Reelin' In The Years -- It Happened One Night (1934), directed by Frank Capra

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Let It Happen", by Tame Impala

       The word ‘Oscar’ doesn’t get bandied about all that often round these parts. My personal interest, and the focus of this blog, has always been that of the genre film, and the Academy Awards rarely deigns to look in that direction, unless it’s to offload a couple of special effects trophies. Yet this is our Reelin’ In the Years tour, a showcase of a century of film, and it just wouldn’t feel right if I just continuously scrounge around for the more obscure movies just to maintain some kind of street cred. So if I’m going to take a trip into the heart of Oscar territory, I might as well swing for the fences with one of the only films in the history of the Academy Awards to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay in one sitting (the other two being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs). Get them all out of the way now, you know?

       That film is It Happened One Night, based on the story by Samuel Hopkins Adams, written by Robert Riskin, and directed by Frank Capra. Claudette Colbert stars as Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who has been locking horns with her father over her decision to marry handsome and totally on the level King Wesley against her father’s wishes. When Pops declares that he is going to force Ellie into an annulment, she literally jumps ship and swims to Miami, with the intent to take a bus up to New York and meet up with Wesley. Which sounds like a good idea, until you remember that she’s an heiress and thus totally incompetent. Enter down-on-his-luck journalist Peter Warne (Clark Gable) who, sensing the story that’ll get him back in the good graces of his editor, decides to help her out along. But who could have guessed that during this long trip to the Big Apple that certain feelings would begin to develop?

       Certainly not the movie industry, as they were so impressed with the ‘person of privilege is left on their own and must rely on a worldly lower-class person, which of course leads to romance’ angle that we’ve seen recycled numerous times over the years. Not only that, but Clark Gable’s character would go on to be a huge influence on the characterization of Bugs Bunny, in particular his eating of carrots. Hell, that old gag where someone tries to hitch-hike and it fails until you show off a little leg? That’s from this film as well. This is really the movie equivalent of a primary source in history class, so much of films would be all have a common origin from this film here, and much like in the case of Frankenstein this film gets a recommendation purely from a historical perspective.

       Man alive, but this movie felt like a slog to watch though. The thing about romantic comedies to me, especially ones that are based on unequal levels of power as this film is, is that they have to reach an equilibrium. The loner appreciates the value of friends, the asshole learns to be more compassionate, and so on. None of which happens here. Ellie starts off as a dim bulb heiress and stays that way throughout the entirety of the film, and it’s the same with Peter as this abrasive, verbally aggressive guy. While there are certainly segments that build up the relationship, and in those segments I’d say Colbert and Gable do have a certain chemistry, it never felt to me like these characters had really changed over the course of the story. Beyond the fact that they wanted to fuck each other rather than someone else.

       Speaking of romance, it might just be my modern sensibilities talking, but the romance in It Happened One Night comes across as really...creepy? Like there’s several moments throughout the movie where it feels like they're infantilizing Ellie, and when it’s coupled with romantic tension it doesn’t sit right. Plus there’s the fact that most of Peter’s dialogue towards her is dedicated to insults and demoralizing statements, in a joking manner or otherwise. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if, and that’s a definitive if, Ellie gave it as good as she got, thus establishing the relationship to be on even footing. Which it doesn’t, and so comes across as less of a romantic comedy and more of some kind of BDSM jailbait roleplay scenario. Or a classic example of ‘negging’, as the kids call it.

       It doesn’t do the actors all that well either. Clark Gable comes out pretty well, it’s pretty easy to see why he was one of the big names of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’, but Claudette Colbert...this film really doesn’t do her any favors in my opinion. Much as I described earlier she’s not especially shrewish at the beginning of the movie but she’s not especially down-to-earth by the end of the film either. She doesn’t sacrifice anything, she doesn’t suffer so she doesn’t grow as a character, maintaining this aura of vapidity through the entire course of the film. Which I admit is more an issue with the character of Ellie than Colbert as an actor, and Claudette Colbert had a storied career, but every time she was on screen I could feel myself getting more and more annoyed.

       As I said, as it regards film history It Happened One Night has a recommendation, but personally I just can’t give it the thumbs up. It’s one of those movies where I zoned out hard about a third of the way though and it never pulled me back in. Maybe if you’re in a relationship you’ll get something out of it, but I feel like if you can relate to a relationship where one partner is verbally abusive and the other is co-dependent then you might have bigger problems then what movie you're going to watch. Hopefully the next stop on our tour will be a bit more up-to-date.

Reelin' In The Years -- Frankenstein (1931), directed by James Whale

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Right On, Frankenstein!", by Death From Above 1979

       Years ago, when in a fit of youthful arrogance I decided to give this whole ‘movie review’ thing a try, the film I decided to choose to kickstart the whole affair was James Whale’s film Bride of Frankenstein, released by Universal Pictures in the year 1935. Proper logic, or at least good etiquette, might have suggested that I start with the original film in the series first. If Star Wars has taught us anything, it was that starting the middle of a story and then going backwards doesn’t work out too well after all. I had seen Young Frankenstein though, I had read Mary Shelley’s novel and I had good ol’ cultural osmosis, so I figured that was good enough and went through with it. And the rest is history, really bad history.

       Years later, when I decided to revisit old movies and old monsters, my mind naturally turned to Frankenstein. Rather than covering the original though I went with another sequel, the under-appreciated Son of Frankenstein. I believe my thinking at the time was that because I had already seen Frankenstein outside of the review process, which I believe I had at some point, then it was no longer a first impression and thus less legitimate of a review. Whether that’s the right mindset is also something I’ve considered, but when I compiling the missing years for the Reelin’ in the Years tour and discovered 1931 was one of those years, it seemed like fate was telling me it was finally time to close the book on this case. Taking a look back 1931 wasn’t a bad time for the cinema; Not only did you have Dracula, but Fritz Lang’s landmark crime thriller M, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Robert Mamoulian’s City Streets, and on and on. Yet of all the films it could have been, it could only truly be Frankenstein.

        Released on November 21, 1931, Frankenstein was directed by Thunderblog alum James Whale, who would later work with Universal on Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Old Dark House. The screenplay was done by Francis Edward Farough and Garrett Fort, while the story was by John L. Balderston and Richard Schayer, obviously based on the novel by Mary Shelley as well as the stage play by Peggy Webling. I think by this point the plot goes without saying, but in case you’re going in blind, here it is: Dr. Frankenstein, a frustrated young genius in the field of medical science, decides the only way to prove his radical theories is to steal a bunch of body parts and organs, stitch ‘em all together and zap the whole thing till it comes to life. Which he does, and it works, only the brain he used was part the expiration date and the Monster ends up going nuts. Thus Frankenstein is moved to destroy his creation, questions are raised about mankind’s hubris, and it is finally determined that fire bad. Also if you live by a lake you should make sure your kids know how to swim.

       I don’t know if any adaptation of a work has proven so influential over a premise as Universal’s Frankenstein has been to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The whole idea of the Monster being created by stitching body parts together and zapping it to life with lightning comes from this film (although it’s technically not lightning that does it), as well as Karloff’s now iconic flat-top,bolt-necked appearance. There’s a few things that never really carried over; Frankenstein’s name being Henry rather than Victor (although there’s a character named Victor here just to make things confusing) for example, and ‘Henry’s’ hunch-backed assistant named Fritz would be largely be replaced by his hunch-backed assistant named Igor, but for the most part this film has informed 99% of everything Frankenstein going forward. Even films that try to look more period-appropriate or stick more closely take some measure of influence from this film, especially in regards to the creation of the Monster. So strictly from a historical perspective Universal’s Frankenstein has more than earned a recommendation, although that doesn’t necessarily say much about it as a movie beyond being the first past the post (aside from the one movie Edison did back in 1910). 

       As a movie then, Frankenstein feels a bit off. Rather than starting with ‘Henry’ Frankenstein’s origins and the building up to the act, we start in media res, with the Monster being brought to life almost immediately. Then immediately after that we jump into the Monster going crazy and all that, with characters and relationships just kind of happen. I assume that this is largely a result of the film being an adaptation of the stage play rather than the novel, but apparently this was in the days when adapting the theatre to the theater was still in its infancy. Lots of tell and not enough show, if you catch my drift.

       Of course Frankenstein is the role that introduced the world to Boris Karloff, in spite of the fact that his career started back in 1918, and seeing him here it’s easy why and how this version of the Monster became THE version of the Monster. Karloff would portray the Monster several times after this, but he’s never looked as good as he does here. The sunken cheeks, the lifeless eyes set in dark sockets, the way he stumbles and stomps about like his legs barely work, I don’t think even Night of the Living Dead captured the premise of a living corpse. He captures your eyes as soon as he gets on screen, and it’s surprising that such an iconic character doesn’t actually get all that much to do. Of course you’ve got the infamous scene with the girl at the lake, and a little bit of stuff when he’s introduced, but it’s not until Bride of Frankenstein that the Monster as a sympathetic character was fully established. For now he’s just a grunting weirdo in big shoes.

       We move on to Colin Clive then, whose inclusion in this film is also rather bittersweet in hindsight. Colin Clive’s portrayal of the titular Frankenstein is almost as iconic as that of Karloff’s, exuding an air of supreme arrogance and barely restrained mania, and his frantic shout of ‘It’s alive!” is easily one of the most famous lines in cinema. However, that Frankenstein only exists in the first third of the movie, the rest of the time he’s just Henry, the dude who’s just there. Even near the end of the film, the point which you’d think would be ‘Frankenstein is finally driven to destroy his creation’, and the film claims it as such, Frankenstein feels like an ancillary character through the whole thing. His entire climatic final showdown with the Monster amounts to him getting beat up and thrown off a balcony, and I’m not counting that as a spoiler because I covered the sequel almost a decade ago. At the very least you could say that they build the romance subplot between Henry and Elizabeth (played by Mae Clarke) better than we would see in The Invisible Man a few years later, even hinting at a love triangle with Victor. The very least is about the only way you could describe it too; Mae Clarke isn’t very good, she and Clive have zero chemistry, Victor is a plank of wood with a mustache drawn on it, and any hint of that triangle is dropped like a bag of rocks almost immediately. Frankenhooker was a more intriguing love story than Frankenstein.

       Let’s see, what else is Frankenstein remembered for...the German Expressionist inspired art design? Great, love the shot of Fritz walking down the dark and winding staircase, but again that only appears near the beginning and a bit towards the end. The laboratory? Same thing, and honestly done better by Mel Brooks in Young Frankenstein. The aforementioned infamous scene with the girl at the lake. Not in the beginning of the movie, but a scathing critique of mob violence if you felt like getting analytical. It’s kind of bizarre to think that so much of what makes this a defining film of the horror genre takes place before the first half hour. Like this is just as much about a wedding as it is about subverting the laws of nature.

       So I guess if you were really pressed for time, you could watch a clip or two and get the gist of it. In spite of my criticisms though, for its time Frankenstein is a fine film, and because of my history with the story and the history the film embodies it gets the recommendation. Of Universal’s Horror line it’s one of the better movies I’ve covered so far, if I were a grading kind of guy I’d probably place it below The Invisible Man but above The Mummy, and since it sets you up for Bride of Frankenstein (currently the best UH movie that I’ve covered) it’s a great deal. And once you’re done watching you can hop back on the Reelin’ In The Years tour bus, as we head for our next stop. It'll be a big step out of our comfort zone, but it’s a pretty big film too. 

Reelin' In The Years -- The Big House (1930), directed by George W. Hill

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Lockdown Blues", by Iceage

       If there’s one thing that the United States of America loves more than endless warfare, it’s prisons. In the late 1800s, after the Civil War had thrown the entire concept of owning people as property into question, although not many of those questions involved the horrific nature of slavery, the bigwigs of the time stumbled upon what they considered an ingenious compromise. Slavery would thereafter be illegal, they declared in the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, except as punishment for a crime. Suddenly chattel slavery wasn’t just a luxury a some plantation owners in the South could enjoy, now every state could have their own little concrete box of people to play with, in as many counties as they could fit them. Nor was this centered solely around New Afrikan people (although they still make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population, because the U.S. is anything but subtle); No matter what your color or creed, if you were a member of the poor and undesirable segment of society then you too had a place in this brave new world of incarceration, and we’re still living it today. If you’re from another country and you’re wondering what it’s like living in the United States, picture a place that persistently demonizes countries like China, the Soviet Union or the DPRK for their supposedly hellish prison systems, yet at the same time makes self-aware jokes and even feature-length films about the fact that its own prisons are hotbeds of torture, rape, drug abuse and gang violence, and resists any and all attempts at addressing those problems, and then multiple it by 5. Also the healthcare sucks.

Today’s stop on our tour brings us to the year 1930, and unfortunately also marks the end of our exploration of silent film for the time being. We’ve broken the sound barrier baby. Of the potential films I could have covered from this year, the biggest name on the card was All Quiet on the Western Front, and indeed for a long time all signs were pointing towards that being the movie I watched. Given what has been going on these days with COVID-19 and everything surrounding it however, I figured that folks might relate to a story about being stuck somewhere for what feels like an eternity. Never let it be said that I can’t be timely and relevant when needed.

       Released in 1930, written by Frances Marion (with additional dialogue by Joe Farnham and Martin Flavin), The Big House was directed by George Hill, not to be confused The Warriors and Slaughterhouse Five director George Roy Hill. After accidentally killing someone while drunk-driving on New Year’s Eve, Kent Marlowe is sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. Once he’s arrived, processed, and transformed from Kent into #48642, he meets his cell-mates, mercurial former hitman “Machine Gun” Butch (Wallace Beery) and charismatic former robber Morgan (Chester Morris), and is introduced to prison life: Harsh discipline, terrible food, no room to breathe, angry neighbors,the works. It’s the kind of environment that brings out a man’s nature, and so it does for Kent. The consequences of such a change, however, might be more far reaching than Kent, his sister Anne, Morgan, Butch, or anyone in prison could have expected.

       The Big House is a film caught between worlds. We were still a ways away from the for-profit, supermax model as it’s known today, so they’re still trying to frame prison as if it's about rehabilitation. Everyone in prison is in there because they deserve it, the Warden is an upstanding gentleman who cares about the prisoners, and all you have to do is put your nose to the grindstone and you’ll be released, free to go off to some faraway island and work a plantation, which has to be one of the most ironic story beats ever recorded to film. Yet at the same time the film is trying to praise the virtues of prison, it exposes the reality of prison as well. Prison guards aren’t just humble folk trying their best to help in The Big House, they are blatantly antagonistic figures who will engage in acts of torture (and just try to tell me locking a man up in a metal box for a month with nothing but bread and water isn’t a blatant act of torture) on little more than the rumours they get from their snitches and stoolpigeons. Likewise prisoners aren’t some inhuman damnable creatures, they are human beings with all the quirks and foibles that come with it, and as human beings ourselves we naturally sympathize with them as they are dehumanized. Which isn’t necessarily by design; As I said The Big House still works under the assumption that people in jail must deserve to be in there, and this is mainly done through conversational asides by Butch of acts of horrific violence. However, since the audience is only told those things and not shown them, because of the way the information is given to the audience, and because the audience is shown the injustices put upon them by the prison, it comes across as a bit of hyperbolic dark comedy more than anything else. It all builds up an atmosphere where you start to question, even just a little, whether they were being sincere or satirical, which I think actually gives it a greater appeal to a modern audience.

       Case in point, my description of the plot would lead you to believe that Kent would be the protagonist of the film. A victim of circumstance as they say, now thrust into this den of lions and forced to survive and in the end proving that he was a good person after all and didn’t deserve to be in that dirty old jail. In actuality though Kent almost immediately takes a backseat, basically becoming a walking plot device in favor of Morgan and Butch, which is for the best because they are far and away the most entertaining and the most (pretty much only) developed characters in the film. George Hill worked with Wallace Beery on several pictures aside from The Big House, and it’s easy to see why; He’s got this rough & tumble, bulldog quality about him that comes across as lovable or scary depending on the mood he’s in, which pairs quite naturally with Chester Morris, who has the good looks and easy charm of your textbook snake oil salesman. Put them together on screen and they’ve got great chemistry, and the arc of their relationship is the backbone of this film. There’s a tiny crumb of romance in there, or ‘friendship’ as they called in those days, but the only characters I was ever invested in, the only characters you’re really able to invest in, are Morgan and Butch.

       Couple more things I feel worth mentioning, the first being the opening shot, with the truck pulling up to the prison, which is this Brutalist concrete behemoth. Very effective, and adding to a point made earlier, slightly surreal. I also liked the look of the scene where Morgan is sent to solitary, there’s some playing around with shadows that looked nice. In many ways this movie is bare bones, a lot of the characters don’t even have last names, but it’s cool to see George Hill and crew put some work into it.

       The highlight of the film though is appropriately enough in the climax, as the prisoners stage a riot and engage in a shootout with the guards. By the year 1930 the U.S. was over a decade removed from World War I and was about a decade away from World War II, not to mention barely into the sound era, and yet filmmakers had already figured out how to translate the tension and claustrophobic terror of warfare to the silver screen. Much like the ending of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, there’s visceral feelings there, a catharsis as the prisoners finally stand up for themselves and a growing sense of desperation as their ultimate fate draws near. Unfortunately a lot of the emotional resonance is undercut by the ending, which felt equivalent to your dad buying you an ice cream after you watched him beat your mom. I don’t think it’s enough to write off the movie entirely, but given what came before it does leave a sour taste in one’s mouth.

       The Big House gets the recommendation. It’s a bit bare bones to be sure, but Butch and Morgan’s story was enough to keep me engaged the whole way through, and as I mentioned there’s a degree of schadenfreude to be had in seeing a movie struggling against its own message in such a way. Check it out if you’ve got the time, and at the moment you’ve probably got nothing but time. Next stop on our Reelin’ In The Years tour we’re going ahead about 365 days, to the not-that-much-better year of 1931. While the card is always subject to change, odds are I’ll be writing about a film that I probably should have covered years ago.  

Reelin' In The Years -- Man With A Movie Camera (1929), directed by Dziga Vertov

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "The Eye of Truth", by Driver

       If you take the words of the United States government at face value, the Soviet Union was a miserable place. A hellish wasteland, that was also a rigid police state, where people lived drab, colorless lives and things like creativity and joy were alien concepts. These statements are naturally quite ironic coming from a country with the largest imprisoned population on the planet, the same one where cops shoot children with repercussions and diabetic people regularly die because they can’t afford insulin, but beyond the blatant hypocrisy the simple fact is that the people of the Soviet Union were incredibly joyful and creative to boot. They had satirical magazines, cartoons and of course cinema. The Soviet people were quick to adopt this fledgling medium, realizing as much as everyone else the practical and creative possibilities such a technology afforded them,and indeed some of the earliest and best innovators in the world of film came from the U.S.S.R. Guess when your movie’s entire existence isn’t tied to the whims of money-hungry studio executives you’ve got room to do something different, huh? Anyway, today on our Reelin’ In the Years tour we’ve stopped in 1929; Probably not the best year of your life if you liked to play the stocks, but at least you had movies. Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, and of course the movie in the title. I think we’ll talk about that one.

Released in 1929 and directed by Dziga Vertov, Man With A Movie Camera (the word ‘The’ seems to be optional) is something of an experimental documentary. We follow our cameraman as he travels about the city doing what a camerman does, which is film. We start in the morning and gradually move across the day, and as we do so we watch people do the things that people do. We see them at work, we see them play, we see them being born and when they die, from huge bustling crowds to solitary souls. Sometimes we see our cameraman on a trolley, other times in a speeding car, even teetering high above the city on a bridge or some scaffolding. It’s the full breadth of the human experience here, on display for the world to see. Hell, we even get some scenes in a movie theater where we watch people watching the footage we were watching, in case you wanted to make a shitty Inception joke.

       Shitty Inception jokes aside, those scenes serve to highlight the crux of what I believe the film is about, and something I believe Vertov addressed in some of his other movies: The heightened reality, or perhaps non-reality, of film. We see glimpses of these people’s lives, occasionally very candid ones at that, and yet we aren’t seeing it through a human eye, but rather a camera eye. Indeed, much of the film is spent by Vertov showing us the world in ways that we as people could not; Freeze frames, slow motion, stop-motion, fade-ins, forced perspectives, montage, revealing the film strip itself and taking us into the editing room to see it cut, and so on. We take things like that for granted in movies nowadays, but there’s this energy with which Man With A Movie Camera leaps into these new techniques that makes you look at movies in a new light. It’s not just watching a novel or a play being adapted for the screen, as was the case for many films at this time, it’s showing the audience the foundation of a new visual language coming into being. Which, given Vertov’s work here, his peer Sergei Eisenstein’s development of montage theory (yes, that thing you so closely associated with 1980s American movies came from the U.S.S.R.) and filmmakers like him, was clearly their intention. I think it also exudes a feeling of… I guess I’d call it ‘modernity’, which I believe tends to be the major barrier of entry for casual moviegoers.

       Regarding the music, as far as I’ve there are two different scores depending on the version you’re watching: The Kino Lorber version features Michael Nyman, and the other by the musical ensemble Alloy Orchestra. I ended up with Kino Lorber, and I think Nyman’s bracing, exuberant orchestral score really amps up Man With A Movie Camera’s natural energy to a great degree. There are several instances where it felt like the score was incongruent with the context of the film, big boisterous crescendos where nothing active is happening or becoming almost menacing when it’s just people laughing at a park or what have you, but otherwise I thought it was perfectly serviceable. Given how important music has been to the enjoyment of these films however, you might want to check out the Alloy Orchestra version as well, get a feel for it. 

       Of course the crux of your enjoyment with this film comes down to your appreciation with this experimentation. There’s no real story to speak of beyond ‘life in this city’, no characters beyond the people being filmed, no dialogue, it’s a purely visual experience. Experimental movies aren’t everyone’ s cup of tea, and if what I’ve described to you in a woefully inadequate fashion didn’t light the spark of interest then there’s likely nothing here for you.. I on the other hand found myself engrossed with Man With A Movie Camera, this pioneer of cinematography and 20th century time capsule all in one, and so I can’t help but recommend it. If you’re a burgeoning cinephile or student of history, then I think you should make room in your queue for this one when you can. It’ll be worth it.

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

The Trailer

and

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)

and

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

and

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...