Silents is Olden

A pretty full Sunday at Hippfest — starting with a Laurel & Hardy double-bill — THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS and THE FINISHING TOUCH — then QUEEN OF SPORTS, then THE NORTULL GANG and then THE WIND.

It was interesting to look at the early L&H and see how nearly-fully-formed the act was right from the off — Stan shaved his head to play a convict and his hair grew back all tufty and this became a trademark. At one point, Ollie blows a raspberry and gets Stan in trouble. In future, this would be rearranged so that Ollie is the main victim of Stan’s stupidity, and is craven before authority.

At the end of the double bill I noticed that my ribs were aching. So it was a good work-out, a way to burn off all that ice-cream I’d eaten in Bo’ness at the marvelous McMoo’s ice cream parlour.

I’m not a huge fan of the Chinese silents I’ve seen — early talkies suit me better. But I decided to give QUEEN OF SPORTS (1934) a try. LOTS of nice camera movement in this one, tracking aslant into the action, in something like a Michael Curtiz manner, plus lots of elevator rises. I seem to recall director Yu Sun doing similar moves in his DAYBREAK, with maybe a Borzage influence.

I tend to get distracted by the naivety of the Chinese films, which is just a different form of the naivety found in American and European silents. But it’s a form which usually comes with a chunk of nationalist propaganda, and the same happened here, but not till the end. I don’t care for nationalism and I hate sports so this movie had two strikes against it as far as I was concerned.

Doing away with the underdog story that animates COLLEGE and THE FRESHMAN, QOS deals with celebrity sprinter Li Ying (Li-Li Li) who comes to Shanghai from the country and is really really good at running. So they have to come up with a couple more sources of tension, but they don’t develop any of these consistently. There’s a potential romance with Li’s hunky coach, and a school figure with a pencil moustache and neck to match. Then there’s a brief interlude where fame goes to Li’s head and she neglects her training to go to a football match and a youth club (scandalous stuff). But that only takes up ten minutes.

Then there are the mean girls who plot to defeat Li, but their plot just involves trying to win against her, which I thought was the point of the sport anyway. And one of them has a weak heart (new kinds of unconvincing acting are tried out to portray this — a “cough” that causes the actor’s hand to flutter from chest to mouth, plus a lot of writhing about).

I enjoyed seeing 1930s Shanghai, and seeing 1920s college movie fashions ported over from Hollywood — pennants! a ukulele! a tiny silver megaphone! And the training montages with wipes galore, something you didn’t really see in American silents, so this is a combination of silent movie and early talkie visual storytelling. And all those camera movies were lovely.

THE NORTULL GANG (1923) was odd in totally different ways. Four working girls share an apartment in Stockholm (and again, nice to see the city) — their lives and loves and so on. This was based on a novel, and the intertitles went for quite a novelistic approach: events were set up before they happened, but in a mysterious and wry way, so it wasn’t like those 1910 movies where the titles act as spoilers, here they’re TEASERS. This was done so frequently, though, that it all felt like the set-up for a story that was just about to kick off. I was waiting for the story to begin, then realised it had, sort of, and then it ended really nicely. An experiment in narrative — the film has a real tone of voice, ironic, self-deprecating, feminist.

And Nils Aster turned up for the second time this weekend, playing a different kind of louse with a different moustache (he plays a jealous guy in OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS).

Per Lindberg directed sensitively (his other films sound interesting too, mostly talkies) — I spent a lot of time just enjoying the streets, and the kind of stuff people had in their houses and offices. (Incidentally, in a short piece about Dickens’ London, called I think DICKENS’ LONDON, we saw an ad on a bus for something called “Iron Jelloids.” If you can score me some Iron Jellloids, I would be appreciative. In JUST AROUND THE CORNER a cigar store was selling “Egyptian Deities.” I don’t smoke but if a free cigar is offered I take it. This has only happened to me once so the risk of addiction seems slight.)

As for THE WIND… that might merit a whole series of posts…

The Sunday Intertitle: Three to Get Ready

So, didn’t make it in for STEAMBOAT BILL, JR but rocked up in time for Frank Lloyd’s OLIVER TWIST, with Neil Brand on piano — great stuff, actually a revelation on the big screen and with proper accompaniment. Our second remember of the Standing theatrical family appeared, Joan Standing, a Standing by marriage (Herbert Standing was in JUST AROUND THE CORNER way back on Friday was it?). John Standing, perhaps the last of the line, is still with us. I said this to friends and Mark immediately volunteered “I’m Still Standing” while Steph offered “Last Man Standing.”

My programme notes for this one are here.

Next up was OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS, a glossy MGM se-and-morality fable. You get not only Joan Crawford but also Anita Page and Nils Aster and Johnny Mack Brown and Dorothy Sebastian and Edward Nugent — all very sleek and elegant. Much as I enjoyed the funhouse visage of Ernest Torrence in MANTRAP, his facial contours a slalom for the eyeballs, there was much to be said for this panoply of male and female loveliness, surrounded by Cedric Gibbons’ moderne sets and aglow with studio moonlight. Maude Nelissen wrenched such heartache from the piano it had to get an emergency retuning in the interval.

Final film would have been THE ORGANIST OF ST VITUS (Martin Fric) but if I’d stayed for that one I wouldn’t have made it home, so the actual last film was THE RACKET, my man Lewis Milestone, and livelier than I’d remembered it, aided by more thugs with ugly mugs than you could shake Percy Marmont at — Louis Wolheim leading the mob with his impacted fender of a fizzog, and George “the Runt” E. Stone playing his equally lovely son. It’s a Howard Hughes production so some of the subsidiary goons may have been picked up from the real rackers, as was purportedly done on SCARFACE. Marie Prevost was ace, and director Milestone himself cameo’d as a speakeasy doorman (“Swordfish!”) ~

“Skeets” Gallagher played a drunken journo with a marked air of Frank McHugh avant la lettre. I googled the play to see whether McHugh had perchance originated the role and sleepy-eyed Gallagher mimicked his perf, but no. (But my research reminded me that John Cromwell starred in the play, and got to direct the remake.) Perhaps McHugh patterned his schtick on Gallagher, or perhaps the McHugh archetype was haunting the Jungian unconch for some time before manifesting — for Milestone! — in THE FRONT PAGE a few scant years later? (There are a few earlier McHugh appearances, but his role in TFP — as “McCue” — seems to set the seal on his persona.)

Mike Nolan (piano) and Frank Bockius (percussion) enhanced this one considerable. I had a ringside seat for the drum kit — RACKET is right! — no sleeping through that one. A riotous jazz-age end to the evening.

More tomorrow!

First Blush

The third in an informal trilogy (and really, everyone should make informal trilogies — they’re the best kind), following OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS and OUR MODERN MAIDENS, OUR BLUSHING BRIDES (1930) is the first full talkie in the sequence, and the earliest talkie I’d seen Joan Crawford in. (I’m now excited to see UNTAMED — as who wouldn’t be, with that title? — her very first speechifying role.)

Shaking up the familiar format of leggy girls and lush deco sets, the movie casts Joan and regular co-star/sacrificial lamb Anita Page as shopgirls, with Dorothy Sebastian completing the traditional trio. DS is really good in this, and it’s a shame she’s the one who slid into extra roles. The department store they work in (Crawford is a mannequin, her friends and flatmates sell perfumes and blankets respectively) is a relatively restrained, realist construction, so that we have to wait until the fashion show at the millionaire’s country retreat before we get any Cedric Gibbons elegance, but it’s worth the wait ~

Uncredited director Harry Beaumont directs fluidly — there are some long “photographs of people talking” scenes, but also some propulsive tracking shots with overlapping crowd dialogue and a dynamic mix of synch and post-synch sound: an early lingerie pageant has a Greek chorus of female customers babbling over it, perhaps to fix the scene as a fashion show rather than a skin show in the censor’s mind. Whatever, it’s a pleasingly weird effect.

Sociopolitically, we’re still in flux: the working girl stuff is quite Warner Bros, with sympathy for the gold-digging impulse (it’s what our current Glorious Leaders would call Social Mobility), but Joan is portrayed as the wisest of the three little pigs, the one who doesn’t trust men and won’t accept the advances of tiny-child-in-a-tux Robert Montgomery until he’s proved his intentions are honourable. Whereas Page and Sebastian both get royally taken by the predatory males they’re foolish enough to believe. This means we get to see Page’s shagging palace (above), a spectacular streamlined suite with leather-bound volumes just for show (“David says women shouldn’t ruin their minds with thinking,” gurgles Page), but the biggest treat is Montgomery’s tree-house —

Yes. This is a tree-house. By Cedric Gibbons. What, no swimming pool?

You can buy the first two films in the series —

Our Dancing Daughters
Our Modern Maidens