8th Kennington Bioscope Silent Film Weekend, Day Two: The Restoration of Happiness

 

Day two and back for another day of rare film, excellent music and the best coffee south of Soho. It’s 10.00am and time for the return of our Queen of Happiness…

 

The Sea Urchin (UK 1926) (35mm), with Colin Sell and introduced by Lawrence Napper

 

Proceedings began with not just a smile but the radiance that only certain stars can bring and not only was there Betty there was also Lawrence thoroughly delighting the audience with the expert enthusiasm and critical judgement that are his trademarks. This ability to speak as you find is essential for this period of British film, so long poorly-viewed but now in the middle of a gentle re-evaluation with the evidence of our own eyes challenging the silent shibboleths of Low et al.

A case in point, is this film’s director, Graham Cutts, who has been unfairly maligned with Hitchcock’s opinion impacting the reputation of one of the period’s most successful film-makers. As with many a British film of this period there are some issues with pacing perhaps – a shaggy dog tale of a joke towards the end which acts against the satisfaction of the main plot points – but there was also some wonderful technique on display and, of course, Britain’s Queen of Happiness, never fails to bring her audience cheer, not in 1926 and not now. Had Lawrence remembered the recipe for the Betty Balfour Cocktail we might have been even merrier…

Betty Balfour urges you all to have a cigar...

Produced at Gainsborough Studios by Michael Balcon and also known as The Cabaret Kid, The Sea Urchin in question is Betty Balfour’s Fay Wynchbeck who as the film starts is a disruptive student in a Parisian girls’ boarding school. Her singing and dancing leads the other girls slightly astray and there’s a fabulous shot of their after-hours partying through the keyhole which Alfred H would have been lauded for. She’s rescued from isolation by Sullivan (Clifford Heatherley, also with Betty in Champagne!) an old pal of her fathers who uses the old man’s request for him to return her to the family seat in England as a means of getting her to work in his nightclub. He pretends to be her father who she obviously hasn’t seen in a very long time…

 

Back in Blighty at that family seat, there’s an ongoing feud between Fay’s family – represented by her aunts Minnie (Haidee Wright) and Mary (Marie Wright) – and their neighbours, the Trebarrows, led by Sir Trevor (Cecil Morton York) and represented by the aerial incompetence of his son Jack (George Hackathorne) who crashes his plane into their garden. Jack’s an affable chap though and plans to race his machine to Paris… and you can guess who he’s going to bump into. Sure enough he encounters Fay in the nightclub and after an amusing food fight is soon helping her escape the clutches of Sullivan and his crony Rivoli (W. Cronin Wilson) who doggedly pursue them back across the channel.

 

No one’s quite sure of all the connections until the end and it’s an amusing, warm-hearted ramble with good chemistry between Balfour and baby-faced Hackathorne – how could you fail with the original BB? Colin Sell saw that chemistry and upped it to 11… charm was the word. A shout out to the many uncredited performers who gave a flavour of contemporary night-life in London if not Paris, there was much skill on show including some fierce Apache dancing unlike anything we’ll see on Strictly…

Restorations and Discoveries: Little Mickey Grogan (US 1927), with Meg Morley, presented by Dave Glass

There’s a moment in Little Mickey Grogan (US 1927) when the kids are dancing on the corner of the street and young Frankie Darro busts some actual breakdancing moves which for me finally proved the existence of time travel. Now that issue’s sorted, we can congratulate the young man for his acting in a charming film that was restored in 2015 following an appeal from his co-star, Lassie Lou Ahern – 8-years old in the film – for help in recovering her final silent film. Eric Grayson led the restoration and explained in a video introduction that a French-language 35mm nitrate print formed the basis of the work with the aid of Lassie Lou’s original script proving the benefits of hording (Mrs Joyce take note…). More on restoration was to follow, see the American Bioscope section below.

You know the old line about how the talkies killed off silent film stars well, meet Frankie Darro whose best years were certainly ahead of him once he grew up and into the model gangster tough enough and short enough to play alongside Cagney et al. He was in Public Enemy, he was the voice of Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet and he was even in the Batman TV show, alongside fellow silent alumnus Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon). Frankie was just nine when he made this charming feature – there goes that word again but never more appropriate.

Mickey Grogan is a quick-thinking street kid who gets by on his own despite the frequent attentions of the truant officer. He can’t help but impress some people though and is soon in temporary accommodation on the couch of office worker Winnie (Jobyna Ralston so often Harold Lloyd’s foil) who has endless reserves of good will. She needs this as workplace bully Al Nevers (Billy Scott) keeps on trying to impose himself on her in yet another example of silent toxicity of the man un-kind-kind.

Winnie’s little home is soon filled with a partially-sighted former architect, down on his luck Jeffrey Shore (Carroll Nye) who Mickey is keen to help and Mickey’s pal Susan (Lassie Lou) whose adoptive parents lose their home and have to abandon her. Even before the Great Depression the American Dream was founded as much on rags as riches. But, of course, the latter are always potentially available if only unlikely good people and good fortune are on hand… if only Winnie is able to convince Jeff that he can still draw plans for an innovative new factory required by her boss, the kindly industrialist Mr Cabal (Crauford Kent) and if only he sees the potential reward of investing in Jeff’s one in a thousand shot eye op…

Who am I kidding? I love this stuff! So did Meg Morley who accompanied with jazz-inflected sympathies of her own to create the feelgood movie of the weekend.

Mickey was followed by the latest 35mm nitrate finds by Joshua Cattermole and new restorations from the Tony Saffrey collection, including: Circumnavigation of Graf Zeppelin (Germany 1930); Wait and See (UK 1910), a Gaumont comedy directed by Alf Collins; and a previously missing film by early pioneer R. W. Paul, The Soldier’s Vision (UK 1900).

 

Eugen Klöpfer and Aud Egede-Nissen

Die Straße/The Street (Germany 1923) (digital) with Costas Fotopoulos, introduced by Dave Glass.

Dave Glass was absolutely correct when he said that the more you watch Die Straße – or Dee Strasser in Scouse – the more you see and this sparkling restoration kept putting me in mind of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, as the main protagonist’s nightmare just grows and grows, people he meets, chances he takes all lead him the wrong way no matter which way he goes on the street.

Eugen Klöpfer plays the bored and sexually-frustrated middle-aged man who definitely doesn’t work in the publishing industry and who sets out for a walk on the wild side of his street, twirling his umbrella and feigning interest in shop windows as he approaches the local sex workers. One woman he sees turns into a cadaver in his fevered imagination but he drives himself onwards until encountering a woman credited as simply a harlot (Aud Egede-Nissen). She proceeds to lead this nervy punter along through the dark of the park, it’s a dance she’s played many times before and not without humour as an elderly couple sit between them as the edge towards each other on the bench. As we later find out, she shares a house with a small child and a blind man played by the protean Max Schreck; two vulnerable people who exist in the criminal uncertainties of this low life.

Her partner, The Pimp (Anton Edthofer) leaves the house to go to work nd is lying in wait once our man with a movie umbrella finally bucks up the courage to follow the woman into a night club where his seduction and exploitation can be controlled. It’s a tense voyage into the underworld, with a dreamlike quality that doesn’t make the realities being dramatized any less pitiful. Klöpfer’s performance is a feverish and compelling one and matched by Egede-Nissen’s archness – she knows what evil lurks in the hearts of ordinary men and how to meet the demand.

Karl Grume’s film is regarded as the first Weimar “street” film and as with much of German cinema of this period was filmed on a giant set from art director Karl Görge. It adds to the nightmarish quality of this unreal yet all too believable world. The piano accompaniment from Costas Fotopoulos added minor chords and jarring lines as were, momentarily, lost in an imagined Berlin with no way home…

 

Focus on Biograph (film and digital), Glenn Mitchell and Dave Glass with Ashley Valentine

Time for the return of today’s MVP, Mr David Glass together again with Glenn Mitchell for another of their popular Focus On… show and tells this time focused on the other Biograph, the film company, based in the USA, you know, that place sandwiched between Canada and Mexico. There were stunning restorations from the Film Preservation Society by kind courtesy of Tracey Goessel and a short video explaining how they are using digital technology to perfect even the oldest and well-worn of original materials. The results were stunning and these early films look like they were recorded yesterday.

We saw a lot of Mack Sennett and I especially liked his rather disturbing turn in DW Griffith’s Father Gets in the Game (1908) in which he has what would now be called a “make-over” and proceeds to join his son and daughter in their social lives… Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose à la mode de mange tout eh Rodney? There was also Mary Pickford, as the co-writer with DW of The French Duel (1909) and starring in his Getting Even (1909) when she was just 17.

We also had Mabel Normand directed in two films by Sennett – The Tourists (1912) and Through the Clouds (1912). Mabel was just 20 and would change film comedy for ever as would so many of this maverick crew. You only have to gaze at the improvised madness of Monday Morning in a Coney Island Police Court (1908) written by Mack and directed by DW who for all the discussion probably doesn’t get credit for giving these mad men their head.

Piano accompaniment was from Ashley Valentine who matched the crazy energies on screen and kept things as calm as possible. More of this kind of thing please!

 

If I Were Single (US 1927) (35mm), with Costas Fotopoulos, introduced by Michelle Facey

This was a chance to observe the pre-talkie Myrna Loy and boy Paramount didn’t stint of fabric, make-up or lighting in presenting her in this extensive supporting role. Roy Del Ruth’s rom-com is a proto screwball comedy with outlandish behaviour from the main players, with exceptional timing and wit so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it foxy. This I would expect from Conrad Nagel and Loy – on her later world-class form – but this is also among the best I’ve seen May McAvoy since Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), she’s made for this kind of quick-fire farce being somehow both sweet and, very, sour if required.

And, who could fail to be more than a little bitter if you were married to the likeable but complacent lump portrayed by Nagel. Sure, Ted loves his wife May, but when he sees a stylish women called Joan (Loy) at the gas station he suddenly decides that he’s temporarily not married in order to flirt. Sadly, his sins soon find him out as Joan is revealed to be an old friend of May’s and, having taken the lighter she gave to Ted for his birthday treat, soon there is more to explain than May can cope with.

Her piano teacher Claude, the excellent George Beranger, is on hand in the hope that he may pick up the pieces, or at least May and there are some excellent – heavily coded – looks of mock everything from the Australian throughout. Based on the story Two-Time Marriage by Jack Townley, If I Were Single was originally released with synchronised music and sound effects, but as the discs are seemingly lost, we had sparkling accompaniment from Costas Fotopoulos to illustrate this sharp and effective comedy… Still not convinced by your Ted though May!

I'm watching my WB Archive DVD and imagining Kevin's intro...

The Trail of ’98 (US 1928) (digital) with Cyrus Gabrysch and presented by Kevin Brownlow.

KB’s KB was back to tell his first-hand tales of Clarence Brown but, unfortunately, I had to leave just as he arrived and so missed this special treat. I don’t know if Mr Brownlow met Dolores del Río, Ralph Forbes, Karl Dane or Harry Carey but he certainly spent time with this remarkable film’s director. The Cinema Museum and the Bioscope bring us two degrees from Kevin Brownlow to classic Hollywood and, in terms of the films, the archivists, historians and projectionists, we re-connect every three weeks.

 

Another stunning weekend and it was pretty perfect thanks to the thousands of hours of preparation. Thanks to you all and see you on 23^rd April for more film on film and a recently discovered “lost” feature film on 16mm!! BOOK NOW!