mgmax Reviews

The Rescue (1929)

Unknown near-masterpiece deserves to be shown

[9/10 · 27 August 2018]

You might expect Joseph Conrad to be an author whose darkly ironic tales of colonialism were turned to romantic mush by the silent movies, yet here's an outstanding, completely unknown 1929 silent by Herbert Brenon that conveys much of his worldview in the course of a tale of desperate sea adventure. Colman plays Tom Lingard, a sort of Bogartish, cynical both-sides-of-the-law trader in the South Seas; a yacht run by a rich jerk gets becalmed near a dangerous island, Colman wants to keep the navy (any navy) out of his territory and sets out to rescue them, falling in love with Lili Damita as the rich jerk's bored wife. (When Ralph Richardson played Lingard in Outcast of the Islands, he was more Old Testament Patriarch than To Have and Have Not.)

Given the date, I worried this would be the silent version of a sound film, and painfully dull; what it actually looks like is that they wrote a talkie script, then filmed it silently anyway. So there are scenes that are a bit static at first, and overreliant on titles, yet it soon grows more visual and, more importantly, retains Conrad's sensibility, depicting the blundering, destructive ways of western powers in the east without holding back for the sake of the romance. A mature, well-made film (said to be missing one reel, but there is only one jump in the narrative that looks like a scene or two is missing) that deserves rediscovery as a major late silent. Shown at Capitolfest in 2018, and mostly in very good condition, this would be a worthy title for any festival or archival series.

The Man with the Iron Fists (2012)

Worst movie of the 2010s so far

[1/10 · 9 September 2013]

It's all about having the right friends, which is how RZA, who cannot write, act or direct, got an Orson Welles-like triple threat debut. Normally this is where I would tell you what the plot is about, but 5 minutes into it you've had more opening narration than Dune yet are still completely baffled as to why the clan which has been hired to safeguard the gold apparently plans to rob itself of the gold which someone else has after all. So let's ignore the plot, which is full of such bafflements (why can an R-rated movie show countless eviscerations but not breasts? what is Russell Crowe doing here? what weight loss plan did he use after this to get down to Jor-El's size?) It is a kung fu mishmashup a la Tarantino, borrowing a number of things directly from Kill Bill but with none of its light-fingered thievery, but what it's about, if anything, is letting a rapper pose as a kung fu master who can float through the air and kick butt despite the fact that he lost his arms halfway through the movie. That's how he becomes the man with the iron fists but, as my son said, "If your movie is called The Man With the Iron Fists, shouldn't he use his iron fists before the last five minutes of the movie?" Basically a numbing parade of endless "give me a break" CGI-driven fight scenes interrupted by cardboard dialogue in the service of an incomprehensible plot that isn't going anywhere you care about getting to, this not only suggests that RZA shouldn't give up his day job, but the lackluster, uninteresting choice of music on the track calls into question his contributions to Kill Bill and strongly suggest that Tarantino was in charge of that department on his film, too.

Yellow Pass (1928)

Visually impressive, emotional melodrama

[7/10 · 20 June 2011]

In 1928, this was one of the first Soviet films to reach the west and considered on a par with Potemkin; Variety felt it was so important that they reviewed it twice (once from the artistic perspective and once from the average exhibitor's jaundiced viewpoint). If not the stylistic groundbreaker that Potemkin was, it's an impressive work of both visual beauty and emotional impact (rare among Soviet silents), that warrants rediscovery for itself and for its director, whose first solo effort (after co-directing Miss Mend with Boris Barnet) this was.

Maria (Anna Sten) and Jacob (I.I. Koval Samborski) are a happy peasant couple soon to become unhappy; the local baron, who rented them the rockiest piece of land this side of Man of Aran, has a daughter, who forces Sten to abandon her own family and wetnurse hers. She in turn has a husband (Vladimir Fogel of Miss Mend) who lusts after the peasant girl whose bare shoulder he's exposed to on a regular basis, and all this leads to Maria having a fight with her husband, trying to flee the home, and winding up with the infamous Yellow Ticket certifying her as a member of the profession of prostitute. (Note: this film bears no resemblance to any other film of that title, most of which are based on a famous American play of the teens.)

Clearly Ozep, in devising this Zolaesque story, was looking for material that would fly with the regime, and there's a perfectly good expose of the decadence of the Tsarist regime here, chaining peasants to aristocratic whim just as the land is chained with barbed wire, and using their bodies for feeding or pleasure indiscriminately. If Ozep's visual lyricism about peasants and the land doesn't go to the florid extremes of, say, Dovzhenko, on the other hand it has a sharp point which it makes with precision and a mordant wit, which you can't really say of Earth.

In fact, though the scenes of Maria and Jacob's peasant life have a rough-edged believability (as in his next film, The Living Corpse, Ozep is a great caster of weatherbeaten, non-actor extras) and quite a lot of visual beauty, the strongest section of the film is when Maria sinks into the profession for which she mistakenly has the ticket. It's worth noting that Ozep made three films in a row with substantial brothel sequences (The Living Corpse and The Murderer Dmitri Karamasoff), and in each case he seems to evince a real, ahem, love for the milieu in all its forced joviality, wanton desire, and seedy decadence, music and lust and self-loathing combining for a vivid impression of manic-depressive hell on earth. Sten, too, reaches the high point of her performance here, trading Maria's customary cow-like blank stare for a despondent world-weariness.

The Living Corpse (1929)

Masterful account of a decent man alienated from grotesque society

[9/10 · 20 June 2011]

Tolstoy's The Living Corpse, once a very popular play (John Barrymore did it on Broadway), starts with what could be the premise of a legal expose— the main character, Protassow (played by the director V.I. Pudovkin), wants to divorce his wife so she's free to marry her aristocratic lover, but both church and civil divorce law conspire to make this simple matter between adults illogically difficult.

But what it's really about is moral alienation; throughout the story, legal solutions to the dilemma present themselves, but Protassow finds them all so degrading, hypocritical, alien to his sense of decency that he just can't go along with the "sensible" thing to do in a corrupt society. In many ways it reminded me of the Coen Brothers' latest (and outstanding) film, A Serious Man, likewise driven by a wife's desire to divorce and marry her lover— Protassow is trying to be a serious man, an ethical and responsible man, but people keep turning up in front of him saying "Here's the sensible thing to do," which invariably really means, "Here's the sleazy thing it would be really, really convenient for me if you would corrupt yourself by doing."

Film history, on no particular evidence, has awarded Pudovkin credit for most of this film, when in fact writer-director Fyodor Otsep/Fedor Ozep was a more prestigious figure at this time and it has clear similarities to his previous and next films, The Yellow Ticket and The Murderer Dmitri Karamasoff. Although one can see Pudovkinesque touches in some montage sequences, the style of the film is more subjectively psychological than didactically Soviet- Hegelian, mirroring the mental state of its main character.

When he's dark and moody, the film is too— capturing a sick bourgeois society with a mordant eye for grotesqueries. When Protassow goes to a tavern, the first thing he sees is a sailor getting drunk while his child begs him to come home. And the three pimps who offer to help him by setting up a scene of adultery to facilitate the divorce are gargoyles straight out of George Grosz, particularly one with what looks like a double-wide set of teeth. The sinister politesse with which they try to transact their business is the equal of anything in Pabst or Lang for moral rot— and equally Weimar-Germanic in feel. (The film was actually shot in Germany by a Soviet production company.)

But when he gets a taste of freedom from his intolerable situation— as when he visits a gypsy dance club— the style goes manic in a manner that looks much less like his fellow Bolsheviks, and far more like that of Ozep's old White Russian colleagues like Alexander Volkoff and V.I. Tourjansky, who were by then working in France. The rapid cutting suggests Volkoff's Kean or Gance's Napoleon (on which both Volkoff and Tourjansky assisted), while the hand-held camera-work suggesting exhilaration or agitation in several sequences reminds one not only of Napoleon but of Dmitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant.

To have made a film of such psychological acuity, in which the drama comes from inner states rather than outward events of the plot, was rare enough in the silent days, though others (notably Stiller and Pabst) certainly did it. But it is hard to think of another film in which those inner states are melded so completely with the style of the film, and in such a varied and visually innovative fashion. It's one of those late silents that leave you marveling at the medium as it existed— at its end.

The Mist (2007)

Even in black and white, a pedestrian mis(t)fire

[4/10 · 27 October 2009]

The one possibly distinctive thing about The Mist was shot down by the studio and can only be seen on the 2-DVD set: a black and white version. What looks like smog in the color version takes on a silvery menace of nothingness in black and white, and Darabont's intention here-- basically to make a Twilight Zone episode-- becomes clear and, at times, visually effective. Nevertheless, this is a misfire which owes most of its flaws to King's original story, but is not helped by Darabont's flat, unconvincing direction, which desperately needs a touch of Cloverfield-era rawness to transcend its TV movie feel.

The blue collar locals are caricatured as dimwits who are more or less instant prey for a religious nutcase; and possibilities for dramatic tension between characters with reasonable opposing views are tossed away (the most intelligent opponent of the hero is done away with quickly). Virtually all the speaking characters quickly wind up in the hero's camp (even though we've seen little reason in their characters why they're all so rationalist and others aren't)-- yet the logic or necessity of the hero's choices are not at all clear.

All that could be forgiven if the movie was... scary! Here we have to start with blame for King-- it's a real letdown that a mist that could have contained anything turns out mainly to have giant rubber bugs in it. The menace of the mist dissipates the moment we first see CGI tentacles. Add in the explanation eventually given for what's going on and this is Lovecraft Lite without a real sense of bottomless awfulness hiding in the Mist.

The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador (1912)

Surprisingly self-reflexive mystery film for 1912

[7/10 · 13 October 2009]

After watching the two Leonce Perret films in the Gaumont set released by Kino, the word that seemed to sum him up for me is "cerebral." I don't mean that there's psychological depth such as you might find in Scandinavian films of the teens here; the characters in both are more or less the standard two-dimensional types of Victorian melodrama, vigorously portrayed by French actors with obvious stage training, but types nonetheless.

But the films take a cool, methodical approach to melodramatic tales that others (not least of them Perret's coworker Louis Feuillade) would have made more lurid. That's both their weakness and their strength, for movies of 1912-3; they are carefully worked out, logical, and thus unusually credible for melodramas of their time. If the delight of Feuillade's serials is the sense that any social order could be overturned at any moment, part of the satisfaction of Perret's is this sense that his world is so solid.

Both films on the set are crime films, that genre which simultaneously presents a vision of the world's proper order and of its subversion. In The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador, which runs about 45 minutes, a guardian (played by Perret himself) conspires to steal his ward's fortune in a manner that turns violent; she winds up in a sort of catatonia, and to jog her memory, a film is made of the events and shown to her (and us). More could have been made of this theme of a film within a film, how true what we see is, etc., but it's pretty remarkable that it's being done at all in 1912.

The one major flaw in this film is Perret's own casting-- plump and genial-looking, he's a natural comedian (which he was, in fact), and he doesn't exude the cold Victorian heartlessness the part wants. Still, the open air photography and the clinically precise staging of events in medium shot make this an unusually fluid and lucid film for 1912, that could easily have come from five years later.

L'enfant de Paris (1913)

Remarkable, fascinating 1913 melodrama

[8/10 · 13 October 2009]

I first heard of this film in an interview thirty years ago with Edward Gory (imdb is trying to correct my spelling, that should be g-o-r-e-y), and it's hard to imagine a more perfect audience for this movie, with its tale of an innocent little girl who loses her parents (one in war, the other to the usual collapse Victorian wives succumb to) and winds up in the hands of scoundrels, only to acquire a purehearted protector in their ranks. (He is, in a nod to Hugo, a slight hunchback.)

The unspooling of this melodrama is hypnotic, in Perret's clear-eyed and skillful telling; even so well-crafted an American film as Traffic in Souls from the same year seems remote and unsteady compared to the clean, perfectly efficient visuals and editing here. That said, it is a modest disappointment that the little girl-- a charmingly capable miniature Bernhardt, able to pull off every Victorian stage gesture never seen in real children-- becomes little more than a prop over time; her plight is never milked for the emotional effect it could have. If there's an apparent flaw in Perret's work-- comparing it not to other 1913 films but to the later teens films it seems the peer of-- it's that he doesn't seem as interested in his actors as you'd like him to be. They're all obviously skilled, and play their types perfectly to type, and he shoots them in medium shot so we can actually see their faces; but there's no reason for a movie called The Child of Paris to be decorous in its playing-- it ought to pull out all the stops and jerk tears like Griffith a few years later. What starts as a serial seems to end as a neatly solved puzzle.

Still, Kino's release of this film in its Gaumont set is an enormously important release that does some serious rewriting of the standard film history.

A Sailor-Made Man (1921)

Lloyd working his way toward being a master of feature comedies

[7/10 · 1 September 2008]

This early Lloyd feature plays more like an extended short, but shows Lloyd beginning to grasp how to shape material for length and dramatic effect, not just slapstick hijinks. He plays a spoiled rich kid, which is never as sympathetic as when he plays the poor young go- getter, who falls for a tycoon's daughter but somehow winds up enlisting in the Navy at the same time. The early machinations to get him into the Navy aren't that good, fairly slapsticky teens-short stuff. (Mild spoilers ahead.)

For a reel or two the main plot is laboriously hauled into position, with both Lloyd and the girl sailing separately near the same papier-mache kingdom of an eastern Rajah, and friendship established between Lloyd and a big gorilla of a fellow sailor-- which is nothing special in itself, but the kind of quieter, character-driven stuff that features need to feel more substantial than short films.

Finally the girl is kidnapped by the rajah, and Lloyd comes to the rescue in antics rather reminiscent of his short Somewhere in Turkey. This part is fast-paced action with some of his most dexterous physical humor I've ever seen, and my kids and I laughed throughout the second half. A Sailor-Made Man may not be among Lloyd's stronger features, but it clearly shows him as an up-and-comer with the versatility to handle both physical slapstick and credible dramatic/romantic material, and no one who saw it then was likely surprised by the outstanding films that soon followed.

Good Day for a Hanging (1959)

Minor but thoughtful High Noon wannabe for Fred MacMurray

[6/10 · 1 September 2008]

A sort of modest High Noon imitation which shows how even a fairly routine western back then could have some interesting things on its mind. Fred MacMurray is the new marshal of a town, and the witness to the killing of the previous one during a bank robbery, which means he's front and center in terms of responsibility for the impending hanging of the kid who did it, a local boy gone bad (Robert Vaughan). His High Noon moment comes when the whole town starts to get a liberal conscience about the kid's lack of proper upbringing, and starts to want to let him go, while only MacMurray stands up for hardcore law and order values.

If the politics of the film are as anachronistic as the tidiness of the supposed western town (which feels like a soporific 50s sitcom suburb as much as it does anything on the prairie), the clash of 50s juvenile delinquent-movie progressive attitudes and a Dirty Harry/Reaganesque law and order type is strikingly ahead of its time. Or maybe, like High Noon, it's making a blacklist/McCarthyism parallel, except here it's justifying following the law (ie, naming names) to a T even when it makes you unpopular with those who would cut the bad guys some slack. Anyway, Nathan Juran is no poetic western stylist, and Fred MacMurray is stalwart but not as intensely compelling as, say, Randolph Scott, but it's an interesting little movie nonetheless.

Emma (1932)

Effective soaper from a unique Hollywood star

[6/10 · 1 September 2008]

I find Marie Dressler vehicles fascinating, not because I entirely enjoy watching her (she's kind of scary) but I find it so interesting that glossy MGM had a star who was aimed at that whole class of old-before-their-time, world-weary housewives and mothers who would put on their frumpy best, walk in ill-fitting shoes after a long day of doing things for everyone but themselves, and sit down for 75 minutes of intense identification with one of their own. Once labor-saving devices and family planning conquered America, women stopped being so tired and worn at such early ages, and so there's never been another star quite like her; the equivalent audience is seeing things like Mamma Mia! today, fantasies of late-middle-aged youth, not premature old age.

In this one she's a housekeeper who is really the only mother a bunch of rich kids ever had; the dad finally marries her in old age, she inherits the estate, and three of the kids come after her to get the money. The setup doesn't entirely bear scrutiny (the spoiled grown kids hardly act like they've even met her before, let alone were raised by her) but it doesn't matter, it's all about her frumpy-old-lady common sense telling the world what's what, a Mr. Deeds for the support hose set, and you can see why her audience ate it up and she got an Oscar nomination.

Little Man, What Now? (1934)

Poetic, heartfelt masterpiece of Hollywood cinema

[9/10 · 17 November 2007]

If you know anything about this film, it's that it portrays the circumstances that led to the rise of the Nazis at a surprisingly early point (1934), long before even Borzage became the first filmmaker in Hollywood to take on that subject directly in Three Comrades and The Mortal Storm toward the end of the 30s. Actually, it's clear from the clues we're given that the menace always at the edge of the story is a violent socialist uprising, not a fascist one. (The talk is always of "equality," not of making Germany great again.) But that in no way invalidates the powerful and even subversive thing Borzage does here .

Like all of Borzage's most famous late silent and early sound films, it follows a young couple in the early, dazed days of love and sexual infatuation; Lammchen (Margaret Sullavan) and Hans (Douglass Montgomery) are first seen at a doctor's office (the clear implication is that they hurriedly got married because of pregnancy), and though money is tight, and Hans already shows signs of worry which Lammchen refuses to share, they enjoy an idyllic afternoon doing nothing by a forest stream.

However, reality soon begins closing in. Hans' boss is a laughing sadist who has hired three single men in hopes that one will marry his daughter; Hans tries to keep his marriage secret to protect his job, but every little betrayal cuts like a knife and the truth is soon out. He and Lammchen go to live with his stepmother in Berlin, but Hans' moral disapproval of her loose lifestyle is obvious, and we figure out long before they do that Jachman is a pimp using the stepmother's spacious apartments (with her connivance) as a brothel. Hans finds work at a department store; but his job hangs by a thread each week and his self- confidence erodes.

The lesson of Borzage's great late silents was that love could conquer death (Seventh Heaven), betrayal (Street Angel), disability (Lucky Star), even wind, sleet and snow (The River), a message that only works with booming organ and the dream state of silence. Which is what makes it shocking when Hans gets swept up in the anger and resentment of the soapbox agitator who pops up at different moments in the movie, and he finds himself holding a rock-- or a knife. He doesn't know what we know-- the unspeakable depths to which an ambitious young man's resentment could take him in the years ahead in Hitler's Germany-- but he knows enough to know that of all the ways he could betray Lammchen, the worst would be becoming the sort of man who picks up a knife at a political rally, ready to take out his anger on any convenient target like a policeman... or a religious minority. And in that moment, Borzage acknowledges for the first time that the greatest threat to grandiose, silent movie-sized love isn't some outside adversity, but the danger in your own heart.

The biggest drawback to the film is the fact that Douglass Montgomery is one of those handsome, callow young juveniles with excessively clean diction of the early 30s, who don't play at all well with today's audiences. Yet to my mind that works in the context of the film; a real movie star would have reserves of charm which would serve to assure us that everything would be all right, but Montgomery really does seem ordinary and thus the risk-- that he could starve, that he could turn vicious, that he could abandon Lammchen one way or another-- seems real. And despite his limitations, it really is a heartfelt performance, and clearly the high point of Montgomery's promising, but not especially successful, career.

The imbalance in the film is that opposite him, in her second film and first of four Borzage roles, is Margaret Sullavan, a 1000-watt bulb whenever she comes on screen. But several sequences involving her take Borzage back to the visual heights of the silent cinema, pushing the dramatic credibility of a realistic talkie but paying huge dividends in establishing a metaphorical mood of dreamlike romance. One is one of the loveliest sequences in all 1930s film: Hans comes home to find Lammchen has run away, he tracks her to a carousel (shades of Liliom), and as she continues to spin out of his reach, distraught and guilty, she pieces together the tale, a sentence at a time-- she'd gone to buy salmon with their last few marks-- but (being pregnant) she was so hungry that she ate her half right there-- and then she ate some of his-- and more of his-- and all of it! Humor and tender forgiveness blend beautifully with a dynamic visual setup to produce one of the most charming and affecting romantic scenes in movie history, a high point in Borzage's late 20s through 1930s streak as the premier poet of young love, in all its gaucheries and foibles, of golden age Hollywood.

The Stoning (1915)

Exceptional realistic drama from early feature era

[8/10 · 19 July 2007]

Report from Cinesation 2003: 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 (The Greatest Question and The Tiger Girl) 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 naiveté 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.

You Are Guilty (1923)

Somber, philosophical early silent drama

[5/10 · 30 May 2007]

Report from Cinevent 2007: YOU ARE GUILTY! (**) James Kirkwood as one of two half-brothers, the other of whom has a mustache and, by the law of silent movie brothers, is therefore no good. Mustache brother embezzles, good brother takes the fall to spare (step-)Mother and hits the hobo trail, and soon he's haunted by The Whispering Chorus-- wait, that was another, not dissimilar movie. Not-bad 1923 silent in the kind of somber, philosophical-slash-depressed vein that pretty much vanished from Hollywood for good later in the decade; even when films like this aren't that great, they offer a fascinating window into the last moment when popular culture still reflected a general view that life was hard, sad and unlikely to end well.

Running Wild (I) (1927)

Younger, more active Fields in fine silent comedy

[8/10 · 30 May 2007]

Report from Cinevent 2007: RUNNING WILD (****) One of the few W.C. Fields silents NOT remade as a Paramount talkie-- though the setup is awfully close to The Man on the Flying Trapeze, with Fields as an office drudge with a messy desk and a wife and pampered stepson who have him beaten down. The turning point of the plot takes it in a more visual direction, though-- his inner lion is released by a hypnotist and he literally runs wild, delivering comeuppance to all his tormentors in a lengthy comedy-action sequence. It had the audience in stitches, and showed that while his silents lack one of the talkies' great assets-- his voice-- they also had sides of his persona lacking in the films made when he was older and less agile.

The Oyster Princess (1919)

Visually extravagant knockabout farce

[7/10 · 22 December 2006]

Who knew that before Lubitsch was Lubitsch... he was Doctor Seuss? Yet my wife, passing by the TV as I watched The Wildcat, mentioned the same movie that had been on my mind-- that strange lone Seuss live-action film from 1953, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.

The comedies in Kino's "Lubitsch in Berlin" DVD set are more funny-strange than funny haha, but the strange is so unique and striking that you may not mind that the humor tends to be on the goofy level of The Monkees TV show. The mature Lubitsch style is so consistently smooth and sophisticated that you'd never guess the same hand had been behind these wild, chaotic, lavishly cartoonish films, which look more like something made by a Tashlin or Jerry Lewis let utterly loose than a wry, sophisticated comedy of manners like Heaven Can Wait or Ninotchka.

The earliest films are the pair of short features starring one Ossi Oswalda, apparently known as the German Mary Pickford, though her knockdown comedic persona suggests Mabel Normand or other gals who blended right in with the boys at Keystone, and her rounded figure is somewhere west of Mabel and east of Fatty. The tone of the comedy is very much like Keystone or other American film comedy of the time-- aimed at mischievous 12-year- old boys of all ages, with comics going through the motions of dramatic situations, but not really investing any dramatic weight in sex, marriage, money, class or anything else grownup. But it's Keystone with sets by Max Reinhardt's theater, a level of rococo visual elaborateness utterly unlike any American film comedy.

In The Oyster Princess Oswalda's a spoiled American brat first seen smashing all the furniture in the room with great gusto. Her indulgent tycoon papa decides that what she needs is a titled European husband, and so they are led to a candidate in an impoverished prince living in a coldwater flat in New York. (The irony is that Lubitsch would shortly become professionally involved with an actress, Pola Negri, who was one of those who made marrying a prince standard silent diva behavior.)

The prince's valet is sent to check out the American heiress, but annoyed at his reception, eventually decides to play the part of prince himself. You can imagine this as the premise of a 30s Lubitsch comedy, sophisticated and delicately risqué about sexual attraction across class lines, but that would be nothing like the slapstick romp that follows, which is more like letting a manic four-year-old loose in a mansion. There's a great deal of running around to relatively little comic end, though frequently it's quite beautiful when, say, masses of servants march in lockstep through the fanciful sets. This visual invention-- which again calls up comparisons to graphic artists (Seuss, Cliff Sterett's abstract Sunday comics for Polly And Her Pals) more than any other filmmaker-- makes The Oyster Princess far more of a treat than its goofy clowning would be in a plainer-shot comedy.

MILD SPOILER AHOY: Interestingly, like Ford's Straight Shooting (which contains things repeated in The Searchers 40 years later), the movie ends with one of those perfect examples of a director first exploring a situation he would return to in his mature style-- wedding- night consummation as the climax (so to speak) of the plot.

This recurs in Lubitsch's The Smiling Lieutenant-- Chevalier, whose princess bride (Miriam Hopkins) has been a cold fish, has turned his interest elsewhere; while the frigid princess has finally warmed up (in fact she's rarin' to go) but can't seem to make him realize the fact. There the dramatic climax comes out of marital miscommunication, shyness versus worldliness, distinctly human emotions-- and it's one of the most touching examples of the Lubitsch Touch in action. Here's it's just an occasion for sniggering-- and the father ends the movie with a wink big enough for Beavis and Butthead to have gotten it seven blocks away. They're gonna do it, hehehe.

I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918)

Interesting, but inconclusive, sexual comedy of errors

[5/10 · 22 December 2006]

I DON'T WANT TO BE A MAN is less visually extravagant than The Oyster Princess (the film on which it is paired on Kino's DVD in the US), but a little more realistic and solid. Ossi Oswalda, the so-called German Mary Pickford, is a bored and petulant teen; a very strict tutor has been sent to watch her, she dresses like a man to escape and go on the town, and winds up spending the evening at a jazz club with her tutor.

SPOILER AHOY: There's a germ of a Victor/Victoria-type comedy here, but it's somewhat flubbed by the fact that it's so hard to read the sexual politics-- Ossi dressed as a man and the tutor wind up cuddling and kissing, yet the movie doesn't seem to be saying that he's homosexual (since they wind up together-- female Ossi and the tutor) at the fade out. So was that normal behavior of two guys hanging out in 1918 Germany? (Try to imagine, say, Mabuse and one of his underlings cuddling.) Did he see her as a person for the first time because he didn't see her as a girl and his pupil? No particular evidence of that dramatic situation on screen.

I Don't Want To Be a Man shows Lubitsch coming closer to the real world, but as would have been the case if Keystone had tried to adapt Edith Wharton, say, he doesn't yet know what to do with it. And, most crucially, he doesn't yet have the actress capable of being more, dramatically and sexually, than a hyperactive tomboy. With his next film, the preposterous and Count Floyd-worthy Eyes of the Mummy ("What do you mean there's no mummy in it?"), he would meet that actress-- Pola Negri.

The Wildcat (1921)

Negri starts to move Lubitsch toward character-driven comedy

[7/10 · 22 December 2006]

One thing that strikes you as you watch the early Lubitsch comedies recently released on DVD in the US by Kino is-- how did Lubitsch come to have such an extravagant visual style, only to give it up a few years later? The later Lubitsch movies are certainly handsome, coming as they mostly do from Paramount and MGM, the chicest of the Hollywood studios. But for all the exotic places depicted in his films, it never occurs to him in later years to depict them with wild curlicues of plaster, fortresses that look like birthday cakes, staircases that descend a quarter-mile amid running water, as he does the European fantasy-land in The Wildcat.

The Wildcat is a sort of burlesque on a genre of military romances buried so deeply in the mists of memory that they still seem familiar even when it's hard to think of an actual example of what's being parodied (The Desert Song?). There's a fortress on the edge of mountainous wilds, and there's a handsome young officer who's been exiled there because of his love life. And then there's a tribe of wild mountain people including a tempestuous daughter, played by Pola Negri, with whom the officer will fall in love.

As with the mistaken identity plot in The Oyster Princess, you can imagine the 30s comedy this would be the setup for, but it's nothing like this-- which mainly consists of running around and clowning broadly. Only a few bits here and there-- a hilariously exaggerated depiction of the results of the officer's Casanova-like behavior, a delightful bit of comedy on the quarter-mile staircase that plays out with the purity and visual grace of Buster Keaton's single-take descent down six flights of stairs in The Cameraman-- are actually especially funny. (There's also a quite racy "Lubitsch Touch" moment involving his photo, a pair of pants, and where she happens to kiss.)

You wish in vain for Negri and her inamorato to sit down and actually share a scene, heat up the chemistry set, show us some real one-on-one Lubitsch Touch worthy of Billy Wilder's line that "Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than most directors could do with an open fly." But at least in Negri you have a recognizable comic human being, full of life and randiness-- and the ending, though still half-cartoon, has an emotional effect well beyond anything in The Oyster Princess just three years earlier.

24 (2001–2010)

Insanely compelling, even when far-fetched or soapy, TV

[8/10 · 29 November 2006]

CTU-- the government agency with the hippest clothes and technology, the messiest private lives and the highest mortality rate in America. 24-- the TV show that you can't stop watching even when you don't believe a moment of it. And Jack Bauer-- the Id of post-9/11 America. Here's a rundown on five years of bad days for Jack Bauer:

SEASON 1-- Investigating an assassination plot against a black presidential candidate, Jack Bauer is forced to become the assassin himself by baddies holding his daughter Kim. This is really the only season to live up to the premise of realistic real time-- in later seasons CTU operatives can drive halfway across Los Angeles in a commercial break-- and that realism pays terrific dividends in certain scenes, as when Jack's wife spends time in the company of a guy who may be another concerned parent or not... and it takes a good two or three episodes to find out for sure. Casting is excellent-- why hasn't bad guy Michael Massie gotten more work?-- and the soap operatic aspects (Jack had an affair with one of his coworkers, which is going to blow up in a big way in both his personal and professional lives) enhance rather than detract from the suspense, all the way to a gut-punch ending which is one of the most shocking in TV history. A terrific season which earned the show a lot of viewer loyalty.

SEASON 2-- The black candidate in Season 1 is now President Palmer, middle easterners want to explode a nuke in LA, and President Palmer's weak handling of the crisis leads to an attempt by members of his cabinet to remove him from office. There are good villains in the terrorists, Xander Berkeley's bureaucratic boss, and especially Penny Johnson Jerald's scheming First Lady, but the CTU office romance of Tony and Michelle is tedious, and the efforts to find a way to put Kim in peril get steadily more ridiculous (two words-- mountain lion! Six more words-- Kevin Dillon as a survivalist kook!) The biggest problem is that the character of President Palmer is so poorly conceived; we're supposed to see him as noble and Lincolnesque compared to the schemers around him, but in fact he always makes the worst choices for the most pompous reasons, making it hard for others to support him, for CTU to do its job-- and for viewers to sympathize with him in the internecine struggle.

SEASON 3-- A couple of drug cartel-running brothers (who Jack has been undercover with) plot to release a biological weapon in LA. This season starts disastrously, with far too much soap-operatic attention paid to younger characters presumably shoved into the cast at the network's insistence. (Call it Dawson's 24.) Having written themselves into a hole, the writers throw a Hail Mary pass at the 8 hour mark which changes everything for the better (despite the fact that it contradicts much of what we've seen). The rest of the season continues reasonably suspensefully, though there are still absurdities (this season's mountain lion is a baby hidden under a desk at CTU!), and the amount of screen time devoted to slow death from infection and/or the threatened torture of captives makes this a deeply unpleasant season to watch. On the plus side, it does bring back both of the show's great villainesses to date, and both actresses take full advantage of the opportunity to show off their highly hissable characters in an encore. And it introduces the best supporting character at CTU ever-- Mary Lynn Rajskub's computer whiz Chloe, who's brilliant, but full of bad attitude.

SEASON 4-- Middle eastern terrorists get hold of a device which allows them to cause nuclear plant meltdowns. The best season since the first, this one does a terrific job of exploring all the fears, issues and character types which had been in the public consciousness since 9/11. Arnold Vosloo is the main villain, a kind of clean-shaven Bin Laden, but much of the plot revolves around a seemingly Americanized Arab-American family who are in fact moles preparing for a suicide attack; the dramatization of jihadist attitudes through the fanatical father, conflicted mother and thoroughly westernized son is quite powerful. Likewise, Jack's frequent resort to torture is explored as a moral issue with no easy answers.

The season isn't perfect-- THIS season's mountain lion is the schizophrenic daughter of the new CTU director who's being treated at CTU (!!!), a subplot that removes the fine actress Alberta Watson from CTU far too early in the season; and Jack's romance with the daughter of a Rumsfeld-like Secretary of Defense is drippy-- but all in all it's a powerful and thought- provoking season, and serves to introduce the third, and by far the most interesting, presidential character in the series, Gregory Itzin's weaselly President Logan.

SEASON 5-- Jack, living under an assumed name, gets pulled back in when Chechen terrorists try to disrupt the signing of a treaty with the Russian president by threatening a nerve gas attack. The real stars of this season are Gregory Itzin as the sleazy President Logan and Jean Smart as his mentally disturbed, but no dummy, First Lady, and the game that's played out between them as the conspiracy twists like a pretzel is great fun. At the same time we get Peter Weller as Jack's ex-boss, now possibly a conspirator, which is as close as we're likely to get to a Star Trek-like Good Jack Bauer fighting Bad Jack Bauer. Not as convincing as Season 4, and the writers prove far too willing to kill off promising characters for the (diminishing) shock value rather than develop them to their fullest, but the performances of Itzin and Smart make this deliciously watchable TV up to the very last twist.

The Horse Ate the Hat (1928)

Funny, but less than great, film of a reliable stage farce

[6/10 · 5 October 2006]

Report from Cinesation 2006: AN Italian STRAW HAT (***) Rene Clair had a huge reputation in the early days of sound, and though it's not hard to see why, it is hard to see why the same critics who loved his films (often voting them onto the early Sight & Sound lists of the best films of all time) were dismissive of great Hollywood comedies with exactly the same virtues. (A Nous la Liberte and Le Million are delightful, for instance, but in no way that Duck Soup and Top Hat aren't equally or more delightful.)

This-- based on a perennial stage farce about the complications that follow when a horse eats a married woman's hat while she's off dallying with her lover-- is skillful enough, and it has a few very funny moments, but made mostly in medium or longshot with little subtlety in the playing, it seemed far more primitive for 1927 than, to pick one American comedy, Kiki (shown earlier the same day)-- and the audience at Cinesation didn't laugh nearly as often, either.

Kiki (1926)

Delightful silent screwball comedy vehicle for Talmadge

[9/10 · 5 October 2006]

Report from Cinesation 2006: KIKI (****) As Jeanine Basinger says in her book on Silent Stars, perhaps the biggest hole in our understanding of silent stardom is the career of Norma Talmadge-- she likens it to knowing talkies without ever seeing Bette Davis. This sparkling new Library of Congress restoration of a 1926 Parisian showbiz farce is atypical for the grande dame roles Talmadge usually played, but as with Marion Davies and Show People, it wouldn't be the worst fate for a star to be known mainly to history for a first-class comedy.

Talmadge, at thirtysomething more game than gamine, is a plucky street gal who weasels her way into producer Ronald Colman's chorus line, his home, and his heart. Because a number of folks present had seen it just a month before at Cinecon, I was prepped for the idea that it was something of a screwball comedy with neither lead behaving in any way that real humans would. (The word "stalker" was used on alt.movies.silent, and aptly so.) But taken as kind of a silent Twentieth Century or Bringing Up Baby, it had lots of laughs, and Talmadge pulls off the comedy beautifully (as does George K. Arthur, as her archrival among Colman's servants).

The Grub Stake (1923)

One of Shipman's best, a fine feminist actioner

[8/10 · 5 October 2006]

Report from Cinesation 2006: THE GRUB-STAKE (****) This 1923 Nell Shipman production is a rip-snorting action movie with enough plot for two or three ordinary Shipmans, happily with print quality that did full justice to its Alaskan photography.

At first it's a bit dismaying to see feminist role model Shipman trying to protect her virginity from a rotter who lured her to Alaska to become a dance hall girl-- virginity is for other silent actresses to worry about, Nell Shipman should be worrying about grizzly bears and rockslides. But soon she's got her invalid father lashed to the dogsled and she's off looking for gold, taking time out along the way to curse God face to face and to frolic amid nature's larger mammals (at which point God is let off for good behavior) before a two-fisted finale with a literal cliffhanger. This picture had everything but the Johnstown Flood in it, and accompanist Ben Model's playing gave it everything he had too. The only pity is that some of the titles were noticeably jittery-- an easily remedied glitch that really shouldn't even have been let out of a major national archive for a show like this.

Bella Donna (1934)

Fine Veidt performance in slow-moving melodrama

[5/10 · 5 October 2006]

Report from Cinesation 2006: BELLA DONNA (**) Third and last film version of a Nazimova stage vehicle about a woman who falls fatally under the spell of a silky Egyptian charmer. Basically another variation on The Sheik, or like The Mummy without mummies, slow-moving and somewhat cheap but with a certain opium-fever-dream feel that works in its own way.

The fleshy Mary Ellis (a light opera star who originated Rose Marie) doesn't have the ethereality the spellbound sinner needs, and the rest of the British cast puts the stiff in stiff upper lip, so it's up to Conrad Veidt to raise the temperature above tepid, and to suggest perversities and cruelties his sturdy British colleagues never dreamt of.

Remember Last Night? (1935)

Strikingly dark comedy-mystery

[5 October 2006]

Report from Cinesation 2006: REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? (****) The notes suggested that James Whale sold this idea to Universal by comparing it to The Thin Man-- but it's The Thin Man as written by Evelyn Waugh, a tale of bright young things drinking and partying fast enough to keep despair at bay, and a reminder that Whale belonged to the same generation of artists formed by World War I who produced things like The Sun Also Rises and Goodbye To All That.

A group of young friends party the night away on a series of amazing Art Deco sets, and when they wake up in the morning, one of them has been murdered. As the mystery-plot mechanics take over, it loses some of its brittle, dark charm, relying on Arthur Treacher in the Thesiger part as a mordant butler for laughs. But at its best this is one of the most striking comedies of the 30s, energetic and gay (in the old sense-- mostly) and often very funny, yet worldly and almost bleak at the same time. If only the solution of the mystery could have paid off the film's tone thematically. The collector's print shown, incidentally, was 16mm, but could have been 35mm for how beautifully it showed off the film's remarkable sets.

The Cossack Whip (1916)

Strong beginning and end in film from career cut short

[6/10 · 5 October 2006]

Report from Cinesation 2006: THE COSSACK WHIP (***) Viola Dana versus the Tsar's secret police, leading up to a climax that prompted inevitable comparisons among this silents-savvy crowd to the legendary Behind the Door. This 1916 melodrama was directed by her husband, John Collins, who died in the influenza epidemic in 1918, and was just far enough ahead of the actual Russian Revolution to treat revolutionaries sympathetically; it sags badly with a soapy middle, when she's torn between revenge and a career in the west as a dancer, but the vividness of the opening scenes (the Cossacks attack her village) and the climax, and Collins' generally lively and inventive staging, make it a strong and memorable film. (Eastman House archivist Ed Stratmann's intro was interesting, talking about how the film was reconstructed from different versions around the world, each containing different censor cuts within a film with, apparently, something to offend everyone.)

Their Big Moment (1934)

Not bad (but hard to see) outing for likable duo of Pitts and Summerville

[6/10 · 4 October 2006]

Report from Cinesation 2006: THEIR BIG MOMENT (***) A 1934 RKO comedy-mystery directed by James Cruze, which apparently is kept off TCM by rights problems with the original play. William Gaxton (a big stage star), Zasu Pitts and Slim Summerville are a magician and his assistants who get hired as fake mediums to try to get a rich widow out of the clutches of another fake (Ralph Morgan). The plot meanders and needed some ironing out, but some genuinely funny bits and a good cast made this a pleasant find. (I was especially taken with the actress playing the widow, Julie Haydon, and wondered if she'd ever done anything else; she sure did-- she originated the daughter in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway.)