Before the Falls… Sherlock Holmes (1916) Neil Brand Ensemble, BFI London Film Festival

Watson and Holmes: a very civil partnership

It was interesting to see the names of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat – current creators of the modern-day Sherlock, on the list of thank-yous from the restoration team for one of the very first screen representations of the original.  This version was arguably as much a re-working of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories as their modern version as it drew content from three stories A Scandal in Bohemia, The Final Problem and A Study in Scarlet whilst adding something of its own.

It was based on the hugely-successful 1899 play written by and starring William Gillette which, as Bryony Dixon pointed out in her introduction, not only had a long run in the USA but also ran for some five years just over the water in London's Lyceum Theatre where once it counted a young Charles Chaplin in the cast.

Great mind at work

Gillette was 62 when the film was made but he still carries of the part of the Master Detective with a rare charisma and intelligence even if he is a little too old to be a romantic interest for Marjorie Kay (17 at the time) as Alice Faulkner (a sort of goody-two-shoes version of Irene Adler).

Gillette is credited with introducing some of the standard visual elements of Sherlock, over his 1,300 stage performances and this recently-recovered film is no doubt all the more precious for preserving such an iconic performance for this enduring and malleable character: we all like to believe in detectives with super-intelligent.

Gillette and Kay

Here he seems to drift into scrapes almost as if he wants to prove he can get out of them – not unlike The Doctor as Mr Moffat would confirm… But he’s always thoroughly prepared whether in wearing a bullet-proof vest made of metal, planting spies in the enemy camp or using his junior butler Billy (here played by Burford Hampden but once by Charlie…)  as the last line of defence.

The film was originally presented as a series and the version uncovered and restored (full details are here) is from a French print which broke this down further into four parts with nine sections. This adds to the slightly disjointed feel of the narrative but it’s Sherlock Holmes; then, as now, it doesn’t all have to add up!

Alice defends her sister's honour in front of the Prince's men

It is very well directed by Arthur Berthelet who does well to lift the narrative away from its stage origins. There is some location shooting in London-looking streets and some interesting camerawork including medium range shots that fade into close-ups at crucial moments and out again.

Berthelet closes in on the action with a repeated disolve...

The story is convoluted and bitty – as you’d also expect from a serial... as you'd expect from Holmes  – and  is really only there to provide opportunities for the Great Detective to show how great he is.

Briefly… Alice Faulkner’s late sister had an affair with a prince and had kept some rather incriminating correspondence which his relatives are very keen to recover. Baron von Stalburg (Ludwig Kreiss), the prince's assistant, and Sir Edward Leighton (Hugh Thompson), a high British official, are trying to negotiate their return before the author’s impending marriage but Alice is refusing to budge.

Sherlock confronts Madge and James

Unfortunately for her, a good-for-nothing family called the Larrabees hear of her situation and try to take advantage… Led by James Larrabee (Mario Majeroni) and Madge Larrabee (Grace Reals) they’re a nasty lot - a little too histrionic for their own good - but, fortunately not too clever.

Holmes,who has been enlisted by the Prince to retrieve the letters, easily outwits by the Larrabees aided secretly by his agent Benjamin Forman (Stewart Robbins) posing as their manservant:  how very cunning Holmes! They decide to call for help from master criminal Professor Moriarty (Ernest Maupain) – who’s hatred for Holmes they hope will guarantee his support.

Guess who?

Yet even with  Holme’s arch enemy now involved can these criminal minds combined win over Holmes' powers of deductive pipe-smoking, intuitive reasoning and, indeed, disguise!

We don’t see too much of Doctor Watson (Edward Fielding) until later in the series when Holmes is sharing his house after an unexplained fire at his own apartments… but the template has recognizably been set.

Subtle gesturing from Mr Gillette - perfect for the big screen

Gillette is as razor-sharp as his name suggests and is a magnetic presence on-screen a natural who underplays so well you'd think he'd been in front of the camera for years whereas this was his only film. He blasts most of cast off screen with a performance of well-honed wit: the calculated confidence born of a thousand or more previous performances.

This was the first screening in Britain since the recovery and for longer than a lifetime: a special occasion that did not disappoint.

The Larrabbees are no match for Brand, Buchwald and Davenport!

A large part of this was due to the joyful accompaniment provided by Neil Brand (piano), Günter Buchwald (violin) and Jeff Davenport (percussion and sound effects). They playing a semi-improvised score based on Neil Brand's melodies as originally commissioned for La Cinémathèque Française. Every bell-ring and thump was precisely on target and the music was as elegantly period-appropriate as Mr Holmes' smoking jacket and as invigoratingly well constructed as his ultimate trap for Professor Moriarty!

There is soon to be a Flicker Alley DVD/BluRay release which - I think? - includes the boys' music as well - one for the Christmas list! Available from Amazon or from Flicker Alley which also has a downloadable press kit explaining more about everything!

Because the Cat just refused to be trained...

Before the main film we were treated to A Canine Sherlock Holmes (1912) a terrific little romp involving a smarter than average dog who does most of his master detective's leg work. Still very funny and an indication of how well-established the Holmes template was by this stage.

A Holmes for all times

Marjorie Kay performs well and went on to work as a nurse in the Great War and from there into stage work and opera. There's are some interesting biographical snippets on the I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere site as uncovered by Chris Redmond.

Young Miss Kay considers her next move

The spice of life… Variety (1925), Stephen Horne, BFI, London Film Festival

“The strongest and most inspiring drama that has ever been told by the evanescent shadows…”

After the red-carpeted glamour of the LFF Archive Gala back to the concrete picture palace that we still call the National Film Theatre and a matinee performance of one of the defining moments of Weimar cinema. I’ve held off watching Variety in the hope of seeing it on screen and with live accompaniment from someone as uniquely adept as Mr Horne: there were apparently some new “talkies” on show in the Festival but this was one of the must-see events of the week.

My patience was doubly rewarded by the fact that this is a film re-born following extensive restoration by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, in co-operation with the Filmarchiv Austria, using nitrate prints and duplicate negatives to create something as crisp and fresh as one of Herr Jannings’ leotards on the first day of filming!

In her introduction Bryony Dixon suggested that you could view Variety as the German leg of a loose trilogy of Ewald Andre Dupont films dealing with the seedier end of show business, the other two being the delicious Piccadilly (1929) and Moulin Rouge (1928). He had a fine eye for the sub-cultural and was helped by the technical imagination of his cinematographer Karl W. Freund who, of course worked on so many great films of the period including The Last Laugh and Metropolis.

Fireworks above and below

Here Freund along with Carl Hoffmann, produced some impossible shots amongst the acrobats on the flying trapeze. It’s hard to imagine the technicolour circus dramas-to-come bettering these moments as you really feel the pressure, the sheer physical improbability of these daredevils connecting with each other, their apparatus or achieving a triple somersault whilst blind-folded and in a sack…  There’s no safety net… and, squirming in my seat, I had a vivid flash back to childhood anxiety watching similar acts at the Blackpool Tower Circus (and there was me thinking I was over that!?).

The family caravan

As Mordaunt Hall fizzed in his New York Times review:  “…there is a marvellous wealth of detail: the lighting effects and camera work cause one to reflect that occasionally the screen may be connected with art.”

Well I would venture that it is more than occasionally as the core of Variety’s appeal is in the performances of the three leads.  Emil Jannings’ presence is first felt at the beginning as you watch the back of a long-imprisoned man walking with a defeated gait, strong shoulders at a stoop, head bowed, to yet another parole meeting in prison. We don’t see Jannings' character’s face but we know how hard his life is… his wife and son are willing to have him back but he has to open up about his crime.

Emile's expressive back...

Finally he does and the film cuts back to the full-faced, confident circus huckster that Jannings’ character, Boss Huller, was before… He seems content living with his baby and wife (Maly Delschaft), running a side-show beauty pageant that attracts the drunks and the old men, but once he soared until a fall left him hospitalised and he longs to return to the heights.

Lya De Putti

To his door is brought a young woman who has been rescued from a ship wreck and destitution. She catches the eye of both husband and wife and the former over-rules the latter when he spots a talent he can use: a genuine attraction in all ways…

The woman (Lya De Putti) is named Bertha after the ship of bad luck from which she was rescued: as new names go it’s not the most re-assuring. She drives their barely-controllable audience wild and Boss decides enough is enough.

Meanwhile Bertha attracts Boss closer to her and as his wife foretold from first sight, he cannot resist this appeal. Too poor to buy a motorcycle and not in possession of a PA to run off with, Boss decides to go back to the trapeze and leaves wife and child to run away with Bertha.

They build up their act in fairgrounds and soon get noticed in Berlin by a British acrobat Artinelli (Warwick Ward) short of a partner following his brother’s fall from on high. Soon they are three and are wowing the audiences in Berlin’s massive Wintergarten theatre.

But success brings its own costs and soon Bertha is spending more time with the younger man leaving Boss at home to darn her tights and to wait for her return. 

No profession is based as much on trust as theirs and yet whilst they depend so much on each other to stay alive they fail to protect each other’s interests on the ground… This is a triangle of trust that can only lead to tragedy if it breaks down.

Clearly it might but possibly not in the way you might expect as even their manager cannot bear to watch the triple twist anymore…

It is a superbly well-balanced film that is a well-practiced as the performers it portrays: Dupont manages to balance the dramatics with deeply personal performances which are especially rich from De Putti as well as Jannings: she matches him for intensity and tells her story in reverse revealing more of her strength as the story progresses while his ebbs away to leave only murderous desperation…

None of the three protagonists are anything other than true to themselves: Artinelli is artful, Bertha wild and Boss a force of his will… the greatest pity is that they met each other.

Stephen Horne took all of this in his surefooted stride and maintained a balance of his own between the low swings of fury and the lovers’ leaps. There is an amazing level of “content” in his improvisations especially when compared to a pre-prepared score: but then he does play up to four instruments almost all at the same time…

I’ll leave the last word to Mr Hall - “Scene after scene unlocks a flood of thoughts, and although the nature of the principal characters is far from pleasing; the glimpses one obtains are so true to life that they are not repellent.” I don’t think I’ve ever read “Mordy” so enthused but he had every right to be.

The restored Variety is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Amazon.de with English subs and a modern soundtrack that is by all accounts of un-paralleled clunker – maybe Stephen could make his improvised score available for download?

Shooting Stars (1927), John Altman, Live Film Orchestra, BFI London Film Festival Archive Gala

Annette Benson, naughty white dove and Brian Aherne

So, to the Leicester Square Odeon for one of the few occasions in the calendar when silent film gets to be the big shot… even in this palace built for the talkies. The red carpet was rolled out and in the absence of the film’s original stars this could be construed as a recognition of the special audience silent cinema attracts although it’s probably just Festival branding…

This was Anthony Asquith’s first feature and, whilst he may have co-directed with A.V. Bramble and co-written along with John Orton this feels very much like what was to come with Underground and A Cottage on Dartmoor. In short, Shooting Stars is another late period British silent that shows we were much, much better than we thought.

Annette Benson: new favourite actress alert!

Shooting Stars is one of the first British films about film-making – although Hollywood had got there much earlier with the under-rated Souls for Sale, the lost Merton of the Movies and others. The business of film provides perfect fodder as the impudent young director sets about the delusion industry with relish… But then what do you expect from Herbert’s son, ex-Winchester and a Balliol alumnus: he was a bright lad with a background in confidence.

Newly restored by the BFI National Archive, the film was presented with a live score by BAFTA and Emmy award-winning composer John Altman whose work includes some of the more elegant sections of Titanic and who, more importantly, has worked with the genius Nick Drake.

Beach cheeky: Donald Calthrop

Here he employed the 12-piece Live Film Orchestra to superb effect in playing his elegantly-energetic themes.  The music moved with the emotional flow of the film with sections of jazz-age swing flowing into romantic themes that hopped between the action on film and the action being filmed and which were infused with the promise of somehow-inevitable sadness even amid the hope. At times the playing seemed to be within the film; echoing the characters’ sentimental journeys with sweetly mournful lines from Chris Garrick on violin, Simon Chamberlain on piano, Jim Hastings, Bob Sydor and Robert Fowler on woodwind: is there anything sadder than the Clarinet?

That’s not to say that Shooting Stars is a sad film it is funny, saucy and very poignant: a study of human frailty and hope. Annette Benson is quite superb as aspiring superstar Mae Feather – enough of a prima donna to bring the show to a halt when nipped on the lips by a dove but somehow lost in her marriage to the blue eyed and frankly dashing leading man Julian Gordon (Brian Aherne who is so-o cool he manages to carry off the most outrageous pair of cowboy leathers).

A British Coop?

Benson isn’t quite pretty enough to be a Hollywood star but she is all the more interesting for that especially playing alongside this Anglo-Gary Cooper. She’s bored and he’s a bit detached not even bothered enough to stop her going to see their own flick with the cheeky comedian Andy Wilkes (Donald Calthrop – the blackmailer from Blackmail). Andy’s rather underfed in comparison with Julian but he’s funny and at least he pays attention.

The action shifts from studio to homes as Mae goes out to stay in with Andy whilst Julian ends up watching his own film next to a couple of school boys – a marvellous glimpse of cine-watching culture as the actor, almost forgetting his own story starts to cheer along with the audience as he (acting) comes to the rescue.

Andy struggles with the telephonics

Their triangulated affections play out across the backlot and studio with some eye-popping set pieces from Asquith and his cameramen Henry Harris and Stanley Rodwell. There’s an audacious opening when the camera pulls back from a cosy blossom tree cuddle to reveal the mechanisms of the studio and then the camera floats overhead as the characters move from stage to stage. As BFI head curator Robin Baker pointed out in his introduction, the script prepared by Asquith shows just how much of these shots were already in his head. The consistency of tone is remarkable throughout and he clearly works so well with the performers.

With apologies to the BFI... the camera floats over the action within the action...

Then there is a marvellous final sequence that I won’t discuss save to say that it is a suitably emotional coda to a wonderful film: pure cinema in a way that wouldn’t be equalled for decades once the microphones popped up to restrict movement, imagination and the visual drama. This film moves like the best of European silent cinema but is very British all the same.

The restoration was another triumph for the BFI and Robin’s pre-show demonstration of the “before and afters” illustrated just how much had to be done. The film looked spanking new even though only one reel of the original negative survived. Watching this wonder, in cinema and with such a score brought more audience engagement than a dozen iMax/3D films involving grim-faced crime fighters and Norse gods. It was almost too much of a shock to walk out to the outside world where Leicester Square was being loudly serenaded by a longhaired man with an electric guitar.

Mae's mellow in the process of being harshed...

As my friend Mary from Santa Barbara would say: “don’t let it harsh your mellow…” and it didn’t.

BFI, can we see this one again please?

There’s more detail on the film on the BFI site with an excellent essay from Bryony Dixon - How to make your first (silent) movie count.

The Live Film Orchestra site is here whilst John Altman’s Facebook page is here – he really has worked with everyone – and there’s an interview with him talking about Nick Drake on MIMO. He also received the Anthony Asquith Award for Achievement in Film Music for Hear My Song...

Red carpet for silent film...