The best in silents… Il Cinema Ritrovato 40, Bologna

 

It’s just struck me that not only was this edition number 40 of the Ritrovato but that was the number in centigrade the temperature hit from time to time. Four dozen or so films to see out of 500 on offer in just eight days, crossing the city, finding the shadows in long medieval streets and I’m an old white guy from Merseyside wearing socks and old band t-shirts? No problem. After locking my flight bags in my room on the day of my departure – all perfectly normal, no sign of heat exhaustion or “sauteed Brit-brain” there – I’m now sat on the tarmac dredging the cranial swamp for the best silent treats of the week.

Matinee Idols Death Match

OK, this wasn’t what they called the strand, that was Women’s Male Stars who were developed to meet the largely female audiences of the growing matinee by the increasingly commercialised studios. In practice this was a competition to decide which of the following was going to be crowned the Male Matinee Idol of the Festival or, to be fair, who was going to come second as Rodolfo “Rudy” Valentino was nailed on in the rather interesting playboy to cabin boy coming of age film Moran of the Lady Letty (1922).

Rudy can't fail. Just ask Dorothy, his friend.

In a lesson to Capital from the Proletariat, Rudy’s character learns purpose in hard work and also finds love with Comrade Moran (Dorothy Dalton) who turns out, to be the very womanly Letty Sternerson. All this after he’s fellow sailors called him Lilly of the Fields… projection methinks! Love and Merchant Seamen is a big topic but mark this one for future reference. It’s a rollicking good adventure!

The ill-fated Wallace Reid has drawn the short straw in terms of his surviving work and his career was also tragically cut short after a studio accident left him addicted to Morphine. But he’s a charming performer and you can see enough in this restoration of Sick Abed (1921) although his is in the rather unheroic position of having to feign sickness in order to avoid a financially troublesome trip into work. He’s a charmer but there are better examples of his full appeal although his chemistry with Bebe Daniels is spot on.

Now for the Irish contender and Male and Female (1919) with Thomas “Tommy” Meighan as the Admirable Crighton who steps up to save the aristocratic by useless family who employs him after a shipwreck. He wins the heart of Gloria Swanson even though their hearts are approximately a foot apart, but class tells after they are rescued and the butler heads off for a new life in the country of opportunity south of Canada…

Torrence takes the competition far too seriously.

Contender No. 4 please… Tol-able David (1921) and its young Richard Barthelmess fighting to defend his family against a bunch of murderous men who are occupying his neighbour’s house. This is quite the best of the four films and as directed by Henry King is a deserved part of the canon. Barthelmess has to act young but this is a right of violent passage with all too believable and nasty stakes. When I say nasty, I mean the extraordinary Ernest Torrence who shows his dark side which such glee: one of the definitive bad men of this era who could also flirt with Clara Bow in Mantrap or do comedy till the cows came home….

 

Enrico Guazzoni’s World

No Ritrovato is complete without two things:

    Divas

    Films of antiquity and the ancient world

On the latter point we were spoiled with a new restoration of Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1913) which take the tableau style as far as it could go with multiple depth of field slowly revealing the full effect of a well designed and choreographed set piece whether in a palatial room or at the Circus Maximus. There are crowds of thousands and the effect is to offer a deep and stylised window into the Italy of emperors and Christian revolt. I’m sure it will all work out… but this is a major film in the history of long-form cinema. What’s that Mr Griffith? Oh, your thing… that’s not due for a couple of years yet. The Hell it is.

Over ten years later an attempt was made to revive the Italian Golden Age with The Last Days of Pompei (1926) – an adaptation of the English novel by Lord Bulwer-Lytton, as had been the two competing versions of 1913. As UCL’s Maria Wyke points out this attempt to recreate the recent cinematic as well as antiquarian past  “… tries to reject the detached tourist gaze on the city of 19^th century imaginings for an impassioned, participatory vision of ancestral suffering.” Cecil B deMille could only watch and admire.

Pina Menichelli beguiles in Alla Deriva

We also had three films featuring one of the three main Diva of the cinematic golden age with Pina Menichelli in three of the seven she was directed by Guazzoni, including La Casa di Nessuno (1915), Una Tragedia al Cinematorafo (1915) and Alla Deriva (1913) which, as Giovanni Lasi writes in the programme, revolves around the presence and intense performance of the actress “… with her ability to hypnotise the viewer with magnetic and unsettling gazes…”. Consider me cross-eyed.

1906 given voice

I missed a couple of Japanese films with Benshi accompaniment but was treated to the Italian version for the 1906 compilation strands which was a delight, especially late night in the Piazzetta Pier Paolo Pasolini. Here Gabriel Gabriel Thibaudeau played piano with Alice Zecchinelli on drums and Julie Linquette providing what could be described as  vocalise combining sound effects, dialogue and narration. This was especially funny for Aux bains de mer (1906) as she provided commentary from a middle-aged couple watching events on the beach and then in the hand-coloured tour de force that is Aladin ou la lampe marveilleuse (1906) from the genius Albert Capellani.

It was one of the most joyous sections of the week and peak Ritrovato under those stars as our laughs drowned out the incessant cicadas.

Aladin and there's also a lamp...

The Child of Paris/ L'enfant de Paris (1913) with Gabriel Thibaudeau & Fabiana Sommariva

Proving that it was not just the Italians but also the French who were leading the cinematic World Cup in the early 1910s, Léonce Perret’s film positively barrels along even though it is based on an unpromising premise of a young girl seemingly orphaned by the death of both parents in quick succession and then kidnapped by a criminal gang for reasons that they only make up on the fly… It is tense and content rich with a high level of cinematic technic from the director and his cameraman, Georges Specht. It’s two hours long and whilst there are some padded sequences overall you are gripped by the search and the chase from Paris to Nice.

There is so much pleasing technique in the film from backlighting, low-angled shots, close-ups and surprising camera movements which allied to the location shooting and a plot involving chases across France, trails gone cold then warmed again, persistence and steadfast heroism sees good win out. After all the shibboleths drummed into audiences about film development, you keep on finding innovations “out of time”… we see more every year with these restorations.

 

Depth of field, lighting, framing... such a complex shot.

Finish Films and Cleaning Women…

If it was Wednesday it had to be Finnish film day with two excellent titles from Finnish actor and filmmaker Teuvo Puro; the first Meren kasvojen edessä (Before the Face of the Sea) (1926), accompanied by the mighty Stephen Horne and the second Noidan kirot (Curses of the Witch) (1927) projected in the Piazza Maggiore and accompanied by Helsinki’s finest Cleaning Women.

Silent film is as much about travelling in space as well as time and I shall be saying more about both films in the coming days but just to say that the three cleaning robots (CW01, CW03 and CW04) that form the band know how to support the narrative of the film screening above them and how, despite their unusual dress senses, to focus musical energy in dramatic sympathy.

Suomi tuntee elokuvan!

Sisterly solidarity in Noidan kirot 

Vögel sind seltsam, aber die Liebe ist blind: Asta and Connie Restored

 

Cheating here but two German films for one with Conrad Veidt first up in a comedy, Liebe Macht Blind (1925) accompanied by Herr Neil Brand with the usual informed wit and wealth of reference. Connie is a psychiatrist Dr Lamare in love with his patient, the very married Diane (Lil Dagover). Her husband Viktor is having an affair with a woman played by one of Britain’s finest silent actors, the sublime Lillian Hall-Davis who is as eye-catching as always. It’s Veidt’s mad professor who takes the comedy biscuits though even after Emil Jannings pops up to spoof his role in The Last Laugh.

The film was considered lost until a pristine nitrate copy was discovered in Chile and another piece of Connie’s range was preserved in all its quirkiness.

Asta messes about on the river.

Less manic but equally important was the restored version of Urban Gad’s Der Fremde Vogel/The Strange Bird (1911) accompanied by James Shelby. The film was one of the first pictures he made with fellow Dane Asta Nielsen in their initial German contract. It’s a tale of an outing on the waterways of the Spree Forest, near Berlin during which Asta’s character forms a romantic attachment with a boatsman (Carl Clewing). The restoration has added some four minutes to the screen time and has added the tints missing for so long from. Shot almost entirely on location – to great acclaim – it’s presents Nielsen’s naturalistic emoting and physicality in ways that we revolutionary for the time. Europe’s first silent superstar was beginning to shine…

 

What Price Glory? (1926) with Gabriel Thibaudeau

The Ritrovato Road is long with many a wind and turn and, sometimes Pilgrims, we’re a bit less than match fit depending on a mix of self-care and the demon drink that my wide’s forebears signed the pledge against (no such thing in Liverpool I have to say…). So it was that my first attempt as watching this quite fabulous restoration failed after a missed the first skirmish with the Hunn lost to Morpheus sweet charms… I dreamt a parallel film that soon took off on its own narrative…

Back for a second try with a strict agreement between myself and Mr M Fuller of Bristol, to wake each other should an old war wound cause us to lose consciousness, we both saw the entirely of Raoul Walsh’s spectacular and, whilst there is perhaps too much larking about and attempts at mutually assured destruction from leading men “Big” Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe as they fight over who’s best and, mostly, who gets the hand of Delores del Rio, it’s undoubtedly a major film.

The combat scenes are extraordinary especially with the colourisation of the explosions so well done it’s hard to work out how they were done – double exposure possibly but there’s no overlap of the images. But the war scenes are so well handled and their intensity explains just why the boys’ squabbling are so necessary – they both recognise the reality of the war and their chances of survival… what else is there to do but enjoy yourselves whilst you still can.

 

Josephine Baker

Someone had mentioned that it was only when you see Ms Baker on film that you realise what a complete package she was: acting, looks, timing, range and humour all quite remarkable but it when Josie dances that my ears popped and musicians Meg Morley on piano with Alice Zecchinelli on drums, set the Jazz tempo to “11” as we saw probably the most energetic and distinctive Charleston I’ve ever witnessed (no one’s doing this on Strictly Come Dancing that’s for sure…).

Baker had longer-stronger legs than most mortals and greater strength than most of the stage-trained actor-dancers around her with the result that she was able to move faster and harder to create the most bewildering spectacle that drew from jazz dancing as well as throwing in some moves that I’ve not seen from other dancers of this era.

Josephine Baker

If it was just this and only this she did then she would still be a legend but her charm and ease with story-telling, her quickness of thought and expression also marks her as a fine dancer. In Siren of the Tropics she somehow manages to rise above the racist subtext - the idea that she doesn't belong in the Paris of her rich white love interest (and his rich white girlfriend) and that she should go “home”. She wants none of that and decides to take her chance in the new world of America.

There’s the obvious irony that she had to leave the US to finally be accepted as a leading lady on screen. As in these French films she was also a sensation in the clubs and revolutionised dance.

What I like best is her impish grin and dimples, she is having the time of her life and it is liberating.

Best festival freeby, evah!!

Sunrise (1927) – Piazza Maggiore

What more can I say about Sunrise? Looking back a week after this stunning World Premier moments stay with me and I can’t wait to watch it again… Albert Camus famously suggested that all art was a search for those first few things that really moved us and there’s something in that with silent film but also in the native experience of this film and Timothy Brock’s music.

Edna, Charlie and a friend

A Dog’s Life (1918)/Shoulder Arms (1918) – Piazza Maggiore

The version audiences have watched for decades was reconstructed from back-up camera angles and second-choice takes, assembled from degraded C and D negatives after the original A negative deteriorated beyond use.

Dave Kerr, Moma

Dave Kerr of the Museum of the Moving Image asked how many of us had seen these two films and after a considerable number of hands went up in the throng he said maybe not… Seems like the former workhouse boy from Kennington was not just a creative genius but an organised one who kept copies of all of his films based on what he considered to be the best takes.

Grade A were used to create copies for the American market and Grade B – almost but not quite as good – were mostly used to cut films for the European and wider markets. So, all of these years, we haven’t seen the very best takes in regional releases nor any others. The restoration team went in search of the material featured in the best canister and, using elements from across the world, from C and D as well as B, came up with about 95% of Grade A material within which to re-construct these films in the way that they were first seen 108 years ago.

Whether it was the suggestion, the occasion, the heat or Timothy Brock’s world-class re-construction of Chaplin’s later scores for these films but Mr Kerr’s point was well made and, with every impish thought shadowing across Charlie’s face, every quicksilver improvisational spark or perfectly executed punchline, it felt like we were indeed watching a more beautiful version of what we already loved. And you know, that can’t be bad.

Hi co-conspirators were also at the best with Edna Purviance revealing and equivalent level of imp to her partner and the two firing off each other with knowing smiles on their faces. Maybe this was something quickly learned from Mabel Normand but Charlie and Edna glance to camera both to make sure we not only know what their thinking but also how much fun they’re having.

This happens even in the middle of Shoulder Arms with it’s faithful representations of life on the font line taken to extremes – the boys sleep underwater in their flooded trench - but as a mark of respect to the millions fighting over there. It’s a mark of Chaplin’s ability and status that he managed to make this film – it’s a matter of how important and loved he was by those who were fighting or who had family fighting that they queued in their millions to see the funny side.

Tonight, the aforementioned Mr Brock conducted the all’ Orchestra Senzaspine in a reworking of earlier reorchestrated Chaplain music to fit the new material. It was again another powerful performance in the piazza and one enjoyed by thousands, in the seats, the bars and on the stage. Charlie’s made something that will last forever and he’s made Edna and his other friends immortal.

In an era of fake prizes, THIS is exactly worth having!

 

See you next year Bologna! Keep it cool.

 

A symphony of two humans… Sunrise (1927), SFFP Restoration Premier, Il Cinema Ritrovato #40

Sometimes you come into these events after a hectic period working and preparing, doing the things you won’t be doing for eight days of potential self-indulgence. Sometimes you get frazzled by the early morning starts and “flight discipline”, maybe you don’t like Ryan Air or, just maybe you get snagged for 90 minutes of passport control? But, as Uncle George said, Here Comes the Sun and, indeed, here came a Sunrise unlike any I’d ever seen before.

My history with FW Murnau’s film starts with home media – Eureka I think – but I didn’t see it on screen as I was waiting for live accompaniment and, as it’s part sound in common versions, which didn’t happen until Elizabeth Jane Baldrey played magical harp accompaniment in the Early Music Centre in York. It was perfect. A decade later and those excellent folk at the San Francisco Film Preserve – who are on some kind of incredible run at the moment – have restored the film from various sources* and it not only looks different, it is different featuring more sunrise than previous versions.

It was unveiled on the first night of the 40^th edition of Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato and it was one of those times when even the beauty of the Piazza Maggiore faded into the background as you lost yourself in the magic of Murnau with this fable of human frailty and love, featuring extraordinary performances from Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien. George dwarfs Janet and Murnau uses this to his advantage getting the most from O’Brien’s impressive physicality – all awkward angles and shadowy purpose, with surprising tenderness to counterpoint the vein popping rage and passion you’d expect.

George. Images from San Francisco Film Preserve

Even with that wig – and it’s an important prop – Gaynor delicate emotional radiance is indeed Oscar worthy and without her the brutality of her husband’s betrayal and callous connivance would not be so hard felt by audiences over the last century – it is a timeless crime and reflects the guilt we all carry at some point (not drowning but ditching…). Part of the play is also that the audience shares in the husband’s desire to experience something new in the city, perhaps these two were a marriage made in a small town with little choice? Maybe they are holding each other back or, just maybe, they’re the perfect partnership poisoned by soulless desire – sexual and societal: the tram to nowhere?

But it was also Timothy Brock and his 80-piece orchestra – maybe more I stopped counting – who really blew the roof off (I know it’s an open square but you know…) with a truly powerful score that had so much quality of emotional phrasing, thematic shifts and unexpected tonality – rich dense power chords illustrating the looming dangers, the heart wrenching strings of passion and despair, a piano seemingly under assault at certain points and all of the smart stylistic references you could want.

This was richly satisfying music, and the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale ill Bologna were having a time of it – lost in their own music - all dressed in formal wear on a day when the city left many of us broiled and sautéed… and yet it was entwined with the narrative, waxing with the richest of silent cinematic emotionalism and wanning with ferocity, murderous intent and extreme peril. A drunken pig was chased though a dance hall by incongruous violins and Margaret Livingstone’s was the amplified vamp, her allure, never more clearly on show, swirling above the conflicted output of an orchestra under instructions to pull us in but show us no way out.

It felt like watching the film for the first time – it really did – and there’s no higher tribute to this combination of the restoration and the score, but what more could you ask, to see and feel this film again as something new and unpredictable. Lost in music, enjoying the silence. A perfect Bologna evening and a reported audience of seven thousand - live cinema in the hottest week of the year!

It was a day for women falling into water – is this a separate strand?** – as we had both festival poster girl Barbara Stanwyck and Gloria Swanson (the IT Girl of 2026 for many reasons: Queen Kelly!!)

The first was in frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure (1930) which features a powerhouse performance from Ritrovato poster girl Barbara Stanwyck who plays Kay Arnold who is living the life of [insert period code words for sex worker] when tiring of one yacht-based gentlemen’s event, rows to freedom only to meet an artist Jerry Strong (Ralph Graves) who gives her a lift. He resolves to paint her, for no other reason than to show the “Hope” he feels in her.

Initially it’s all about the work, and long hours of him asking her to gaze upwards at imagined stars – it’s only a ceiling she replies – but gradually she falls for his creative approach and, inevitably, her very presence is more than enough to upset the elevated circles in which he moves, his prudish parents and his trophy wife. There’s splendid support from Marie Provost as Kay’s best buddy and leisure lady but the jokes about her weight are hard to watch.

Tom and Gloria back in time

For Gloria it was not just her character, Mary, but everyone in the ship who crash into a lonely tropical island…after her pappa Lord Loam (Theodore Roberts) takes his family and servants on a cruise. Male and Female is an adaptation of JM Barrie’s stage play, The Admirable Crichton from 1902 and you suspect that the themes of class and entitlement examined by the play’s dislocation of the “natural order” were played down as DeMille went for his now familiar targets. This is exemplified by the re-titling – “now, why didn’t I think of that…” Barrie commented at the time.

Yacht-wrecked with no service operations to provide for them the clueless aristos have to rely on good old Irish ingenuity as head butler William Crichton (Thomas Meighan) emerges as the handiest man and the natural leader. His position in this new society draws the attention of Mary and the two share a bizarre fantasy of themselves in a mythical Byzantian dream in which Swanson famously got ready for her claws-up with an actual lion.

In both films, class plays a part, and love is not enough to bridge the gap… or so it seems. JM Barrie’s tale leaves things open by the admirable Crighton has certainly moved on to find himself in a country once called the United States of America.

All this on Day One… more to come as we plod the streets in search of fresh fruit, hot drinks and new celluloid excess… In The City!

 

 

* Restored in 4K in 2026 by San Francisco Film Preserve at BFI National Archive, Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, Cineric, Haghefilm and L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratories, from 35mm elements provided by BFI National Archive and MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art. Funding provided by Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts and San Francisco Film Preserve Preservation Partners

This version runs 94 minutes matching the original runtime of the 1927 Fox Movietone theatrical release but upping the quality in ways that demand rewatching!

 

**There were indeed many more films across the week featuring scenes of women falling in water with surely a missed opportunity not to include Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet although the actress takes a splash in the restored er fremde Vogel (1911) directed by Urban Gad.

 

 

Nasty woman? The Red Kimona (1925), Pioneers - First Women Filmmakers Blu-ray

“The illustrated journalism now prevalent finds its finest achievements in the publication of photographs surreptitiously taken. The value does not seem to lie in the fact that the photographs are of notabilities, but that they have been taken by stealth.”

The Right of Privacy (1896), John Gilmer Speed

This one is a doozy, absolutely newsworthy and, with apologies to Mrs. Wallace Reid and her subject, Gabrielle “Dolly” Dardley aka Darley, Layral, Layradi, D'Arley… later Mrs Wiley, the characters in real life are more extraordinary than those we see on screen. Probably best to start with the film but be prepared for murder most frequent and some substantial case law.

Dorothy Davenport had a highly successful career as a leading actress and after the death of her film star husband, Wallace Reid after he became addicted to morphine following an on-set accident, she fought to raise awareness of the perils of drug dependency with a series of films she produced starting with Human Wreckage (1923) which was based on this subject and featured her playing the wife of a drug addict then onto Broken Laws (1924) about the consequences of bad parenting, in which she also featured. She was the prime mover behind these films but her first directing credit was Linda (1929). She would also write and later on would take whatever role she could earn going forward including working with her friend director Arthur Lubin, co-writing scripts for the TV series, Francis the Talking Mule (1950-56).

Dorothy Davenport aka Mrs Wallace Reid

All that’s a far cry from this film, announced as being based on a true story – well, certainly a story – and which starts with Mrs Reid sitting in an almost expressionist set of a public library reading through old newspapers about a crime of the heart committed by a woman betrayed in 1917 (the date was changed to wartime for dramatic reasons). Actually, before this, we get the titles which are set against a fallen woman appealing to heaven for redemption and as the titles end we see her trying to climb her way out of the lower depths towards the light. The film may have been described as having been “made under the personal supervision of Mrs Reid”, but the director was Walter Lang making his first film in a career that would include Technicolor musicals like The King and I (1956). This inventive beginning is followed by many pleasingly framed sequences in a well-made film.

In the library the newspaper headline reads Story of Gabrielle Darley Startling Human Document with the quote “I didn’t know what to do… I loved him so…” from “a beautiful child-like girl”. Let’s stick with that for now as Mrs Reid turns to camera and the title card reads: This is a true story. Much of it is on record in the Superior Court of California. If it contains bitter truths, remember that I only turn the pages of the past… She calls for understanding of women like Gabrielle and hopes the audience will play their part in helping them.

We cut to the innocent face of Priscilla Bonner as Gabrielle Darley who is wrestling the news that her supposed fiancée has headed off to California to marry another woman. She cannot believe that her Howard (Carl Miller) truly intends to marry someone else and follows him, finding him buying an engagement ring in a jewellery store. He turns and cuts her dead and then she shoots him in a moment of disbelief – the very definition of the French concept of un crime passionnel although surely that’s not going to protect her in an American court.

Carl Miller and Priscilla Bonner

The court case is well handled and I have to say Bonner is excellent and Lang makes the absolute most of her abilities with frequent close-ups of her huge eyes welled up with tears and hooded with bitter regret; the crushing weight of lost love, false promises and an action that killed a large part of herself as well as her cruel lover. Bonner’s peepers are almost constantly moist and with such a reflective quality you can see the outline of the camera in her irises. All this is used to great affect when, to my surprise as a first-time viewer, and no doubt many others at the time, she is acquitted by the jury of twelve men. Much is made of her poor background and her unloving parents with Harold promising romance and escape and yet delivering her only to a life of degradation and prostitution in New Orleans, then renowned for its red lights.

But she retained faith in her man and was sorely misled as he stole her money and her heart.

After the judgement Gabrielle wants to atone for her crime and is taken under the wing of a wealthy socialite, Mrs. Beverly Fontaine (Virginia Pearson) who is virtue signalling at her expense and, as her housekeeper (fab Brit Emily Fitzroy) points out, will soon tire of her. During this period, she meets and falls in love with Mrs Fontaine’s chauffeur Freddy (Theodore von Eltz as Terrance O'Day) and we can see a romantic redemption ahead but not so simple.

Events get in the way as Gabrielle has to leave to find work and Freddy is called away to the army and the war in France… she gets the chance to work in a hospital and focuses on paying back the debt she feels that she owes.

Priscilla Bonner

It’s a very affecting film with flavour added by the likes of Tyrone Power Sr. as Gabrielle's father, Mary Carr as the protective prison matron and the imposing George Siegmann as Mr. Mack, “a client” who dwarfs Gabrielle and is the epitome of the physical and moral degradation she has had to endure. But without even knowing anything of the truth you wonder at the circumstances of the murder – why was she carrying a gun? – not to mention Gabrielle’s subsequent determination to find a humble route back to good grace.

Tightly scripted by future director, Dorothy Arzner the Red Kimono itself is an emblem of Gabrielle’s fall from grace, tinted bright red to highlight the guilt of the oldest profession and her frequent flashbacks… It’s a very effective device and combined with Bonner’s photogenic emoting makes the films narrative and moral arc a compelling one. That’s Hollywood though… there’s more outside than inside this film.

 

Another cameraman who should have got his union to prevent his having to do a roller-coaster reel!

"Historical accounts credit Dollie Wiley with murdering six people – five husbands and her best friend. However, police arrested and charged her with only one murder, that of Leonard Topp whom she gunned down in 1915. A jury acquitted her of that crime."

Prescott Daily Courier, 13^th January 2002

Now, I don’t want to harsh your mellow, but the true story of Gabrielle is not quite as it is advertised. This doesn’t invalidate the film’s good intent nor the efforts of cast, crew and Mrs Reid to make something positive of it but it is interesting in of itself. Also, as luck would have it, the real nature of Gabrielle aka “Dollie” was such that reality and fiction would meet in court and again with an outcome that arguably did more good than the motivations guiding the action intended or deserved. Fiction is stranger than truth.

After seeing the film in 1927, having previously been unaware, Dollie decided to sue upon the basis of the film highlighting the past that she was trying so hard to move beyond – her argument being that she wanted to assume a quiet and anonymous place in society. Reid made the mistake of using her actual name as well as her story and in Melvin v. Reid (1931) the court decided that "any person living a life of rectitude has that right to happiness which includes a freedom from unnecessary attacks on his character, social standing or reputation." So, the fiction that presented her in the best light as a reformed and Christian character ended up landing her a windfall when Reid eventually lost.

But it seems that Dollie was another performer creating a version of herself, perhaps one closer to the film version. Her reality was far more complex and far from walking away from the life of sex work she was very much an active participant running houses of ill repute on a commercial scale, not so much a victim but a manager. Indeed, by the time she met the man she would shoot, her lover and pimp Leonard Topp, Dollie was already running a brothel in Prescott and was a woman of some disrepute*.

Film Gabrielle haunted by her past...

Defended by the flamboyant Earl Rogers, one of the most successful criminal lawyers of the time, Dollie was able to defy the odds as she and Rogers swayed the all-male jury. Rogers was a master of detail and persuasive argument losing only three of his 77 murder trials as defending counsel and he had a client here who was clearly some actress. His daughter, Adela Rogers St. Johns covered the case in one of her first journalistic assignments, and it was her story that was adapted by Arzner for the screenplay. After journalism she wrote novels and a number of screenplays including Lady of the Night (1925), Children of Divorce (1927) and A Free Soul (1931) and even had an uncredited hand in A Star is Born (1937) which was loosely based on What Price Hollywood? (1932) which she had based on Colleen Moore and her husband, alcoholic producer John McCormick.

Nothing sums up the trial so much as a line decades later in Final Verdict, St. Johns’ 1962 memoir, where she wrote that with men like Topp, homicide was not only justifiable, but obligatory. For Dollie's personal narrative and Mrs Reid's film this is the money shot, but murder it was and, as in the film, the verdict is still astonishing.

Dollie’s second case followed the film about her first and Melvin v. Reid (1931) established the limits of First Amendment defences and the privacy tort when republishing true but shameful past facts lacks public interest… The court reasoned that "any person living a life of rectitude has that right to happiness which includes a freedom from unnecessary attacks on his character, social standing or reputation." This decision still stands as a key precedent.

The real "Dollie"

Yet, whilst Mrs Reid took a financial hit, Gabrielle resumed her chosen profession and went through a series of marriages all of which ended up unhappily, especially for her husbands. The full lurid details are to be found in various places, there’s even a book in the works, but Leo W Banks article in the Phoenix New Times from 12^th August 1999 takes some beating**!

It all connects to the prescient line at the top from John Gilmer Speed, which is ever more relevant in today’s society in which our souls are captured unwillingly by the demon devices in everyone’s pockets. What we are doing is one thing but how it is presented in seemingly infallible moving images is often something else entirely.

The Red Kimono was banned in the United Kingdom by the British Board of Film Censors, as with its predecessor Human Wreckage, if only they’d known the full true story, they would have banned it even more! You can find the film in the indispensable Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers box set from Kino Lorber.

 

There's also a short booklet by Julie McDonald,The Murderous Madam: The True Story of Gabrielle "Dolly" Wiley of Prescott, Arizona (Wild West History) which you can find on Amazon!

 

*Gabrielle Darley: Murderess or Misunderstood Maiden? March 22, 2013, By Sam Lowe

**A Madame, a Murder, a Mystery, Leo W Banks Phoenix New Times, 12/08/1999

Tuning in… Yet Another Movie - Pink Floyd in Film, Regent Street Cinema, Part Two USA

If he wants to be a revolutionary he has to learn to work with other people...

Unnamed student in Zabriskie Point's debate about collective radical action.

Back to the differences between the British and American scenes and the question of whether they were more radical and politically aggressive across the pond. Certainly, there was more violence in the US, the stakes were higher with the Vietnam War and, well, guns, as the Kent State massacre demonstrated in 1970, but there was still the same something in the air. So here are two films in which a British and Italian director attempt to portray the American counterculture using the musical assistance of the men from Regent Street Poly and Cambridge…

  

San Francisco (1968) + Zabriskie Point (1970) + Introduction by series curator Sophia Satchell-Baeza

 

San Francisco is something of a twin with Tonight…, with that film’s assistant director, another Cambridge multi-talent, Anthony Stern – who exhibited his art alongside Syd – heading to California to film the scene over there and, once again there were naked women – a coincidence? He used a demo version of Interstellar Overdrive, quicker and with a more aggressive live feel, to the version Whitehead had recorded in the studio, and cut his film to match the music. The effect is startling and the stop-start nature of the rapid cutting acts as the perfect nervous breakdown for Syd’s Floyd’s overdriven riffing. San Francisco is militaristic, protesting and having a fine time with sexy mock rituals… meanwhile the terror was unfolding in South-East Asia.

 

Sometimes the style of the film is what makes these relatively ordinary streets appear heightened and in the moment, whilst elsewhere the naked woman and the “ritual” appears to be trying too hard to be transgressive, the male gaze is present – sorry Anthony! But it was a time when the limits of the new expression were still being established and not every “new freedom” had equal merit but who would know how things would be viewed 60 years later? San Francisco still feels fresh and experimental and, whilst there are debates to be had over just how ground-breaking Floyd’s music actually was, with Syd as guitarist and Rick Wright on keyboards, they were more adventurous than most and proto punk in approach. Syd heard AMM and other improvisational groups of the time and the band were reaching out and striving for the “next projected sounds” that their EMI publicity promised.

San Francisco through the lens

Zabriskie Point (1970) was Michelangelo Antonioni’s big break in America following on from his era-capturing success with Blow Up (1968) but what made the London mystery work was its focused locations and strength of performance across the board. MGM gave him a substantial budget for Zabriskie but the results are mixed in fascinating ways, with some incredible cinematography, the mind-blowing violent sequence at the end but with a plot that is vague and does not have the depth of his Italian work. Here the silences appear coy rather than purposeful and the actors, are a mix of professionals such as Rod Taylor and newcomers in the main role, Daria Halprin and the ill-fated Mark Frechette. They are not David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave but there’s chemistry and Halprin is the more assured of the two.

 

They’re not helped by a script, based on a treatment by Sam Shepherd, which is just a little too free-wheeling and reliant on both co-incidence and the audience filling in gaps. And yet… the lengthy sequence at the beginning with the students seemingly involved in a genuinely heated debate about the course of resistance to follow works very well, and it’s not the only one. This section features noted Black Panther member Kathleen Cleaver to add that touch of realism and, her experience as one of the leading academics of the movement is also placed against the violence of the state’s response with the Panthers being the first to be attacked by the Police’s new SWAT team in Los Angeles. Dangerous times and whilst there’s a picture of her holding a rifle in a 1968 issue of The Black Panther, the shooting at the protest in this film was a sad foreshadowing of the events at Kent State University just two months after Zabriskie’s eventual release.

 

Mark Frechette

Perhaps Antonioni had immersed himself too much in America or at least the process of trying to understand the country. He spent many months driving around in search of stories and his film reflected this as it starts off with this discussion of how to challenge authority and ends with an explosion of violence which may or may not even be real, let alone an answer. In between the story is focused on an itinerant fork truck driver, Mark (Mark Frechette) who flees from the shooting of a policeman at the demonstration and a young woman temping for a property development company Daria (Daria Halprin), who meets with Mark on her journey out to a big meeting in the spectacular desert home of her boss (Rod Taylor).

 

Throughout Antonioni smuggles meaning in his usual ways, leaving the gaps for us to fill as passengers in the film journey. This is his most scenic film since L’Avventura with huge shots of the desert roads, big skies and enormous silences. Cinematographer Alfio Contini earns his crust with excellent overhead shots of the lonesome roads along which Mark flies and Daria drives, and there’s even an audacious shot of a man at a bar in which the camera pulls in and appears to go through the window into the bar – a precursor to the outstanding single take ending of the director’s next film, The Passenger (1975), Antonioni’s final film of his contracted three with MGM.

 

Zabriskie Point itself is a strange world of yellow and brown striped hills shaped by a long dead river and when viewed from Homestead Overlook, appears like another planet. The “Love Scene” between the couple and dozens of other real or imagined couples dancing in the dust, played by members Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater troupe with whom Sam Sheperd was associated, is a mystery. The Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia provides the score here with his country-inflected improvisations having been preferred to the Floyd’s best efforts with which Antonioni would almost always find the things he didn’t like in his daily meetings with Roger Waters as the band worked overnight in the studio.

“We could have finished the whole thing in about five days, but Antonioni would listen and go ‘eets very beautiful, but eet’s too sad’, or ‘eet’s too stroong’. It was always something that stopped it from being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy. It was hell, sheer hell.”

Roger Waters*

Antonioni is another of those mentioned in these screenings who was at the launch of International Times at the Roundhouse, which is where he first encountered The Pink Floyd**. The group wrote a lot of music for the film but only the sparse beats of Heartbeat, Pig Meat, the country-styled Crumbling Land – which Gilmour said any number of US bands could come up with – and the explosive magnificence of a reworked Eugene in the form of Come in Number 51, Your Time is Up. This was probably what the director wanted from them anyway but with the outtakes now available we can now hear Rick Wright’s beautiful progressions for The Violent Sequence that were to become Us and Them on Darkside of the Moon. Elsewhere there were songs and blues improvisations that wouldn’t re-appear but the group were honing their craft and writing quickly with this their third album in 1969 after the More score and Ummagumma.

Daria Halprin

 

I obviously like this group but I also like Antonioni and I thoroughly enjoyed watching this film on the big screen, just as not every album is Dark Side or Piper at the Gates, not every film is L'Avventura, La Notte or Red Desert. If you haven’t seen it, well, it is certainly an intrigue and it has to be seen and heard on the big screen.

"A fucking crazy man to work for..."

Nick Mason* 

There’s some fascinating background to the casting of Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette, according to the former in a 2022 interview she said Antonioni had seen her dancing and decided that she could be his lead. She spent two years working with him on the film and felt much closer to him than her co-star who, in their awkward interview with Dick Cavett, said he’d clashed with the director and was disappointed in large parts of the film. In some ways she felt it was a wonderful process but she also felt the end product didn’t quite reflect their workings. Frechette is the edgier on the show with Mel Brooks thankfully chipping in to fill the dead air his moodiness brings – this really was a moment in American counter-cultural history and where are we now?

Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in the sand of Zabriskie Point

Sadly, Mark was to die in prison after being sent down following an armed bank raid with other members of Mel Lyman's Fort Hill commune. Daria Halprin was briefly a resident too during her relationship with Frechette but followed a differnt path, now MA, REAT, RSMT and clearly a sincere deep thinker who has led a very interesting life, including marriage to Dennis Hopper but especially as an artist in her own right. A dancer, director, writer and teacher she now runs the Tamapala Institute she established with her mother, also a dancer. Seeing her now she seems completely at peace and thought-through, a far cry from the anger and uncertainty of her film character - a fulfilled artist in her own right.

 

This was quite some day and there’s more to films come from this most cinematic Floyd. It’s easy to understand how filmmakers and music makers were drawn to each other for these collaborations and, of course, given the amount of experimentation there would be interesting mistakes as well as moments that stay with you a long time, deep resonance almost haunting the hallowed space of the Regent Street Cinema as Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière ask their ghostly co-habitants to maybe just turn the sound down a little.

More Floydian adventures in film: Yet Another Movie continues until 7th June - details on the Regent Street Cinema website. 

PS Once again I failed to spot a young Harrison Ford as an "Arrested Student"... ah well, next time!

*From a Connor McNight interview with Waters and Mason in ZigZag magazine, July 1973

**Saucerful of Secrets, The Pink Floyd Odyssey, Nicholas Schaffner (1991), Sidwick & Jackson

Kathleen Cleaver debates

OK Boomers?

Rod Taylor is in a different movie... Sam Shepard's?

Careful with that camera, Alfio! Or rather, those cameras, there are dozens of different angles of the big finish before in-studio work showing household objects being blown up (and not by Hemmings).

Games for May: Yet Another Movie - Pink Floyd in Film, Regent Street Cinema, Part One: UK

Speed-walking up Regent Street after the Victoria line closed on the hottest day of the year so far, I was overwhelmed by the anxiety of missing the first film as well as the ever-present sense of Floydian past as London’s sunny streets blurred the perception of time around me. Maybe I’ve read too much Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, but psycho-geography is real, as indeed is psychedelic-geography, man. Only last week I’d been in the 100 Club in which the Yardbird's Jeff Beck smashed guitars for Michelangelo Antonioni, whilst Middle Earth still haunts Covent Garden as does UFO Club Tottenham Court Road, music and place pulls you right back, as does film: combine all three and it’s not just Grannie who takes a trip.

 

In terms of the where, the Regent Street Cinema is celebrating the 130^th anniversary of the first film screening in this country from the Lumiere Brothers and it also happens to be the alma mater of former architectural students Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright who all attended when what is now Westminster University was Regents Street Polytechnic. Add Roger’s old Cambridge friend Syd Barrett and then another, David Gilmour (the Floyd were a five piece for a brief moment) and you had a group that was at the forefront of British psychedelia from 1966 onwards.

 

Yet Another Movie is a season of Floydian films assembled by Sophia Satchell-Baeza, a freelance researcher and curator of impeccable taste, who set the scene with details from Nick Mason’s biography. Mason attributes at least his and Roger’s fascination with lighting and staging to their broader education as “Architectural Abdabs” (an early group name) at the Poly and, with Rick and Syd’s more emotional musicality it was understandable that they’d be drawn to film and vice versa. 

  

Speak (1962) and The Committee (1968) with introduction from series curator Sophia Satchell-Baeza

 

The Pink Floyd improvised a score for fellow Regent Street alum, John Latham’s 1962 Avant Garde flicker Speak, in 1967 but the version we saw today featured a proto-industrial electronic score from the artist himself which, along with the rapidly changing images on screen, drove a couple of the audience to head for the bar early. It’s remarkable that over 60 years on this work can still startle and disturb (possibly for medical reasons admittedly). Latham didn’t want any “tunes” breaking out accompanying his free-flow and like so many artists of this scene, wanted the watchers to impose their own meaning or, indeed, lack of… we turned on but maybe didn’t all drop out or relax to float downstream.

 

Latham's film and others were used as background projections by the band in ground-breaking ways as what we would recognise as the modern concert experience was created as a mixture of sight and sound. The Floyd’s score can be found on the massive Early Years boxset as can outtakes from their other films including those screened today including the entirity of the next film on Blu-ray.

 

The Committee (1968) I haven’t seen on the big screen or in this restored state and whilst Nick Mason describes their score as a jumble of extended sound affects there are certainly some representative examples of extended instrumentals which sound like either an early version of Keep Smiling People a piece played in their 1968 spring tour and which morphed partly into their proto-post-rock classic Careful with that Axe, Eugene.

Robert Langdon Lloyd and Paul Jones discuss meaning

The Committee was written by an economist and social scientist, Max Steuer, then as now a lecturer at the LSE and a founding member of the Centre for Philosophy and Social Science. It was his only film but it is not surprisingly a reflection of his concerns about the way society is managed. It’s not clear whether the committee(s) in question make decisions or whether they are large-scale focus groups to help the powers that be command and control through informed opinion testing, but there’s a sinister management elite behind them alright… maybe.

 

Director Peter Sykes had approached Syd for a score but when he came up with an improvisation in early ’68 and suggested that it be played backwards, he turned to the other four for a more disciplined outcome and its this we hear, from the opening electronica to the Hammond organ driven main theme and that early Eugene, hinting at menace and possible violence – I wonder if Michelangelo Antonioni was watching and listening? More on that later…

 

Some versions of the film start with a quote from Joseph Shumpeter which lays out the agenda... our likes and dislikes do not amount to a programme of independent action: are we really more concerned with the strategies of games than living a clear-headed existence? But this is perhaps more help than the audience needs.

 

Arthur Brown sets the party alight

The story opens with a car driving through country lanes, the driver (Tom Kempinski) incessantly chewing wine gums as he blathers on to a seemingly hapless hitch-hiker – the Central Figure (Paul Jones) – about the inconsequentialities of his life. They stop in a glade so that the driver can check his engine and he carries on his prattle as he does so. The Central Figure is impassive, smoking a cigarette and wandering around the clearing – seemingly relaxed.

 

Then, almost out of nowhere, we feel unease as the driver sticks his head under the sharp edge of his car bonnet… the Central Figure looks intent for a brief second and then slams down the bonnet completely severing the man’s head. In the silence that follows he remains calm, continuing his smoke and his even-paced stroll. Finally, he drags the body into the car and, bizarrely, sews the head back on. His wrong-headed acquaintance continues on his journey, bewildered.

 

Later he is called to a special Committee… is this heaven, a higher force or an advanced form of market research? It’s an interesting film as you try to make sense of it and Paul Jones is very good at being distant and disaffected. There are some choice moments as the Committee members enjoy a party with music from Arthur Brown along with his Crazy World, in front of an audience that includes a few familiar faces such as John "Hoppy" Hopkins who set up the London Free School, co-founded International Times (IT) and, with producer and early Floyd manager, Joe Boyd, the UFO Club at which the group were the house band. I think we also saw Barry Miles with his distinctive chunky glasses and blonde hair, he co-owned the Indica Gallery and also helped start IT.

Like so much of today's efforts, this film came out of the general philosophical and political underground centred with thus relatively small London in-crowd. British psychedelia is often considered less radical than its US counterpart but there is no doubt of the commitment to experimentation and alternative views of how society should be organised.

 

Iggy... aka Evelyn Joyce

Iggy the Eskimo Girl (2002) + Tonite, Let's All Make Love in London (1967), Introduction by Sophia Satchell-Baeza and Dr Alissa Clarke, De Montfort University, co-curator of the Cinema and Television History Institute's Peter Whitehead Archive

 

Iggy the Eskimo Girl (2002) featured film shot in the late sixties of Syd Barrett’s sometime girlfriend – also known as Evelyn Joyce (no relation) and who is featured on the cover of his first solo album, The Madcap Laughs, adorning the newly painted floors of his flat in Egerton Court which he shared with the artist Dougie Fields. Directed and filmed by Anthony Stern, partly for a film originally called The Wheel, he repurposed the materials to create this tribute to Syd’s latter-day muse which was set to the blistering 170-odd seconds of See Emily Play, Syd’s Floyd’s finest moments in pop. Stern’s distinctive stop-start technique – he worked with Peter Whitehead, see below – still leaves the audience discombobulated and, unlike “Emily” it’s pretty clear that Iggy did “understand”. 

 

Tonite, Let's All Make Love in London – a Pop Concerto for Film – was presented in a recent remastered format and looked very fresh. It starts with Peter Whitehead’s rapid cutting as he synchronises dancers in swinging London’s clubs to a trippier version of Interstellar Overdrive than we’re used to, which still allows for some remarkable alignments as Syd’s lighter flies up and down his fretboard, Nick’s cleverly propulsive light touch, Roger’s angry bass (it’s still furious 60 years later…) and Rick’s elegant anticipation. Wright was the only classically trained musician having attended the Royal College of Music for a while before changing course and knowing how to hold an improvisation together in the manner of his jazz heroes. Whitehead filmed the band recording both this and an improvisation called Nick’s Boogie, and it’s a great document of the band in their psychedelic pomp with Syd leading on guitar and that cigarette lighter.

It’s split into sections addressing: Loss of the British Empire, Dolly Girls, Protest, Pop Music, Movie Stars, Painting and the US scene. There are some of the talking heads you would hope all of whom have to contend with Whitehead’s curt interview technique which certainly leaves Julie Christie slightly defensive but then she also comes across as open and genuine, relishing strength of relationships and her week on holiday away from everyone after finishing Dr Zhivago. In comparison Andrew Loog Oldham comes across as about as genuine as Malcolm Maclaren or Simon Cowell, being too busy planning for tomorrow rather than worrying about today and deliberately over-tutoring one of his new charges in the studio. That said, Vashti Bunyan is allowed to get on with it… ALO was a master of marketing and probably still is!

Julie Christie

 

His most famous success, The Rolling Stones were filmed previously by Whitehead for Charlie is My Darling (1966) and they’re here too in revelatory film as fans throw themselves at the stage and each member – Charlie apart – before being thrown back into the crowd like so many fish. Jagger is interviewed and almost ties himself up by fretting about the future we now enjoy in which machines mean we only work four hours a day. Oh. Hang on…

 

Michael Caine frets about the end of empire and its influence on the shortness of skirts whilst there’s more sexism to come much to Lee Marvin’s delight. In the section on the opening of the Playboy club in London, we see Dolly Reid who, fact fans, was later to feature in Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert’s Hollywood exploitation pic, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1969). It’s as the chap representing Hugh Heffner says, in London there was a relatively small scene and you could expect to find “faces” in most of the key haunts. Indeed, we see Terrence Stamp, Jim Brown and Sharon Tate arriving at the premiere of her husband, Roman Polanski's film Cul-de-sac (1966).

 

The same was true of Cambridge creatives with Sophia Satchell-Baeza reading out excerpts from Jenny Spires’ diary about how, this ex-girlfriend of Syd’s in Cambridge, met Whitehead and suggested his film needed not juts current pop music but something from the underground. She was thinking Astronomy Domine but her went with the entirely instrumental Interstellar Overdrive… she was living with Syd and his new girlfriend in Soho and offered to introduce the director to Barrett, no problem, he had known him since their Cambridge days… Like minds, a few streets apart in swinging Soho, and on the same artistic plane. What are the odds?

 

More overlap and co-incidence were to come and I’ll tell you all in the next post… Meanwhile, tickets are still available for next Saturday's continuation of the season with some rarely-screened Floydian curios. Details on the Regent Street Cinema website!

 

Jenny Spires and Syd