1920s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists project Vol. 3)

[thirtyframesasecond]

The Barbican has some screenings of little known silent films soon - can anyone recommend any of the following?

Cikáni
Princesse Mandane
Das Spielzeug von Paris
Der goldene Schmetterling

[swo17]

"Regen" is easily available on one of the Kino Avantgarde sets

It's on the first set, along with Ménilmontant, La glace à trois faces, H2O, etc. Indispensable.

[Tommaso]

My last night's viewing consisted of another film that should be better known: Barbed Wire (Rowland V. Lee, 1927). The film is set in a small village in France during WW I, and unusually for its time it thematises the hatred that a young French woman encounters when she falls in love with a German prisoner-of-war. This is a slowgoing film at first, giving us realistic and occasionally even humorous scenes inside the prisoners' camp, but it then picks up a lot of emotional momentum and becomes a very strong critique of war, a war which is foremost in the minds of the people.

Astonishing performance by Pola Negri in the main role; the only film I've seen in which her acting fully convinced me (i.e., there is none of her usual over-acting here), and Clive Brook is equally fine as her German lover. Visually it's also very good, with fine camera movements (including a 360° move through the village) and a keen eye for the beauties of this rural area. The only letdown is the preachy ending, which - especially because of the intertitles - reminded me unfavourably of Ince's "Civilization"; and I don't know how often I've seen 'visions' of dead soldiers marching through the sky as a climax of a film (admittedly, this is a rather early example). But these are minor points in a film that left me quite impressed, over all.

If anyone has doubts about it: it was a co-production of Paramount and UFA, and so it was co-produced by Erich Pommer. And apparently (if imdb and the sleeve of the OOP VHS can be trusted), it was co-directed by none other than Mauritz Stiller.

[zedz]

"Regen" is easily available on one of the Kino Avantgarde sets, and if I remember correctly, the mutating milk-filled drops are there, too. Very beautiful film which probably makes it onto my list, too. Incidentally, Hanns Eisler wrote music for the film later on; the piece called "14 ways to describe rain" is one of his very best chamber music pieces, quite unlike the agit-prop style often associated with this composer.

The wonderful Dutch Ivens set includes multiple versions of the film with different soundtracks recorded through the years, including the Eisler.

[Ann Harding]

The Barbican has some screenings of little known silent films soon - can anyone recommend any of the following?

Das Spielzeug von Paris

I don't recommend Das Spielzeug von Paris (1925, M. Curtiz). It's a very flat melodrama with a lot of pouting from Lili Damita. The film was broadcast on French TV some months ago. Give it a miss!

I don't recommend Das Spielzeug von Paris (1925, M. Curtiz). It's a very flat melodrama with a lot of pouting from Lili Damita. The film was broadcast on French TV some months ago. Give it a miss!

[Sloper]

A few thoughts on the 'Rediscover Feyder' set. Lots of SPOILERS below...

Visages d'enfants (Faces of Children)
Not sure that this will make my list, but if it does, it will be carried on mostly by the first ten minutes or so, which follows the POV of a young boy at his mother's funeral procession with some of the most striking images and use of montage I've seen in the whole of the silent era. The rest of the film deals with how difficult it is for the boy to cope without his mother, especially when his father seems to have moved on sooner than he has. It drags a bit in the final third, but it's still left me excited to see some more Feyder in the '30s project.

I agree that Faces of Children never quite tops that opening sequence, although it’s still a great film and might appear on my list. What I thought about this and Crainquebille (and I guess I said something similar about The Man Who Laughs as well…) was that they were much better at evoking the physical and emotional situations of the characters than they were at getting us (I mean me) emotionally involved in those situations.

A classic instance of this would be the trial scene in Crainquebille: for once lumped with a setting he can’t do very much with (a courtroom), Feyder resorts to extraordinary special effects to convey the old man’s perception of what is happening to him. Objects and people are blurred, distorted, enlarged or shrunk, the judges are shown clawing the air like monsters, and the marble bust above them turns its head to stare menacingly at the accused man. Amid all this, Maurice de Féraudy seems to have been encouraged to be as comical and twitchy as possible, and in short there is little attempt to invest the sequence with any kind of emotional weight. Later, inexplicably, the witness for the defence has a surreal nightmare – induced by a smoking fireplace – in which the courtroom becomes a sort of slow-motion inferno, and the magistrates intermittently appear in blackface with white robes, leaping down from the bench to leer demonically into the lens. Scary stuff…

The film continually shies away from pathos. Crainquebille himself apparently remains stoic for most of the story, unaware that his life is being destroyed, and his final descent into suicidal despair is bewilderingly quick. When Jean Forest comes along at the end, it ought to be like that wonderful moment in The Crowd when Sims, after his abortive suicide attempt, is consoled by his own son – but instead, once again, on an emotional level Feyder’s treatment of this moment feels kind of perfunctory, albeit perfectly framed and lit.

We’re left to admire, from a distance, the incredible visual richness and authenticity of Feyder’s Paris, with its bustling streets, shops and news-stands in the day time, and its gloomy street corners, disused shops and dank, sewage-ridden, rat-infested garrets at night. The film is also cleverly constructed to deliver its satirical message. The Paris we see here, from the wonderful opening pre-dawn sequence onwards, is one of bourgeois decadence and corruption, to all of which Crainquebille is blind. He’s a sort of ‘Letzte Mann’ figure who, at the beginning of the story, mistakenly imagines that his customers respect and love him. There’s a very telling scene where one of them – Madame Laure, I think – talks about the dream home she hopes to buy one day, and Crainquebille guilelessly inserts himself into her idyllic fantasy as her neighbour, greeting her over the fence with a bag of produce in one hand.

Of course, as in the Murnau film, this world spurns the old man after his underserved fall from grace, and we see his isolation as he sits alone in a bar, a huge crowd seething in the market square behind him. His eventual despair comes from a perception that he is no longer worthy to live in this respectable world – as a lumbering drunk, he isn’t even worthy of a prison sentence - but the boy brings him out of this because, like the night-watchman in Der Letzte Mann, he is the only character with whom the hero had a meaningful relationship before. And so he rediscovers true values, affection, kindness and so on, and in the final pair of shots is seen sheltered in the warmth of Mouse’s hideout, watched over and protected by the line of gas-lamps along the dockside. All the boxes are ticked; and yet, whereas Murnau’s (and Freund’s, and Jannings', and everyone else’s) inventiveness and brilliance served to reinforce the impact of the tragic story being told, and of the redemption at the end (I know others see it differently, but to me that film is like a textbook on how to dazzle the senses and tug the heart-strings at the same time), with Feyder the artistry seems to swamp the humanity. I’m sure I’ll go back to the film many times, but there’s a remoteness to it that stops it from quite being a masterpiece.

Despite Forest’s brilliant performance, I’d say much the same thing about Faces of Children, which observes the hero’s plight in a way that is both uncompromising and clinical. There’s a great sequence where the boy is sent to live with his godfather for a while, so that he won’t have to see his father’s remarriage; really so that the father won't have to deal with this emotional hurdle. The boy's departure and return feature some brilliant location work, with Jean and the priest gazing down on the village from the top of a hill – there’s a really vivid sense of alienation here between Jean and what remains of his family, and his disorientation when he returns to find a new mother and a new sister is conveyed very believably by Forest’s pained, enraged facial expressions. He attacks his part with an intensity you wouldn’t expect in such a young actor. What emotional force the film has is down to his performance, I think, because the other actors really aren’t on the same level: even at the end, when a loving bond is at last formed between him and his stepmother, the focus is all on him, and the emotional release comes when his dead mother’s picture, hanging on the wall, comes back to life and smiles down at him. Still, there’s a nice subtle touch here, when we see the father beginning to make his way back home, down a long avenue lined with trees – unaware that his son has just attempted suicide, he is nonetheless riding back to a home which will now be peaceful and happy, since his new wife can now take care of the children's emotional needs. We never see the father arrive home, and this last shot of him returning from work, intercut with his wife cradling Jean in her arms, beautifully sums up the conventional family dynamic that has now been established, with a sort of wryness that tempers the sentimentality, and retains something of the film's acerbic quality up until that point.

The real stand-out on this set, for me, was unsurprisingly the film whose narrative demands the least emotional (and the greatest visual) sensitivity from its makers: The Queen of Atlantis. Maybe I was just in the right mood for it, but this one completely floored me, right from the prophetic shot of a camel skeleton at the start, and the sinister, tantalising first half hour, when Saint-Avit is haunted by his memories. I have rarely seen flashbacks handled so well as they are in this film. They’re often overused and prone to cliché, or just tediously expository, but here Feyder leads into them so deftly that I was quickly lulled into a hypnotic trance.

I’ve never read Benoit’s novel, or seen any of the other film versions, or read or seen any incarnations of Rider Haggard’s She, to which I know this story bears some resemblance; and it’s exactly the kind of overwrought ripping yarn for boys that normally leaves me stone cold. And how much of what I love about this film is down to the source novel I don’t know, but anyway – what I love about it is that there’s hardly a trace of real ‘adventure’ or romance in the whole thing. The story unfolds at a funereal pace, and is shot through from start to finish with an overpowering sense of melancholy; it has the lethargic quality of a dream that’s always threatening to become a nightmare. For the first half or so it looks like it’s building up to be one of those stories about the woe-to-man that is Woman; the femme fatale whom no man can resist or survive.

But when Antinéa finally turns up, she is amazingly unalluring and uninteresting. Apparently Feyder regretted casting Stacia Napierkowska in this role; she seems to be a good actress but doesn’t quite look the part, and apparently the critics weren’t very kind to her performance. I can’t help thinking that Feyder might have helped her out a bit more by paying a bit more attention to her, but the way she is marginalised turns out to be one of the film’s great strengths. It means that Saint-Avit’s obsession with, and seduction by, the ‘mystère’ of the desert comes across as far more profound than if it had merely been an erotic infatuation.

This especially pays off at the end: it seems unthinkable that Saint-Avit or his friend are acting on their desire for She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, whom we last saw tormented by guilt and possibly about to do a Lady Macbeth and kill herself. They’re drawn back out into the desert by something less tangible, which I can’t really describe in words, but Feyder captures it to perfection in the way he films the desert (all on location, apparently; this film could eat Lawrence of Arabia, and his camel, for breakfast). The Atlantis sets are magnificent too, especially the red marble room where the husbands’ sarcophagi are stored. There’s too much to say about how good this film is – too many wonderful moments.

And the atmosphere of relentless unease is supported throughout by Eric le Guen’s score, which is one of the best I’ve heard. He also did the AE Les Vampires, but this is better. Really in tune with what the film is doing. Antonio Coppola’s (no relation to ‘those’ Coppolas, as far as I can gather) accompaniment for the other two films in the set seemed insensitive to the films’ subtle shifts in mood, so I mostly watched them silent.

[HerrSchreck]

"Regen" is easily available on one of the Kino Avantgarde sets, and if I remember correctly, the mutating milk-filled drops are there, too. Very beautiful film which probably makes it onto my list, too. Incidentally, Hanns Eisler wrote music for the film later on; the piece called "14 ways to describe rain" is one of his very best chamber music pieces, quite unlike the agit-prop style often associated with this composer.

The wonderful Dutch Ivens set includes multiple versions of the film with different soundtracks recorded through the years, including the Eisler.

I absolutely adore REGEN... what a wonderful film-- a true impressionist gem in that it manifests on celluloid those priceless impulses one gets when standing in a beloved city during a brief and endearing daylight shower... the folks scattering good naturedly under awnings, fiddling with umbrellas, the smell of warm asphalt getting wet, the population and the city structures themselves having the mostly cheerful experience of responding en masse to the unexpected, mood-coloring event of a sudden shower. For some reason the film brings back the magic of childhood, as the complications of growing older cause many folks to bloop over these "stop and savor the weather" mindsets-- or maybe it's just the complications of surviving in a shitty ecomony. Reminds me a bit of Paul Burnford's STORM (available on the indispensable UNSEEN CINEMA set-- now THAT's a set that's a pearl from the DVD age we're not likely to see again, those great side projects released through IMage or HVe).

But when Antinéa finally turns up, she is amazingly unalluring and uninteresting. Apparently Feyder regretted casting Stacia Napierkowska in this role; she seems to be a good actress but doesn’t quite look the part, and apparently the critics weren’t very kind to her performance. I can’t help thinking that Feyder might have helped her out a bit more by paying a bit more attention to her, but the way she is marginalised turns out to be one of the film’s great strengths. It means that Saint-Avit’s obsession with, and seduction by, the ‘mystère’ of the desert comes across as far more profound than if it had merely been an erotic infatuation.

Join the Stacia-Just-Aint-Hot-Enough-To-Be-Believable,-The-Frump club... existing membership made their initiation speeches in the set's thread. Membership is free.

[Gregory]

^ Shame about that thread. It got on-target in a discussion of the films toward the end when Le Clé du Ciel made a couple of posts, both of which were mostly lost when the forum got hacked. I tried to find the complete posts on Internet Archive but couldn't find an archived version of the forum complete enough to include that page.

It's been a while since I went through the Feyder set, but I remember thinking that Queen of Atlantis was by far the least of the three films. I recall thinking that it wasn't as extravagant or as imaginitive as its story warrants: too silly to take seriously but not enough to be entertaining, which is a crucial quality for films of this length that are fairly short on substance. Napierkowska did not bring much to the film.
Crainquebille impressed me a great deal--a lovely, moving film. It perhaps goes a bit beyond the believable in showing how comfortable and contented the main character is while in jail (rather than merely looking to it as a source of food and shelter in desperation later on). However, this is just a fanciful embellishment, which reminds me of an O. Henry story, "The Cop and the Anthem," that presents the same irony of the Crainquebille story, only with the basic chronology reversed.
Faces of Children was just as impressive in many respects, but I found that ultimately it relies on easy sentimentalism at the end in order to resolve the story, which stood out in contrast to Feyder's execution of the story up to that point. I was left somewhat unconvinced about Jean's bond with his stepmother.

[Sloper]

Oops, didn't know the Feyder set had its own thread... A lot of La Clé du Ciel's posts on this forum have been truncated, I think, which is a big loss.

But just to reiterate, I think I would locate the problem in the way the actress is directed, or just the fact that the story is not as centred around her as it appears to be at first. Schreck mentions Musidora in that other thread, and that's a good example of a woman who does not seem conventionally beautiful, but who performs and is directed in such a way to create an amazingly charismatic, sexy character. I don't know whether Napierkowska was capable of something similar or not, but the film she's starring in is so much more interesting than Les Vampires; or than Die Spinnen, or Lost Horizon, which Tommaso mentioned in that thread, both films which I find as boring as they are impressive.

I can well understand Gregory's reaction here - 'too silly to take seriously but not enough to be entertaining, which is a crucial quality for films of this length that are fairly short on substance' - but to me L'Atlandide is a bit like Vampyr, a genre piece by a visionary director who saw and (I think) conveyed to his audience a strange and wonderful kind of substance in this apparently ridiculous story. And Schreck's description of the unnerving sense of place in Feyder's film could also be describing Vampyr, which famously makes 'reality' seem as creepy and death-steeped as the monsters and phantoms who inhabit its margins.

[Tommaso]

And another round-up of last week's viewing:

Dirnentragödie (Bruno Rahn, 1927): the last film of this pretty unknown German director who died at an early age, and a quite impressive one. Asta Nielsen plays an ageing prostitute who falls in love with a young student cast out by his family; she loses him to a younger colleague, and finally asks her pimp to kill the younger girl. That's basically all that happens in the 113 minutes of this film; but though it's rather slow-paced, I found it rather gripping. Most of all because of Nielsen's performance: excellent in its bleakness, with some devastating moments in which she realises her lover is lost to the younger girl forever. Not an expensive production, none of the UFA sheen here, but a very realistic, often Kammerspiel-like atmosphere, and somehow I thought that this whole story would have been worthy of a remake by Fassbinder. Probably an inspiration for the Hochbaum films of the early 30s, I would guess. An additional attraction is the effective camerawork by one of the greatest pioneers of the German cinema, Guido Seeber. Not in my top 50, but definitely recommended. Try to see the old ZDF TV recording that is floating around.

Romola (Henry King, 1924): an adaptation of the George Eliot novel set in Renaissance Italy, this is a pretty conservative film in terms of camerawork (it rather looks like something from 1915), but it works wonderfully, thanks to the Gish sisters and the film having been filmed where the action takes place, i.e. in Florence, whose look at the time of the Medicis is nicely recreated here. A very nice flick in which Lillian Gish as Romola plays the daughter of a scholar who falls for a young imposter (William Powell in one of his early roles, and pretty good he is!) who makes it to a tyrant of the city, while at the same time entertaining a relationship with Tessa, a poor girl (Dorothy Gish). Nothing much to rave about artistically, but very well made, and I felt perfectly entertained. And the Gishes are beautiful as ever. Once available on an old Grapevine VHS; not sure whether they've put it onto dvd yet.

Finally, The Devil's Wheel (Grigori Kozintsev/Leonid Trauberg, 1926). This rather unexpectedly blew me out of my socks. A simple story of a sailor on leave getting into contact with the harbour city's hoodlums, this is - to take one of the motifs that occurs centrally in the film - a veritable rollercoaster ride of editing and relentless images, and this quality was also helped by the very aggressive soundtrack that graced the version I was able to see (taken from Russian TV, it seems). Only 50 minutes long - apparently two reels are missing -, its tension never subsides, and it's an impressive portrayal of the dark side of Leningrad in the 20s, which the film propagandistically condemns to destruction (literally) in the end. Breathtaking, and definitely on my list.

[myrnaloyisdope]

Anyone with thoughts on Oscar Micheaux?

Having seen Within Our Gates and Body and Soul, I find both works to be really fascinating, but frustrating in some ways as well. Within Our Gates, has some very powerful sequences, most notably the rape sequence, but has some very amateurish sort of editing and shot construction as well. Body and Soul similarly has some really great stuff too, notably Paul Robeson's performance, but the sloppily explained subplot with the twin brother, makes things very confusing. Micheaux's editing is sometimes bewildering, as basic shot continuity is ignored for some sequences, yet sometimes he makes sequences of great power that speak to an almost entirely different filmmaker. Is there missing footage somewhere that would make the two films cohesive, or is there some other explanation for Micheaux's inconsistency?

I read an article on Body and Soul, that argued that Micheaux was intentionally confusing the narrative as a sort of means of undermining conventional expectation, but if that is the case, it just comes off poorly.

Regardless, I think both films are essential, though I expect Within Our Gates, will be the one making my final list.

[Sloper]

This thread has become fairly quiet, but how would people (and especially lubitsch) feel about an extension? I was thinking maybe December 18th – from a selfish point of view, that gives me a week after the end of my teaching obligations to cram in all the stuff I haven’t watched yet… But I realise that’s the run-up to Christmas, and our list-master may have plans. And my list now has more than fifty titles on it, so I won’t kick up a fuss if we keep to December 1st as the cut-off date. Just thought I’d ask.

I was thinking of writing up some thoughts on the ‘Ford at Fox’ silents, but on looking at the set’s dedicated thread, I found that I’d largely be repeating others’ opinions – some especially relevant comments from Schreck, Tommaso, Tryavna et al in this part of the thread (and some great discussion of Ford and others on previous pages). The stuff about the Murnau influence hampering Four Sons and Hangman’s House suddenly made complete sense of my antipathy to those films. Watching them I had a really disorienting sense that they were meticulously, artfully crafted, and yet somehow devoid of any real beauty or feeling…whereas the pictorialism in The Iron Horse and 3 Bad Men felt so natural, so Ford-ian, so completely wedded to the telling of these full-blooded American stories. And the characters were human beings, not well-painted, well-animated waxworks. And the narratives didn’t seem utterly, laughably absurd (though they might have done in other hands). Those two later films feel like classic instances of a great artist enthralling himself to some ‘master’ and losing touch with the very talents you see him discovering and harnessing in his earlier work.

My love for John Ford is blossoming rather late – until recently I guiltily watched his films with cold reverence, never quite understanding the religious fervour with which so many film-makers and cinephiles seem to adore him. Then, around the start of 2010, I saw Bucking Broadway, and was so charmed by it that I had to go and re-visit some of the later classics – Drums Along the Mohawk (which I see has been much discussed and praised in the Ford at Fox thread), The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley especially – to see if I’d finally ‘get’ them. Everything that had seemed portentous and corny before now seemed sublimely beautiful, and genuinely moving – Valley in particular was a completely different film to the one I had watched and scorned as a teenager.

Anyway, enough ‘road to Damascus’ – the point is I was very eager to get my teeth into more early Ford. The synopsis for Just Pals had me reaching for the sick-bag, but this was even more of a revelation than Bucking Broadway. I watched it a second time about two days after my first viewing. What really amazed me was the subtlety of the two leads’ acting: Buck Jones, as the nogoodnik Bim, defies all the stereotypes of this kind of role, suggesting a profound kind of disaffection in his handsome, angular, melancholy face. That sounds pretentious when talking about a film like this, but the great thing about Jones’ performance is how completely natural and unaffected it is; he simply makes his character totally compelling and sympathetic with every gesture. It's very satisfying to watch him gradually emerge as a man with more energy and integrity than all the 'respectable' townsfolk put together, and to realise that this was the real cause of his seeming delinquency. The lack of exaggerated mugging from him and George Stone (as the boy) also helps to make the film very funny – and humour is one aspect of Ford’s work that I still can’t get on board with in most instances. The (very brief) scene where they attempt to kill a chicken is beautifully played. Loved that bit with the kittens, when the schoolteacher has the idea of drowning herself - very subtly done. Anyway, the film is just an all-round brilliant piece of storytelling. Nothing grandiose, no artistic pretensions, but a great work of art.

The Iron Horse seemed to me like the greatest, most archetypal of westerns, but with a love triangle / revenge plot awkwardly crowbarred in. Ford never seems as interested in the people here as he is in the building of the railroad, and it’s a shame that the latter is diluted like this – nicely played though the human story is. 3 Bad Men, on the other hand, is hard to fault. Again, the plot didn’t sound very promising to my ears, but Ford and his collaborators made it utterly beguiling: a much better marriage of historical recreation and human interest than The Iron Horse. The extended climactic shoot-out is particularly fine, mixing pathos with humour and suspense in a way that only Ford could pull off.

Been watching quite a bit lately, but nothing else I feel ready to comment on. New favourites include Storm Over Asia (gawp) and Erotikon (a strange film, maybe partly because of Paul Mercer’s wonderful but dissonant score; I’d like to watch it again silent to see if it comes over as more funny and less creepy a second time; and I’d love to hear others’ thoughts about it…). La Roue was as disappointing as J’accuse – it seems that apart from Napoleon, I just don’t like Gance very much. Wasn’t quite as enamoured of The End of St. Petersberg as I had hoped to be, but Storm and Mother will still make my list. A Page of Madness, Lonesome and The Bride of Glomdal more than met my incredibly high expectations, though I'd need to see them a few more times before verbalising my feelings about them!

[reno dakota]

. . . how would people (and especially lubitsch) feel about an extension? I was thinking maybe December 18th – from a selfish point of view, that gives me a week after the end of my teaching obligations to cram in all the stuff I haven’t watched yet…

I'm in the same position, so I would really appreciate a small extension.

[thirtyframesasecond]

There's only a few things I have left to see that I can easily get a hold of. Funny, I assumed the end of the year was the cut-off point - if it is 1 December, then it might be too late to get hold of the Borzage set, Secrets of a Soul - films that I'd wanted to watch but hadn't got around to buying (they're worth it, right?)

I'll probably start the '30s once I've exhausted what I have left to see (I'm assuming we're doing this next) but would like the extension nevertheless - still have to see the restored Metropolis on a big screen!

[swo17]

Extension thirded.

[Sloper]

You mean fourthed. (I can't believe I'm correcting swo's maths...)

[lubitsch]

Already out of sheer personal interest I shift the date in the einterest of most here as it seems to 1st January 2011, we can even see if some need a month more but then we really should close the show if this list project is ever supposed the ever reach the current decade again.
Come on folks, get going, use the long wintry evenings and spark a bit of discussion here, it's been a surprisingly quiet event after all the discussion the pre 1920s list.

[swo17]

To be perfectly honest, I feel like the '20s, more than any other decade, are filled with so many stone cold, indisputable classics that talking about them can be intimidating, and nothing I could say would bring them any more recognition really. Not to mention how little survives from the era, which makes it harder (though not impossible) to deviate too much from the established canon. I would frankly be shocked if I compared my current top 50 with anyone else's and didn't find that we had at least half our lists in common. (Well, maybe not lubitsch's.) That being said, I've tried to share some of my thoughts on less heralded works and will continue to do so as long as I can think of something original to say.

You mean fourthed. (I can't believe I'm correcting swo's maths...)

I was simply testing you to see if you would catch my mistake. Erm, yeah, that's it. I need a nap.

[Tommaso]

I appreciate the extension, too, even though my list seems to be fairly complete now and I've given up hope of making the viewing of the period as 'complete' as was possible (to a degree) with the pre-20s list. There's simply so much floating around from the 20s...

To be perfectly honest, I feel like the '20s, more than any other decade, are filled with so many stone cold, indisputable classics that talking about them can be intimidating, and nothing I could say would bring them any more recognition really.

Yes, true, I had this feeling recently when going through the CC Sternberg set. Also, the well-established classics have had quite a bit of discussion here already, and I don't feel like repeating what I said earlier in a much more vague form here; more vague because when I wrote, for instance, about the Ford films that Sloper mentioned, at least the memory was fresh as I had seen them only the evening before... Two years on, I sometimes barely remember the plot...

So I turn to an indisputable classic that I only managed to see recently, Pal Fejös' Lonesome. I had high hopes for it because of the praise it had already received here in another thread, but I simply wasn't prepared for how much this would blow me out of my socks, and so I have precisely this feeling of intimidation which swo describes above. It is simply such a beautiful and touching film and yet utterly modern for the time, making use of some avantgarde techniques in editing occasionally; but what really counts is the way that Fejös makes you feel with the characters, their joy when they meet first, their anguish on being separated, the unlikely but strangely convincing ending. Of course the film reminds one of Murnau at his best, but it has a style of its own, and the fairground scene is such a tour de force of filmmaking that it is simply astonishing even more than 80 years later. Top 20, at the very least.

And while I am talking about indisputable classics that indisputably need a dvd release at once, let me remind everyone to watch Dupont's Varieté (1925), if only because it hasn't been discussed in this thread yet, I think. While it's floating around in various forms, often truncated or otherwise hampered, I recently had the chance to see it in a good-looking and seemingly complete version taken off German TV. I was again amazed about the subtlety of Jannings' acting, easily the equal of his performances in "Der letzte Mann" and "The last command", and about how this grim and realistic film nevertheless exudes more than just one shining sparkle of style once we see the artists on their trapeze; and so does Lya de Putti (one third vamp, two thirds fragile young woman whose eyes don't only make Jannings helpless...). Karl Freund's camerawork is as astonishing as always. Certainly one of the great Weimar classics, but you probably knew that before.

[swo17]

Yes, Lonesome. Just rewatched this myself the other night (so I can still remember the plot ) though I was heavily under the influence of antihistamines at the time, so my apologies if I've misremembered something. (Loved the part where the roller coaster careened off the tracks and kept soaring right on up into the sky, where it was eaten and promptly regurgitated by an affable cartoon dragon!) Watching the film, I am hard pressed to think of any two people (and I am including my parents, me and my wife, and Jay-Z and Beyonce) whose courtship I am more rooting for than the two leads of this film, who are presented as just the most genuine, deserving people imaginable. Speaking as someone who was lonesome for a good deal of his formative years (don't worry, I'm over it now) I can completely identify with every awkward look and gesture (i.e. trying to hold hands at the fortune teller's) and with every step they take closer to familiarity ("Look at us, two normal people talking about love"). The scene where they exchange photos, when he comments on hers, just gets me in the gut every time. And then I love the statement made by the ending

SpoilerShow

that our lives have become too busy to notice even those closest to us

which I think has just become more and more relevant with time. Definitely top 20 worthy, maybe even top 10.

And thus concludes my brief review of me, erm, I mean, of the movie.

[myrnaloyisdope]

Lonesome almost manages to out-crowd The Crowd. In some ways it sort of does. By stripping down the film's events to a single day, the themes of averageness and alienation are amplified and it feels more like a slice of life. The Crowd succeeds in a lot of ways, because Vidor infuses the film with some fine stylistic touches (ie the cinema verite photography of New York, expressionistic sets, and some really inventive camera work.), and because Vidor keeps the leads very normal, but all throughout there are some more Hollywood-ish conventions. It's not a bad thing and fortunately Vidor (as per usual) is up to the task and keeps things focused. Lonesome manages to find an odd balance of being very accessible, but not really feeling like a Hollywood film. I agree with swo about how badly the viewer wants to see the lovers get together. Oh and my summer trip to Coney Island and a ride on "The Cyclone), made me appreciate that sequence all the more. I'm really hoping to see the film one day in it's restored state.

One of my favorite facets of the time period, particularly in regards to Hollywood is the willingness to incorporate European emigres and their styles into the industry. It's pretty startling and I don't think has been matched since, but at one point you had Murnau, Lubitsch, Fejos, Feyder, Sjöström, Christenson, Leni, and Stiller all making movies relatively unperturbed (save for Stiller) in Hollywood. It was a pretty special time.

As for Fejos, has anyone else watched Broadway? The version floating around is an interesting mess, although a lot of that is out of the differences between the sound and silent versions. The sound version is missing the last reel (in Technicolor), but the silent version has it. So the person who created this version used the silent version and added the existing soundtrack discs to "re-create" the sound version. It's an admirable effort, but the problem is that the soundtrack is longer than the silent version and so to compensate the "ripper" will pause the film or replay shots to compensate. I don't think I've gotten a true impression of the film, but aside from the opening credit sequence and some interesting camerawork, the film really is a disappointment compared to Lonesome.

[Tommaso]

Lonesome almost manages to out-crowd The Crowd. In some ways it sort of does. By stripping down the film's events to a single day, the themes of averageness and alienation are amplified and it feels more like a slice of life.

That's true, but still the overall effect is quite different. As soon as the lovers in Lonesome get together, they overcome this averageness, it simply doesn't concern them anymore. That's why Lonesome is after all such an achingly romantic film, despite its realism, and that's why I find it much closer to the city scenes in "Sunrise", not in content but in effect. The good old idea of love as a means of transformation perhaps.

In The Crowd however, the love of the couple proves strong enough to finally make them stay together, but only after a lot of struggles, and the typical American idea of 'having to achieve something' is far more prominent here. Vidor doesn't necessarily endorse it, but it forms such an important part of the mental makeup of the characters, especially of the husband, and tragically so because he is singularly unsuited to fulfil his own expectations, or rather those that others impose on him (that's why he isn't able to do something to reach these dreamy goals).

[swo17]

I'm not sure if The Crowd would interest me as much if not for the wonderful camerawork. (And it interests me very much.) Whereas with Lonesome and Sunrise, I'm primarily drawn to the characters, with the visuals just serving as icing on the cake.

[Sloper]

Thanks for the extension, lubitsch; very much appreciated.

Big SPOILERS for Sunrise, Lonesome and The Crowd below.

The first time round, I watched Lonesome with the Sunrise comparisons in mind, but it seemed to me closer in spirit to The Crowd; maybe somewhere in between the two. The relationship in Sunrise has a very childlike, Edenic quality; it’s a film about the loss and rediscovery of innocence. In Lonesome, the central couple are very much young (but not that young) adults, struggling to overcome the various obstacles (primarily their own insecurities) that are keeping them apart – it’s a much more down-to-earth vision of love than you get in Murnau’s film, though still quite earnestly romantic. The Crowd, then, is the most grown up of the three. I have to disagree with Tommaso about love keeping John and Mary together; it’s something more pragmatic (if I were feeling cynical I would say ‘true to life’) than that.

Notice that at the end of their Coney Island trip, when they’re travelling home on the subway, John’s proposal of marriage is sparked by an advert – for some sort of ‘dream home’ if I remember rightly. All three of the male protagonists in these films have aspirations beyond their current status, but in Sunrise and Lonesome these aspirations distract from the love relationship (or, in Fejos' film, represent a poor substitute for such a relationship); in The Crowd, the marriage is wryly figured as an integral part of that American Dream that John Sims is looking for. The snapshot we get of this marriage in those wonderful scenes in the apartment suggests that, after a short time, these two people can no longer stand each other’s company. The children keep them together, but it’s clear that the relationship is not what it was. That scene at the beach is a gently scathing portrait of a less-than-ideal family life. It’s not that Sims is unhappy exactly, but when we see him sitting there playing his ukulele he appears unmistakeably restless and frustrated. When his advertising slogan wins the competition, this seems to herald the imminent fulfilment of The Dream, but then comes the cruellest twist: prompted by these exciting new presents, the little girl runs into the street, and is crushed by a truck. The crowded, mechanised modern world re-asserts its stranglehold on the characters’ lives. And the accident does not bring John and Mary closer together; it is the love of his son (or, perhaps more accurately, and selfishly, his son’s faith in him) which saves John’s life.

When the family is reunited at the end, it is not by love, but by the shared experience of the clown act. Note the echo here of John and Mary’s initial bonding experience on the bus, when they both laughed at the clown with the billboard hung over him. Now John is eking out a living in exactly the same way, and perhaps the point at the end is that they are now laughing with, rather than at, the clowns on stage: their delusions of superiority, or of being capable of achieving anything remarkable, have been thoroughly stamped out; they are not a special couple, but just two more rocking, laughing heads in that amorphous crowd we see at the end, like so many jack-in-the-boxes. As the camera pulls back in that last shot, we (the audience) are invited to see ourselves mirrored on the screen. Just as Sims has had to acknowledge the clown within himself, and laugh at the comedy of his life in order to stave off despair, so we are invited to acknowledge our status as mere faces in the crowd. Crucially, however, this ending does not send us out laughing, but rather with the sobering impression that life is made endurable, not by fulfilling our personal dreams, not by finding our heart’s desire (to use Lonesome’s phrase), not by nurturing a family (which is important in Sunrise, and is hinted at by the doll in Lonesome), but by sacrificing individuality altogether and fading into the mass of humanity. There’s more than one way to read the tone of that ending, but I find it really chilling. Even the suggestion that Sims will now find employment – thanks to the random contact he makes with his fellow spectator – comes across as a “welcome to the crowd” moment. His vague talent for writing slogans, which until now he seems to have regarded as a way of distinguishing himself from the crowd, has become the very thing that pulls him back into it.

It’s significant that John and Mary’s entire courtship (leading up to the proposal) takes place at Coney Island, where life is an endless succession of laughs and thrills (including the sexual thrills of the tunnel of love) into which the mundane and dreary are not allowed to intrude. The subway, of course, is mundane and dreary, hence John’s enthusiastic grab for the idealised dream he sees in the advert. The implication of the subsequent events seems to be that the relationship is put under intolerable strain by the demands of everyday reality; but again, it’s interesting that the concept of communal entertainment (this time of a much more communal, more passive variety) is brought back at the end, but this time not so much an idealised illusion, more a necessary anaesthetic.

In some ways the fun fair serves a similar purpose in Sunrise and Lonesome: it, and the forbidding urban environment of which it is a part, serve both to bring the lovers together and tear them apart; it is a mixture of friend and enemy. The Man in Sunrise is lured by the excitements offered by The City, so different and so thrilling compared to the mundane toil of life at home. But when they get to the city, they find all sorts of things that connect it to home: there’s a link between that loaf bread which O’Brien eyes on the table at home, and the piece of bread he gives to Gaynor as a peace offering in the restaurant; at the fun fair, he finds himself playing the farmer when he catches the pig, and then reluctantly does the peasant dance with his wife; just as the girl from the city preys on him at home, so Gaynor is now preyed upon by a man from the city; their un-worldly innocence is evident throughout the photographer scene, and is what makes this an important ‘re-connecting’ experience for them; and of course there’s the famous shot where the busy streets turn into a flowery meadow. The man is learning that he cares more about his wife than about the attractions of the city: she turns out to be a lot more fun than the actual city girl. There isn’t anything inherently great or exciting about the city – indeed the way it’s designed evokes a dream-landscape rather than a real place – it just happens to be where they are when they patch up their marriage.

What’s interesting is that the transitional space between the village and the city – the lake – is made out to be the real source of danger, from the tourists’ arrival on the boat, to the almost-attempted-murder scene, to the storm at the end. The storm gives the film an exciting climax: for the couple to simply arrive home and tell the city girl to pack up and leave would not quite be enough, partly because it would be un-dramatic, but also because the husband still needs to be confronted with the possible consequences of what he had been planning. So I’m not sure I would clamour to read the lake as symbolic…but maybe it suggests that impulse to change, that yearning for something better, which is a feature of all these films, and always seems to threaten the protagonists’ chances for happiness.

The man's aspiration is a very small feature in Lonesome, but highlighted forcefully when we are first introduced to Jim. By his bed, on the floor, is an issue of ‘Popular Mechanics’, and later we see him listlessly working on what looks like a model of some piece of manufacturing equipment. Like John Sims, Jim puts the pursuit of his ambitions to one side so as to have fun, and finds love as a consequence. Because I was thinking so much of The Crowd while watching Lonesome, I was half expecting things to go wrong here. Fejos’ film observes this burgeoning romance with something of Vidor’s sardonic irony: there are definite hints, at times, that Jim might be taking this more seriously than Mary. On a second viewing, I could see what was really going on here. Both of these people, perhaps because of their prolonged loneliness, are insecure, but they show it in different ways. Mary is guarded, elusive, always wearing a smile which sometimes seems more of a mask than a gesture of affection; Jim is wise-cracking, nervy and at times painfully over-earnest, as when he utters the “here are we, talking about love” line swo mentioned, and Mary responds, “let’s just have fun”. When he tells her she is the girl of his dreams (or something to that effect), she responds, “and I think you’re a marvellous guy”.

Things are perhaps moving too fast for Mary, and I guess the jackrabbit race, and the subsequent fire on Mary’s train, is open to obvious symbolic readings: Mary faints from the fear and over-excitement, and Jim, trying to push his way to Mary’s side, is arrested. The moment before all this where he shies away from the speedboats is interesting – I can’t see what coins he has in his hand here, but is the point that he could only afford one ticket, and is afraid of letting Mary go off on her own (as we then see on the jackrabbit ride, which turns out to be far more dangerous than the speedboats)?

In some ways, this portrayal of the relationship is in line with stereotypes of the male/female dynamic, where the man’s job is to pursue and the woman’s is to ‘play hard to get’ (a dynamic played with in The Crowd and Sunrise as well). You might even see this dynamic as extending to the conclusion of the film, where Jim plays an over-earnest, sentimental tune (“I’ll be loving you, always”), Mary tries to shut him up, and he comes and bursts the door down. To paraphrase The Quiet Man, there are no locks and bolts between them now – the walls, literal and metaphorical, that they and others had put up between them, have been breached, and they can now share those sad, private (and suspiciously similar) little spaces we had seen them being ‘lonesome’ in before. So here, the city and its crowds are seen as both uniting and separating the couple, but ultimately the things that separate them are only extensions of their own insecurities. The very apartment block which seemed so confining and de-humanising before is what re-unites them at the end.

I love the deft characterisation at the beginning: Mary so well-ordered, her clothes laid out the night before, alarm set for the right time, dressed and made up in the space of a dissolve; Jim scattering himself all over his room, repeatedly forgetting how late he is and realising he doesn’t have time to do certain things, trying to button his shirt and do something else at the same time (this is all hilariously similar to my morning routine…). And the later portrayal of solitary ennui is note-perfect: those nightmarishly slow evenings when you could do all sorts of things, but can’t actually bear to do any of them, and then suddenly realise you’re craving human company. There’s a nice sense of panic and urgency running through the film as well, from the opening shot of the alarm bell (and the lightning storm at the end), to the repeated images of clock faces and other revolving objects (the big wheel and giant spinning top behind Jim and Mary at the beach, which reminded me of that allusion in Brief Encounter to the song, ‘Let the Great Big World Keep Turning’). The sense that the rest of the world is having fun without them, and the neat way this is reversed when the couple are left alone on the empty beach, and then turned into a nightmare vision of swarming, faceless crowds, blinding rain and lightning, paper streamers flying randomly, as if the whole world has descended into chaos now that these two can’t be together, and then the closure at the end when they are safely stowed away in the protective confines of the apartment – despite the flamboyance, it’s all very true to life, as swo says.

And yes, I was amazed at how intensely I wanted these two to be together, and how genuinely afraid I was that the film might have a downbeat ending (which I would normally be cheering for). That said, I think the other two films, though they don’t create as much suspense, have a more profound emotional impact.

I had put Sunrise quite low down on my list, but I’m glad I watched it again yesterday (the Czech print – at first glance, quite inferior to the Movietone version, but it’s nice to have it) as I’d forgotten just how heart-breaking it is. That childlike quality I mentioned earlier has a lot to do with it. There’s something incredibly poignant about the innocence of this story, the ‘too good to be true’ aspect to the couple’s making-up process, the wife’s easily won but completely genuine forgiveness, the man’s boyish delight at being happily married again.

And I always find The Crowd an emotionally harrowing experience, all the more so because of the irony that pervades every scene and every intertitle, and perhaps because of the Hollywood elements myrnaloy mentioned, which for me only throw into relief what a remarkable, uncompromising film this is. James Murray is brilliant in the central role, and maybe the circumstances of his life play a part here; and of course the direction and camerawork count for an awful lot; but there’s something about his portrayal of this cheerful, naïve, rather small-minded man’s descent into disillusionment, poverty and despair that haunts me. I’d be hard pushed to say which of these three films is, in any objective sense, ‘the best’, but The Crowd is definitely the one nearest the top of my list. The other two offer very beautiful, touching, hopeful accounts of love (and life in the modern world); but The Crowd’s bracing gaze into the abyss leaves a deeper impression.

[Wombatz]

Great stuff on the crowd, I agree with most of what you say, reading only the ending a little differently: I wouldn't say the family reunite. She goes out with him, so she has forgiven him for the moment, but to me it feels like his work getting the relationship back and running again has just begun. And then I don't think that the fact you're just part of the crowd after all is such a bitter thought during that pullback at the end. To me it says: We all laugh at the same things, we're equal, don't fight your humanity. But yes, I also find it harrowing, because to me it's clear (like you point out, the small contact he makes) that the Murray character will start all over once he's on his feet again. Plus the circus bodes even worse than the funfair for a matchmaking place, since in it you're just consumers . . .