Season Introduction & Shanghai Express (1932), Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention, BFI

 

Anna Wong, the actor’s niece, never met her aunt but she learned a lot from her father who assured her that his sister had felt fulfilled as she entered her final years after over 80 films and a legacy she must have been aware of by her death in 1961. Few stars have had to work as hard as Anna May Wong to keep working at a high level and, as the series title indicates, this involved a lot of reinvention and hard graft: learning how to dance when dancing was what was expected of you, learning to drop her American accent when in Britain on stage or on screen and learning to spot opportunities and making the sacrifices necessary to grab them. She was tough as well as everything else.

 

Anna was speaking as part of a panel of four providing an introduction for the season ahead with each bringing their own expertise and particular connection with the first Chinese American film star. Season curator Dr Xin Peng, Assistant Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Cambridge University was on hand along with Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll, the essential new biography on AMW which is out now in paperback and in the BFI shop ready for signature. The group were completed by Pamela Hutchinson film writer and historian with a particular interest in the silent era and in the women whose stories are less appreciated than they deserve to be silent film is a crusade all of its own but with Anna May, there are so many wrongs to right for us all.

 

The women took turns in introducing their favourite clips from the actress, starting with Piccadilly selected by Pamela, who chose the clip were the actress is working in the kitchen cleaning dishes but is caught dancing and promptly sacked by the club manager. He later, of course, realises his mistake and she becomes the club’s, and his, main attraction and, in some ways, this story mirrors Anna’s own journey from the sink to the stage and screen. Anna selected Pavement Butterfly for it allowing her aunt to show her range as well as her ability as a clothes horse and dancer – a natural even before training.

Pamela Hutchinson, Anna Wong, Katie Gee Salisbury and Dr Xin Peng

Katie picked another German film, Song, which again allowed Wong to show her “chops” as an actor in the scene in which she pretends to be her knife-throwing partner’s lover allowing the temporarily blinded man to believe she has come to see him – it’s so moving and we see in close-up Anna’s ability to cry on cue… who knows what sadness enabled her to summon tears so readily? By contrast, Xin chose a clip from the all-star review Elstree Calling, this being a parody of Taming of the Shrew, showing Anna’s finesse at pie-throwing whilst dressed in her Piccadilly costume.

 

After success in Europe Anna returned to a two-film contract with Paramount starting with Daughter of Shanghai (1931) as Fu Man Chu’s daughter and then, tonight’s main event, Shanghai Express (1932) in which, as we shall see, she makes the absolute most of her part even having to compete for screen attention alongside Dietrich. Sadly, her obvious strengths continued to be ignored by a Hollywood and US society in transition for want of a better word. She returned to Europe, not for the first or last time, as she continued to fight for her identity and her career.

 

As the panel showed with her later talkies, Wong may not always have had a leading role but she seems always to have made her roles leading and was a dynamic presence in each of the clips we saw no matter how much submerged in the constraints of cliché. She was a formidable woman; she was relentless and she made herself count. We shall learn a lot more over the next month or so.

 

Anna & Marlene...*

Shanghai Express (1932)

 

In her introduction, Katie Gee Salisbury asked for a show of hands for those who had seen our main feature and I was among the large minority who had not and it did not disappoint on the big screen. Marlene I know, von Sternberg too but this is one of those films for which the term “classic” was invented with the Austrian directing his light and shadow with swaggering invention and bringing out the best from his cast in one of the great train mysteries. Dietrich takes the breath away with her sorrowful wit and no one ever captured her fine features the way Josef did and his DOC, Lee Games who won the Academy Award. There’s a moment when she’s leaning against the wall of her compartment, allowing the rising smoke of her cigarette to twist and turn over her brightly lit face which gives us so little of what she’s thinking that we’re lost in the examination… all she asks is to be believed and we all have the faith by the end.

 

Alongside her are the chiselled and slightly stiff features of our own Clive Brook, his equally stilted sonorous voice redeemed by his character’s febrile confusion around Marlene’s Shanghai Lil. His upper lip couldn’t be any stiffer but underneath his professional cool, Captain Donald “Doc” Harvey is about as mad about the girl as he can be it’s been five years and four weeks when the two meet again on the Shanghai Express but he’s never stopped and neither has she… they just need to believe in each other.

 

How could anyone steal a scene in such circumstances, let alone provide some of the key moments of this film? Well, if you’re not familiar, it’s possible with the look, the physicality and purposeful delivery of Anna May Wong. As Pam said in the previous session, Anna knows how to handle the moments between dialogue, and she can make even solitaire look like a deadly game. Von Sternberg realised this and places her so often in the corner of his scenes, drawing our eye to her keen observation and intensity through the frame of carriage windows as characters move back and forth, shifting in importance and meaning.

 

The director choreographs both actresses very well but it’s Anna’s movements that are the most potent, she’s a woman of agency and, unlike so many other characters she played, she is not here to provide oriental adornment or be the tragic loss that foreshadows the central lovers. The chemistry between her and Dietrich also makes this a female buddy movie, they’re “coasters” making their living in the rich resorts along the south China coast but they also look after each other, see the same moves and instinctively act in tandem. Not so much Thelma and Louise as Butch and Sundance… with a 78-rpm portable turntable playing some high-energy jazz that buzzes them down as it imposes their presence on the other travellers.

 

The real chemistry is between the two women whatever Lil does with Doc, there’s something enabled by von Sternberg but created entirely by Marlene and Anna that you very rarely see in this era and it speaks to the strength and intelligence of both performers. They present more than can be possibly interpreted in one viewing, purposefully enigmatic and completely controlled and the only truly serious characters in a film featuring a clutch of lovely supporting caricatures. That’s not to say that these walking sub-plots are not all expertly worked from Eugene Pallet’s wonderfully raspy gambling man to Gustav von Seyffertitz’ grumbly German hypochondriac and Lawrence Grant’s perpetually outraged Reverend Carmichael. Then there’s Émile Chautard as the French Major with a sad secret, Louise Closser Hale as the English lady smuggling her nervous pooch and the familiar “yellow face” of Warner Oland, here a revolutionary and later the “Chinese detective” Charlie Chan.

Oland stands out in a film that aims for authenticity and there’s none more so than Anna May Wong who shows exactly how to make the most of every second of screen time. It’s a shame that Hollywood wouldn’t give her the chance to develop as a leading actor, especially in a decade in which white actors continued to play oriental roles in make-up**. America’s loss was Europe’s gain as we shall see as this celebration of her talent, determination and reinvention unfolds.

 

Full details of the season are here on the BFI website: do not miss this!!

  

Katie Gee Salisbury introduces in NFT1

*Nope... They worked well together but they were not together according to Katie Gee Salisbury and others. Ms Dietrich's liaisons were generally freely admitted and publicly documented.

**The Good Earth (1937) featured Paul Muni and Luise Rainer in Oscar-winning yellowface… Wong was considered for her role but Hays Code anti-miscegenation rules meant that Muni’s wife had to be played by another white person. Anna was offered another role but she refused saying: “You’re asking me – with Chinese blood – to do the only unsympathetic role in a picture featuring ab all-American cast portraying Chinese characters?” This quote is as per Kenneth Quan in his profile on the star on Asia Pacific Arts.

 

When Erich met Irving... Merry-Go-Round (1923), Flicker Alley Blu-ray

  

“…inexcusable and repeated acts of insubordination… extravagant ideas which you have been unwilling to sacrifice… and your apparent idea that you are greater and more powerful than the organization that employs you.”

Irving Thalberg’s letter of termination to Erich von Stroheim

I’d seen the new restoration of this film at last year’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone but sometimes in the rush of a festival you don’t always pick up everything about a film, especially one with such a complicated backstory as this. According to von Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski in his book-length audio commentary, Erich spent something like 33 days directing the film, 20-25% of the total according to the accounts of Universal’s new Head of Production, Irving Thalberg, who fired him and Rupert Julian who replaced him and yet this film could hardly be more “Von”.

 

Koszarski quotes from the meticulous diaries of James Winnard Hum who was sent to man-mark the Austrian spendthrift by Thalberg, a 24-year-old “Boy Wonder” who was busily turning Universal into a business with a command-and-control structure that was not going to co-exist with the old ways of director-led films. Thalberg had more to offer than just a belief in budgets and schedules but having already had to intervene on the director’s over-spent Foolish Wives (1922), when von Stroheim wanted to keep on shooting, was not going to allow him to risk Universal’s financial well-being not matter how “inspired” the ideas. Foolish Wives had been a smash but maybe studios will one day learn that Thalberg’s creative due diligence was a necessary counterbalance to unfettered and expensive creativity.

 

So, enter Mr Julian, a director badly in need of a hit and who would later claim more of the film’s ideas as his own than were his due. Koszarski reads out von Stroheim’s script outline during his commentary and it’s quite clear that not just the story but the shooting instructions were followed pretty faithfully with the result that the film, with most of the original cast and crew intact, carries the hallmarks of its author and original director.

 

This means a film that is marked by the harshness of certain characters and the cruel fate of others all against a backdrop of a fantasy Viennese noble demimonde that von Stroheim convinced everyone was his too. The extremes of the characters’ backgrounds makes the cruelty all the more painful as fairground organ grinder Agnes Urban (Mary Philbin) is forced to keep on playing just as her mother is breathing her last by her monstrous boss, Huber (George Siegmann). This is further contrasted with her soft-focus flirting with handsome Count Franz Maxmilian von Hohenegg (Norman Kerry) who has the luxury of visiting her incognito feigning to be a necktie salesman.

 

The Count’s life is unreal as a matter of course though, marked by duty and ritual that obscures feelings and curtails freedom. He is due to be married to the daughter of the Minister of War (Spottiswoode Aitken), the Countess Gisella von Steinbruck (Dorothy Wallace) in a decision Emperor Francis Joseph (Anton Vaverka) has decided is in everyone’s best interests. All of this is far from the carefree Count’s mind as he slums it in Vienna’s playground, the Prater amusement park, and seeks out its main attraction, the Merry-Go-Round.

 

The film opens with a mix of stock shots of Vienna showing the gothic history, the night life and the sordid underbelly as a young mother says goodbye to her son and throws herself off a bridge into the Danube. Then we join the Count as he shakes off a luxury hangover care of his manservants’ attentions including a risqué glimpse of the Kerry derriere which caused issues with the censors – more so, according to Koszarski, than the sexual violence later in the story. You can always count on the moral arbiters to miss the real point can’t you?

 

Life is so different for the workers at the Prater fairgrounds with Huber treating everyone, including his wife Marianka (the great Dale Fuller!), who he pointedly gives a tiny portion of his meal to, not to mention Agnes and her father Sylvester (Cesare Gravina who will later play alongside her in The Man Who Laughs) as they try to care for Ursula, his wife, her mother, who is in the last stages of serious illness.

 

The visit of the handsome stranger lifts Agnes spirits and, given the poverty of her life, the comparison with his true status is almost comical still wheel of fortune wheel of fire… the Merry-go-Round if life and just in case we’re not sure about the cyclical nature of fate and despair, every so often a silver0skinned devil appears laughing over a carousel spinning helplessly below.

 

The pathos is broad-brush but the finesse of the cruelty is such that this is merely another tragicomic aspect of the hopeless duality of love, life and grinding duty. I really don’t know exactly how socialist von Stroheim was but this critique of naked greed and careless class couldn’t be more on point for the times. He may be mourning a “lost Vienna” but not if it was this unfair.

 

And still comes the misery, Nicki (Charles King) is Agnes’ friend, and he loves her even though his deformity and humped back preclude her romantic interest – in his mind at least. He has an orangutang which is his livelihood, but also a friend who looks at Huber with savage eyes (no less than the rest of us). He watches in anguish as she falls for the handsome Franz as there is nothing he could or would do to stop it.

 

The greatest indignity of all awaits Agnes when, inevitably, the truth will out and she endures a humiliation in front of her “betters” and her father that is difficult to watch. This is as intended by von Stroheim but the director of 75-80% of the film deserves a lot of credit for largely taking script, cast and crew and making the film in the uncompromising fashion we identify with his predecessor.

 

There are also some very fine performances on screen and is this the best Mary Philbin role? She’s full on committed and never really crosses over the line towards purely melodramatic being believable sad and humiliated and in love all at the same time. Cesare Gravina is so intense and has just the face for this kind of gothic tale in which the cavernous depths of man’s everyday cruelty to man are ultimately compared with the First World War. Norman Kerry is, of course, a big lunk, but that’s what the role demands and many a better actor would struggle to complete his story arc… you have to see it!

 

The restoration features a newly commissioned orchestral score composed and conducted by Robert Israel, which contributes greatly to the emotional vibrancy of the cast and story and it’s a very rewarding watch and re-watch.

  

The restoration is fabulous and there’s an extra looking at it in more detail and much more:

 

·         Audio Commentary by Richard Koszarski - Go behind the scenes of the troubled production and explore Merry-Go-Round’s incredible filmic legacy with an in-depth commentary track from cinematic historian Richard Koszarski

·         Vienna Actualities - Explore Vienna in the years before World War I with 17 minutes of historical footage, courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria

·         Old Heidelberg (1915) - A new restoration of a feature from director John Emerson and producer D.W. Griffith, which served as an influence on Merry-Go-Round and also boasts Erich von Stroheim’s very first acting role

·         Restoring Merry-Go-Round - Go behind the scenes of the brand-new restoration with film restorer Serge Bromberg

·         Photo Galleries - Production stills, publicity, and other rare documentation

·         Souvenir Booklet - Featuring a new essay on the production by Richard Koszarski and notes on the restoration by Serge Bromberg and Lucie Fourmont

·         English SDH Subtitles

·         Reversible Cover Artwork – always a bonus!

 

Full details are available on the Flicker Alley website and those that re-sell US Blu-rays to the UK. It’s a fascinating part of the changing face of Hollywood as well as being one of Erich’s best concepts brought to life with a little help from his “friends” Rupert and Irving!

The Rabmadár Redemption? Slave Bird (1929), with Elaine Brennan, Bonn Silent Film Festival 2025

It happened in the women’s prison on the evening of 26^th May…

  

Slave Bird aka Rabmadár aka Prisoner No. 7 is frank in ways that might surprise modern viewers as much as contemporary ones and was, as a result originally banned by the Hungarian authorities until its success overseas led to a re-release. It’s depiction of human and criminal relationships, together with some audacious nudity and inferences of non-conforming sexuality, would never have made the screen pre- or post-code in the United States.

 

A co-German and Hungarian production filmed in Budapest and directed by Pál Sugár and Lajos Lázár, it begins with two dynamic sequences that set the scene in imaginative and purely cinematic fashion. The action starts in a court room in uproar with a lone figure working his way through a crown of people and running to a telephone booth calling his newspaper: I’ve got it… the first report on the lawsuit against the doctor! There follows the flow of news as his report is transcribed, edited and then typeset and proofed before being printed on huge Linotype off-set printers and emerging as newspapers – hot metal headlines!

 

According to Dr Janka Barkóczi, as quoted in the programme notes*, the editorial office of Az Est newspaper were used for these scenes with the - domestically well-known - journalist and poet Lőrinc Szabó is seen working on the story, subbing and proofing, adding an element of reality to the film’s mix of documentary and melodramatic technique.

 

Waves of cyclists distribute the papers across the city as we catch a glimpse of the Az Est front page – in both Hungarian and then German (forgive my translation) - Prisoner No. 7 Not crime but humanity.

 

The Doctor talks. Violent sobs frame her revelations. A great brave woman's heart triumphs over the rigid letter of the law.  … public opinion unanimously demands (leniency).

 

The subtitles of the Bonn streaming version didn’t include all of the text and only flashes of the newspaper’s coverage but I wanted to see what the Hungarian and German audiences saw… who is this mysterious Doctor and what has she done to invite legal process and such overwhelming sympathy. It’s an unusual start to a film that embellishes its relatively simple story with a good deal of sophistication and meaningful under-currents.

 

A flashback then to the women’s prison on 26^th May and as we travel across the city the camera fixes on the outside of the jail and then, through iron bars to a circle of women prisoners taking exercise under the watchful eye of a guard before walking back to their confinement, silhouetted against the fading light as they and us are incarcerated within the brooding misery inside. The Doctor is played by the elegant German actress Charlotte Susa who also sang opera (another Silent Multi-tasker) and enjoyed a long career in her home country although having gained an MGM contract she failed to develop a career in Hollywood. She mostly playing femme fatales and here she is cast in a romantic role – with full meaning - as the Doctor who cares perhaps too much for the prison inmates.

 

She is especially concerned with Anna, prisoner number 7, played by Lissy Arna another German actor and one who did work in America providing voice-overs for German films. She is exceptionally good here as the subject of wrongful imprisonment, taking the rap for her lover’s crimes and in frequent close-up demonstrating the misery of her choice and the anguish of lost love. She wants to put things right and make sure her man is following the straight and narrow – her sacrifice must not be in vain. But, as Anna’s plaintive eyes look tearily out of the bars on her cell her vision of her love Jenő becomes reality for the watching audience and in ways that make us pity her even more. The film’s pacing is impeccable.

Charlotte Susa

 

The second we see Hans Adalbert Schlettow (here as Hans Adelbert von Schlettow) as Jenő we know that Anna’s in trouble… is there anyone else who could play such a dastardly and apparently likeable rogues as Herr Schlettow? Nein, ich sage dir, tausendmal nein! The actor was often on the wrong side of the cast as seen most recently in Bonn’s streaming of Song (1929) with Anna May Wong**and he’s also familiar from Die Nibelungen (1924) and Anthony Asquith's A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929). Here he is superbly full of himself, preening at the mirror and then effortlessly charming the women around him… all with a twinkle of devilment in his eye.

 

He has already cast a spell on the innocent “Birdie” (Ida Turay) who believes it’s true love but is quick to work on the new maid (Olga Kerékgyártó) who he spies on in her underwear, and he also keeps a close watch on the Manageress (Mariska H. Balla) casting avaricious eyes at her safe.

 

 Hans Adalbert Schlettow and Olga Kerékgyártó

I don’t know why you are so interested in prisoner number seven… she’s one of hundreds of thieves.

 

Back in prison, the Doctor is in her rooms watching her pet bird in its gilded cage and no doubt drawing the same allusions we do before she is called to Anna’s aid in the night. But Anna is only feigning sickness, she wants the Doctor to let her out for just one night, and, as she asks “… isn’t there someone you can’t live without?” But, as one of the guards (Szidi Rákosi) has already said about the Doctor, she not only has her favourite but “modern concepts of incarceration”. Whatever the reasons, she agrees to swap places with Anna and the young woman escapes dressed as the medic and makes her way to the hotel where her Jenő works.

 

But in the hotel, things are about to take a dramatic turn as a striking new guest arrives, a beautiful “artiste” from Paris played by El Dura who is described as a “native Creole” on IMDB and as an actress and revue dancer. The term was used to cover those of mixed race and originally of European (mostly French or Spanish) or African descent born in the West Indies or parts of French or Spanish America. Whatever, it is good to see her given such a meaty role and, once again, not an opportunity afforded in Hollywood. She is playful and quickly gets the measure of Jenő who is clearly out of his criminal depth.

 

El Dura getting the measure of her man...

He runs her a bath and hopes his charm will win her over but he’s left imagining her getting undressed with a split screen showing us his febrile inventions in graphic detail. I’m not sure if this brief nudity was left in the original re-released version or inserted back during the restoration but it certainly shows Jenő’s mind-set and contrasts painfully with the realities of prison and Birdie’s cosy fantasies.

 

As she keeps Jenő at arm’s length, the two hatch a plot to rob the hotel, with the head waiter distracting the manageress as the dancer grabs the contents of the safe… and, it would have worked as well if not for the appearance of Anna… but there are more surprises in store as the film’s main narrative streams meet in a powerful swirl of unexpected emotions.

 

In addition to the outstanding cast, the film is enlivened by state-of-the art cinematography from Hungarian József Bécsi - worked on many of the early films of director Michael Curtiz - and the experienced German Adolf Otto Weitzenberg. Anna is filmed from overhead during crucial moments in her cell whilst their cameras frequently follow the movement of the players just as effectively as the close-ups that reveal the emotional nuance of the main players.

The spirited improvisations from Irish pianist Elaine Brennan, recorded live during the screening at Bonn, also ran so smoothly with the narrative and the emotions on screen. I think this is the first time I’ve heard her work and look forward to hearing more – accompanying a two-hour film on the fly, especially one as unusual as this, is no mean feat: you need a wealth of melody and compositional agility to tell the tale of steadfast Anna, faithless Jenő and the Doctor whose compassion may redeem everyone.

 

The film was long considered lost until an incomplete copy was passed from a Dutch collector to the National Film Archives of Austria who, with The National Film Institute Hungary in Budapest, were able to complete a fuller restoration in 2023 after the missing parts emerged. The film is now some 2171 metres long, almost complete. The news broke in Hungary in 2023, online as well as in print… we’ve come a long way from hot metal but hot news remains the same!

 

I hope to see this film on British – or Italian – screens soon!

 

Lissy Arna

 

*Dr Janka Barkóczi, nfi.hu, 11 December 2023

** Song is due in London at the BFI in September with Stephen Horne accompanying!!

She knows why the caged bird sings...

 

Knives Out… Sensation im Wintergarten (1929), Bonn Silent Film Festival 2025 streaming, with Günter Buchwald and Frank Bockius

We have only the crème de la crème…(at the Wintergarden)

 

As a child during our regular family trips up the Lancashire coast I would be terrified as we watched the daring young men and women on the flying trapeze in the Blackpool Tower Circus as they swung high above our heads with no safety net, only flesh, bone and sinew away from a fall to their death. I knew they probably wouldn’t fall but my heart was always in my mouth as I watched them take their chances and it was always a relief once they had finished.

 

Now none of these acrobats enlivened the jeopardy by fixing long swords to the floor and then to a hoop through which they would fly at the end of their routine but in Their Son aka Sensation im Wintergarten, this is exactly what the great “Frattani” does and it is not just his sweetheart who hopes he will keep on swinging rather than being sliced and diced in his shiny silk costume… it’s also exactly the kind of device an ill-wisher might use to finish the man off. It’s the most gruesome variant of Chekhov's gun principle, if you see it in Act IV it will, probably, “go off” by Act VII… Chekhov's water torture more like.

 

Looks easy doesn't it?

After the trapeze artists my relief was always short-lived for then we had the always sinister clowns, led by the legendary but scary Charlie Cairoli. Laugh? I could have cried. It’s safe to say that there was no danger of my running off to join the circus but this is exactly what young Count Paul Mensdorf does in this picture, escaping from his disciplinarian stepfather Baron von Mallock (Gaston Jacquet looking just as shifty as he would with Louise Brooks in Prix de beauté (1930), weasel eyes and untrusting moustache…). Mallock has somehow worked his way into the affections of Paul’s mother Gräfin (Erna Morena) and, having secured his meal-ticket treats her son with cruel disdain.

 

Paul (Alphons Schünemann at this point), runs away and comes across a circus and, watching through a break in the tarpaulin is captivated by what he sees. He’s spotted by a friendly clown Barry (a very good Vladimir Sokoloff, a Russian emigree who would soon depart for Hollywood) and pulled into the new family of acrobats and jugglers. He meets one of the young stars, the horse-rider Madeleine (Alexandra Nalder) and the two form an instant friendship.

 

Vladimir Sokoloff and Claire Rommer "enjoy" the show...

The film actually starts with Paul (Paul Richter) now a world-famous trapeze artist under the name of Frattani as he travels across to Europe on an ocean liner from New York. He’s spotted by a group of young women as he trains and we see a newspaper revealing that this “King of the Air” is coming to perform in Europe for the first time. There’s some good business with cinematographer Mutz Greenbaum’s camera following Paul as he swings back and forth finally puling the curtains on his admirers before focusing on the muscular form (had Herr Richter not fought dragons in Die Nibelungen?) and a thoughtful fade back to his childhood and the split from his mother who now believes him long dead.

 

In Berlin there are wonderful street scenes as the camera follows traffic through the Brandenburg Gates and along Friedrichstraße to the Wintergarden wherein are promised “Internationales Varieté”. The stage sequences were filmed in the Wintergarden and its huge auditorium allows director Gennaro Righelli to pull the camera too and from the performance area and across the audience adding so much atmosphere to the proceedings especially when using a multitude of local talent, dancers, high-wire artists, acrobats and chorus girls. The venue was destroyed during the war but rose again in Potsdamer Straße*.

I wish I knew who the Dodge Twins were?

Back in 1929, Paul is reunited with Madeleine (now grown up as Claire Rommer) who is queuing with dozens of other hopefuls at an audition for a chorus girl. She has fallen on hard times and yet not even Paul's status is enough to persuade the hard-nosed Varietédirektor (Adolphe Engers) to give her a chance. But the King of the Air is nothing if not determined and he manages to wangle her a shot as “Mademoiselle Madeleine, the famous dancer from the Folies Bergère” and, after instructing the orchestra to play the Eccentric Charleston knowing she can and does ace it, whetting the whistle not only of the salacious director but also of Baron von Mallock who has already made his entrance and sexually harassed half the usherettes before even making it to his seat.

 

The Baron has only gotten worse over the intervening years and is fleecing Paul’s mother as he spends his time gambling and cavorting with other women and he immediately sets his sights on Madeleine and her long legs. The sequence is so well handled with the camera pulling away over the audience as Madeleine dances across the stage giving a real impression of the space and also the atmosphere as the sub-plots line up with cuts to the Baron, the manager, Paul and Barry cheering on the jazz.

Gaston Jacquet and Erna Morena

Then we get the build up to Paul’s turn as Clown Barry sets up the deadly basis for his act, only a clown could show how sharp the swords are and only a laughable figure could reinforce the morbid possibilities of this shiny steel… the slightest slip and the acrobat is guaranteed a bloody end. Richter appears to be doing some of the work himself including balancing on his head on his trapeze but the trickier work must have been a stunt man? It’s edited well though and you can almost feel the audience as uneasy as I was as a child in Blackpool.

 

Paul is on top of his game but having found his love with Madeleine he starts to worry about his ability to perform, he now has something to live for and danger loses it’s thrill. Meanwhile the Baron won’t play fair with anyone and once he realises who Frattani is, there can only be one or two outcomes, especially when Paul’s mother also finds out. I can guarantee a stressful denouement.

 

Talking of magnificent men performing the seemingly impossible, I give you Günter Buchwald and Frank Bockius whose accompaniment was recorded live at the Bonn screening and reproduced for this streaming. The two are so familiar with each other they always play in sympathy with the action on film and the circus atmosphere would not be the same without Herr Bockius triplets and paradiddles whilst I still do not know how Herr Buchwald manages to seemingly play both violin and piano at the same time. Epic work gentlemen and next year, I promise, I will be in Bonn to see how this all works in person!

 

This was the premier of a new digital restoration from 2024-25 which built on earlier filmic materials combining a vintage positive print from the Swedish Film Institute with the DFF’s nitrate materials to create a version missing only a few sections which are covered by new title cards. It’s pretty complete, minus the third act, and whilst not exceptional is a very entertaining snapshot of German theatrical culture as well as film culture at this time.

 

This is as close as we’ll ever get to a night out at the Wintergardens!

Man on a wire... the documentary element gives the film more grounding

* The Wintergardens were – probably – the first theatre to screen films using the Bioscop projector in 1895 when its inventors the Skladanowsky brothers put on a show. This was, of course, a year after the Blackpool Tower Circus began its uninterrupted 130 years run. It all connects!

 

There is more about the venue and it’s destruction by Allied bombs in the Second World War here: https://www.berlinluftterror.com/blog/wintergarten-kabarett

 

Last word to Lotte Eisner writing at the time and quoted on the Bonn website…

 

Claire Rommer is allowed to show two sides of her talent, to be a charmingly quiet creature and suddenly transform into a spirited, eccentric dancer. This truly gives her the element of surprise that the film's narrative envisions. Her beautiful body wrapped in a glittering leotard, she dances a baker's dance, lithe and full of verve.

Lotte H. Eisner, Film-Kurier, No. 212, September 6, 1929

 

 

 

Coming soon... Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention, BFI September & October

 

Just a quick note to make sure you’re all aware of what promises to be one of the finest silent seasons at the BFI in years this autumn! Anna May Wong was a unique presence in early Hollywood and the season includes some of her earliest appearances when her screen presence was as undeniable as the studio’s inability to turn her into a fully-fledged star. Her best films were – mostly – made in Europe and those are here too along with her talkies most of which I haven’t seen so, if you’re looking for me in September and October I shall mostly be gazing at the screen on the Southbank as Anna’s legend glows brighter! 

Quoting the press release:

“This season celebrates Anna May Wong’s transnational life and career, as well as her collaborations with and inspiration for Asian diasporic communities. From silent cinema to multiple-language talkies, vaudeville to television, Hollywood to Europe and beyond, Wong constantly reinvented herself, even when being routinely typecast in roles and narratives confined by racist and sexist stereotypes and taboos.

The illustrated discussion INTRODUCTION TO ANNA MAY WONG’S REINVENTIONS on 8 September, led by season curator Xin Peng and featuring Wong’s niece Anna Wong, author Katie Gee Salisbury and film historian Pamela Hutchinson, will consider Wong’s key roles and films, discuss her life and career, and reflect on her legacy. The event will be followed by a book signing of Salisbury’s Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong.”

 

Films screening will include:

Drifting (Tod Browning, 1923), restored by the George Eastman Museum

Peter Pan (Herbert Brenon, 1924), restored by the George Eastman Museum

The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin, 1922)

The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)

Song (Richard Eichberg, 1928), restored by Filmmuseum Düsseldorf

Pavement Butterfly (Richard Eichberg, 1929), restored in 4K by Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum

Piccadilly (Ewald André Dupont, 1929), restored by the BFI National Archive with support from Simon and Harley Hessel

Hai Tang (Richard Eichberg, Walter Summers, Jean Kemm, 1930)

Daughter of the Dragon (Lloyd Corrigan, 1931) on a restored 35mm print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive

Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Java Head (J. Walter Ruben, 1934)

Dangerous to Know (Robert Florey, 1938)

Daughter of Shanghai (Robert Florey, 1937)

Lady from Chunking (William Nigh, 1942)

Portrait in Black (Michael Gordon, 1960) 

Flower Drum Song (Henry Koster, 1961)

“A key scholar lecture ‘A YELLOW SPOT ON THE SILVER SCREEN’ - ANNA MAY WONG’S PERFORMATIVE PLEASURE on 2 October will see Professor Yiman Wang reanimate Wong’s legacy and delve into her performative pleasure to advance a method of enjoying the actor’s paradoxical agency as a tragedienne and a comedienne.

Presented in partnership with the Department of Film Studies, King's College London, and Cambridge Film & Screen, the event will be followed by a signing of Wang’s book To be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World.”

 

Watch out for further details on the BFI’s website!

 

One for the Clive Brook fans...

 

Gimme Some Truth* … Hypocrites (1915), Woman with a Movie Camera, BFI with Caroline Cassin

"Everyone told me that ...plays, aiming at anything like a moral, would never pay... Hypocrites was my first chance to prove that I was right."

Lois Weber from a Moving Picture Weekly interview in July 1915.

 

By 1915 Lois Weber was reaching a peak of popularity that would see her as one of the highest paid directors in Hollywood and also rival to DW Griffith for prestige. They were also both “Banned in Boston” but for completely different reasons one for her art the other for his racism (as clearly articulated at the time). But, as Anfield’s finest, Caroline Cassin, film programmer and MC at Women & Cocaine, pointed out in her introduction, Lois has been largely left out of cinema’s history books even as her competitor continues with more respect than he deserves.

 

Caroline quoted screen writer Clara Berringer in 1919 saying that no other industry has given women such an opportunity as the motion pictures had and it’s still an astounding statistic that more women were working in the first 20 years of the American film industry than are working now – and in more senior positions. Lois Weber made 40 feature films and 95 shorts in a 26-year career which compares well with Griffith’s 33 features and Cecil B DeMille’s 70 over his lengthy career. But this also means that she made almost as many features as Greta Gerwig (four), Katherine Bigelow (ten), Clair Denis and Chantal Akerman (14 each).

 

The problem is now and not then and, as Caroline said, looking back can be the most radical action especially in a world in which the progression of rights and equality is no longer a given. By 1920 California had given women the vote ahead of almost everyone else, women had the minimum wage and outnumbered men in LA but at the same time, the business of filmmaking was being consolidated into male-dominated consortia and accountants were getting an ever firmer grip on the means of creative production.

 

Blessed are the Marketers...

Weber had always been commercially successful and this film returned $133,000 at the box office¹ against a budget of $18,000 - a return on investment rarely found in today’s multiplex-driven portfolios in which even micro-management of from concept to edit does not guarantee success. In 1915, Griffith and Weber both had the final say throughout (which leaves him with no excuses and her with an extraordinary body of work tackling social and moral issues. If Shoes was about poverty, Where Are My Children family planning, then Hypocrites is about Weber’s view of Christian morality… and basically the way we live our rotten lives.

 

The moral underswell of the film is so much rooted in contemporary Christian belief that it is slightly obscure to modern viewers, especially those, like me, who skipped Sunday school and let himself down in O Level RE – I mean how can you go from 90%+ in mocks to a Grade C?! Anyway… the film’s publicity makes the aims clear, quoting from a “special report” from the National Board of Censorship: “This allegorical satire hits at the foibles and immoralities of modern society and asks for a recognition of the truth in all things…” This serious piece of “artistically-handled” symbolism only reveals itself if we understand the strict moral Christian teachings that were supposed to underpin American society the – actual – truth being now as then that the more these are trumpeted in church the more they are contradicted by the behaviours or ordinary citizens and, of course, by those in power.

So, whilst we might not all be fundamentalists we can certainly agree on the mass hypocrisy. We can also recognise Weber’s bravery in picking a fight with the immoral majority, especially given their role in distributing the film. Let he or she who is without sin or sense of perspective, cast the first stone…

 

Readers of this blog...

Hypocrites begins its twisty narrative in a small-town church in which an earnest priest (Courtenay Foote) is trying his upmost to connect with his mostly complacent parishioners. Weber’s camera focuses on groups in the audience, a bored businessman here, a distractedly faint-hearted family there and many caught up in everyday concerns who are just going through the motions, attending church as a social obligation whilst they think of better things to do. The preacher despairs of truly reaching them, the wandering attention of his own choir being aptly demonstrated by his discovery of a Sunday scandal-sheet featuring a story on Why the Truth has Startled Paris. This is a painting from 1914 by Adolphe Faugerson and is not Weber’s only illusion to classical art and literature in the film.

 

Truth is naked in the illustration in the paper… as she will be throughout as portrayed by Margaret Edwards, former winner of a body beautiful competition - "the most perfectly formed girl on the stage..." - who reveals pretty much all in misty double exposure… with Weber deploying a flesh-coloured bodysuit according to Stamp, to protect most of her modesty.

 

“I want to take exception to your statement that The Hypocrites was produced to attract by reason of the nude woman… I hoped that the picture would act as a moral force. The nude woman is too delicately carried through to act otherwise.”

Lois Weber, New York Mail, 23^rd January 1915

Myrtle Stedman wants to follow Courtenay Foote

Exhausted the priest falls asleep and starts to dream of his struggle, finding himself attempting to lead his parishioners up a steep hillside. Few follow, and as the people cannot make the journey to find the truth the priest asks for the Truth to come to them and the two descend into a story within the dream in which he is Gabriel the Ascetic, sculpting a statue of Truth which nearly blinds even his fellow monks once it is revealed to the public there is mayhem.

 

The scene involving the public unveiling is a great set piece from Weber, her camera panning round a circle of assorted rich and poor, the royal family, soldiers, drunkards, working girls and the innocent. They are made up of the same faces from the church all deaf to the truth with the exception of a young girl, a woman who has fallen too far and a nun who loves Gabriel the man not the monk...

 

We see a lot more Truth as the narrative moves through the ages until Gabriel brings her to the modern world in order to hold her mirror up to scenes of politics, high society, relationships, and family. All are found to be flawed with the family facing the death of a child through their overindulgence. Weber’s composition is so strong and in one remarkable sequence, The Mote in the Eye, the camera focuses on the eye of Myrtle Stedman to show Gabriel's face: she wants to do the right thing but her feelings for him overwhelm her moral decision. It's a great bit of composition and if you look hard enough you can see the cameraman's hand whirring the camera's handle round.

 

Fashionable fibs...

Lois makes sure we get the point, again and again... and Courtenay Foote convincingly holds the hope and despair of the pious whilst Myrtle Stedman is also convincing as the woman with the Ascetic in her eyes, Adele Farrington covers a range of roles with assurance and Dixie Carr makes for a mournful Magdalene. Of course, Miss Edwards deserves a special mention for great posturing and Lois is right, her appearances do not present in a salacious way: what the viewer sees is what they wants to see and a decade before Hitchcock, Weber was making voyeurs of her audience.

 

Naturally there was naked controversy and in spite of scrupulous efforts to ensure that religious and secular authority were won over by the moral message Ohio banned the film and the Mayor of Boston reputedly asked for Truth to be painted over - so that the whole truth was less revealed? Nevertheless, Hypocrites was a smash and Mr de Mille was no doubt taking notes about classicism and fleshy displays.

 

The film opened on 20th January 1915 at the Longacre Theatre in New York with an actor dressed as a monk providing a live prologue... this was serious and very popular, stuff. The New York Times called it "daring and artistic" whilst the Evening Telegram went so far as to say it was "...the most remarkable film ever seen". Margaret Edwards even appeared at the Los Angeles opening, dancing between the screenings - it was an event.

 

Can you see the cameraman?

As it established Weber’s reputation – securing her “authorial signature” as Stamp puts it– it was also “a meditation on her own enterprise” with Paul D. Young² saying that Hypocrites “embraces its own constructedness, the better to elevate the filmmaker to the status of an artist.” So, as Weber later said, it was she as well as Truth that was holding a mirror of truth that her audience might see themselves. Surely a more worthwhile endeavour than re-telling the alternative facts about the formation of the KKK?

 

Weber remains a vital historical figure for such revelations about the emerging motivations of “art-house” filmmakers as well as what her successes show of the appetite of audiences to be challenged. America’s first homegrown woman film director needed to pay her way in this business and for a good while she did just that, the story of Lois Weber is one of ground-breaking success and it’s that vibrant career which still informs the period and should be celebrated just as we did tonight!

Two Weber shorts were also screened, Fine Feathers (1912) and the immaculate Suspense (1913) which fits together so many advanced cinematic technique that Griffith fans really do need to give their heads a proper wobble!

 

The film was screened as part of the Woman with a Movie Camera strand and more details can be found on the BFI website.

More classical allusion... Rodin or earlier?

 

^1. As per Shelley Stamp in Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, (2015) University of California Press – the definitive text on the filmmaker’s work and recommended reading as is Anthony Slide’s Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History (1996), Greenwood.

^2. Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber: Hypocrites and the Passionate Recognition of Authorship, Cinema Journal 55, no.1 (2015) as quoted by Shelley Stamp in the above! 

*John Winston Ono Lennon

Pen-Ultima Thule – The Edge of the World (1937 cut), Birkbeck College

“Edge of the World was entirely saved for me by the editor (Derek Twist) … I mean, Flaherty with no story – at least I had the semblance of a story – took about six months to cut Man of Aran, and then it wasn’t any good…”

Michael Powell, Powell, Pressburger and Others (1978) BFI

The last few decades have seen a bonanza of different mixes, demos and alternate cuts of the output of the most familiar musicians from The Beatles and The Stones to even JS Bach, Erik Satie and Taylor Swift (not together…). Each new variation fascinates and paints a picture of the artists on route to their eventual well-known statements, the elements of Strawberry Fields Forever are interesting because they sound so different to the magical mix created by George Martin and his “Boys” and they show how decisions were reached in search of the perfected final version.

So it is with film, with a boom in “Limited Editions” featuring different cuts of even the most esoteric of films. Getting to see a different version of a classic film some of us have seen dozens of times is pretty rare though and to see Michael Powell’s first major “personal” cinematic statement in a form not seen since its original release in 1937 is not only rare it’s almost certainly unique and it happened again on screen right here on 8^th July 2025 in Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image Cinema a lifetime after it was last seen in this form.

How there came to be a copy of this Mark I release of the film is a story of its own and owes everything to conversations between passionate cineastes one of whom, Bob Geoghegan, Director of the Archive Film Agency and a man of many parts, knew he had a copy of the film safely stored on 35mm nitrate but not the exact age. SO it was that investigation revealed it to be a print from the year of release and one that was different from that we know in significant ways. He duly created a digital transfer from these materials for projection at this event.

Inspired by the evacuation of the Island of St Kilda a few years before, The Edge of the World has been recently restored by the BFI and I’d last seen this at Bologna in 2023 but this was something else entirely as Christopher Bird explained in his introduction to a room full of the very people you’d usually find in Il Cinema Ritrovato, some who’d come a long way for this rarity. Chris had scrupulously prepared a shot-by-shot comparison video for four key moments from the films, showing us three before revealing the fourth a very important moment from the ending shot which I won’t spoil.

Technically, Michael Powell is a much better filmmaker than Robert J Flaherty...

The video ran the two versions side by side and it was easy to see the gaps in the restored version against the fuller shots on this 1937 version. For whatever reason – and this is where the historians come in and dig deeper than the primary evidence – Powell re-edited the film in the 1940s no doubt when he had more success and clout behind him so that the version we have been watching all of lives is what he wanted us to watch some eight (?) years after it was first released. As he said in the quote at the top, Derek Twist brought this production home with Powell struggling with a limited budget and, after St Kilda’s owner refused, a last-minute change of location to the island of Foula across the North Sea to Shetland.

In general, the newly-revealed film showed more of the reaction shots to discussions between the main characters filling out the narrative and engaging us with more of the wonderful locals who we would see again when Master of Ceremonies, Professor Ian Christie, screened Return to the Edge of the World a BBC-funded documentary returning Powell, John Laurie and Grant Sutherland back to the remains of the society they filmed amongst. It’s a wonderful film and Laurie is full of mischief with a mystical twinkle greeting every islander who’s name he feigns to have remembered. A special time for both.

I’ve written about this film a number of times before on here but every viewing only makes it more impressive – not least because of the three or so “new” minutes but also the achievement of Powell’s team in making of the film was an epic adventure in itself. "200,000 feet on Foula" was Powell's original title for his book on the making of the film and references the immense amount of footage shot… thanks be to Mr Twist again!

Powell and drama-documentarist Robert Flaherty did not get on and their methods were so different with the Englishman choosing to use actual actors for his depiction of disappearing cultures. In the end the skill of the story making as well as the players and crew win the day for Foula. EOTW is about as political as Powell gets as he highlights the failure of government to support the islanders as they drown their dogs and cut their losses in the saddest of circumstances. I wonder what happened to the folk of St Kilda, Rachel Johnson, the last of the native St Kildans, died in April 2016 at the age of 93, having been evacuated at the age of eight… what stories did she and other tell of their traumatic changes? Powell caught the dramatic truth better than his rival over on the Irish Aran.

Christie and co also presented us with some fabulous extras including Smith (1939) a public information film promoting a charity helping ex-servicemen, The Embankment Fellowship Centre, which was once lost not just to film archives but also film history. This was introduced by the remarkable Mark Fuller who’d actually found the only remaining copy by tracking down the charity - now called The Ex-Service Fellowship Centres - who revealed that they not only have materials about the project but also a copy of the film! They are now called Veterans Aid and the film is available to view on their website.

We also saw the poignant, An Airman's Letter to His Mother (1941) which is so revealing of the times in which Powell made films and the nature of lived experience during wartime.

My thanks to the following:

• Christopher Bird
• Ian Christie
• Mark Fuller
• Bob Geoghegan

And also the audience of some of the most cinematically curious people in the country and, indeed, in the town!

The next event at the BIMI is Voices from the Chorus presented by Ian and Robert Denning. Full details are available on the Birkbeck website.