Blanche and Boris… The Deadlier Sex (1920), Silents Under the Stars, with Michael Mortilla

 

 “You can’t feature Blanche Sweet too much for her performance here certainly justified stardom and will go a long way toward pushing her up to the top again.” Wid’s Film Daily

 

If Lobster Films supremo, Serge Bromberg’s car hadn’t broken down on a trip to see his cousins in the South of France, he’d never have got into conversation with a garage mechanic who knew someone who had some old films and, as it turned out, was happy to clear some storage space. Serge discovered an old Pathé wooden camera along with a stash of films; some trailers, some pornography (natch) and a complete 35mm print of The Deadlier Sex… previously considered a lost film. Adding new intertitles, beginning and end credits and a clean-up, the film is now perfectly preserved by the Academy Film Archive and is exceptionally good-looking copy of Boris Karloff’s first major feature but also a fine example of just why Blanche Sweet was such a huge star.

 

The film was been streamed as the 33^rd annual Silents Under the Stars event run by the Hollywood Heritage Museum normally outdoors at the Paramount Ranch. This being 2020, this was the Covid-19 edition with watchers across the World glued to their laptops for a special screening accompanied by the museum’s regular accompanist Michael Mortilla and introduced by Randy Haberkamp, Hollywood Heritage board member and Silent Society Committee Chair.

 

This was also a fundraiser for the Hollywood Heritage Museum on its 35^th anniversary as well as the Santa Monica Mountains Fund for the restoration of the Paramount Ranch which has recently suffered horrendous damage in a fire. Donation details below.

 

Best of all, this film was being shown to Boris Karloff’s daughter Sara, who had never seen the film and had only come across it in an interview with his father in which he remembered the unsettling realisation of seeing himself, alone on screen and thinking, that’s how I look! The film was shot in the beautiful hills and rivers of Truckee, California which just so happens to be 24 miles from where Sara lives… You know, all in all, I think this was meant to be!

 

Onto the film itself and Wid’s Film Daily was spot on in highlighting Blanche Sweet as the outstanding player; she has a relaxed, naturalistic approach that elicits audience complicity in even the maddest of schemes driving the odd narrative. Her open features, generous smile – revealing slightly British dentures – and energetic physicality holds everything together and she’s on screen for pretty much the whole film.

 

Young Mr Karloff

She plays Mary Willard a resourceful young woman who is determined to take proper control of her father’s legacy after he dies suddenly at their home, the two in loving response looking forward to their annual walking holiday. To protect his assets, she needs to overcome the aggressive – commercial - advances of Wall Street financier Harvey Judson (manly Mahlon Hamilton), who pushes the rules to the limits in his desire to gain others’ capital.

 

This is where the film takes a strange turn as Mary decides the only way to stop Harvey from unfairly dominating the market and undermining her father’s fund is to drug and kidnap him and then take his out to the wilderness where he can either sink or swim as a proper man.

 

This seems such a common thread in the Twenties having just watched Miriam Cooper in Is Money Everything? (1923) as well as Leni Riefenstahl in The Great Leap (1927); heck, what would people say if The Deadlier Sex was a Berg Film espousing the nourishing impact of the outdoor life on conflicted urban businessmen?!

 

Still in his city suit, Mahlon Hamilton

Anyway, glossing over the fact that Kidnapping People is Wrong, Blanche quickly makes you forgive her as does Hamilton’s Harvey, as he starts offering huge amounts of money to the locals only to find that it counts for nothing in what is essentially a barter economy. Jim Willis (Russell Simpson) is one such man, an old friend of the Willards with pine wood running through his veins, pretends that Mary is his niece and also has some of the film’s best lines in the quaint ways he rejects every dollar offered by Harvey.

 

Of course, not everyone is disinterested in filthy lucre and, local tracker Jules Borney (Boris Karloff) is happy to take Mary’s money to force a fight with Harvey in an attempt to get him to “man up”. As an aside this reminds me of my Scouse Nan trying to get me into fights when I was a kid for pretty much the same reason…

 

Back in California, Jules takes things too far and having bested Harvey has to be fought off by Mary. Harvey, who doesn’t know that Mary is his business rival, begins to feel differently about his strange predicament and starts to enjoy aspects of the absolutely stunning countryside – this is one of the best looking location shoots you could hope for, positively Swedish from raging rivers to pine-topped mountains.

 

Then he has an idea to force Jim into taking him back to civilisation be pretending to kidnap Mary – here we go again people with The Kidnapping!? What could possibly go wrong? Only Jules, spotting an opportunity to rob Harvey and take Mary into the bargain. Meanwhile, what’s happening back in Wall Street and can this faked kidnapping on top of the faked rescue from another faked/actual kidnapping possibly not be found out!?

 

I have previously seen The Deadlier Sex in Pordenone back in 2017 and enjoyed the chance to see it again in a more focused setting. It’s good-looking and good fun and Michael Mortilla’s playful accompaniment brought out the best of its good humour. Robert Thornby’s direction is very effective, especially out at these rugged locations whilst cinematographer, Charles E. Kaufman, captures the sweeping vistas as well as the emotions.

Lovely depth of field Mr Kaufman!

 

Before the main feature, there was also a fascinating short called Life in Hollywood – Part One (1927) which showed the main studios with a voice-over revealing the addresses. Some still stand to this day although I’m not sure if Cecil B. de Mille’s replica of George Washington’s house is one of them.

 

The home of Hollywood Heritage, as President Richard Adkins explained, is actually the oldest film company studio and where de Mille shot the first Hollywood feature, The Squaw Man in 1913. All of which made the footage of the Paramount Farm fire all the sadder.

 

If you want to help restore this precious slice of Hollywood Heritage, click on the link here.

 

I’m sure many of us will as the silent film community is as supportive and unified as never before during the Covid-19 crisis and this was another special online moment when silent cineastes stop what they’re doing across the World and watch and learn and listen in silence.

 

Thank you, Hollywood Heritage!

 

Ain't she Sweet? 

 

Cecil's studio from Life in Hollywood (1927)

Part of the fire damaged Paramount Ranch: please donate to help with the restoration if you can.

An education… The Guinea Pig (1948), BFI Dual Format - out now!

How are you going to mix a boy whose father is a general with a boy whose parents keep a grocer’s shop in Pimlico?

Seventy years on this film is still not without relevance with its debate about the need to reconcile the state school system with public schools. Lord Fleming’s Report for Rab Butler’s Board of Education had proposed that 25% of state school should go to the public sector but in the end rows over funding stopped this from happening. Still, playwright Warren Chetham-Strode wrote of how this might work in practice and it’s a stirring story still infused with the wonderful spirit of post-war optimism: the idea that it was possible to see the other’s point of view. Who then would have imagined this to be such a radical idea now?

Newly restored on this spanking new BFI Blu-ray/DVD dual format release, The Guinea Pig is stirring entertainment from a time when the idea of social mobility wasn’t just an ideal but a practical necessity in a country almost as ravaged by victory as the defeated. In his booklet essay, John Oliver explains that the Boulting Brothers saw cinema as an “educative source” and they followed the socially inclusive Journey Together (1945) with this film, perhaps the first to really address the need for change in British educational system.

Joan Hickson and Bernard Miles

The film is emotionally forceful with just about the only thing stretching credibility being the 24-year old Richard Attenborough as 14-year-old Jack Read, the titular Pig. But you soon believe in his cockney pluck, as the young lad from Pimlico sent by his hardworking parents to Saintbury school, founded by King Henry VIII no less and stuffed to the rafters with alien traditions and manners. Jack’s parents are played by Joan Hickson and Bernard Miles with the latter getting a co-writing credit for fleshing out the working-class characters and dialogue – this ain’t the first film to feature the word arse but it’s up there.

The film opens with Jack being seen off at Waterloo Station by his folks as Mum wonders if he’ll be alright and Dad, knowing full well the risks of the endeavour, looks on with war-weary optimism. As they head back to their tobacconists Jack settles in with his new school mates on the most unmagical of “Hogwarts Expresses”. He meets Tracey (Thomas Bateson) a thoroughly decent sort who is to look after the newcomers and he also shares a carriage with an incredulous Miles Minor (young Anthony Newley) as he tells his new pals which “prep-school” he went to.

Master Newley on the right

I can see how the film would play to general audiences but I wonder how the public-school fraternity would have viewed the unfolding events at stately Saintbury – actually Sherborne school in Dorset. In fairness the film gives full credit to both sides of the argument for inclusion but is Jack a little bit more polite and resilient than more of us state school lads would have been and are the conservative masters and pupils also just a little too understanding?

On arrival, Jack meets another thoroughly decent chap in the form of Nigel Lorraine (Robert Flemyng who was born in Liverpool) a former army officer who lost a leg in the war and is giving the boys the benefit of his experience. He’s a hero and the film’s nod to his good nature and his service is heart warming in itself. As he guides Jack to his House, you know he will be key to Jack’s success or failure.

Thomas Bateson, Dickie, Cecil Trouncer and Edith Sharpe

Jack meets his House Master, Mr Hartley (Cecil Trouncer) who is altogether less welcoming than his wife (Edith Sharpe) but the two are almost stock public school characters; she the mother most of them literally never have and he the stern voice of unyielding tradition; a grumpier version of Mr Chips yet we know what happened to him…

Jack soon encounters lots of attitudes and traditions that don’t agree with him; he’s picked out by one of the prefects to be his fag before he’s even finished his tea, whilst the others rag him about his accent and he’s teased at the traditional welcoming ceremony in which the new boys have to bow three times to the statue of founder Henry whilst getting their rears kicked. But Jack won’t have it and fights back… reminding me of my response to a similar situation in the Merton College "Freshers’ Blind".

Anthony Nicholls and Robert Flemyng enjoy a smoke watching the cricket

Jack’s resilient but even he tries to escape only to be stopped at the school wall by Mr Lorraine who was on a moonlit walk with the Hartley’s lovely daughter Lynne played by the always excellent Sheila Sim who had married Attenborough in 1945. Sheila too was from Liverpool, starting life off overlooking Calderstones’s Park not far from where John and Paul would live.

Sim and Edith Sharpe add a lot of light to what would otherwise be an all-male environment and one in which Jack falls foul of the strictures regarding talking to women. He wolf whistles the neighbouring girl’s school and gets beaten for just walking and talking to Bessie from the bookstore (Maureen Glynne).

 Edith Sharpe and Our Sheila

The film’s trajectory isn’t entirely predictable and gradually the emphasis shifts from Jack’s struggle to fit in and to succeed onto the reactions of the school board and old Mr Hartley: will they accept any success for the guinea pig and will this influence their approach to inclusion going forward. It all comes down to a choice between investing in the school’s already splendid infrastructure and scholarships that may help make more opportunities for Jack and others.

It is surprisingly moving and well played by the Roy Boulting and his sparkling cast.  It may just have been the flicker of long dead optimism – the changes suggested were hardly revolutionary after all - or the genuine hope that we can work across backgrounds, but I suggest you have your hankie ready.

Happiest days of our lives?

The restoration from the BFI looks splendid and it comes with a chunky booklet with John Oliver’s excellent essay Bridging the divide: class and consensus in The Guinea Pig, and another on the creative curiosity of the Boulting Brothers from Corinna Reicher. There’s also a host of quirky archive extras including short films about schooling from silents to the sixties as well as slices of life in ration-book Britain: I love the way the BFI fill out these releases with so much special content.

The film is available on dual format direct from the BFI online or from their soon to re-open shop. It’s a cracker!

Dolomites theory… The Great Leap (1927), Kino Lorber Blu-ray

In which the dynamic trio of the Weimar “mountain film” turn out a comedy that illustrates the main themes of the genre whilst showing the simple glories that made it such a success: the challenges of nature and, indeed, woman.

Now, let’s get this particular woman out of the way from the start along with those easy-to-make philosophical connections to what was about to happen. Leni Riefenstahl is one of the most controversial filmmakers for her documentaries charting Nazi rallies and the 1936 Olympics – major works of propaganda that were hugely important to their cause - but I’ve no idea if she’d even read Mein Kampf when she was acting in this and Arnold Fanck’s other berg films, The Holy Mountain (1926), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929) and Storm Over Mount Blanc (1930). At this stage, Hitler was on the edges of Weimar politics having been imprisoned in 1924 for six months after a failed coup, whilst his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) won only 12 seats in the 1928 election (under proportional representation) and were the ninth largest party with the German Communist Party on 54 seats and the SPD (Social Democrats) on 153.

Leni and Adolf certainly were connected in 1932 when she was transfixed by his performance at a rally and he started to see her as the ideal of Germanic femininity after her directorial debut, The Blue Light. At this point, she was far from the “fellow traveller” she later claimed to be and, indeed, even that film was co-written by two men of the Jewish faith, Carl Mayer and Béla Balázs… her compromises, and infatuation, were now to start building up and, post war, there would be half a long lifetime of recriminations and rationalisations.

Leni Riefenstahl

But forget about Leni for a moment, did Arnold Fanck and Luis Trenker’s mountain films specifically connect to a far-right philosophy that was still being defined? Both may well have viewed the purity of mountain life as a cure for the ills of the city but this is surely part of a broader romantic view of nature not just limited to Germany or indeed this period. They were certainly less cooperative with the Nazi’s and, whilst they stayed in Germany, they never accepted any propagandist brief as enthusiastically as their former colleague.

As with all classic film you just need to watch and try to understand in the context of the period in which it was made and here we have a film in which Fanck, Trenker and Riefenstahl make a zany comedy which actually pokes fun at their own berg films including the over-idealisation of the rugged rocky paradise which they had always shown setting urban men free. The filmmaker's gaze is still fixed on the actresses' form and features throughout, promoting her as a physical as well as sexual ideal and yet there is some sending up. Leni’s goatherd Gita, even lives in a fairy tale chalet with her younger sisters and it’s one of the few sequences filmed on set as if to clearly mark its un-reality. The youngsters frolic like mystic nymphs whilst snow – actually goose feathers – falls like so much plastic in a life-sized snow globe.

Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker

Even the mountains are used for fun with Gita climbing up two granite stacks to avoid the attentions of Toni, Trenker playing it for laughs with goofy looks and daft hair. This is still a serious freestyle climb with no safety line and with the actress in bare feet which were cut to shreds as she climbed to the top of both and another to the left, posing, smiling and teasing,  making it all look easy. Riefenstahl had started off as a dancer but injury caused her to look elsewhere and after meeting Trenker she was introduced to Fanck and then turned her fitness and core strength towards the rockface.

Fanck’s films often took long to make and part of the reason for that, as film historian Samm Deighan says in her superbly informative commentary, was that the performers kept on getting injured. It was also down to shooting almost entirely on location and, as in this case, using six cinematographers to capture the audacious stunts and sublime locations 12,000 feet and more up in the Dolomites.

Hans Schneeberger

One of these, Hans Schneeberger, also had to act as Michael Treuherz, the cossetted and conflicted man from the city who takes a break from the rat race to enjoy the great outdoors and finally find himself. In this he is aided by his manservant Paule, played by Paul Graetz, a proper comic actor, who wasted little time in getting out of Germany in 1932, making films in Britain and Hollywood before his untimely death in 1937. A cabaret artist and stage actor who had worked with Max Reinhardt, Graetz delivers the most naturally humorous performance as the cheekily inventive valet who comes up with elaborate ways to help is master win the ski race for Gita’s affections.

The film is split between the opening sequence of comedic climbing and then, after a studio bound set up for the love triangle, the great ski race which is almost an hour long. Michael and Paul arrive as the greenest of tourists and it’s love at first sight for the virginal financier as he encounters Gita with her goats. Michael is a mess of a man who only knows the artificial world of commerce, whereas Gita knows how to handle herself, taking a break from longingly photographed free-swimming in mountain lakes to save him from a water mill.

There’s something of Riefenstahl’s performance that brings to mind Pola Negri in Lubitsch’s comedies, especially Die Bergkatze (The Wildcat or The Mountain Cat) from 1921. There’s the same rough and ready femininity on display and they are clearly dominant over the clueless males; Germanic fantasy women yes, but think of Mabel Normand kicking Charlie Chaplin all over Hollywood in 1914? Gita is clearly superior to the men, a better climber and a good heart, at ease with herself and her surroundings.

In contrast, uptight Michael has no clue how to woo and wastes an evening trying, and failing, to work up the courage to enter his new love’s chalet, watching in unmanly horror as the goofy Toni strolls in to steal his strudel, much to Gita’s disgust. She has to take the lead and decides that if Michael wins the local cross-country ski race, he will also win her heart… however incredibly unlikely that may be.

Paul Graetz and friend

Gita takes care to exclude Toni from the race, luring him into following her around the course along with her favourite goat (uncredited) on skiis… whilst Paul works out a number of devices to help his man win: an inflated suit to add bulk and buoyancy, preventing any falls and even a small propeller to aid is climb. The plot is merely an excuse for Fanck to unleash wave after wave of trick shots as the stunt team defy gravity (and logic) during the course of the race.

It is a visual treat and great fun especially with the addition of Neil Brand’s expertly attuned accompaniment. Neil’s seen those skylines for years of course and whilst he expresses a wealth of scoring experience, he also grounds his themes in both an understanding of contemporary purpose as well as the dynamics required to elevate these “landscapes of transcendent and mystical power”. It’s as much as masterclass as Fanck’s direction and his performers’ climbing and uplifts the action when perhaps a little too long is spent in the snow…

Deighan’s context for the film is that it is an “escapist fairy-tale” made not just at a time of topline political and economic turmoil but of poverty and desperation – let us absolve ordinary Germans from the guilt to come and at least enjoy this film for how it appeared to be to them at the time.

I watched the new Kino Lorber Blu-ray which is available direct from them in North America – I have my sources (thanks Mary in Santa Barbara!) – or through Amazon.com and other international shippers.

Skiers' greeting meaning "Good skiing!"

Dark Lady in love shock… Is Money Everything? (1923), Miriam Cooper

It was such a horror I’m glad I don’t remember anything more about it…

Four decades before Lennon and McCartney wrestled with the relationship between love and money, Miriam Cooper and Norman Kerry were involved in earnest consideration of the same issue under the guidance of Glen Lyons. The results are pretty conclusive and if the Scousers had been paying more attention they could have saved themselves hours of writing in Paul’s living room and the resultant two minutes and twelve seconds of pop glory but perhaps you can never have enough evidence?

I wasn’t really here for the answer just for the chance to see The Dark Lady of the Silents as Miss Cooper entitled herself in her autobiography, written “with” Bonnie Herndon and published in 1973 when she was – probably - 82. As I may have mentioned in the past, the star of Griffiths’ Intolerance and Birth of a Nation (not Oh, KKK…), has always stood out for me. There is indeed something about Miriam and if it’s not necessarily her acting, it’s certainly her look, at once striking and almost modern with big, soulful eyes that manage to be more knowing and yet less emotionally engaged than Lillian’s or Mae’s.

She is highly watchable and holds the attention on screen in spite of her honest assessment that she wasn’t a great actress and that her strong features and those dark eyes, described to her in the book as “sensual” and “liquescent” by two breathless academics after one screening of BoaN, touched many a watcher. She certainly did not lack the disciplined desperation of the poorer class nor the ability to transport herself into a role and suggested that an imagination born of necessity was key to her success.

Miriam Cooper

“… when Mr Griffith told me, ‘you’re a Southern girl watching your brother go off to war’, I didn’t have to act, I was that girl.”

She draws some fascinating parallels with her contemporaries – all of them young, pretty women, often without fathers and seizing the chance the pictures provided to support their families. These were also characteristics that appealed in inappropriate ways to DWG too and Mary Pickford wasn’t the only one who thumped the old racist. Cooper wonders how so many youngsters could write about the silent era and rightly points out that so much of the contemporary sources were PR guff: I’m not making anything up. I was there… Yet, she clearly is inventing some events and storylines throughout her story, not that this stops the book being entertaining. She tells all in a stylishly frank way, dishing dirt and opinion as freely as you’d expect from a grand dame but we’ll never really know if her first cinema make-up was applied by Mack Sennett or whether Lil and DW were closer than professionally required?

Only three of her forty shorts and five of her twenty one feature films survive, BoaN, Intolerance, The Woman and the Law – Griffiths’ director’s cut of her main story in Intolerance - husband Raoul Walsh’s Kindred of the Dust (1922) and Is Money Everything? So, unlike her hated love rival (?) Theda Bara, she at least has some major films extant and even this film allows us to see her in a run-of-the-mill feature in decent shape the Grapevine DVD being taken from a 35mm print.

Norman Kerry

Miriam took a pay cut down to $650 a week to make Is Money Everything? as times were still unsure for her and Walsh who was yet to breakthrough. She filmed in Detroit whilst he soon set off for Tahiti to make Lost and Found on a South Sea Island. They were also starting to drift in their marriage and she wonders whether she still loves him in her diary as quoted in the biography. Absence made the hearts fonder although they did eventually divorce in 1926.

 Cooper describes the film as apt because of their money worries but it’s also about a couple faced with a choice of success in business or with their marriage which might explain why I find her portrayal convincing enough! She plays Marion Brand, wife of John Kerry’s ambitious grocer, John. John’s a god-fearing man at the start of the film and one who eschews violence, much to the pleasure of his father-in-law, Reverend John Brooks (John Sylvester).

After marriage he buys into the town’s grocery business and starts to make a real success… which increasingly is at the expense of other local businesses. His ruthlessness impresses a rich city woman, Mrs. Justine Pelham (Martha Mansfield) travelling through town, and it won’t be the last time the two cross paths as John transposes his grocery acumen to Wall Street.

The pressures of earthly success drive the Brands apart...

The family moves to high society in New York and whilst Marion begins to get isolated, the city slickers flock to John’s new success yet some, notably Justine’s husband, Roy (William Bailey) and leading financier Phil Graham (Lawrence Brooke), clearly do not like his impact on their capital nor his aggression. Pelham sends his wife to extract as many secrets as she can but Justine has her own more romantic agenda and sets about tying to woo John away from Marion.

The films only around the hour mark, yet it’s light on the detail of the money making and heavier on the social life of the Brand’s new society. There’s a long sequence on a hunt during which Justine pretend to have fallen from her horse in order to entrap John but, corporate killer he may be, he does not lack in love or loyalty to his wife.

But, as the money keeps pouring in, the pressures on the Brands’ marriage only increase as the temptations of unchristian power and desire beckon… Marion is there suffering in almost every scene and if there’s to be a way out, she will have to be the one to take drastic measures.

Martha Mansfield plays The (One Who Would Be) Other Woman

So… not a classic but Glen Lyons directs well and creates a watchable morality tale that was no doubt a crowd pleaser across the mid-West. Throughout it Miriam Cooper draws the eye and for the reasons she and Bonnie Herndon articulate in the biography, quoting film historian Walter Coppedge, “Of dark liquescent eyes and a strangely still but magnetizing beauty, Miriam Cooper’s looks were oddly provocative: she had sex and breeding, and she moved with an inviting grace… Griffith’s ‘Dark Lady’… struck a contrast with the two other types he developed…” these being the “vivacious freckle-faced hoyden” (Constance Talmadge) and the “ethereal innocent” (Lillian Gish).

Further viewing: One of Cooper’s best-looking survivors is the sixteen minute The Confederate Ironclad (1912), directed by Kenean Buel and available to view in stunning quality at the National Film Preservation Society website – which is full of wonders!

It is also well-worth watching The Woman and the Law (1915) on the Eureka Intolerance set, you see more of Miriam and the narrative is naturally far more focused than the strands we see in the main film. Plus, there is just more of the dark eyes and the timeless connectivity of Ms Cooper!

Further reading: If you can find a copy, don’t hesitate to pick up The Dark Lady of the Silents – as Miriam says, she was there and even at a distance of sixty years, her recollections are invaluable especially when place in the context of the more forensic studies of those academics who weren’t.

Lobby card bonus: