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 first 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
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…
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