One of the major problems with life is that it intrudes on watching movies. Saturday, other responsibilities kept me away from the Castro, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, until mid-afternoon. Among other things, I missed Serge Bromberg’s Treasure Trove. What a pity.
But here’s what I saw on Saturday and Sunday. You can also check out Thursday and Friday in San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Part 1.
Underground
We got two introductions to this British melodrama from 1928. First, Bryony Dixon of the British Film Institute talked about the restoration. "It can take a very long time to [raise the money] for a big restoration costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. It took, I think, 15 years to get this one going." Initially, all they had was a fourth-generation print. They found another source in Brussels, and "We were able to combine these elements" to make the restoration.
Now that I’ve seen the restoration and the movie, I’d call it money well spent.
Next, Leonard Maltin introduced the movie. "I’ve seen this film once before. I remember liking it." He talked about the great film collector and historian William K. Everson, and the "visual flair" you find only in late silent films. "No one was untouched by the work of Murnau and other innovators of that period…It seems kind of a shame that just when filmmaking had reached this pinnacle, sound came along and everything froze."
Underground is not about criminals or black-market economics, but the London subway system. When the movie started, I assumed it would follow Aristotle’s unity of place, and contain all (or almost all) of its action within the subway system. I was wrong, and a bit disappointed. It opens and closes in the subway, and two main characters work there, but it’s set all around working-class London.
But really, I didn’t have much to be disappointed about. Underground is a fun melodrama about a cad, a nice guy, a nice girl, and a mentally unhinged young woman. A great deal of it was shot on location, with a real sense of London in the late 20s.
Stephen Horne gave his usual fantastic one-man-ensemble accompaniment. I could see him from my seat, and noticed him playing flute, accordion, clarinet, and piano. I think he’s part octopus.
Under the Lantern
Weimar Germany must have had a thing about prostitutes. The Germans filmed a lot of downbeat tragedies about girls sliding into the oldest profession and suffering the consequences. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl are unique only in being better than the others. (It helped, of course, to have Louise Brooks.)
In Under the Lantern, we follow the fate of a young woman who goes dancing without her overly-strict father’s permission. She takes up with her boyfriend, joins a vaudeville act, becomes a kept woman, and is eventually reduced to walking the streets. But don’t worry; worse things are ahead.
It’s an often-told story, reasonably well-done, although slower than it needed to be. It worked well enough to make me hope that she could turn her life around.
But it had one big problem: The star, Lissy Arna, while an excellent silent actress, was not the ravishing beauty that the story required. And she looked too old in the early scenes. When an intertitle told us that she was underage, I wondered just what age constituted adulthood in the Weimar Republic…35?
Many of the film’s flaws were papered over by the Donald Sosin Ensemble. Their European and yet jazzy score carried all of the film’s rich emotions, and deepened the otherwise shallow sequences. Occasionally, someone on screen would turn on a phonograph. When this happened, the musicians stopped playing and we were treated with recordings off of old 78s.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West In the Land of the Bolsheviks
The Soviet Union was a pretty horrible place to live in 1924. World War, revolution, civil war, and an experimental economy had shaken the nation to the core. No one quite yet knew how much freedom of expression would be allowed. (Final answer: not much.)
And yet, in that very year, Russian film theoretician Lev Kuleshov created one of the most intentionally silly comedies I’ve ever seen. The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West In the Land of the Bolsheviks (let’s just call it Extraordinary Adventures) makes Duck Soup feel like neorealism.
The title character is an American executive who comes to the newly-Communist Russia on business, brandishing a fur coat, Harold Lloyd glasses, and an American flag. His sidekick and bodyguard is a cowboy with a quick draw and a slow brain (Mr. West isn’t any smarter). They almost immediately fall in with a bunch of con artists intent on taking advantage of their ignorance and fear to separate them from their money.
I have to give a special shout out for Aleksandra Khokhlova as the "sexy" con artist. As skinny and flexible as Popeye’s Olive Oyl, she comes off as a strange, warped, and hilarious caricature of a human being. Like everyone else in the movie, she’s a broad stereotype, but her bizarre performance is funnier than any other.
It seems strange that a movie intended to be Communist propaganda would show almost all of its Russians as liars and thieves. Only near the end do honest Bolsheviks appear, and only then does Extraordinary Adventures become Communist propaganda.
The Mattie Bye Ensemble did a great job accompanying the feature.
Extraordinary Adventures ended Saturday’s program. I had a nasty surprise on my way home. When I arrived at the North Berkeley BART station around noon, I discovered that someone had stolen my bicycle.
Now, on to Sunday:
Seven Years Bad Luck
The always entertaining Serge Bromberg introduced this 1921 Max Linder comedy. More to the point, he introduced Linder.
Max Linder is probably cinema’s first comic star. He started making shorts in his native France in 1905, and came to the USA in 1916. He went back and forth between the two countries until his 1925 suicide.
The festival screened two American Linder comedies: the 1917 short Max Wants a Divorce and the 1921 feature, Seven Years Bad Luck. This was my first Linder experience, and I found him funny–often hilarious. Linder reminded me of an upper-class Charlie Chase—dapper, normal, and stuck in funny situations. It’s clear that he influenced Chase, but then, he influenced everyone.
Unfortunately, the feature hit its comic peak early. Max’s servants conspire to keep him ignorant of a broken mirror. One servant, who vaguely resembles Linder, stands on the other side of the empty mirror frame and imitates his master’s every move while shaving. It’s the old mirror routine (Groucho and Harpo did it in Duck Soup), but I’ve never seen it done so well as it’s done here.
The rest of the film plays fine, but never again reaches that level. Max keeps expecting to have a lot of bad luck. That sort of thing tends to be self-fulfilling.
Donald Sosin and Frank Bockius collaborated on the musical accompaniment. It was fine.
Dragnet Girl
Earlier this year, New York’s Antohology Flm Archives ran a series called "Auteurs Gone Wild"–films by major directors that are not in the director’s usual style (see Rare Lubitsch in New York). Yasujiro Ozu’s Dragnet Girl would have fit right in. As Noir City’s Eddie Muller explained it when he introduced the picture on Sunday, it was quite a surprise to discover that Ozu, known for his quiet and contemplative family dramas and low-key comedies, "made a 1930s Warner Brothers gangster movie."
Muller also talked about the "absolutely dazzling camera movement," more "like a Martin SCorceses fever dream" than anything by Ozu. The future director of Tokyo Story clearly wanted to make an American film; posters and signs are all in English.
The movie definitely has style. It’s flashy and fun to watch. And Kinuyo Tanaka is wonderful as a seemingly innocent young girl who’s really a tough-as-nails moll. Well, maybe she’s not as tough as she seems. The exceptionally handsome Joji Oka brings energy and charisma to the part of her gangster boyfriend–a Japanese James Cagney. But the story manages to be both weak and confusing. In the end, it just didn’t do much for me.
To accompany Dragnet Girl, Gunter Buchwald played piano and violin, with Frank Bockius on the drums. Their jazz-infused music was everything it should have been.
The Girl in Tails
This 1926 Swedish romance starts similarly to Under the Lantern. A young woman disobeys her father’s orders to go dancing. But this time, breaking the rules and making trouble results in love and happiness, not tragedy.
Actually, her father doesn’t object to her going to the ball; he just won’t pay for the needed clothes. This is particularly unfair because he gives her brother a seemingly limitless clothing budget. So she steals her brother’s white tie and tails, and goes to the dance in drag.
And let me add that the film’s star, Magda Holm, looks very fetching in men’s formalwear.
Of course she scandalizes the town, but she has a few defenders, including the very wealthy young man she obviously loves. You never really worry that things will not come out right.
The Girl in Tails goes on too long, and overstays its welcome by about 15 minutes. But it’s such a warm, generous, and subversive movie that you can forgive a few slow spots.
The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra did their usual wonderful accompaniment.
The Sign of the Four
I was a huge Sherlock Holmes fan in my early teens, and I’ve reread all of the stories over the last few years. The second novel, The Sign of the Four, is one of my favorites. It’s an atmospheric mystery with a good action climax. And Watson gets to fall in love.
Eille Norwood played Holmes in something like 45 movies, mostly shorts, from 1921-23. The Sign of Four, a feature, was his last.
It’s hard to imagine how the dialog-heavy Sherlock Holmes stories could work in silent film, but they do. After all, much of the talking in the original stories involve one person telling another about what happened. All you need is a flashback and you’re back to telling a story visually.
Norwood is one of the best Holmes of the screen, up there will Rathbone, Brett, and Cumberbatch. He underplays the great detective, moving little and seeing all. His is a contemplative Holmes, a man always in the process of thinking.
On the other hand, Arthur M. Cullin makes a poor choice for Watson–especially for The Sign of the Four. Flabby, plain-looking, and dull, there’s nothing here for Mary Morstan to fall in love with. Cullins didn’t play Watson in any of the other Norwood Holmes films, which makes this choice odder.
The film follows the book relatively closely, but when it deviates, it goes off in the wrong direction. Specifically, in the "innocent white girl menaced by evil dark people" direction.
Oh, well. It was fun, anyway.
Donald Sosin (on piano) with Guenter Buchwald (on violin) kept everything lively.
Harbor Drift
Sleep deprivation is a major problem with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. At least it is for me. If I try to attend everything, I don’t get enough sleep.
And that’s why I’m not really qualified to tell you about Harbor Drift, yet another German film about poverty and prostitution. The movie started, and I fell immediately to sleep. I think it was about half over when I woke up.
From what I saw, it was well made, with daring camera angles and wild editing. I couldn’t really get a handle on the characters, but the main ones seemed real and sympathetic.
Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius’ accompaniment sounded fine, even in my dreams.
The Navigator
The closing show of the Festival presented one of Buster Keaton’s most beloved works. It was the only film screened that I’m really familiar with. This was my fourth time seeing The Navigator theatrically. (I also own the Blu-ray.)
This is not my favorite Keaton, but it’s still a very fun movie. Keaton and Kathryn McGuire play spoiled rich kids adrift on an otherwise deserted ocean liner with no power. Thus, two people who can’t boil water have to make due in an environment designed for feeding hundreds.
This provides for plenty of great comic sequences. Buster tries to put an unconscious Kathryn into an uncooperative deck chair. The two, working together, manage to create a pot of coffee comprised of three beans and a couple of quarts of salt water. A small cannon with a lit fuse manages to always point at Buster.
In my favorite sequence, Buster tries to shuffle and deal a pack of cards so wet that they’re dissolving in his hands. Kathryn got the cards wet in the first place, and chivalry demands that he ignore their soggy condition.
Unfortunately, the Matti Bye Ensemble added too many bizarre and weird sound effects. At first they were funny, but soon they just got in the way of the truly funny stuff going on onscreen.
Nevertheless, watching Buster Keaton with 1,500 other fans is always a wonderful experience. It was a good way to end an enjoyable, if exhausting, weekend.
Bayflicks 