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.

The Sunday Intertitle: Inn Trouble

One of our most enjoyable discoveries of the last few years was Claude Autant-Lara’s L’AUBERGE ROUGE, a wickedly macabre anti-clerical farce set in a mountain inn where the hosts have taken to murdering and robbing their guests. So I was excited to discover an earlier (1923) version of the same legend made by the often brilliant Jean Epstein.

On a bad day/film, Epstein could be dull, but he’s great fun in experimentalist mode, as he is here, essaying a spooky tale literally told after supper by some snobs in periwigs, by candlelight and everything. And it’s great to see him working with macabre material, as he does so effectively in THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.

One could quibble — many of Epstein’s visual experiments are too dramatic for their circumstances. Intercutting between our heroes riding through the night — quick cuts of riders flashing by, hooves cratering mud — with the crowded hostelry ahead — a more languid wide shot, repeated — he creates a degree of hilarity because nothing’s actually happening in the inn. It’s a simple journey/destination treated as if it were a chase to the rescue.

Then, when the innkeeper gestures with his towel to demonstrate that the joint is so crowded you can’t even find a seat, Epstein attaches his lens to the towelled hand and pans it round the room, like a ’20s Sam Raimi. Huzzah! But Eh?

But then, when the creepy old woman sneaks up behind our main guy, and Epstein extends the moment for max suspense, and gives us the subsequent card-reading with giant close-ups (some of them impressionistically blurry) and giant title cards and looming hands — it’s REALLY GOOD. Silent horror films should always go this far. Hardly any do.