Satan and Judas:
The Spanish Inquisition:
French Revolution:
Russian-occupied Finland:
A Finn girl named Siri kills herself rather than fall into Russian hands, and this sacrifice releases Satan from his thousand-year punishment. Movie was pretty good, but I had an incredible time watching it while blasting the latest albums by:
Movie about Ivor’s life repeatedly falling apart even though he’s rich, white, and handsome. First his college buddy, a trend-following buffoon with a pretty sister, knocks up local girl Mabel. She pins it on the rich boy so his family will pay her off, even though scholarship kid Tim was the culprit, and Ivor is expelled on moral grounds and kicked out of his home.
Subtle, Mabel:
But Ivor inherits some money, somehow? He marries a fancy actress, who spends all their cash, cheats on him, then kicks him out of the apartment. He spends some time pathetically mooching off pathetic older women then runs off to France. Fortunately back home, Tim is dying and deathbed-confessing to clear Ivor’s name, so his family takes him back when he returns home half-starved.
Hitch pulls off some really great framing and closeups, but the movie felt like a chore, a couple steps down from The Lodger, so I opted to cut my losses and skip the couple hours of blu extras for now.
The DVD has a music score, but in interviews towards the end of his life DW Griffith said he intended for this film to play in sync with Coil’s The Golden Hare With a Voice of Silver. Despite my issues with Coil soundtracks in the past this worked out nicely, with a barn dance set to “The Anal Staircase” a special highlight.
A Lillian Gish desperation spotlight – she’s betrayed by a man who pretends to marry her, then after her baby dies she moves to another town to start over, but not far enough away from the local busybodies. Now handsome Richard Barthelmess (disgraced flyer of Only Angels Have Wings) is falling for her, and the heel is after Richard’s ex-girl Kate, who is beloved by comic-relief butterfly professor Creighton Hale (The Cat and the Canary). It all works out, ending in an absurd triple wedding.
The Prof, Kate, and hat-rack cow:
Rightly known for its climax, when Gish runs into the frozen wilderness and passes out on an icy river which breaks into chunks heading for a waterfall until daredevil Richard rescues her, this being before stunt doubles had been invented. An editing quirk I noticed throughout: we’ll see a character action in a medium shot then it will cut to a wide shot and we’ll see the same action again, as if whenever our perspective pulls back we have to rewind a couple seconds.
Gish finally fingers the heel:
After the Essanays and the Mutuals…
–
A Day’s Pleasure
Family vacation, but the family fades into the background as Charlie (1) tries to start the car, (2) fights with a big dude on a bouncy boat, (3) argues with an intersection traffic cop. I heard about three seconds of the intended music then switched over to Hesitation Marks.
–
Sunnyside
A couple good jokes (sending his girl’s annoying brother to play in traffic blindfolded) but mostly plotty, as hotel odd-jobsman loses his girl to a city slicker then finds out he’d been dreaming the whole episode.
–
The Idle Class
Two Charlies – the idle rich drunk neglecting his lovely wife Edna, and the golfing tramp who stumbles into a costume ball where everyone thinks he’s the husband, who is stuck inside his armor costume. The golfer whom Tramp Charlie has been antagonizing turns out to be Edna’s father. Lotta asses get kicked.
–
Pay Day
The best of this batch, with great elevator timing and reverse brick-tossing gags. Episodic like the others, he works in construction, takes a lunch break, goes out drinking with the boys, can’t catch a bus, finally makes it home to his horrible wife Phyllis Allen. Edna barely appears, but Foreman Mack Swain played her dad in this and The Idle Class.
–
The other three First National shorts were rounded up in The Chaplin Revue, then he got into features with The Kid and never looked back.
As the master dies, a duel between his top disciple QQ (Andy On, rookie cop of Mad Detective) and the master’s son Shen An (Jacky Heung of Chasing Dream), which QQ wins, taking over while the son asks for a rematch. I thought this meant Disciple QQ was the righteous leader and the son was the entitled guy trying to cheat his way into power, but I got it backwards. Anyway, the whole rest of the movie is rematches, QQ coming off worse and worse. It’s all nicely lit and designed, fake-looking in a beautiful way.
Meanwhile, Shen An has got a banker hotgirl (Bea Hayden Kuo of Tiny Times) but gets rescued by postal carrier Tang Shiyi, who knows the secret short sword technique QQ thinks Shen An is protecting. This all escalates to a video-gamey final wave battle in the castle before the the Martial Arts Circle breaks it up and sends everyone away for a few years to cool down.
Convict 13 (1920)
Buster goes from incompetent golfer to escaped prisoner to prison guard via costume changes. He foils a one-off super-violent prisoner and a full-scale riot using makeshift weapons. More people get killed or injured by sledgehammers in this than in any other movie. His girl is the warden’s daughter, at least until he wakes up, the whole prison stint a dozing golfer’s dream. Running down the street from a horde of cops is always funny, as is the painter/bench bit.
When you are beginning to suspect that Joe Roberts is behind you:
–
Hard Luck (1921)
These made a good double feature – from trying not to get hanged to trying to hang himself. Unemployed and suicidal (I cannot relate), Buster stumbles into a gig catching armadillos for the zoo. He never finds one – we get increasingly large fishes, a fox, some horse stunts, and Buster tied to a bear. As all movies must, it ends with him rescuing a woman from bandits. Pretty good shotgun shells-in-the-fire gags.
–
The Black Tower (1987, John Smith)
Something completely different: male narrator is haunted by a tower appearing in all different parts of the city. He tries not going outside anymore, living on snacks from the passing ice cream van, then is hospitalized, then while recovering in the country he sees the tower again, walks up and steps inside. Story starts again with a female narrator who sees the tower while visiting his grave. Calm movie with various tricks and playing around, narrating over color fields later revealed to be closeups on household objects, editing back and forth in time to make buildings re/disappear, or masking the image so passing cars are swallowed by a mid-frame tree.
The Fourth Dimension (1936)
Right after I watch the movie Deja Vu there’s a “Deja Vu” title card in It’s Not Me, then the first Painleve film I find is showing time as an image flipbook and imagining that higher-dimensional beings can change pages at will. Pretty dry science film but it’s fun that scientists have always been excited about time travel.
–
The Octopus (1927)
Pretty random assortment of live and dead octopus…
Great doc, because octupusus are great.
–
Sea Urchins (1929)
More cool sea creatures which become increasingly disturbing as you learn more about them, zooming into their spiny surface to discover a horrid living forest of waggling suckers and claws
–
Daphnia (1928)
Nothing cool or cute about the microshrimp “water fleas,” ghastly transparent insectoid monsters, silently battling their nemesis The Hydra by the million in every lake and pond.
–
Freshwater Assassins (1947)
This one has sound – enjoy some swinging horn jazz while underwater insects munch on even smaller insects, 24 minutes of weird shrimpies chowing down on each other.
Silent stop-motion silhouette adventure movie on 35mm with live music from Anvil Orchestra at the National Gallery, it truly doesn’t get any better.
There’s a serial killer murdering the blondes of London, but the movie is more concerned with showing us all the media technologies of the time (telegraph, newspaper, radio, electric billboards). Meanwhile after a performance of “Golden Curls,” the few performers who weren’t wearing wigs are worried about their walk home. Good music by Neil Brand, and I love the construction paper graphics on the intertitles.
Ivor Novello arrives, pale and scarved, at a boarding house, acting like a dramatic ghost while renting a room, and is assumed to be the killer so everything he picks up is implied to be a possible murder weapon. He likes local girl Daisy, which annoys her hanger-on Joe. First the landlady then the cops go snooping through Ivor’s stuff, then the real killer is caught off-camera but not before jealous Joe gets an angry mob to beat Ivor half to death.
Killer calling card:
British people must spend 15% of their day standing in shocked silence after something mildly disagreeable happened. Novello’s legacy: he would be portrayed ninety-some years later by the guy who also played young Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia 2.
POV: Ivor Novello wants to kiss you
