silent film – Dr. Film’s Blog & Marketplace

The Road Ahead

I touched on this a little in my newsletter, and if you didn’t see that, then you’ll want to sign up for it by emailing me. No, it’s not on my website yet. I know it needs to be.

A good friend of mine who runs a candy shop told me that he was at an impasse once. He either needed to expand his business or close down. I know exactly what he meant. If that intrigues you, keep reading.

Some of you have complained about my blogs on these topics and called them “existential whining,” and if you’re in that camp, go ahead and skip this one because it’s going to be one of those. On the other hand, many of you follow this just to see the struggles and successes of a guy who does this work.

I have been trying to figure out just why I am not being very successful doing film restorations. Tommy Stathes ships my products, and he’ll be the first to tell you he’d like to move some of my stuff out of his cramped apartment.

I’ve gotta tell ya, I was super disappointed in the turnout I got for the free movies I did during the early part of the pandemic. I was getting 20 and 30 viewers for some and 80-90 at the best. I don’t think we ever topped 100. Then, Ben Model keeps posting that he’s getting 1000 or more! You’ve gotta hand it to Ben. He’s been doing the longest-running free movie show during the pandemic, and people love it. This was my big clue that I must be doing something wrong! I mean, for heaven’s sake, I’m doing free movies, and rare stuff, during a pandemic, and I can’t get any views? I was hoping to do a public service by doing these shows, and I thought they were good, but I eventually suspended them because they were literally more work than they were worth. They weren’t helping my “brand,” I wasn’t getting donations, and it was taking time away from projects that DO pay.

So instead of becoming insanely jealous of Ben, which is tempting, I did what Ben does. When Ben has a technical question, he sends me an email asking about it. I’m probably a good guy to consult with technical problems (especially if you want a long-winded answer.)

But you should never ask me about marketing problems. Because I’m a marketing moron. I consulted Ben, who is a Marketing Genius! and asked him for some tips. (In fairness, although Ben is really good at this, I’m way behind the curve on this kind of thing, so you can’t expect me to pull out of a dive immediately. My failures are my own, so don’t blame Ben for my goofiness.)

Ben steered me to Seth Godin, a marketing legend, and to Michael Boezi, who does his own podcast. Now, I am frequently in the car and listen to podcasts (now even more often because I am shuttling disks between helpers working on my projects). I started reading Godin’s blog, and I will freely admit that Godin annoys me.

I’m an engineer. We deal in facts. We want concrete answers. You know, science. Godin’s blog is all, RAH, RAH, you can do this! Well, I don’t need RAH RAH, I need ideas!!! If there are concrete ideas in there somewhere, I’ve missed them, because I got lost in the cheerleading. I gave up. (I should probably reconsider this at some point… Godin annoyed me a lot less than Michael Bay has with his awful movies.)

I did a Godin spoof on my podcast. (Please note that I also spoof ME a lot, which is one of my saving graces… like WC Fields, I make fun of everyone; no one is immune.) Still, Boezi kind of crept in to my brain. Remember, as an engineer, I have a pre-trained bias against marketing. It’s not science: it’s squishy social stuff. In fact, one of the guys who was helping me told me that I was a disloyal engineer for even listening to such a thing. Marketing people, in his view, are evil. They’re all Herb Tarlek.

What I like about Boezi is that he does have a fair number of concrete ideas. I would say there’s a fairly low signal to noise ratio (translation for non-geeks: there’s not much content I find usable per episode), but that’s mostly because no one else really does quite what I do.

Wait, I hear you cry. There are surely others. Well, sorta. I do high-end restorations at 2 and 4K. Many of them go back to archival film! I go overboard on it. I focus on stuff that’s not out there, terribly damaged, or incomplete, and I do in-depth restorations of things I think are cool. In other words, if I don’t do it, it will never happen. I know that I’m the only independent consultant goofy enough to go for National Film Preservation Foundation grants. How do I know this? They told me. Yes, I’m nuts!

This is my take-away from listening to a bunch of shows, consulting with a bunch of people, and thinking a lot:

I need more product out there. I know that I need more stuff to sell, but for one reason or another, it hasn’t happened. This ridiculous King of the Kongo project has been on-again off-again for 8 years. I have more projects than I can count that ALMOST happened, and I had literally given up on Kongo when Steve Stanchfield convinced me to go for it one last time. I then thought that all my grant prospects had fallen through, but I swung for the fences and got it. Now I’m obligated to finish it and all my other projects are on the back burner. For notes on which projects I have going, see the end notes here.

I should blog more often and make them shorter. Well, good luck on that. I don’t think in sound bites, and I don’t write short blogs. I think about things. It’s like when Hitchcock was pressured to use a pop score for Torn Curtain, and Bernard Herrmann told him, “I don’t write pop scores. You don’t make pop movies.” If you want two-paragraph platitudes, I recommend Seth Godin’s blog.

I should do more podcasts and make them longer. (Irony noted that my blogs are seen as too long and podcasts seen as too short!) The podcast is something I’ve seriously thought about discontinuing, and I have great trouble doing them regularly, but some of you really like them. Oddly, the ones that get listeners are the ones that I do that cover stupid goofy stuff. We sorta morphed into old-time radio sorts of things and both Glory and I enjoy that. I guess the six of you who listen to these do, too. The “straight” podcasts get about half the listeners (yeah, three). No, seriously, we get maybe 50-75 listeners for an episode, which isn’t fantastic, but not bad. The one thing I can say that is somewhat encouraging is that we do distinguish ourselves by making a podcast unlike any other film podcast. Someone called it “the weirdest film podcast on the web!” Who else would have a spoof of 2001 or an episode with Claude Rains playing a satanic lawyer? We do.

My website needs re-tooling. This is a fair call. Boezi has several good ideas about optimizing web sites, none of which I’ve implemented. I last updated my site a year or two ago, after learning that my text-heavy site alienated viewers. (Just like my text-heavy blogs.) I’m currently re-thinking this.

I need an email newsletter. Ok, I hate email newsletters. As I said in my first one, they always seem like they’re trying to sell me something and I HATE that. I struggled a lot with doing a soft-sell one and I think I did it OK. Of course, it was probably too soft-sell because I sold zero products! But I get that it’s important for a lot of reasons, so we’ll do it.

I should sell stuff directly from my web site. I agree. My opinion of Amazon would not be fit for a blog that is supposed to be PG. It might not even fit into an R-rated blog. I don’t like them at all. I will do this.

I take on too much work myself and need helpers. Boy have I learned that this year. Now I have two helpers. But the problem is I can’t pay them anything. I also learned that I need an uber-macho computer, so what I did was buy these guys fast computers with grant money and then have them pay the grant back in work. It’s going OK. The backlash here is that I need to do more work than I can pay for or that sales justify, so I’m looking at forming a non-profit.

My own self-assessments have proven wrong and that continues. I was thinking that I was a total loser at this stuff and had screwed up everything I’d tried. I also thought I was reaching a sum total of NO ONE and that people didn’t really care about my work. What’s been very touching this year is the outpouring of support I’ve gotten from a lot of you, including some cash (blush) that I didn’t expect. (I should probably do a whole blog post on this. I did an outdoor movie show and a woman came up to me, crying, thanking me for bringing my movie shows back. It was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve had this year.) I have also learned that a lot of people have trouble setting up web sites, Amazon stores, blogs, and podcasts. Well, I’ve DONE all that.

It’s just that I built it and no one came. I’ve got to fix that. I’ll work on it. The upshot of the candy store analogy is that I realize now that I’m not really successful here, so either I have to finish Kongo and hang it up, or I need to get some funding to have 3-4 people helping me. Like the candy store, I have to either expand or close.

Now, just FWIW, here’s a partial list of stuff that I couldn’t get off the ground before Kongo:

The White Tiger (1923) I wanted to merge my print with UCLA’s. No traction with UCLA. Universal did it recently, probably without my print. I had mine scanned for archival use and nothing happened. Thanks, UCLA.

Rocky Jones Lost Pilot (1951) I scanned this. We only have 2 of 3 reels, but it’s cool. I’m hoping to get a 3rd helper to get this out for me.

Willis O’Brien shorts (1915-30). I love these and they’re hard to find. Got them scanned, no time to clean up at this point. Considering skipping them: this got the lowest rating of any of the shows I did, even with brand new scores. Sometimes you guys don’t love the same stuff that I love!

Lupino Lane shorts (1920s). This ALLLLMOST happened. I was planning to collaborate with Dave Glass on this right before Kongo showed up and then I couldn’t do it. Some of the prints are warped in such a way that I can’t easily fix them. I still have a bunch and it’s near the top of the list.

Ella Cinders (1926) this has never been put on Blu-ray in a good way. I tracked several prints (original Kodascopes) and was arranging to have them scanned. I’ve also found some stills and the original score. I think we could do a decent reconstruction of what this was including missing footage. No budget, no time.

Alice in Wonderland/The Horror (1931/3). Several people are pestering me about this. I was about to get Alice scanned before the pandemic started, but we ran out of time. There’s also a print of Intolerance of 1933 at MoMA which would be a perfect thing for triple feature. All Bud Pollard, one of the most bizarre filmmakers ever.

Thunder Over Texas/I Can’t Escape (1934/3) Edgar Ulmer double feature! Immediately before the pandemic, I had Thunder scanned, but I will need another print because some of it was warped fairly badly and didn’t scan well. We had most of I Can’t Escape scanned, but not quite ready.

Dynamite Dan/The Midnight Girl (1924/5) Karloff and Lugosi before sound! I commissioned a new score for Dynamite Dan (Kodascope) and I was never able to get Midnight Girl scanned. I think this would be a cool one.

So you see, I had a lot of irons in the fire. They just all got cold!

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)