I said I was going to write something about THE WIND, didn’t I? Saw it at the closing gala of the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival and, despite its grim subject matter, it was cinematic ecstasy.
But instead of a proper appreciation I find myself doing whatever this is (a comic strip?)
The film has a supporting character called Sourdough, you see, a sort of Gabby Hayes / Walter Brennan sidekick type. Here he is:
And this is what he’s singing:
Request granted!
Seems ole Sourdough went Northwest, to the Klondyke Gold Rush of ’98 (this may have involved some time travel) and met his fate in an icy wilderness. Somehow his friends were able to locate the exact spot at which he got lost… Did they find his body there? Most people, when they find themselves lost, wander about a bit in hopes of getting found. Ole Sourdough never was the sharpest.
One more connection — the heroine of THE WIND, Lillian Gish, gets off the train and is given a long cart ride by Sourdough and his friend Joe to her destination, a ranch called Sweetwater. The name provokes hilarity from another traveller on the train — it seems an ironic joke in this sand-blasted locale. Of course the connected film is ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, but I don’t know if the reference, presumably deliberate, originates with Leone, or Bertolucci (who recalls stuffing the script with nods to his favourite westerns), or co-writer Dario Argento (who might well enjoy THE WIND’s terrifying climax).
In OUATITW, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) is transported from train station to Sweetwater by a gummy Sourdough type, Sam (Paolo Stoppa), who is likewise amused by the place name.
THE WIND seems outside the range of films OUATITW is otherwise paying tribute to / cribbing from. It’s full of western stuff, but doesn’t feel like a western — but, like OUATITW its central generic atypicality is the presence of a female protagonist. The Leone film ultimately struggles to keep Jill central, and ultimately will have one of her rivals for lead character, Harmonica (Charles Bronson), say that she no longer matters at all to the central conflict, which is true in the moment but also kind of an admission of defeat by the very masculine authors. THE WIND has different (studio-imposed) third act issues, but to its credit writer Frances Marion and director Victor Sjostrom keep Gish’s Letty absolutely at the heart of the film, as active protag, focus of sympathies, and chief point of view for the audience…
David Mamet (not pictured above) seems awful, but he’s quite a good essayist. In his book on acting (True and False) he lays out the difference between storytelling (the director and writer’s job) and acting (the actor’s). As an example he chooses a single shot from the TV show Cagney and Lacey, which he says is a good show (debatable — but I guess pretty good for its benighted time) involving Tyne Daly, who he says is a good actor (unquestionably true).
Daly, pursuing a suspect, enters a slaughterhouse or some other insalubrious place, says Mamet, and sniffs, then grimaces, telling us that it smells bad in there. No, says Mamet — somebody (the director) has apparently instructed the actor to tell us a story, that the place smells bad, this luring her from her rightful domain, the actor’s, which is being truthful. Nobody, alone and unobserved, will snort up the malodorous miasma of a slaughterhouse in order to make an expression of distaste about it, for the benefit of nobody but themself, especially while chasing a dangerous criminal. Lured into what the late Dudley Sutton called, in my presence, “telegraphing” — what I have elsewhere called the Keystone explicatory pantomime — Daly has made herself briefly unreal, a plot function rather than a character.
Daly is probably not too happy about having this momentary lapse in a long and distinguished career turned into a teachable moment, so I apologise to her. She’s awesome.
Keystone wasn’t the only place where the explicatory pantomime held illimitable dominion in the 1910s. Biograph also diverted their players from dramaturgy into telegraphy, and we see this in the early work of D.W. Griffith. When he first appeared in movies as an actor, (in RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST, 1908) apparently Billy Bitzer asked him why he was waving his arms about. Griffith said he’d been told that was how you were supposed to act in pictures.
There’s perhaps less Italianate emoting in the films Griffith directed, but the players still talk to themselves as soon as they’re alone, gesture for nobody’s benefit save the audience’s, and strike rhetorical poses that might have come out of numbered illustrations in a book on thespian posturing.
Griffith credited himself with inventing a more modern screen acting, and since Griffith is a detestable figure in many ways I’d love to debunk this, while admitting that in advancing the art of intercutting and constructive editing Griffith is still unassailably important. (Such advances may originate elsewhere, conceivably, but he did a lot to popularize them.)
Theory: Lillian and Dorothy Gish introduced cinematic acting as we know it, and Griffith was the beneficiary.
As of 1911, Griffith’s performers still resort to telegraphy and rhetorical posing. You can see this clearly in the above film, which deals with an innocent girl seduced by a sleazy actor (think THE WHITE SHEIK, and our pastyface creep here is a good Sordi type). Blanche Sweet is a good actor with a lot of star quality, but she still labours under the widespread misapprehension that conveying facts to the audience is more important than being truthful. In this film about the difference between theatrical artifice and real emotions, the behaviour of the barnstormers on stage (in a hilariously condensed melodrama — masher annoys girl, chunky hero sees him off, embrace and CURTAIN) is in no real way different from the behaviour of the “real” people in the “real” (sometimes actually REAL) world.
In 1912, the Gish sisters find themselves in a Griffith picture, having rocked up at his studio with their mom, looking for work. “We thought we were in a madhouse,” recalled Gish, describing how Griffith chased them around the set while firing a pistol into the ceiling. Ah, the old Billy Friedkin – Sam Fuller pistol-shot technique, this is where it begins! Or maybe in the circus, with the big cats.
In AN UNSEEN ENEMY, nobody lapses into telegraphy except the “slattern.” She seems to be acting in a whole different register from everyone else. True, Elmer Booth as their brother is a hilarious ball of energy, but he’s nevertheless “in the moment,” truthful if not exactly real (the Wellesian distinction best illustrated by Jimmy Cagney — unreal but true).
Lillian, in her memoir The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, recalls the kind of direction the sisters received in rehearsal, after Griffith had supplied colour-coded ribbons so he could tell them apart: “Now, Red, you hear a strange noise. Run to your sister. Blue, you’re scared too. Look toward me, where the camera is. Show your fear. You hear something. What is it? You’re two frightened children, trapped in a lonely house by these brutes…”
We can’t expect Gish to have 100% recall of every word Griffith used, but if we assume this is accurate as to the kind of direction Griffith imparted, it’s a mixed bag. The scene-setting (“You’re two frightened children”) would pass as modern direction, and the straight cues (“You hear something”) are fine too. But “show your fear” would seem to trespass into telegraphy.
However. It’s the kind of line that can be interpreted in different ways — as a command to trump up some kind of performance, or as an invitation to reach into one’s memories or imagination and dredge up the appropriate emotion and its outward signifiers. Lillian was the kind of actor who would always do the latter — she doesn’t have an untrue moment in all her seventy-five years of screen acting, and I doubt she had many in the years she spent beforehand on the stage. The point is, Griffith’s lousier notes could be transmuted into useful, playable ones with sufficient skill and intelligence on the part of the player.
The Gish sisters came from the theatre — Katherine Cornell had bribed Dorothy into not looking at the audience by placing jelly beans on the set table and telling her she could have them later if she was good. So they’d been trained in not acknowledging the Great Eye of audience or camera. But several other Griffith players had legit training too — Lionel Barrymore was already with the company when the Gishes joined, for instance.
I’ve just seen Barrymore in THE WHITE CAPS, that 1905 vigilante melodrama by Edwin S. Porter & Wallace McCutcheon, but I didn’t even recognize him in that film’s perpetual wide shots. He’s not egregiously overacting, allowing for the fact that he’s playing an abusive drunk. But Barrymore was a big ole hambone, capable at times of being both unreal AND untrue, if not properly controlled.
Barrymore is somewhere in THE BATTLE (driving a wagon, seemingly), a pre-Gish Civil War pic. There’s a fair bit of poor acting in this, but it’s not as old-fashioned as in THE MAKING OF A MAN. The young beau, one minute in, seems distracted by something behind the camera — probably Griffith, barking directions at him. A reminder that filmmakers were like ringmasters of lion tamers (hence the firearms — what about a nice bullwhip while you’re at it, Dave?). But telegraphy is largely absent — at 10:27 Miss Sweet is seen talking to herself, but this is hysterical anxiety and probably a silent prayer, an acceptable melodramatic version of naturalism.
Acting is osmotic — put one good actor in your cast and they may pick up bad habits from the others but are just as likely to transmit some of their authenticity and force. The more good actors you assemble, the better everything gets, almost exponentially. The Gish sisters would have constituted a huge gust of youthful truthiness, and it certainly seems that Griffith, never more than a bum actor himself, noticed. So it’s evolution rather than revolution, the performances were already improving… but it’s quite a rapid evolution: in one year, the show-and-tell school seemingly goes from majority to bare minority.
(Incidentally, Lillian recalls appearing as an extra for Griffith, along with Dorothy and their mother Mary, before the sisters’ official debut in AN UNSEEN MENACE, playing members of a theatre audience. So she MAY be in the top clip, but I can’t see her. Maybe it was a different theatre scene in a different movie. Bonus points if you can find it!
JUST MAYBE —
2.42 into the film — woman with two young girls at the top of frame? I suck at identifying people, but if anyone has an edition sharper than YouTube and less facial blindness than I…
It looks like, subject to just a leetle bit of money being raised, Edinburgh Filmhouse will reopen! Maybe even this year?
You can donate here! Now that reopening seems ALMOST certain, it’s even more worth supporting. I chucked in a little more dosh myself. See you at the reopening!
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