Hitchcock and Horne, London Film Festival - The Manxman (1929)

This was the final restoration premier for the Hitchcock Nine and the BFI series went out with a bang... a piano, fiddle, oboe and two harps! Presented as the London Film Festival‘s archive gala, the screening took place at the Empire Leicester Square, a former music hall where the Lumière brothers staged the first commercial projected film shows in 1896.

Now it’s one of the cinemas of choice for blockbusting premiers so, there could be no bigger or better venue for the culmination of the BFI Hitchcock project.

The Manxman was Hitchcock’s last purely silent film (Blackmail was made in both formats… although it’s better as a silent in my opinion) and as Robin Baker, the BFI’s Head Curator, said in his introduction, showed the director’s mastery of the form.

Malcolm Keen and Carl Brisson

The restoration team had the benefit of the original negatives amongst others and their thousands of hours of labour showed in yet another crisp print projected into the Empire’s huge screen. The restoration process has been painstaking and as Baker said, it has taken longer to restore than films than Hitchcock took to make them.

And, what can you say about the new score from Stephen Horne? Having blown us all away with his music for The First Born at last year’s archive gala, he repeated the trick this year… adding appropriately Celtic touches to reflect the dramatic landscapes of the Isle of Man.

Randie Ayrton confronts Carl Brisson

Inventive, controlled and passionate the music was performed by Stephen with an expert ensemble made up of Jennifer Bennett (fiddle/viola), Joby Burgess (percussion), Janey Miller (Oboe and the aptly-named Oboe d’Amore) and Ruth Wall (Lever Harp/Wire Harp and a passing resemblance to Anny Ondra...).

This was the fifth of the nine restored Hitchcocks I have seen and whilst I have thoroughly enjoyed the new music placed against the other films, Horne’s score was the most sympathetic. This is very much Stephen’s “day job” and it really showed as his music offered gentle support to the story, anticipating mood changes and helping the viewer interpret the meaning and feeling. He’s spent decades dueting with the directors of silent film and so his mastery of collaboration-after-the-fact should come as no surprise.

Here his music played a major part in turning this event onto a memorable occasion, making the very best of a film of great visual flair but low-level dramatic impact.

The boys argue over who buys the next round...

The Manxman was based on a highly-successful 1894 novel from Manxman, Hall Caine and dealt with social norms of the Isle of Man a semi-autonomous island that even in the twenties was still mildly out of step with mainland Britain (even now…?). The social pressures on the main protagonists would have been a curiosity then and they certainly are now. The characters’ motivations therefore seem obscure and fathomless… which is where the music comes in helping to fill the cognitive gaps and anchor the heartbreak in terms we can better understand.

The story is a love triangle based in a small fishing port where a poor fisherman, Pete Quilliam (Carl Brisson) is best friends with a lawyer, Philip Christian (Malcolm Keen). The two men, from different ends of the social scale, are as close as brothers and pursue the same causes with Philip helping the fishermen fight for their rights.

But they also have other interest at heart. Pete is in love with Kate (Anny Ondra) the daughter of the local pub landlord and so, we soon discover, is Philip.  But when her father, Old Caesar (Randie Ayrton wearing two impressive earrings), rejects the fisherman as not being worthy he pledges to make his fortune overseas and return to marry Kate.

Dad watches Kate as she weighs up the options...

She pledges to wait for him and he asks Philip to watch over her. Pete leaves and via clever use of Kate’s diary, Hitchcock shows the developing feelings between her and Pete’s best mate… out of sight, out of mind.

Pete is reportedly killed and the two are free to pursue their affair but her returns unharmed and enriched, to claim his bride. Philip will not stand in his buddy’s way and, with his career on the rise, has other issues of standing to consider.

Pete marries Kate but they are doomed to unhappiness even after the birth of a baby… Will true love out or will society force them to persist in their sad compromise?

It’s a slow-paced film but Hitchcock puts as much emotional spin on things as he can but this sometimes means that the actors seem to be over-reaching. All three are very skilled but I struggled to view Malcolm Keen as genuine romantic competition to Carl Brisson (sorry mate!) – he is very expressive but hasn’t got leading man good looks. Besides, Anny Ondry can’t hide her earthy qualities and you instinctively feel that she’d be better off with the swarthy Dane.

Hitchcock’s camera spends a lot of time on Miss Ondry and you can understand why he chose her for Blackmail, she… radiates!

Can you spot Anny in this picture?

Also stunning is the north Cornwall scenery that stands in for the Isle of Man, you can see the director really enjoying himself with some shamelessly gratuitous shots of the cliff sides, forests and brooding  skies…usually with Anny skipping across them!

I shall really miss the Hitchcock premiers but these films will run and run. Robin Baker said that The Pleasure Garden had recently been shown to a crowd of 6,000 on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro… now there’s a great venue for silent film!

The Manxman is currently available as part of the Silent Hitchcock collection but, as I’ve said before, it’s worth waiting until the restored version is made available, hopefully complete with Mr Horne’s superlative score. The BFI are working on it…

There she is!

The Lillian Gish method… La Bohème (1926)

It’s easy to be condescending in your reaction to silent film… but distance in time doesn’t disable the skill and audaciousness of its creators and all cliché is dismantled when you look hard enough...

Decades before de Niro, Christian Bale and others made an art form out of physical deprivation in support of their roles, Lillian Gish was doing the same. To prepare for the tragic ending of this story (c’mon it’s from the opera by Puccini, what do you expect?) she visited sanitaria to study tuberculosis patients in order to learn how to breath with minimal movement of the rib cage. Then she starved herself of food and water for the three days before she shot the ending…

John Gilbert and Lillian Gish

Director King Vidor, said that he feared that it might be the end of her life as well as her character’s and it is genuinely shocking to watch her frail last moments as she hauls herself across Paris to meet her lover for the last time. It could be horribly melodramatic but she transcends this with conviction and incredible physical bravery. Why was she doing this? I was reminded of Emil Janning’s physical transformation in The Last Laugh but that was just acting... the knowledge that she weakened herself -risking her health – shows a level of professional commitment way beyond the norm.

Maybe she felt the need to make a statement as in some quarters her characterisations were staring to be seen as old hat. Herbert Howe, for instance, wrote in Picture Play magazine that, “When Lillian Gish now appears you know she is due for a beating. . . A Society for the Prevention of Screen Cruelty to Lillian Gish should be organized."

Yet Gish's method acting ensures a suitably grand climax to this operatic tale. With no music to emphasis the tragedy, she had to make the images convey the full force and, everyone else, including John Gilbert, is simply in support.

Gish picked the best rising talent she could to make this film after seeing early cuts of King Vidor’s magnificent The Big Parade. Vidor was to direct with his stars John Gilbert and Renée Adorée with the likeable Karl Dane also involved.

The story is set in 1830 and shows the lives and loves of a group of bohemians living in the service of their art in a tumbledown house in the Latin Quarter. Gilbert plays the would-be playwright, Rodolphe, who, in order to pay the rent writes stories about cats and dogs for a pet-fancier’s journal. His room mate is a struggling artist, Marcel (Gino Corrado) and their group is completed by down at heel musician Schaunard (George Hassell) and writer Colline (Edward Everett Horton).

Their landlord constantly chases them for rent but they just about make ends meet and their diet is enlivened by the occasional windfalls of Marcel’s girlfriend Musette (Renée Adorée) who lives downstairs in rather more salubrious circumstances… the source of her income is more than hinted at.

Renée Adorée and John Gilbert

Alongside the bohemian’s room is that of a lonely lace maker and embroiderer, Mimi (Gish) who has only her pet bird for company. It’s almost too pitiful but not in the hands of Gish who, even in her thirties could carry off “innocent battler”…she’s believable and not just dramatic.

The landlord wants her out and she is saved by the scheming Vicomte Paul (Roy D’Arcy, relishing the in the villainy) who has more than her fabric in mind… He starts to commission work form her just so he can stay close and work out a way of having his evil way…

Meanwhile Mimi meets Rodolphe and the two fall in love. Mimi encourages the writer to work on his first play and starts to sacrifice herself for him especially after he loses his work at the journal and she has to work nights to get the money to make him think he’s still employed… nothing must come in the way of his work.

Mimi and Rodolphe forget the food

We move from winter to spring and Vidor gives us another of his famous external sequences as the friends enjoy a day out in the countryside and Rodolphe and Mimi perform a wonderfully-shot dance amidst the trees. Nature boy and nature girl…

But this bucolic bliss cannot last and Rodolphe’s jealousy drives a wedge between him and Mimi. He forgives her when realising how ill she has become in supporting him, but as he races off for a doctor Mimi runs away. She doesn’t want him to care for her at the expense of his play.

Rodolphe searches frantically but cannot find his love. This drives him on to finish his play and, thanks to Mimi’s earlier networking on his behalf, it becomes a great success. As Rodolphe and the friends celebrate, Mimi is drawn back to him for one final farewell…

Opera libretto’s rarely a good film do make but Gish performs with such force that this one works... She is aided by the superb flowing direction of Vidor who also seems to have pretty much let her get on with it. Gilbert is engaging as the charming but slightly obtuse Rodolphe although he is less effective as the drama ramps up. Renée Adorée is under-used but has some good dramatic moments, especially towards the end.

It’s Gish’s film, as it was always going to be, giving a lie, yet again to Louise Meyer’s assertion that tragic endings do not great careers make. Hollywood caught up with her in the end but Gish ploughed her own furrow through her incredible long life.

La Bohème in available from Warner Archives in decent quality and with a sprightly new score.

Happy Birthday Lillian!

Buster Keaton in The Cameraman (1928)

Buster Keaton

I haven’t written much on here about silent comedy aside from a very short comment on Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last. Maybe I’ve been put off by the amount of material already available or possibly I don’t trust my sense of humour…

From the very start of my interest in silent films I’ve always been a Buster boy rather than a Chaplin kid… as I’ve got older this still holds true, although clearly they should both be revered. Not just two of the greatest comics but two of the greatest film-makers.

Hitching a ride

Buster Keaton seemed a lot more physically high-impact than Chaplin and, in addition to subjecting himself to grand moments of actual peril, steam engines… falling buildings…  he looked faster, harder and more robust. Less of a mime and more of a maniac!

Here is seen in a way-too-large bathing costume but there’s no disguising his muscularity. Buster was fit and he needed to be to cover the ground as he carried on into his thirties with a number of career-sustained injuries…

Buster Keaton and Marceline Day

But the most agile thing about Buster was his mind and in The Cameraman he just keeps the ideas coming. He plays an imaginary game of baseball at Yankee Stadium, taking strike, fielding and running all by himself. Waiting for the phone to ring he runs up and down the stairs - too far down to the basement and too far up the roof... When his girl does ring he runs across town at full pelt to greet her as she places the phone on the receiver.

It’s all run at relentless pace by a man at the peak of his creative fitness…Unable to find a seat on the crowded bus he rides alongside Sally on the wheel arch, then he changes alongside a much larger man in a tiny cubicle at the pool and emerges in the other man’s costume only for it to get lost underwater without him as he tumbles off the diving board. Breathless.

A little large...

The story begins as it ends, at a parade. Buster is a 10c a shot tintype photographer. He becomes entranced by a young woman he photographs (Sally, played by the elegant Marceline Day) and, after losing her in the confusion, begins a relentless search to find her. He tracks her down to the MGM news service where he attempts to get a job as a cameraman in order to impress her.

His initial attempts all end in failure as her catches a fire engine the wrong way to a warehouse fire, arrives at Yankee Stadium when they’re playing away and then double and triple exposes his film… keep winding it forward and not backward, is Sally’s advice.

A lovely Day

Sally senses something in Buster and agrees to go on a date. They have an hilarious time in the pool where Buster struggles to fight off any number of would be suitors. Then, as they walk to the beach, pro-cameraman and rival in chief, Stagg (Harold Goodwin) offers them a lift…Sally in the front of his two-seat saloon and Buster getting soaked to the skin in the third seat by the boot.

Sally tips Buster off about a potential gang fight at the Chinese New Year celebrations. At last, he’s the right man at the right time and he fearlessly films the battle, aided by a clever monkey he picked up along the way…

Man and monkey...

But, after all this it seems that Buster forgot to load his camera.  He gets the can and that looks to be very much it… We next see Buster trying to film a speed boat race. Sally and Stagg are in one of the3 boats and Stagg loses control sending both flying as his boat circles around a helpless Sally. Buster bravely goes to the rescue only for Stagg to take the credit and the girl!

But all is not lost…

Buster Keaton and Marceline Day

The Cameraman is rightly regarded as one of Keaton’s classics and possibly his last major work. He’d lost his own company by this point and was working for MGM. But, in the case of this picture at least, it did not restrict his energy and innovation. Edward Sedgwick directed the film but with a fair amount of Keaton intervention alongside the invention... a crossover point in the way these films were made.

This was the third silent film of the weekend in our house and grabbed the attention of teenagers and spouse alike: the timeless cool of Buster Keaton. Because that’s ultimately it about Mr Keaton, he is cool and intelligent. He’s relentless and nothing stops him getting where he needs to go. He doesn’t moan or get down, he takes it all with dispassionate grace and emerges ultimately triumphant and with the girl. 

The Cameraman is available as part of the Keaton Collection from TCM along with Spite Marriage and Free and Easy.

All you need is ... Love (1928)

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert

Leo Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina might well be one of the most adapted of all time but this film version takes up only a thin sliver of the story. You can only translate limited elements of the written word onto screen and maybe each adaptation reflects the focus of the times and the commercial and creative needs of the acting talents involved. But perhaps this one more than most.

The follow up to Flesh and the Devil, their smash hit from the previous year, Love is a vehicle to show the continuing sizzle between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.

The big reveal...

Nominally directed by Edmund Goulding, it seems that Gilbert was calling many of the shots. The film had a troubled genesis with stars and crew coming and going until Gilbert and Goulding were finally in place. Oh what to do with the emergence of a phenomenon?

John Gilbert is likeable here but he’s outmatched by the power and presence of Garbo in my opinion. Garbo has a way of shifting emotional focus that is too nuanced for him to always follow. There’s a moment in the “happy ending” when she shifts from smiling lovingly at her son to shock at seeing her lover after so long and then onto joy within a second… the reverse shot shows Gilbert happy but out of step. A slip in the direction perhaps but a revelation of a surprising gap in acting range between these two…

John Gilbert

Don’t get me wrong, Gilbert is a true great, a charismatic freak of nature who audiences would be drawn to heroically and romantically… but he was up against possibly the most skillful actress of the period. I mean the Swedish girl was so good she waltzed from silent to sound carrying an accent as thick as the snow that engulfs them at the film’s start.

John Gilbert is Captain Count Alexei Vronsky, the latest in a long line to serve the Tsar’s army with honour. He encounters Anna Karenina (Garbo) in trouble as her carriage is over-whelmed by snow en route to St Petersberg.

Unable to continue, he helps her to an inn where he is struck down with love at first sight the second she removes the veil from her face. But, although the warmth between the two is immediate, Anna rebuts Vronsky’s approach.

George Fawcett

There’s a nice exchange of manly banter between Vronsky and Grand Duke Michel (George Fawcett) as he returns back late to his regiment the next day. The Captain says that he was delayed by snow, “was she pretty?” asks the Duke, “yes” replies the Captain.

But Anna is married to the much older Senator Alexei Karenin (Brandon Hurst) and they have a young son, Serezha (Philippe De Lacy). The course of true love will not run smooth…

But run it does and gradually the young soldier and the politician’s wife begin an affair. But, whilst Anna doesn’t love her father figure of a husband, it is clear that Vronsky has a rival for his affections. Anna loves her son as much as anything and this will eventually force her into abandoning her lover.

Greta Garbo and Brandon Hurst

The Senator exacts a terrible revenge and threatens to ruin the Captain’s reputation whilst refusing to let Anna see her son… Threatened with the loss of the two loves of her life Anna heads to the train station and… gets on a train. Here is the film’s major divergence from the book as the “happy ending” version kicks in and Anna is able to return to her son’s side and to be ultimately re-united with her lover after her husband dies.

Love is therefore not truly Anna Karenina but this ending does make sense in the context of the film. Anna is torn between her options but, from what we have seen, there’s no way she would kill herself if it meant never seeing her son again.

Philippe De Lacy and Greta Garbo

Whether that’s a failure of the film to engage sufficiently with her dilemma is open to debate. No doubt Garbo could easily follow this dramatic trajectory but the audience wanted her and Gilbert as a couple more than anything else.

As the Photoplay review said at the time: "It isn't Tolstoy but it is John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, beautifully presented and magnificently acted."

One of the film’s best sequences is when Anna is watching Vronsky in a regimental horse race. The direction is very good here as we switch from rider to race to the watching crowd where Anna is contorted writhing between the delight of her lover winning and the terrors of this most dangerous sport… 

The cinematography from William H. Daniels is worth mentioning. The outdoor scenes of the wolf hunt and the horse race are particularly well handled and show the technical mastery that had been reached by this point. There’s some superb tracking shots of both Gilbert and Garbo as they walk forward deep in thought and unable to connect with their surroundings and the people around them.

This is a nice crisp print but I’m surprised Love has not been made available in remastered quality with all the trimmings we’re starting to get used to. For now the Warner Archive version will serve well enough.

Greta Garbo... smiles

Shelagh it was really something… A Taste of Honey (1961)

Murray Melvin and Rita Tushingham

This brave film broke new ground in the early 60s in its depiction of inter-racial love, homosexuality and family life on the brink of break down. Based on the play by Shelagh Delaney it also featured some of the same cast, the other-worldly Murray Melvin and the misfit queen, Rita Tushingham.

Delaney wrote the play when she was just 18 in the late 50’s and it shows incredible maturity and insight. It has withstood the passage of time pretty well all things considered…maybe the youthfulness of its writer provided inoculation against over-working and too much mature concealment. This is an honest statement and it still feels real when other period pieces may come across as over-mannered.

Rita Tushingham

This is helped in great part by director Tony Richardson's use of the locations and the actors.

Gritty, grimy Manchester (so much to answer for…) is the backdrop and these are streets Delaney knew all too well. The film opens with a bus ride across town, passing the city’s magnificent gothic town hall and other municipal splendours (surpassed only by those of neighbouring Liverpool…) en route to a tumble down garret in sunny Salford.

Throughout the city provides the backdrop from cobbled streets and chimney stacks to the swing bridge and the docks at the end of the ship canal smashed into the rock of southern Lancashire.

It’s hard to think of any studio shots and this is a great snapshot of real Lancastrian life. There’s even a guest appearance form the mighty Blackpool - all front and no trousers… a tower and three piers as if two weren’t enough!

Over this backdrop are cast genuine accents, from Tushingham (Liverpool) and Dora Bryan (Southport) which centre the film more authentically than the cod “northern” accents of many regional dramas of the time. Melvin was an exception here being London born, but he makes a decent fist of Mancunian and his “difference” is not to be disguised anyway.

"In a river the colour of lead..."

The actors also looked right and strikingly different in the case of Tushingham and Melvin… had there ever been such an a-typical leading couple in any British film? They are both bloomin’ brilliant.

Tushingham plays Jo, a seventeen year old on the cusp of leaving school and starting real disappointment. 

Her mother Helen is domineering and desperately in search of the financial and emotional anchor of a man. She’s played by a quite superb Dora Bryan who pitches the Lancastrian flippancy exactly right throughout… silly but hard as nails underneath.

Dora Bryan and Robert Stephens

She’s romancing a younger man of means, Peter Smith (a greasily-splendid Robert Stephens) who ends up becoming Jo’s wicked step-father. Unable to stand the sight of each other, Jo is cast adrift on a day trip to Blackpool and left to make her own way home via bus.

She meets a handsome sailor, Jimmy (Paul Danquah), who has previously helped her with a wounded knee. Jimmy is of mixed race – his family hailing form Liverpool – and not the kind of boy her mother would want her with. But they head back to the house and we know there will be consequences. After all, he “dreamt about you last night and fell out of bed twice…” I knew Morrissey loved the film but I hadn’t realised how he’d lifted whole chunks for The Smiths’ lyrics – a man of taste as well as charm...

Rita Tushingham and Paul Danquah

Helen goes off to live in bungalowed bliss with Peter leaving Jo to find a flat – even more run down than the places she’s used to with her mum. She takes a job in a shoe shop and it’s here that she encounters a young textile student, Geoffrey Ingham (Melvin). The two form a friendship … and offer the chance of a new kind of family. Geoff is gay at a time when homosexuality was strictly illegal in the UK and it’s hard to imagine the impact this character would have had on audiences at the time.

Yet Jo offers unconditional friendship and is wildly interested about what he “does” in his relationships. He’s too pushed down by social guilt to go into the details and his subsequent attempts to form a physical relationship with Jo may be an expression of his wish to be “normal”. But Jo doesn’t want that from him - she wants his friendship and his compassion. She accepts him for what he is.

Murray Melvin and Rita Tushingham

Geoff is steadfast and starts to provide Jo with home comforts, cooked meals and the love her mother only directed elsewhere. His creativity has the potential to encourage Jo’s own – she had a portfolio of thwarted artistic ambition from school…

As Jo’s pregnancy follows its course, Geoff is there to support her as she agonises over the mess her life has become…

Meanwhile Helen’s relationship with her soak of a husband quickly runs aground as he runs off with a younger model… Cast aside she returns to the only purpose she’s ever had. Finding Jo’s flat she quickly interposes herself between Geoff and her daughter and, in spite of Jo’s wishes, pushes him out… she wants to be the one to look after her daughter… what else has she left?

Murray Melvin and Dora Bryan

Geoff skulks off but you hope he’s not done with Jo… she’s still so young and with so much potential if only life doesn’t get the in the way. Somehow you feel she may overcome the teenage pregnancy and not repeat the mistakes of her mother. That’s the film’s challenge and Jo looks trapped at the end but if she is, it’s not quite in the way her mother was… maybe an art school future still awaits and enduring friendship with Geoff.   

A change was definitely going to come.

A Taste of Honey lingers…days after viewing. It’s timeless even when so obviously rooted in its time. The issues it addresses are still very much of concern, as equality of opportunity is knocked back years by recession and cold-hearted educational reforms.

Rita and Melvin are an eye-catching and ground-breaking couple who defined new types of individualistic heroes for British cinema. TheDVD is readily available from Amazon. Shelagh, it was really something…

Postscript:  Shelagh Delaney passed away this year having changed British theatre for ever as well as influencing Morrissey and The Smiths – he said that she was as “at least  50%” of the reason he writes and the band’s This Night has Opened My Eyes is a retelling of A Taste of Honey.

I saw Murray Melvin a few weeks past at the BFI looking hale and hearty – my wife remarked on his powerful presence! He’s a distinguished film and theatre scholar now but still acts occasionally as does Rita Tushingham, Garston’s finest!

Hitchcock, Mira Calix + Juice, NFT – Champagne (1928)

Through a glass lightly...

Another week, another Hitchcock restoration premier - not that I'm taking it for granted - and another brave choice of music... Following Shlomo's beatbox score for Downhill, this time the BFI had commissioned electronic composer Mira Calix, who I’d last seen performing a DJ set at Warp Records' 20th anniversary all-nighter.

This time Calix was performing her own music, using a bank of electronic kit, pre-recorded instrumentation and supported by the Juice Vocal Ensemble (Kerry Andrew, Sarah Dacey and Anna Snow).  The four walked on stage suitably attired as jazz babies, almost as if they were taking part in the film as well as providing the music… This could be another combination of sound and vision that might struggle to find the right balance - that's the risk of old meets new - but overwhelmingly they met the challenge very well.

Betty Balfour, Jean Bardin and dancer

There was a moment, as a woman danced furiously behind the main characters, when the rhythm of the music matched perfectly the staccato edginess of her movement… it was a startling connection, as if the rhythm of the dance is a constant over the decades and Calix had just tuned into that continuum with amazing precision.

Ferdinand von Alten, Jean Bardin and Betty Balfour

But then, for a film about youthful nightclubbing, Calix is an astute choice. She’s been a mainstay of Warp’s roster for many years now and has alternated between ambient sound-scaping, IDM, DJ-ing and composition. Classically trained, she has an enviable range and produced an intelligent and very entertaining score full of subtle references and which always reverted to a satisfyingly deep bass: the staple of many a good rave and a simple resonating signifier of the unsettling promise of a good night out.

Juice gave strong voice to her music, all three technically proficient individually and working well in subtle harmony. They threw in sound effects and all joined in Balfour’s quite bizarre hand-dance as the club scene reached its climax… the jazziest of jazz hands and a strange signal to move albeit one rebuffed by her confused and disaffected lover. We knew how he felt... it's an odd film.

Betty Balfour - cross-eyed

I should say that there was a split vote on the effectiveness of the music with my wife finding it intrusive and occasionally jarring. Still, this is my blog… and she’s entitled to comment below!

The ultimate judge of silent movie scores is how well they meld with the film and I felt that, in addition to the visceral impact of the bass lines the music served to bring out the quirks and the comedy...it's all about the timing!

Champagne was not one of Hitchcock’s personal favourites and is a-typical in terms of its light-hearted storyline. It still has his visual flair with a number of striking sequences, but there’s little drama or threat… although The Man - none of the characters are named - retains an air of menace to the end.

Betty Balfour and Jean Bardin

Ultimately any film staring Betty Balfour is going to be a giggle. Described at the time as Britain’s Queen of Happiness and compared with Mary Pickford, she is certainly an energetic performer. Her mobile features enable her to switch expression with unpredictable swiftness and Hitchcock often lingers on her face as she moves the story along with a laugh that emphatically becomes a frown and vice versa...

Not your conventional movie star she had huge expressive eyes and a winning disposition... it’s not surprising that she went on to sustained success in Europe.

Betty plays a spoiled little rich girl who begins the story by flying out to rendezvous with her boyfriend (Jean Bardin) on a cruise ship. She’s been forbidden by her Wall Street banker father (a frowning Gordon Harker) from marrying the boy, but she’s not to be thwarted…

Ferdinand von Alten and Betty Balfour

But at the same time, she is also spotted by a predatory man (Ferdinand von Alten) who begins to pursue her – interrupting her attempts to make love to her beau.

The Girl’s father finds out about the stunt and follows her to Paris in a fury… she’s reckless, a good time girl and with no sense of fiscal responsibility… Even the Boy is frustrated by her relentless party-time as she makes fun of her assistant’s dowdy clothes at an impromptu fashion show with her socialite chums.

Gordan Harker... who's the Daddy?

But then dad turns up and reveals that the party has to stop, he has lost all in pursuing her to Europe and his business has gone bust. She’s not a bad girl though and immediately offers to sell her mound of jewellery to help them yet, in a superb sequence focusing on bodies below the head, we see her being robbed in the street – they have nothing. This is deft stuff from Hitchcock who keeps the narrative moving with economy and grace – we don’t get bogged down in exposition.

The girl attempts to look after her father in a mean little apartment… she’s ill-equipped. Then she tries to get a job and ends up as a flower girl in a dubious night club… she’s innocent and it takes her many wide-eyed shocks to understand the dynamics of the place. All of which Hitchcock relishes… in so many of these early films he ends up taking us to similar venues of adult entertainment.

 

The scenes in the club are the fulcrum of the film - this is where the champagne really kicks in. The main characters are constantly interacting with the crush around them and always in danger of being over-showed by these lively lights. This could be any club at any time and Hitch directs the chaos really well – the relentless energy and high spirits of  a champagne fuelled good time.

Amidst all this, The  Boy returns to rescue The Girl but they fight and she takes up The Man’s offer of help… they head off on a cruise ship back to her home in America and, to her surprise, she is joined by her true love.

It is now that the truth is finally revealed as her father arrives to explain that he hadn’t lost his money and had been trying to teach her a lesson all along. What’s more, we learn that the Man has been in Daddy’s employ all along: charged with luring her away from her boy.

All confusion passed… the girl agrees to marry the boy and all look set to live happily… Hitch can’t resist a few sinister stares from the Man who looks at the Girl through the bass of his champagne glass.

Jean Baldin and Betty Balfour

Champagne is a slight and oddly constructed comedy with a wonderfully quirky performance from Betty Balfour… part innocent, part irritant… she is unpredictable and usually emerges from each crisis with a beaming smile. There are times though when her eye-balls-to-the-wall performance throws up a frown of sorrow and you can understand why she retained the sympathy of the British public – she may be a brat but she’s not malicious and is ultimately humble and a quick learner!

Betty Balfour

The rest of the cast perform their parts well, with Ferdinand von Alten standing out for his menace even at the happy ending. Gordon Harker is good at looking grim but he still looks more like a fairground boxing promoter than a financier!

Champagne is currently available on DVD but this restoration is something else and well worth the wait for the eventual release.

For more information on the marvellous Ms Calix visit her official website here.

Postscript: As usual the film was introduced by the BFI’s Keiron Webb who pointed out that a 22-year old Michael Powell had been involved with Champagne as a still photographer, nice to think of our two greatest directors working on the same silent film.

As he spoke about the restoration work, it struck me how extraordinary the BFI’s efforts have been this year and how much I’m going to miss these events. The big finale is still to come with The Manxman but what are the BFI going to do to follow this?!

Betty ponders life beyond the Hitchcock 9...