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

Adorée arrives... The Eternal Struggle (1923), Joe Harvat Restoration

Restoring reputation as well as materials, performance and craft! This film has a measly 5.9 on IMDB with 20% giving just 1.0 which makes you wonder how many have actually seen it or, in fairness, at least in its current form as restored by Joe Harvat, who used a Kickstarter to fund the project in 2025. The sole user review there says it is “dated” which is an unhistorical term with no utility… how can anything be created and immunised against the opinions and shifted tastes of the generations to come, especially over a century later. It is of its time, but then, aren’t we all. The film was considered lost until the Russian archive handed over a copy to the Library of Congress in 2010… but it is not only found but "reborn" for a new generation to properly evaluate.

 

And, what The Eternal Struggle is, is a fun ride with some superb performances, action scenes and with outstanding location work in what looks like somewhere near Nell Shipman’s God’s Country on the borders of the US and Canada. The Silent Film Stills Archive has a snippet in which the director, Reginald “Realism” Barker explains that almost all of the outdoor scenes were shot “in the glacial fields of Alberta”. Almost certainly, Nell was an influence on the film’s rugged approach but there was also a trend in films based on the Canadian Mounted Police as well as the location with the adaptation of Jack London's The Call of the Wild released only a couple of weeks before.

 

Reginald Barker directingPat O'Malley and Renée Adorée (SFSA)

This story was based on New Zealander Edith Joan Lyttleton’s 1913 novel The Law-Bringers, the film places the performers not just in the context of the time but also in the chilling rivers and frozen mountains close to the actual locations. The most spectacular backdrops were around Banff and Lake Louise, Alberta with the production crew travelling to the Canadian Rockies. Other scenes used the reliably more accessible and far warmer, Big Bear Lake, California.

 

At this point, Renée Adorée’s acting also owes much to Mary Pickford with high energy bounce and a fighting spirit. But, whilst this was one of her first leading roles in Hollywood, possibly her breakthrough, she already had her own skill-set honed in Europe* and when her eyes flow with tears and her face is set she can be both frighteningly febrile and sweetly sympathetic. Her most famous role was probably in The Big Parade (1925) as the French girl who steels John Gilbert’s American heart in war-torn France, the woman who like the war, never leaves him. With her huge brown eyes, slight overbite and liberated movement, she was atypical for a Hollywood leading lady of the time and in a less obvious way brought a European sexuality to the screen as with the Polish Pola. This is a significant film for presenting her breakthrough in a starring role.

 

Renée Adorée AKA Emilia Louisa Victoria Reeves

“Renée Adorée, who was often given French-Canadian roles, was at her most ebullient in The Eternal Struggle, leaping up and down in the middle of the street and egging on two fellow French-Canadians to fight over her with knives…”

Hollywood's Canada : the Americanization of our national image by Berton, Pierre, 1975, McClelland and Stewart

 

As Berton goes on to say, this film was very much part of the genre of a “Mountie Film” which normally featured the North-Western Mounted Police in a “love versus duty” quandary, usually pursuit of a sister, a brother or a romantic interest (and has done the maths analysing some thirty films that fit the brief) who they have to decide to capture or let go… and the Mounties always get their man (or woman).  

 

The film starts with one such moment as Bucky O'Hara (Pat O'Malley) – possibly the sole Irish immigrant in North America who didn’t join the NYC Police Department – is on the trail of one Oily Kirby (Pat Harmon). He finds a cabin in the woods which is inhabited by the very fine looking Camille Lenoir (Barbara La Marr aka "The Girl Who is Too Beautiful" and Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler’s namesake when she came to Hollywood in 1938). Bucky takes a shine to Camille and decides to stick around – which doesn’t sound to me like the typical MO of the NWMP but whether be luck or design, he spots Oily hiding in a basket and proceeds to arrest him. Camille pulls a gun and Oily almost escapes following a short chase… Bucky got his man.

Pat O'Malley and Barbara La Marr

Back in the town of Grey Wolf we meet the locals including the vibrant Andrée Grange (Renée Adorée) who is dancing for the locals, two of whom almost come to blows over her after offering her presents. She is the “idol” of every man in Grey Wolf although there are perhaps different words that could be used to describe their regard. Take the distinctly dodgy Barode Dukane (Wallace Beery) who has a name as well as a face that only a mother could love and yet who seems to think he can buy anything, even love, telling Andrée that he has presents for her.

 

Meanwhile Bucky arrives with Oily in tow and delivers him to Sgt. Neil Tempest (Earle Williams) at the Mounties’ headquarters. Bucky goes to the bar, run by Andrée’s father Pierre Grange (Josef Swickard), and in the drinking and dancing melee meets the young woman and gets a slap for being just too forward. Now, you know and I know that this is cinema code, even in 1923, for the start of true love but there’s a big fly in that ointment: Sgt Tempest has already proposed.

 

Pat O'Malley, Renée Adorée and Earle Williams make a crowd.

One thing leads to another thing and then another… the two men realise their mutual interest and both do the decent thing as Bucky pretends to only be “joking” about his affection for Andrée. Broken hearted she goes to see Barode Dukane who has been so generous with his presents and who we now know has some kind of criminal connection to Camille… One thing leads to another and a title card reveals that he sees his chance to “comfort” the distraught girl who we next see running into her father’s bas saying that she killed Ducane!

  

“She is not mine and she is not yours… She belongs to the Crown and she’s going back!”

 

Her father and her “loyal best friend” Wo Long (George Kuwa, Japanese and American actor) help her to escape and she heads to Herschel Island – in the Yukon and far, far North-West of the actual locations - to board a ship and away to the mercies of the sea but O’Hara follows and after an altercation with two sailors, Capt. Jack Scott (Anders Randolf) and his first mate (Fred Kohler who plays second mate in The Hell Ship (1927)), does his duty and arrests his sweetheart. With love overpowering his sense of duty, Sgt Tempest also follows and tries to help her free, initiating the film’s most thrilling sequence as the two canoe down a stretch referred to as the Devil’s Cauldron “a six-mile gash through solid granite” ending with a waterfall that would leave them dashed on the rocks below, unless… someone can get to them in time.

 

Renée and Wally

And still, the question remains – did Andrée kill Dukane and what actually happened on that dark and stormy night?

After Gosfilmofond gifted a digital copy of the film to the U. S. Library of Congress along with a number of other films, in 2010, Joe Harvat was able to secure a 2k scan and then spent seven-months, digitally cleaning the film. The opening and closing credits were missing and all of the title cards had to be translated/rewritten as English. Apart from some deterioration at the beginning the film looks so crisp and detailed – a pleasure to screengrab!

 

Joe also commissioned David Drazin to provide a fresh piano accompaniment for the film which enhances the viewing experience with an energy and style of the period.

What the papers said:

 

The New York Times reviewer, Mordaunt Hall, was a tough man to impress but he saw the film as a "vigorous and interesting" melodrama in his write up of 10^th September 1923. He considered it as a superior example of the "Mountie" genre, praising Del Marr for her presence and Adorée for her "extraordinary charm" and ability to convey the character's terror and innocence – exactly as I said above! He was also impressed by the film’s “ruggedness” and I should think so given the effort involved in filming in Alberta…

 

The Variety review of 23^rd September called the film "one of the best of the snow pictures" and expected it to be a “solid money-maker” as a superior Mountie film. They focused on the box office draw of Barbara La Marr but were also very impressed with Adorée’s "vivid personality" and "emotional depth” as she carried the weight of the film’s dramatic tensions. There was praise too for the location shoots which captured the beautiful isolation and with Barker's ability to make the cold feel "visceral" and "authentic" to the audience.

 

Rugged

Photoplay Magazine (November 1923) described the film as a "thrilling and picturesque" drama, with the "Northwest" setting feel like a character itself, thanks to the "magnificent snow photography". There was also praise for the chemistry between Renée Adorée and Pat O'Malley – and, for me, the latter looks much more convincing once he’s in the great white outdoors with stubble softening his made-up features!

 

Ultimately The Eternal Struggle makes the most of its story and provides a fine example of staple fair at this stage of silent cinema. It’s a very worthwhile project from Joe Harvat and I applaud his efforts to make the film available again – a Kickstarter page to follow with interest!.

 

* Adorée presented as French in Hollywood but was in fact born Emilia Louisa Victoria Reeves on September 30, 1897, in Hamburg, Germany the daughter of a London-born circus performer, James Reeves, and a Belgian mother, Victorine Schreiber. The theory is that it was more interesting to be French at the time when there were many famous Brits in town but she actually adopted her new identity in Australia - see link below. In Europe, she had come up through the circus and then theatre but her first film was made in Australia: £500 Reward (1918).

 

She’s billed as Rene Adorée on a poster for the film and as a member of The Magleys, a duo she had formed with the American dancer Guy Magley. The Melbourne Punch described them as among most graceful dancers to ever visit Australia and this poise, along with her circus abilities – acrobat and horse riding – stood her in good stead with the action and dancing in The Eternal Struggle and many more!

There's a fascinating  post outlining the actor's early years by Nick Murphy on the Forgotten Australian Actors site from which the image of The Magleys is taken below - excellent research on a person still seen as French by many, the truth is far more interesting!

Cor blimey, n’est pas!!

Guy Magley and Renée Adoree performing in Samples in Australia in 1918.

Rich mix… Kennington Bioscope 9th Annual Silent Weekend Day One

 

 

Carboard Lover (1928), with John Sweeney, introduction Ben Model

 

At the end of UK premier of restored Cardboard Lover, Dave Glass asked the audience if it was indeed, as restorer Ben Model asserted in his introduction, as good as if not better than The Patsy and Show People her other two smashes of 1928? Answer there came none… we were all too busy absorbing the film, and the fine-timing of Marion and Nils Asner in one of those silent films in which you can almost hear the dialogue, a speedball of a proto-screwball, amazing pace and so knowing. The simple answer was that we couldn’t judge on a single viewing especially against two films that many had seen on numerous occasions but, one our later it feels at least on a par.

The Cardboard Lover was the second to be filmed and the last to be released and so it absolutely shows Davis hitting a peak and also displaying a perfected screen persona incorporating influences from Mabel Normand to Stan Laurel but also so much of her own mischief. She’s a force of nature in character and performance with an energy that would be hard to catch in sound: like Douglas Fairbanks after a six-month bootcamp at a clown school run by Buster Keaton, Harry Houdini and Roscoe Arbuckle.

She’s aided by a spritely performance from Nils Arsner who shows that Swedish sense of humour to great effect, matching her gurn for gurn in a face off I did not expect. He plays elite tennis player Andre who is engaged to the sublime Simone as played by Jetta Goudal who gets impersonated to death by Marion in a scene prefiguring her taking the mickey out of Marsh, Negri and Gish in The Patsy.

Nils. Jetta and Marion. In drag. Again.

Marion Davies is Sally a preppy young woman on vacation with a group including Marion’s niece Pepi Lederer as Peppy by name, peppy by nature. In life she was Louise Brooks’ best friend and the actress wrote an chapter on the tragic Pepi in Lulu in Hollywood entitled Marion Davies’ Niece, a woman who struggled to be “… a person in her own right, not a way station or would-be friends of Marion and Mr Hearst…”. Best not to dwell on what she wrote about Marion though.

 

Here Miss Davies is at her peak and sparkling through the romance and the comedy as Sally sets her sights on Andre’s autograph and then acts as his one-woman defence against the allure of Simone who he cannot stand and yet cannot resist. He makes Marion promise to prevent his will from wavering even if it means giving him a sock on the jaw, a punchline that we know is going to arrive at some point for his struggle is real!

John Sweeney played along with Marion and Nils with a deftness of touch and laughter in his hands, what’s that modern saying about game recognising game? He was swinging!

I was one of the 600 plus silent film fans who backed Ben’s Kickstarter campaign to restore and produce a Blu-ray of The Cardboard Lover and I can’t wait to see it in May and share it with my family: watching it with an audience always brings out the reaction the comedy deserves.

 

Rediscoveries and restorations 1 – with John Sweeney, introduced by Dave Glass

To my over-caffeinated and sugar-pumped corporeality this was an injection of an accelerant that provided a high impact sucker punch after being left dazed by the emotional heft of Sprechende Hande aka Talking Hands (1925), a German documentary about the Oberlinhaus Nowawes care home and school for the deafblind neat Potsdam. Directed by women’s rights activist and co-operative pioneer Gertrud Da­vid neé Swiderski, it is a humbling film that shows the patient and richly rewarding work of the church run Oberlinhaus which won a gold medal at the Paris World's Fair in 1900 for its holistic approach to treatments that brought the deafblind into the world.

The film follows the painstaking introduction of language based on hand movements which taught the subjects language through which they were then able to communicate and understand the exterior world. There’s one moment in which a group communicate by hand as a sighted teacher rads the newspaper: watching people overcome disability together places so much of our daily struggles into context.

John Sweeney had seen the film and accompanied it here and almost the first thing everyone asked after the screening was what had happened to the institution after the Nazis came to power. Luckily they were protected by their National Socialist governor Dietloff von Arnim and after surviving the war – being used as a hospital to treat the wounded in 1945 – the Oberlinhaus continues its work today with over 2,000 employees and many more residents.

Also included was another previously mislaid film rescued by Chris Bird in 2022 and screened probably for the first time on well over a century, A Victim of Circumstances (1913), from the Thanhouser studio. This featured a reporter played by Harry Benham who was romancing a woman played by Mignon Anderson although her father disapproves. The young man is arrested for photographing a rich man – I know, typical eh? – and whilst be cleared of any charge, this is enough reason for the father (Justus D. Barnes) to forbid the marriage as clearly his potential son-in-law is the wrong sort.

Things are nicely turned around though once the old bigot himself is arrested after being found in possession of stolen goods foisted on him by a fleeing snatch thief. It’s not a fair cop but the film takes us through his ritual humiliation as he is photographed, finger printed and even filmed by the forces of the law before realising that not only is Justice blind it is also fallible.

 

Young John Gilbert 

The White Heather (1919) with John Sweeney

 

Directed by Maurice Tourneur, this fab restoration from the San Francisco Film Preserve was only rediscovered in 2023 and is a beautifully filmed drama of faithless cads, true brave-hearts and financial skull-duggery that you can find on the SFFP website. I’ve previously written about it here, but it was great to see it on the big screen and with live accompaniment. Holmes Herbert plays the increasingly unlikeable Lord Angus and Mabel Ballin as Marion, the woman he wrongs. She has steadfast friends though in the form of the youthful John Gilbert playing Dick Beach who sets off in search of the Captain (Gibson Gowland later of Greed…) and Alec McClintock (Ralph Graves) who also loves Marion and will fight through hell and deep waters to save her… A cracking adventure and with some exceptional underwater scenes.

 

Ivor and Isabel

The Triumph of the Rat (1926) with Costas Fotopoulos, introduction from Bryony Dixon

The more I see of British silent films the more I wonder how they got such a bad reputation in the first place. Granted this one is strangely uneven but it’s also deeper than you’d expect allowing Ivor Novello to demonstrate the most existential of triumphs against the most intractable adversity…

Graham Cutts’s direction was very fluid with lots of deft camera movement around the ballroom and, capturing it’s grimy decadence in most expressionist ways, the Coffin Club. It really is a film of two halves as the reformed Rat, Pierre Boucheron (Ivor), rather bored with being the kept man of Zélie de Chaumet (Isabel Jeans is A Queen!) who, as fans will recall, he seemingly spurned in the first of these three films… makes a bet that he can capture the heart of the stunning Madeleine de l'Orme (Nina Vanna) after glimpsing her at a ball.

This begins a charming rat and mouse between the former rodent and the young woman with Pierre using his wiles to catch her attention before, somewhat inevitably, falling for her. This is too much for the controlling Zélie who tells all to ruin their relationship. Pierre is too decent to make excuses and tumbles into a descent that sees him falling into poverty and being forced away from his friends at the Coffin – the always watchable Marie Ault (from Wigan) playing proprietor Mère Colline and Julie Suedo as Mou, one of the club’s dancers who has a soft spot for our hero.

 

Ivor relishes the chance to show he can play despair although he’s no Lillian Gish (but could she sing?). It’s heart-rending and his only triumph might well be to just survive… we’ll have to wait for the final film in the trilogy, The Return of the Rat (1929) to find out where this story ends up. The three have the same characters but tend to not follow the dramatic instructions left by their predecessor.

 

Week-End Wives (1929) with Cyrus Gabrysch, introduced by Lisa Stein Haven

The day started with another very fine British film which was a pretty-much perfectly exercised bedroom farce directed by Harry Lachman and starring Monty Banks. Following on from her presentation of her research into the Italian born-American star at the previous day’s silent Film Symposium (of which more later!), Lisa gave us another expert overview of this impeccable comic actor with the tiny moustache who was born Mario Bianchi in Cesena in North Eastern Italy just down the E45 from Bologna… before emigrating aged 17 to the USA. He started on stage then joined the Arbuckle company in 1918 making 35 short comedies by the early twenties.

 

Of course, for course many Britishers Monty is always down as the future Mr Gracie Fields – they wed in 1940 – but this was a marriage of Lancashire wit and talent with Umbrian nous and charm: they were a powerhouse couple and obviously great fun at parties. Banks’ British adventure began after he was declared bankrupt in 1927 after which he came to work for British International Pictures (BIP) in 1928. As Lisa points out this was after the passing of the 1927 Cinematographic Films Act which brought in the Quota Quickies. His films included Adam’s Apple (1928), Compulsory Husband (1930) and this one, the most complete and thankfully in the BFI archives on 35mm.

 

Monty has adventurer Max Ammon who cannot keep his driver in his golf-bag for long and forms a potential relationship with bored housewife Helene Monard - played by the spirited Annette Benson of Hitchcock’s Downhill fame and also Anthony Asquith’s brilliant Shooting Stars… One misunderstanding leads to another especially as Helene’s husband, uptight and grouchy Henri played with dashing flair by Jameson Thomas, is also bored and certainly fed up of egg and bacon breakfasts. It’s the little things…

 

The love quarter is, almost, completed by wannabe divorcee Madame le Grand, played by the fabulous Estelle Brody, so interesting to see her so far from the cotton mills of Hindle Wakes in this more vampish role. Brody was another American emigree who enjoyed success in the UK although this was not long to survive the coming of sound. Madame seeks legal advice from Henri and soon they are playing consultations of a more amorous kind. Then we discover that there is a fifth element and it’s the violent and unpredictable Monsieur le Grand (George K. Gee) out to win his wife back and to remove any obstacle.

Everyone gets wonderfully entangled and just when you think it’s getting too complicated it just gets more so and funnier. Comedy is precision work and Harry Lachman directs with near perfect timing.

 

I like Monty a lot and look forward to Lisa’s upcoming biography! She has also written about Sid Chaplin who made his Hollywood exit at the same time as the movies changed.

 

Der Student von Prague (1926) with John Sweeney, introduced by Michelle Facey

I missed the evening show which was the classic Weimar gothic adventure directed by Henrick Galeen and starring Conrad Veidt as the hellraising student who makes a deal with the Devil and has to confront the horror of his own dark soul. Based, as was the 1913 version, on a mix of Faust and a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, William Wilson, this is a fabulous tale of a man who haunts himself with marvellous location shots and overall cinematographic excellence from Gunter Krumpf – Veidt vs Veidt is something to behold.

There’s a recent Blu-ray release from Deaf Crocodile which features the recent restoration which  runs at 133 minutes with a score from Stephen Horne. If you haven’t got it already, why not? It also has Brigitte Helm in Alraune (1928) – absolutely essential!

 

It was a day of rich content at the Cinema Museum and the best thing is, we have more of the same tomorrow! *

 

 

*Written before the Day Two write up for reasons best known to the author…