The Sunday Intertitle: Usher??!!

Although NOT FOR SALE, the film which thrust Ian Hunter upon an unready world, has a great intertitle in which two lady residents of a boarding house complain that the food is terrible, but it’s ALL-ENGLISH MEAT, my favourite intertitle so far at the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival was shown by Professor Lawrence Napper in his lecture on Nurse Edith Cavell and her cinematic legacy. In the 1915 NURSE AND MARTYR, as the patriotic if foolhardy nurse stands before the German military judge, he has a flashback to an act of kindness she had done him — pulling a thorn from his paw showing sympathy at the death of his son — but then his face hardens and he bangs his fist and says, via title card, “BAH — SHE IS ENGLISH, SHE MUST DIE.”

Nothing of that kind in the day’s highlights, which for me were CITY GIRL and THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. Murnau’s film was accompanied by Neil Brand and the Dodge Brothers, who gave it energy and brought out the emotion with a largely improvised score that was at times almost pop — and worked. I’ve never enjoyed the film so much or been so moved by Mary Duncan and Charles Farrell’s romance, which, in its early scenes in the city, has something of LONESOME about it.

My programme notes for Epstein’s Poe adaptation are here. Stephen Horne and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry accompanied this one on piano, harp, vocals, and just about everything else. “Not as much banging on the piano as I’d expected,” someone said, but the versatile Horne made up for that with some genuinely startling screams. The harp made everything beautiful as well as disturbing, which was exactly what the film called for.

I had made the error of donning a pair of trousers upon which I had previously spilt superglue, and at one point the tension became so great I shattered my trouser leg.

The various bus and train journeys also enabled me to finish one Martin Beck and start a Rex Stout.

Today — a Laurel & Hardy triple bill, THE NECKLACE (a Chinese rarity, adapted from Maupassant), THE UNKNOWN, and L’HOMME DU LARGE.

Thus Spake Zorro

A fun-packed day in Bo’ness for the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival yesterday — and more today and tomorrow. My programme notes are online this year, you can access those for THE MARK OF ZORRO here. And the whole history of programme notes is up here.

Fred Niblo’s swashbuckler of old California — his finest film, I think — looked stunning on the Hippodrome’s big screen, in its Photoplay restoration and with Neil Brand and Frank Bockius accompanying it on piano and percussion (amazing feats of synchronization, quite apart from the romance and excitement). A treat.

Earlier in the day I saw Lawrence Napper lecture on the filmic history of Nurse Edith Cavell, as prelude to Herbert Wilcox’s 1928 DAWN, starring Sybil Thorndyke as the patriotic nuse. Discussing the case, we all agreed to disapprove of Nurse E.C., since she was smuggling British soldiers home under the cover of the Red Cross — undermining that organisation’s whole existence. We reckoned if she’d been a German doing the same thing, the British would have shot her too.

Anyway, the film, accompanied by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius, was suspenseful and made with some skill, though heavy on the intertitles. Maybe it was partly because the Belgian print screened (the film exists in two cuts) was titled bilingually, but doubtless British silent cinema’s tendency to prolixity was also a factor: whenever you got one title card, it spilled onto a second, the writers just having too much good stuff they wanted to say.

Today I hope to see NOT FOR SALE, CITY GIRL and THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER — a Murnau, an Epstein, and the first-named will be my first experience of W.P. Kellino, and Ian Hunter’s first film. Expect some reviews or reactions shortly.

Pola to Kay

We watched CONFESSION (Joe May, 1937) and then discovered MAZURKA (Willi Forst, 1935) on YouTube. With subs!

Fiona had done her research and knew that the Warners picture is pretty well a shot-for-shot remake of the Cine-Allianz Tonfilmproduktions GmbH one. Warners bought the distribution rights and then instead of releasing the film, they remade it. One of the few cases of a Hollywood studio finding a foreign film so perfect they didn’t change everything around. See also Duvivier’s PEPE LE MOKO becoming John Cromwell’s ALGIERS (the musical version, CASBAH, is a slightly different story). Farrow even tried to cast actors who resembled the supporting players in Duvivier’s film. Kind of a good idea, since certain shots might only make sense with certain faces. Somebody pointed out that the very weird low angle shot of Norman Bates peering over at the motel register in PSYCHO makes sense with Anthony Perkins’ long, beaky face, and doesn’t work in at all the same way with Vince Vaughn’s big meatblock of a head.

Still, a comparison of the Duvivier with the Farrow clearly shows that everything Duvivier does works better than Cromwell’s attempts at imitation.

May is better at it — he seems to really understand why everything is the way it is, so his copying is more intelligent, somehow. Both Forst and May were Viennese and may have had a shared sensibility. Forst did make a few films after the Anschluss, always apolitical, usually musical — some give him credit for “subverting pan-Germanic Nazism” with his “ardent Vienna-Austrian topos” (Wikipedia, no source given).

Cheekily, CONFESSION even directly recycles some original footage from MAZUKRA, where no actors are involved.

Joe May’s Hollywood career was a serious come-down after his German success, though one could argue that his heyday was circa 1920 when he had his own studio and exterior lot. But his best films came in the late twenties. As an emigre, having to start over in his fifties, he couldn’t get properly started, his jobs were very intermittent, and he slid towards B pictures.CONFESSION is probably his finest moment in US film, and it’s not really his.

Image 1: a seduction. Image 2: a rape. Both from CONFESSION, but exactly similar versions appear in MAZURKA.

Still, his casting choices are good — Kay Francis isn’t an obvious replacement for Pola Negri, but she’s excellent in the part. Warners gave him access to Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp and, uh, Ian Hunter. He’s quite well-cast and does no major harm. May copies the cleverest parts — I must see more Forst! — there’s a great motif of light fittings, seen in point-of-view by girls being kissed — there’s a cunning reason for this — and enhances the odd moment with the larger resources available to him. His closing shot is a doozy, more epic and transcendent than Forst’s, though cornier —

CONFESSION is available from Warner Archive so you shouldn’t watch an old fuzzy TCM recording like we did. Even though it’s melodramatic froth, and even though it’s pretty well a clone of someone else’s film, it’s great.