The Cameraman's Revenge

When the Clouds Roll By (1919): As comedy premises go, trying to drive someone to suicide is, well, an interesting one, I suppose… In this film Doug is the unwitting victim of a (literally) mad scientist’s experiment in seeing how far someone can be pushed before they snap, a project involving filling the poor bastard so full of superstitious obsession he can barely function. When he meets the love of his life, the doctor’s plan is complicated, but not quite thwarted, as he uses this to his own advantage (further tying it into the film’s main subplot). All this action kicks off with a scene that is quite astounding; after a bad night’s dinner (in which we even see the food doing acrobatics in his stomach), Doug retires to a bad night’s sleep and a short but nonetheless amazing dream sequence. I think I may be right in saying this business—which features the original version of the “walking on the ceiling” scene Fred Astaire did decades later in Royal Wedding and has him being chased by his poorly digested meal—must’ve been one of the most technically advanced things shot in film history up to that point. It’s still kind of breathtaking. The problem is, it’s so good the rest of the film couldn’t live up to such a beginning. It’s not a bad film by any means (though it never does quite explain how this surprisingly large conspiracy against Doug actually comes about); Victor Fleming had worked with Fairbanks as a cameraman long enough by then that he knew what to do with Doug in his directorial debut. Maybe that’s the problem, as the film does kind of manifest the Fairbanks-by-numbers feel alluded to here. We’ve seen him do this sort of vaguely-clownish-young-man-wakes-up-to-self-saves-day-gets-girl thing a fair bit already…

The Mollycoddle (1920): …and he does it again here, to be sure, playing the somewhat disappointing descendant of a line of rootin’ tootin’ frontiersmen, raised (unlike them) amidst wealth and luxury in Monte Carlo, with Anglophile affectations that earn him the mockery of his “fellow” Americans. The difference here is that Doug has a rather better story in which to play out his “lamb to lion” transformation (neat phrase copped from the DVD booklet); finding him inadvertently en route back to the mother country after said “fellow” Americans prank him, Doug has to square off against Wallace Beery’s boat captain and diamond smuggler, who mistakes him for a secret service agent. It’s probably not the most dramatically convincing “lamb to lion” moment—just being on his native soil again seems to bring out the atavistic he-man in this product of foreign luxury—but who cares, the whole thing actually adds up to something rather excellent. Still, it’s hard to deny that Doug was starting to look his age in this film (mind you, I’m now the age he was when he made this and I only wish I could do a quarter of the things he could), and he must’ve known the time was passing when audiences would accept this sort of thing. Change of direction was in the air…

Reaching for the Moon (1917): With the benefit of hindsight, again, this film’s been viewed to at least some degree as an indication of things to come for Fairbanks. He’s playing a similar sort of character to the one in Wild and Woolly, a young fellow with what I suppose you might call a reasonably rich fantasy life, or, perhaps a bit more kindly, aspirations to greatness. But, as the film’s opening titles remind us, you should be careful what you wish for in case you get it, and the story is an object lesson in that principle, giving the film a kind of “moral tale” quality the previous film didn’t have. Doug finds himself the king of Vulgaria one day, but being King isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; there’s assassins to dodge, a pretender to the throne looking to bump him off, a not terribly appealing princess to marry, etc… All this business is eventually revealed as a dream, with Doug having learned his lesson thereby, though quite what the lesson is I’m not sure; is the film saying it’s better to be ambitious within your means or to not be ambitious at all and to just settle for what you’ve got? Either way it gives a slightly melancholy if not bitter cast to the happy ending. The Vulgaria stuff is great, though, especially the fête on the canal where he has to dodge multiple attempts on his life; this has some of the best stunt action we’ve seen from him so far.

A Modern Musketeer (1917): As I said earlier, quite a few of Fairbanks’ early films have vanished, including—according to the DVD booklet—six he made after this one, which has itself only recently returned from the land of the lost (only the first half of the film was known to exist for some decades). I’m pleased that it has, cos it’s probably the best film in this set so far, there’s a real feeling of Fairbanks at the height of his powers; and there’s no lesson for him to learn in this one, it’s far more straight ahead “go out there and be heroic”. Here he’s Ned Thacker, born during a cyclone to a mother enamoured of The Three Musketeers, and consequently absorbing both those influences into himself; young Ned’s a tearaway stifled by the confines of his small Kansas town, and so off he goes out west. I listened to the audio commentary, by Messrs Vance & Maietta who also wrote the DVD booklet, and they make a point about Fairbanks’ characters being this sort of out-of-time figure, which is kind of literally illustrated by two short scenes of Fairbanks as the original D’Artagnan; apparently he was already interested in trying his hand at a costume picture, but hedged his bets by sticking these scenes in an otherwise modern picture. They do underscore the nature of Ned, though, who winds up having to save his love interest from both an Indian “chief” and the thorough cad looking to marry her, all against the astounding backdrop of the Grand Canyon (which, as the commentary observes, was still a fairly obscure place to many people in 1917); whereas before Doug has been capable of doing heroic stuff, here he is a hero, which is a different thing. Exuberant, terrific fun.

The Matrimaniac (1916): I often talk about the economy of storytelling in older films, and how much less time they usually take to set themselves up and get going. This is a comparatively extreme example, though; clocking in at just 46 minutes (barely feature-length even by 1916 standards), it quite literally cuts to the chase. I’d almost swear it was missing an opening reel to establish the characters, but no, apparently it does just begin in apparent mid-story. Here, Doug is the young man eloping with the love of his life—in broad daylight through the front door of the house, no less—in the face of opposition from her father and another suitor. Quite what Doug has done to offend the old man (apart from merely existing, perhaps) is never explained; we simply begin kind of in medias res with Doug deflating the tyres on the old boy’s car so he can’t chase them once they begin their flight. Still, he’s not going to let a minor thing like that stop him from interfering in his daughter’s happiness. Fun (I particularly enjoyed the scenes where Doug and the hapless minister he’s roped in to perform the ceremonial duties are hamstrung by an unhelpful mule), although hard not to feel there wasn’t something missing. Like motivation for the plot.

Wild and Woolly (1917): Again, Fairbanks plays a part I could easily imagine Harold Lloyd having done in the following decade. He’s the son of a New York-based railroad magnate who’s grown rich off sending his railroads out west, and the son has accordingly grown up a fanatic for the old west. When a business opportunity in Arizona pops up, Doug finally gets his chance to actually head west for the first time in his life, and the folks running the place decide the best way to get him on side is to dress the place up like the 1880s frontier town it stopped being long ago so it lives up to his fantasy of the old west. Little do they all realise some real wild west business is about to go down. Given the film’s intention as a spoof of the “eastern westerner” story, and the way it’s about the distance between the old west and the “modern” world, it’s worth remembering just how far the early movie era overlapped with the old west; Buffalo Bill Cody, after all, died only a couple of months before this appeared, and he did a fair bit towards packaging the idea of the “wild west” as a performance of the sort the townsfolk stage here. By now Fairbanks himself had moved from Triangle, under the aegis of D.W. Griffith, to his own production company, but he obviously retained some lessons from Griffith; the climax of the film plays out not unlike one of his films (maybe if The Battle at Elderbush Gulch had been funnier. We’ll say nothing of how the two films treat their Indians). Apparently this was one of Fairbanks’ favourites, and I can see why; his character may be a bit of a buffoon living a bit of a fantasy, but he can turn on actual heroics when required.

Moving onto another of the numerous DVD box sets I’ve been accruing in recent months… this time the early works of Douglas Fairbanks; the DVD booklet makes a case for him as the comparatively forgotten man of silent cinema even though he was one of the top stars of his age. Insofar as I myself know him, it’s only from a few of his big 1920s actioners, so seeing him start out in small comedy is going to be interesting… As far as I can tell, quite a number of his early films have gone the way of most silent cinema, but there seem to be several more still extant than what’s in the box, so I presume what we have here is supposed to be a representative sample. Let’s start, then…

His Picture in the Papers (1916): His third film, seems like a fair enough place to start. Here he’s the son of a health food magnate whose enthusiasm for the family business is decidedly less than that of his old man; after his two sisters appear in a vegetarian magazine promoting the business, dad insists he find a way to do the same if he expects to inherit it and marry his intended beloved. Once he has actually has to do something the film starts taking off as Douglas has to come up with ideas to publicise himself, and also ultimately defeat the gang of crooks bedevilling his future father-in-law; the action climax is a nice foretaste of things to come.

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916): Curious that Fairbanks began in features and only made this one two-reeler once he was established. He apparently hated this astoundingly odd little number, which was made twice with different directors and the participation of no less a figure than Tod Browning; in it he plays drug-fuelled scientific detective Coke Ennyday, sent to bust a drug-smuggling ring trafficking the very stuff he needs in quantities even Aleister Crowley might’ve thought excessive. It’s eccentric stuff on many levels and I’m not really sure it works (and the twist ending shows, a little sadly, that American audiences in 1916 apparently couldn’t be expected to just accept the plain fucking bizarre on its own terms); somehow I’m happy to know it exists, though.

Flirting With Fate (1916): Doug plays a struggling artist; unlucky at making money or making love, he decides to end it all… equally unlucky at suicide, however, he hires a hitman to bump him off. Suddenly luck comes his way and life is worth living again… but the hitman is still out there. The film was criticised in its day, and I think not unfairly, for taking too long to set up the situation, but once the comic business gets going it’s pretty good stuff (I just wish there’d been a little bit more of it after that buildup), as we watch the increasingly paranoid Doug freak out as he tries to avoid the hitman he assumes is still after him, unaware the latter has undergone his own character arc. It’s this aspect that really gives the film its comic flavour.

As a parenthetic note, it’s kind of interesting to see Fairbanks doing the sort of thing Harold Lloyd might well have done in the following decade, there’s a certain similarity of character, although obviously Lloyd was still pretty low-level at the time Fairbanks’ star was rising fast. These films certainly give a feeling of being “early”, too, though I don’t know if I’m just reading them from hindsight… obviously in 1916 no one knew where his career would go in the following decade, but from my perspective nearly a century later I suppose hindsight is inescapable. Knowing where he would go, I got a sense from these films of Fairbanks trying to work out what it was he should be doing. Still, like I said, that’s probably just hindsight talking. Going to enjoy the rest of this set, I think.

In this day and age, when almost everything seems to be on DVD within minutes of its theatrical release, it’s remarkable to think that a film could be considered lost “forever” within two years of its appearance. Such was the case with the second film about the sinking of the Titanic (the first one apparently is indeed lost forever): In Nacht und Eis was thought to have vanished some time in 1914 until it reappeared in 1998, boosted by the hype over young Mr Cameron’s retelling of the story (although I also read that the BFI had held a copy for decades without realising). Rather than encourage Cameron’s “retrofit all the films in 3D!” fetish by revisiting Titanic on the big screen, I chose to look at this instead. (It’s on YouTube if you want to do the same.) It’s a fairly compact melodrama (albeit a longish one for the time at 35 minutes) which seems to have learned a few lessons from Griffith while also manifesting some of the tableau vivant tendencies of early cinema (cf. the scenes where the first officer is sending radio messages for help and you see people running past the window of the telegraph room); while most of the interiors are evidently outdoor sets, as was usual at the time, I did rather like the way the camera rocks about to simulate motion on the sea, I don’t suppose that was a common trick in 1912. One thing the film does kind of lack is much in the way of human interest, there are no really defined characters (I don’t know if any of them are even named), but then again with only 35 minutes I suppose spectacle was deemed to be the main thing… then again, considering the “human interest” Cameron brought to his film, maybe this one is better off after all. Maybe it’s of historical interest now more than anything, but I quite liked this.

Much as I’ve liked these other Lubitsch films, this one gives me a greater feeling than any of them of Lubitsch just getting everything right. Characterised in the opening titles as a “grotesque comedy”, that seems like an odd description; regardless of whatever its creators may have thought it was, the film struck me as being one of the best silent comedies I’ve ever seen, and I only wish I’d been more firmly pointed in its direction much earlier. Ossi Oswalda stars again (alas, this is the last we’ll be seeing her in this collection) as the daughter of the oyster magnate Mr Quaker; daddy dearest agrees that she should marry a prince and gets a matchmaker to find her one. Unfortunately the best option is the impoverished Prince Nucki, who sends his valet Josef to check Ossi out… but when Ossi mistakes him for the prince, complications ensue. This is brilliant stuff, Lubitsch has a top story to tell and an excellent cast to tell it; Ossi shines, obviously, but she’s well matched by Harry Liedtke’s prince, Julius Falkenstein’s hapless Josef and Victor Janson’s lugubrious, not easily impressed Quaker. (Also interesting to see a young Curt Bois, nearly 70 years before his appearance in that Wenders film.) But Lubitsch himself, as the controller of all this, is the real star of proceedings, he just gives such a feeling of being on top of his game throughout, as witness, for example, the splendid “foxtrot epidemic” sequence at the wedding when everyone except the groom (who’s too busy enjoying a feed) goes dance-happy, and the way everything in the film generally seems right somehow. I think I read that this was Lubitsch’s biggest hit to that point in his career, which I can totally understand; certainly it’s one of the best films I’ve seen since I started keeping this blog…

From now on I’m trying to reserve my designated Silent Sunday posts for rewatches, so that I can use the other six days of the week to go through any unseen ones I may have (and currently that’s about 30 titles). Still, since we’ve been in Lubitschland for the last couple of posts, it seemed fair to go with this work of his for today; not part of the box set but a special feature on Criterion’s Trouble in Paradise (which I must also revisit). Here Lubitsch and screenwriter Hanns Kraly borrow the plot of Die Fledermaus and compress a three-act operetta into a three-reel silent not-quite-feature; Alex von Reizenstein finds himself in the slightly complicated position of facing a short stay in jail for behaving scandalously in public, as well as having to attend a grand ball being put on by a prince. Needless to say he much prefers the latter invitation, which he accepts while his wife Alice inadvertently finds someone to take his place in jail overnight before setting out to see just how scandalous her husband gets when he thinks she’s not looking. Fairly fluffy stuff (and, again, there’s the amusing idea that getting plastered only helps to unlock one’s repressed inner poof—cf. Emil Jannings as the pisshead jailer Quabbe), but consider the source material, it’s not exactly Jacobean tragedy, is it. Perfectly likeable, and the three-reel format seems to suit it well enough; after seeing the last couple of films, though, I did kind of miss Ossi Oswalda (IMDB incorrectly credits both her and Kitty Dewall with playing Alice); Agda Nielson is fine as the maid (who also goes to the party), but I couldn’t help but feel Ossi would’ve filled that part even better.

Or Lancelot and the Real Doll. The baron wants his fairly hopeless nephew to marry to keep the family bloodline going, but young Lancelot has a… problem with women. Fleeing his many prospective brides for the safety of an abbey, the greedy monks (impoverished and happy to relieve Lancelot of his substantial dowry) suggest an alternative to a real woman, i.e. a life-size doll. Conveniently, the doll-maker Dr Hilarius has just the thing, a doll “of solid character” modelled on his own daughter Ossi. But when the doll gets broken, the real Ossi has to fill in for her, and, funnily enough, complications ensue. If the above plot rundown weren’t enough of an indicator, we know from the get-go that there’s going to be bugger all naturalism in this film when Lubitsch himself appears as the “stage manager,” setting up a model set with obviously fake trees and the like before cutting to an equally if not more fake life-size version of the model. There are other examples of this sort of thing throughout the film, my favourite being the pantomime horses that draw Lancelot’s carriage (and get a line of dialogue near the end). Apart from the amusing artifice of the decor, and just like the last film, The Doll gets a lot of its charm from Ossi Oswalda, who seems pretty much exactly in tune with the material and hits the right notes all the way through as the real girl pretending to be a Real Girl, as it were. It is, perhaps, stretched very slightly thin over its running time (a bit over an hour) and might’ve fared better at the tighter three-reel duration of I Don’t Want to Be a Man, but it’s not exactly a painful experience at that, least of all while la Ossi’s on screen posing as her own mechanical clone…

I am accruing box sets (Doug Fairbanks, Lubitsch silents, John Ford silents, Ozu Eclipse box, Hammer films and a nice-looking Laurel & Hardy set I scored just the other day) as part of my general build-up of unwatched stuff, and I really need to start getting through the damn things. Consequently, tonight I decided to make a start on the Lubitsch box, starting logically with this, the earliest film in the set, one of several not-quite-feature-length films he turned out in his early days. By 1918 Lubitsch was an established director who tended to alternate between light comedy and more serious drama; this is him decidedly in the former mode. Ossi Oswalda plays the teenage tomboy left in the care of her uncle and her governess, who lament her less than ladylike ways and hire a new governor, Dr Kersten, to rein her in. Less than thrilled by this, Ossi sneaks out one night in male drag to see how the other half lives, but will manhood prove to be all she thinks it is? A bit fluffy but perfectly genial, the film gets a lot of its charm from the lively performance by Oswalda, who was herself only 18 at the time, and from the intriguing gender politics, if you want to call it that, especially when it comes to her unexpected escapade with the good doctor after the ball, the extremely drunk Kersten getting quite kissy and cuddly with what he still thinks is a young man… Other than that it’s not a film about which a great deal needs to be said; Lubitsch hasn’t quite refined the “touch” yet but it’s well done and the 45-minute runtime seems to suit the material well. You’d never guess there was a war going on when the film was made, nor that Germany would officially lose it just over a month after the film was released…

A Victor Sjostrom double bill today. Sjostrom’s been hailed as the Swedish D.W. Griffith, so it was interesting to watch these after yesterday’s Griffith shorts… particularly Ingeborg Holm, which Griffith might well have directed himself. This was just one of eight films Sjostrom made in 1913, which, even allowing for early feature films being shorter than they usually were later, is pretty impressive (Ingeborg weighs in at 73 minutes on this disc). It’s also so unremittingly bleak that, were it not for the happy ending, you might mistake it for a Russian film of the same vintage (cf. Bauer at the same time). Nice young family on the up and up, parents raising three kids and father’s starting a small business. Then he gets tuberculosis and dies. Then mother can’t keep things going, so the children are taken from her and she gets packed off to the poorhouse. Eventually she goes mad from grief. This really is almost completely unrelieved gloom, lightened only by a few moments of kindness shown to Ingeborg by the foster parents; it’s heavy going, not made any easier by being shot in the prevalent style of long takes and (mostly) immobile framing. Like I said, Griffith might’ve made this film—cf. what he eventually did in Intolerance—but in 1913 he would’ve made it a two-reeler, and it might’ve been more palatable in that form. I don’t know. Sjostrom seems to have made about half his total directorial output in just the period from 1912 to 1916; unfortunately, if the filmography I’ve read is right, only four of his films still exist from that period (this being one, obviously). As such, we can’t exactly trace his development over those years, but this one still gives a feeling of early work somehow. Which, after all, it was even though it was his eighth film…

Anyway, this review reckons Ingeborg’s main problem was that Sjostrom had to shoot the film mostly indoors. Terje Vigen suffers few comparable issues. I remain puzzled by the opening title saying the restoration was done from a print discovered in 2004 and the implication that the film was lost until then, because the latter detail is demonstrably untrue (the film is excerpted at length in Brownlow & Gill’s Cinema Europe from the mid-90s),but never mind. Whatever else Sjostrom had been getting up in those years where most of his output has vanished, his technique had obviously advanced markedly between Ingeborg and this film. Terje comes around a time of change in the Swedish film industry towards making fewer but more expensive films of higher quality, and I suppose we can see that in the contrast between the older film’s social realist tendency and this film’s status as an adaptation of a literary classic (Ibsen’s poem of the same name). Set (initially) during the English blockade of Norway during the Napoleonic wars, Terje (played by Sjostrom himself) attempts to break the blockade by rowing to Denmark to retrieve food for his starving family but is caught in the attempt; years later, he must save the life of the man who imprisoned him when the latter is in trouble. While Sjostorm doesn’t entirely avoid the sentimentality of the conclusion, he still manages it better than he did four years earlier; apart from having more of the outdoor footage Swedish silent cinema would be famed for, he’s also got a more compelling narrative to work with too. The end result is a significant advance on Ingeborg Holm; I respect the latter for its historical importance (effecting changes in Swedish law about the treatment of the poor), but I actually like Terje Vigen.