Brandon's movie memory

I’ve enjoyed all the Frank Borzage movies I’ve seen so far, so this week I watched all three that he released in 1929. Not only in the same year, but according to IMDB they all came out within a two-month period – can that be right? I’ve only seen seven feature-length movies from 1929, so now 43% of them are by Borzage.

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Lucky Star

Hunky, brave Tim (Charles Farrell, of course) meets a cute girl (Janet Gaynor, of course), then goes off to war in France and gets his legs blown off delivering food to the troops in a crappy horse carriage whilst his old boss at the telephone company takes the proper army truck to meet girls. There is no such thing as subtlety!

Chuck and Big Boy fight atop a telephone pole:

Janet watches, impressed:

Back home, Tim’s boss (Guinn “Big Boy” Williams of a couple Lang and Renoir movies) is passing himself off as a brave sergeant in town and wheelchair-bound Tim is making friends with the dirty, savage young girl (TOO young, as Tim eventually finds out, backing away slowly). But the girl’s parents promise her to Big Boy. Can Tim rise from his wheelchair for the first time since the war and crutch-walk into town (in the snow) in time to stop the marriage and claim the girl as his own, publicly revealing Big Boy to be a war coward along the way? Yes!

Big Boy and Janet’s mom Hedwiga Reicher:

Paul Fix (After the Thin Man, El Dorado, Red River), who sadly never worked with Tom Mix, is a buddy of Tim’s, his only human contact besides the girl. That’s probably him driving by, as Tim leans on a crutch at top of the frame.

Shot as a part-talkie with dialogue and effects, but that version has been lost, leaving behind a silent masterpiece. As silly as the plot can be, I got caught up in the (melo)drama of it all and the glorious visuals. Also loved how the film is sped up to make Tim look more wheelchair-proficient than he actually was.

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They Had To See Paris

Good ol’ down-home mechanic Will Rogers (I liked him better as Judge Priest) strikes it rich as an investor in the town oil field. His wife acts just like Effie in Ruggles of Red Gap, packing up the family (unattached older son Rod, and daughter Opal who’s in love with a hometown boy) and heading to Paris to get them all fine clothes and high culture.

Rod with Christiane Yves, probably:

What would a Borzage movie be without beautiful cinematography, fluid camera movements and heartfelt performances? Well, it would be this one. Sound pictures were in their clunky infancy, and even a prestige director like Frank couldn’t make much of a talkie in 1929. No music, but could’ve used some – full of stagey, awkward, staticky silences in the dialogue. It’s also his first comedy that I’ve seen, and I wouldn’t say it exactly had the Lubitsch Touch. But it’s not late-Keaton bad, just disappointing.

Poor Will is saddled with increasingly unlikable wife Irene Rich (Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Champ, Fort Apache), aristo-dating daughter Marguerite Churchill (Dracula’s Daughter) and wannabe-bohemian son Owen Davis Jr. (All Quiet on the Western Front). Will raises some hell, wearing a suit of armor to a party and having a non-genteel, drunken conversation with guest of honor Grand Duke Mikhail (above), but eventually his family has him depressed so he fakes an affair with tedious slut Fifi (below) to horrify his family into returning home.

Unfortunately this wasn’t a career-killer for the grating Fifi D’Orsay. She appeared in They Just Had To Get Married, then in Joanna’s favorite film What a Way to Go. TJHTGM isn’t a sequel to this (though it sounds like one) but apparently They Had To See Paris was enough of a hit to engender follow-ups, first the semi-sequel So This Is London then the full-on sequel Down to Earth, both of which starred Will Rogers and Irene Rich (and Grand Duke Mikhail even returns in Down to Earth). This is some corny flick, and with Borzage (and let’s also blame the writer Owen Davis Sr., young Ross’s dad) unable to hide his cheesy melodrama behind the artifice of title cards and artful silent cinematography, it just sits out stinking.

Family reunion:

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The River

Another gorgeous Borzage silent about simple-minded youth in love, ho-hum. This one is a different viewing experience because it’s incomplete, reconstructed with stills and titles a la the TCM version of Greed. Something else that’s different: Charles Farrell plays opposite Mary Duncan, not Janet Gaynor. Duncan (also of City Girl, 4 Devils) lived till the 90’s but only acted through ‘33, and was obviously better-suited to this part than Gaynor, since the character is not at all the innocent sweet girl.

Farrell, polite and capable but so dumb, builds a riverboat to see the country but stalls at a dam for the winter. There are six more trains into the city where he plans to spend the season, but busying himself with skinny-dipping and wood-chopping, he can’t seem to manage timetables and misses them all. Now it’s just Farrell and somewhat cruel sexpot Duncan. Finally she stabs him and he proposes to her, in that order, but she laughs off the proposal until he almost dies in the cold.

Take it, D. Callahan:

The fragment ends with an extraordinary sequence that stands with Borzage’s best work. Allen John has chopped wood all night in the snow, trying to prove that he’s man enough for Rosalee, and he falls deathly ill. Snow is rubbed all over his bare chest in an effort to break his fever, but his heart stops beating. Desperate, realizing how much she loves him, Rosalee climbs into bed with Allen John and tries to warm him alive with her body. Borzage films their faces in close-up with a religious intensity reminiscent of Dreyer, lingering on Farrell’s beatific eyes as his soul slowly seeps back into them. The communion of bodies here is both a rebirth and a renewal, of Allen John’s life and Rosalee’s hopes.

Just then, Mary Duncan’s old boyfriend, the murderer Marsdon (Alfred Sabato, who directed the first talkie in Italian) escapes from prison to reclaim her from the weakened Farrell, but fortunately hulking deaf-mute Sam (Ivan Linow, of the Unholy Three remake, who has played characters named Rako, Red, twins Loko and Boko, Tossilitis, Slumguillion and Heinie) appears just in time. The closing titles are outrageous:

IMDB mentions lost characters The Miller and Widow Thompson, but the fifth lead of the surviving footage has got to be Marsdon’s pet crow, left behind to watch the girl while he’s imprisoned. I’m always glad to see a bird as a major character.

Mary Duncan with crow:

Scenes from movies in the silent era, cut together to flow nicely. Music that alternates between pleasantly ambient/minimal, and sharply attention-grabbing, including cuts by Fennesz and David Grubbs. Lots of graphic, sometimes deviant, sex. Pointless quotes from ancient poetry on intertitles connect and divide the piece into sections.

Seemed, to me, more valuable as a collection of scenes to peruse, to marvel at these unknown early films (didn’t recognize a single shot, but then I’m no silent film scholar) than as an original piece of editing/filmmaking. It didn’t wear out its welcome, but neither was I impressed by the connections made between scenes. Maybe with access to the original footage one could better appreciate Deutsch’s contribution, besides as curator of some damned interesting old movies. Still excited to see his earlier Film Ist pieces composed of footage from scientific films.

More wonderful screenshots:

I told Katy it was more a string of comic episodes than a consistent story, but I badly misremembered. Very consistent indeed… almost too consistent, with some mopey bits and plot necessities dragging down the comic momentum. But Chaplin’s goal was presumably not to make just the funniest film, but something both funny and true.

From A. Vanneman’s terrific Chaplin articles in Bright Lights:

Charlie has three big men to contend with in The Gold Rush, Tom Murray as “Black Larsen,” Mack Swain as “Big Jim,” and Malcolm Waite as “Jack Cameron.” Wolf Larsen scarcely has a personality. He is merely a symbol of the savagery of nature. He murders two Mounties and leaves Big Jim for dead, before Nature herself, reclaiming her own, sends him plunging to his death in an avalanche.

Big Jim is Chaplin’s partner/rival searching for gold. They don’t do much searching, really, just hide out in murderer Larsen’s cabin attempting to keep peace and stay alive through the cold and hunger. Among the danger and misery we get Chaplin turning into a chicken, a cooked and eaten shoe and the famous cabin-on-edge-of-cliff number. Big Jim found plenty of gold at the start of the film but can’t get back to it, and when he does Larsen clubs him (amnesia!) before heading for death by avalanche. Jim, dazed, wanders towards town and isn’t seen for 45 minutes.

Charlie takes the second half with a love story, pining for Georgia Hale who makes fun of him, then feels sorry for him, and finally decides she loves him moments before Charlie reveals he’s become a millionaire by helping Big Jim re-find his gold. Not quite a City Lights ending but it’ll do.

More Vanneman:

“Oh, you’ve spoilt the picture,” exclaims the cameraman when Charlie and Georgia kiss, an inside joke based on the cliché that in Chaplin’s pictures he never got the girl. When Chaplin re-released The Gold Rush with a soundtrack in 1942, he cut out the kissing scene for some reason, although it’s still clear that Charlie and Georgia are going to get married.

Second time I’ve avoided the re-release, which is shorter and supposedly has Chaplin’s bemused voice narrating instead of the intertitles. Sounds ghastly, but maybe I’ll be on a Chaplin completist kick one day and check it out.

November was Shorts Month! All shorts were watched at home on video, except for an outing to the November edition of Bizarro Saturday Morning, at which I fell asleep during the only theatrical short, tired out by episodes of Casper, Ultraman and Rocket Robin Hood, so it’s sadly not represented here.

The Policemen’s Little Run (1907, Ferdinand Zecca)
Tedious, undistinguished little romp, wherein cops chase a dog for stealing food, then the dog chases the cops. Fakey backgrounds ensue. Ferdinand Zecca, director of Kissing in a Tunnel (not the 1899 original or the 1899 remake, but the 1901 remake), later co-directed one of the first feature-length (well, 45 minutes) films.

Troubles of a Grasswidower (1908, Max Linder)
The Mr. Mom of its time. Dude is an asshole so his wife leaves him, goes home to mother. Dude then fails to do the simplest household tasks until everything is in ruins and his wife returns to shame him. Terrible! Well, it’s slightly more bearable than the cops chasing the dog. Linder must’ve played the widower; he wrote and starred in plenty more shorts, such as Max’s Hat, Max Takes Tonics and Max and Dog Dick (?!)

Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (1911)
Now that’s more like it. Winsor announces he’s going to make an animated moving picture, some blowhard dudes laugh at him, then he damn does it and it’s brilliant. One should never doubt the author of Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend.

Winsor at work:

Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906, Edwin S. Porter)
Most of the movie is the guy drinking, eating and going home, with finally some actually dreaming there at the end. His shoes fly off on strings, some stop motion, some Exorcist bed-bucking and Little Nemo bed-flying. The best part, with little devils beating him from above, looks like a Melies-lite advertisement for headache powder. One assumes he’s speaking the punchline at the end, but there’s no intertitle. Comic strip was better!

Winsor would later create his own animated Rarebit films, and Melies would make the probably unrelated Dream of an Opium Fiend in 1908.

The Telltale Heart (1928, Charles Klein)
I love total Caligari-ripoff expressionism in cinema, and there isn’t enough of it so I was happy to find this. Completely excellent, probably my favorite Telltale Heart yet. I don’t mean to disparage the recently-watched Ted Parmelee animated version and I do miss the rich voice of James Mason, but everything works here – the Caligari sets and fonts, the acting of the lead fellow, his crazy-POV version of the inspectors and the montage and effects (overlays and mirrors).

Depending who you believe, this was either directed by Klein (a writer/director up to the 40’s) or Leon Shamroy (cinematographer through the 70’s who worked with Fritz Lang, also shot The Robe, Caprice and Planet of the Apes).

Fall of the House of Usher (1928, James Watson & Melville Webber)
Every version of Telltale Heart re-tells the story with narration or titles, but this film tells the Usher story through mystifying visuals… and since I’m not familiar with the story I still don’t know exactly what happened, but boy was it awesome.

What if cinema had ended up looking more like this? What if poets were directors? The mind boggles. I’ll bet Cocteau loved this (or despised it since he didn’t think of it first).

dream sequence from When The Clouds Roll By (1919, Victor Fleming)
A semi-remake of Rarebit Fiend! Douglas Fairbanks eats some Welsh rarebit (melted cheese on toast) along with mince pie, lobster and an onion. Not a drunken fool like the original rarebit fiends, DF is conned into eating the nightmarish midnight snack by a mad doctor. He then runs around doing stunts on horses, trampolines and camera-trick houses, pursued by ghosts, a party of society women and giant costume versions of the foods he ate. I am definitely dressing up as rarebit next halloween.

Oramunde (1933, Emlen Etting)
Woman in a too-long white dress dances on the rocks to express her sadness. Made me sad so I guess it’s pretty good.

Hands (1934, Ralph Steiner & Willard Van Dyke)
Hands, falling, against black, doing stuff. Montage of hands doing stuff on location. Hands getting money for doing stuff. Hands buying stuff, taking vacation, getting married to other hands. Counts as propaganda somehow.

Grand duke Ramon of some little island (Abacco), not a thrifty fellow, is introduced throwing money into the water for diving natives, while his white-bearded treasurer Paqueno is taking a meeting about the island’s huge debts and given three days to repay them. I thought the rest of the movie would be between the duke and his finance guy, but white-beard disappears after he screws up in chapter four, replaced by a more charismatic character.

Meanwhile, a businessman named Bekker wants to buy part of the island to mine sulfur, which would clear the government debts but would turn this tropical paradise into a stinky sulfur pit, so the duke declines, leading Bekker to instead contact the local easily-located anti-government conspirators.

Bekker and the money man:

The Duke’s proposed way out of this mess is the love letter he’s received from Russian Crown Princess Olga, who wants to marry our duke despite her family’s objections. She finally heads to Abacco, “pursued by a descendant of Ivan the Terrible,” and bumps into…

Professor Philipp Collin, “a gentleman of changing names and professions,” our movie’s new hero! A master of disguise and trickery who has just broken into a blackmailer’s house and retrieved the purloined royal love letter (long story), he puts ugly old-woman makeup on the princess and pretends she’s his wife.

Lady and the duke:

The princess manages to marry our duke, Collin makes a fortune in bond trading through his inside-info on the royal goings-on, and Bekker and the conspirators are easily defeated after they try to hang the duke.

Amusing comedy, packed with plot left-turns, broken into chapters so it plays like a serial. A few exciting motion shots (camera scrambling onto land from a boat). Movie is much better than its title.

A Nazi collaborator made a sound remake ten years later, after Murnau’s death

Grand Duke Harry Liedtke, who’d appeared in early Lubitsch films, was killed at home by Russian soldiers in ‘45. Professor Alfred Abel, star of Metropolis and Phantom, was also in a Sirk film and tried his own hand as director. Princess Mady Christians came to the U.S. in the 30’s, played in the remake of Seventh Heaven and portrayed an old Joan Fontaine in Letter From an Unknown Woman.

Walter Rilla (which one was he again?) fled the nazis in the 30’s, returned later and played in the 1960’s Dr. Mabuse pictures. Max Schreck, after Nosferatu and The Street, plays one of the conspirators (which one?)

My favorite intertitle:

I watched the 90-minute export version this time (with translated czech titles?). The main problem I usually have with Sunrise is that it’s too long for the Lambchop double-album I like to play with it, and the main problem with the 90-minute version is that it’s too short for the Lambchop album. Somebody needs to cut a version of Sunrise that is exactly the right length for the Lambchop album! Next time I’ll try the French DVD that has ‘em pre-synched so I can see how they did it.

The marriage-threatening amoral woman from the city, Margaret Livingston, apparently specialized in broken-marriage films in the silent era, appearing in films named Married Alive, After Marriage, Wandering Husbands, Divorce and Alimony.

Male lead George O’Brien worked regularly with John Ford and after 1932 exclusively appeared in Westerns, ending his career with Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn in ‘64. I think I like him better than Charles Farrell.

Janet Gaynor won the first best actress oscar for this along with Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, would be nominated again in the sound era (A Star Is Born, 1937) and then retire.

The city:

Pig in the city:

Boat rescue:

Sunrise:

Charles Farrell is Chico, an athiest who works in the Paris sewers (I’m not sure what he does down there – looks like he’s doing his laundry, or fishing rags from the water) and dreams of being a mighty street washer up on the surface. Janet Gaynor lives with her abusive sister, possibly both as prostitutes. As usual for the beginning of a Borzage movie, Something Good happens to the guy (he’s given a better job) while Something Bad happens to the girl (a rich uncle comes to take them in, asks if they’ve been “clean” and Janet answers no, so relatives leave and Janet’s sister tries to kill her). Chico saves her but gets himself in a pickle with a cop… he says she’s his wife, so now the cop will come by Chico’s house tomorrow to verify the story.

Standing in the gutter, looking at the stars:

What to do!? If you said “why doesn’t Janet stay at his house for a day” then you’re as smart as the screenwriter. Chico lives on the seventh floor, whose set is actually seven stories high, as noted by the outrageous vertical tracking shot following the pair up the stairs. There’s some business about who’s sleeping where and some talk about God, work, fear of heights and whether Chico is a very remarkable man (he is), and the next day he buys her a wedding dress.

A very remarkable man:

I don’t know how long afterwards (a day? a year?), war breaks out, and it breaks out in a hurry – Chico has about an hour to report to duty. The war lasts a few years, he and his street-washin’ buddy flamethrow some dudes, the local cabbie is roped into a huge cab-driven troop movement (which actually happened, and which Borzage recreated with either an awful lot of cars or a clever model).

Papa Boul and what’s left of his cab:

Chico is feared dead, so Janet’s admirer back home (not a slimy villain or anything, just a suave dude who likes her) is making his move when Chico bursts in, alive but blind and believing in God, for a happy-ish ending (he’s still blind).

Chuck on the stairwell:

The story doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a gorgeous movie. The street set (which looks familiarly like the one from Street Angel) and the apartment are wonderful, and the war is remarkably shot (dig the silhouette-soldier who attacks Chico).

Farrell and Gaynor are as good as in their other movies (well, maybe Gaynor has less to do here), and Gladys Brockwell (dead two years later after a car crash) shines as Gaynor’s whip-bearing sister. Simone Simon and James Stewart starred in a sound remake ten years later, which is not quite as highly regarded.

Gladys Brockwell:

“Will they lead the same sorry lives that we have?”

The Eclipse box set title is “Three Family Comedies” but I’d forgotten that Ozu even made comedies until the opening titles played over a drawing of a kid holding his crotch. Then my realization “oh, this will be a zany comedy featuring kids doing dirty stuff” turned out to be off base. Sure, kids are the protagonists, and it features some comedy, but it all leads to the quote above (spoken by the kids’ father) which belongs firmly in drama territory.

Dad’s got a new job so he moves the family close to work. Actually he moves ‘em into the suburb where his boss lives, and it comes out later that dad is kind of a suck-up. The kids are intimidated by a pretty mild gang from their school until they learn to use their wooden shoes as weapons and they dominate the group. It’s kinda like the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey but with Japanese schoolchildren instead of apes.

Most of the movie seems to be this low-key power struggle with the kids which includes searching for sparrow eggs to eat raw (to prove strength) and trying to get an ‘E’ (for ‘excellent’) in calligraphy at school. A scene at the boss’s house is the turning point. Everyone is watching the boss’s home movies in which our kids’ dad is making funny faces and cracking everyone up – everyone but his kids who are ashamed that their father is playing the fool. The older boy (Ryoichi) goes home, calls dad a yellowbelly and trashes the house until he gets spanked. Moods improve later and the movie ends with the kids relatively cheery again and getting along with the boss’s son (who dresses like Oddjob).

One scene I didn’t get: the bully kids find a valuable coin, pool their money to make change, then hand over the change to a policeman and walk away bummed out. What happened?

A scene in dad’s office where the camera follows a contagious yawn made me yawn too. Yes, there is camera movement in an Ozu film. Movie is obsessed with trains and streetcars too – there’s one passing behind the action whenever possible.

Apparently Ozu’s Good Morning nearly thirty years later was a semi-remake.

TCM:

I Was Born, But…, which Ozu developed from his own story, is a social satire of comic delights and melancholy resignation to the innocence lost as the boys face up to the compromises that await them. The film won first prize at the Kinema Jumpo awards – the first of six such prizes he would eventually win – and is regarded as Ozu’s first genuine masterpiece.

Michael Koresky:

“I started to make a film about children and ended up with a film about grown-ups,” said Ozu, speaking to the film’s dark side. Because of this, Shochiku didn’t know what to do with the picture, even delaying its release for two months. This potent mix of comedy and pathos within the domestic space would, of course, continue to dominate Ozu’s oeuvre in the coming decades—and while the age disparity between the generations would grow smaller, the resentment gap would grow even wider.

Poyraz (2006, Belma Bas)
Rural people sure live quaint and handsomely photographed lives!
Nuri Bilge Ceylan was thanked in the credits

Why Play Leapfrog (1949, John Sutherland/MGM)
Let’s hear it for capitalism! Clever cartoon describes why inflation is okay and raw material costs don’t mean much. A boring explanation of why America is so darned great that ends by telling factory workers to be more efficient and come up with smart cost-saving ideas which will lead to greater pay increases.

Balance (1989, Christoph & Wolfgang Lauenstein)
Ominous stop-motion – five mute guys with numbers on their shirts and telescoping fishing poles in their shirts are on a balanced platform suspended in space. One catches a sort of music box and the others get greedy, leading to a fight which ends with one guy on the far end of the platform from the box.

Broken Down Film (1985, Osamu Tezuka)
It’s a popeye-like cowboy cartoon except that the film’s projection problems (hair in the gate, scratches, countdown leader, etc) are part of the story. Cute.

and a few from the Unseen Cinema box set…

Paris Exposition Films (1900, James White)
Some one-minute films at the Eiffel Tower a decade after its construction. Best part is this guy on the left side of the screenshot. People were walking up to the camera and this guy saw his chance for stardom, so he prepares himself for some manuever (maybe a backflip) but blows it, stopping instead to shake hands with an acquaintance offscreen as the film runs out.

Captain Nissen Going Through Whirlpool Rapids, Niagara Falls (1901, Edison Co.)
It takes longer to type the title than to watch the film, which is of some submarine-looking craft bobbing in a river. Found a wonderful tale online of Nissen’s stupid death four years later, but unsure if it’s true.

Down The Hudson (1903, Frederick Armitage & AE Weed)
Much more interesting than the submarine thing – New York riverfront over a hundred years ago. I assume lots more of this stuff will be on disc five.

The Ghost Train (1903)
Oooh, someone learned to invert the black/white image AND to matte a moon into the upper corner. This is one of my favorites because it is neat-looking and twenty seconds long. If only you could say the same for Transformers 2.

Westinghouse Works, Panorama View, Street Car Motor Room (1904, Billy Bitzer)
Long factory tracking shot reminds me of the beginning of Manufactured Landscapes. Unlike in ML, all the workers stop and look at the camera.

In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea (1925-ish)
Crazy three-panel layout illustrating the poem told with text above and below the picture. Lots of ghostly superimpositions. This was so damn cool I had to lay down for a while.