Oooh, Betty!! A Sister of Six (1927) with Neil Brand, British Silent Film Festival Day Four

"Charming scenes – Gorgeous gowns – Splendid Acting. Betty Balfour’s greatest picture.”

As if it were possible to love her any more, A Sister of Six cemented Betty Balfour’s place in our silent hearts as forever, Britain’s Queen of Happiness.

This was a very special occasion as Magnus Rosborn had brought over an exceptionally fine 35mm print from the Swedish Film Institute: shipping back “Bettys to Blighty” in our hour of greatest need. This copy has only been screened a handful of times outside Sweden and is of a restoration completed in the mid-seventies from original nitrates that were sadly discarded at the time. New finds of nitrate elements raise the possibility of further digital restoration of this exceptionally energetic Swedish-German co-production that showcased an impressive array of European talent.

This was credited as directed by Ragnar Cavallius – script-writer for Greta, Lars and Jenny’s The Saga of Gosta Berling – but cinematographer Carl Hoffman (you know, Faust and all that Varieté, Varieté, Varieté…) really took the lead and this much was clear from his hand-held pursuit of a cheeky monkey to an array of shadowy dollies and pull-aways.

Betty on her way to finishing school...

A visual treat the film was filled with outstanding energy not just from our Betty but her handsome co-star Willy Fritsch who plays a Count Horkay tricked by his cousin into a trip to meet the seven daughters of Mrs. Gyurkovics (Lydia Potechina), the eldest of which is he is lined up to marry but – gasp! – he’s already wed. Y’see, Pat and Paddle’s Cocktails is supposed to be madcap but this, this is madcap and charming and funny throughout!

The plot is so complicated and cunning you could twist a tail around it and call it foxy but it doesn’t matter because at any given moment you’re only a cute Balfour twinkle or a mad Aunt’s leer away from a smile. The aunts in question are brilliantly created by Karin Swanström as Countess Emilie Hohenstein and Stina Berg as Countess Aurore Hohenstein – two women so concerned at the romantic behaviour of their niece, that they have prepared a padded room for her.

Padded room, dark mansion-imprissonment, cross-dressed Count come to the rescue? All you need to do is make sure that Betty is at the heart of all that and you’re there!

A Sister of Six is simply one of the most joyous silent films - the publicity quote above is no exaggeration - and no wonder the front row fan whooped with delight at the merest mention of Betty’s name. Mr Brand did very well to play on amidst the riot but it was magnificent on all fronts.

Women Variety Performers on Phonofilm

Tony Fletcher dropped his sock to the stage and we entered an alternate universe of music hall madness as the stars of the day were recorded on Phonofilm, a one-take audio-visual technique of the 1920s. Here we found Edith Kelly-Lange on violin, Yvette Darmac, Emmie Joyce (no relation to Alice or me) articulating her need for love and scouser Gertrude Watts aka Beryl Beresford, being all kinds of cheeky alongside husband Leslie Hinton Cole.

But nothing caused greater excitement on Silent Saturday than Fay “Frenchie” Marbe singing There's More to The Kiss Than XXX, a saucy song from your actual George Gershwin with lyrics from Irving Caesar. Miss Marbe was so smilingly direct she had us mooching along in the most carefree way as audience participation reached alarming new heights.

Fay “Frenchie” Marbe

Phil Carli then kicked off his talk on early sound and recording systems by declaring that “Edison was an ass!” about which there was complete agreement. A fascinating character though and a very entertaining presentation!

PG Wodehouse Stephen Horne, Neil Brand and Bryony Dixon

This was an interesting session whether or not your golf clubs, like mine, have been relegated to the lowliest garden shed. Neil Brand read from one of PG Wodehouse’s golfing short stories, A Woman is Only a Woman, and, relishing every bon mot, showed how crisp and witty PGW’s prose was, making me feel pure shame for never having read him (putting that right now). PG’s stories of golf are, of course, far more about the players – and men – than the game itself and are revelatory about twenties polite culture in general.

“Love (says the Oldest Member) is an emotion which your true golfer should always treat with suspicion… I have known cases where marriage improved a man’s game, and other cases where it seemed to put him right off his stroke. There seems to be no fixed rule.”

The Stoll Company made six shorts based on these stories and we were treated to three of them after Neil’s reading with Stephen Horne hitting an Eagle or two and proving more than up to par on accompaniment.

Rodney Fails to Qualify (1924) introduced us to the diminutive Harry Beasley as The Caddie, an invention of the film series intended to fulfil the same function as The Oldest Member in the stories: the oil that keeps the stories running. We couldn’t work out Harry’s age… anything from 20 to 40 but he was guaranteed cheeky!

The Clicking of Cuthbert (1924) featured the eternal Moore Marriott as grumpy Russian novelist Vladimir Roseleaf whose unexpected passion for golf, wrong-foots the local book group enabling Peter Haddon’s Cuthbert to impress Helena Pickard’s open-minded blue stocking Adeline.

Chester Forgets Himself (1924) in which Jameson Thomas’ Chester Meredith, a man with a potty mouth, almost loses his quest for Ena Evans’ Felicia Blakeney by forgetting to express himself. Some lovely title cards left Chester’s language to our imaginations but Felicia liked his tone better!

Canine Capers…

We’d already seen one comedy canine (in Cocktails…) and there just had to be more as is BSFF tradition. This sequence included Cecil Hepworth’s astonishing Dog Outwits the Kidnappers (1908) in which a dog not only outwits kidnappers but drives their car off… I hadn’t seen it before and I may have whooped.

Contrary to the title Teddy the Dog doesn’t actually drive a train in Clarence Badger’s Teddy at the Throttle but he saves Gloria Swanson who is *actually* tied to railway tracks! Proof that, even if only on this occasion, attempted murder-by-steam train was a thing in silent films.

Then we had charming Charlie Chase taking a bath with Duke the Dog in Dog Shy (1926). CC is the real deal and a premier league performer with or without the pooch.

  

Gloria, ready for her chain-up...

The Pleasure Garden (1925) with Philip Carli

Introducing, Bryony Dixon took us back to 2012, the year of the Hitchcock Nine and the BFI’s epic restorations which were unveiled throughout the year with diverse accompaniment – anyone else remember the beatbox Downhill!? Hitchcock’s directorial debut, The Pleasure Garden was Bryony’s favourite restoration – if not favourite film – given the challenges of the source material and the creative process involved in putting, literally, every cup of tea in its right place. Hitchcock was not a director who ever put in a shot without purpose and everyone served the overall narrative including that of a lone tea leaf floating in a cuppa; a sure sign of impending visitors for our grandparents and every viewer in 1925 (or 1927 when, post Lodger, this film got its general release).

The Pleasure Garden has some great Hitch moments: from the opening sequence as dancing girls hurry their legs down a spiral staircase to then be ogled by a front row of sweaty middle-aged men (ahem!) only for Virginia Valli to laugh off the attentions of her ogler-in-chief (you go, girl!) to the, sickly-disturbing, drowning as Miles Mander’s character finally loses it in the heat. This moment never leaves the film – as stark and psychotic as any in silent film.

Philip Carli, suffering throughout with that most British of gifts, an ‘orrid cold, cast off his discomfort to accompany with a dramatic dash, clearly relishing his duet with Alfred!

Virginia Valli disapproves

And then there was Betty…

The evening show was Stephen Horne and Minima’s fantastic re-scoring of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr whichI had previously seen and raved about at the Barbican back in January. A film that takes on dramatic new flavours in the hands of the collaborating accompanists: their project is not so much a re-scoring as a chance to reflect on the pure brilliance of Dreyer’s technique.

And that was me at this year’s British Silent Film Festival, a wonderful event for which everyone involved – players, presenters, programmers, volunteers, bar staff and sandwich makers - should take a bow as we smooch Fay Marbe’s There's More to The Kiss Than XXX in their general direction!

A hard day’s night… Von morgens bis mitternachts (1920) with Stephen Horne & Martin Pyne, Barbican

"No money in the World can buy anything of value... Money is the most miserable trickery!"

This was a fascinating opening to the Barbican’s series of Weimar expressionism which, it turns out, was far less a movement than a triptych. Introducing the screening Stephanie Bird, Senior Lecture in German at UCL, explained that expressionism was an extension of romanticism but, in its truest form, was limited to very few films of the 500 or so produced at the time.

Only this film, Caligari and the closing segment of Waxworks, can be considered purely expressionistic… even though elements of technique are commonly overlapping – atmospherics intended to show interior states but almost all using more conventional narrative structure and design.

Ernst Deutsch

Von morgens... was almost too radical to be released – either stylistically or politically - and details of its initial distribution are a sketchy as the painted sets. Karlheinz Martin’s film certainly avoided any commercial success and, thanks to a limited run in Japan a copy was preserved and then discovered in 1959 long after being written off as lost.

As it was this might well have been Von morgens bis mitternachts’s UK premier?

Martin had directed the stage version of Georg Kaiser’s 1912 play on its debut in 1917 (it was revived at the National Theatre as recently as 2014) and so knew what he was dealing with… and was able to take off confidently in a more cinematic direction. Expressionist art and theatre had been popular since before the war and expressionist elements were used in across different media without infusing overall substance. Take for example, the striking advertising for some post-war Murnau films that promise Caligarian experimentation whilst the films themselves deliver more conventionally.

The Lady reclines

Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morn to Midnight) might well be the high-water mark of Weimar expressionism – a drowned world of pained dislocation that makes Caligari look almost mainstream. Robert Neppach’s sets are off the scale eccentric and combined with Carl Hoffmann’s cinematography serve to rob the audience of any anchor in reality throughout the whole film: we’re as lost as the cashier who reaches in vain for his ideal and his truth…

The film was accompanied by an improvised score from multi-instrumentalists Stephen Horne (piano, accordion, flute and more) and Martin Pyne – a percussionist, vibraphonist and composer who has worked with Stephen on a number of other projects including Berlin, Symphony of a City and The Battle of the Somme.

The Cashier's cosy yet "nauseating" home life

Their styles blended perfectly and matched the swirling mood of the visuals from the stentorian Brechtian swing of the opening  – I think the boys have located the next whiskey bar alright – to the dislocations of the psychedelic cycle races and the fuzz-toned piano strings for the glimpse of the Cashier’s domesticated alienation .  At times I was reminded of the heavy modern jazz of The Bad Plus (known for unconventional covers of The Pixies, Nirvana and Black Sabbath) as well as the more experimental adventures of Uri Caine (whoprovides similar service for Gustav Mahler) - it was silent film accompaniment as aerobic workout and no less than this powerfully-strange film deserved - a hi-energy approach that must have blistered a few fingers and banged a few nails!

Unlike Caligari it is more difficult to pinpoint this film’s intent and story. The stage play looks more precise in terms of narrative and it would surely be cheating to use its seven acts to illuminate the film’s five… We have to go on what we see.

The actors are integrated into the sets their expressiveness strictly limited by the style of their surroundings. Conversely what we see is what they feel – a scrappy, uneven and rough-cut slash of life. A cashier trapped behind his till bars as surely as in any prison and a world unfinished in our perception by inherent contradictions and irreconcilable knowns and unknowns.

Erna Morena

Ernst Deutsch plays the Cashier in a regular-irregular bank. He is married with a piano-pounding daughter and an elderly mother to maintain. He is clearly a worried man – it’s painted all over his face, especially round his right eye – but he needs the work.

So, what makes him take the biggest step of his life when an attractive Italian Lady played by Erna Morena (who also starred in the expressive if not expressionist Algol (1920)) arrives to cash in a cheque. There is something wrong and the payment cannot be made – the Bank Manager (Eberhard Wrede) has beetle-like suspicions: yet another person trying to cheat the system he serves.

Money can't buy you love

But the money is important for the Lady must buy a picture… she is so desperate she is persuaded by a young man (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) at her hotel to offer her precious pearls as security.

The Cashier so wants to help that he casts all thoughts of family away and steals the money from his bank. He takes the stolen cash to the lady in her hotel and is confused by her acquisition – he does not understand the painting:  “is it you?” She laughs at him and his petty desire and is now further removed as she falls back striking a pose exactly as in the abstract painting.

A street girl also has the face of Destiny...

The Cashier rushes out into the street – his life in shreds and has a series of encounters with women, all played by Roma Bahn, a Beggar, a Whore and finally a Salvation Army Girl. In each case the woman’s face is replaced by a skull – an example of what Stephanie Bird sees as Expressionism’s misogyny – death connected to female sexuality? Of course Roma Bahn also plays The Cashier’s daughter.

Bicycle race

The Cashier travels in search of meaning for his money and ends up betting heavily on cycle racing in one of the film’s outstanding sequences: painted crowds cheering on the distorted wheels of chance: all the confusion of a real sporting event without the needs for a scorecard.

Society is layered just like the audience for the races

The cheapest seats are up top....

The Cashier’s search continues as his day raises far more questions than answers: will he find enlightenment before the clocks strike midnight…Can the Salvation Army help him in this hour of need?

Von morgens bis mitternachts is available on DVD from Edition Filmmuseum if you’re feeling in a questing mood but the contemporary film industry obviously either didn’t see the point or were too concerned by the film’s less than enthusiastic take on capitalist society at a time when the German economy, already in tatters, was burdened with war debt and on the verge of three years of hyperinflation during which revolutionary alternatives began to abound.

Destiny thy name is Roma Bahn

And yet, the film made it to Japan. You have to wonder about its influence there – A Page of Madness deals on similar feelings and is an even more dislocated tale.

Next up in the series is Caligari itself featuring a four-hander from Neil Brand and John Sweeney… not to be missed. I hope they have their clothes suitably painted with white angles and star-bursts.

Times up