The Easter Sunday Intertitle: Not on the Lone Prairie

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…

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…