Train kept a rollin’… The Signal Tower (1924), Stephen Horne and Martin Pyne, San Francisco Silent Film Festival Streaming

“… so, remember… never think of anything but your duty, until the track’s clear and your train’s safe!”

I’d previously seen a screening of Kevin Brownlow’s own copy of this film with Cyrus Gabrysch accompanying ferociously at a breathless evening at the Kennington Bioscope and this was a chance to see the restored film Kevin had played a major role in constructing with the SFSFF. There were no 35mm copies and so Robert Byrne of the SFSFF, Patrick Stanbury and Mr Brownlow worked with surviving 16mm elements, scanning materials at 4k, digitally repairing and creating a new 35mm negative from which prints were struck that were then dye tinted by specialist chemists in Prague.

The results were screened at the 2019 SFSFF and are astonishingly good, crystal clear with the beauty of the Californian forests fully enhanced and the locomotives as impressively highlighted as the actors. What is it about boys and steam trains? The accompaniment from Stephen Horne, aided by Martin Pyne/Frank on percussion, brought out the full majesty of the setting and the mechanics as well as one of the most febrile of conclusions in silent film.

Virginia Valli wrote a letter to Picture Play magazine from location in Mendocino County “I’m… just about as deep into the wilds of Northern California as any picture player has ever ventured. It’s beautiful; great redwoods, the bluest sky I have ever seen and brown and yellow maple leaves lending a dash of colour to the deep green of the firs. It’s so beautiful it’s actually awe-inspiring.”

This restoration certainly confirms that former and emphasises the “awe” in terms of Clarence Brown’s setting – the entire movie was shot in situ with sets built near the railway tracks – but also his treatment of the locos. In his introduction the Bioscope event and his essay for the SFSFF festival, Brownlow emphasised Brown’s fascination with trains. Brown was an engineer by training and clearly relished filming these steam-powered giants, getting up at the crack of dawn with his cameraman, Ben F. Reynolds, to record the trains powering through the pines with steam billowing above them and into the narrow sunlight.

The company hade rented a stretch of track which had only one service a day and so were able to take their time in presenting the life of this remote outpost and, with plenty of time to stage the most explosive of life-sized stunts: no scale models were damaged in the making of this film.

You can understand Brownlow’s passion for this is a film to make the rail enthusiast’s pulse race that bit faster as this is a film to increase everyone’s BPM as Brown winds the tension to almost unbearable levels: a runaway train speeding down towards a defenceless passenger train, a signal man fighting the elements and time to dislodge the tracks and faced with the horrific dilemma of having to save the many whilst his wife is under imminent threat from a boozed-up Wallace Beery with only one thing on his mind; a very vulnerable Virginia Valli.

Rockliffe Fellows watches an actual train steam by in a signal towerpurpose built on location

Those misty Mendocino Mountains contain a signal box vital to the effective running of the railroads and manned by just two men each working twelve hour shifts. The always upstanding Rockliffe Fellowes plays one of these “Tower Men”, Dave Taylor, whose wife Sally (Virginia Valli of Wild Oranges and The Pleasure Garden fame) and young lad Sonny (Frankie Darro) live in an idyllic wooden house near the tower – three miles from the nearest town.

Dave’s partner Old Bill (James O. Barrows) is indeed old and one-handed and so is replaced by Joe Standish (Wallace Beery) a man who’s flash suit and polished shoes mark him out as self-obsessed from the start and who is referred to as a “railroad Sheik” by one of the company’s engineers.

Dave lets Joe take over old Bill’s old room and he soon sets his sights on Sally even though her cousin Gertie (Dot Farley) initially acts as a kind of shield for his unabashed “sheik-ness”. Sally sends Gertie away to pay more attention to her fiancé unwittingly removing her own last line of defence… Joe soon makes his move and Dave kicks him out.

Wallace Beery and Virginia Valli

A storm is brewing though and as events take a serious turn on the mountain, Joe arrives late and, drunk in the heart of a crisis, forces Dave to take over and, once again kick him out. But that’s not the end of Joe’s nuisance as Dave sees him heading towards his home through the wind and rain… As disaster looms he must choose between Sally’s safety and his responsibilities to protect the passengers.

Beery does his usual top-notch job – his intensity belying his lighter, more likeable edge whilst Valli was the perfect complement, with a vulnerability running alongside her desperate resolution to resist the demon in her house; the film would not work as well without her imbuing Sally with so much depth and without Beery’s ability to kid us that he’s just not going to be as bad this time. Rockliffe Fellowes meanwhile, is the perfect heroic straight man to the descending chaos, a natural straight-backed affability informing his character.

Full marks to young Darro as well, aided and abetted by Jitney the Dog.

The family under threat

Biographer Gwenda Young describes The Signal Tower as one of Brown’s most personal films and he even made an appearance as a switchman trying to stop the runaway train as well as being “Conductor Brown” the addressee of a telegram. The “home invasion” represented by Beery’s character cuts to the heart of every relationship and powerfully contrasts with the accelerating disaster without. For the many or for the crucial few?

It’s a dramatic scenario and one that required a great deal of precision musical engineering from accompanists Stephen Horne and percussionist Martin Pyne with the latter providing the locomotive power to the former’s heat and steam. Brown’s film is full of controlled rhythms and contrasts from the towering bucolic surrounds to the dynamic force of the locomotion and the wayward intensity of the human drama and the score successfully navigated this triple track escalation to the film’s pulsating closure.

For the musician, every note’s a dead man’s handle – for the train driver, everything stops if you release your grip but the music is dependent on the continuation of a thousand stabs of precise pressure: all the right notes and all in the right order with Beery’s leery menace as much a threat as the speed of those locomotives. Stephen’s themes were as strong as you’d expect and the rhythmic requirements brought out the forces pushing the ultimate dramas of family, lives and morality under threat.

So, now is exactly the right time to join the SFSFF and to experience this film which is online until the 4^th April. There’s also a collection of some previous restorations and the promise of more to come. Full details are on their website here.

Rudy can't fail... The Eagle (1925), with Neil Brand, 10th Hippodrome Silent Film Festival

 

Back when Arthur was young, I went to watch Kevin Brownlow introduce this film at East Finchley’s ultimate picture palace, the Phoenix Cinema, and he shared his coversations with one of the silent era’s most calmly professional directors along with clips from films I just had to see. Since then, I’ve watched them on the big screen; Flesh and the Devil (1926), The Signal Tower (1924) and The Goose Woman (1925). Brown never disappoints and brings out the best in his actors; a real warmth of performance amongst the smoothly worked narratives.

 

Watching first time my focus was on Rudolph Valentino as this was the first of his films I’d seen (and I still haven’t seen either The Sheik or The Son of the Sheik…) but now I was watching as much for Louise Dresser, who was so heart-breaking in The Goose Woman and is grand again here playing Csarina Catherine the Great as passionate and impetuous with a penchant for young officers and for executing those who don’t please her.

 

Her scenes with Valentino as the dashing Lt. Vladimir Dubrovsky, are wry – if conflicting - with sexual role-reversal as the predatory monarch tries to get her man tipsy, offers him a career path based on favour and generally behaves like a man. Dubrovsky has enlisted to be a fighter and not a lover and absents himself even though he knows this will seriously affect his prospects both in military life and, well, just life.

Louise Dresser and Rudolph Valentino

 

This isn’t any man Catherine is sexually harassing though, it’s one played by Rudolph Valentino. No other silent actor comes with quite so much baggage as the Latin lover, the man who broke so many hearts that people seemingly took their own lives rather than face up to life without him… Surely, he had to take himself that seriously too? But no, what we find is a very handsome man who can act and who has a deliciously inclusive sense of humour to prick the bubble of heroic pomposity: think Antonio Banderas in an Aldomorvar film: a little camp but in that masculine way only the most “secure” can carry off.

 

Valentino’s Dubrovsky is one of the bravest officers in the imperial elite and arrives at a parade for the Csarina at the film’s start full of promise. He’s a man of action and spotting a runaway carriage he leaps onto the Csarina’s favourite horse, and she did like her horses… (“not true…” says History) and sets off in pursuit – Brown’s cameraman fast behind – pulling level, jumping on and pulling the horses to a halt in classic cowboy style.

 

The party he rescues includes a beautiful young noblewoman, Mascha Troekouroff, played by the delectable Vilma Bánky, who has great chemistry with Valentino and pretty much every single thing around her. She would star with him again in Son of the Sheik, her beauty and intelligence matching his own with a challenge that his persona needs; she’s not being swept off her feet by anyone.

Rudolph and Vilma

 

Pleasantries are exchanged and there’s an instant connection but Mascha ‘s head is not easily turned and her Aunt Aurelia (Carrie Clark Ward) is the one waving enthusiastically after Dubrovsky as their carriage pulls away. He laughs but his quick thinking has earned him that awkward appointment with his Czarina who is more than happy to see her horse returned unharmed…

 

It’s not a good day on balance for Dubrovsky as he receives the news that his father is seriously ill because of his estate and fortune being stolen by the by the villainous Kyrilla Troekouroff (James A. Marcus on fine form). Dubrovsky won’t take this lying down and soon turns himself into a Robin Hood figure – The Black Eagle – who leads his father’s remaining loyal staff into an escalating set of countermeasures aimed at over-throwing the usurper.

 

Encountering a man who has been employed to teach French (incidentally, the language of the Tsarist court even up to the pre-revolutionary period…) to Kyrilla’s daughter, Dubrovsky takes his place as a means of breaking in and causing chaos. Yet, when he arrives, he sees that his student is to be the beautiful girl he rescued in the runaway carriage.

James A. Marcus as the Fearless Kyrilla!

 

Thus, things go as rom-coms go with enough will-they/won’t-they to keep you guessing as Bánky and Valentino work their humorous rapport as far as they can without popping the dramatic bubble. Kyrilla is revealed as more bullying buffoon than despot as the threats of imminent retribution from the Black Eagle un-nerve him more and more: you do wonder how he ever managed to take control of the Dubrovsky estate… still, he does have a bear chained in his wine cellar for playing “jokes” on guests.

 

Brown directs with deceptive efficiency and with more than the odd flourish. Not for nothing was he “blind-tasted” as Lubitsch by one Hollywood insider according to Kevin Brownlow, with some innovative shots including an amazing dolly shot along the full length of Kyrilla’s banquet table. It’s a very well-made film with sumptious sets from the legendary William Cameron Menzies, and the restored print is in superb condition; watching it is indeed, as Mr Brownlow said at the Phoenix, “…seeing silent film as it really was”.

 

Accompaniment was provided by Mr Neil Brand who had dressed for the occasion and entered his music room in colour before sitting down to accompany in back and white. His themes went well beyond those chromatic limitations though and he gave us the rich romance and visceral daring the film deserved. As festival director Alison Strauss put it in her introduction, we were watching “together, alone” and the improvised music gives the immediacy that binds us as viewers, sat in front of screens from Worthing to the Winter Palace.

  

Who is The Black Eagle?! 

The Eagle is now available on spruced up Blu-Ray from Kino and is well worth filing between Camile and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse if you like your Latin Lover in alpha order or, Monsieur Beaucaire and Cobra if you’re going by date.

 

The Hipp-fun carries on and you can still catch up on most of films, intros and Q&As via the festival website and the Falkirk Community Trust YouTube channel.

But not least... The Last of the Mohicans (1920) with Cyrus Gabrysch, Kennington Bioscope

Shortly into production of The Last of the Mohicans, Maurice Tourneur suffered an injury leaving his assistant Clarence Brown to complete the film. Brown, a one-time car salesman, had decided the Frenchman was the best director in Hollywood and in 1915 had approached him directly to teach him everything he knew as a replacement for the assistant he had just fired… By 1920 Brown was Tourneur’s right hand and he later told Kevin Brownlow that it was like receiving an Oscar when the master commented on the finished film: “not bad, Mr Brown, not bad…”

On such relationships are great films made and Kevin Brownlow, introducing this screening of his own copy, recalled having to call in a favour from Henri Langlois in order to screen the same to Clarence Brown in the 60s, the latter pointing out every scene that should have been tinted so emphatically that Kevin had to be reminded by the Bioscopes projectionist, the mighty Dave Locke, that the copy if black and white.

It mattered not as the screen comes alive when Brown and Tourneur’s vision is projected. Apparently, Maurice was none too keen on location shooting and so Clarence had already plenty of experience which shows in the action on top and against huge mountain-scapes as well as the impressive and disturbingly blood-thirsty battles scenes. This is one aspect I was not expecting and the large-scale attacks on women and children by the rogue native American tribesmen is unsettling to say the least.

But this is not your usual story of cowboys and Indians… no matter how demonised the Huron tribe is we also have “good Indians” in the form of the diminished Mohican tribe not to mention inter-racial love that is remarkable for the time and the novel even has the extra twist of Cora Munro being mixed race. The book was the second of five James Fenimore Cooper wrote in the mid-nineteenth century about the battle for supremacy between the British, the French and the native Americans and was set in 1757, during the Seven Years' War with the French army aligned with the Huron tribe in a losing battle against British dominance (but don’t worry America, 1776 is just around the corner).

Barbara Bedford and Alan Roscoe

Cora (Barbara Bedford) and Alice Munro (Lillian Hall) are the daughters of British Colonel Munro (James Gordon) who commands Fort William Henry, south of Lake George in the colony of New York. The French are planning and attack and Uncas (Alan Roscoe) – the last Mohican warrior – is sent by his father Chingachgook (Theodore Lorch) to warn the Brits… Cora is immediately taken with the handsome fellow and her useless compatriot Captain Randolph (George Hackathorne) looks on jealously.

Wallace Beery, perhaps surprisingly, plays an Indian scout Magua who, of course, has a treacherous heart and is secretly going to lead the Munro girls into the hands of his pals in the Huron tribe… all the better to get his way with Cora. It’s not just Wallace and Alan in black-face though, there’s not a single native American in the film and as Brown quipped to Brownlow, there’s one called Murphy. Obviously, Daniel Day-Lewis wasn’t yet available… although Boris Karloff was, playing an, uncredited, native.

Wallace Beery who's actual wife is just below in the feathers...

Mohicans is a classic adventure story and the film does it justice with exceptional performances from Bedford, Roscoe and Beery – he’s just so good at being bad. Brown makes light of the novel’s complexities and strips the story down whilst moving the moral issues forward. The actual events are as much a backdrop as the scenery to the three-way tussle for Cora and she makes for a brave and action-oriented hero herself.

Cyrus Gabrisch made himself at home in the great outdoors, filling the valleys with mountainous chords and propelling the action ever onwards with fleet-fingered progressions that traversed the emotions as fluidly as Uncas scaled the sheer rock walls for his love.

Time's almost up lads...

Tonight’s shorts were also from Mr Brownlow’s collection and started off with a Biograph film, By Man’s Law (1913) which featured Mae Marsh taking yet another unfortunate fall as a society girl the local do-gooders want to “rescue”. The film board of Ohio apparently complained that “the rich should not be satirised…” Oh yes, they must!

Kevin revealed the astonishing statistic that Paramount, having made 1017 silent films, only managed to preserve 37 of them… although I’m not sure how many were found in other archives and stores? This partly explains why there is only one reel remaining of the fascinating A Trip to Paramount (1922), which featured a number of well-known stars working on and promoting their films. We had Rudolph Valentino going through his paces bullfighting in Blood and Sand accompanied by Nita Naldi doing her own “torrid-adoring”, then Cecil B Demille’s Manslaughter with Leatrice Joy in the splendour of the so-far-over-the-top-they’re-back-under… Roman scenes.

Maximum plumage, Swanson Overdrive

There was Wallace Reid with a mini-version of himself driving a toy racing car and Bebe Daniels showing off a mini-Bebe dancing on the palm of her hand and then a brief glimpse of Glorious Swanson in the now lost film Her Gilded Cage. So many we recognise but others we couldn’t as their films have gone…

Meg Morley accompanied with trademark assurance and captured the confident mood of these untouchables from the era of peak-cinema, masters of mood who confidently led our hearts astray for fleeting minutes as we sat watching in the dark.

Another splendid night in the museum… thanks Bioscopers and to the Cinema Museum staff and volunteers.

For updates on the campaign to save the Cinema Museum please check out the website and, if you haven’t already done so, please sign the petition to save this precious and irreplaceable community resource!

Closer up... The Goose Woman (1925) with Cyrus Gabrysch, Kennington Bioscope

I’ve seen this film before but I’ve never really seen it until now. Sometimes in our eagerness to view a film we put up with substandard digital copies – legally of course – but in the end you will always pay, without hesitation, to watch something as splendid on screen as Louise Dresser. Tonight we were treated to the restored 35mm print courtesy of UCLA, Robert Gitt and Kevin Brownlow which featured far more content and clarity as well as the dramatic enhancements of Cyrus Gabrysch’s energetically complex accompaniment.

The Goose Woman is a very good silent film but what raises it to the level of exceptional is the performance of Miss Dresser as the woman for whom all vanity has dissolved. She’s caked in her disappointment as surely as her pigs are snout-deep in in the mud of her swampy small-holding.

Director Clarence Brown is no slouch either and there are very few moments in film as powerfully sad as the accidental destruction of the last recording of Dresser’s fallen opera singer Mary Holmes (once Marie de Nardi…) in her pomp. Placed on the table by her son, Gerald (Jack Pickford), Mary’s precious shellac rolls slowly from the kitchen table smashing on impact with the cruel stone floor. Having lost her voice giving birth to the unwanted boy now he – unintentionally – destroys her last memento… and her self-loathing simply won’t allow her to forgive him. She pushes him out and then finds that the gin bottle she’d hidden in the kettle has evaporated away… like her life.

There are many such symbolic moments showcasing the “Brown Touch” – Gerald’s interrogation by the police is punctuated by his nervous distraction at a dripping tap, one cop shuffling coins and another cracking nuts… You can only agree with what he said to Kevin Brownlow half a century ago when the latter showed him his copy: “I hadn’t realised I was that good!” Kevin also showed the film to Mary Pickford on one of her rare trips to London and she was impressed with brother Jack’s performance – thirty years after she lost him to alcoholism in 1933. It’s always a privilege to hear Mr Brownlow’s introductions – he is literally on first-name terms with silent cinema history.

Dresser wore very little make-up for the production, far less than Jack Pickford from the look of some scenes, and allowed herself to take her character to believable extremes. She relishes the degradation of a woman whose life has been destroyed by her failings and yet who has a sense of her own ridiculousness. She’s a drunk, she keeps geese, you got a problem with that?

Jack and Constance

Yet so much of her situation is down to her being judged – her pregnancy supposedly cost her voice but more likely it sank her in shame. When she reveals a terrible truth to Gerald about his parentage, we don’t see specifics just his reaction and that of his sweetheart Hazel (Constance Bennett, a star in waiting).

Things are about to get a whole lot worse as a rich neighbour is shot dead and through her gin-glasses Mary devises a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a fox: she’s going to reclaim her fame by pretending she saw the murder and show the world that she’s still Marie de Nardi! But as her fortunes begin to rise, the police inspector being a fan laps it up, she inadvertently puts Gerald right in the frame…

Brown handles these complications with such economy, the pay-off is superb, enabling his performers to slide through the narrative with the focus purely on their emotions. Of course he was Garbo’s favourite director: he let her breathe.

He also manages to infuse the story with humanity and comedy balanced against the dramatics. When Mary staggers off to find out what the murder scene looks like she’s pursued all the way by one of the geese… The animal in question is uncredited but she had an agent, you can be sure of that!

The pace of the film is deceptively unrelenting and Cyrus set the keyboard alight with classical flourishes as he bantered with Dresser and matched her note for note. The movie is richly toned – a gothic setting that influenced Sparrows – and this gave the pianist lots of room for rich textures of his own: all the stars were aligned on this one!

The packed house at the Bioscope burst into applause even as the credits started and deservedly so.

Earlier on we’d been treated to a couple of enjoyable oddities. The first was a dizzying compilation of railway “ghost shots” from Lyman H. Howe, Ride on a Runaway Train (1921),  which I hope never to see on Imax. The sequences showed some impossible angles and were sped up to create a disorientating feeling of being just in control… literally a rollercoaster of images and impossible railways!

Then there was watcher’s digest version of The Patent Leather Kid (1927) starring Richard Barthelmess and Molly O'Day from the Paul Killiam Silents Please TV series in 1961. The film was cut to less than half an hour and featured Mr Killiam’s narration explaining the narrative and other background. It worked remarkably well and from a time when silent film was largely regarded as a quaint relic, no doubt helped the flame to burn.

Molly and Richard

Richard B plays a cocky boxer who has courage only when wielding his fists; having been enlisted to fight in the Great War he has to find a way to be brave with guns and bombs… He’s saved by the love of comrades and of Molly O’Day with a bitter sweet ending marking it as definitely post-Big Parade.

Next up at the Bioscope is the Italian sky pirate film Filibus (1915) which pormises to be another treat!