Category: Views and reviews

I Have a Bad Feeling About This

OK, I’m a movie fan and there are a lot of people who know I’m a Star Wars fan.  Sort of.  A former Star Wars fan.  Well, a fan of Episodes 4, 5, and part of 6.

I remember when Star Wars came out in 1977, before it said A New Hope, before anyone knew anything about it.  (And trust me, doubters, on the original release date, it did not say A New Hope.  This is why Episode IV will always be called Star Wars to me, because that’s the way it was originally billed.)

And then Episode V came out, The Empire Strikes Back.  I was not as impressed with that one initially, but this is a film that holds up very well on repeated viewings.  There may be some slow spots in it here and there, but overall, this is a great film.

And then Episode VI came out.  Half of it was great.  The stuff with Luke and the Emperor.  Good stuff.  The stuff with Jabba the Hutt in the intro was pretty good.  But the Ewoks.  Oh, the Ewoks.  They were obnoxiously cute, in a cloying 4-year-old way.  That’s exactly what they were intended to be, because Lucas himself had sold out to the Dark Side.  In this case, it’s not the Sith, but much darker: Merchandising.

(By the way, I’m going on 30+ years of reading about this franchise here.  I’m not going to source this.  It would take days, and I’m not being paid.  I’ll stand by what I said.  If you think I’m an idiot, then so be it!  Hi, Tom!) The original plan for Return of the Jedi was to have a planet of the Wookiees instead of the Ewoks, which dramatically tied things together better.  But Wookiees aren’t as cute as Ewoks: Ewoks look like little teddy bears.  Ewoks sell better.

So Lucas made more money from merchandising than he would have otherwise.  It was a calculated move.  The movie suffers for it.  Jedi reeks of cute for two full reels, and it stalls the story.

Then we have another problem.  Like it or not, Star Wars is an epic.  It’s structured like an epic.  Epics have themes.  The theme of Star Wars is “sometimes good people must die in order to forward a worthy cause.”  This is why Ben Kenobi dies in Episode IV.  No one major dies in Episode V, but Han’s death is up in the air.

Harrison Ford has said many times that he felt that Han Solo should have died in Return of the Jedi.  From a dramatic and structural standpoint, he was right.  Han Solo really has nothing to do in the story.  Apparently, different drafts of the script had him dying either in the pit on Tattooine or the raid on the uncompleted Death Star.  Lucas told Ford that there was no money in “dead Han” dolls, and that was the end of it.

The movie suffers for it.  Here’s the problem: yes, it would have been sad to see Han go, just as it was sad to see Ben go, but for the sake of the story, and for the structure of the story, it was important.  You might have been upset the first time you saw it, but it would make more sense to you as you thought about it.

So I had mixed feelings about Episode VI, until I saw Episode I.

I can’t tell you how much I hated The Phantom Menace.  I really, really, really hated it.  There was nothing good about it.  When a great actor like Liam Neeson turns in a bad performance, you know that something is wrong.  I also knew that when we had the climactic chariot race from Ben Hur in the middle of The Phantom Menace, that something was dead wrong.  It’s just called the pod race in Phantom, but trust me, it’s the same thing.  (As a side note, Phantom Menace was an early all-digital film, and I remember thinking that the trailers for it were out-of-focus.  They weren’t.  It just looked like that.)

Ultimately, I hated The Phantom Menace so much that I wouldn’t even see the next two entries in the series.  I still haven’t seen them.  As a kid, I’d loved the Star Wars films, but these were lousy.  I wondered for years how George Lucas had changed so much over the years to make such horrible films.  I read various things.

I came to one clear conclusion: George Lucas never changed.  I hadn’t either.

I read an interview with Martin Scorsese in which he recounts a screening of New York, New York.  Lucas told Scorsese that the movie would make a lot more money if Liza Minnelli and Robert DeNiro would end up together at the end.  Scorsese countered that the movie wouldn’t make any sense if that happened, and Lucas said, “Yeah, but it would make more money.”

That sums it up.  The entire history of movies has been the struggle of Art vs. Commerce.  Repetition and sameness are deadly for art, but they are the heart and soul of commerce.  We go to McDonald’s at midnight because we know that the Big Mac that we are buying is just the same as the one we had in Pittsburgh last week.  They count on that.  On the other hand, if you go to an art show and all the pictures are the same, you feel pretty cheated.  Art is supposed to be unpredictable.  The movies have always been about balancing those two forces.

Scorsese is about Art.

Lucas is about Commerce.

If we look very carefully, Star Wars (Episode IV) isn’t a very good film.  It has moments that are classic, and it has two performances that elevate it into something it wouldn’t have been otherwise.  Dramatically speaking, it’s not anything great, with creaky dialogue and several problems with pacing that should have been addressed.

(OK, don’t beat me up here.  Star Wars Episode 4 changed the world of movies, and I know that.  What I’m saying is that it doesn’t hold up on repeated viewings and has a lot of script problems, just like Lucas’ other productions.  It’s got some good actors who put the script across and enough spectacle to help gloss over the problems that the script has.)

Most importantly, What Star Wars had going for it was that it was the first commercial film to capture the fun of the 1930s movie serials and combine it with the groundbreaking special effects that 2001 had started.  The opening shot was mind-blowing for audiences in 1977.  We’d never seen anything like that.  We were used to sci-fi epics looking desperately fake, like Logan’s Run, which had come out the year before.  This looked very convincing.

Harrison Ford had terrible troubles with the dialogue in the film.  “George, you can type this s***, but you sure as hell can’t say it.”   Mark Hamill remembers Ford making notes in his script, desperately trying to make sense of the lines, trying to find a context in them that would make the character work.  He succeeded.  Ford’s performance, paired with that of Alec Guinness, are the dramatic saving graces of the film.  If we add in Peter Cushing, who makes great use of a brief part, and James Earl Jones, who is unseen as Vader but adds an immeasurable presence to the film, we have a movie that is pretty well acted.

Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher acquit themselves less admirably, but both have gone on to do other things well.  I think this was simply a case of not being able to transcend the material.  Perhaps Ford was only able to do so because his part was better written in the first place.

Alec Guinness was at the preview and complained that the last battle sequence at the Death Star was about five minutes too long.  Bravo, Alec!  He’s absolutely right.  In reissues of the film. I often watch audiences during this scene and they get bored about halfway through.  As spellbinding as this was in 1977, it doesn’t hold up today.  Lucas is too in love with that cool shot of diving into the canyon in the Death Star.  It’s overused; the whole thing is too long.

In addition, there’s a bit of the ending that’s too short!  (Potential spoiler, although not much of one…)  When Han decides at the last minute to join the battle and help rescue Luke, we don’t really know he’s going to do it.  It’s a surprise and it’s cut in at the last second with no establishing shot at all.  It’s jarring to first-time viewers.  Where’s Han?  Where did he come from?  If we’d had a few more shots of Han thinking and one of him trying to get there at the last second, it would have been more dramatic but less surprising.

Lucas was grilled by many critics at the weakness of his script.  To counter this, he brought in Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan for Empire Strikes Back.  This makes the script immensely stronger, even though Empire is really the second part in a three-part epic, the part that’s always the least interesting.  The first part has all the setup, the third part has all the resolution, and the second part just gets all the characters in trouble.

That said, Empire is full of suspense, action and great dialogue.  Lucas hated it.  He resolved to take over more the reins on Jedi, and we saw what that got us.

We note that Lucas made the Indiana Jones films, too.  Well, except that Lawrence Kasdan wrote the first one, and Lucas is said not to have liked the script too much.  His buddies Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote the second one, more to his specifications, and it’s not very good.  The third one was kind of a piecemeal effort and is largely saved by the brilliant performance of Sean Connery.  The less said about the last one, the better.

We also note that when left entirely to his own devices, Lucas can’t really come up with a good epic… I submit Willow (1988) as evidence.  It’s not a great film, and the last reel might as well be the last reel of Return of the Jedi with Jean Marsh substituting for the Emperor.  Reliables like Val Kilmer and Marsh are wasted.  Ron Howard, a variable but often talented director, doesn’t save it.

I can only come to the conclusion that Lucas is, as he has often said, a film cutter at heart.  He does make a mean action sequence. They’re always cool, even if sometimes too long.  He’s not much of a storyteller, and I say that with a big caveat.

Lucas is excellent at creating a story and a universe.  He studied the art of epics and how to structure them.  He doesn’t follow through on it, cuts corners, and can’t make the guts of it, the dialogue and character motivation, work.

And that brings us up to today.  Disney has purchased Lucasfilm.  What’s my reaction?

Well, initially, I had a bad feeling about it (hence the title and hence my quote from the films.)  My initial reaction was that Disney would cute the series up even worse than Lucas had, and I made a video of it. (This was the first video that made it on YouTube as a response to the sale. Gotta be proud of that!)

Disney and Lucas have long had what I think are the same problems.  Disney is often worse, though. Disney saw Star Wars and decided to make a movie with even cuter robots and then graft it on to a remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, add in some weird effects and a journey not unlike the end of 2001, and they released it as The Black Hole.  It’s a tremendous misfire of a film.

But, unlike Lucas, Disney has changed since 1979.

Disney has grown and diversified.  They’ve hired new and different people, and they’ve absorbed Pixar while revitalizing their animation unit.

In recent weeks, I heard that Harrison Ford may be interested in playing Han Solo again (something he said he’d never do), and that Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill may be on board too.

I find it even more interesting that Disney is talking to Lawrence Kasdan about writing scripts for the series.  In my opinion, it was Kasdan who saved Jedi, helped save Empire, and made the Indiana Jones series what it was.  He has often said that he didn’t want to work on these films again.

Again, I can only come to one conclusion.  These people didn’t want to work with George Lucas again.  I don’t think they hated him personally… in fact, I think they all regard him as a friend.  Deep down, though, I think they all realize that George was his own worst enemy on the Star Wars films.

I’m not a big Disney fan.  I admit it.  They are big bullies and throw money and legal logistics around like a baker throws pizza dough.  That said, can they save the Star Wars franchise?

I’m not sure.  They’ve made some good first steps.  Frankly, they couldn’t make films much worse than George did.

Howard’s Blend

Do you recognize this woman?  She was a fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, a famous singer at the Metropolitan Opera, and she had her jaw broken by Barbara Stanwyck.

And yet you probably don’t know her for any of those things.

The woman in this photo is Kathleen Howard (1884-1956), who is best remembered today as probably the most memorable in a string of “shrewish wives” depicted in WC Fields films.  Like Fields regular Elise Cavanna, who I wrote about last year, Howard moved seamlessly between major careers.  She was renowned in each one, but each was different enough that many people don’t realize that she was the same Kathleen Howard.

Howard’s performances in three of Fields’ films, You’re Telling Me (1934), It’s a Gift (1934), and The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) are nothing short of brilliant.  It’s easy to descend into just a bitchy, clichéd performance as a Fields wife, but Howard transcends that.  She’s given the characters a back story, and you can feel the frustrations in her life that have made her into the person she is.  That said, she is also supremely awful to Fields, in ways that have him cringing in fear.  Howard is human but still horrible.

Back in the pre-internet days, we’d look at Howard’s filmography and see that she seemed to burst on the scene in 1934 with a supporting performance in Death Takes a Holiday.  But where was she before that?  Most stage actors dabbled in silent film and had a few credits before gaining fame in talkies.

But Kathleen Howard never made a silent film.  She was busy singing.  As a child, she wanted to be a singer, but everyone told her that could never happen.  That didn’t stop her.  She worked her way to the top as a contralto at the Metropolitan Opera.

She even wrote a highly entertaining book about it.  It’s called Confessions of an Opera Singer, and you can read it here.  Interestingly, her story parallels Edie Adams’ story (which Adams also chronicled in a book).  Both were told that they couldn’t make it as singers, that almost no one really did, that women couldn’t handle their own careers, etc.  And both were determined to make it anyway, which they did.

Howard was popular enough outside the opera house to be a recording star, and it’s actually fairly easy to hear her singing in the late teens and early twenties.  Here are some.

But the best parts are for young singers, and Howard got a little old for it by the mid-1920s, so she switched gears.  She became the fashion editor for the magazine Harper’s Bazaar.  This was no third-rate magazine; it was one of the best in the business, and Howard wrote many articles while managing the other contributors.  (This also parallels Edie Adams somewhat, since Edie became her own fashion designer in the 1960s.)  You can see the cover of one of her Harper’s issues here.

Then, abruptly, in 1934, she offered her talents to Hollywood.  This may sound like a leap of faith, but as an opera performer, one is also doing a great deal of acting, so she was not without considerable experience.

Again, I don’t like to link to YouTube clips that violate copyright, and I didn’t post this one, but in this case, I really think you need to see Howard in action.  This is the porch scene from It’s a Gift (1934), which is one of the funniest scenes in one of the funniest films ever made.  If you don’t agree with me, then you’re wrong.  I’m not even going to argue with you about it.

People like Howard fascinate me because they’ve had successful careers in varied fields.  I tend to be unsuccessful at everything I attempt, and yet Kathleen Howard was at the top three different times.  I love her blend of careers and the way she just seemed to move effortlessly among them.  Sometimes performers are inactive for years at a stretch while they regroup and try something different.  Not Howard.  She was in there and working.

Howard was just another of the brilliant people who surrounded WC Fields.  Contrary to his public image, I am more and more seeing Fields a loyal friend who helped out other actors.  Howard and Elise Cavanna were both great performers who did multiple roles.

Another guy I keep spotting in Fields pictures, sometimes just in the briefest walk-on part, is Lew Kelly.  I’d love to have a whole write-up on him, but I just don’t have enough information, so I’ll hijack this posting a little for him.

Kelly (1879-1944) was a vaudeville headliner who traveled the world as Professor Dope, a character that apparently made fun of drug addicts (this was very popular in the teens.)  By the 1920s, his career had more or less dried up, but he became a popular utility player for many comedians in the 1930s.

Kelly appeared with Wheeler and Woolsey, multiple shorts with the Three Stooges, but he’s in seven films with WC Fields from 1932-35, often in uncredited bit parts.  Kelly was one of those guys who could just be pointed into the scene and would give a good performance every time.

What does all this add up to?  Not much, I suppose.  It gives a little context to history.  I see some of these films and wonder who some of those people were in their “real” life.  I keep finding that the answers are really fascinating to me, and I hope they are to some of you, too.

FOLLOWUP:

I had some fascinating off-line chatter on this topic.  Dr. Philip Carli sent a nice followup in a response that I’ll include in the text here.  Also, David Heighway discovered a nice picture of Howard in Götterdämmerung that I just had to post.  Here are both of these followups.

Carli:

It should be mentioned that Howard was the leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera in the teens alongside the legendary Ernestine Schumann-Heink; both women were among the very few of their period to achieve popular celebrity in that voice, and indeed both singers had extremely wide ranges, reaching well up into the mezzo-soprano range as well as into the low alto register. Judging from her few Pathé and Edison recordings, she was one of the great ones, but her career was awkwardly placed on each side of WWI so her career was largely split between Germany and the US. Although contralto parts are often secondary and frequently “women of a certain age” parts, Howard’s vocal and acting range was wide enough that she sang the title roles in Saint-Saens’ Samson et Delilah and Bizet’s Carmen with great success in Europe, and she looked pretty sexy in both parts, judging from contemporary photographs. She also created at least one notable operatic role, that of the greedy and pompous aunt, Zita (originally named “La Vecchia”, or “the old lady”), in Puccini’s only outright comedy, the one-act Gianni Schicci, which had its world premiere at the Met on 14 December 1918 with the celebrated baritone Giuseppe de Luca in the title part and American soprano Florence Easton as Lauretta (who sings “O mio babbino caro”, one of Puccini’s most famous arias); music critic James Huneker praised Howard’s comic performance as “the horrid hag” in his New York Times review the next day, unwittingly predicting the way her acting career would go with Fields.

Heighway’s photo:

 

 

Ten Questions with Bob Furmanek

Since the Dr. Film blog is very pro-preservation, I thought I’d highlight some people who are doing preservation work.  It saves me work on writing blogs (yay), and it gets some publicity to people who are fighting the good fight for preservation.

I’ve got several feelers out for people in the biz, but this will be our first one.

Mr. Furmanek poses with heavy 35mm reels and a Simplex XL.

 Q1.  I know you have worked with Jerry Lewis on some of his films. We all know Jerry as a philanthropist and a comedian.  Can you tell us a little about what you’ve done with Jerry and how Jerry feels about film preservation?

I began working for Jerry in 1984 and worked for several years as his personal archivist. He owned a huge warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood that contained material dating back to the 1940’s, including home movies, scrapbooks, photo albums, recordings, transcriptions, kinescopes, etc. It was my responsibility to identify and catalog all of the material. It took two years to get the job done.

He is very supportive of film preservation and has often expressed  his concern over the deterioration of important materials. He has lent his name and support to several projects that I’ve worked on over the years, including the restoration of a 1928 Loew’s movie palace. I know that he has donated some of his vast collection to both the UCLA Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Q2. You recently did a show at George Eastman House showcasing some of your 3D collection.  Can you tell us about that?

Jack Theakston and I were asked to present a program on the history of 3-D motion pictures at the Dryden Theater and it was a great thrill. I had never been to the George Eastman House before this event and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I brought the only known polarized 3-D print of Robot Monster and the audience loved it. They have a very conscientious staff and I look forward to presenting more 3-D programs at the Dryden Theater in the future.

Q3.  Tell us a little more about your 3D work.  You’ve really done a lot to preserve 3D over the years.

Thank you Eric, that’s very kind. I began my work over 30 years ago when I discovered that the studios and copyright holders were not being very proactive in preserving their 3-D holdings. Thankfully, the situation has gotten better at most of the studios. Most recently, we were able to insure preservation of the science-fiction film Gog and that was very gratifying.

The full story of the Archive’s history is on our website at http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/home/history-of-the-archive

Q4.  I recently heard about your quest to bring some 3D Blu-rays out to the market.  Can you tell us about that and how we might be able to help that happen?

We recently provided important research materials to both Warner Bros. and NBC Universal on their 3-D holdings. Thanks to our documentation, both Dial M for Murder and Creature from the Black Lagoon were mastered in their director-intended aspect ratio. It’s the first time both films have been presented in widescreen since the original theatrical release.  Viewers will no longer see the scissors pre-set device on Anthony Dawson’s back or the telephone pole in the upper reaches of the Amazon which were both visible in the open-matte versions. It’s very important to honor the director’s creative vision.

So far as how you can help, my best recommendation is to support the initial two Golden Age 3-D releases on Blu-ray. Dial M is available as a stand-alone release and Creature can be purchased in the Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection Blu-ray set. It’s also available as a single disc, region free disc in the UK. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creature-Black-Lagoon-Blu-ray-Region/dp/B008LSAQPW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350684816&sr=8-1

If these titles perform well, it will encourage the studios to dig deeper for other vintage 3-D material. There were fifty 3-D features produced between 1952 – 1955 so there’s a lot of prime stereoscopic material still buried in the vaults.

Q5. I know you’re a big fan of a really short-lived color process called Super Cinecolor.  We’re all geeks here.  Tell us about that and why Super Cinecolor is cool.

My interest began around 40 years ago. As a fan of Abbott and Costello, it always bothered me when their two Super Cinecolor features (Jack and the Beanstalk, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd) were shown on television in black and white. I eventually tracked down a 35mm print of Beanstalk in the mid-1970’s from an old time distributor in Baltimore, Robert T. Marhanke. I’ll never forget how vivid the colors looked on that 1952 print and it encouraged me to learn more about the process. When seen in an original 35mm print, the process has a very unique look with neon blues and deep, vivid reds which lend itself well to costume films and science-fiction titles. Some of my favorites are The Highwayman, Invaders from Mars and The Magic Carpet.

Because of the unique aspect of the double emulsion stock, it’s very difficult to accurately transfer Cinecolor materials in telecine. When I produced Special Edition laser discs of Beanstalk and Bela Lugosi’s Scared to Death (in two color Cinecolor) I was very careful to replicate the vibrant and somewhat unnatural hues found on the original 35mm prints.

Q6. You were THE GUY who rediscovered the missing color footage for the Star Trek episode “The Cage.”  I know it’s a little asterisk in your career, but it was really important for a lot of Star Trek geeks.  How did that happen and how close was that to being tossed out?

I found the footage in a vault with other negatives, IP’s [Interpositives] and fine grains. The vault was full of material from long-closed accounts and the film would have eventually been destroyed. It was not labeled and was lying on the floor under the bottom rack of a shelf. When I pried open the rusty can, there was a roll of color 35mm negative. I un-spooled the first few feet and when I saw the Enterprise, I realized that I had found something very special. This was around 1987 and Paramount had just released the pilot on home video using color footage from “The Menagerie” with the trims inserted from a 16mm black and white work print. When I inspected the footage, I found that it contained all of the trims removed in editing the two part episode. We contacted Gene Roddenberry’s office at Paramount and made arrangements to return the one-of-a-kind film directly to him.

Q7. Most collectors have a holy grail of collecting, something that they hope might be out there but they haven’t found yet.  Do you have something like that?

Yes, I would love to find the last missing Lippert 3-D short, Bandit Island with Lon Chaney. It had a limited 3-D release in both polarized and anaglyphic versions in the fall of 1953. One side survives in the 1954 feature The Big Chase but I would love to find the missing side. I tracked down all of the lab records and the 35mm materials were last accounted for in 1954. The only hope for its survival might be a 35mm release print in private hands.

Q8. You’ve long been an advocate of good, strong 35mm projection.  With the advent of good digital projection, do you still feel as strongly about 35mm?

I certainly do. Digital has a clean but somewhat unnatural look to me, especially if it’s been tweaked and scrubbed clean of natural film grain. Plus, there is something special about watching an original 35mm print that was screened theatrically when a film was first released. I often wonder how many thousands of people sat in a theater watching this very same print for the first time on the big screen.

Q9. I seem to recall that you were once working on a restoration of another short-lived process called Perspecta.  Tell us about Perspecta and why that was interesting.  Can you give us a short list of important titles that were released in Perspecta?

I was very good friends with the late Bob Eberenz, the gentleman that worked with Robert Fine in developing the system for MGM. Bob had restored a 1954 Fairchild integrator for me and hearing those films with the original panning and gain control was quite a surprise. Even though it’s still a mono signal, the effect of fullness and left/center/right separation could be very convincing.

I presented an all-Perspecta show on April 26, 2002 at a 1928 movie palace on a fifty-foot screen. We ran Forbidden Planet plus MGM shorts, cartoons and a promo reel. The Fine and Eberenz families were in the audience and it was a very special evening. After the show, I had people tell me how convincing the Perspecta sounded when spread across that big screen.

About ten years ago, Bob and I approached several studios and offered to preserve their Perspecta tracks to a new master so they could be utilized for home video. Unfortunately, none were interested.

Some of the noteworthy films in Perspecta include High Society, Bad Day at Black Rock, This Island Earth, Away All Boats, White Christmas, To Catch a Thief, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, East of Eden and The Barefoot Contessa.

10.  I’ve been asked questions by ignorant reporters all my life.  This is the question I always want to give people: What’s the most important question that I should have asked you but didn’t?  Once you tell me that, please answer that question!

Oh, I don’t know, how about asking if I’ve had any regrets in doing this work?

To that question I will answer, absolutely. Everybody makes mistakes and I’ve made some doozies. But all in all, I’m proud of what’s been accomplished. There’s a renewed and growing interest now in Golden Age 3-D and I’d like to think in a small way, I’ve played a part in that revival. With the technical availability now to master the original left/right elements in HD and align and correct any registration issues, we can truly make these films look better than ever before. That presents a very exciting opportunity to restore and preserve the filmmakers original stereoscopic vision.  I hope to have an ongoing involvement in bringing vintage 3-D material to Blu-ray.

I’ve had a great time chatting with you Eric, thank you so much for your interest in my work.

Another Take on the Colorado Massacre

This has been beaten to death in “the media” (whatever that means). I don’t want to have a political discussion or a political rant about gun rights or letting psychos loose or anything like that. I mean no disrespect to the people who lost lives, property, limbs, or well-being. What happened in Colorado was horrible, and I want to make that clear.

However, this is a movie blog, and this happened at the movies. The whole incident reminds me of just how much we’ve lost as a society in so many ways.

The screening of The Dark Knight Rises was a community event. We have so few of those today. It was an event that people wanted to attend, that people wanted to share. It was the opening of a movie people were eagerly awaiting, and they lined up to see it.

That kind of thing is going away. When I was a kid, there were lines around the block to see Star Wars. Before that, you’d stand in line to see Gone With the Wind or The Sound of Music. The opening night of a James Bond film, every two years or so, was a big event. Even the Star Trek films were a big deal. Now, not so much.

Our whole culture has become depersonalized and cold, in a way that seems like a bad Stanley Kubrick film. Movies are not for big screens but for iPhones. Want to eat in a restaurant? Well, you can go to the fast food giant and they can pump you full of calories for pennies, and you can do it all from the privacy of your car, never seeing anyone, never talking to anyone else, never sharing the experience. Don’t take the bus, take your car. Kids don’t even play outside anymore. They stay inside and play video games. It seems that we can live our entire lives without sharing anything with another living person.

Is it any wonder that Facebook has become so popular? As the whole world has become so depersonalized, Facebook is personal. You can pick your friends, build communities, and share things. Like it or not, people are biologically attuned to this sort of thing. We need it, but we’re not getting much of it these days.

That’s why, even though I’ve not seen a single one of the Christopher Nolan Batman series, I welcomed this phenomenon. People gathering in one place at one time to share a moment in the cinema! Cool!

And now this happens. Beyond the grim statistics and horrible outcomes, it says a lot about what the cinema has become, not a bit of it good.

It seems that Holmes left the back door open and came back to the premiere unobstructed. Where were the ushers? We don’t have them anymore. What was the emergency evacuation plan? We don’t have them anymore. Where was the projectionist? Long since fired, replaced by automation. The only people manning the theater were zit-faced teenagers at the popcorn stand, none of whom had any idea what to do. OK, more staff may not have solved the problem, but it certainly could have helped.

This was a big premiere. A multiplicity of social issues were involved. There were children, even some newborns, in the audience. Why? Why would a parent take a pre-teen to a violent movie like this? In an age of helicopter parents who over-control every aspect of the lives of children, how is this OK? How is it that we can’t see Bugs Bunny on network TV anymore, because that’s too violent, but you take those same kids to see Batman blow people away on the big screen?

In the old days, in the 40s or 50s, it would have been harder for this massacre to happen. There’s nothing new about midnight showings, and there’s nothing new about sold-out openings. Those have been going on for years.

What’s different is that in the old days there was always a theater manager present, and each screen had an usher, or multiple ushers. Someone had the responsibility to check the exits and to warn management if people got unruly. The usher would throw you out if you were obnoxious. What a refreshing idea! In the wake of many theater fires, there was a plan (required by law) to evacuate people in the case of an emergency. The ushers were trained in how to do this.

A lot of theaters even had a kiddie movie run simultaneously with the “adult movie” so that the parents could drop off the kids safely. Other theaters actually had rooms for parents with small children, glassed off from the main house, so that they could watch the movie but not have loud children disrupt the experience for everyone else.

We solved all these problems by firing all of the ushers and relaxing all the rules. Today, people can act up in a theater, can call on their cell phones endlessly, and there are no consequences. It’s had a big impact, too: most people don’t want to go to a movie theater anymore, because it’s not as fun as it used to be.

It’s easy to blame the theater owners or Hollywood itself for this problem, but that would be unfair. As movie theater attendance dwindled due to TV, Hollywood reacted by making bigger, more spectacular movies. TV couldn’t compete in spectacle. In making bigger movies, they needed to recover more money, so they charged the theaters more for them.

Since the Supreme Court had decreed that movie studios could not own theater chains, Hollywood and the owners had to vie for tight funds. The theater owners reacted in the only ways they could. They fired the ushers, laid off excess projectionists, hired teenagers at minimum wage, fudged on equipment, skimped on theater cleaning, etc.

Patrons noticed the changes and reacted by going to fewer movies. And Hollywood and the theater owners reacted by tightening even more. It’s gotten worse and worse. Many theaters are to the point that they are actually unpleasant to attend, and the whole presentation is slipshod at best. Fifty years ago, attending a movie was a spectacular event. Today, seeing a movie means going to a depersonalized box theater. We’ve gone from filet mignon to McDonald’s, but we are still charged for filet mignon. Is it any wonder people don’t go?

As fewer people attend movies in theaters, Hollywood has turned to a reliable demographic: teenage boys love to get out of the house, from under their parents’ thumbs, to see movies. All of the rest of the world has been conditioned to stay home.

Gee, today we have movies that are based on comic books, with no plots and too many explosions. Why is that?

And that leads me back to The Dark Knight Rises. An event, a community event, aimed, predictably, at fifteen-year-old boys. Still, it’s better than nothing, and I was for it, if for no other reason than it keeps alive a 100-year-old tradition of cinema.

My fear is that this will erode the theatrical experience even further. People will probably feel like sitting ducks in a movie house, perhaps with some justification.

How do we fix it? We remember some things:

  1. People go to the movies for a good time. We have to give them one. That means that they have to behave well in groups. Americans are born for rugged individualism, and that should have some limits inside a theater: no loud talking, no cell phones, no throwing things, etc.
  2. We have to have one or two trained theater employees at each screening to enforce behavior rules and help in case of emergencies. Having someone there who has a clue about what to do in an emergency makes people feel safer.
  3. If we fixed #1 and #2, then more people who aren’t necessarily 15-year-old boys might come back to the cinemas. We should make movies for them, too. Did you notice that Midnight in Paris made $100 million on a small budget? There wasn’t an explosion in it. Food for thought, guys.

I find that more and more movies are made for a smaller and smaller audience paying less and less money for each one. That means that all of cinema is becoming YouTube. YouTube is great, but it’s not for Lawrence of Arabia, or even The Match King. It’s great for cat videos, and promos, and your nephew Louie’s new shaky-cam epic, shot in the back yard.

As I mourn for the victims of the shootings in Colorado, I fear one of the casualties may be cinema itself. I almost feel a responsibility to go see a movie just to vote with my dollars.  As a wise man once said, “If the psychos scare you so much that you change your behavior and live in fear, not doing what you once did, then that’s how they win.”

Let’s not let Holmes win.  There’s a reason that the Dr. Film pilot ends with these words: “Go out and see an old movie.” Movies were designed with an audience in mind, timed for an audience, and play best with them.  Let’s all go see a movie (preferably an old one.)

Ray Bradbury Meets the Man of 1,000 Faces

When I was a kid, growing up and watching movies on TV, I read about Lon Chaney Sr., in the magazines of Forrest J. Ackerman.  Ackerman (1916-2008) was a great friend of Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen.  As of Mr. Bradbury’s death today, Harryhausen (1920- ) becomes the last survivor of the long-lived group.

Ackerman always praised Lon Chaney and claimed he was a special actor, whose like is not to be seen today.  Even as a nine-year-old, I wanted to see more of his films.  In those days, most of Chaney’s pictures were impossible to see.  If you were very lucky, you might see a chewed-up print of The Phantom of the Opera or The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  It was unlikely that you’d see any of the other ones.

As video came to the world, I got a slow trickling of Lon Chaney movies.  I was a teenager at the time.  I was mesmerized by him.  What an actor.  Ackerman was right.

Then, many years later, I attended a lecture at Butler University with Douglas Adams and Ray Bradbury, two authors who could hardly be more disparate, but were both typecast (if one may use that word for an author) as “science fiction guys.”  This, as Harlan Ellison would tell you, is considered by the literati to be one small step up from porno authors and men’s room attendants.

Adams came on and was enchanting.  He read excerpts from his Hitchhikers’ Guide books, and some other things.  He was a natural-born actor, able to put a spin on his work like no performers I had ever seen before.  I loved every moment of what he did, and since he died not long after, I’m glad I got the chance to see him in person.

Then Bradbury came on.

By this time in his life, had had a stroke, and was stuck in a wheelchair.  His speech was somewhat impaired.  His ability to move one hand seemed to be a little strained.

I realize that everyone will focus on Mr. Bradbury’s literary accomplishments, which are legion, in celebrating his life.  I don’t want to take anything away from that at all, because I love Bradbury’s work.  But there was another side to him, as a lover of film, and since this is a film blog, that’s what I want to cover here.

Bradbury called films “wonderful” and “magical,” and he wanted nothing to do with the idea that they were somehow low-class art.  He’d worked on many films himself, including the underrated Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and Moby Dick (1956).  He did a fantastic impression of director John Huston when he spoke of the making of that picture.

He went on to talk about his favorite star when he was growing up.  Born in 1920, Bradbury was an impressionable child just as Lon Chaney was becoming a big star.  In those days, it was fairly easy to see movies reissued, so even as a youngster, he was able to see most of Chaney’s big pictures in reissue.

Chaney, he said, was able to reach into his soul and find something in some of these characters that was human and touching, despite how horrible they often were.  Bradbury often teared up a bit when talking of Chaney’s work, and how emotional it made him.

Of course, most of the audience had no idea what he was talking about.  After all, Chaney has been dead since 1930, and he only made one talking picture.  Even today, a good bit of his silent material is difficult to see and a fair chunk doesn’t survive at all.  But I had seen it!   I knew exactly what he meant.

One of the things that always annoys me in an interviewer is when they ask me, “Can you name an actor today who is like this silent star we’re discussing?”  Well, no.  Lon Chaney was unique in cinema.  There was no one ever like him, and there likely never will be again.  Despite the fact that some of his movies were clichéd and hammy, with hare-brained plots and weak direction, Chaney was always able to wring something worthwhile out of them.

He was so good at certain things that he got tagged with them and had to do them over and over again.  Weird, contortionist makeup?  He was great at it.  Playing disabled characters with deformities?  No one better.  Ethnic types?  Chaney’s your man.  And the thing that tied them together: No one, no one ever, was able to convey the emotions of traumatic disappointment and utter heartbreak like Chaney did.  One facial expression.  You felt his pain.  The man was a genius.

It was almost a given that Chaney didn’t get the girl at the end of the picture, but he sure tried and it killed him (sometimes literally) that someone else ended up with his love.  I often find that some of Chaney’s best performances are in his most conventional parts, like Tell It to the Marines (1926) or While the City Sleeps (1928).  But Chaney could still play convincingly through thick makeup.  Even a fairly conventional picture like Shadows (1922) features Chaney playing an 80-year-old Chinese laundryman.  It is hard to see the 39-year-old Chaney in the part.  After a few minutes, we simply believe he is that character.

As I continued to listen to Bradbury, it occurred to me that much of his work was colored in the same way that Chaney’s had been.  No, not science fiction, not horror, not claptrap.  Chaney was all about emotion. Often it was about a alienated person who didn’t really fit in with the rest of society.  Bradbury’s work was too.

I remembered that in high school we’d been assigned to read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.   I know that the “English teacher mentality” taught that 1984 was a timeless classic.  I felt at the time that Fahrenheit 451 was much more interesting, because it had passion that I never felt at all in Orwell’s novel.  Bradbury’s characters deeply loved a history that society was taking away, so much that they were willing to die in order to preserve it.

It was a very Lon Chaney sort of idea.

Bradbury was moved to tears again as he recounted Chaney’s untimely death in 1930, and how it affected him personally.  This man, his hero, was dead!  It could even happen to someone like Lon Chaney!  It made the ten-year-old boy shudder at both Chaney’s mortality and his own.

We are fortunate that Bradbury lived over 90 years, just as we are unfortunate that Chaney never reached 50.  Tonight I celebrate the legacy of both men.  I hope somewhere, somehow, The Man of 1000 Faces gets to meet the creator of The Illustrated Man.

As a postscript: I have seen an artist’s picture, which I cannot find, of Death laying the final mask on Lon Chaney’s face.  I can think of no better image to include here.

Post postscript: (added 8/26/12).  Michael Blake found the picture, which I am including here.

 

Guest Blogger DW Atkinson reviews The Three Stooges movie

DW Atkinson, one of the moving forces behind Cinesation, is perhaps the biggest Stooge fan I know. Even his license plate and email have variations of NYUK (the Curly laugh) on them.

Full disclosure: I’m not the biggest Stooge fan ever. I don’t find them hilariously funny, as some do, but I respect them. When I see what they were able to do with the 35-cent budget allocated to them by Columbia, and I compare it to what many of the other Columbia comedians were able to accomplish with the same money, the Stooges blow them out of the water every time. I figured that Mr. Atkinson was the most qualified to review this modern-day version of classic comedy.

DW’s review starts below the trailer for the new film.

The Three Stooges: Those who saw the film this weekend — a 58% male crowd — didn’t love it, assigning it an average grade of B-, according to market research firm CinemaScore. Even if word-of-mouth on the movie doesn’t end up being fantastic, 20th Century Fox didn’t spend much to produce the film: $37 million.

The word film was used but it was digital for me. B- is generous. What I could do 37 million? Don’t get me started.

I just watched the new Three Stooges movie.
I could tell it was partially made as an homage to Howard, Fine & Howard.
But too many times it was it was an Oh-man moment for me. Not in a good way either.
And as usual, most of the good parts were in the trailer spoiling too many scenes.

The movie just didn’t work for me. It couldn’t decide what it wanted to be or how to get there.
It was funny in parts, made me smile and laugh.
But when it’s over, the “what the hell was that” question smacked me upside the head faster than Moe with a shovel.

I am not a fan of the Farrelly’s work with the exception of Shallow Hal.
In fact, after paying to see Dumb & Dumber back in the day, I vowed to never pay to see another Farrelly movie.
I still think it’s a dumb movie and I was dumber paying to see it. I could have edited it down to 30 minutes.
Anyways, like most Farrelly flicks, body fluids/functions have a spotlight and the Stooges are not immune.
The nursery scene went a little long but it was funny at first. The Curly gas scene worked because unlike
some other gags, it wasn’t over worked.

I don’t understand the reasoning for the assorted famous supporting cast members and I don’t care enough to look it up. Larry David? Really?

I don’t believe a real Stooge fan will like the new Three Stooges Movie,
but having said that, they won’t hate it either.
It could have been worse. Remember the Laurel & Hardy movie back in 1999?

How would I rate the film?
Would I go see it again? NO
Would I buy it on DVD next month? NO
I give it three Nyuk’s = a grade of C

Kevin Brownlow and the Holy Grail

Kevin Brownlow (right), and Abel Gance (1967)

Seldom has a movie, particularly a silent film, been so enmeshed in legend and politics as Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927).  The French have their own restoration, there’s a different version at MOMA, and there’s yet a different cut made by Francis Coppola, who owns the rights to show it in the US.  But the most famous, most complete version has been assembled by Kevin Brownlow, slowly, painstakingly, over the last 45 years or so.  It hasn’t been shown since the 1980s in the US.

Attending a screening of Napoleon has become something of a Holy Grail.  The few European screenings have attracted viewers from all over the world.  The challenge of mounting a showing is daunting.  The film is about five and half hours long, and it requires a screen for three interlocked projectors with a triple-wide ending sequence.  Since it doesn’t have a recorded score, the film has an orchestral accompaniment written by Carl Davis, which he generally conducts himself.  Just the thought of paying overtime and double overtime for the union musicians is staggering.

I was lucky enough to attend a showing in Oakland, California on March 31.  It was spectacular.  The theater was breathtaking, an art deco gem called the Paramount, absolutely gigantic, and painstakingly restored.  I’d have gladly paid most of what I paid for admission just to look around the theater.

So what about the movie, you ask.  Well, I’m getting to that…

I try to keep the Dr. Film blog pages from getting too saturated with film theory and technical jargon. I strive to have the blog full of film lore for geeks, but I also want to encourage newcomers.  With this film, I have a problem.  I can’t seem to discuss the movie without doing it in film geek terms.

The problem with talking about Napoleon is that it diverges strongly from most other silents.  The differences between it and the run-of-the-mill silent films of the period can only be explained and illustrated by using fancy film terms.  So I will apologize in advance to any newcomer who may be reading this.  I hope it is still rewarding to any newcomer, but if you find if rough going, I recommend skipping forward to another one of my blog articles.

Napoleon is part of a rarefied class of films made by half-crazy directors who went wild spending money and had crews and producers that would support it.  It requires a charismatic director so dedicated to the film that people will follow him into the abyss.  In a very real sense the making of a film like Napoleon is like a Napoleonic campaign.  Consider that Gance went to all the places that Napoleon did, with a similar sized crew/army, and prop ammunition, etc.  The logistics are quite impressive.

Napoleon joins the rank of films like Intolerance, Metropolis, Lawrence of Arabia, Heaven’s Gate, 2001, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and a number of others.  All of these have troubled production histories, bloated runtimes, maniacal directors, and out-of-control budgets.  All of them are today considered at least minor classics, some major classics.  Most of them were subjected to investor interference and extensive recutting.

I am saddened by the idea that many of the people who saw Napoleon did so without ever having seen another silent film.  What makes Napoleon unique is that it uses a number of fascinating techniques.  Some ideas were used years later, others not at all.  To see Napoleon is to see one of the great experimental films ever made.  There are parts of it that work brilliantly, other parts less so, but the ideas we see in this film are nothing short of staggering.

Consider these:

• Silent films tended to be cut with a slower rhythm that modern films are.  Gance has several sequences in Napoleon that are cut with lightning speed, just as fast as a modern Michael Bay film.  Gance had the intelligence to use this technique sparingly, so that the confusion of “chaos cinema” used in action sequences today is minimized.  What does happen is that we get the effect of being “in the fight” while still clearly understanding what is going on.

• A brilliant little sequence uses a technique I’d never seen before.  Napoleon sees Josephine and finally gets a chance to meet her properly.  He’d met her briefly a number of times before.  Gance gives us a closeup of Napoleon, and then flash cuts of their other meetings, and then back to Napoleon reacting.  In the space of a second, we understand what’s going on in Napoleon’s head as he works this out.  Amazing technique.  No flashbacks, lap dissolves or anything.  The only other time I’ve ever seen anything like it is during a scene toward the end of Charade (1963), but that usage is fundamentally different and is actually cut slower!

• Moving camerawork was difficult in 1927.  Film stock was slow, which meant that a lot of light was required to keep anything moving in focus.  Furthermore, most cameramen were using hand-cranked cameras, which naturally limited mobility.  Gance gleefully breaks all convention here.  Motorized cameras, handheld camerawork, cameras on seesaws, on wires to create smoother shots.  It all looks rather seamless and more like some of the work we see today with Steadicams and the like.  Gance had no such things.  Perhaps the Germans were doing a bit more with the moving camera at this time, but Gance integrates it wonderfully into the film, less as a stunt and more as a real storytelling device.

• Gance’s Polyvision, with three interlocked cameras, used at the end of the film, is amazing.  Gance could have met with Henri Chretien, creator of the Hypergonar process that eventually became Cinemascope.  That would have given him the widescreen process he craved.  What he came up with was equally brilliant.  The interlocked projector technique, which he called Polyvision, is extremely similar to Cinerama, which debuted publicly in 1952.  But even here Gance does things differently.  Cinerama always apologizes a little for the join lines between the panels, trying to minimize them as much as possible.  Gance embraces the whole idea.  While Cinerama always used single shots (the same scene spread across each of the three screens), Gance will happily have a different shot on each screen, or a mirror of the right screen on the left screen.  Sometimes Napoleon will be seen in closeup in the center panel while a long shot is seen on the side panels.  This would never have been done in Cinerama!  At the end of the film, he even tints each screen to match the French flag in a sequence that is as bravura a piece of filmmaking as I have ever seen.

Is it excessive?  Sure it is.  That’s the whole point.  If I can make an analogy that’s used frequently, Gance starts Napoleon like an organ with all the stops pulled.  You’d think he had nowhere to go.  What he does is to effectively build more stops through the end of the picture and use those.  Yes, it is wearing, and yes, there are sequences that are so long that any producer would scream to cut them back.

That’s why I can understand why people have wanted to cut Napoleon down to a manageable size for years.  Gance himself recut it and recast it with sound.  He remade it with sad results.  But if we look through history, Intolerance was long and was recut.  That was DW Griffith’s picture, one of the directors Gance revered.  Metropolis was recut extensively.  2001 was recut.  Brazil was recut.  Lawrence of Arabia was recut.  Each of these films was long and excessive, made by an obsessed director.

Again, that’s the point.

This is why I laud Kevin Brownlow for restoring Napoleon as it was.  He’s fought the good fight against recutting it to fit modern tastes, to fit cinema runtimes, to anything other than the best we can approximate Gance’s vision.  This is why that, to this day, Napoleon still stands out from the crowd.  It’s not commercial.  It never was.  It’s not like any other film, silent or sound.  It wasn’t intended to be.  It is what it is.  Even Coppola’s cutting and speeding-up of Napoleon, which was intended to minimize the overtime for the musicians, compromises Gance’s vision.

Napoleon felt, to me, a lot like a David Lean film (Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia.)  It also had a strong influence from DW Griffith (Intolerance) in terms of narrative structure and editing.  But it also had an avant garde feel.

The acting was brilliant, particularly Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon.  Davis’ score was an inspiration, based on pieces of music from each period in Napoleon’s life.  The theater, presentation, and ambience were all top notch.

Out of all the brilliance of the evening, I still need to single out Kevin Brownlow.  I wouldn’t call soft-spoken Mr. Brownlow obsessive.  I would call him dedicated to doing the right thing.  He’s suffered slings and arrows for years from people who didn’t care to have Napoleon restored.

I give him a special tip of the Dr. Film fez.  Without Kevin Brownlow, we’d be missing a key piece of movie history.  It’s a glimpse of a cinema that was, a cinema that never would be, and a cinema from the mind of a genius.

A still from the triptych: look carefully, and you can see where the 3 images join

Special side note: Much was made of the idea of putting Napoleon out on DVD or Blu-ray.  I, for one, hope it never is.  What I hope for is a well-publicized successful roadshow of the film in major cities across the US.  I know that theatrical exhibition is passé today.  I still think Napoleon should be seen in a theater, with an audience, and if possible, with a live score.  Brownlow mentioned that Stanley Kubrick wanted to borrow a print of Napoleon to watch on his flatbed viewer (a small-screen device used for editing films.)  He told Kubrick that this was a bad idea, given that the film lost most of its impact on a small screen.

“It’s like watching Lawrence of Arabia on a phone,” Brownlow said.  (Mind you, I believe Mr. Brownlow would happily release the film on DVD just to get it out there for people to see.  It is my own opinion, not his, that it shouldn’t be on video.)

For the record, I won’t watch Lawrence of Arabia on anything but a big screen, and I think Napoleon deserves the same respect.

Dude, #youSawTheArtist

Now that The Artist has won the Best Picture Oscar, I’ve been asked by numerous people to recommend other silent films.  People treat me as if I speak a foreign language and that perhaps I can teach them the secret to unlocking it.  In a way, this is really true, because silent film uses a different filmic syntax, and it’s one that has to be learned with repeated viewings.  Silent film technique is not primitive… it is quite advanced, in fact, but it is fundamentally different from the techniques we use today. That’s why it can seem a little silly if you are not used to it.

Most of the people who ask me about silent films are younger folks who are just discovering silents.  I hope this will dispel the myth that I somehow dislike younger people or “newbies,” which is definitely not the case.  The entire goal of the Dr. Film show is to be able to include films and shorts that will appeal to a broad audience, from newbies to dyed-in-the-wool film geeks.

What I don’t like, and will continue not to like, is the persistent cultural idea that there were only five films made before Star Wars, which seems to be the oldest film most people will watch.  I refer to these as the “Holy Quintet” of classic films. (See the end of this article for the list of the “Holy Quintet,” just in case you’re wondering.)

Silent films suffer even more in popular culture, They were often copied poorly, causing them to have that blown-out over-white look, and they were often transferred at speeds that were completely incorrect.  This only hurts the whole of silent film, because originally all the prints were lovely and they were all projected at reasonable speeds.

Most articles that I see trot out the same few silent films, often with a dismissive swish that these are flickery and sped-up, not understanding the basic idea of what silents were about.

If you’ve been reading about The Artist, then you’ve seen these articles, too.  Everyone wants you to see Sunrise, Passion of Joan of Arc, City Lights, Metropolis, and Intolerance.  These are becoming the clichéd “see these after you’ve seen The Artist” list.

The problem that I have with this list is that they are not terribly accessible.  Not in a strict sense of availability–these films can all be found on video, and often downloaded.  The problem is that these are not films I’d recommend for newbies.  It’s the equivalent of handing Beowulf to a kid who’s just finished Green Eggs and Ham.  Sure, Beowulf is great, but the poor kid is probably going to be put off a lot of literature because this is just too much for him.

All of the films in the “see these after you’ve seen The Artist” list are films I’ve seen, and one of the things that they share is that they tend to be rather broad-sweeping epics.  They tackle big issues, they’re big and ponderous, and they’re “arty.”  There’s nothing wrong with that–I like these pictures–but I fear that the won’t play well for viewers who are new to the medium.  Worse still, these are all films that demand a great deal of concentration and play infinitely better on a large screen with an audience.  I’ve got to face the fact that I need to hook new viewers by finding films that will play well on an iPhone. Then I slowly must convince them that the theatrical experience is far superior especially for silents!

I need  to emphasize once again that silents are fundamentally different from talkies.  You can watch Transformers 3 and walk into the kitchen, come back, and you’ve heard all the explosions and dialogue that you need to follow the story.  We can’t do that with silents.  If you miss two or three minutes, then you may be lost.  More importantly, there are things we can do in talkies that we can’t do in silents, but there are things that we can do in silents that we can’t do in talkies.

Ben Model frequently points out (and accurately), that one of the things we can do in silents is to have large, noisy objects sneak up behind the protagonist while he is unaware of them.  In Buster Keaton pictures, this is often a train.  When Buster’s back is to the train, even if we can see it, we’re somehow able to believe that Buster can’t hear it.  We don’t hear it either.  Once he sees it, then he is aware of its existence.  Sight is the only sense we have in a silent film.

The other thing that many have already gleaned from me is that I tend to veer off the mainstream, so I figure that you can find all the big, epic silents you need.  I’ve prepared a list of ten silent films that I hope will encourage you to see more.

These are not what I think are the ten best silent films.  I hate lists like that.  These are not my favorite silent films.  I hate lists like that.  These are not even what I consider a balanced overview of what silent films represented.  I’m not sure I could do that with just ten.

Here are the criteria I used–

  • The film must be available in some way on video or for download.
  • The film should be something that helps showcase the uniqueness of silent film.  It should either be something difficult to make as a talkie or something that was never attempted again for other reasons.
  • Big photographic epics that play well on big screens should be avoided.  Tight comedies or dramas play better on small screens.
  • Let’s have some fun and pick films that most others skip over and don’t mention.

The list, in random order, not by quality.

  1. Sherlock Junior (1924) with Buster Keaton.  I didn’t want to pick The General, because everyone will pick it, and because it’s a little too epic for new viewers.  Still, Keaton has a special timeless quality about him that appeals across generations.  This film is action-packed, and it contains a delightful sequence in which Keaton walks into a movie screen.  Again, it couldn’t be made as a talkie, because the “film” he walks into is bizarrely disjointed and would contain wildly disparate sounds to destroy the illusion.  Sherlock is probably not Keaton’s best film, but it is a film I think would appeal to a broad audience.
  2. The Mark of Zorro (1920).  I have to include a Douglas Fairbanks title in this list in order not to feel inordinately guilty.  Thief of Baghdad needs to be seen on a big screen, but Zorro is a blast no matter how you see it.  I’m not going to recount the Zorro legend to you, because you should already know it.  Fairbanks plays him brilliantly.  He was a force of nature, an unstoppable guy who seemed to embody the term “irrational exuberance.”  Fairbanks was not afraid to break all the rules of filmmaking and storytelling, either.  The last 20 minutes of so of Zorro is a non-stop chase.  It’s too long, it stops the film cold in its tracks, and it does nothing to forward the story at all.  I loved every second of it and would never cut a single frame. Fairbanks makes it work.
  3. Films of Max Davidson.  Available only as a German DVD, mostly due to rights issues and because Americans don’t like the idea of Max in general, these films are gems.  Max had his own series of short films under producer Hal Roach in the late 1920s.  He could hardly have misfired with the help he had available: many of the shorts were directed by young comedy genius Leo McCarey and photographed by budding genius director George Stevens.  Still, Max is one of the great comic performers, if only because he reactsso well.  Max’s reaction shots are a model of how a comic can and should stretch a funny situation for maximum laughs.One example I can give of Max’s brilliance is in Pass the Gravy (1928).  This is truly one of the funniest short films ever made by anyone at any time.  And it basically has one jokestretched out for almost 20 minutes.  I can even tell you the joke without giving anything away!  Max’s character is a stereotypical little Jewish guy from the 1920s, complete with beard, cheapness, etc.  He generally has an idiot son who commits some sort of mischief.  In this one, the son accidentally kills the neighbor’s prize rooster, Brigham.  The son then cooks it, leaving the FIRST PRIZE band highly visible on the rooster’s leg.  The family serves it up to the neighbor in hopes to mend the discord between the two families.  Max doesn’t understand what’s happened, but the rest of the family does, and they desperately try to explain the problem in pantomime so that the neighbor doesn’t find out.  It’s a work of genius.Should Second Husbands Come First? manages to top this in terms of sheer political incorrectness.  Money-grubbing Max is trying to marry a rich widow, much to the dismay of her two sons.  They concoct a scheme to break up the wedding: one son dresses up as a shamed woman, holding a young child “she” claims to be Max’s illegitimate son.  The boys could only find a black baby for their shenanigans, so they powdered all the visible parts.  Mortified at the events, Max’s cheap friends quickly take back all their wedding gifts.  The baby’s pants fall off, revealing a posterior of the incorrect tone.  The ruse is exposed, and Max demands all the presents be returned.  Yes, folks, in the space of 45 seconds we have two Jewish jokes, a black joke, and a butt joke.Hal Roach felt these were all OK because they were not of a vicious nature and everyone was subject to the humor in these films.  I tend to think he was right, but there are still people who think these films should be banned.  Maybe they should be banned, but you should see them first, because they are truly hilarious.
  4. Grass and Chang.  These two groundbreaking documentaries are about as fascinating as movies get.  I don’t want to tell you too much about them, because they have to be seen to be believed.  The thing to bear in mind while seeing them is that they were made by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who later made King Kong (1933).  You start to realize in watching these films just how much Cooper borrowed from his real-life experiences when making Kong, and you see a glimpse of native life (and wildlife) in Asia that was not captured any other way.  There are probably more tigers killed in Chang than exist worldwide today!  Beautiful photography, intense editing, fascinating action sequences.  Yes, they’re violent, not for young children.  Yes, they’re hoked up for maximum effect.  That doesn’t stop them from being landmark films.  As a side note, it’s important to realize that Cooper was basically the real-life (and smart) equivalent of Forrest Gump.  Almost every major event in the 20th Century had Cooper’s involvement: he was a WWI aviator, POW, anti-Communist, pioneer in the aviation industry, documentary filmmaker, studio head, major investor in Technicolor, major backer of David Selznick and John Ford, WWII hero, major investor in Cinerama, and several other things.  Amazing films, amazing man.
  5. The films of Charley Bowers.  I don’t know what to say about this guy.  He’s unique in all of cinema.  Was he smoking something?  Probably.  Bowers’ blend of stop-motion and live-action was pioneering and mind-blowing.  Sadly, most of his films were lost for many years, and many have only been rediscovered in the last decade or so.  Bowers’ comic character was sort of a combination of Chaplin and Keaton with a bizarre inventive streak thrown in.  Bowers casually showed elephants walking into the Capitol in Washington DC, with effects as convincing as any today.  In one film he invented a solution that could graft anything onto living plants.  A desperate farmer, overrun with vicious mice (bearing machine guns), hired Bowers to eradicate the pests.  Bowers solved the problem by harvesting cat-tails, grafting them onto plants, at which point live cats sprout from the plants!  This is all shown on screen in full view.  Bowers’ stop-motion happened simultaneously with Willis O’Brien’s work.  While Bowers never animates dinosaurs, he meshes live action with stop motion in brilliant ways that O’Brien never tried.  O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen rarely moved their camera during animation, but Bowers gleefully pulls back from a closeup to longshot, effectively animating both camera and model.  Bowers is one of the great rediscoveries of the past twenty years, the kind of rediscovery that keeps collectors like me digging for more lost films.
  6. The Wind (1928) with Lillian Gish.  Swedish director Victor Seastrom (aka Sjöstrom) was a great innovator in silent cinema who returned to his native land and eventually acted in Bergman films.  This one is one of his best and most effective.  Again, it’s simple.  Gish is an innocent young woman stuck in a small shack in the desert.  She’s been stuck with crass, unfeeling relatives in a hot, desolate landscape.  Her isolation is something we can feel intensely, and we can understand her starting to go slightly mad in the environment.  In self-defense, she kills a man who was making improper advances, then buries him.  A wild windstorm ensues, blowing up the dry sand all around the shack.  The man is uncovered and flails around outside at the windows.  Is he really dead?  Gish has to deal with a range of emotions and a terrifying situation.  It’s a brilliant film, not screened enough.
  7. The Unknown (1927) with Lon Chaney.  This is a film that doesn’t lend itself to description.  I love running it for audiences, because it starts off a bit silly, drawing titters, and then moves into territory that has people cringing by the last reel.  Director Tod Browning  has been roundly trashed in popular criticism in the last decade or so.  Well, whether like Dracula or not, this is a great film.  Chaney plays an armless circus performer who throws knives with his feet, at lovely young Joan Crawford.  Unbeknownst to almost everyone, Chaney actually has arms, using them to steal and murder after hours.  Alas, Crawford sees his form, identifying his unusual double thumb, as he commits a murder.  Chaney has a brilliant idea: he bribes a doctor to remove his arms, thereby making certain that he can never be identified for his crime.  Chaney’s performance in some of the later scenes is remarkable.
  8. The Kid (1921) with Charlie Chaplin.  I have to include a Chaplin film, and everyone is going to tell you to see City Lights or The Gold Rush.  Those may be more important films, but The Kid is very accessible, very well acted, and filmically very important: it was the first major comedy feature picture.  Certainly, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) is also a feature (just squeaking by the time requirement), but The Kid is far more advanced structurally.  It paved the way for comedies and comedy-dramas for years to come.  Jackie Coogan is a wonderful child performer, and Chaplin exploits him perfectly.  Chaplin’s mastery of both film direction and geography meshed with his sensitive portrayal combines to make this a great film.
  9. The Patsy (1928).  Marion Davies is one of the most maligned talents in cinema.  Citizen Kane unfairly portrayed her as a talentless hack, something that Orson Welles regretted in interviews for years.  Her long-time lover, William Randolph Hearst, often threw Davies in costume dramas, a genre for which she was ill-suited.  When left to her own devices, Davies was an ace comedienne, able to make a charming performance from even the frothiest script.  In this film, as the forgotten “good girl” in the family, Davies loses all the cute men to her sister.  Thinking she needs a better personality, Davies impersonates Pola Negri, Lillian Gish, and Mae Murray.  (Don’t worry, it’s funny even if you don’t know the people she’s imitating).  Davies is a delight to watch in her attempts to win the favor of a young man– a man also being pursued by her sister.  Throw in sterling work by Marie Dressler as the mother, and this is a howl from start to finish.
  10. Destiny (1921).  I know the pundits are going to say Murnau, Murnau, Murnau!  To you I say, Lang, Lang, Lang!  Murnau is more pretentious and arty than Lang, and Lang,  (when he’s not being long-winded and preachy), is more accessible.  This, to me, is his best film.  A young woman, Lil Dagover (also the female lead in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is distressed when her lover leaves with a stranger and does not return.  The stranger is Death, and his garden wall is impenetrable.  Eventually, Death agrees to a challenge: if she can defeat him and save just one of three men from his fate, then Death will reunite the lovers.  This concept has been ripped off a zillion times, from The Seventh Seal to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.  Sadly, the surviving prints of this film aren’t the greatest, so I’m a little hesitant to recommend it on that level, but I hope viewers will find its simple story so compelling that it overcomes the deterioration of poor copying.

I know that I’m going to get brickbats hurled at me because of these choices.  What?  No Harold Lloyd?  No DW Griffith?  No deMille?  No Arbuckle?  No Ince?  No William Desmond Taylor?  No Louise Brooks?  No Colleen Moore?  No Valentino?  No Napoleon?

Well, this is the problem with lists.  You note that I produced more than ten examples of people omitted from this silly list.  I hope that these films will pique your interest and challenge you to watch more silent films.  I hope it will encourage you to patronize some of the revival theaters and film conventions that trot out many rare films that can only be seen on the big screen.

(And OK, you made it this far.  The holy quintet of classic films are as follows:  Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, and Gone With the Wind.  I actually had a theater manager tell me that he’d just like to have a theater running a different one of those five films every week because they’d all do good business.  So much for challenging your audience a little!)

Charade’s Stone Unturned

I wrote this for a special screening of Charade (1963) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

 

Charade (1963) is one of those films that has almost everything going for it.  The cast is littered with Academy Award winners: Audrey Hepburn, George Kennedy, James Coburn, and Walter Matthau.  Costume designer Hubert de Givenchy and composer Henry Mancini also brought home Oscars. Cary Grant and director Stanley Donen both deserved them many times and eventually got honorary ones.

Many of these are household names today, at least in households with a few film fans.  At the showing on Feb 17th for the Winter Nights Festival, Sandy McLendon will be discussing Givenchy and his fashions.

There is another, less-known, but vitally important contributor to Charade, and he was also an Oscar winner.  Writer Peter Stone’s screenplay is a work of art.  The plot is fairly commonplace: five soldiers stole a stash of gold from the US government in WWII.  One of them stole all of it, and, years later, the rest are ready to kill each other to get it.

This could be the basis for a predictable episode of Columbo, but instead Stone keeps the audience guessing throughout.  One of his best tricks is to sprinkle the plot development in small doses throughout the film.  For years, writers have struggled with this problem.  When too much plot (often called exposition) is discussed early in the film, then the audience is bored, the pace grinds to a halt, and there is no mystery to unravel for a long period of time.

The James Bond films long ago threw in the towel on this problem, having the character M explain the mission to Bond in a customary long scene early in the film.  In his Austin Powers films, creator Mike Myers parodied this practice by calling his M character Basil Exposition, since that was really his job.  

Stone does no such thing in Charade.  Indeed, the first shot in the film is of a dead body being thrown from a train.  It is some time before we realize that this body had been the husband of Regina Lampert (Hepburn).

Slowly, we find out, in small hints, that he was one of the WWII soldiers, and we meet the other men who are after the money.  Her trouble, which the audience shares, is that everyone has a stake in the game, so that means everyone is lying to everyone else.

The audience has to listen carefully to everyone to decide which clues are lies and which lies are clues.  The plot twist at the end is so carefully set up that many audiences, unfamiliar with the film, will gasp when the killer is exposed.  And afterward, there is still one more twist.

This is a difficult task for the screenwriter.  Sometimes, he can turn in a story with great dialogue and characters, but the killer’s identity is completely transparent.  Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) has this problem.  Despite the fact that Cary Grant and Grace Kelly have a delightfully funny romantic interplay, there is no mystery in the film at all.  The plot hinges on the identity of a jewel robber imitating Grant’s style, and the ultimate revelation is so obvious that most viewers had long since guessed it.

On the other side of the coin, the mystery can be too complex.  When the writer tries too hard, the limits of plausibility are stretched, and sometimes the entire plot structure becomes laughable because there are simply too many twists.  This failing comes out strongly in The Dark Hour (1936), which has a final scene with two characters both confessing to the same killing, piling on twist after twist, until no one can believe either of them.

Stone was able to balance the need for mystery and plausibility, but he was also a master at witty dialogue and plot developments.  Cary Grant helped get him the job for Father Goose (1965), which, as a wacky comedy, was a change of pace for both men.  Stone won the Oscar for the screenplay, saying this in his acceptance speech: “My thanks to Cary Grant, who keeps winning these things for other people.”  Stone went on to write the book for the stage musical 1776, which was made into a film in 1972 and continues to be revived today.  His chief task was to create a sense of tension in a story that had an ending the audience knew beforehand: it was required to end with the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Stone kept the audience wondering how the committed but obnoxious John Adams could get Congress to adopt the Declaration, with endless obstacles, interpersonal problems, and political hassles in his way. 

A few years later, Stone wrote a suspenseful screenplay for The Taking of Pelham 123.  As in Charade, Stone was able to create an intricate web of characters carrying out a complex plot, while at every point it was completely plausible.  It is no surprise that both Charade and Pelham 123 have been remade, although neither film compares favorably with its original.

In later years, Stone turned increasingly to stage work.  He was working steadily until his death in 2003, with two shows that premiered after his death.  Another writer helped finish his adaptation for the musical Death Takes a Holiday, which opened last year and is currently playing off-Broadway.

Hollywood is a place that usually ignores the importance of good writing, even though every actor and director will admit that a good film starts with a good script.  Peter Stone’s work was consistently excellent.  He created a legacy of classics, revivals, and remakes that continues to dazzle audiences.