WHAT SILENTS & PRE-CODES HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

[charliechaplinfan]

Recently I watched two pred-codes.

The Good Bad Girl (1931, Roy Wm Neill) with Mae Clarke, James Hall et Marie Prevost. Mae Clarke is a gangster's moll who dreams to have a normal life. She meets a young man from a rich family. They get married. All is well until her former boyfriend escapes from prison and looks for her. The script is not very original and resembles various other features of the time with Stanwyck. Nevertheless, it was enjoyable thanks to Mae Clarke's sensitive acting plus the comic relief delivered by Marie Prevost. Nevertheless, it's highly forgettable.

I watched this today and I have to agree with you. The film is held together by the performances of the two actresses otherwise it's forgettable. Mae Clarke is always enjoyable.

I also watched Faithless with Tallulah Bankhead and Robert Montgomery. Tallulah is an awful socialite who spends and spends and neglects the charities chosen by her father. She has one redeeming quality, the love of a good man Robert Montgomery but refuses to marry him as he won't live off her money and she won't live off his 20k per year. That problem is cleared up when she loses her fortune and Robert loses his job. However she leaves to live the society lifestyle and is soon lured in to being a mistress for a wealthy gent. Seeing Robert again she gives up the lifestyle and ends up on the street, starving unable to pay her rent she gives her shoes to the landlady. Down on her luck and given soup in a soup kitchen she finds Robert again, they marry, find happinessonly for it to be snatched away again when Robert has an accident. The only way to pay the bills is by prostitution only she is discovered first by Robert's brother and then by the policeman who is a cop with a heart who finds her a job. Completely changed from the socialite that she was she faces having her husband turned against her when her brother in law tells her husband. The best film I've ever seen Robert Montgomery in.

[charliechaplinfan]

I watched Hold Your Man today, another brilliant pairing of Gable and Harlow with some great set pieces, Gable bursting into Harlow's flat trying to evade the police and discovers Harlow in the bath only to swap places with her to soap up and pretend to be her husband. They are both confidence tricksters, although he seems to have more experience than her. He goes away when a job goes wrong, she waits for him, finally he discovers how much she means to him, they get a licence to marry only to discover that the man Gable punched for touching Harlow has died. The whole film flows quickly, Harlow ends up pregnant in a reformatory but finds her happy ending. You can't compare the films before to the ones straight after the code. Pre 1934 sex happened, after 1934 it was a different story.

[JackFavell]

I love Hold Your Man, I love the Gable-Harlow pairing very much here, they are so sassy. I especially like the women at the reformatory - especially Theresa Harris as Lily. She would have a few good roles before the code, like in Baby Face, and then had to play the obligatory maids and servants. She has always been an actress I watch for, she really stands apart from other character actresses.

[feaito]

Hold your Man is a very good picture!

[charliechaplinfan]

I was glad to be able to see it, I prefer the Harlow/Gable partnership to any other pairing he had during the thirties, they are both sassy and suited to one another.

[drednm]

Winds of Chance is a terrific, sprawling adventure film from a Rex Beach story set against the Klondike and that search for gold.

No music track and missing the 2nd reel but it doesn't stop this nicely tinted film from being solid. What a cast!
Anna Q. Nilsson, Ben Lyon, Viola Dana, Victor McLaglen, Dorothy Sebastian, Hobart Bosworth, etc.

Exciting river rapids sequence looked awfully real to me (no models or dummies). Also of interest are the mountain and snow scenes with many similarities to Chaplin's The Gold Rush, which was filming about the same time (different locations).

[JackFavell]

Wow, that is a great cast, Drednm!

[drednm]

Watched the bizarre 1930 film Undertow which starred Mary Nolan and Johnny Mack Brown. In this early talkie Brown plays a lifegaurd who clunks his head on a log while saving a kid from drowning. He catches the attention of blonde Nolan who is fighting with her yucky boyfriend (Robert Ellis). They fall in love and go off together to the lighthouse Brown has been assigned to man.

Next scene is three years later with Nolan depressed and looking longingly back toward shore. They fight constantly and their kid is sick. They then have a big fight about "milk from a can" just about the time that Brown goes blind from getting clunked on the head by that log. Later, Ellis is coming to the lighthouse to pick of the records (he's the boss) and Brown tries to hide his blindness. But Ellis catches on and kidnaps the partially willing Nolan.

Back on land she realizes her mistakes and steals a boat to get back to the lighthouse. Brown clunks his head on a wall and his eyesight is restored. As the couple starts to make up, Ellis returns but is surprised when Brown can see. They have a big fight.

Nolan made about a dozen talkies up through 1933. He talkie career never took off although she has a good voice. Brown and Ellis are a tad hammy here. The sets and lighting are excellent in this Universal film. Clocking in at 56 minutes, I wonder if part of this film is missing?

[Ann Harding]

Yesterday I watched Rain (1932, L. Milestone) with J. Crawford and W. Huston. In spite of some great camerawork by Milestone (including a 180°panoramic shot!), I found the film very stagey. I loved the Walsh silent with Gloria Swanson, but this one didn't click for me. Crawford and Huston are doing their best, but it comes through as extremely verbose. William Gargan is not a patch for Walsh himself and his voice is terribly monotonous. Rather disappointing...

[feaito]

I watched the amusing adventure film "The Gaucho" (1927) with Doug Fairbanks in the title role -devil-may-care as usual- and fiery Lupe Vélez as his paramour. She looks very pretty in this picture. The KINO DVD edition's print is of good quality and has a rather wonderful score. Nigel De Brulier plays an "ideal" priest, generous, humble, kind et al; Eve Southern plays the girl of the shrine -who survived after falling off a cliff as a young girl, thanks to the Virgin Mary (played by Mary Pickford)- and Gustav Von Seyffertitz is an Argentinian dictator -I like very much this fine character actor. All in all, a fun picture that's amusing as any adventure romp made today.

Also included as a bonus was the even more interesting & very bizarre Fairbanks 1916 feature "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" in which he plays a weird detective (addicted to cocaine) and that features Bessie Love, Alma Rubens, Tom Wilson and Allan Sears, directed by John Emerson. I was completely baffled by the drug references (cocaine, then legal apparently) and the rather radical plot!

[Birdy]

I've never seen this but have heard of it. It is a Sherlock Holmes parrody and since I'm on another Holmes/Watson jag, I may have to look for it. The Goucho sounds like fun.

[MichiganJ]

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is truly one of the most bizarre silent shorts ever. Fairbanks as Coke Ennyday shoots (then legal) coke so he can thwart opium smugglers. Written by Tod Browning, apparently Fairbanks hated Leaping Fish so much he didn't want it released. Bessie Love looks absolutely gorgeous, though.

I really enjoy The Gaucho. It provides Doug with a slightly darker hero to play in that he's originally a thief, a drunk and a womanizer. Good film.

[JackFavell]

Gustav Von Seyfferitz has been showing up in almost every movie I've seen in the last couple of weeks! He's also in two of the Hildegarde Withers series which recently played on TCM.

[Ann Harding]

During the WE, I went to see a rare Franco-American silent called L'Empire du Diamant/The Empire of Diamonds (1920-22) directed by Léonce Perret with Lucy Fox, Henry G. Sell, Léon Mathot, Marcel Levesque and Laurent Morlas. Perret -one of the main directors at Gaumont in the teens- left France for America in 1919. For this film, he used a cosmopolitan cast of French and American actors. The film has the typical flavour of serials with many twists and turns. But unlike the serials, it's condensed in 78 min. It boasts also some amazing locations: New York, a liner across the Atlantic, Paris, London, Nice, Monte-Carlo! It gives the film a kind of 'reality' it wouldn't have achieved in a studio. The story revolves around a gang of crooks who are flooding the market with fake diamonds made by a chemist. The director of a diamond company is inquiring. He is kidnapped and his daughter goes on his trail. If the story was not particularly original, the cinematography was absolutely superb. With one glimpse, you recognise Perret's style and sense of composition. The film was shot by René Guissart (who worked on Niblo's Ben-Hur). You have those typical back-lit landscapes with some silhouettes against the sky on top of cliff, sun-lit verandas full of flowers with ladies reclining, and large windows opening on a view of the Eiffel Tower. The film has Perret poetic touch. We get some comic relief from Marcel Levesque (The unforgettable Mazamette and Coquentin in Feuillade serials) and some breathtaking stunts from Laurent Morlas escaping a windmill in fire. Overall, it was very enjoyable.

[JackFavell]

This is why I enjoy your posts, AnnHarding. You manage in a few words to give the plot, the highlights, and the background of the movie. You have a gift for description. I am especially glad you mentioned Rene Guissart.... one of the greatest pleasures of Ben Hur is the cinematography.