WHAT SILENTS & PRE-CODES HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

[feaito]

Captain Salvation is one of the most entertaining Silents I've seen. I truly enyoyed it!

[drednm]

I watched the 1929 talkie Atlantic, a very ambitious disaster film based on the Titanic. The poster for the film boasted the largest cast every assembled for a film (doubtful) and called this the "leviathan" of talkies. While the sound was ok and the sound effects quite good, the overall effects were limited. For some reason the ship is the Atlantic and not the Titanic but the story is the same. We get a bunch of fictional characters dealing with the impending disaster and the noble crew etc. One problem is that most of the actors here are not well known. Madeleine Carroll and Monty Banks were about the only ones I recognized. More than that, the acting is pretty dreadful with all that early talkie pausing: "Do you mean to say the ship is in PAUSE PAUSE PAUSE trouble? Much like the old Carol Burnett skits on old movies. The film differs from others about the disaster in showing the passengers in total panic as they try to escape the ship. In the end, the film is still very moving because the story is so tragic.

[Ann Harding]

I have been watching several silents during the past week.

The Ace of Hearts (1920, W. Worsley) with Lon Chaney is a star vehicle where Lon belongs to a strange fraternity who organises murders. He is in love with the only woman of the clan, Leatrice Joy. Alas, she marries another one. So he gives up his life to save Leatrice and his rival. Wallace Worsley is not a great director. He tends to go through the motions. Still, enjoyable because of Lon, even if he overacts a bit in places.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928, H. Brenon) shows Chaney as a circus clown who adopts an abandoned child. The child grows into teenage Loretta Young, only 15 at the time. I liked it far more than Ace of Hearts, probably because of the charming interaction between Young and Chaney. The story is full of clichés, but it was nevertheless enjoyable.

Quo Vadis? (1925, Georg Jacoby) is mammoth Italian production with Emil Jannings, chewing the scenery relentlessly in the part of Nero. The film is extremely dull, with a model-size Rome being burnt. Jannings is out-of-control. Ustinov and laughton are understated in comparison. In the part of Licia (Ligia in the US version) we get the Brit Lilian Hall-Davis with a blond wig. The whole thing is a bore. I just woke up for a few minutes when the christians are being murdered in the arena. One small christian girl was attached behind a chariot drawn by four horses. Not only did she survive the treatment, but she manages to pull herself on top of the chariot and control the horses! This is really crazy when you know that the girl looked like a diminutive May McAvoy instead of a massive Hope Emerson....Mad!

And yesterday I went to the European premiere of the newly discovered Chaplin: A THIEF CATCHER (1914). It's a very crude Keystone with Ford Sterling in the lead. Chaplin appears only for a few minutes as a baton wielding policeman wearing an oversized uniform. He is nevertheless unmistakable. I enjoyed more the two newly restored Keystone they screened: THE MASQUERADER (1914) where Chaplin managed to get job disguised as a lady and HIS MUSICAL CAREER (1914) where he is a piano mover with Mack Swain. I guess if you are Chaplin fan, this a DVD box worth acquiring as you'll get the best possible quality print of all those Keystones. (BTW if you are in the UK, the Keystone Boxset comes out on Dec 13th from the BFI and it's much cheaper than the US issue.)

[charliechaplinfan]

I've got my eye on it

[intothenitrate]

Ann, is the version of Ace of Hearts you watched the one with the recently composed score by Vivek Madela (SP?). He was the winner of the Young Composer's competition through TCM.

I think that score is really beautiful. He uses a modern composer's "vocabulary" of chords, melodies, and rhythms but it's very sympathetic to what's going on in the film.

[charliechaplinfan]

I watched Upperworld today, I think I expected more of Warren William, Mary Astor and Ginger Rogers, it's entertaining but not a watch again.

[intothenitrate]

CCF, I recorded this movie [Upperworld] last week, and looked forward with great relish to viewing it. I'd watch anything with Warren William, Mary Astor or Ginger Rogers in it--individually--but to have all three in one picture, it seemed too good to be true. I finally watched it last night, and couldn't get over how completely lame it was. I'm still getting over it. As the kids say these days, "meh."

So now this morning I'm bothered by the question of why it was so lame. Certainly, my expectations leading up to watching it were pretty high, having enjoyed Warren William in films like Skyscraper Souls and Employee's Entrance, Ginger Rogers in the Golddiggers movies, and Mary Astor in, well, anything. But all that brilliance seems to have gone up in smoke. WW had gone from ruthless to toothless. The Ginger Rogers character, who typically would have telegraphed a certain amount of hard-bitten cynicism and resignation as a girl caught up in the sex trade, instead affects the manner of gushing schoolgirl. And Mary Astor, who I usually look to for some layered complexity and intelligence, just seemed to be showing up and delivering the lines...like a talking prop. Then there's the pivotal role of the cop played by Sydney Toler, who never evoked an ounce of sympathy from me anyway, but that's a different matter. J. Carroll Naish, who is more than capable of turning in a nuanced performance, might as well have had a big, garish sign on his back saying, "I'm the sleazy villain in this story." I'd have to complain about the lighting too. It just seemed that the sets were brightly lit with top lights--so there was no mood--just a quick, paint-by-numbers walk-through of an obvious and shop-worn script.

Like I said, this was still bothering me this morning, so I did a little reading over at the IMDB. Was it the director? I looked at Roy Del Ruth's bio and got the feeling that he was a quintessential studio director, a "company man." He has some pretty racy pre-codes (that I've seen) to his credit, like the 1931 version of the Maltese Falcon and the fore-mentioned Employee's Entrance. Then I looked at Ben Hecht's screenwriting credits, and wow, he was no slouch! If you look at the "personal quotes" section of his bio to get a sense of the man, you'd have to surmise that his original story must have been a lot juicier and hard-hitting than what was actually brought to the screen.

So here's my theory. This film, according to IMDB was released in April of 1934, and the Code went into effect in July. But Warner's saw the writing on the wall. They had this property that Hecht had written (you should see the gobs of money he was paid for his work!) and they needed to make the film before the script was entirely unusable. And yet, they needed to tone down and/or justify the salacious elements of the story, again, as a preemptive self-censoring gesture. Del Ruth probably wasn't the kind of director to stand up to the producers (and others), and there must have been endless tinkering with the script. That led to the principle actors having to deliver lines they didn't believe in and convey motivations that were illogical and inconsistent. It must have been supremely frustrating.

I only go on at length about this because, as you can tell, I'm pretty emotionally invested in WW, GR & MA, and was very, very let down by this picture. But hey, isn't that why we come here in the first place?

[charliechaplinfan]

Of the three stars Ginger Rogers had the most spark, I'm glad it's not just me that felt deflated. I think you must be right about the precode angle, I usually love Ben Hecht's movies, I can only think that his script was watered down to get the film out before the code became effective but it made the film lame. If you find out anything else please share.

[MichiganJ]

While I haven't seen the film, I checked the biography I have on Hecht and Upperworld has only one mention. According to the book, Hecht was in the middle of writing many projects and "dashed off a story outline" that was then sold to Warner Brothers. it doesn't sound as if Hecht himself did a whole lot of work on the actual script.

Looking through my pre-code books, Upperworld gets a brief mention in only one, and it is in reference to Ginger Rogers wearing the "loosest and flimsiest of tops" while singing Shake Your Powder Puff.

[charliechaplinfan]

Shake Your Powder Puff was the high point of the film.

[Birdy]

I got in a fun pre-code this week: Reducing
This comedy/drama, 1931, stars Marie Dressler who goes to live with her wealthy sister, Polly Moran. Polly's daughter, Anita Page, doesn't think much of Marie's family but has a change of heart when a man does her wrong and her aunti steps up to her rescue. Polly owns a salon and Marie tries to work there with many antics ensuing. The best line? "I wish I'd stayed single and raised you to think the same way!"

[JackFavell]

I have those Polly Moran/Marie Dresslers recorded somewhere - I think it's time to dig them up and watch them again! Sounds perfect for this time of year.

[MikeBSG]

I really liked "Ace of Hearts" when I saw it earlier this year. I would say it is the best film Chaney made with Woolsey as the director.

"Laugh, Clown, Laugh" was good, but I like "He Who Gets Slapped" better out of Chaney's clown films.

Earlier this week I saw "Bed and Sofa," a Soviet film from 1927 by Abram Room. It is about a married couple in Moscow who let a friend sleep in their apartment on the sofa. A wonderful film. It reminded me of Lubitsch in spots. (The film was made about 4 years before Socialist Realism became the norm for Soviet cinema.) Really worth seeing.

[charliechaplinfan]

I watched Captain Salvation yesterday starring Lars Hanson and Marceline Day. A story of the sea and the redemption of a prostitute and the unchristian values of a small town. Lars Hanson was perfectly cast as the man who is rejected by his fellow villagers after he takes an ill prostitute into his home, he runs away to sea with her only to find himself on a prison ship with a cruel master. Ernest Torrence plays the captain and Paulie Starke the prostitute.