1920s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists project Vol. 3)

[myrnaloyisdope]

I always interpret the ending to The Crowd as somewhat bleak or at the very least tenouous and uncertain. I mean sure the family is reunited and having a great time at the show, but John Sims now has a job as a sign board wearing clown is still as thoroughly mediocre as he was before.

I agree with you Sloper about how uncompromising the film is. I know Vidor has said that the studio wanted to tack on a happy ending with John Sims having made good a couple of years later and in fact it was filmed. Vidor stated that he reached a compromise and the film was distributed with both endings, leaving the projectionist to decide which ending got shown. I recall Vidor stating that to his knowledge, no one ever chose the happy ending.

[Tommaso]

I agree with most of what you said, Sloper, great post. But I still feel the need to defend my reading of the ending of "The Crowd" a little:

I have to disagree with Tommaso about love keeping John and Mary together; it’s something more pragmatic (if I were feeling cynical I would say ‘true to life’) than that.

Perhaps, but while I could see a pragmatic aspect if it comes to John, I can't see it for Mary. I mean, what is her advantage when she stays with him? When she tries to leave him, she already has tears in her eyes, and she makes sure that he has everything he needs (the meal is in the oven, and the clothes are ironed). Even when she has already left the house, she cannot leave with the bullies from her family, and she returns to the house saying that John has always so much depended on her. She simply wants to see him again, even though she uses the pretext of telling him that he can see his son anytime he wants. And then he wins her over with the theatre tickets and most of all that little, unassuming bunch of flowers, which she first presses against her face and then puts it on her dress, a symbolic act of reconciliation, and in my view of love. And then it's her who starts to dance once John has put the record on the grammophone. Perhaps that's not 'love' in the narrow sense of the word, but she does care for him, perhaps like a mother would. But I can't see pragmatism in any of this, I'm afraid.

The snapshot we get of this marriage in those wonderful scenes in the apartment suggests that, after a short time, these two people can no longer stand each other’s company. The children keep them together, but it’s clear that the relationship is not what it was.
[...]
When the family is reunited at the end, it is not by love, but by the shared experience of the clown act.Note the echo here of John and Mary’s initial bonding experience on the bus, when they both laughed at the clown with the billboard hung over him.

Well, the film surely shows lovers' quarrels and disillusions. But as to the end, note that the laughing and cheering between the two does not start with the clown act, but that it already begins in the scene before, at the end of the dance, the two of them together with their child on the sofa, and that this laughter then simply segues with a cut to the clown scene. It's not the clown act that reunites them, or makes them laugh together again, then.

I agree with you Sloper about how uncompromising the film is. I know Vidor has said that the studio wanted to tack on a happy ending with John Sims having made good a couple of years later and in fact it was filmed. Vidor stated that he reached a compromise and the film was distributed with both endings, leaving the projectionist to decide which ending got shown. I recall Vidor stating that to his knowledge, no one ever chose the happy ending.

Thank God indeed. And this reminds me about how annoyed I was about the tacked-on happy ending of Griffith's "The Struggle", a film which I otherwise found surprisingly good and a highlight of Kino's second Griffith set. But as that's 1931 already, it doesn't belong here.

[Sloper]

I don't think that the fact you're just part of the crowd after all is such a bitter thought during that pullback at the end. To me it says: We all laugh at the same things, we're equal, don't fight your humanity.

Yes, that's certainly part of it - you put it very well. The question, perhaps, is how you see the film defining that 'humanity', and I see it as quite a cynical definition. But as Tommaso's post also shows, my reading of the ending is over-determinedly bleak...

Perhaps, but while I could see a pragmatic aspect if it comes to John, I can't see it for Mary. I mean, what is her advantage when she stays with him? When she tries to leave him, she already has tears in her eyes, and she makes sure that he has everything he needs (the meal is in the oven, and the clothes are ironed). Even when she has already left the house, she cannot leave with the bullies from her family, and she returns to the house saying that John has always so much depended on her. She simply wants to see him again, even though she uses the pretext of telling him that he can see his son anytime he wants. And then he wins her over with the theatre tickets and most of all that little, unassuming bunch of flowers, which she first presses against her face and then puts it on her dress, a symbolic act of reconciliation, and in my view of love. And then it's her who starts to dance once John has put the record on the grammophone. Perhaps that's not 'love' in the narrow sense of the word, but she does care for him, perhaps like a mother would. But I can't see pragmatism in any of this, I'm afraid...

Well, the film surely shows lovers' quarrels and disillusions. But as to the end, note that the laughing and cheering between the two does not start with the clown act, but that it already begins in the scene before, at the end of the dance, the two of them together with their child on the sofa, and that this laughter then simply segues with a cut to the clown scene. It's not the clown act that reunites them, or makes them laugh together again, then.

My memory of the details you mention was quite vague - in all honesty, I hadn't seen the film for a while, though I used to watch it obsessively when I was first getting into silent films. Having dug out my old VHS just now and watched it again... Yes, it was definitely too dismissive to say that it's 'not love' that brings them together at the end. John certainly says he loves Mary, and her concern for him is obviously more profound than mere habit. It is, looked at from one angle, quite a happy ending. The dancing child especially contributes to this effect, and of course the moments you mention where Mary puts the flowers on, and they dance and start laughing.

What I meant by 'something more pragmatic' was not so much the economic reasons for being together - indeed Mary would be better off, materially speaking, being looked after by her awful brothers. It's more the sense I get that this couple stays together, not because they make each other happy (which on the whole they don't), but because they are bound together whether they like it or not, by marriage, by their child, and by a not entirely healthy mutual dependence. Their laughter at the end of the dance might seem, on one level, like their happiness at being reunited, but that segue to the clown act casts a different light on it, turning it (I think) into a more mindless, less meaningful kind of laughter. It makes it seem as though they laugh because there's nothing else to do - because, as the intertitle says, the crowd will laugh with you always, but cry with you only for a day; so it's a choice between laughter and the wheels of the freight train.

The beauty of the ending is in its ambiguity - as myrnaloy says, the tenuous, ambiguous quality of it, and the fact that you can read it in several different ways. The story I heard about the multiple endings was that there were more than two, but whatever the choices were I love that they plumped for an ending which is not one-sidedly bleak or happy. I like to take a bleak view of it because that's my temperament, but there's a lot of laughter, love, and maybe the promise of some happiness there as well.

I was relieved to find I enjoyed the film as much as ever. One nice detail I'd forgotten was the way John plays with Mary's hair: when they first meet, he tucks it into her hat, does so again on the subway, and then later during their quarrel he nags her about what a mess it is; all part of his desire to mould her into an ideal dream wife, frozen as she appears beside Niagara Falls.

And what a score by Carl Davis. I'm seeing him live next Friday, accompanying The Iron Mask in Birmingham's Symphony Hall. Can't wait...

[myrnaloyisdope]

Some thoughts on a couple of obscurities I tracked down:

I managed to watch Karl Brown's feature film, Stark Love and found it pretty fascinating.
Essentially the film is a love story between a young man, the only one in his village who can read and an illiterate woman, whom he determines to send to school in the city. Complications ensue due to some the death of the man's mother. The climax was interesting in it's brevity and understatedness. It didn't feel like a Hollywood film.

The film was also helped by the use of location filming and the use of amateur actors. The film is a love story set in the southern mountains amongst "hill people" and despite the occasional condescending title card, Brown seems to have affection for the people of the film.

It has a documentary feel in some ways due to the natural setting and the way it documents a way of life that was pretty alien to a growing part of the population. The rugged setting and the immense poverty of the area is on display. One particularly striking image of a young girl in her cradle covered in flies, reminded me quite a bit of a Live-Aid-esque image of a starving child.

I would hesitate to say the film is much more than a curiousity, but I am certainly glad to have seen it.

I also watched Monta Bell's Pretty Ladies, mostly trying to spot Myrna Loy in her earliest surviving film. She's a chorus girl, but I couldn't spot her. The film stars Zasu Pitts as a Follies' comedienne looking for love, with the always fun Lilyan Tashman as her gold digging rival. The print I saw was quite truncated and is kind of hard to follow, particularly in the introduction. Highlights of the film are Zasu's performance and Bell's solid direction. I find Bell to be underrated, but he's often quite solid with some nice fluent camerawork and he keeps his film's moving. Zasu performs a particularly bizarre musical number dressed in a fly costume, and at one point goes in blackface with absolutely no provocation. It's quite a change from the previous year's Greed, but she manages to do some great work.

The final sequence was very strong, with Zasu having been informed that her husband has cheated on her, but she tells her husband that she doesn't believe it and she takes him back. The final shot of the flm is of Zasu praying and thanking God that her marriage is in tact, before a title card reads: "Thank You God, but don't let it happen again." It's one of those moments that gives Zasu's character a whole different subtext. The idea that she knows, but takes her husband back anyway is pretty compelling.

[Tommaso]

Erotikon (a strange film, maybe partly because of Paul Mercer’s wonderful but dissonant score; I’d like to watch it again silent to see if it comes over as more funny and less creepy a second time; and I’d love to hear others’ thoughts about it…).

I had to re-write the first few sentences of this post because I didn't realise at first that you were talking about the Stiller film (which is great, of course), so I couldn't make rhyme nor reason with regard to your words about the score and the supposed greater funniness in connection to the film I had in mind (or, which rather has just more or less blown it), i.e. Erotikon (1929) by Gustav Machaty. No relation to the Stiller film at all, but one that definitely needs to be seen (it's available on a Czech disc with English subs).

While the story itself may be more or less a conventional melodrama (society guy meets unexperienced girl, has a night with her and quickly forgets her, but she doesn't, and you can guess that this leads to all sorts of problems...), Machaty's direction makes this into a truly captivating film, almost constantly at fever pitch. Fascinating close-ups, an almost avantgarde sensibility for visuals for the most part, and incredibly stylish in terms of sets, clothes and hair-dos. Think of a late UFA silent seen through the eyes of a cinema auteur, and you have an idea. Machaty, as well as his leading lady in this film, Ita Rina, are in dire need of more recognition, not least if I think of the director's even better, and even less known "From Saturday to Sunday" (1931) which will figure extremely high on my 30s list. A fascinating director of women at the very least. A very rich and captivating film that has my fullest recommendation. And yes, I think it's better than the Stiller

[myrnaloyisdope]

I was really fascinated by Erotikon. It does have an unusual quality. I remember viewing it and feeling a sense of dissonance between what was happening and what I was expecting to happen.

A couple more obscurities:

The Last Performance - Paul Fejos' first American film is a variation on the well worn backstage love story a la Variete or almost every Lon Chaney film. Conrad Veidt is the master magician who is in love with his assistant, who happens to love someone else. The copy I watched was pretty rough and truncated to about 48 minutes, so that hindered my enjoyment quite a bit. The film rushes by and unfolds without any explanation, so it is hard to connect with the characters, and the print was so rough that I couldn't spot dear Mr. Veidt until about halfway through the film. What remains to be enjoyed are some interesting visuals and some neat high angle shots, typical of Fejos, and the courtroom climax is pretty decent. If anyone's films are in dire need of some restoration and appreciation, it's Fejos.

Fultah Fisher's Boarding House - Frank Capra's first film, a 10 minute adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling poem was really quite impressive. I'd heard pretty awful things about it, and didn't know what to expect. The film uses Kipling's verses as the intertitles and in an impressive technique superimposes images from the film onto the intertitles. The film is brisk and pretty fascinating, a sort of sea of images. There's a particularly impressive use of shadows in one instance and it is quite polished and adventurous considering it was Capra's first film and that he didn't direct another for four years. I will try and get it up in a watchable place, as I think it should be seen.

[the preacher]

I would like to participate if you let a newbie from Spain in. It seems a very interesting exercise and I've read many intriguing recommendations.

I'm afraid the most acclaimed Spanish silent film, La aldea maldita (1930), is ineligible, but don't miss El sexto sentido / The Sixth Sense (1929) by Nemesio Sobrevila: Carmen is happy. She is in love with Carlos, a young man filled with optimism, the exact opposite of his taciturn and tormented friend Leon. On Carlos’ advice, Leon pays a visit to Professor Kamus, whose invention reveals the truth about beings and things. This invention is none other than the cinema, which he presents as a sixth sense. From then on, an unfortunate misunderstanding puts Carlos and Carmen’s love in danger.

On the surface, Filmoteca Española's classification of Nemesio M. Sobrevila and Eusebio Fernández Ardavĺn's romantic comedy The Sixth Sense as an avant-garde film seems like a tenuous designation, loosely supported by an episode in which abstract forms and flicker images momentarily appear in the cueing of a film reel. But The Sixth Sense also functions as a metafilm, a self-contained reality conjured by Professor Kamus (Ricardo Baroja) who, as the film begins, has just discovered a "sixth sense" in the camera's all seeing eye that enables him to see the objective truth. This everyday truth is reflected in the affection displayed by the gregarious Carlos (Enrique Durán) and his chorus girl fiancée Carmen (Antonia Fernández) during a picnic in the country with his perennially morose friend Léon (Eusebio Fernández Ardavín), and Léon's demure girlfriend Luisa (Gertrudis Pajares). In an attempt to change his friend's sullen disposition, Carlos persuades Léon to pay a visit to Kamus whose film therapy sessions have successfully liberated patients from their own repressed states - an experimental treatment that has proven effective for Kamus's own fanciful young assistant (Felipe Pérez) against his domineering mother. However, when Léon catches a glimpse of Carmen in a seemingly compromising position during dance hall rehearsals, the footage only serves to sow further doubt in his mind on the possibility of finding peace of mind, and threatens to derail his friend's happiness as well. While the inclusion of abstract elements found in avant-garde films do reinforce Sobrevila and Ardavĺn's penchant for unconventional imagery, the underlying nature of their experimentation is perhaps more accurately exemplified by the film's prescient themes of surveillance and subjective reality that prefigure Harun Farocki's cinema - exploring the nature of the film image and the camera as apparatus for the human eye in its disjunction between cognition and recognition, reality and truth.
Acquarello (Strictly Film School)

[knives]

Got the Renoir Lionsgate boxset today and decided to open it with Charleston Parade thinking it would be the low point of the set. I hope that's still true of course, but if that's not true at least I had this little bit of fun. Technically speaking it looks like a film a good ten or fifteen years older with the only modern flourish being the very odd slo-mo. The whole affair is bizarre though. It seems like Renoir turned it into a sci-fi film exclusively to turn around the nature documentaries of the time. In that sense I suppose the film is very advanced racially speaking.

[the preacher]

The ten best films of 1920 by Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell

[lubitsch]

The ten best films of 1920 by Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell

A bit baffling. No mention whatsoever of The Mark of Zorro or Der Golem? Not to say anything about films like L'Homme du Large and Von Morgens bis Mitternacht. It's mostly written by Kristin Thompson who certainly is the less impressive part of the couple but I wouldn't have problems to recommend 10 films of the era. At least they give Last of the Mohicans its due and Bordwell points out as well as gunning did (and I with my far lesser means) that Mästerman should be finally dug out of the grave where it's hidden.

[knives]

I just realized IMDB has Queen Kelly down as 1932, not 1929. I guess my list didn't need an other von Stroheim anyways, but it is such a lovely movie.

[swo17]

That's a recent change then. I know for a fact it was listed as 1929 a couple months ago. I vote it's still eligible, since it was a 1920s film for at least part of the project (and will in all likelihood be corrected to 1929 at some point).

[myrnaloyisdope]

Yes, Queen Kelly has generally been listed with a 1929 release date. It's a bit of a funny one, because it was never officially completed and I'm not sure to what extent it would have been distributed at that time, but I think in spirit it's a 1920's film regardless of its release history.

I have been reading Scott Eyman's The Speed of Sound and so far it is an excellent chronology of the transition from silent film to talkies in Hollywood. It has piqued my curiosity about some of the early Vitaphone shorts, 1928 talkies and so-called "goat gland" pictures. I watched the first feature length all talking film, The Lights of New York and boy is it dreadful. There's no camera movement at all and almost every shot is in medium length with some conveniently place microphone obscuring prop, which all the characters huddle around to talk. As far as the story goes, it's the kind of hackneyed gangster stuff that was well-worn 5 years previous. Yet this terrible little film that was made for $23,000 dollars in one week, grossed over $1.2 million.

The whole transition period is so fascinating, because of the immense artistic perfection that certain silent films were attaining, and the crudely vacuous amateurishness of the early talkies. Yet it was the dreadful talkies that were doing business, while films like Lonesome and Four Devils were being ignored.

[knives]

Yes, Queen Kelly has generally been listed with a 1929 release date. It's a bit of a funny one, because it was never officially completed and I'm not sure to what extent it would have been distributed at that time, but I think in spirit it's a 1920's film regardless of its release history.

I agree, it's just that we have that little IMDB rule.

[Tommaso]

You could argue that "Queen Kelly" is eligible for the 1980's list, because the reconstructed version we are voting for was assembled in 1985. Sorry, but we really all know better than imdb: this is a film copyrighted as 1929.

[domino harvey]

But the List Project rules don't allow common sense (see: Breathless being voted in on the 60s List)

[Tommaso]

I know, but getting the year wrong by one year is not the same as by three years. I'd like to hear our list-master's opinion about this special case, please. Otherwise I will have a completely unexpected top-five candidate for the 30s list....

[swo17]

I know the IMDb rule and don't think we should abandon it, but has something like this ever happened before where the film changed decades on IMDb during the timeframe of the lists project? My thought was that we could keep it in the 1920s on the technicality that that's where IMDb classified it during at least part of the project.

For the record, I got Queen Kelly from Netflix early in September and I remember looking it up at that time and it being 1929.

[knives]

I believe Heaven's Gate had a similar situation during either the '80s or '70s list and it was decided to go with the most recent decision.

[the preacher]

Queen Kelly is a special case because it is an unfinished film.

On 24 November 1931, a rewritten ending in which the prince discovers that Kelly has successfully committed suicide by drowning was shot by cinematographer Gregg Toland. This version was released in 1932 in runs that were limited to Europe and South America due to a clause in Stroheim’s contract.

But I guess that nobody votes for that version, then 1929 should be the right date...

[lubitsch]

I think while we should keep to the imdb, for me the imdb listing at the beginning when I compile the viewing guide is the reference point, not the one at the end. What if the imdb staff reclassifies e.g. all the GDR 1965 films which were released in 1990 on the last day before the vote and shifts them 3 decades ahead?
This aside while the relase date is surely a good rule, it's clearly not handled consistently with the imdb and in the future we should make clear in advance if we really want to cling to the new dates if imdb switches let's say Askoldov's Kommisar from its current 1967 to the release date 1988. I see e.g. that Sonnensucher by Konrad Wolf was shifted from 1958 to 1972, but generally this films really don't belong where they were placed by the whims of dictatorships.
Anyway I think I speak for the majority when I say let's keep Queen Kelly where it was for the whole original voting time, in the 20s.

[zedz]

It's a dumb rule, but at least it's a rule, and there have been plenty of times when films have been disadvantaged. The first go-round, one of my favourite films of all time was a 1970s film when I compiled my 60s list and a 1960s film when I compiled my 70s list, so I couldn't vote for it at all. As I recall, the world kept on turning.

In this case, since the imdb change is pretty much last-minute, I agree that it makes sense to retain its eligibility (as long as everyone understands this). It's going to be the highest ranking Von on my list, at any rate. As a consequence, we may need to stipulate in the 30s list rules that it's not eligible. I can't see the point of making the call one way if we're not going to make it the other.

[Tommaso]

Agreed on all points.

[Tommaso]

The Last Performance - Paul Fejos' first American film is a variation on the well worn backstage love story a la Variete or almost every Lon Chaney film. Conrad Veidt is the master magician who is in love with his assistant, who happens to love someone else. The copy I watched was pretty rough and truncated to about 48 minutes, so that hindered my enjoyment quite a bit. The film rushes by and unfolds without any explanation, so it is hard to connect with the characters, and the print was so rough that I couldn't spot dear Mr. Veidt until about halfway through the film. What remains to be enjoyed are some interesting visuals and some neat high angle shots, typical of Fejos, and the courtroom climax is pretty decent. If anyone's films are in dire need of some restoration and appreciation, it's Fejos.

I think this must have been a pretty good film in its full-length version, and even in the 48 minute cut it shows a lot of Conny Veidt's qualities as an actor. I liked how he manages to bring the change about from benevolent man (taking the young thief under his protection) to an apparently 'evil' character (not really the right word, as he is simply a jealous and heart-broken lover) and back again. The two central scenes of 'stage magic' (one of them in the courtroom) are very well made and truly suspenseful. And indeed, the visuals: best of all that climactic moment when Veidt discovers the lovers, with his shadow looming over them Nosferatu-style. But elsewhere, too, one can see Fejös' expertise in organizing the frame in a natural, but at the same time artful way. Very good, even though this version plays a little like a collection of fragments indeed. And yes, it looks terribly blurry.

Also watched recently: Crossroads (Jujiro) by Teinosuke Kinugasa, a film already mentioned in this thread. Less experimental than "A Page of Madness", but nevertheless an interesting film. The acting and make-up seems totally stylised, and the film makes a lot of use of expressionist influences in terms of lighting and some weird montage sequences. My only problem was that there was no benshi to explain the plot to me. The Japanese version - which relied on such a storyteller, of course - comes only with the barest of intertitles, and can be rather confusing in places. Kinugasa apparently added a lot of intertitles when the film was shown in Germany to make up for the absence of a narrator. In any case, a quite memorable and very well-acted film, with an impressive Akiko Chihaya in the main role.

And finally I watched the second half of Kino's Constance Talmadge disc, Her Sister from Paris (1925). This was one of the funniest and most endearing films I watched for a long time. Talmadge is utterly charming in her double role as Viennese housewife and stylish Parisian actress, and the film, while basically conventional, is so well written and nicely plotted that I completely agree with those reviewers and the blurp on the Kino disc that compared it with Lubitsch. This is not Top 50 material, but I would certainly recommend it to anyone, especially as the Kino disc has a very fine transfer (even the nitrate decomposition looks perfect... ). Seriously, it's for releases like this that I've really come to like that label, despite their occasional sloppiness and ...ahm... mistakes in Blu-Ray region coding. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

[knives]

Over the past week I've been watching some Harold Lloyd to see if my opinion can change. While I still think he's unfunny weaksauce I think I can develop a more refined thesis for why. Primarily I think he just doesn't work as a silent comedian. With the exception of the soda bar scene in Speedy I've found that all of the funniest bits are essentially word gags. None of the puns are visual and even the physical humour tends to have a talking aspect to it. The Freshman, which has quickly become my favorite movie of his is basically a sound comedy. The speech scene made my laugh harder than any silent movie short of Keaton's has and that would have excelled even more as a sound movie. The dance scene at the end is full of successful physical humour but it seems to depend an awful lot on how things are being said. There's an audio part to the comedy that heightens it. It's not really needed in that scene and if anything this aspect usually takes away from Lloyd's otherwise quality gags, but it works none the less. A better example of his talkative nature ruining him is Hot Water (a film that in personality out Keatons Keaton) which while having a number of great audio gags doesn't really have a gag that's translatable into silents until the car ride. The first gag is basically their arguing so much that they nearly get killed with the second (speeding) being only successful with the audio setup. Both times I smiled, but at the same time couldn't help but think that as a sound comedy I'd laugh at these in premise great jokes. In the silent form these are all just tired though. I have come to notice, just to compliment the poor man, that the terrible plotting of his shorts are absent from the longer features. His need to sell jokes on characters in specific situations with a past and a future makes him easily the most modern comedian of the silent era. While both Chaplin and Keaton needed drastic overhauls to their over the years Lloyd could have made these films in any era. In fact a lot of '80s favorites do seem like reduxes on these films, the aforementioned Hot Water basically being a Vacation movie. I'm not sure if this compliment isn't turning backhanded by mistake.