Thing I probably should have realized well before now: Buster Keaton's films were blockbusters. It's kind of obvious - they're full of jaw-dropping action and never look like they're cutting corners, the train crash in The General was famously expensive, and Keaton was a big star - but until Peter Bogdanovich casually mentions that Keaton's movies cost two or three times what other movies being made at the time, it didn't quite click with me that his movies were that sort of outlier. Maybe it's a sort of survivorship bias - chances to see Keaton's greatest films come reasonably frequently (as well as Chaplin's, to speak of another guy who clearly spent on his silents), so they form our impression of what silents were like, and that these are remembered because they're incredibly elaborate doesn't necessarily connect until you've seen enough other things. And even then, the number makes an impression.
Unfortunately, the availability of these movies on disc seems to ebb and flow a bit - the best versions of from Kino, who reissue them every few years after the previous versions have sold out, and right now they're at a pretty low level. That the next release is 4K discs is probably too much to ask, but wouldn't that be something? Especially when you watch this movie and note the difference in picture quality between Keaton's films, which have good surviving prints, and some of his later TV work, which look like they are third-generation kinescopes or something. It seems unlikely - 4K isn't a given even from major studios, let alone smaller distributors - but I wonder. To a certain extent, silents are the sort of catalog items that can get sold to the same people again and again if the quality is bumped, and some of the other movies that thrive on that (The Evil Dead, for instance) are starting to come out.
Even if that sort of release isn't in the cards, it seems like there should be more Keaton discs out, more on Prime, etc., to coincide with this movie's release. Hopefully that's the case when it reaches home video.
The Great Buster: A Celebration
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 November 2018 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Is there necessarily much new to learn about Buster Keaton in 2018, a hundred years after his first on-screen successes and ninety after his most fertile period ended? No, not really, although many viewers of Peter Bogdanovich's "celebration" will likely pick up something new to them. It's a good primer by a meticulous student of the medium, and it's worth having one of those come around once in a while to remind people of Keaton's brilliance anew.
Bogdanovich is thorough, making sure that practically everything Keaton ever did in the entertainment business has a moment to be seen, mentioned, and placed into context, and as such this survey can seem a mile wide and an inch deep. Despite the seeming need to rattle off every short that Keaton made, Bogdanovich has a way of making it not seem a dry list despite his restrained narration; he's quietly reverent and very conscious of who his long-term audience may be, slipping in bits of repetition and reinforcement that may serve him well when people are half-paying attention to this as it streams. It's a manner of speaking that can register as odd - it doesn't feel either conversational or like the written word - but it's clear in terms of both relaying information and atmosphere, saying this is worth knowing but not cause for a raised voice.
He's not alone in his praise for Keaton, of course. He enlists a great many people to pay tribute, some predictably enjoyable because they've done this sort of thing a lot and are established as both knowledgeable and charismatic; you listen when Mel Brooks, Werner Herzog, or Leonard Maltin talks movies. others who are surprisingly dedicated fans who have become close to the family (Richard Lewis, Dick Van Dyke). Bogdanovich does stumble a bit with younger voices, and that is in some ways the film's greatest weakness if part of the goal is to introduce Keaton to a new generation; he doesn't seem to know what he wants to get from Bill Hader or Quentin Tarantino, for instance, and seems to miss opportunities to dissect the man's genius more fully with Johnny Knoxville and director Jon Watts - Knoxville being as good a person to talk to about stunt-based physical comedy as anyone while Watts's discussion of how Keaton's expressive stone face influenced how he used the masked title character of Spider-Man: Homecoming doesn't go much further than "he was a big influence".
Showing posts with label Buster Keaton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buster Keaton. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 07, 2018
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Silent Sunday: Three Ages, Orphans of the Storm, Intolerance
This didn't quite end up being the seven hours of silent film in one day that I initially reckoned on it being - though many sites listed Orphans of the Storm as being almost three hours long, the Somerville's print clocked in at something like two and a quarter, though I have no idea how much (if any) of that was a matter of different cuts or frame rates. Theater manager Ian Judge mentioned that they were pressed for time beforehand, as the film started at two and they had a 4:45 screening of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes scheduled for the auditorium, but there turned out to be a fair amount of room, even with accompanist Jeff Rapsis taking a moment to read a review of Orphans from the time of its release that used some really sensational metaphors.
It was somewhat instructive to see three silents with different presentations and pedigrees almost back to back, though. All looked pretty good, but it was kind of interesting to note that the DCP presentation of the restored Intolerance, while the clearest and most stable, looked kind of off. I hate saying that in an unquantifiable way, especially if it might just be a matter of my eyes/brain not being used to seeing this sort of movie this way and confusing "unfamiliar" with "poor". I wouldn't be surprised if silents, with their often deep blacks, suffered a little more from that particular digital projection problem area than later movies. I also wonder a bit about the tinted sequences - I imagine that the restoration worked with the original black-and-white footage and then applied a filter program to make those scenes blue or green or yellow as necessary, but it seemed a little brighter than usual. That had a blue-tinted scene really looking blue, as opposed to like night.
Orphans of the Storm, meanwhile, was a black-and-white print from the early 1970s that had not been tinted, and while it looked fantastic (a great exhibit for how these movies look better on B&W stock than color), we were warned that certain scenes, like when Louise is alone and panicked near the river, would look odd because some shots were shot at night while others were shot in the day and intended to be tinted blue, but weren't.
The music was the other big difference. I'm made the point of how seeing silents in a theater can be different every time because you get a different soundtrack, but this really drove it home. Jeff was great, as always, working "La Marsaillaise" into the score for French Revolution-set Orphans of the Storm fairly often and just generally doing a great job of tracking how D.W. Griffith brought a surprisingly light touch to a heavy story for two plus hours. It's an endurance test. It's the other two movies that had included scores that made me think a bit, though. Three Ages had a somewhat weak soundtrack to my ears, a kind of tinny, plinky piano sound that reflected what was happening on screen rather than helping to build or emphasize, while Intolerance had a new orchestral score by Carl Davis (along with some sound effects, which always seems kind of weird in silents to me, because if we can hear that sound exactly, why not voices?); it gave the movie some oomph. Given I felt when I came out of these movies - a little underwhelmed despite frequently being amused in the case of Three Ages and impressed even if I had occasionally been impatient for Intolerance - I wonder how much the scores managed to set the mood.
So, anyway, that's six and a half hours (give or take) of silents in one day, which is a lot. I appreciate both the Brattle and the Somerville getting their silent programming in before I left for Montreal, but I was joking for days before and after about how they might want to check with each other a little more often, because you've got to think there's a fairly limited audience for long D.W. Griffith epics in the first place, and scheduling two at the same time has to cut into it!
Three Ages
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2014 at the Brattle Theatre (Silent Movies Special Engagement, 35mm)
Three Ages was hardly the first parody movie - the practice of doing a quick takeoff was so common in early cinema that Thomas Edison's employees may have spoofed Frankenstein mere days after making it, for all we know - but it's noteworthy, a feature by one of the great silent comedians that not only has fun with a great movie but makes it his own. Buster Keaton may not quite be Mel Brooks at his peak here, but he's still a guy who knows his way around a joke.
His inspiration here is D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, although his parallel stories are much simpler. In each, a beauty (Margaret Leahy) is courted by a suitor (Wallace Beery) who appeals to her parents (Joe Roberts & Lillian Lawrence) and The Other Guy (Keaton) who loves her true but can't catch a break. And while the specific trials in all the time periods - the stone age, the Roman Empire, and present-day 1923 - may be different, the basics of the story are the same.
This basic premise sort of winds up a stumbling block as well, because it means there's no escaping that Keaton and his compatriots are repeatedly telling the audience the same joke three times in a row. That's kind of rough when the joke already has whiskers on it, like Buster trying to make his beloved jealous by cozying up to another girl who is not in on the gag, but even the better parts suffer for the repetition: Keaton, co-director Eddie Cline, and writers Clyde Bruckman, Joseph Mitchell, and Jean Havez are not trying to subvert expectations as they cycle between ages, and what probably seemed very clever for a comedy 90 years ago doesn't quite get the same reaction now. Also not aging particularly well (and probably not that great in 1923, either) - how all three of Margaret Leahy's characters come off as somewhere between fickle and indifferent to which man wins her, even if all three do start to show some fondness for the Keaton characters later on.
Of course, it's not like the Buster Keaton section of an evening at the movies was ever about nuanced storytelling or great acting - though Keaton, Leahy, and company are fine - it was about gags. While there are pratfalls aplenty, there aren't a whole lot of the really elaborate bits that Keaton is best known for. There's also a steady stream of jokes based on how modern activities translate to other times, most pretty good. It did make me curious just how long the "cavemen dragging women off by the hair" meme has been with us, as this movie not only uses but makes some fun of it.
Though Three Ages doesn't quite have the scale of some of Keaton's other movies, it's actually a pretty solidly constructed hour. I don't know whether the Roman sets were built for this picture or standing from another, but they look nice, and while the caveman costumes and props are goofy, they never feel cheap. Heck, I was actually fairly impressed by the (presumably) stop-motion dinosaur Buster rides at one point, and a lion puppet is impressive both for how it gives the initial impression of being real and for how well its operators work it for comedy.
This wound up being Buster Keaton's first feature, and he built it so that it could be pulled apart into three shorts if it flopped or the gimmick didn't work. That caution hurts it a bit (and indicates how formulaic some of these shorts could be), but more jokes work than don't, and Keaton finding his feet is still pretty good.
Full review at EFC (dead link)
Orphans of the Storm
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2014 at Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)
Filmmakers sometimes make weird decisions. Some are objectively odd but basically harmless, such as casting real-life sisters in a movie whose plot involves one of their sibling characters being adopted. Folks probably wouldn't do that today, but it works out rather well for Orphans of the Storm, a gem of the silent era.
The siblings in question are Henriette Giraud (Lillian Gish) and her sister Louise (Dorothy Gish); about twenty years ago the newborn Louise was placed on the steps of Notre Dame cathedral to save her high-born but unwed mother scandal, and while Henriette's poor father was about to do the same thing for different reasons, he not only could not go through with it, but returned home with two babies. Though Louise's mother left money for whoever found her daughter, their lives are still potentially tragic - the fever that took Girauds mère et père left Louise blind, and just as they arrive in Paris to seek a cure, Henriette is kidnapped by a smitten aristocrat. She is rescued by the far nicer Chevalier de Vaudrey (Joseph Schildkraut), but by the time they return to the carriage station, Louise is gone, with a family of con artists looking to put her to work panhandling. And, as if things were not dire enough, it is the eve of the Revolution!
Griffith isn't going to stop there, of course - he's relating a melodrama, so there's a whopper of a coincidence to tie things together and a string of dramatic cliffhangers. He inserts Revolutionary figures like Robespierre (Sidney Herbert) and Georges Danton (Monte Blue) into the narrative to give it greater scale, and does a fair amount of rabble-rousing, whether against long-deceased French aristocrats - this atrocity, a caption declares, is true! - or by having the introductory text draw a direct parallel to his day's "anarchists and Bolsheviks". Griffith was not a very subtle man, and both the action and the titles bellow. It's not surprising that a key portion of the climax hinges on the oratory of Danton (declared "the Abraham Lincoln of France" in one intertitle) despite this being a silent picture; Griffith loved this sort of thunder.
Taking that into account, it may come as something of a shock to hear that Orphans of the Storm is not always, or even mostly, a particularly heavy movie. Griffith may absolutely have points he wants to make, but he also sons to entertain his audience, and does so by grounding it in both the enjoyably light romance between Henriette and le Chevalier and the unshakable sisterly affection of Henriette and Louise. Today, it is more common for the cynical and downcast things to ground the cheerful ones, but no matter how guileless the orphans may seem while other characters are similarly good for no particular reason compared to others' selfishness there is something propulsive to how human goodness is presented as just as powerful a force as those opposed to it.
Plus, it allows Lillian Gish to at least seem to be having a little fun in the midst of all that's going on. There's a plucky determination to Henriette that is often overstated but which works here; it becomes a baseline we can easily see her returning to even after scenes of distress. The movie puts lines in her mouth that could make the character something of a joke, but that doesn't happen even if she is emoting enough to make her point in a silent movie. It's the basis of an enjoyable chemistry with Joseph Schildkraut, who captures the Chevalier's decency and make him funny in odd situations without paying the fool. He and Gish (and Griffith et al) do enough with held glances, little smiles, and implied witticisms to convey romance better than any chest-beating. And while I may have a little laugh at Lillian and Dorothy Gish playing adopted sisters, it does communicate their connection to the audience immediately, and while Dorothy was generally not known for playing the tragic heroine the way her sister was - the pair are cast somewhat against type (and Lillian's original suggestion) here - she suffers nobly here, with far less ham than one might expect for the period.
(Modern-day audiences may cringe at how Louise is often described as "helpless" and needing to be assisted "like a child", though, no matter how unaccommodating 1789 may have been to the sightless.)
Griffith keeps things moving at a good clip, at least in the version screened at the Somerville Theatre (an untinted print that ran closer to two hours than the nearly-three generally listed). It's a nice balance between keeping the story focused and giving the director room to play with bigger issues, although the end does seem a little stretched at points, with Danton's heroic oratory seeking to take much longer than what it would stave off, and not quite as exciting as a similar scene in Griffith's Intolerance. That film looms over this one a bit, though some of the scenes of the Revolution or the jail for "fallen women" are impressive spectacle, and the whole thing looks great.
In fact, though I saw Intolerance later that day (and, yes, that is a lot of silent cinema at once!), I preferred this. Griffith had a point to make here as he often did, but he certainly made an entertaining movie this time around. Almost a hundred years later, filmmakers often stumble making stories that use history as a backdrop, but this early example does an excellent job of not diminishing either side of the coin.
Full review at EFC (dead link)
Intolerance
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2014 at the Brattle Theatre (Silent Movies Special Engagement, DCP)
D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, these days, is most often brought up as a defense for his having directed The Birth of a Nation, and while it will always be linked with that movie - Griffith made it partially in reaction to the reputation he gained for Birth, after all - it's an essential piece of movie history on its own. Few movies today can match the sort of ambition he showed 98 years ago, even if the act of inventing much of modern cinema language means there is still a bit of refinement to be done.
Four stories from different periods are interwoven, each an illustration of how prejudice and intolerance interferes with love and happiness. In the present, "The Dear One" (Mae Marsh) spends her days caring for her factory-worker father until the work of priggish reformers sends both her and The Boy (Robert Harron) to the city, where potential corruption, redemption, and tragedy await. In another place and time, Huguenot girl Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson) and Catholic Prosper Latour (Eugene Pallette) intend to marry, unaware that Catherine de Medicis (Josephine Crowell) is preparing a purge and that she has also caught the eye of a mercenary (Allan Sears). The ancient city of Babylon is the setting for a story about a feisty Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge) who falls for Prince Belshazzar (Alfred Paget), unaware that the high priest of Bel (Tully Marshall), furious over the increased worship of the goddess Ishtar, intends to betray the city to an invading warlord. And in the time of Christ (Howard Gaye), the Pharisees do not just look down upon others, but expect others to look up to them.
Griffith's ambition with Intolerance was staggering for 1916 - the movie is king-sized, especially for the silent era, at roughly three hours (depending on which cut you see), and the idea of telling multiple stories in parallel, only related via theme, was all but unheard-of. Those themes themselves, meanwhile, were broad and impassioned, an earnest and heartfelt lecture on how prejudice have been harmful forces throughout human history. It might, arguably, be a bit of a stronger argument coming off of Birth of a Nation if there were any black characters of note in the film, but it's certainly difficult to argue with Griffith's intensity in making the argument. And he's not content for the film's components simple half-stories solely dedicated to making a point; he could probably have built two or three decent movies out of the various pieces without too much padding.
That scale doesn't come very close to being Intolerance's undoing, but Griffith does overreach a bit. The emphasis is very clearly on the twentieth-century and Babylonian stories, with the other two serving as reflections. Indeed, there's barely a story to the Biblical segments - what starts out focused on the Pharisees sort of becomes a way to use incidents from the Gospels to comment on The Dear One's tale, which itself takes a fairly long time to get to the point. The French story isn't quite so sparse, but it is secondary enough that it can be difficult to recall where it was going when Griffith returns there after some time away. It's not enough for the audience to get impatient while watching the movie, at least until the lights come up for an intermission when a viewer is perhaps ready for it to be winding up after a thrilling, climactic-seeming battle sequence. There's at least another hour of this?
Yes, there certainly is, but that's no hardship, in part because Griffith and company edit the heck out of the last act). The kind of cross-cutting between different locations and sets of characters that Griffith does here was almost (if not completely) unprecedented in 1916 - the next time you see an action movie jumping between two big operations happening simultaneously, remember that it has its roots in the Dear One and the Mountain Girl both frantically racing to prevent a calamity here - and he does it just about as well as anybody has in the century since. This is also a grand, opulently-produced film, most noticeably in the Babylonian scenes where the filmmakers seem to have built an entire ancient city, but the rest are nothing to sneeze at. And while Griffith is preaching about the need for love and tolerance, he does that in part by displaying the violence that their absence brings with sometimes shocking frankness, from battles in Babylon that are much bloodier than those of the typical silent to the horrific aftermath of the massacre of of the Huguenots. It's not all blood and decapitations, though; his skill is on display in not making the happy sensuality of the worshipers of Ishtar seem exploitative, how the factory owner's massive, empty office suggests wastefulness at the top while the workers suffer that remains current today, or how he casually presents a more human Jesus than is often the case without disrespect.
There also aren't a great many holes in his large cast. Constance Talmadge (credited as Georgia Pearce) is quite the firecracker as the Mountain Girl, committing totally to a woman whose tomboyishness never gets muted and whose flaws aren't much smoothed over. She'd be easy to overdo, but Talmadge keeps the audience's favor throughout. Mae Marsh is a different sort of leading lady in the twentieth century segments, exaggerating everything about the Dear One just enough to make her story seem grander, really selling how the events take a toll on her. Marsh has the best supporting cast of the picture, with Robert Harron as "The Boy", Miriam Cooper as "The Friendless One", and Walter Long as "The Musketeer of the Slums" (with those characters having as great a collection of silent movie non-names as you will ever see). The French story may be somewhat forgettable, but Josephine Crowell's Catherine de Medicis captures the mannerisms, arrogance, and fear of the religious bigot as well as anybody ever has, even without her voice being part of the occasion. Lillian Gish also shows up in a recurring cameo that adds a bit of emphasis but doesn't actually allow her to do anything interesting.
Like a lot of works that innovate, Intolerance fades a bit now that the things that were done here first have become relatively common. The flip side is that as an early work, it can just go for things in a way that later movies can't - the Pharisees thanking God for making them better than everyone else is perfect in how direct and on-the-nose it is. So while there are things Griffith does in this movie that would certainly be refined later, it's still got the vital energy of innovation, and that makes it highly watchable, even almost a century later.
Full review at EFC (dead link)
It was somewhat instructive to see three silents with different presentations and pedigrees almost back to back, though. All looked pretty good, but it was kind of interesting to note that the DCP presentation of the restored Intolerance, while the clearest and most stable, looked kind of off. I hate saying that in an unquantifiable way, especially if it might just be a matter of my eyes/brain not being used to seeing this sort of movie this way and confusing "unfamiliar" with "poor". I wouldn't be surprised if silents, with their often deep blacks, suffered a little more from that particular digital projection problem area than later movies. I also wonder a bit about the tinted sequences - I imagine that the restoration worked with the original black-and-white footage and then applied a filter program to make those scenes blue or green or yellow as necessary, but it seemed a little brighter than usual. That had a blue-tinted scene really looking blue, as opposed to like night.
Orphans of the Storm, meanwhile, was a black-and-white print from the early 1970s that had not been tinted, and while it looked fantastic (a great exhibit for how these movies look better on B&W stock than color), we were warned that certain scenes, like when Louise is alone and panicked near the river, would look odd because some shots were shot at night while others were shot in the day and intended to be tinted blue, but weren't.
The music was the other big difference. I'm made the point of how seeing silents in a theater can be different every time because you get a different soundtrack, but this really drove it home. Jeff was great, as always, working "La Marsaillaise" into the score for French Revolution-set Orphans of the Storm fairly often and just generally doing a great job of tracking how D.W. Griffith brought a surprisingly light touch to a heavy story for two plus hours. It's an endurance test. It's the other two movies that had included scores that made me think a bit, though. Three Ages had a somewhat weak soundtrack to my ears, a kind of tinny, plinky piano sound that reflected what was happening on screen rather than helping to build or emphasize, while Intolerance had a new orchestral score by Carl Davis (along with some sound effects, which always seems kind of weird in silents to me, because if we can hear that sound exactly, why not voices?); it gave the movie some oomph. Given I felt when I came out of these movies - a little underwhelmed despite frequently being amused in the case of Three Ages and impressed even if I had occasionally been impatient for Intolerance - I wonder how much the scores managed to set the mood.
So, anyway, that's six and a half hours (give or take) of silents in one day, which is a lot. I appreciate both the Brattle and the Somerville getting their silent programming in before I left for Montreal, but I was joking for days before and after about how they might want to check with each other a little more often, because you've got to think there's a fairly limited audience for long D.W. Griffith epics in the first place, and scheduling two at the same time has to cut into it!
Three Ages
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2014 at the Brattle Theatre (Silent Movies Special Engagement, 35mm)
Three Ages was hardly the first parody movie - the practice of doing a quick takeoff was so common in early cinema that Thomas Edison's employees may have spoofed Frankenstein mere days after making it, for all we know - but it's noteworthy, a feature by one of the great silent comedians that not only has fun with a great movie but makes it his own. Buster Keaton may not quite be Mel Brooks at his peak here, but he's still a guy who knows his way around a joke.
His inspiration here is D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, although his parallel stories are much simpler. In each, a beauty (Margaret Leahy) is courted by a suitor (Wallace Beery) who appeals to her parents (Joe Roberts & Lillian Lawrence) and The Other Guy (Keaton) who loves her true but can't catch a break. And while the specific trials in all the time periods - the stone age, the Roman Empire, and present-day 1923 - may be different, the basics of the story are the same.
This basic premise sort of winds up a stumbling block as well, because it means there's no escaping that Keaton and his compatriots are repeatedly telling the audience the same joke three times in a row. That's kind of rough when the joke already has whiskers on it, like Buster trying to make his beloved jealous by cozying up to another girl who is not in on the gag, but even the better parts suffer for the repetition: Keaton, co-director Eddie Cline, and writers Clyde Bruckman, Joseph Mitchell, and Jean Havez are not trying to subvert expectations as they cycle between ages, and what probably seemed very clever for a comedy 90 years ago doesn't quite get the same reaction now. Also not aging particularly well (and probably not that great in 1923, either) - how all three of Margaret Leahy's characters come off as somewhere between fickle and indifferent to which man wins her, even if all three do start to show some fondness for the Keaton characters later on.
Of course, it's not like the Buster Keaton section of an evening at the movies was ever about nuanced storytelling or great acting - though Keaton, Leahy, and company are fine - it was about gags. While there are pratfalls aplenty, there aren't a whole lot of the really elaborate bits that Keaton is best known for. There's also a steady stream of jokes based on how modern activities translate to other times, most pretty good. It did make me curious just how long the "cavemen dragging women off by the hair" meme has been with us, as this movie not only uses but makes some fun of it.
Though Three Ages doesn't quite have the scale of some of Keaton's other movies, it's actually a pretty solidly constructed hour. I don't know whether the Roman sets were built for this picture or standing from another, but they look nice, and while the caveman costumes and props are goofy, they never feel cheap. Heck, I was actually fairly impressed by the (presumably) stop-motion dinosaur Buster rides at one point, and a lion puppet is impressive both for how it gives the initial impression of being real and for how well its operators work it for comedy.
This wound up being Buster Keaton's first feature, and he built it so that it could be pulled apart into three shorts if it flopped or the gimmick didn't work. That caution hurts it a bit (and indicates how formulaic some of these shorts could be), but more jokes work than don't, and Keaton finding his feet is still pretty good.
Full review at EFC (dead link)
Orphans of the Storm
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2014 at Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)
Filmmakers sometimes make weird decisions. Some are objectively odd but basically harmless, such as casting real-life sisters in a movie whose plot involves one of their sibling characters being adopted. Folks probably wouldn't do that today, but it works out rather well for Orphans of the Storm, a gem of the silent era.
The siblings in question are Henriette Giraud (Lillian Gish) and her sister Louise (Dorothy Gish); about twenty years ago the newborn Louise was placed on the steps of Notre Dame cathedral to save her high-born but unwed mother scandal, and while Henriette's poor father was about to do the same thing for different reasons, he not only could not go through with it, but returned home with two babies. Though Louise's mother left money for whoever found her daughter, their lives are still potentially tragic - the fever that took Girauds mère et père left Louise blind, and just as they arrive in Paris to seek a cure, Henriette is kidnapped by a smitten aristocrat. She is rescued by the far nicer Chevalier de Vaudrey (Joseph Schildkraut), but by the time they return to the carriage station, Louise is gone, with a family of con artists looking to put her to work panhandling. And, as if things were not dire enough, it is the eve of the Revolution!
Griffith isn't going to stop there, of course - he's relating a melodrama, so there's a whopper of a coincidence to tie things together and a string of dramatic cliffhangers. He inserts Revolutionary figures like Robespierre (Sidney Herbert) and Georges Danton (Monte Blue) into the narrative to give it greater scale, and does a fair amount of rabble-rousing, whether against long-deceased French aristocrats - this atrocity, a caption declares, is true! - or by having the introductory text draw a direct parallel to his day's "anarchists and Bolsheviks". Griffith was not a very subtle man, and both the action and the titles bellow. It's not surprising that a key portion of the climax hinges on the oratory of Danton (declared "the Abraham Lincoln of France" in one intertitle) despite this being a silent picture; Griffith loved this sort of thunder.
Taking that into account, it may come as something of a shock to hear that Orphans of the Storm is not always, or even mostly, a particularly heavy movie. Griffith may absolutely have points he wants to make, but he also sons to entertain his audience, and does so by grounding it in both the enjoyably light romance between Henriette and le Chevalier and the unshakable sisterly affection of Henriette and Louise. Today, it is more common for the cynical and downcast things to ground the cheerful ones, but no matter how guileless the orphans may seem while other characters are similarly good for no particular reason compared to others' selfishness there is something propulsive to how human goodness is presented as just as powerful a force as those opposed to it.
Plus, it allows Lillian Gish to at least seem to be having a little fun in the midst of all that's going on. There's a plucky determination to Henriette that is often overstated but which works here; it becomes a baseline we can easily see her returning to even after scenes of distress. The movie puts lines in her mouth that could make the character something of a joke, but that doesn't happen even if she is emoting enough to make her point in a silent movie. It's the basis of an enjoyable chemistry with Joseph Schildkraut, who captures the Chevalier's decency and make him funny in odd situations without paying the fool. He and Gish (and Griffith et al) do enough with held glances, little smiles, and implied witticisms to convey romance better than any chest-beating. And while I may have a little laugh at Lillian and Dorothy Gish playing adopted sisters, it does communicate their connection to the audience immediately, and while Dorothy was generally not known for playing the tragic heroine the way her sister was - the pair are cast somewhat against type (and Lillian's original suggestion) here - she suffers nobly here, with far less ham than one might expect for the period.
(Modern-day audiences may cringe at how Louise is often described as "helpless" and needing to be assisted "like a child", though, no matter how unaccommodating 1789 may have been to the sightless.)
Griffith keeps things moving at a good clip, at least in the version screened at the Somerville Theatre (an untinted print that ran closer to two hours than the nearly-three generally listed). It's a nice balance between keeping the story focused and giving the director room to play with bigger issues, although the end does seem a little stretched at points, with Danton's heroic oratory seeking to take much longer than what it would stave off, and not quite as exciting as a similar scene in Griffith's Intolerance. That film looms over this one a bit, though some of the scenes of the Revolution or the jail for "fallen women" are impressive spectacle, and the whole thing looks great.
In fact, though I saw Intolerance later that day (and, yes, that is a lot of silent cinema at once!), I preferred this. Griffith had a point to make here as he often did, but he certainly made an entertaining movie this time around. Almost a hundred years later, filmmakers often stumble making stories that use history as a backdrop, but this early example does an excellent job of not diminishing either side of the coin.
Full review at EFC (dead link)
Intolerance
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2014 at the Brattle Theatre (Silent Movies Special Engagement, DCP)
D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, these days, is most often brought up as a defense for his having directed The Birth of a Nation, and while it will always be linked with that movie - Griffith made it partially in reaction to the reputation he gained for Birth, after all - it's an essential piece of movie history on its own. Few movies today can match the sort of ambition he showed 98 years ago, even if the act of inventing much of modern cinema language means there is still a bit of refinement to be done.
Four stories from different periods are interwoven, each an illustration of how prejudice and intolerance interferes with love and happiness. In the present, "The Dear One" (Mae Marsh) spends her days caring for her factory-worker father until the work of priggish reformers sends both her and The Boy (Robert Harron) to the city, where potential corruption, redemption, and tragedy await. In another place and time, Huguenot girl Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson) and Catholic Prosper Latour (Eugene Pallette) intend to marry, unaware that Catherine de Medicis (Josephine Crowell) is preparing a purge and that she has also caught the eye of a mercenary (Allan Sears). The ancient city of Babylon is the setting for a story about a feisty Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge) who falls for Prince Belshazzar (Alfred Paget), unaware that the high priest of Bel (Tully Marshall), furious over the increased worship of the goddess Ishtar, intends to betray the city to an invading warlord. And in the time of Christ (Howard Gaye), the Pharisees do not just look down upon others, but expect others to look up to them.
Griffith's ambition with Intolerance was staggering for 1916 - the movie is king-sized, especially for the silent era, at roughly three hours (depending on which cut you see), and the idea of telling multiple stories in parallel, only related via theme, was all but unheard-of. Those themes themselves, meanwhile, were broad and impassioned, an earnest and heartfelt lecture on how prejudice have been harmful forces throughout human history. It might, arguably, be a bit of a stronger argument coming off of Birth of a Nation if there were any black characters of note in the film, but it's certainly difficult to argue with Griffith's intensity in making the argument. And he's not content for the film's components simple half-stories solely dedicated to making a point; he could probably have built two or three decent movies out of the various pieces without too much padding.
That scale doesn't come very close to being Intolerance's undoing, but Griffith does overreach a bit. The emphasis is very clearly on the twentieth-century and Babylonian stories, with the other two serving as reflections. Indeed, there's barely a story to the Biblical segments - what starts out focused on the Pharisees sort of becomes a way to use incidents from the Gospels to comment on The Dear One's tale, which itself takes a fairly long time to get to the point. The French story isn't quite so sparse, but it is secondary enough that it can be difficult to recall where it was going when Griffith returns there after some time away. It's not enough for the audience to get impatient while watching the movie, at least until the lights come up for an intermission when a viewer is perhaps ready for it to be winding up after a thrilling, climactic-seeming battle sequence. There's at least another hour of this?
Yes, there certainly is, but that's no hardship, in part because Griffith and company edit the heck out of the last act). The kind of cross-cutting between different locations and sets of characters that Griffith does here was almost (if not completely) unprecedented in 1916 - the next time you see an action movie jumping between two big operations happening simultaneously, remember that it has its roots in the Dear One and the Mountain Girl both frantically racing to prevent a calamity here - and he does it just about as well as anybody has in the century since. This is also a grand, opulently-produced film, most noticeably in the Babylonian scenes where the filmmakers seem to have built an entire ancient city, but the rest are nothing to sneeze at. And while Griffith is preaching about the need for love and tolerance, he does that in part by displaying the violence that their absence brings with sometimes shocking frankness, from battles in Babylon that are much bloodier than those of the typical silent to the horrific aftermath of the massacre of of the Huguenots. It's not all blood and decapitations, though; his skill is on display in not making the happy sensuality of the worshipers of Ishtar seem exploitative, how the factory owner's massive, empty office suggests wastefulness at the top while the workers suffer that remains current today, or how he casually presents a more human Jesus than is often the case without disrespect.
There also aren't a great many holes in his large cast. Constance Talmadge (credited as Georgia Pearce) is quite the firecracker as the Mountain Girl, committing totally to a woman whose tomboyishness never gets muted and whose flaws aren't much smoothed over. She'd be easy to overdo, but Talmadge keeps the audience's favor throughout. Mae Marsh is a different sort of leading lady in the twentieth century segments, exaggerating everything about the Dear One just enough to make her story seem grander, really selling how the events take a toll on her. Marsh has the best supporting cast of the picture, with Robert Harron as "The Boy", Miriam Cooper as "The Friendless One", and Walter Long as "The Musketeer of the Slums" (with those characters having as great a collection of silent movie non-names as you will ever see). The French story may be somewhat forgettable, but Josephine Crowell's Catherine de Medicis captures the mannerisms, arrogance, and fear of the religious bigot as well as anybody ever has, even without her voice being part of the occasion. Lillian Gish also shows up in a recurring cameo that adds a bit of emphasis but doesn't actually allow her to do anything interesting.
Like a lot of works that innovate, Intolerance fades a bit now that the things that were done here first have become relatively common. The flip side is that as an early work, it can just go for things in a way that later movies can't - the Pharisees thanking God for making them better than everyone else is perfect in how direct and on-the-nose it is. So while there are things Griffith does in this movie that would certainly be refined later, it's still got the vital energy of innovation, and that makes it highly watchable, even almost a century later.
Full review at EFC (dead link)
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Somerville Silents: "One Week", "The Scarecrow", and Our Hospitality
Sunday was a good day - got up, went to North Station to meet my mom and her husband who were down from Maine for the day, had brunch with them, my brother Matt, and his wife Morgan, saw the Red Sox win a game against the A's despite the fact that John Lackey came off the DL to pitch the game, had really good fish & chips for supper, and then got Mom & Bill to their train in time to catch mine to Davis Square for this program.
So, I probably can't say this set of films was the highlight of my day, but it was certainly a highlight. It's part of the Somerville theater's summer repatory and classic program, a three-pronged attack which includes Sunday morning/Monday evening classics, Friday/Saturday midnights, and a monthly silent film program on Sunday nights. All are playing on their main screen, all in 35mm (at least - there are hints that some may be 70mm).
Let me just say - if all the prints look as nice as the ones we saw Sunday night, it's going to be pretty nice. These are 90-year-old movies, and the prints seemed to be at least second-generation from the copyright notices (maybe newer - the intertitles had a digital look to them), but they looked as good as anything playing at the Somerville, and they are right up in the top tier of presentation in the Boston area. It wasn't a great turnout, but a good one, and I do hope that even more show up for Seven Chances (with "Neighbors" and "The Goat") on 10 July.
Especially the girl behind me who enjoyed it, but admitted she was mostly a big Harold Lloyd fan. Call me. That's the sort of thing that makes me develop a crush more or less instantly.
One bit of terrible photography before getting to the reviews:
Jeff Rapsis at the keyboard, warming up for the big show. He was really impressive tonight - his music for the prologue to Our Hospitality was especially terrific, and I'm sure my musical brothers will tell me that playing to fast-paced movies for two hours straight (no break between films), at least partly improvising, is difficult, and he did an excellent job.
"One Week"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 June 2011 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Somerville Summer Silents)
As frantic and nutty as silent comedy features are, the shorts are oftentime even more so. "One Week", for instance, starts as a goofy little concept - a new groom (Keaton) and his bride (Sybil Seely) attempt to build their house from a kit with her old suitor (Joe Roberts) lurking about making trouble. In just twenty minutes, it becomes an increasingly elaborate series of set pieces as the house gets screwier and screwier.
Keaton and co-writer/co-director Edward F. Cline keep the jokes coming, and for a twenty-minute comedy short, the kit-house is a remarkably intricate construction, with some jumbo-sized slapstick in the latter half of the movie. They also have a little bit of fun with a bathtub scene, breaking the fourth wall with a wink and a smirk.
"The Scarecrow"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 June 2011 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Somerville Summer Silents)
More or less the same cast and crew are together again for "The Scarecrow"; this time, Keaton and Roberts are farmhands living in a different elaborate house (this one complete and multi-functional) competing for the affection of the farmer's daughter (Seely), though neither really has the approval of her father (Joe Keaton). It's a bit of a thin story; indeed, much of it comes down to "Buster Keaton gets chased by a dog".
Not that there are very many people that you would rather see spend ten minutes getting chased by a dog, especially when you consider that this is Fatty Arbuckle's dog and quite a talented one, running, jumping, and climbing to keep up with Buster. Many of the other gags in the movie are based on the Rube Goldberg contraptions built into the farmhands' bunker - not quite as elaborate as the house of "One Week" in some ways, but still quite amusing in their ingenuity.
Much of the rest is knockabout humor, sort of akin to the Three Stooges. You don't really see this sort of "smacking-each-other-around" comedy that much these days, and that's probably a good thing, all told, but there's a sort of pure, rapid-fire, "nobody really gets hurt" innocence to it that absolutely works in this sort of unreal context.
Our Hospitality
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 June 2011 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Somerville Summer Silents)
Consider this: There is roughly as much distance between the present day (the 2010s) and the time when Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality was made (the 1920s) as there is between when it was made and when it was set (the 1830s). Strange, right? It gives a little extra kick to some of the jokes, too. And while a little perspective doesn't hurt, you do not need this in the front of your mind to enjoy the movie: This early Buster Keaton feature is highly entertaining even without that sort of context.
In the early 1800s, blood feuds weren't uncommon, and the one between the Canfields and McKays got particularly ugly one night in 1810, leaving the widow McKay to flee north with her baby to live with her sister. Twenty years later, son Willie (Buster Keaton) gets a letter telling him he has inherited the McKay estate, and he hops a train to claim it - with his loyal dog following - the feud something his urban mind doesn't take seriously. But old Joseph Canfield (Joe Roberts) hasn't forgotten, and has passed it down to his sons (Ralph Bushman & Craig Ward). Naturally, the nice girl Willie meets on the train (Natalie Talmadge), who invites him to dinner, turns out to be Canfield's daughter. It's a good thing that the Canfields' code of honor won't let them kill Willie while he's enjoying their hospitality. After dinner, though, all bets are off.
Our Hospitality is among Keaton's first feature-length comedies, and it shows some growing pains. The train trip between Jersey City and Rockfield at times seems to be shown in real time, with beats and gags that we see more than once but which don't necessarily benefit from the repetition. In some ways, time has hurt it - some of the gags are visual things that would work well in later cartoons, the weird, elastic worlds of 1930s animation that themselves look odd and dated now - but even then, it was a longish sequence that doesn't really involve or tell us anything about Willie. Like many silent comedies, it seems quite modular - the various segments likely break quite cleanly on reel marks, so that if the projectionist had any trouble with the switchovers, the flow of the movie wouldn't be broken.
That's a good thing, because comedy is, in large part, timing, and Our Hospitality has really phenomenal comic timing. A scene of an oblivious Willie walking down a street with one of the Canfield boys, who keeps trying to find a pistol with which to shoot his companion, is one part absurdity and one part rhythm, making what could be a single, weak piece of black comedy funny for a good stretch. And in some ways, Buster Keaton gives a clinic on doing a lot with a little - the middle of the movie relies on Willie's reactions to finding out that the Canfields are gunning for him, and considering that Keaton was often called "The Great Stone Face" for face for his permanent deadpan expression, that he pulls it off kind of makes one wonder how he does it.
The other things he's known for, of course, are slapstick and daring stuntwork, and the movie frequently has him in his element there, with plenty of perfectly pulled off physical comedy (watch for Keaton's father as the conductor of the train, performing some trademark high kicks), along with a final act chase that involves horses, trains, ropes, and a raging river. It's one thing on top of another, with Keaton and co-director Jack Blystone expertly balancing laughs and thrills. Forget that it's 1923 and therefore all the stunts and effects are done in-camera (including one, used in the final cut, where Keaton nearly got swept away by the current); it would be an exciting, well-made sequence even with digital wire removal and the like.
This comedy earns a thrilling finale; the story by Jean Havez, Clyde Bruckman, and Joseph Mitchell balances wit and danger, with a prologue that sets suitably high stakes. For this screening, the atmosphere of that first act was greatly enhanced by pianist Jeff Rapsis, but the basic materials are there for it to work with a different score or even perhaps when truly silent. Most of the jokes translate pretty well to the twenty-first century; there are surprisingly few moments likely to feel more anachronistic than they did in 1923.
Indeed, it's kind of amazing how well Keaton's movie holds up; slapstick and death-defying action apparently never go out of style, especially when you're this good at it.
(Formerly at EFC)
So, I probably can't say this set of films was the highlight of my day, but it was certainly a highlight. It's part of the Somerville theater's summer repatory and classic program, a three-pronged attack which includes Sunday morning/Monday evening classics, Friday/Saturday midnights, and a monthly silent film program on Sunday nights. All are playing on their main screen, all in 35mm (at least - there are hints that some may be 70mm).
Let me just say - if all the prints look as nice as the ones we saw Sunday night, it's going to be pretty nice. These are 90-year-old movies, and the prints seemed to be at least second-generation from the copyright notices (maybe newer - the intertitles had a digital look to them), but they looked as good as anything playing at the Somerville, and they are right up in the top tier of presentation in the Boston area. It wasn't a great turnout, but a good one, and I do hope that even more show up for Seven Chances (with "Neighbors" and "The Goat") on 10 July.
Especially the girl behind me who enjoyed it, but admitted she was mostly a big Harold Lloyd fan. Call me. That's the sort of thing that makes me develop a crush more or less instantly.
One bit of terrible photography before getting to the reviews:
Jeff Rapsis at the keyboard, warming up for the big show. He was really impressive tonight - his music for the prologue to Our Hospitality was especially terrific, and I'm sure my musical brothers will tell me that playing to fast-paced movies for two hours straight (no break between films), at least partly improvising, is difficult, and he did an excellent job.
"One Week"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 June 2011 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Somerville Summer Silents)
As frantic and nutty as silent comedy features are, the shorts are oftentime even more so. "One Week", for instance, starts as a goofy little concept - a new groom (Keaton) and his bride (Sybil Seely) attempt to build their house from a kit with her old suitor (Joe Roberts) lurking about making trouble. In just twenty minutes, it becomes an increasingly elaborate series of set pieces as the house gets screwier and screwier.
Keaton and co-writer/co-director Edward F. Cline keep the jokes coming, and for a twenty-minute comedy short, the kit-house is a remarkably intricate construction, with some jumbo-sized slapstick in the latter half of the movie. They also have a little bit of fun with a bathtub scene, breaking the fourth wall with a wink and a smirk.
"The Scarecrow"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 June 2011 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Somerville Summer Silents)
More or less the same cast and crew are together again for "The Scarecrow"; this time, Keaton and Roberts are farmhands living in a different elaborate house (this one complete and multi-functional) competing for the affection of the farmer's daughter (Seely), though neither really has the approval of her father (Joe Keaton). It's a bit of a thin story; indeed, much of it comes down to "Buster Keaton gets chased by a dog".
Not that there are very many people that you would rather see spend ten minutes getting chased by a dog, especially when you consider that this is Fatty Arbuckle's dog and quite a talented one, running, jumping, and climbing to keep up with Buster. Many of the other gags in the movie are based on the Rube Goldberg contraptions built into the farmhands' bunker - not quite as elaborate as the house of "One Week" in some ways, but still quite amusing in their ingenuity.
Much of the rest is knockabout humor, sort of akin to the Three Stooges. You don't really see this sort of "smacking-each-other-around" comedy that much these days, and that's probably a good thing, all told, but there's a sort of pure, rapid-fire, "nobody really gets hurt" innocence to it that absolutely works in this sort of unreal context.
Our Hospitality
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 June 2011 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Somerville Summer Silents)
Consider this: There is roughly as much distance between the present day (the 2010s) and the time when Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality was made (the 1920s) as there is between when it was made and when it was set (the 1830s). Strange, right? It gives a little extra kick to some of the jokes, too. And while a little perspective doesn't hurt, you do not need this in the front of your mind to enjoy the movie: This early Buster Keaton feature is highly entertaining even without that sort of context.
In the early 1800s, blood feuds weren't uncommon, and the one between the Canfields and McKays got particularly ugly one night in 1810, leaving the widow McKay to flee north with her baby to live with her sister. Twenty years later, son Willie (Buster Keaton) gets a letter telling him he has inherited the McKay estate, and he hops a train to claim it - with his loyal dog following - the feud something his urban mind doesn't take seriously. But old Joseph Canfield (Joe Roberts) hasn't forgotten, and has passed it down to his sons (Ralph Bushman & Craig Ward). Naturally, the nice girl Willie meets on the train (Natalie Talmadge), who invites him to dinner, turns out to be Canfield's daughter. It's a good thing that the Canfields' code of honor won't let them kill Willie while he's enjoying their hospitality. After dinner, though, all bets are off.
Our Hospitality is among Keaton's first feature-length comedies, and it shows some growing pains. The train trip between Jersey City and Rockfield at times seems to be shown in real time, with beats and gags that we see more than once but which don't necessarily benefit from the repetition. In some ways, time has hurt it - some of the gags are visual things that would work well in later cartoons, the weird, elastic worlds of 1930s animation that themselves look odd and dated now - but even then, it was a longish sequence that doesn't really involve or tell us anything about Willie. Like many silent comedies, it seems quite modular - the various segments likely break quite cleanly on reel marks, so that if the projectionist had any trouble with the switchovers, the flow of the movie wouldn't be broken.
That's a good thing, because comedy is, in large part, timing, and Our Hospitality has really phenomenal comic timing. A scene of an oblivious Willie walking down a street with one of the Canfield boys, who keeps trying to find a pistol with which to shoot his companion, is one part absurdity and one part rhythm, making what could be a single, weak piece of black comedy funny for a good stretch. And in some ways, Buster Keaton gives a clinic on doing a lot with a little - the middle of the movie relies on Willie's reactions to finding out that the Canfields are gunning for him, and considering that Keaton was often called "The Great Stone Face" for face for his permanent deadpan expression, that he pulls it off kind of makes one wonder how he does it.
The other things he's known for, of course, are slapstick and daring stuntwork, and the movie frequently has him in his element there, with plenty of perfectly pulled off physical comedy (watch for Keaton's father as the conductor of the train, performing some trademark high kicks), along with a final act chase that involves horses, trains, ropes, and a raging river. It's one thing on top of another, with Keaton and co-director Jack Blystone expertly balancing laughs and thrills. Forget that it's 1923 and therefore all the stunts and effects are done in-camera (including one, used in the final cut, where Keaton nearly got swept away by the current); it would be an exciting, well-made sequence even with digital wire removal and the like.
This comedy earns a thrilling finale; the story by Jean Havez, Clyde Bruckman, and Joseph Mitchell balances wit and danger, with a prologue that sets suitably high stakes. For this screening, the atmosphere of that first act was greatly enhanced by pianist Jeff Rapsis, but the basic materials are there for it to work with a different score or even perhaps when truly silent. Most of the jokes translate pretty well to the twenty-first century; there are surprisingly few moments likely to feel more anachronistic than they did in 1923.
Indeed, it's kind of amazing how well Keaton's movie holds up; slapstick and death-defying action apparently never go out of style, especially when you're this good at it.
(Formerly at EFC)
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