was Miss Shearer herself who gives two top-notch performances in a manner my daughter described as naturalistic and unaffected – “she’s not like the rest: she’s almost modern…” (I feel that I’m giving our Beth a good grounding; don’t you?).

Norma Molly and Norma Florence...

Norma does indeed stand out and the same intelligence on evidence in her more famous pre-code hits can be seen here in the sassy, gum-chewing, broken hearted Molly Helmer. If you didn’t know she was also the soft, highly privileged but decent, Florence Banning you might struggle to recognise her… but that is acting. I get the impression she really enjoyed the former role more – there’s a lot more of an emotional ride and she’s the true noblewoman in the end; defined by her choices and not her position in society.

This is typical Hollywood double-think – an industry in a hurry to get rich quick, largely peddling tales in which the ordinary poor have it better because that choice of being “good” is much harder: this played well with their working class audience who then gave them back a fortune in return.

Miss Shearer is often accused of riding high on the extent of her husband, Irving Thalberg’s, considerable influence but this is some months before their affair began although she was in a relationship with this film’s Director Monta Bell at the time… But Norma Shearer is a darn fine actress and she shows it twice over in Lady of the Night (1925): even in the 1920’s women didn’t need any help from men in gaining success through sheer talent. And, do we really think that one of the best talent-spotters in Hollywood history would push the claims of anyone he didn’t think was anything less than exceptional?

On this evidence Shearer was an unique acting presence and one that relied more on skill than sheer good looks to impress. Her emoting is impressively nuanced and you are compelled to watch her every sneer, wince and head-tilt as her Molly struggles to make the best of things as the dice roll first for then against her…

Lew Harvey

The film opens with Molly’s father Chris being sent down for twenty years just after she is born. He says goodbye to her in handcuffs then rails against the wealthy Judge Banning (Fred Esmelton)

 as his baby daughter is wheeled up safe in the arms of her rich aunt Miss Carr (Dale Fuller).

18 year’s later both girls are orphans and as Florence leaves her select school for girls, Molly leaves her reform school with her gum-chewing friends Gertie played by Betty Morrissey and another, un-named, performed by Gwen Lee.

Typical Girls: Gwen Lee, Betty Morrissey and Norma Shearer

Molly heads off to Kelly’s bar for an evening of dancing with her long-standing beau, “Chunky" Dunn (the marvellous George K. Arthur) whilst Florence attends an elegant coming out party. Chunky attempts to defend Molly form the attentions of a local wide-boy only for a neighbour, David Page (Malcolm McGregor) to have to step in and do the job properly. Molly is impressed and starts planning a boyfriend upgrade by inviting her rescuer to diner. 

George K. Arthur

Mr Page is not just handy with his fists though, he’s an inventor and before his appointment he achieves the breakthrough he’s been working for: a device that can open any safe! Wow, if only the script had gone into more specifics on that one… He tells Molly and, their gooseberry for the evening, Chunky who suggests there will be a fortune available from the underworld but Molly’s having none of it and tells David to sell it as a security device to banks.

He follows the straight and narrow and seals a lucrative deal with local bankers and their wealthy backers – including Judge Banning. He meets Florence and falls in an instant… future life sorted – not bad for an evening’s work.

Choices, choices... Malcolm McGregor and the Normas

But… it’s not that simple and David’s life is to be eventually decided by the women in his life and not his own free will… an interesting progression from Alice D.G. Miller (who wrote the scenario) and Adela Rogers St. Johns who scripted. The ending’s not too surprising but the way we get there is based on moral code and not character weakness or happenstance… it’s not greatly dramatic but it is well done and Norma Shearer shines!

I watched the Warner Archives edition which comes with a cracking new score from Jon Mirsalis. It’s worth it for the double barrels of Norma and that first glimpse of Miss Crawford. It's available from Amazons...