Pordenone Festival of Silent Film has started, and we’re attending virtually, which means we don’t get Lubitsch’s LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN, but I guess that’s OK as I’ve seen it. We do get the very interesting JOKEREN/JOKER, from 1928, a Danish production from Nordisk with a German director, Georg Jacoby (known for his Nazi era operetta-films) and multinational stars including Brits Henry Edwards and favourite Shadowplayer Miles Mander, the human knitting needle.
The intertitles are a bit blah, and they’re also modern reconstructions with no attempt at period style. The dialogue is stuff like “I was in love with a young woman, but she left me for the rich Sir Herbert,” while the narrational titles just describe what we’re about to see, which is shockingly primitive for a 1928 film.
A shame, but a minor one, because the film itself is very sophisticated, even louche. Set in Nice at carnival time, apropos of Jean Vigo, it benefits greatly from the colourful, somewhat surreal location, with tragic scenes enacted by men in pantaloons and false noses.
Miles Mander is the whole show in my opinion, an actor you can really HEAR in silent films, whether you’ve heard him in talkies or not. Ideally cast here as a skeezy lawyer who’s bankrupted himself over an unfaithful mistress and now resorts to extortion to square the bills, he’s also quite smellable as he awakens in dirty shirt and braces, sprawled over his desk in a cat-infested office. Anyone who brings such sensory overload to a soundless film is aces in my book.
Of course it’s not really soundless because multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne provides marvelous accompaniment.
In the title role, Henry Edwards cuts a dashing figure, so unlike Joaquin Phoenix. IMDb has bifurcating him, attributing this sole credit to a separate Mr. Edwards from the rest of his filmography, which is British — he turned up in films from the teens to the fifties — OLIVER TWIST, GREEN FOR DANGER, good things like that. Here, in his youth, he’s what I’d call a proper matinee idol, while at the same time his bony, beaky features do suggest the titular playing card, or perhaps Mr. Punch. If that sounds not quite attractive, he’s a British leading man of the early twentieth century, what do you expect? His performance emerges from under a glistening pomaded carapace. But he can do soulful.
This was my first Jacoby film, I think — he doesn’t move the camera* but his shots are lovely. Without the ability to screen-grab from Pordenone’s streaming platform, I can’t show you any though. I’m keen to see Jacoby’s silent QUO VADIS with Emil Jannings as Nero, and I should check out his Hitlerian musical output sometime.
Pordenone is superb value, whether in-person (impossible for me at the start of the new teaching year) or online — check it out!
STOP PRESS – Jacoby does do some simple but elegant walk-and-talk shots.
Gabriel Gabrio, a kind of tuxedo breeze-block, is Sir Herbert Powder, his physique suggesting that he must be quite a convincing Jean Valjean in Henri Fescourt’s LES MISERABLES.
Elga Brink, another victim of IMDb bifurcation, is an elegant and sympathetic heroine.
Hello. I’m Fiona Watson, Mrs Shadowplay, and I’m back to carry out my threat to review Conrad Veidt’s sound career, in chronological order, or at least, the order listed on the IMDB. Because there’s far more to him than the kohl-smeared, expressionist flailer of the Silent Era.
Unfortunately, I can’t review Land Without Women/Das Land ohne Frauen 1929, Connie’s (and Germany’s) very first sound film because it’s currently lost, as much of Connie’s output is. Could someone start making a REAL effort to find this stuff please? Apparently one of his ‘lost’ films, Storm Over Asia/Tempête sur l’Asie 1938, isn’t ‘lost’ at all, it’s just sitting in an archive. What bloody use is that?
Synopsis – in the early 19th century during the Napoleonic war, thirteen men of an army detachment are left alive after a battle. They decamp to a nearby windmill where they find a family. The young daughter, Dora (Karin Evans), becomes emotionally attached to Captain Burk (Veidt) as they resolve to take a last stand against the enemy in what is essentially a suicide mission. The family flee but Dora sneaks back to be with her beloved Captain.
This film is now in a lamentable condition. Watching it was like receiving a film via telepathy from a not very good psychic. Bad show I say! It has some historical importance and deserves a restoration, although I doubt that’s possible because other, cleaner elements probably don’t exist any more. We even have moments where the image completely whites out. You can’t repair what’s not there.
The Last Company was part of a popular series of films celebrating Prussian history and derring-do, and it’s solid, with a magnificent (and very long) opening tracking shot over the bodies of dead soldiers in a muddy field, while crows caw ominously in the background. This is probably the most cinematic part of the film until we get to the action-packed, death-sodden ending, which is dynamically shot and edited.
What comes in between is mostly a chamber piece which gives away its stage origins. The storyline is pretty thin, but what impresses is the naturalness of the performances. Nothing seems forced or projected to the back of the stalls. These look and sound like real people. There’s some humour and a hell of a lot of hearty, bawdy, soldierly singing. (At one point David asked me if it was a musical.) We even get overlapping dialogue; pretty bold for something shot in 1929/1930.
According to an intriguing review in Variety from 1931, an English language version was shot, then dubbed with British accented voices to match the German actors’ lip movements. The writer felt that the dubbing was distracting and badly done. So apparently Connie’s voice remained unheard outside Germany at this stage, which is a great pity, because the original proves that he was no “squeaking horror” as he referred to earlier efforts to record him. His voice was beautiful, unusual and distinctive.
The Squeaking Horror role goes to his leading lady, Karin Evans (Dora), who may have had a perfectly acceptable speaking voice when you were standing next to her in real life, but who sounds like she’s been hiding behind the flour sacks of the mill, inhaling helium between takes. It’s most disconcerting. But what’s really diverting is how Connie has completely changed as a film actor.
(Sorry about the lack of subtitling here. Basically the situation that’s unfolding is that his men are packing up to leave. What they don’t know is that they CAN’T leave, because if they don’t stay and fight it could mean the deaths of thousands of their countrymen. Understandably, Connie looses his temper when they question his authority)
He seems to have almost immediately grasped the difference between silent and sound acting. His theatre training undoubtedly played a big part in this. At no time do you associate him with the wild, expressionistic contortions of Caligari or Orlac. He’s singled out in the Variety review as giving ‘an exceptionally fine performance’ despite the dubbing hindrance, and having seen the original German version, I wouldn’t disagree with that.
Granted, he doesn’t have much to do apart from be intense, imposing, commanding and sombre. He does that for about 80% of the film’s running time. The other 20% is given over to his tenderly chaste romance with the Squeaking Horror and his firm but compassionate leadership of his men. He’s certainly a striking figure, with his immense height and searchlight eyes beaming out of his soot-blackened face.
This dubbed version doesn’t seem to exist anymore unless it’s lurking about in a vault with Das Land ohne Frauen. What are the chances of that? Two Conrad Veidt Talkies in which a woman shows up in a male-dominated environment and throws a spanner in the works, in English and then in German. Not the same woman obviously. (Strike that. I’ve just discovered, via David Bordwell’s blog, that the dubbed version was shown in Bologna in 2011 as part of a Veidt season. He says it was part dubbed, part redone with the actors speaking English, so maybe people outside Germany DID hear his real voice)
Amusingly, when Die letzte Kompagnie was released in the States in its lip-flapped state, it was retitled Thirteen Men And A Girl, which sounds like a Deanna Durbin musical or a porn film. Imagine a mash up of 13 Men, Deanna and porn, dear reader, then defenestrate yourself out of shame! David suggests Debbie Does Deutschland as a more acceptable alternative, but I don’t think he should be encouraged in these efforts.
Marlene Dietrich (chums with Veidt), filming The Blue Angel next door, popped onto the set of The Last Company for a chinwag and to show off her frilly knickers. I love the way German directors wore lab coats, like they were ‘film scientists’ or something. Allegedly, Veidt repaid the compliment and nipped over to the Blue Angel set to watch Emil Jannings (another chum) have apoplexy because the film was being stolen from under his nose by Dietrich.
Sidebar – Jannings would eventually marry Veidt’s ex-wife, talented actor, singer and cabaret artiste, Gussy Holl; an extraordinary volte-face on Holl’s part. I suppose talent and charisma count for a lot, despite what shape they come in.
Director Kurt/Curtis Bernhardt, like so many German film artists of Jewish heritage fleeing the Nazis, would end up having a Hollywood career. Not an exceptional one, but not too shabby either. He would occasionally explode into brilliance, particularly on the ‘women’s pictures’ he became famous for. In Payment On Demand (1951), a Bette Davis vehicle, he utilised extraordinary transparent sets, and he guided Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman, Joan Blondell and Eleanor Parker towards Oscar nominations.
Bernhardt would direct Veidt again in Der Mann, der den Mord beging/The Man Who Committed Murder 1931, the next film I’ll be tackling. Join me as we explore the little discussed Veidt sound filmography.
LIEBLING DER GOTTER, Emil Jannings in an early German talkie. Surprisingly sophisticated — I guess Europe had a couple of years to absorb the early mistakes and discoveries of American sound film, so there’s immediately an understanding that UNsynchronised sound — separating sound from image — offscreen voices and noises overlaid on top of contrasting images — is one of the most powerful and absorbing techniques, at least as valuable as lip-synched dialogue.
CALIFORNIA SPLIT — I’d seen this years ago and knew it was good — Fiona hadn’t. More sound innovation, as Altman mixes untold layers of overlapping gab, sometimes allowing a clear conversation to emerge from the wordstream, sometimes smothering bits of it in crosstalk, sometimes submerging everying in burbling accretions of babel.
The film itself is terrific. I recall Elliott Gould talking about it in Edinburgh. He was a producer on it and said that the ending was originally supposed to show him and George Segal exiting the casino, filmed from outside: they’re friendship is over.
Altman approached Gould and suggested, it being very late/early and everyone tired, that they could end the film indoors and save themselves relocating and setting up a new shot. Gould agreed, and has wondered ever since if he made a mistake, and if the film underperformed because of it.
Maybe the very end is a tiny bit lacking — but not in a way that hurts your memory of the experience. A good illustration of Kurosawa’s point that, when you’re tired, your body and brain tell you that you have enough footage when you really don’t. The only solution, AK counsels, is to go ahead and shoot twice as much as you think you need.
A hard lesson!
The movie is wonderful — I miss the pre-McKee era when films could shamble along loosely, apparently neglecting all rules of structure, until at the end you realised that everything was there for a reason and an artful design had been functioning all along, UNDETECTED.
We also watched TAP ROOTS (George Marshall, 1948), beautiful Technicolor but by God it was dull.
Apart from Boris Karloff as a Native American with an English accent, and a fairly well-written part for Van Heflin, and the odd political interest of this GONE WITH THE WIND knock-off (Susan Hayward being flame-haired at the top of her voice) in which the South wins the Civil War against itself (a valley of abolitionist Southerners is invaded by the Confederates), the most striking moment was a surely unplanned incident in a river battle where one horse, improvising wildly, mounted another, trapping the hapless actor on Horse (2)’s saddle in a kind of Confederate sandwich with horses instead of bread. Looked painful. I have never weighed a horse but I believe they’re not featherweights.
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