The Sunday Intertitle: Primeval Genius

Howard Hawks was probably right to reckon that his movies came into their own when they started talking, but that doesn’t mean his silents are devoid of interest — they’re just damned hard to see. A GIRL IN EVERY PORT at least ought to be more widely available, but it was made at Fox and so has vanished into a black hole (not even light can escape, though the great Ford & Borzage box set did manage to make it out, a lone blip alas). And so to FIG LEAVES –

A nice dinosaur with long eyelashes.

We open in the Garden of Eden, envisaged as part of stone age times, so Darwin and Biblical Creation co-exist happily. The scene-setter is a cave-man getting walloped by a giant chimpanzee, leant height by forced perspective sets courtesy of William Cameron Menzies. In fact, that might be one of the giant chimps from the Menzies-designed THIEF OF BAGDAD, minus the fetching black satin shorts Mitchell Leisen provided. How many chimpanzees in Hollywood were there willing to be subjected to optical illusion growth?

From there we go to Adam’s love shack, where he (George SUNRISE O’Brien) and Eve (Olive “the Joy Girl” Borden) snooze in their twin beds, a trickling sand device eventually tipping a coconut onto George’s noggin to wake him. This delightful prelapsarian Flintstones fantasy world segues into a slightly less interesting contemporary section, essaying standard domestic comedy situations with a pronounced sexist slant surprising and disappointing in Hawks (and his male and female writing partners).

I kind of wish they’d kept it all stone age — the main advantage of the modern stuff is some snazzy fashion show bits of catwalk finery by Adrian. I guess cro-magnon times offered fewer opportunities for flapper garb, although I did admire George’s fur mankini.

Generally, Hawks romcoms can be divided into those which have goofy gimmicks, and those that have strong, interesting and convincing story worlds. This one is firmly in the same category as MONKEY BUSINESS, which — hey! — had a chimp in it too. And begins with Hawks’ offscreen voice directing Cary Grant. I like MONKEY BUSINESS. It’s not great or anything, but it’s fun. And so with FIG LEAVES.

The Whit Sunday Intertitle: The Russians are Coming!

THE RED DANCE is a Russian Revolutionary super-epic silent made by Raoul Walsh at Fox Pictures — visually it’s a stunner, while narratively it conforms to all the requirements of the Hollywood take on tsarism vs communism: we shake our heads sorrowfully at the abuse of power under the reign of Tsar Nicholas, then shake our heads sorrowfully at the naughty communists stirring the people up so as to exploit them. It’s not actually an unreasonable stance, given what was to come, although it conveniently ignores Kerensky and the fact that the original overthrow of the Tsar was not the work of Bolsheviks alone — the overall political purpose is similar to Charles Foster Kane’s: those with money and influence should look out a little for those without, for their own safety and security.

Also, like the later RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS, it makes the bizarre and inaccurate inference that Rasputin was a revolutionary. I guess with two lots of evildoers on opposing sides, adding in a genuine wild card like Old Greg, who weakened the system from within without seeming to have intended it for any political purpose, would have been too damned complicated.

An absolutely ASTOUNDING image, no?

Walsh serves up spectacular set-piece scenes by the score, aided by gigantic sets and dramatically sweeping camera movements: was this his biggest film other than THIEF OF BAGDAD? It’s certainly more fluidly and dynamically handled. The leading man is Charles Farrell, looking chunkier than I’ve ever seen him, as a Russian commander torn between loyalty to the Tsar (that well-meaning fathead!) and love of a humble schoolteacher’s daughter, played by Dolores Del Rio, a quite passable Russian since she doesn’t have to speak. Although her rather flamboyant body language does suggest a Latin temperament rather than a Slavonic one.

Soviet showgirl Dolores.

Poor Dolores — while everyone else is in a Fox epic movie, she seems to spend the first hour trapped in a Lars Von Trier movie — her mother was shot dead before her eyes by Cossacks, her father dies in prison, and she’s mistreated by the book-burning, brutal farmers she lodges with, until hulking soldier Ivan Linow turns up and tries to rape her. The farmers respond by selling her to the guy, but in the meantime she meets Farrell, Linow sobers up, and turns out to be a typically Walshian hero-lout, a great good friend and a hard-drinking womanizer with a sentimental streak. Quite a turnaround.

Now don’t get me wrong, you can get some lovely farmers…

The thing that really ramps up the preposterosity in this thing, though, is the title cards. Written by Malcolm Stuart Boylan, whose credits stretch from 1920 to 1963 (this guy could be the model for Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby, such is the downward spiral of his career), they plumb the depths of silliness at every turn, and seem to specialize in flat-out absurdity and self-contradiction. Boylan obviously loves his dramatic paradoxes, but maybe he loves them too much?

The plot is arse-out daft to begin with — someone is sabotaging the Russian military effort in WWI, by issuing orders to retreat when they’re winning, subtle tricks like that. That someone is obviously a traitor, but somehow nobody knows who that someone is. Charles Farrell is tasked with finding out “who signs the orders” — a phrase that calls our attention to the fact, which could perhaps have been more carefully disguised, that it ought to be possible to get that answer by looking at the orders and reading the signature on them.

The solution turns out to be Rasputin, given the sinister treatment by Walsh, who nearly always shoots him with his back to the camera, so we can see his power reflected in the faces of those dealing with him. But this part of the plot is swiftly abandoned in favour of dopey romance with Charles and Dolores, in which the injustice of Russia’s feudal state is boiled down to a comparison of footwear.

If you’ve seen RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS or Barrymore’s earlier TEMPEST, or MOCKERY, you can probably predict the ending — disillusioned with both monarchy and communism, the couple flee into honorable exile, aided by a pal. I was slightly surprised to see them leave by an aeroplane, produced out of nowhere for the purpose, but why not? You’ve got to have some kind of novelty in an entertainment as by-the-numbers as this one. Still, the impressive spectacle and striking design compensate for the banality of the conception, and in Linow’s lovable brute you can see Walsh beginning to figure out what really interests him in movies.

The Sunday Intertitle: The Young Fellah

“Young Fellah” was Cecil B. DeMille’s pet name for his star, Gloria Swanson, whom I recently enjoyed and “got” for the first time in Raoul Walsh’s SADIE THOMPSON.

Here’s the thing — Swanson’s self-parody in SUNSET BLVD is so dead-on accurate and unsparing, it might seem to serve as a tombstone for her whole career. There was nothing left afterwards but self-parody, inadvertent this time. And everything before seems to be dismissed by the portrayal of Norma Desmond as a deluded egomaniac.

But I was judging way too soon when I thought along those lines. I’d only seen BEYOND THE ROCKS, a mediocre Sam Wood melodrama with a preposterous, meandering plot, in which Rudolph Valentino and Swanson strike no sparks, and almost seem to be trapped in different dimensions. SADIE THOMPSON is Swanson unleashed, and she has a leading man she relates to, in the unlikely form of the film’s director, Raoul Walsh himself.

I’m a huge, idolatrous fan of Lewis Milestone’s pre-code RAIN (1932), one of the most cinematically exciting films of its age, in which Walter Huston is impeccably awful as Davidson the reformer, playing without any of the usual disguise that actors use to say “Don’t worry, *I’m* not like this really!” Joan Crawford is incredible as Sadie, another performance slightly tainted by Billy Wilder — Tony Curtis’s lipstick in SOME LIKE IT HOT echoes Joan’s to an alarming degree. So the Walsh film had to really work to win me over. And despite the fact that the film’s last reel is lost, which ought to considerable blunt its power, I found it an incredible experience, probably on a par with its illustrious successor.

Lionel Barrymore makes a very sound Davidson, hinting at the man’s inner depravity far more than Huston does (maybe Barrymore just has that kind of face, but the script also foreshadows more heavily than the Milestone), but its Swanson who makes the difference. Boisterous, boyish and sometimes mannish, she explodes into the film with slapstick excess, showing that while she may not have enjoyed working for Mack Sennett, she still picked up invaluable lessons in knockabout. Swanson is blessed with perhaps the unloveliest smile ever to disfigure a leading lady, but it works beautifully here: Sadie’s glamour derives from being the youngest white woman on Pago Pago, and she’s a tramp. An excess of charm would be counterproductive. All Swanson’s potential defects work to her advantage here: dumpy build, sausage arms, thin lips, horsey face. There’s no attempt to conceal them, they’re all useful elements of Sadie’s lusty, unselfconscious appeal. It took nearly the whole movie to find Swanson in any way physically attractive, but she started to appeal as a personality immediately.

Swanson’s helped by Walsh, who’s wonderfully unaffected. His characterisation was probably the same as his direction: appreciating Gloria for everything she could do. She gets all the pyrotechnics, while Walsh appears laid-back, even when squaring for a fight. Sleepy-eyed, with an odd smile that appears crooked without being asymmetrical, and appears bashful without coyness.

My experience of early Walsh is limited, but there’s certainly a world of contrast between THIEF OF BAGDAD and this. I haven’t seen enough to know if this is a result of Walsh’s technique leaping forward in the intervening four years, as many filmmakers’ did, or if THIEF was deliberately retro in style (I suspect in part it was).

Designer William Cameron Menzies makes the usual atmospheric use of bead curtains and mosquito nets, but the big effect is the way Trader Horn’s whole establishment seems to sag under the continuous downpour. A subtler kind of expressionism than his big effects in BELOVED ROGUE or whatever, because you believe it on a naturalistic level. The turnstile made from a tree stump and a broken oar is a nice touch too, and in the scene where Barrymore makes Swanson kneel, the window behind him is a writhing morass of waving foliage and rain: looks like a Japanese tentacle monster attack, which is not inappropriate for the scene’s true meaning.

By the end, I was enjoying the film so much I was terrified that the truncated ending would ruin my pleasure, but the restoration, though it’s unable to do much about moments of severe nitrate decomposition along the way, cobbles together a satisfactory patchwork finish that at least wraps the story up in a way that’s as smooth as one could hope for, considering. So that the impression that remains is that of a mature film of the late silent era, showcasing a strange and dazzling performer.

Nitrate decomposition as poetic commentary: Sadie kneels to pray, and dissolves in a heavenward spray of beam-me-up-Scotty effulgence.

Americans, buy this sucker –

Sadie Thompson (Silent) [DVD] [1928] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC] [2028]