June 22, 2008
Silent Sunday: The Delicious Little Devil (1919)
This rather unfunny comedy is available on DVD because of a certain fifth-billed actor who hadn't yet settled on a moniker yet; his birth name was too ungainly (Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla), so here he's billed as Rudolpho De Valintine, but later he'd settle on Rudolph Valentino.
Unfortunately, absent the exotic locales and the heavy makeup, he lacks that androgynous sex appeal that made him so famous, and since the main attraction here is the rather unsexy and mostly unfunny Mae Murray, there's really not much reason to watch this aside from curiosity about what Valentino was like before he was Valentino.
Previous Silent Sundays:
June 15: I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918)
June 8: The Kiss of Mary Pickford (1927)
June 1: Hot Water (1924)
May 25: La Chute de la maison Usher (1928)
May 18: After Death (1915)
June 15, 2008
Silent Sunday: I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918)
Ernst Lubitsch offers an early glimpse of the joys of Weimar cinema with this cross-dressing comedy about a young girl who emancipates herself by dressing up in men's evening clothes and going out on the town. She supposedly learns some lessons about how hard men really have it, but I don't think Lubitsch is convinced, and besides, he's more interested in the romantic possibilities of the situation. Ossi's romanced by her Teutonic tutor, who thinks she's a he, but things don't turn out the way they do in countless Hollywood comedies of gender confusion.
The film is available on DVD as part of Kino's exquisite "Lubitsch in Berlin" set, which contains a good cross-section of the light comedies and historical epics he made before heading west to Hollywood in 1923.
June 8, 2008
Silent Sunday: The Kiss of Mary Pickford (1927)
In 1926, while visiting Moscow, Hollywood supercouple Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks starred in a film about a young man who wants to become a movie star to impress his girlfriend. Pickford only learned about the film late in life, and Fairbanks died never knowing about it. The director, Sergei Komarov, had posed as a newsreel cameraman and convinced the superstars to clown around for him, including getting Mary to play a silly love scene with a bearded Russian actor (he loves me, he loves me not), at the end of which she kisses him. Around this footage, he constructed an American-style slapstick comedy about the unhealthy obsession with fame.
June 1, 2008
Silent Sunday: Hot Water (1924)
I continue my silent education with a lesser-known Harold Lloyd comedy in which the middle-class everyman deals with domestic chores, unwanted relatives, and existential horror. Will he get the groceries home intact? Will he get a speeding ticket?
Will he hang for murder?
The film starts off pretty well, slooooows down to a crawl, and then redeems itself with what just might be one of the funniest finales in silent comedy. (I can't say for sure—I haven't seen enough.)
May 25, 2008
Silent Sunday: La Chute de la maison Usher (1928)
I watched this surrealist masterpiece late at night, in the dark, by myself. It's among the scariest movies I've ever watched, and is surely the most effective at dragging you into its nightmare. I couldn't sleep that night, and Jean Debucourt's haunted, blank stare and a wispy white lace dragging through the water cropped up in my dreams on several subsequent nights.
But the real nightmare is that this appears to be the only Jean Epstein film available on DVD in the United States.
(I'm using the French title to distinguish this from James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber's version of Poe's story, which was also released in 1928 and which, according to Nick, is the 24th best film of all time.)
May 18, 2008
Silent Sunday: After Death (1915)
Russian director Yevgeni Bauer directed 26 films during a four-year career before his death from pneumonia in 1917. William M. Drew wrote a fine introduction to Bauer's career; he tells us that Bauer made comedies, social dramas, and historical films, but what he's best known for are his dark tales of obsession. Three of these films, Twilight of a Woman's Soul, The Dying Swan, and this one, After Death, are available on DVD from Image Entertainment.
Here, the fates of Andrei (Vitold Polonsky), an introverted, even misanthropic scholar, and Zoya (Vera Karalli), a mysterious, beautiful actress, intertwine into a tangled knot of guilt that even death can't dispel. Or maybe it's that only death can dispel it.
(This is an attempt to start a regular feature. We'll see how regular it ends up.)