I Ate Mont Alto's Cookie, Or: Cinesation 2003 Report (long)
Max Nineteennineteen
Hearing Richard Roberts express his complete lack of interest in Anne
Coulter v. James Agee-- in person!
Meeting Frank Lloyd's granddaughter, and actually managing to think of
a silent Frank Lloyd movie!
Hearing Hugh Hefner's name repeatedly applauded, for reasons that have
nothing to do with Viagra!
Eating a homemade cookie intended for the absent members of the Mont
Alto Orchestra!
Spending so much time in the dark that my watch's luminescent dial
stopped glowing each night!
These were just a few of the highlights of my first visit to an old
movie festival, and my first to any film fest out of town since
Telluride almost 20 years ago (when I realized that what I liked best
was the old movies, and so I was paying a lot of money to see about 3
of them over the course of 4 days). It was great to meet so many
people I have seen named here, or to have them vaguely know my name
from here, or to meet lots of folks who never heard of me or even
alt.movies.silent but were perfectly capable of beginning a
conversation with "Well, that was good but it's not as good as NELL
GWYN" or "I haven't seen John Ford's brother in anything where he
wasn't playing an old coot with a beard," without having to have it
explained to them who John Ford, let alone his brother, was.
There is a brotherhood of film fanatics, and it was a great pleasure
to meet so many of you and enjoy the terrific hospitality of the
Cinephiles, the Lion's Club and the Massillon Club, and of the town of
Massillon, which despite having football as its established religion
is apparently tolerant of alternative lifestyles such as ours.
Here's what I saw (all but 1 movie and two halves) and what I thought,
to be posted in two parts because it's getting late. (My scale, by
the way, is: 4 stars/highlight of the fest, 3 stars/well worth seeing,
2 stars/worth sitting through, 1 star/vault fire candidate.) I lost
track of who played for what but Rodney Sauer, Phil Carli and Joseph
Rubin (of the Gish Festival) all played wonderfully well for the
silents, by the way, and added immeasurably to the pleasure of the
event.
THURSDAY
FOREVER AND A DAY (***) For a movie with six or seven directors, a
rah-rah wartime propaganda intent (that There Will Always Be An
England) and an episodic plot, this hangs together surprisingly well,
and its best episodes are excellent. Although the token American
actors are gauche (and the movie requires you to believe that Bob
Cummings could be descended from C. Aubrey Smith), the historical
progression from Georgian to Victorian England is witty and
well-observed, while the WWI episode proves to pack quite an emotional
punch when Roland Young (who's terrific) and Gladys Cooper get the
news that their hero son will never be coming home. This is the movie
that Cavalcade is too dated to be now, and it's interesting that Una
O'Connor pops up as the harbinger of the social changes between the
wars in both films.
THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT (****) As a piece of work this Paramount
promotional film from 1932 is kind of a hack job, with frustratingly
short clips of a zillion stars ("George M. Co--"). As a historical
record, though, it's an amazing time capsule, with scenes from lost
films like The Miracle Man that AREN'T the one scene we all know
survives, footage from movies like Sternberg's American Tragedy that
looks like it was shot yesterday (probably far superior to any
surviving print), and at least one scene from a film that was never
finished (Daughters of War, a WWI nurse drama with Ruth Chatterton,
directed by Dorothy Arzner, and promoted here with stock footage from
All Quiet on the Western Front, according to Early Film). To be
honest the talkie clips are fairly lugubrious and it's with some
relief that the Marx Bros. turn up (in a promo for Monkey Business
which is NOT from the film, and which you've probably seen elsewhere);
though The Smiling Lieutenant (which is on TCM this Friday, btw)
provided fun too.
MURDER ON DIAMOND ROW (THE SQUEAKER) (**) Was there ever a bigger hack
among name-above-the-title authors than Edgar Wallace? This 1937
British thriller has a game, droll cast ranging from Edmund Lowe to
Alistair Sim, and people like Georges Perinal (assisted by Robert
Krasker) and Miklos Rosza behind the scenes, and the best you can say
is that they work their butts off trying to give some style and
suspense to one of Wallace's typically lame pulp plots. One thing I
noticed that the notes didn't mention: bad guy Sebastian Shaw (believe
me, I didn't give anything away) would later play Darth Vader-- for
the five seconds that he's a ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi.
FRIDAY
THE WISHING RING (***) One of two films I'd seen before, this sweet,
knowingly naīve idyll of merrie olde England needs little
introduction; Rodney Sauer was nervous beforehand about whether his
score would match this print and the speed it was intended to be
projected at (7 fps instead of the 32 he was used to, I think) but he
did a splendid job, although the brief snatch of Survivor's "Eye of
the Tiger" during a love scene was a bit out of place.
CHU CHIN CHOW (ALI BABA NIGHTS) (*) Okay, I admit to a low tolerance
for pre-Fred and Ginger stage revue-style musicals, so someone else
may defend this, and I grant you that Walter Forde (Rome Express)
worked overtime to come up with interesting, Sternbergesque visuals.
All I can say is, watching a cast ranging from music hall comics to
Anna May Wong and Fritz Kortner do ancient gags and mug in Arabian
Nights costume brought to mind someone's comment that after a certain
point, every bad movie becomes a documentary about actors who are in a
bad movie. It just didn't gel for me and I left after half an hour.
THE STONING (****) Viola Dana in a 1914 Edison/Charles Brabin
production about a girl who comes to a bad end; strikingly realistic,
especially in contrast to the Griffith films to follow with similar
themes--for instance, although the boy (Harry Beaumont) is the
proximate cause of her troubles, it's not because he's black-dyed
evil, just immature and dissolute, and it's clear that it's her own
naivete about him (and love) that's as much to blame for her downfall.
Very nicely done (and a great print for 1914), a perfect example of
the kind of non-Victorian realistic silent Brownlow talks about in
Behind the Mask of Innocence.
GORDON BERKOW PROGRAM-- Various things, one of which was a real
jawdropper-- a trailer for Bardelys the Magnificent (Vidor, John
Gilbert doing Fairbanks, lost), containing all kinds of footage far
beyond the brief clip in Show People. It looked, I am sorry to
report, really good. He also had a Sennett Bing Crosby short, I'll
Surrender Dear, which was quite funny (great animation gag involving
their progress across the country as shown on a map) and like a Road
movie test run, except for lacking the other guy.
PASSPORT TO HELL (***) Elissa Landi as a woman with a past stuck in
French and German Africa just as WWI is breaking out; looking for a
protector she puts the moves on a naīve officer, doesn't fool his
Prussian dad (Warner Oland), and then falls for his best friend (Paul
Lukas, who's excellent). Only a few lines had that cynical pre-Code
zing that we all know and love, but as serious pre-Code dramas go,
well-acted, fairly well paced, and intelligent about the limited
choices available to women in that kind of situation, and how
destructive social codes can be for both sexes. Also shown on this
Frank Lloyd program was a 2-reeler from 1915, When The Spider Tore
Loose, which I couldn't follow.
MADAME POMPADOUR (****) Several people I mentioned this to said D.
Gish's earlier Nell Gwyn was even better, but not having seen that, I
thought this was an incredibly lavish and eyefilling costume epic in
which she gave a sprightly performance (and was quite a cutie).
Spectacularly good print, too, one of the best for a silent I've ever
seen. Oh, to have to choose between Dorothy Gish and Viola Dana for
one's heart in the same day...
THE RED MILL (***) As I was walking out afterwards Richard Roberts was
asking somebody what he thought, and this person replied that it was
the worst Marion Davies picture he'd ever seen. Well, I suppose
that's true for me, too, since it's not as good as Show People, the
only other one I've seen, but I thought it was fun and, being directed
by F. Arbuckle, captured a lot of the Keystone spirit, albeit sort of
in the way of expensive 60s comedies like The Great Race and Those
Magnificent Men..., where the money does occasionally get in the way
of the slapstick. (Actually, seeing Davies with pigtails and big
wooden shoes clomping around an entire studio-built Dutch town brought
to mind Shelley Duvall in Altman's Popeye.)
more to come...
Early Film
>There is a brotherhood of film fanatics, and it was a great pleasure
>to meet so many of you and enjoy the terrific hospitality of the
>Cinephiles, the Lion's Club and the Massillon Club, and of the town of
>Massillon, which despite having football as its established religion
>is apparently tolerant of alternative lifestyles such as ours.
See:
http://www.us.imdb.com/title/tt0270971/
Max Nineteennineteen
SATURDAY
I missed the first part of WILDFIRE, the Lillian Russell feature, and
it's missing a big chunk anyway, so I won't try to evaluate it.
THE LILY AND THE ROSE/THE TIGER GIRL (***) This was James Cozart's
"archive surprise" from LOC, a 1915 Griffith production (direction
credited to Paul Powell) which is from a 1920 reissue and in any case
missing the ending, though the print quality was generally good (some
decomposition). L. Gish is the "lily" of a small town who is romanced
in about two seconds by a society guy and marries him, but shortly
thereafter he's off dallying with the "rose," aka "the tiger girl,"
aka a dancer played by Rose Dolly of the Dolly Sisters. With its
archetypal characters and unlikely story, this was the Hollywoodized
version of a girl's downfall next to the realism of The Stoning, and
there's certainly no acknowledgement that the fact that she sits
around knitting in New York City might bear some blame for her hubby
hanging out with tiger women who do interpretive dance by the seashore
(he should meet Leni Riefenstahl in The Holy Mountain). But taken on
its own terms it was well directed and acted.
THE GREATEST QUESTION (**) The actual Griffith-L. Gish collaboration
of the fest I found much less digestible than The Lily and the Rose.
Take a poor but plucky country girl, stick her as housemaid with a
lecherous murderer and his harridan wife played in the most
one-dimensional barnstorming villain style, dress the whole business
up with some pretentious blather about spiritualism and life after
death, and it's no wonder that by the end you'll need no less than TWO
deux ex machinas to get you out of it (a visit from beyond the grave
AND the discovery of oil on the property). In the middle there's a
sequence, where the older son is killed in war and then appears to the
mother, that is masterful. It belongs in a better movie.
A COUNTRY FLAPPER (**) An early title promises that the movie won't be
bothered by anything like a plot, but alas, it isn't so-- and an
amusingly-observed tale of 20s small town youth (led by D. Gish) gets
bogged down in a plot about the dad of one stealing the church funds
and burning down his own barn to cover up his bootlegging operation
(all of which he apparently gets away with, by the way-- calling the
Hays Office).
DEFOREST SOUND SHORTS (***) James Cozart also brought gorgeous prints
of a group of DeForest sound on film shorts including the black singer
Abbie Mitchell (first black performer in sound film, he says), Eddie
Cantor (very young and with a cynical edge he would soon sand off),
and Weber and Fields doing their pool room routine (bizarre and
unexpectedly homoerotic).
THE BRIGHT SHAWL (***) A couple of people I talked to had, like me,
been warned after Pordenone that this was pretty but a stiff. With
expectations lowered, we were mostly pleasantly surprised-- yes, it
could move faster, and give Barthelmess more to do than pass notes and
glower as he tries to help Cuba overthrow the Spanish, but it was
generally absorbing, has a great cast (from an impossibly young and
saucer-eyed Mary Astor to Edward G. Robinson, already playing old guys
with dyed gray hair) and does, indeed, look great. Also amusing to
see D. Gish playing exactly the sort of dancer-seductress her sister
lost her husband to earlier in the day.
FRONTIER GAL (***) A 1945 comedy Western with Rod Cameron and Yvonne
DeCarlo, the sort of thing you'd pass by on AMC but in a Technicolor
IB print it glowed like a neon sign and proved to be smart, witty,
casually confident entertainment happy to wink at the audience all the
way through.
Also on Saturday and Sunday there were a fair number of shorts, the
best of which to my mind were two RKO shorts in the Masquers series, a
riotously madcap Tarzan parody with James Finlayson called Thru Thin
and Thicket, which was really good (directed by Mark Sandrich around
the time he did the incredible, Oscar-winning So This is Harris), and
a pretty good parody of Victorian melodrama called Lost in Limehouse,
which I THINK had an especially audacious slip-past-the-censors gag in
it—the butler's name is "Effingwell," and at one point the elderly
Lord stubs his gouty foot and shouts "Effing Well!" in a way that
seemed like it was supposed to suggest "F---ing Hell!"
SUNDAY
No wonder Paul McCullough was despondent; they can't even bother to
keep him in frame while Bobby Clark's doing stuff. (Missed the title
of that one—Fits in a Fiddle, I presume.)
SOS ICEBERG (****) There seemed to be general agreement that this
Arnold Fanck production, seen in the English-language version
co-directed by Tay Garnett, was the hands-down talkie champ of the
weekend. Dialogue scenes are a little stiff and clichéd but who
cares, the scenes filmed in the Arctic are hair-raisingly real
(especially when one of the actors is trying to swim from iceberg to
iceberg, and clearly in real desperation). La Riefenstahl is given
little to do but it is quite interesting to see Gibson Gowland,
looking exactly like he did in Greed, and going similarly nuts in the
extreme cold this time. (Who would have guessed that he had a plummy
British accent?)
WILD MONEY (***) I had seen this Paramount programmer before when Bill
Everson showed it, a genial and very satisfying comedy about a
newspaper accountant (Edward Everett Horton) landing on top of a big
story. Not big laughs, but a really nice, likable movie.
I had to leave before the last film, a DeMille production called
Changing Husbands, but there was one last item scattered throughout
the entire weekend:
THE CHINATOWN MYSTERY (****) Yes, this serial starring muscle-bound
Joe Bonomo was silly, repetitive, and not terribly well developed (the
movie kept introducing Francis Ford's fellow villains, then they never
did ANYTHING). It was also a ton of fun scattered out over the
weekend, and the audience ate it up and applauded for Hugh Hefner (who
paid for the restoration) every time his name appeared. Take a tip
from Joe Bonomo: when four big guys charge at you, the best way to
deal with them is to pick one up and throw him at the other three.
Works every time.