Show people… Die große Sehnsucht (1930), Bonn Silent Film Festival 26

Camilla Horn

Quiet! Sound recording in process!

 

I love films about film and the silent era had some excellent examples from Eleanor Boardman’s Souls for Sale, Maurice Tourneur’s A Girl’s Folly* (1917), the lost Merton of the Movies (covered here on this blog) to the British Shooting Stars, and the German Die Filmprimadonna (1926). They give us a tantalising glimpse behind the screen, showing films in production, sometimes actual ones with Erich von Stroheim on Greed and Chaplin on A Woman of Paris in Souls. By showing the process though they let the audience in on the secret and in doing so enhance the end product… yes, even the slapstick chaos of Show People!

 

This is the German version and it features mehr sterne als im Himmel, or something like that, to coin a phrase. Yet, whilst the guests keep on coming, the film retains a compelling central story that is something along the lines of the later What Price Hollywood? (1932) and no doubt many more before, in which a young star breaks through potentially leaving friends and lovers behind.

 

The couple in question are Eva von Loe, played by an more earthly Camilla Horn than I’m used to  and Paul Wessel, a hope-less Harry Frank who seems like a nice chap until events start to move. They are part of a reserve army of extras who as much a part of the filming as the audience. Most of the details pass them by but they are just happy to be in the frame.  

 

The set up

Shot “on location” at the EFA Studios in Berlin, the script was co-written by one Emeric Pressburger along with Hans H. Zerlett and the director István Székel – later Steve Sekely. It is based around the filming of a feature of the same name, Die große Sehnsucht (The Great Longing aka Camera! Action!) which has the double longings for love and career… everyone wants to be in pictures but at what cost? But, neither the question nor the film is that serious and to cap it all there is the most outrageous of endings signalled by letters attacked to the bloomers of the dancers in the final dance sequence.

 

We start with a call for silence as the sound department sets the levels and a lovely tracking in shot moves us from on high under the gantry and onto the sound stage – reminiscent of shots in Shooting Stars but also that rare “making of” footage shot of L’Hebier’s L’Argent by Jean Dréville. It’s a very silent shot for a talkie where microphones needed to be close to the action but opens up the visual world of the film in swooping fashion. The accompaniment also provides a lovely diegetic moment as Mykyta Sierov’s flute is foregrounded as the camera finally settles on a man in Regency costume playing the same instrument. But, there’s an additional touch from Sekely, as the camera shifts from the man seemingly playing the flute to the musician at the side of the stage actually playing it – extra delicious as we know it’s really Mykyta.

 

It’s break time and we switch to the canteen with extras in costume ask for boiled sausages with salad whilst, in the actors’ area, Luis Trenker is having lunch with Hans Schlettow who prods the fourth wall by saying that they’re due to feature in a scene in which they meet Elga Brink in the canteen. She duly arrives and Luis is introduced as having just come down from his “Holy Mountain” in case the audience was in any doubt.

Luis Trenker, Elga Brink and Hans Schlettow

Poor chap! He’s been in films for twenty years now… always as an extra.

 

Luis then hands over the baton by saying hello to Cornelius (Ferdinand Bonn) who is a perpetual “background actor” and who is sitting next to Paul as Eva comes rushing across the canteen with an urgent need to speak to him. Just one kiss though before rushing back to take her place at the tables in a staged night club in which Carla Marventa (Berthe Ostyn) is singing to this captive audience but seriously not impressing director Hall (Theodor Loos) who, after numerous takes, can’t take anymore of her vocals and fires her. He tells cast and crew to take the afternoon off but is distracted by the pretty blonde girl sat among the extra “audience” but is too enraged to take notes.

 

How do you do, I’m Conrad Veidt!

 

Conny duly arrives to find the set empty and greets long-suffering assistant director, Mopp (Paul Kemp) who tells him of the need for a new star. Meanwhile Eva has read too much into her director’s distraction and seeks him out in the hope that she can take over. Herr Veidt arrives just in time to jump to the wrong conclusion thinking she has been cast and when Hall corrects him remarks on her looks: “but can she act?” is the reply.

 

Camilla Horn, Conrad Veidt and Theodor Loos

… the Ondra Bar is now open!

 

Meanwhile, it’s Anny Ondra’s birthday and she celebrates with Charles Puffy (Károly Huszár) and a host of other faces I couldn’t quite place – she’s definitely A Party and when asked by Puffy how old she is, promptly pouts her thumb in her mouth. Anny gets more time than most for some leggy shots of exhuberance and the sign of a star at the peak of their powers. She had a productive 1930s, even though her accent excluded her from more British films with Herr Hitchcock 

 

What shall we do? Garbo’s in America. Bergner** isn’t available.

 

The pressure’s on an as Hall gets desperate enough to give the unknown blonde a go, he calls on Mopp to tell him who she was. Unfortunately the AD is drunk as a streifenskunk and has to be sobered up under a shower. Back in the land of the straight he remembers her name and full address and so we can proceed with the ending we’re all expecting. She gets handed the script and works all night on it with Paul but will she be able to den erwartungen entsprechen?

 

The answer is uncertain especially when Paul starts to feel excluded… and there’s still time to meet Fritz Rasp – being unexpectedly charming (Brooksie always said so…), not to mention Betty Amann, Lil Dagover, Jenny Jugo, Gustav Diessl (still not forgiven by me for Pandora’s Box…), Fritz Kortner (ditto), Harry Liedtke, Jack Trevor and many more…

Anny and Puffy

 

The balance between the drama and the star-spotting is well kept and everything comes together for that cheeky big finale. Fun for lost of reasons and including a lovely self-awareness and wiliness to make fun of the industry in ways that still surprise. Well done!

 

A very funny scene is at… (a) … party when a couple of stars do an imitation of Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel. It’s comic, and at least gets those two (about the only German stars missing) by names into the picture. 

Variety, 13 October 1931

 

This silent version that was screened was sent out to the many theatres that still didn’t have sound systems and works very well, it even adds to the meta feeling as we see throughout: the idea of a silent film about a talkie and a talkie about the birth of anew stars featuring a host of older stars not all of whom would make the transition to the extra dimension. Sadly, that wasn’t going to be entirely their choice.

 

For this stream, there was fine accompaniment from Richard Siedhoff on piano and Mykyta Sierov on oboe/flute which follows the dynamic shifts between the stage and behind the screen along with the romance. Personally I’m not so sure about the kazoo used to imitate the singing voices – the jokes already there in the mime – but otherwise they do a really pleasing job. I wonder what Camilla Horn’s singing voice was like, hopefully the sound version is still around for us to compare someday?

 

Camilla Horn and Harry Frank

 

*Screening at the Kennington Bioscope on 30^th September as part of a fund-raiser for The Cinema Museum – details here!

  

**Elisabeth Bergner, star of Fräulein Else (1929) and a hugely successful actress who moved to the UK in the mid-30s and provided the origin for the story used in All About Eve!

Camill and Fritz Kortner

"They're making a film based in Vienna for a change..." 

Paul Kemp Mopps up...

Crime & Punishment… Schatten der Weltstadt (1925), Horne & Baldry, Bonn Silent Film Festival 2026

 

When night sets on the big city

And lights and make-up and laughter mingle

Then, from streams and deceptive pomp emerge

The shadows of the metropolis, the shadows of the night…

 

Have to say that the “F” in FOMO reached a peak this year for the Bonn Silent Film Festival as I not only “MO” on a two-part screening of the magnificent SFI restoration of Gösta Berling Saga (1924) but also a rare screening of L’Inferno (1911) as well as many goodies including this stylish Weimar thriller with accompaniment from the many hands of Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane Baldry… if only I’d been there. I say it every year and there will be no stopping me in 2027!

 

A man dies in the agony of a heart attack, grabbing the dark-stylish hair of a would-be younger conquest, falling down with frozen grip as her silent scream is given startling verbal reality by our harpist (probably not pianist…). It is but one moment in a two-hour tour-de-force accompaniment from Elizabeth and Stephen which sees them intertwining phrases and melding tonality of strings plucked or hammered with hand or keys. I can’t imagine how it feels standing on the precipice of even a practiced and prepared for cinematic trio: piano, flute and accordion interplaying with harp, percussion and voice, all relating to the action on screen.

 

But Stephen and Elizabeth Jane are pitch-perfect musical adventurers, sure of each other’s contribution just as they are of their ability to match the momentary moods and themes of the film unfolding in front of them. A fourth element is always the audience and, whilst I played my part in our living room, it’s the immediate ambience that provides a call and response as compelling as the narrative. In the live stream from the festival, you can feel this almost tangible atmosphere. You are, very quickly caught up in the mix and the focus on film which is the ultimate magic of live cinema… contrapuntally rubbing circles on our stomachs and patting ourselves on the head, two things are true at the same time even moving in different time, space and direction.

 

Ellen Richter

It's all about the hair though. Ellen Richter was a one-woman industry by this time in Germany with her own production company, Ellen Richter-Filmgesellschaft, managed with her husband Willi Wolff, who directs her in this film as most of her others. Ellen was once described as a forgotten star but is now resurgent with recent screenings at key festivals including Moral (1928) and others at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 40^th Edition. She’s a German diva with sharp features, eye-drawing presence and jet-black hair that is often pulled back to allow the focus on eyes as deep as the Danube of her native Vienna and which beguile as they inform. And clothes, she wears these with the grace of a Borelli or Bertini exuding a Germanic athleticism which saw her feature in many action adventures.

 

Her physicality is on display here as she goes in search of her husband’s killer into the dark underbelly of Paris but first she must play her part in the demimonde of the wealthy as Olly, the wife of a just-promoted prefect, Henry Bernard (Alfred Gerasch). The film’s opening already gives us a hint of the degradations to come as a well-dressed man is propositioned in the street after the theatre and a young woman, presumably poisoned by the skin game throws herself in the Seine in the establishing shots bookended by portentous poetry.

 

No wonder! Making a career with a wife like that…

 

Horrid Henry: Alfred Gerasch

We then join the couple at the lavish party they’re giving to celebrate Henry’s elevation and it soon becomes apparent that a price is being paid for his career and by Olly. The inference is clear, she has been abused for her sex as much as the desperate women of the streets and, as leering men of influence pass inappropriate comments we see her being approached by her husband’s benefactor, the government minister (Philipp Manning). One man, a journalist Felix Granier (Walter Janssen) complains about the language and assumption that an attractive wife is a professional asset… and we soon learn that he is Olly’s lover, her refuge from her brutal husband and the deals he makes using her body as collateral.

 

But enough is enough and when the minister makes his way to Olly’s boudoir to collect his reward she cannot go through with it and, as the shadows of the musicians and the dancers at the party play against the curtained windows the old man has a heart attack and promptly dies. Henry tries to cover up the location of the death and sends the dead man away in a cab pretending he’s dead drunk… It’s not a particularly clever ploy and the police soon come knocking only to find the new prefect dead with a pair of scissors deep in his back. Olly enters the room and seems shocked but these guys know a good actress when they see one.

 

The story moves on in swiftly in detailed ways and the trial of Olly follows in a magnificent studio set - designed by the art directors Otto Erdmann and Hans Sohnle – which emphasises the pomp and process with Olly isolated on the stand, distant from her judges and jury with a circle of lights illuminating the search for the truth among the murky testimonies below. By this stage Olly is almost defeated and reluctant to tell a story that no one will believe over and again but gradually her situation is revealed and she shows the scars of her husband’s beatings. She is acquitted due to lack of anything other than circumstantial evidence but this is not enough to stop the media portraying her as a murderer who got away with it.

 

The most hurtful of this group is Felix who hasn’t the stomach to see through the whole trial and still won’t see her as she begs his mother (Frida Richard) to understand that she is innocent. In the face of this intransigence and the police’s indifference, she resolves to find the murder herself. She gets her first clues on returning home to find that a rough looking gentleman of the streets, Emil, aka Egghead (Robert Garrison) had wanted to see her urgently. We encounter Emil at her court case where he was so worked up by Olly’s evidence that he shouted out support and a caricature is printed in the paper below the acquitted.

 

Emil knows something but has been forcefully removed by a man who we later discover is Boxer Karl, but Olly’s maid gives her enough detail for her to head off to spend long weeks searching for the man who can save her reputation and identify the true killer of her tormenter.

 

The third act involves her perilous journey through darkened streets at risk from criminal and cop alike until she finally finds out Emil’s name and likely location at the Black Stork. This is the deepest dive-bar you can imagine; two women waltz with a cat as a violin and accordion play on and Boxer Karl’s gang look on… there’s Egghead, Elegant Hugo and Cocaine Max (who later went into advertising I believe). And it has to be said that Harald Paulsen performs a mini masterpiece as the relentlessly cruel boxer, never giving an inch and driving the narrative uncertainty with convincing menace, flashing fists and a sharp blade.

 

Olly in the Underworld

Will Olly manage to outwit both the forces of the legal and criminal enterprise… it’s another job for Richter the adventurer and allows Richter the clothes horse, plenty of scope as she pulls the audience with her to the end.

If crime dramas primarily pursue the purpose of keeping the viewer in exciting suspense and astounding him with a witty and unexpected ending, the film corresponds to this intention throughout. 

The Grazer Tagblatt

 

The film was another successful one for Richter and Woolf with the latter showing plenty of Weimar style and featuring some expressionist scenes (even though there’s nary a mention in Lotte Eisner’s Haunted Screen) with oppressive staircases, guilty apparitions in court and her bedroom curtains and a demimonde of the darkest hue. I like the use of eggagerated flashback to show how the prosecution frame the murder and the different takes – a technique we’d take for granted now, especially after Columbo and Murder She Wrote!

 

Richter’s success continued into sound but being Jewish, she was banned from acting after the election of the Nazi government in 1933. She and Woolf moved to Vienna and then ended up in New York after the annexation of Austria in March 1938. They returned to Germany after the war and although she started another production company although her husband died in 1947 (according to Wikipedia) there’s no evidence I can find that she resumed her career either side of the camera, living mostly in Dusseldorf until her death in 1969, aged 78. Still, we have this film and other precious examples of her glittering career and can understand how and why she was so successful during the good times.

 

Which is where I came in and Stephen and Elizabeth-Jane, helping to reanimate her star power in front of our very eyes.

 

Harald Paulsen is Boxer Karl

No animals were harmed in the making of this film

Cocaine Max

Hair death grip 

Feathers!

Here we gather... Nuts in May (1976), BFI Blu-ray Out Now

 

In my office, packed floor to ceiling with home media – digital, analogue, paper, plastic and vinyl – it’s easy to forget the time when we assigned value to film and television based on a single viewing and memory alone. I was a teenager when Nuts in May was broadcast in 1976 and it not only stayed in my mind but it became a shared memory with my partner, similarly, raised on a diet of Play for Today although not so much of the ITV in her case.

In the 2021 BFI Q&A in the extras the cast recall the in-joke created by Roger Sloman’s character, Keith asking “our larder isn't sticking in you is it?” when a rain-sodden Ray clambers into the back of his Morris Minor. It’s such a daft line – for many reasons – but to this day is repeated by cast and crew whenever they meet. In the same way, I am Keith to my wife’s Candice-Marie, on holiday or on walks when I’m stating the obvious or being boringly precise about unimportant subjects.

Mike Leigh’s film was made on a rain-soaked shoestring in 1975 but it has remained in our minds and collective consciousness ever since: perhaps because of the freshness of performances and the enduring relevance of this most “suburban” of rural dramas – one of the extras is Basil Wright’s documentary The Country Comes to Town (1933) and Nuts is certainly the Town come to the Country and a small camping site that represents the clash between class and culture, freedom and licence and McCartney’s Wings versus homegrown folk songs about going to the zoo.

Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman

It’s interesting to hear Leigh talk about the characters as being something created by the actors and not so much his scripting and it’s clear that his actors prepared thoroughly for their roles by thinking themselves into these characters and then reacting to the situations the loose script put them in. Husband and wife team Sheila Kelley and Stephen Bill who played biker couple as Honky and Finger, travelled down to the filming location in Dorset on a motorbike completely in character although I’m not sure if she was wearing the platform boots seen in the film.

Alison Steadman, who ties with Nigel Hawthorne on nine Plays for Today and is still ubiquitous on our telly’s, and Roger Sloman (surprisingly only three PfTs) create a couple of well-intentioned monsters in Candice-Marie and Keith – both as memorable as Say Beverley in Leigh’s Annabel’s Party (1977) in terms of their being within a gnat’s whisker of believability. The couple are socially conscious, vegetarians and adherents to The Country Code and yet they are not tolerant of people who either do not share their values or are just not aware. In this space is Ray, played with diffident precision by Anthony O'Donnell – another class act with a long career – who just wants to be left alone but who is pulled into the disapproving gravitational whirl of the couple’s dissatisfactions (with each other as well as everyone else).

Ray is a student PE Teacher who is also studying geology and who likes processed milk and “Diddy” David Hamilton’s Radio One show (on which we hear Wing’s Magneto and Titanium Man, a mid-period dip…). Spurred on by Candice-Marie, Keith asks him to turn the transistor down only to have to move their tent when their noisy neighbour ignores him. It’s a foretaste of what’s to come when Honky and Finger arrive but in the meantime the couple form an uneasy truce with Ray, Candice-Marie especially being interested in reaching out much to Keith’s jealous disapproval.

Wings' Titanium Man or The Zoo Song? Your choice...

There’s enough between Candice-Marie and Keith to fill out a marriage counsellor’s big notebook and they are a couple held together by the strangest of power dynamics as well as their self-impose rules. After jealously attempting to intimidate Ray for his choice of syllabus (I know!), Keith has to back down after Candice-Marie says she doesn’t want to go on any further trips with him – it’s the unsubtle blackmail of children and both are undoubtedly immature but hey, let he who is without sin cast the first stick on the bonfire…

Keith takes his wife on a coastal walk – five miles he estimates, before revealing it was 14 after they return. His organised in a disorganised way wanting to take three sets of footwear for a walk involving a clamber, seaside pebbles and Corfe Castle, C-M resists and is glad of it after the rain soaks his plimsoles… their relationship is full of micro-aggressions and petty sniping but they can, at least come together for the formal duties of singing together, he on banjo, she on guitar. The songs featured were written by the actors in character.

The delicate balance is disturbed by the arrival of the very urban Honky and Finger on their motorbike - a couple who just don’t know the “code” that Keith has in his head nor the rules of the campsite. They’re loud but not unreasonable but when Finger wants to start a fire on the campsite, Keith cracks and a confrontation is unavoidable. It is a visceral moment and sympathies are balanced as we can recognise the pressures on both couples of an ungoverned situation that throws them together in ways for which they are not prepared: the reality of the class divide.

And they say culture war is new and that “Woke” – that word really meaning to other – is a “mind virus” of modern design. Imagine Nigel and Kemi pitching their tents next to yours in a wet and sodden west country camping site… shudder.

Stephen Bill, Anothony O'Donnell and Sheila Kelly

There’s a must-have limited edition which includes an illustrated booklet with essays on the film by Mike Leigh, John Wyver and Dr Adam Scovell and writing on the archive films by Ellen Cheshire and Vic Pratt. It may help you decide on whether you’re Team Keith or Team Candice Marie but, as with all things as magically real as Leigh’s work, these rich characters are not all bad and they’re not all good. As he always says, there is no “they” in his work, only us…

 

Special town and country features:

Newly restored by the BBC in 4K and presented in High Definition

Archive commentary by Mike Leigh (2009)

Mike Leigh Remembers… Nuts in May (2026, 14 mins): the director looks back on one of his most influential television plays

Director and Cast Q&A (2021, audio, 43 mins): Mike Leigh, Alison Steadman, Roger Sloman, Anthony O’Donnell, Sheila Kelley and Stephen Bill are reunited on stage at BFI Southbank

BFI London Film Festival 2024 Screen Talk: Mike Leigh (2024, 48 mins): celebrating the 2024 release of his film Hard Truths, Leigh discusses his career with writer and journalist Amy Raphael

The Country Comes to Town (1933, 21 mins): a documentary made to help modernise the image of farming and the British countryside

Spring Comes to England (1934, 16 mins): documentary on the journey produce makes from field to market – including Candice Marie’s favourite, mushrooms

Winter on the Farm (1941, 15 mins): a public information film on Upton Manor Farm in Dorset

The Chiffy Kids: Pot Luck (1976, 19 mins): the Children’s Film Foundation favourites take a holiday under canvas

Play Safe: Camping and Fishing (1978, 2 mins): a safety awareness film showing the dangers lurking in the countryside

You can/must order Nuts in May direct from the BFI from 17^th August and come rain or shine it’s perfect viewing for all of us who wonder why the neighbours are so noisy and the World doesn’t do as it’s told.

There’s a fabulous moment in the BFI Q&A when Alison and Roger click right back into character as if the half-century between had been a lunchbreak, and then lead the audience in a sing-along of the Zoo song. Ultimately this work binds us together with its vitality and memory of a shared entertainment. That’s priceless.

Alison Steadman and Anthony O'Donnel say "Big cheese!"

High and Dizzy… Laurel & Hardy: The Silent Years (1929), Masters of Cinema Blu-ray

 

This is the one boys and girls; this is the one… Following on from their definitive collections of Laurel & Hardy’s silent classics from 1927 and 1928 comes Eureka Entertainment’s presentation of their work in 1929 all presented in high definition for the first time in the UK.

 

Newly restored in 2K from the finest available materials, this Blu-ray edition is absolutely essential viewing for anyone with a sense of humour or in need of a laugh in this year when global politics (and football) went fully slapstick. Not to overplay comedy or make light of anything or any-one supposedly real, but this set contains eternal truths about love and companionship that, clearly, have never been more relevant, never been more needed in this age of performative cruelty. Stan or Ollie might poke you in the eye or strip your chest hairs off with fly paper, but they do it with sincerity, lost in the moments of petty humiliation that ultimately bring us together. You may find yourself hiding a goat in your room or kidnapping a horse but there’ll always be a lesson to be learned and even if you have to risk your lives on a skyscraper just to change into each other’s trousers… what’s left but to laugh and carry on.

 

Two moments from growing up… my Grandad Jim Joyce introducing me to Laurel & Hardy on our old black and white: “watch these lad, they’re really funny…” and, later, as a teen on a late bus in Liverpool watching a tipsy tramp fall over as he got on board saying: “it’s a shit brick la, it’s a shit brick …” looking me straight in the eye and smiling. We suffer daily in our ways but passing on these sentiments is the currency of resiliance – you can easily lose your dignity but who cares, who really cares when all we need to do is laugh. Laugh is all your need. Well, that and kindness: brotherly laughs. 

Still, here the facts are clear and we see peak Stan and ultimate Ollie in 1929 just as silence was giving way to sound, the two of them riding a wave that would make that transition easy for the funniest people on the planet. On film, at least…

Liberty (1929)

This film could have been called Putting Pants on Ollie and after starting with clips of the American war of independence we see our heroes as convicts on the run, diving into a getaway car and then spending the rest of the film trying to get changed into their proper clothes. This follows the usual self-contained logic of their and Leo McKay’s classics as they go from one compromising situation to another before Harlow finds them trying to swap their trousers in a cab. They end up high above the city after running into a construction site lift.

 

Thus, hundreds of feet above the city, balanced precariously on metal girders and with a crab in Oliver’s trousers – of course! – the duo struggle to save themselves and it is dizzying and mesmerising with a real sense of danger even though they are using a set-up on top of a building with a safety mat – just like Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. The shots are still hard to watch and, as the commentary from Chris Seguin and Kyp Harness points out it’s like a surreal dream with Stan especially on the point of falling either from a ladder tottering on a plank or when he grabs onto a loose girder which sails out over the Culver City/Los Angeles sky attacked to a crane. It’s a vertiginous ballet of near misses and mortal fear performed by two men in their early forties yet fit as squirrels!

 

This set-up was constructed on top of the Hal Roach Studios and this is also one of three of the films on this set to feature a teenage Jean Harlow, here as the young woman encountering the in-cab trouser-swapping. Accompaniment is from Maud Nelissen and there’s also the original Robert Youngson score, newly restored by Stephen Horne which is fascinating to compare – musical slapstick pattern recognition.

 

Wrong Again (1929)

 

This was Leo McCarey’s last hurrah as writer and principal director of the duo (although he stayed involved on script, directorial assistance and “brand advisor”) and it’s a surreal doozy with the boys trying to claim a reward by returning a lost horse called Blue Boy from the stables where they work, to a bewildered millionaire seeking a stolen painting also called The Blue Boy. It’s an easy mistake to make and of course they make it in style, anticipating rich reward for their act of kindness as the mix up continues in surreal style at the owner’s mansion. No animals were harmed in the making of this film, only human pride.

 

That’s My Wife (1929)

 

Lloyd French directs from a story by Leo McCarey and it’s time for Stanley to dress in drag to play Ollie’s wife so that his uncle will pay him inheritance due to his being “happily married”. Potentially meta, this one starts with Ollie’s clearly unhappily married wife (Vivien Oakland) leaves mainly due to the ever-presence of her husband’s best friend Stan, who seems oblivious. The two men then debate which of them should leave in order to restore balance but just as Mr Laurel is finally persuaded that he should quite his mate’s married home, up pops that Uncle who is so keen to see and reward his nephew’s marital bliss. Cue the wig and dress and a face that inly a drunken fellow diner could love as they head for a slap-up, slapstick meal and foot fights…

 

Big Business (1929)

 

AKA “the one with the Christmas trees”, directed by James W. Horne, and in which our fir-tree friends try to make a sale with James Finlayson who is not in the mood, not now and possibly not ever, for season’s greetings. The violence, once again, is petty and what can the modern sophisticate say except that comic life is still nasty, brutish and short-tempered. Don’t try this at home with online AI Help Bots; just go after their programmers – the guys who draw up the requirements and the specifications. Customer disservice is always hilarious.

 

 

Der letzte Mann?

Double Whoopee (1929)

 

Directed by Lewis R. Foster from another McCarey script, this is one of the most famous shorts and not just because of the appearance of rather more of Jean Harlow than might be expected, Double Whoopie is a close to perfection as you can get – so many of these films are almost as close – and sees the boys take jobs at a fancy hotel where defective lifts humiliate European princes and pride comes before a fall in a game of tit for tat that escalates from Ollie’s doorman to the front desk. I wondered if Murnau’s the Last Laugh had been an influence on Ollie’s excess of esteem.

 

 

Bacon Grabbers (1929)

 

Lewis directs, Leo writes and there’s another glimpse of Harlow at the very end of this one as she brings the first part of a double whammy of punchlines that leaves the audience reeling. Stan and Ollie are bailiffs tasked with recovering a radio from a late paying customer and hilarity ensues as they try and serve him with his papers. Said customer is Edgar Kennedy giving it the “slow burn” in response to the boys’ persistence… so many of these films are explosive ending with the cathartic expressiveness of Stanley’s weary look to camera. Here’s the inside out almost a century before Disney’s Freudian cartoon.

 

Wikiparently, repo men were referred to as “bacon grabbers”, short for “those who grab your possessions…” pigs who steal not squeal?

 

 

Oliver, Edgar Kennedy and Stanley

Unaccustomed As We Are (1929)

 

This is the first sound comedy they made. This is the first sound comedy anyone made! *

 

Now, this is an historic film representing as David Kalat points out above* in his excellent commentary: the momentous debut of our boys in sound. As a talkie he describes how it is a major film whereas this silent version is slow in comparison with title cards delivering punchlines when we can lipread the speed of the source dialogue. Soon Hal Roach could get as much for a Laurel & Hardy sound short for as much as a full feature and that’s the kind of multiple we can all get behind. Kalat remarks on their accents but he’s wrong in saying that Laurel came from the same place as Chaplin, he was a Lancastrian and not a Londoner and you can still trace the region in his voice and his style. They grew up in the same theatres, but London and Lancashire… dare I say we have a different sense of humour?

 

Guest star, and for the first time, is the lovely Thelma Todd who was so popular she was paired with Zazu Pitts for a series of comedies as well as later staring with the Marx Brothers. In Harlow fashion, she loses her dress in a car door in This Is the Night (1932) and this element of her act was already well established by that point and in this film, as many others, she is soon down to her underwear and we can admire the figure that helped her win Miss Massachusetts in 1925!

 

Edgar Kennedy plays her policeman husband and – always suspicious – he turns to violence as retribution for the boys seeing too much of his wife. The results work a little better in sound than silence but it’s still a winning combination.

 

 

Trousers, again. Berth Marks.

Berth Marks (1929)

 

This was the duo’s second talkie but here is the silent version offered to picture houses that didn’t have sound and sees the boys as two travelling musicians on their way to Pottsville… This, as so many of their films were, is cross-referential and the expectations of mutually-assured destruction set by Battle of the Century and furthered by Double Whoopee, are taken to their logical extension here as, having blundered into a couple’s sleeping carriage on the train, Stan is not aware of the suit-ripping mayhem that is unleashed and only revealed in full at the end of the film. Chaos is guaranteed but we know that and let’s do something new as well.

 

I very much enjoyed Andreas Benz’ organ accompaniment on this and the above film, his lines are familiar ones from the versions I would have seen in the 1960s and, being old enough to remember organs rising up in front of screens in the Odeons of Liverpool and Blackpool, there’s a nostalgic resonance that is very much of Stan Laurel’s original birth county of Lancashire. With a piano there’s more light and shade and the organ has a more defined sound which takes a lot of musical agility to accompany this kind of quick-fire comedy. It works very well and gives a lovely warm hug to the boys in excelsis!  

 

 

Angora Love (1929)

 

Released on 14^th December, this was the boys’ last silent film and it’s fair to say that they had perfected the art. I’ve written about this film a few times before after live screenings (four times!) and it absolutely one of their best as they try to conceal a goat hidden in their apartment from their landlord – Mr Edward Kennedy again! There are 50 Ways to Leave Your Goat Herd…

 

That's not your wife Oliver...

Now, for those of you with a sound set up, there are also two 1929 talkies They Go Boom! and The Hoose-Gow which show the development of the duo’s comedy with the added dimension which, as David Kalat says, enabled them to speed their comedy up and develop now ways of pushing forward their narrative and punchlines. 

 

There’s a limited edition of 2,000 copies which you’ve all probably ordered anyway and which includes an O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Scott Saslow, a fulsome collector’s booklet featuring new notes on each film by writer and comedian Paul Merton along with a new essay on frequent collaborator James Finlayson by silent cinema expert Chris Grosvenor.

 

In addition – deep breath - you get:

 

1080p HD presentations on Blu-ray from 2K restorations by Blackhawk Films of all films

 

New scores:

 

Andreas Benz (That’s My Wife, Unaccustomed as We Are and Berth Marks)

 

Neil Brand (Bacon Grabbers, Wrong Again and That’s My Wife)

 

Gaylord Carter (Big Business)

 

Robert Israel (Angora Love, Big Business and Double Whoopee)

 

Maud Nelissen (Big Business, Liberty)

 

There’s also an alternate musical scores on select shorts including the Robert Youngson score for Liberty, newly restored by Stephen Horne

 

Don't hang about: LIMITED EDITION!!

New audio commentaries:

 

Liberty and Berth Marks by film writer Chris Seguin and Kyp Harness, author of The Art of Laurel & Hardy: Graceful Calamity in the Films

 

Double Whoopee, Unaccustomed as We Are and Wrong Again by film historian and writer David Kalat

 

Big Business and Angora Love by silent film accompanist Neil Brand

 

That’s My Wife and Bacon Grabbers by Kennington Bioscope regular Glenn Mitchell, author of The Laurel and Hardy Encyclopaedia

 

Unaccustomed As We Are alternate sound version

 

Alternate dubbed version of Double Whoopee

 

1929 sound shorts They Go Boom! and The Hoose-Gow

 

New documentary by David Cairns and Fiona Watson

 

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (excerpt)

 

Crazy Heights – Alternate Super 8 version of Liberty

 

Super 8 versions of Big Business, Double Whoopee and Angora Love

 

Stills Galleries

 

You can order direct from the Eureka website and, frankly, no home should be without what are some of the finest comedies ever put on screen! But you know that… "it"/"Life" may well be a "shit brick" at any moment but, even tossed onto our arses by outrageous fortune, this is laughter, this is (self) love!

There's Jean!

Swanson Summer… Zaza (1923), Kino Lorber Blu-ray

The fastest, easiest, most enjoyable picture I ever made…

Gloria Swanson

 

There’s a buzz about Gloria Swanson what with a UK premier of a new restoration of Queen Kelly* and a cracking book about the film fresh on bookshelves** but, then again, there’s always been a buzz around Gloria. What strikes you so often about the primary stars of this enduring medium is the sheer kinetic energy displayed in service to the narrative, the action and the story. They had faces then of course but they had to radiate and then they had to mime: no portion of the screen was uncovered and no doubt was left in audience’s minds of the feelings on display.

Gloria was, of course, one of the golden generation of short actors, arching her back and standing on tippy toes to gain a fraction of an inch when measured against Mary, Mabel or Viola Dana. Lord knows what they were feeding them in Brooklyn, but the Talmadges were almost supernaturally tall at 5ft 5” and therefore probably unbeatable in the inter-studio netball league (if there was one).

But no matter how big they were, the harder they fell if they were playing alongside Gloria and this film features a couple of catty skirmishes with Mary Thurman (5ft 4”) who goes down just as quickly as Bebe Daniels (5ft 4”) in Why Change Your Wife? (1920). Gloria is too swift, has lightning combinations and goes in harder every time and, as Zaza, the talk of Parisian nightlife, she is peerless and fearless. Thurman plays Florianne, a singer just below Zaza on the bill and in the pecking order, who loathes her more popular rival as much as the men love her but she’s a tryer, we have to give her that.

Watch out for a swinging right hook Yvonne!

The film opens with a title card invoking the spirit of Zazas past on stage and on screen – Rajane, Duse, Leslie Carter, Farrar - before introducing another – “a modern and tempestuous Zaza – the Zaza of today – “, who is to be found in a small provincial theatre not far from the capital. The new sensation dominates the bill and backstage as well and we find Zaza in a dressing-room tizz as Gloria establishes her star’s quality by playfully bullying her loyal assistant Nathalie (Yvonne Hughes) when she can’t find the silk gown she’s actually wearing. She blames her anyway then smiles a crafty smile and drops a tip on the dresser. She’s somewhat less forgiving of the stage manager and crew, not to mention Florianne whose head-dress offends her as she peers through the safety curtain spyhole and so she plucks part of it out.

Director Alan Dwan sets a Fairbanks-frenetic pace as you’d expect and how else to establish the presence of Zaza who has to be a stage stunner even in silence and with her motivations only hinted at. Opening at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris, in May 1898, Pierre Berton and Charles Simon’s play contains a backstory that is not present in Hollywood, not even implied, with Zaza having been a prostitute before escaping to success in the music hall. But don’t worry, things do get a little "French"… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Gloria abides

Zaza casts a spell on her audience and one of those enthralled is the rich gentleman Bernard Dufresne (H. B. Warner) who comes to the theatre every night to stare adoringly at the petit star as she swings high over the audience in a very literal attempt to make her jump out of the screen. Technically these are so well filmed with the camera above Gloria as her swing moves to and fro at alarming speed, the cinematographer must have been moving exactly in parallel motion probably on a cherry picker or some other device, not looking down and cranking with all of his might to capture the action below.

 

Zaza’s swing is very impressive but it’s also her biggest weakness as Florianne cuts one of the ropes which frays and snaps during a performance throwing the star to the ground below and breaking her leg. Besotted Bernard takes command and arranges for the best surgeons in all of France to make her well again but she must spend a long time convalescing in his rural retreat and one thing leads to another… as it was always likely to do!

Gloria and HB Warner in the press

Yet there’s more than one twist in this particular tail as Bernard’s full situation is revealed and heads may have to rule over hearts. You really have to watch it to find out as Gloria gets to show us her dramatic range – her true superpower – emoting in ways that few could accomplish. But it’s not just her face, she is physically expressive despite not being a dancer, and has a natural pep and swagger that fills the screen and draws the eye.

The film is also splendid vehicle for Swanson as a clothes horse with stunning designs from a young Norman Norell who, recently graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he studied fashion design, joined Paramount in 1922. He worked with Gloria and also with Valentino before the film business moved to Hollywood and he then would go on to have a huge career in fashion right the way into the early 1970s.

Gloria's glorious gowns!

His remarkable talents are well on display here and you couldn’t ask for a finer clothes horse than Swanson who wears his creations as extensions of her character’s personality. You don’t need to be tall to wear haute couture on screen, just natural grace, main character poise and Zaza-vroom energy!

This contributes to the film’s joys and, later on, acts as a counter point to the difficult choices Zaza must make as life moves from on stage and in stalls, to bucolic family settings. Love is love but there are many forms as she will discover…

The music is from Jeff Rapsis and is based on the original cue sheets from 1923 which takes us close to the original musical experience of audiences watching. It’s a 2.0 DTS-HD MA sound mix so hi-fidelity way beyond 1923 but all the better for filling your living room with Jeff’s expert extemporisation and practiced feel for the period and the musical sentiment of this joyful film. 

An excellent package all round from Kino-Lorber and apologies for only taking the nine years to watch and review it! NOW is the time though, now is Swanson Summertime!

*BFI 20^th September and tickets go onsale 6th August - there's also an introduction from Pamela Hutchinson author of…

**The Curse of Queen Kelly, (Sticking Place Books) – you can order from here or the BFI Shop and don’t forget to bring them along for signing on 20^th!

Gloria expects you on 20th... NO excuses!

Midnight at the oasis… On the Beach (1959), BFI Blu-ray out 27th July!

 

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river…

 

TS Eliot, The Hollow Man (1925)

 

In 1959 the Doomsday Clock, established in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to symbolize the threat of nuclear war, stood at seven minutes to midnight. In 2026 it is just 85 seconds… the closest ever. So, any attempt to review this film as a “period piece” is undermined by proliferation and the persistent threat of global conflict involving weapons of mass destruction.

 

 

I hadn't previously seen On the Beach, it sounds like an upbeat Cliff Richard musical with that title, but this is a Stanley Kramer film and it could well be one of the most sobering ever made as the remnants of humanity await the drift of the nuclear radiation down south to Australia. Yet, even in the face of almost certain doom, there are new tales to tell and moments of humanity, and warmth. It’s no longer that hard to place ourselves in the mindset of 1959 when the Cold War was in full freeze and nuclear stockpiles were already big enough for mutually assured destruction. Growing up through the end of the Cold War we had every expectation that The Bomb would slowly be defused… but there you go.

 

Directed by Kramer, sandwiched between The Defiant Ones (1958) and Inherit the Wind (1960) this is another in his string of films addressing topics Hollywood normally avoids. Adapted by John Paxton from the novel of the same name by Australian writer Nevil Shute, it is an unflinchingly clear view of what course human history could take just over a decade after the World war which followed on from the War to End All Wars two decades before. It wasn’t such an unreasoned expectation that conflicts were inevitable even if the costs were to be so great and so universally unavoidable. We never learn.

Gregory Peck

It begins on a submarine, an illusion of safety among the routine, under the auspices of Commander Dwight Lionel Towers played by Gregory Peck, whose Mount Rushmore visage of wisdom and pained humanity opens in concerned close up, scanning the seas for signs of life. They are heading south to Melbourne, the last survivors of the US Navy which, like most of the planet has fallen under a hail of nuclear weapons in a conflagration that is not explained but which is still ongoing. The radiation of the war is mostly in the Northern hemisphere but it is slowly being carried towards them… some months away.

 

The film gives us a scenario of slight hope with the submarine being sent north to investigate the distribution of the radiation cloud, which according to the theory, may be dispersing more quickly than at first thought leaving the possibility of inhabitable land. At the same time, a series of morse code signals are received from San Diego… is it possible that another group has managed to survive?

 

In Melbourne though, life continues almost as normal with the only real difference being the lack of gasoline and the city full of cyclists, electric trams and horses. One of the local naval officers, Lieutenant Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins) is assigned to the Americans. He’s a family man whose wife Mary (Donna Anderson) is in denial about their limited future and who can blame her with a small child to protect.

 

Melbourne after the fall

As Towers arrives he is met at the station by Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner) who instantly catches his eye – as Ava Gardner is apt to do… - although he is living as a man whose wife and children are somehow still alive back in America. There’s also a British scientist, Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire) who drinks too much mourning his involvement in the nuclear programme and knowing exactly what is coming. Both Gardner and Astaire are magnificent and give quite possibly some of their finest performances in the mid/late careers, freed of the lightness of much of the material they had to work with in this time. Both also have important roles to play in showing that there is new life and new love even in the direst of circumstances as Julian rebuilds a Ferrari racing car, winning a race that whilst it has a few too many crashes to be anything other than “a ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines…”, does allow him one last hurrah. Peck is excellent of course as convincing as ever as a man of duty and dignity who will follow his course no matter what the personal cost.

 

He and Ava get to bring new romance to the final laps of humanity as Moira and Towers get close as the reality of his situation finally sets him free. But, for how long. The local authorities have dispensed suicide pills to be used when the options are a slow death by radiation or nothing… Peter and Mary have the hardest journey to take with their child, once the future now requiring a desperate choice. Perkins is at his most sympathetic and young Donna Anderson acquits herself well.

 

As the congregation outside the church starts to dimmish with the coming of the summer winds, the banner reads that “there is still time Brother…”

 

Fred Astaire, Donna Anderson and Anthony Perkins watch a yacht race on the beach

Scott Harrison, in one of two new commentaries, points out the title is taken the verse at the top from TS Elliott’s poem The Hollow Man. These beach is terminal* which presents a desolate landscape and a state of moral destitution “it is not about hope or optimism but about when we chose to give in to the inevitable and how we chose to live under a death sentence. It may even – as the book – be about suicide. Most of all though, it is a warning and one that stands to this day.

 

We still have this capacity to destroy whilst at the same time are plunging the planet into a slow hot death with fossil fuels… this is the science fiction of probabilities, a warning we have still to head and the circumstances of which have only worsened over this new century. In this respect, we are all Mary…

 

 

Anthony and Donna

Special features:

 

Presented in High Definition

Audio commentary written by Dr Philip Davey, author of When Hollywood Came to Melbourne

Newly commissioned audio commentary by Scott Harrison

Making On the Beach (1959, 9 mins): rare 8mm footage shot by amateur filmmaker Richard Goslin

Interview with Donna Anderson (2015, 19 mins): the actor discusses her time working with the cast and crew of On the Beach

Kim Newman on Apocalypse Cinema (2022, 22 mins): the film critic deconstructs On the Beach and discusses the socio-political environment in which the film emerged

Clothes to Die For: The Costumes of Ava Gardner (2022, 16 mins): costume historian Elissa Rose explores Ava Gardner’s impressive wardrobe in the film

A Tribute to Stanley Kramer (2004, 14 mins): a celebration of Stanley Kramer’s life and career, featuring interviews with screenwriter Abby Mann and Karen Sharpe, Kramer’s widow

Operation Hurricane (1952, 33 mins): after the first Soviet atomic weapon was detonated in 1949, the British accelerated the development of their own nuclear deterrent. This haunting film documents the first atom bomb test on the Monte Bello Islands

Original theatrical trailer and galleries

 

Fred on form

For the first pressing only there’s also an illustrated booklet featuring new essays by Dr Christina Brennan and Barry Forshaw and a biography of Stanley Kramer by Jennifer Frost. Also includes writing on Operation Hurricane by the BFI’s Vic Pratt, notes on the special features and film credits

 

In his commentary Scott Harrison reads out the most pertinent and the most well-known closing section of Eliot’s poem, which aptly describes the fate of these last few survivors. At the time one of the reviews has noted that perhaps On the Beach could be the film that “saves the World” … well, it’s getting its second chance now thanks to this excellent release.

 

 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

TS Eliot, The Hollow Man (1925)

 

You can order direct from the BFI Shop in person or online and from all good retailers of home cinema. Poignant, terrifying and sobering.

 

 

*JG Ballard’s Terminal Beach (1964), a short story based on a man’s physical and mental deterioration on a nuclear testing site, may or may not have been inspired by this film. There was something in the air and the World came very close with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962… ever closer to midnight.