Going for a song... The Garden of Eden (1928), with Stephen Horne, BFI UK Restoration Premier

Film writer David Thomson has described late period silent film as a medium just bursting to express itself through talk and watching this sparkling romantic comedy you could also add the desire to laugh and sing. Lewis Milestone’s picture is bursting with virtual sound and has an irresistible rhythm that Stephen Horne accompanied quite superbly on piano, accordion, flute and sheets of paper… of which more later!

 

This was the UK restoration of the San Francisco Film Preserve 4k restoration which I had missed in last year’s Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. It’s a revelation not just in terms of wit and Lubitsch-style “coding” – thanks to scriptwriter Hans Kraly a frequent collaborator – but also in the way it allows for the showcasing of the beauty and talent of Corinne Griffith. In her introduction the BFI’s Bryony Dixon called for a show of hands for those who had heard of the actress before and a handful of us raised our hands. Many more will now have her imprinted in their minds for the next few days.

 

She has a spirit all of her own and shows plenty of emotional skills as well as comedic timing in a partnership with baby-faced Charles Ray – looking nothing like his 39 years and one bankruptcy – whose timing and grace had already served him well in a career dating back to 1911 and included Thomas Ince’s The Coward (1915) and The Busher (1919) in which he competes with one Jack (John) Gilbert for the hand of a young Colleen Moore.

 

Corinne Griffith in front of the cameras that loved her so...

Griffith was – also surprisingly – only four years younger and had been in the business since 1916 and starred in films like Black Oxen (1924) with a really young Clara Bow, as well as The Divine Lady (1929) for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. Her reputation has no doubt suffered as so many of her films are now lost, I make it 55 out of 72, but she was a major star and producer who was not only one of the most beautiful actors in Hollywood but also clearly among the most financially astute.

 

Bryony gave a fascinating insight into the actors’ relationship with men and money which culminated in her fourth divorce and an attempt to pass herself off as her own (fictional) sister to avoid paying alimony to her departing husband – points for effort but she could afford it and died a wealthy woman. A life well lived and in this context perhaps an unlikely pastry chef with operatic qualifications which is how her character Toni LeBrun begins the film.

 

It's a midnight flit as she leaves a note for her aunt and uncle and runs away from Vienna to join the “opera” having been encouraged by a letter from the Palais de Paris in Budapest… Sadly the venue is not so fine as its name suggests and is little more than a gentlemen’s dance hall with scantily clad women kicking up the dust for their leery clientele. She arrives with her opera diploma and finds the owner, a super smart Madame Bauer (Maude George – close cropped hair and plenty of "coding"…) more interested in her legs than her voice.

 

Maude George's Madame has a plan!

Toni takes things at face value though and is soon being kitted out by the wardrobe mistress Rosa (the exceptional Louise Dresser of The Goose Woman and more) in the most unoperatic of revealing costumes. She complains leaving Madame Bauer to offer her a seemingly more modest chiffon dress only for her to cue the stage lights during Toni’s performance which causes a mighty uproar amongst the sleazeballs in the stalls. Also watching is predatory nobleman Henri D'Avril (Lowell Sherman) whose boredom is swiftly transformed as Milestone’s camera pulls in to reveal the double image of the up-lit girl in his opera glasses.

 

Things get worse when the amorous aristocrat expects to have his post-theatrical meal in Toni’s company but she is too quick for him with the aid of Rosa, and, as tens to happen in an environment without employment rights and strong HR, both get fired. Rosa extends a helping hand though as she is due her annual leave and takes her new friend with her to Monte Carlo…

 

Now, if you have any remaining disbelief, I suggest you suspend it for it turns out that the humble dresser, Rosa, is, in fact a Baroness who gets just enough pension from her former husband, to live the life she used to in the expensive hotels of the Principality of Monaco and signs Toni in as her daughter, ennobling her and within a few days, adopting her as one later intertitle confirms.

Rosa reveals her nobility.

Now, as they enjoy the luxuries of the Eden Hotel – with its rather fine gardens… the story changes pace as Richard Dupont (Charles Ray), naughty but nice nephew of Colonel Dupont (Edward Martindel), a friend of Rosa’s, spies Toni and soon comes a courting. Griffith and Ray have a very smart interplay and this is a romantic screwball comedy in waiting as the two engage in a courtship based on misunderstandings, cheeky games and good old-fashioned coup de foudre with all of the hurdles to acceptance this usually implies.

 

There’s a lovely bit of business when Richard spots Toni playing the piano and singing, he peers across at this beauty who is naturally annoyed until – after she switches the light off to hide – he imitates and the two engage in something like l’amour de morse code, before the rooms on both sides of the hotel follow suit. Love, and lights, are in the air.

 

Richard is a songwriter when his duties as wealthy playboy permit, and he writes a song for Toni which as he plays to her, causes her to melt in his arms in a sure sign that their musicality is compatible. Later when his uncle decides to make his own proposal he also plays the song only for his phrasing to leave Toni cold. Yes indeed, the two youngsters seem destined to be together and the only tiny thing stopping the inevitable is the sleeping draught they both end up taking during a sequence that asks the question, how interesting is a proposal really?

Griffith and Ray make sweet music

Turns out it’s not quite the only thing though as soon, and what are the chances, Richard’s posh relatives arrive including his Uncle Henri, recently returned from Vienna… can you see where this is going?

 

The Garden of Eden is so smoothly directed by Milestone that it manages to serve the plot complications and keep the ball rolling without annoying even the modern audience. Griffith had fabulous timing and Ray is appealing in the gung-ho way of all noble, would-be songwriters who fall for women out of their class. Audiences now and then knew what to expect from this kind of film and Milestone delivers with emphatic efficiency and purpose aided by swoon-worthy design direction from William Cameron Menzies.

 

The jury of his peers, aunts and uncles...

Of course, whilst this 4k restoration looked gorgeous on screen it was greatly uplifted by Stephen Horne’s timing and invention. There’s one moment which I think may have surprised the audience when the Colonel sits down to play the song and the sheet music has been placed on the strings of the grand piano, Stephen had anticipated this and, diegetically, his playing also included paper on the piano strings. That’s experience! Sadly, the sheet music gave no clues as to what was being playing and so Stephen had to improvise the music that persuades Toni of her love just as he did the rest of the score… it’s a kind of magic. Another outstanding afternoon of live music, informed introduction and classic film at the BFI…

 

There’s more high-quality Corinne on the National Film Preservation Foundation site with a lovely restoration of her 1922 film A Virgin’s Sacrifice – you can screen it right here!

Details of the restoration of The Garden of Eden can be found on the San Francisco Film Preserve website - they also stream films from time-to-time and so it is well worth signing up for their newsletter! It is also to be hoped that they add this to the films they have released on Blu-ray through Flicker Alley such as the splendid new Louise Brooks early film collection... of which more later! But a Corinne Griffith box set would be most welcome too!

 

Back home… Foolish Wives (1922), Timothy Brock, Il Cinema Ritrovato 36th Edition (Part One)

OK, remind me how this goes again, we leave the country that has held us prisoner since 2016, sorry 2020, and land in a place where almost everyone wears face masks and where films of all eras are screened every day from 9.00 till passed midnight. Some how we’re supposed to sleep, eat and socialise and to take care of the other routines as the Celsius hits high 30s… and, somehow, some of us are supposed to write stuff about it? The pleasure and the pain of this festival is precisely down to their being too much to do… so, turn off you mind, turn on your out of office, relax and float downstream on the Reno.

 

Herewith begins my highlights of the first few whirlwind days… let’s start with a biggie.

 

“Sooner or later those romantically inclined American wives who believe the superficial polish of Old Worldling and his fascinating ways are the essential qualifications of a husband will be disillusioned. They are sure to come to the realization that the man for the American Woman – is the American Man.”

 

Foolish Wives (1922) 

 

The first million-dollar movie acclaimed the publicity… and, spectacularly, Erich von Stroheim delivered on the ROI and Universal had another hit on its hands from the most complex man in most parts of Hollywood whose productions had the skill of DeMille, the scale of Griffith and a dark heart the latter could never think or feel. The son of a hatmaker, the Austrian was all too aware that clothes maketh the man and, for that matter, how far you need to go to get a hat to get ahead, his incredible drive seeing his not only create himself anew in the USA but also emerge from the field of European theatricals to be trusted with audacious projects such as this one, the controversial Blind Husbands (1919) – screening later this week here – and his masterwork, Greed (1924) of which I had the pleasure of seeing the four hour reconstruction screened at the BFI a few years back.

 

He arrived in 1909 and how he built his reputation in less than a decade is a story for another time but what you can see in this film is the extent of his control, basing it on a “novel” he didn’t write, and using huge reconstructions of Monte Carlo and a cast of thousands, he effectively played a version of his invented self. Instead of a bourgeois Viennese faking German aristocratic airs, he’s a phoney Russian military officer, Count Wladislaw Sergius Karamzin, accompanied by his two cousins, minor white Russian royals who have fled the unfortunate events in their home country.

The three live in a grand villa and frequent the Casino and all the best places so they can work their various whiles on unsuspecting rich tourists, the more American the better. This is a slick crime caper movie from before the days when slick crime capers set in this period were all the rage. But Erich is making sure we see the seedier side as well, he and his two “cousins” may smile and be villains too, charming con artists, but he has a debauched sexuality which is revealed early on when Cesare Ventucci, a local tradesman/counterfeiter visits with his young daughter Marietta (18-year old Malvina Polo) who is distastefully described as “half-witted”, clutching her dolly. Marietta attracts reptilian glances from the Count, who even licks his lips (not for the last time) and if we were under any misapprehensions about the true depths of this man’s character von Stroheim makes is crystal clear right from the off.

 

It might even be described as “Hitchcockian” in another country, another decade… but the director is making us complicit in his character’s agendas from the get-go, and, as we want redemption for all our lovable rogues, he’s giving us a tricky moral maze to navigate. Also, about that redemption… this film was made in Hollywood but this is not a “Hollywood director”. The Count is charming us all if we let him, suspending our own disbelief despite all of the evidence of all that is put before us, call him Boris by any other name, or Don. This is just fantasy or is it real life?

 

Von Stroheim puts so much detail in the films of his I’ve seen and this was to have been over six hours long and split in two screenings if he’d had his way. The length was as grandiose as the location, designed by Richard Day, his debut as art director, and who later won seven Oscars and worked on Greed, and this presented the studio with all the dull problems you’d expect and with his presented cut of 31 reels, soon reduced to 14 for its New York premiere and then another four, including the spectacular extended opening. This restoration produced by MoMA and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, contains no previously unseen footage, but does attempt to recreate the balance and sense of that first theatrical release as well as the sparkling clarity, via digital processing. Scenes have been returned to their original order, the 1928 re-release – the basis of most version to date - intertitles have been replaced with the original texts, adding tinting and recreating the spectacular colour effects of the climactic fire sequence.

 

Erich and Miss DuPont

The other characters are almost as nuanced as the Count, with Maude George as Her Highness Olga Petchnikoff and Mae Busch as Princess Vera Petchnikoff, ugly sisters on the inside but not without good humour and some compassion; professionals without the Count’s unhealthy singlemindedness and tastes. They distract rich American Andrew J. Hughes (Rudolph Christians who was replaced by Robert Edeson’s back view after dying during production) whilst the Count attempts to seduce his much younger wife, Helen (Miss DuPont aka Patricia Hannon from Kentucky) in front of his very eyes. They first meet on a sunlit hotel veranda and the start of the seduction is so very well signified with not a moment out of place as by almost imperceptible gesture, stolen glances, over newspaper and book, yes Foolish Wives by Erich von Stroheim (100% meta) the two begin to connect and to collude. She is, after all, a bored young wife who is reading about romantic fantasy and quickly interested in the attractions of foreign nobility.

 

The Count is sexually voracious – a predator in every way – and we soon learn that he has not only wooed their maid Maruschka (Dale Fuller, excellent here as in Erich’s Greed and The Wedding March, proper skilled actor) but made her pregnant. He keeps making her promises we know he won’t keep and maybe, at the time he means it, maybe… but people pleasing won’t save him for ever and she will have her revenge at some point.

 

It’s all but pointless to describe the narrative in too much detail as its detail on screen is so full of nuance that only by viewing can you fully appreciate (yes, that is a cop out) but to see it on the giant screen in the Piazza Maggiore, was special. Which brings me to Timothy Brock’s extraordinary score and the performance of L’Orcestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna which he conducted. His score was technically brilliant in terms of the Russia themes he borrowed and interwove to support the grandiosity on screen and also the delicious lines of his own written to map every strange and unusual nuance from von Stroheim’s screen. It felt complete with the film and completed that magical connection between the place, the audience and the film that makes live silent screenings so compelling and which makes this place, almost uniquely, a truly silent city.

 

Brava Mr Brock, Bologna and Erich’s cast and crew. Glad to have you all back where you belong*.

 

*Get Back screens at the Piazza on Thursday, natch.