Way out south east… Tumbleweeds (1925)/The Gunfighter (1917), with Dr Ilya Poletaev and John Sweeney, Kennington Bioscope

Women ain't reliable - cows are…

 

That’s what you cowboys call yourselves, isn’t it, tumbleweeds?

 

See also:

 

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys

Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks

Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such…

 

That was Wayland Jennings advice but at this stage it’s way too late for those of us keen to ride alongside William S Hart as he blazed his trails across South East London in an evening celebrating this most accomplished of silent actors and a genre that seemed to emerge fully formed from the start. Recently we’ve been watching The English in which Emily Blunt’s mannered aristocrat forms an unlikely alliance with a native American and shows the kind of resilience and toughness required to survive and exert yourself in these primal united states. William S Hart was, if not the first to embody this spirit, certainly the first to comprehensively show the cinema audience the brutal realities only just passed.

 

William S Hart makes his point to young Jack Murphy

Tonight, we had two films from different stages of Harts’ career The Gunfighter (1917) and Tumbleweeds (1925), including an introduction he performed in a 1939 release of the latter which featured the former Shakespearean setting out almost his own eulogy not to mention that of the cowboy. Tumbleweeds was, at 61, Hart’s last film and, here he talks of the many injuries that stopped him continuing as an action hero, with his anguished cry about “the thrill of it all”.

 

Produced by Hart, Tumbleweeds is based on the last major events of the opening up of the West, the Cherokee Strip land rush of 1893. when a huge swathe of land owned by native Americans and used for grazing cattle, was made available for claim from a new wave of “homesteaders” from the East. This provides the film with a huge cinematic moment when the army gun fires at noon, setting off a race featuring thousands of horses, wagons and one man on a penny farthing. Director King Baggot tracks the whole event and you feel almost as much a part of the conflagration as you do in Napoleon’s charges or those of The Chess Player. It sends a chill when you consider this event was just thirty years earlier, as close to 1924 as the collapse of the old Soviet Union is to now. Time flies comrade… and the pictures below show how clearly audiences may have been able to imagine the actuality as it was reported.

For this sequence alone you can understand why some have called this his best film, although reviews were fairly mixed in 1925 and understandably so given a narrative that is slightly assumptive and coded with expectation; as if all of the other characters know exactly what will happen with Hart’s character, Don Carver and there’s not the fierce dynamic uncertainty of say Hell’s Hinges (1915). Hart is of course excellent as the principled foreman of the Box K Ranch, and there’s a humble wistfulness to his performance here as he looks out at the thousands of cattle taking his hat off with his men to declare the “end of the West”.

 

William S. Hart and Barbara Beford

All of the elements of the Western are here, faithful sidekick Kentucky Rose (Lucien Littlefield in what will become The Slim Pickens role), goofing but always coming up trumps, love interest, Molly Lassiter (Barbara Bedford) initially appalled but gradually warming and then the unacceptable faces of progress, men with capitalist intent who try to cheat their way to the money… honestly, America, you should have watched more of your own movies. The baddies here are Molly’s useless brother Noll (J. Gordon Russell) and his mate Bill Freel (Richard Neill), as cowardly as they are unscrupulous… emblems of the essential unfairness underpinning the dash for land something that could only be overcome by the decency and fight of men like Don and women like Molly. The good guys won or at least they did on screen.

 

It’s an engaging spectacle with the romance and resignation of Hart’s character at the centre as the whirlwind of history carries the hopes and schemes of the good, the bad and the greedy.

 

Accompaniment was provided by guest pianist Dr Ilya Poletaev, Associate Professor of Piano at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, who graced the narrative with magnificent lines to accompany the epic sweep and the emotional minutia. Tumbleweeds is the precursor of other films based on the 1893 land rush, including Wesley Ruggles' Cimarron (1931), The New Frontier (1935) and Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992) and the spirit of the 1890’s all the way to Emily Blunt. The end of the old West and Hart’s career, until that final introduction in 1939.

 

The Gunfighter (1917), Mr Hart requests that you raise both hands in the air.

The Gunfighter (1917), with John Sweeney

 

The KB’s Christopher Bird provided two excellent introductions to these films but it was this one that he had the most personal stake in, helping to construct not one but two restorations based on two slightly different 9.5mm home-movie condensed versions from the late 20’s and the recent discovery of one and a half reels of 35mm nitrate. This part of the picture had French intertitles but luckily his colleague at Photoplay, Kevin Brownlow, had a copy of the script, producer Thomas H. Ince being one of the few to insist in a thorough script in a time of so much improvisation.

 

The script was invaluable in reconstructing the narrative and the sense of the film but there was no way of matching the font used at the time. At this point enter Fritzi Kramer, graphic designer by day and runner of the esteemed Movies Silently blog by night. Fritzi went full method on the typeface volunteering to recreate the extinct font by analysing the title cards of two of Hart’s other films. She also mocked up a wanted poster for Hart’s character and lovingly created and aesthetic that, combined with Chris’ painstaking work, has helped to restore just over half of what was once considered a lost film.

 

The Gunfighter was screened at the Hart retrospective at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2019 and tonight was presented with even more improvements from Mr Bird. The sense of this movie is entirely there and it’s a fine example of his output in the teens, with Hart playing an anti-hero rescued by the love of a good, and much younger, woman, here played by Margery Wilson (20 at the time, Hart was 53, plus ca change).

 

Old Bill and Margery Wilson 

Wild Bill Hart plays Cliff “Killer” Hudspeth, leader of a band of outlaws who have achieved supremacy in the local area through his despatch of notorious gun-bullies. His reign is threatened by the mixed-race El Salvador (Roy Laidlaw) who wants to muscle into the territory using less principled means of extortion. Cliff meets Norma Wright (Wilson) a milliner on the door of her shop, as he is in the middle of a gunfight with one of El Salvador’s senior henchmen, 'Cactus' Fuller (Milton Ross) and even though the later cheats, turning, shooting, missing and being shot dead on the count of eight… she is appalled, calling Cliff a murderer.

 

Cliff disagrees and promptly carries Norma off to his gang’s base in the Gila Mountains of Arizona, although this does seem to reflect an almost charming naivete on the gunslinger’s behalf. That said, Norma can see there’s more to him than meets the eye… Cliff is fully aware of his inner conflict though and spends the night drinking whiskey and seeing visions of all of those he has killed. In the morning he agrees with Norma not to kill again… he has seen the light. Choices are not always this simple in the West and the town make Cliff their sheriff on the grounds he eliminates El Salvador using ultimate force if necessary and then the Mexican attacks the town and kidnaps Norma…

 

I love the artwork for this promotional ad

There’s a harder edge to this film than Tumbleweeds and a more fearsome protagonist. Hart himself is playing a more faceted character and not the first nor last outlaw pardoned in exchange for enforcing law in the USA.

 

John Sweeney rode along adding much dramatic accompaniment to further restore the film’s intent. The Western genre is so endlessly fascinating, with questions of morality, loyalty and bravery that never truly grow old, much like William S Hart who one hopes, died with his cinematic boots on.

 

Another special Bioscope evening, you just don’t see these films anywhere else, certainly not on 16mm from private collections. Still London’s Silent Speakeasy as Pamela Hutchinson said way back on Silent London, and full of passionate souls who pay all due respect and reverence to these wonderful films and their history.

Photographs from the actual landrush in 1893... 

The Avenger: Endgame… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone Day Eight

Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, a Story of the London Fog (1927) for the third time on the big screen, I can’t help wondering about the director’s political thinking. It’s probably been said before, but in the context of the late twenties, a film about hysteria roused by frenzied media coverage and leading to vigilantism and mob justice is not just about a serial killer… then again, it has been a long week; your mind is prone to wonder in Pordenone.

The real issue is how the public respond to the feeling of a murderer in their midst, an “other” set to destroy their way of life and someone who could be any one of them… This is the self-imposed terrorism of the newspapers we buy and the gossip we make and it is of course as old as the hills and always current. As Neil Brand said in his introduction to the 2017 premier at the Abbeydale in Sheffield, Hitchcock has made voyeurs of us all: we’re as obsessed with the vicious fantasy as the folk on screen and we lap it up all the same.

The story is not really about the murderous Avenger but how someone is perceived based on prejudice and human weakness. Ivor Novello’s lodger, Jonathan Drew is a jazz-age Man Who Fell to Earth, an alien in style and manners who is both “queer” and “doesn’t like girls” according to the title cards and this is more about his strangeness than any sexual statement. Who else to have cast in this role but a man with the same androgyny as David Bowie, whose Thomas Jerome Newton fifty years later, was scarcely more alien in the context of the earthy East End.

Ivor the Alien

Then there is June Tripp’s character who is positively seeking otherness, bored with her plodding boyfriend, over-eager copper Joe Chandler (Malcolm Keen) … she’s a feisty character and not given to hysteria and you know she’d be the practical one in any future relationship for her lover is deep in grief and needs her support – in every sense she saves Jonathan.

There’s an intimacy established with The Lodger’s characters so quickly, from the girls backstage at the Golden Curls show – reference in the opening montage and at the close – as the gobble up the news, to the Bunting household with father (Arthur Chesney) and especially mother, the peerless Marie Ault who’s Irish accent you can almost see on screen!

The Lodger is a bold creative enterprise from the title cards right through to the shot-making, story and performances. It needs a score to match… and Neil Brand has delivered something Alf would thoroughly approve of.

This is the second time I have seen the film with Neil Brand’s orchestral score and I have to say it is even better than the first: this is a soundtrack “in love” with this film’s characters and narrative and which works through the core of the film via a joyful osmosis; a duet between old and modern in totale simpatia. As with all of Mr Brand’s scoring, there’s a wealth of knowledge at work about the practice and those who have perfected it and one can hear echoes of Hitchcock’s future and past in the music.

This is one of the most re-watchable of silent films and the music recognises that and works with it; it’s composition that pays due diligence to audience expectations and is simply fearless in respecting the source and our ability to interpret the musical signals. The music is without pretence and is an honest, daring tribute to the watched and the watchers; it completes Hitchcock’s project goals by working on our voyeuristic involvement in the sensational story, June’s bath and the chess match by the fire that makes ‎Steve and ‎Faye’s Thomas Crown affair look like a bored game.

As the last act of Le Giornate it’s pretty much the perfect choice; beyond meta as a cinematic experience and, whilst it works on an immediate level, it’s a connoisseur’s delight: good vintage, delivered at the perfect temperature in the best silent restaurant in town.

The Joker

Before the end, there was still some interesting business to take care of. Sadly, I missed Colleen Moore’s rags to cinema comedy, Ella Cinders (1925) but I did make myself acquainted with “The King of Clowns”, Swiss-born Adrian Wettach in Son Premier Film (1926). Wettach – stage name Grock - had extraordinary physicality, a dynamic athleticism gained from his circus days and here, even at 45 his athleticism and energy are impressive as is his range of expression; positively Chaney-eque.

This first feature, natch, had him chasing his inheritance to Paris and getting involved with show people after his things are stolen. It’s French Whimsy alright and I have to say I prefer him without the make-up… too many clowns and Jokers this year.

William S Hart wasn’t joking though, certainly not in Blue Blazes Rawden (1918) when the high plains drifter was cast as a fierce woodsman in the “forest frontier” of the Canadian northwest of the 1880s. Jim Rawden is as wild as the wind, and when he comes into town for a good tie m with the boys he immediately comes head-to- head with the crooked English bar owner,  “Ladyfingers” Hilgard (Robert McKim) who tries to cheat him at cards and then gets an accomplice to empty Jim’s gun and sets up a fight he can’t lose…

As the two men face off, and Jim realises he’s firing blanks, his sheer rage puts Ladyfingers off and too frightened to shoot straight he falls. English to the last though, Hilgard asks Jim to lie to his mother and tell her he was a good man.

Thus it is that when she (Gertrude Claire) and her other son arrive, Jim goes out of his way to do the decent thing and tell her what she needs to know. Once again, his character have been “saved” by an honest white woman and this one of his own age too… (I wasn’t joking on that point M!) – Claire was only 12 years older than Hart.

Maude George plays the wilful Babette DuFresne, half French-Canadian, half-native American who loves Jim and wants him away from these people. As the Diane Koszarski notes in her film notes, Maude “…had been cast as morally suspect foreigners and vamps at Universal, Triangle, and Selig…” and was therefore ideal for the role.

It’s been quite a week for Hart and also for Reginald Denny whose final film was perhaps his funniest. Skinner's Dress Suit (1926) is that rare thing, a genuinely charming comedy featuring two vibrant leads – Denny and the lovely Laura La Plante who cuts a rug almost as sharp as her platinum bob. In thrilling style, the two dance the Savannah Shuffle…. a variation on the Charleston – before leading a host of society types in trying to learn the steps.

Denny has such an affable presence and is a precursor of the pre-code talkies to follow with his measured, realistic emoting and perfect sense of timing. And he can also dance, the Savannah Shuffle needs to be brought back; someone needs to tell Strictly/Dancing with the Stars…

As I type, I’m at Venice airport waiting for my delayed flight back to Britain… more time for coffee and reflection on another special week with silent pals on and off screen. Grazie molto Pordenone and let’s do it all again in 2020 however long the passport queue has become by then.

 Let's Dance.

PS Many, many thanks to PH: Britain's Queen of Bloggin'. Her daily updates have been so stylish and informed, you can read then all on her Silent London site.

If blogging is like jogging then this has been a marathon. But a fun run all the same!