Every day is like Sunday… Honest presidents, Red Hotels, wind and mountains. Pordenone Day Two

And so, the festival begins properly on day two with a mild hangover, sleep depravation and the unreasoned compulsion that it is vital to see everything.

We also started off with The Three Tenors of British silent film accompaniment: Brand, Horne and Sweeney and all three swung like jazz-age musketeers on the Verdi’s sensational piano: a reminder of the strength in depth and sheer variety of playing from the leading accompanists.

John Sweeney accompanied the first two sections of the John M. Stahl’s The Lincoln Cycle an extraordinary concept involving an American president who aims to only tell the truth and to be always keeping his promises? This speculative fiction started off with My Mother and My Father (both 1917); both are in superb quality and are very effective docudrama. The second was more exciting than the first – Lincoln’ mother dies – and featured a flashback illustrating Honest Abe’s long history of staying true to his word.

L'Auberge Rouge (The red hotel) (1923) followed with Stephen Horne on accompaniment.

Jean Epstein generates tremendous atmosphere with this tale of the, fairly, unexpected. It’s a darker than Poe mystery play in which a cold case is gradually resolved at a dinner party at which the murderer, completely unsuspecting, hears a traveller’s tale that implicates him after so many long years of evasion.

There’s quite stunning use of a hand-held camera as it roams around the dining room table over the candles and straight into fear-filled eyes as the story unfolds. This creates a claustrophobia to which is added the almost magic realism of the flash backs… a rain sodden inn, packed with people, furtive glances and everyone playing some kind of part. Even the servant at the dinner party looks like she’s involved… impressive attention to details that rewards the viewer with a greater concision than some of today’s other directors.

Gina Maines eyes are one of the main special effects deployed but she’s not alone in a striking and very effective cast.

Stephen Horne takes these supernatural elements in his stride and embellished Epstein with his unconventional explorations beyond the keyboards.

The first feature film in the John M. Stahl strand was Sowing the Wind (US 1921), a restored version from MoMA, screened on 35mm with accompaniment from Neil Brand.

An interesting if overlong tale of the moral double-think of 1920’s society, the film featured some out-right feminist intertitles as a grumpy rich man discovers to his cost that women are not just playthings. Women are treated poorly as male entertainment and despite being worshiped at clubs, they are then not being considered worthy of being married: even their daughters. Of course, this logic has to come a cropper at some point and the full soul-searing hypocrisy is only realised when it happens to one of the grey old men spouting the most vociferously about women’s’ place.

Stahl’s direction is slow and occasionally he mistimes reactions shots but the lead actors are watchable enough if a little wooden in some cases. Anita Stewart is very photogenic but she doesn’t always convince and neither did her romantic lead, Josef Swickard leaving the older supporting actors to do most of the dramatic heavy lifting.

Neil Brand accompanied and matched Stahl’s off beats with practiced precision clearly enjoying himself thoroughly on the Teatro Verdi’s splendid Fazioli piano and making light of the director’s uneven pacing.

Luis Trenker holds on

I’d seen Mario Bonnard’s stunning Der Kampf ums Matterhorn (The Great Conquest) (1928) in Berlin and once again was knocked out by the rugged scenery and the bravery involved in the technicalities of filming it. We flew over the Alps on the way out, the peaks little different from the clouds and here again was Bonnard taking our minds higher than expected in this tale supposedly based on actual events and the novel they inspired by Carl Haensel. It’s men of granite versus taller, harder rockfaces and a lot of fun!

Maud Nelissen accompanied and found the awe amongst the high peaks of drama with some dramatic sparse scoring matching the spaces of those hypnotic peaks and emphatic changes in density matching the action on the slopes.

In between these mighty main features, the Festival’s strand on advertising is proving highly amusing and that the more things change the more they get advertised the same: benefits, value propositions and brand building is classic work.

Ewald A. Dupont’s Das Alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law) (1923) was another film I’d already seen and this time featured accompaniment: Alicia Svigals (violin), Donald Sosin (piano), Romano Todesco (accordion) and Frank Bockius (drums). Details of my original viewing here.

James Cruze’s The Mating Call (1928) closed out the day as part of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By. It’s a fun film featuring the always excellent Thomas Meighan, the under-rated Evelyn Brent (originally-named Betty Riggs) and rather a lot of Renée Adorée who does what we call in the trade a “Hedy Lamarr” … My previous post is here.

Neil Brand accompanied and kept his eyes fixed on the keyboard.

And that’s Sunday, one day closer to what they’re already calling Jenny Hasselqvist Tuesday*!

*Well, I am…