Reelin' In The Years -- Eleven P.M. (1928), directed by Richard Maurice

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Hear the Dogs", by Dog Faced Hermans

       As it is with far too many things, the contributions of Black people in the field of cinema is often downplayed or outright ignored in the United States. Take today’s stop on the Reelin’ In The Years tour as an example: For much of my life, I thought that Black cinema had sprung forth from the 1960s on the heels of the cultural zeitgeist, and that the majority of the roles afforded to actual Black men and women (not the jackasses with shoe polish on their face) were relegated to bit parts as servants or what have you. Then recently I came to find out that films with Black leads, even a predominantly Black cast, go as far back as the silent era! The world is lucky to have as many films intact as we do from that era, so the fact that we’ve managed to swell the ranks with films that by their very nature are historically and culturally significant is certainly a treat for a lover of cinema. Which is exactly what I claim to be, and so 1928 is going to be dedicated to one such film. Sorry Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, maybe next time.

       Possibly released in 1928, although it could have been as late as 1930, Eleven P.M. is the last known, and as far as I can tell the only surviving, film by Cuban-born writer/director Richard Maurice. The film begins with Louie Perry, a young writer & athlete who’s attempts to finish writing a (bizarre) story for a church newspaper are constantly interrupted by the various people in his life, which will all come to a head at eleven p.m. Tired out, he decides to take a nap, at which point the film jumps to a completely different story. About a poor violinist named Sundaisy, a girl named June and a young boy named Clyde Stewart, and the web of lies and deception which forms in the wake of their meeting. A meeting which might just have the tinge of the supernatural to it.  

       Eleven P.M. is definitely an interesting movie. Historians and film buffs will mention things like shooting on location and filming at unusual angles to classify it as an experimental film, but I don’t think I noticed because of all the weird shit that kept going on. I mean the film starts with a guy who is writing a story about how people can reincarnate as animals through force of will for a church newspaper of all things, and then he takes a nap and disappears for a bulk of the movie’s runtime. Then you’ve got the whole Sundaisy story, which you would think would play out like your typical Christian morality tale, except the religious leaders in the film are either gullible or outright criminals and it’s got more in common with old folk tales than anything else. Not to mention the numerous time skips, spread out over 24 years, that sees children age into exact copies of their parents. All of which takes place in little over an hour. It’s the criticism equivalent of wind sprints.

       Beyond that weirdness, it’s intriguing to me how race was such a non factor in what would have likely been labeled a ‘race film’ by the U.S. Aside from a one-off reference to Sundaisy being a ‘half-breed’, which even for the time sounds a bit harsh, it doesn’t come up. Black and white people marrying each other, working for each other, just hanging out, and it’s just fine. Which should be no big deal, but I think there’s been this prevailing attitude in modern times of the 20th century being this static homogeneous blob of bigotry until the late 60s when folks like Martin Luther King Jr. appeared out the aether, when in reality it was an ongoing process. That’s not to minimize the fact that racism was and still is a problem in the United States, and it’s not like this movie has Sundaisy kicking the shit out of Klan members or anything, but there’s something comforting about seeing a film from 1928 that says ‘yeah, it’s not that big a deal’. Puts things in perspective a bit, I dunno. It also makes sense that after his relatively short time in the movie business Richard Maurice would go on to do great work in labor organizing, helping to found the Dining Car and Railroad Workers Union. Practicing what he preached, in a manner of speaking.

       I’d also be remiss if I didn’t give props to Rob Gal, who composed the score for this edition of Eleven P.M. When it comes to silent films I think we collectively expect certain sounds that go with that, so when that expectation is subverted it gives the film a bit of an alien atmosphere. So it was with Haxan, with its free jazz and William S. Burroughs narration, and so it is here, where Rob Gal’s combination of sparse blues and dirty R&B brings to mind Tom Waits rather than Fritz Lang. I think Eleven P.M. would be plenty weird regardless, but the addition of Rob Gal’s music pushes it to another level. Easily my favorite score of the films we’ve covered so far.

        The only real problem I can come up with is that Eleven P.M. is just a weird fairy tale, and like fairy tales doesn’t have much in the way of strongly written characters or dramatic arcs. Yet I can’t say I was ever bored, and it moves along so quickly you don’t have the time to anyway. It gets the recommendation; an experimental silent film that’s also a pioneer of Black cinema sounds too awesome not to watch at least once, so you better watch it 4 or 5 times to be safe. But don’t take too long, because our next stop on this Reelin’ In The Years tour is only a year away...     

Reelin' In The Years -- Tartuffe (1926), directed by F. W. Murnau

A Trailer (not THE Trailer)

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The Appropriate Tune: "Hypocrite", by Cage the Elephant

So far the Reelin’ In The Years tour has provided me the perfect opportunity to finally cross some things off of the old cinematic to-do list. I finally covered another Fritz Lang filmm I got to see what the big deal was with Buster Keaton, and now I finally cover the works of Freidrich Wilhelm Murnau. In the days of early cinema there are few directors who are as well-regarded on a critical level as F. W. Murnau, which is certainly saying something considering just about the only surviving films left from that time are from the best of the best, and yet for a long time he existed (much like Buster Keaton) as some vague name that I heard sometimes in passing. In fact, when I first watched Nosferatu years ago, I don’t even know if the fact Murnau directed it even crossed my mind. Not a huge deal, especially for the more casual movie fan as I was at the time, but when the idea of covering all the gaps in the timeline came to me, it only seemed right to finally get him in here. He has a film archive named after him, but I’m pretty sure this is a greater honor.

Released in 1926, Tartuffe or Herr Tartüff, was one of the last films made by Murnau in his native Germany before moving to the United States to work for Fox, the future home of his critically-acclaimed masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Written by Carl Mayer, based on the play by the French satirist Moliere, it tells the story of a house worker (Rosa Valetti) engaged in that timeless get-rich-quick scheme: slowly poisoning the old codger (Hermann Picha) you’re working for while manipulating him into signing over his fortune to you. When the grandson of the old gentleman discovers that his grandfather has been set against him, even being barred from the house, he decides to use his acting training to adopt the persona of a traveling cinema presenter, which is apparently a thing that existed at the time. The film? Tartuffe, the story of a man named Orgon taken in by a saint named Tartuffe, who isn’t as saintly as he appears to be, and his wife Elmire (a returning Lil Dagover), who’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect her husband. How apropos to the current situation that the people watching the film find themselves in.

  There’s something of a tragic irony in a German film that warns against blindly trusting people, especially those in positions of authority, because they might not have your best interests at heart, especially the church in Tartuffe’s case. The metanarrative of watching a film that’s largely about people watching a film is kinda fun, and we even have a moment where the 4th wall is broken and a character addresses the audience. I’ve never seen a silent film do that before, so points to Murnau for that.

Tartuffe is also a neat little showcase for Murnau as a visual storyteller. There’s a real visceral quality here; you see that clanging bell and you can feel it your bones just as the murderous housekeeper did. You see Tartuffe slowly marching around Orgon’s manor, clad all in black, his face contorted in a mask of judgment and disapproval, leering at Elmire’s body, and you can feel the bile rise in your throat. There’s a certain presence to the characters here, this exaggeration that feels right in line with Nosferatu’s emaciated vampire, and yet at the same has none of the trappings of the German Expressionist style that film was made under. Honestly my major criticism with the movie is that Murnau does too well at conveying the context of the scenes visually that the dialogue cards sometimes feel excessive and disruptive to the flow of the scenes. Which I can’t tell is a pro or a con for Murnau, considering he’s adapting a play here, and you’d think the dialogue would be pretty important.

Nothing to say about the choice of score this time around, it does its job. The picture might be a bit fuzzier compared to what we’ve seen before as well, which is either due to the realities of film preservation or perhaps this was an earlier release by Kino Lorber before they really started digging into those high-quality restorations. Anyway, Tartuffe gets the recommendation. I feel like I’m giving Murnau a bit of a short thrift here, but it almost feels like trying to review a fable or a fairy tale. Like it works, it captures the spirit of Moliere’s satire in an elegantly simple way, and then it leaves without a fuss. As a proper introduction to the works of Murnau Tartuffe has gotten me very interested in exploring the rest of his filmography, those that have been recovered at least, and I think after watching it you’ll feel the same. 

Reelin' In The Years -- The Lost World (1925), directed by Harry O. Hoyt

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Dinosaurs Will Die", by NOFX

       While Arthur Conan Doyle’s life will forever be connected to his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, whether he wanted it to or not, the man did in fact write other things. One other thing, at least for the purposes of this review, 1912’s “The Lost World”. Aside from being the basis for the second Jurassic Park movie and kind of getting its plot ripped of for King Kong, “The Lost World” was a prime example of a subgenre of fiction that conveniently enough could also be labeled as ‘lost world’ stories, where the protagonists stumble upon some hidden section of the world that contains some secret heretofore unknown to Western civilization. Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”, “King Solomon’s Mines”, and so on and on. Following the rise of science fiction lost world stories have steadily been replaced with alien worlds and other dimensions, except those made intentionally with the aesthetic in mind, but seeing as most of the planet has been scouted out at this point I suppose it was inevitable. Plus the whole ‘plundering other people’s culture for your personal glory and enrichment’ thing has long since been played out at this point.

       Thirteen years later, “The Lost World” would get the motion picture treatment, directed by Harry O. Hoyt and a screenplay by Marian Fairfax. After an introduction by Mr. Doyle himself, who would actually pass away 5 years after this, we get into the movie proper: Ed Malone is a young reporter who doesn’t take many risks in life. So much so, apparently, that his girlfriend refuses to marry him unless he puts himself into some kind of life-or-death situation, because that’s what a healthy relationship looks like. Desperate for some danger, Ed ends up attending a presentation by Professor Challenger, who claims to have discovered a place deep within the jungles of South America where dinosaurs still live. Challenger is unsurprisingly treated as an object of ridicule by the scientific community, but when he mentions that he’s looking for volunteers to mount a second expedition in order to prove his claims, Ed finally finds that life affirming experience that he’s been searching for (for about 2 hours). It doesn’t go too well at first, it turns out Challenger likes to attack reporters on sight, but soon Ed, Challenger, Professor Summerlee the bookish coleopterist, big game hunter John Roxton, and Paula White, daughter of Maple White who died on the first trip, are off to South America in search of this mysterious ‘lost world’. I wonder if they’ll find it?

       As it was with the other films we’ve covered so far, it’s surprising to see just how much they were able to accomplish so early in the medium’s lifespan. With the combination of  good set design, matte paintings, extensive miniatures and forced perspective shots, the jungles of South America and the streets of London both have a vibrancy to them, in spite of their age. Nowhere is that more apparent than the dinosaurs, all of which are animated in stop-motion. Given you rarely see stop-motion animation because it’s so ridiculously time consuming even with modern technology, that The Lost World has the amount of dinosaurs it has, the variety of dinosaurs it has, doing all the things they do is pretty crazy. The animation is fairly smooth as well, not too far removed from what you’d see in King Kong less than a decade later.

       The Lost World is also a lot more light-hearted than you’d expect from a movie involving dinosaurs dying in horrible ways. It’s been at least a decade or so since I’ve read the original story, and while the Sherlock Holmes stories certainly weren’t devoid of humor, I didn’t expect the movie to have such a goofy bend to it. The opening is not that far removed from what you’d expect from the Buster Keaton film we covered last time, with gags peppered throughout, occasionally breaching into downright madcap territory. It doesn’t help matters that the score, composed by the returning Robert Israel, is quite good while at the same time being perpetually whimsical. Listening to this music while looking a Professor ‘I Look Like Brian Blessed’s Dad’ Challenger makes it a little hard to take things seriously.

       Which leads into one of the two biggest problems with The Lost World: The  dramatic tension, or lack thereof. Perhaps it’s my modern sensibilities here, but this is a film that feels like it has no stakes, nothing that really gets the blood boiling when you’re watching. They set up a love triangle that you think it going to lead to something big, and then it’s resolved amicably. You’ve got the characters stuck on a plateau with a bunch of dinosaurs, which they never interact with (wouldn’t be until Kong that you’d get interactive puppetry). In spite of the extremely stressful situations the cast finds themselves in it’s rare to find moments where it feels like they’re really in danger, and in several of those cases the situation is resolved almost immediately. It’s not that I’m expecting people to get picked off like it’s Kong: Skull Island, but when you’re dealing with animals the size of apartment buildings you’d expect a bit more carnage. Hell, The Invisible Man had a higher body count by the end of his movie, and that was one naked dude running around in the winter.

       The second biggest problem has to deal with a topic that was bound to show up covering old movies:Racist imagery. In the case of Destiny, while there were cases of Chinese and Arab people played by folks who clearly weren’t, it seems like those cultures were used more because of how different it probably seemed to Germans audiences at the time rather than to denigrate or mock those cultures (although I’m not Chinese, Arabian or North African, so that’s not my call to make). With Our Hospitality you have a Black man working for the Canfields, and since that movie takes place in the 1830s you know he’s not getting a 401K, but he’s only in a couple of scenes and doesn’t really do much. In The Lost World however, you get treated to ‘Zambo’, who suddenly appears when the movie shifts to South America and is unmistakably some dumpy fuck in blackface, and who sports a broken arm the entire time he’s on screen, which is either from a lost scene or I had a stroke at some point and forgot when that happened. If that’s all it was you could probably ignore it and move on, but then they decided to give Zambo some lines, so you get to experience this one man minstrel show in big ol’ letters on the screen. Overall it’s not a lengthy part of the movie, it’s not integral to the plot, but as soon as that shit started to happen all that atmosphere or suspension of disbelief or what have you that had been built up to that point instantly dissipated, and it never fully recovered. Mind you, this happens while there’s still about an hour or so of movie to go, so that’s a long fucking time to be half-way paying attention to a movie with no sound.

       1925 is here, and The Lost World leaves with no recommendations. While the stop-motion animation and the art design are a treat, the fact that you have to sit through blackface and that the movie is 144 minutes of lukewarm oatmeal that builds to an okay finish. I’ve mentioned King Kong multiple times now, but honestly that is essentially this movie done larger and better. Or if you wanted something a bit different you could try The Valley of Gwangi, wherein a bunch of cowboys fight a T-Rex. It was even made by Ray Harryhausen, so either way you’re getting a taste of that sweet, sweet stop-motion action. And the Reelin’ In The Years tour rolls on...