Anomalous Material Weekly Feature: 10 Best Silent Films

Here we are again true believers, with my latest weekly 10 best feature for the fine folks over at Anomalous Material.  For those of you not in the know, those same said fine folks have given me a (possibly foolish on their behalf) regular gig as feature writer.  It is a series of top ten lists on various cinematic subjects - and anyone who knows me can attest to how perfectly suited I am to such an endeavor (yes I am a  list nerd).  This week's feature, my twenty-third such feature, is on the timely subject of silent movies.  Why are silent movies timely in this day and age of digital in your face mass media you may ask?  Well, it is because a silent film is just days away from taking home the Oscar for Best Picture (and probably Director, Actor, Score and Editing as well).  So with that in mind I composed a list of my personal favourite silent films of those (semi) lost woebegone days of yore.

Read my feature article, "10 Best Silent Films" at Anomalous Material.

As for the many silent films I had to leave out of this list, one of the most important is a little thing that debuted back on December 28, 1895 in Paris by the name of La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.  Directed by film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumere, it was the very first film shown at the very first public screening of a film anywhere in the known world.  It is just a mere 50 seconds long and really shows nothing but exactly what the title would have you believe it shows, but considering what it led to, aka, the birth of cinema, it probably should be mentioned somewhere here.

The White Hell of Pitz Palü, Sturdy Pre-Hitler Leni Riefenstahl and the Strange and Fascinating Allure of the German Mountain Film

Before Adolph Hitler and his National Socialist party came to terrible power.  Before the Nuremburg Laws were heinously put into effect. Before the Third Reich's invasion of Poland and Czechoslovakia and the inevitable advent of World War II.  Before the horrors of the Holocaust.  Before the Berlin Wall split the nation in two.  Before the likes of Lang and Wilder and Sirk and Lubitsch escaped to Hollywood and (relative) artistic freedom.  Before there was ever a Fassbinder or a Herzog or Wim Wenders.  Before any of this there was the natural beauty and simple, pure pleasure of the German Mountain Film.  And the greatest of this forgotten genre was Arnold Fanck and G.W. Pabst's two and a half hour silent masterpiece, The White Hell of Pitz Palü.

This sweeping and quite harrowing film (especially harrowing for this admitted acrophobic) is used as an important and quite intriguing talking point in Quentin Tarantino's own alt-history WWII masterpiece Inglourious Basterds as poor Archie Hickox tries to get around his bad German accent by using this film and a story of growing up in the setting's valley as an excuse (it doesn't work).   Tarantino, the ever consummate cinephile plays highly with the Weimar era German cinema in his film, but given the circumstances, he only scratches the proverbial surface.   Thought of with a sense of national pride, the German mountain film, as opposed to the contemporaneous  Expressionist cinema and its own inherent avant-gardism, tried bringing the ideal of the human form, in both its physicality and spirituality, to the forefront of the film industry.  Though, again as opposed to the aforementioned German Expressionism (aka, Murnau, Lang, Weine etc), the mountain film is pretty much forgotten in this day and age.  Well, forgotten except for perhaps QT, myself and a few German film scholars.

Palü, along with films such as The Holy Mountain and The Great Leap (also directed by Fanck), could never be accused of being overly creative in their storytelling techniques - men go up a mountain, some do not come back - nor would I say they were generally greater than many of the Expresionist pieces of the day, but the sheer visual beauty of the mountains themselves (the Bernina range in the Alps) and the way Fanck filmed them (Pabst, a great director of the urban underworld of 1920's Berlin, put his directorial input in with the indoor and mountain'less' portions of the film) are something to never be forgotten.  The swift, thundering avalanches, the devastating wind swooping off the mountaintops, the monstrous vehicle that is nature, coming down upon the specks of bravado-laden humanity that dare brave these near peerless peaks.  The White Hell of Pitz Palü is a dangerous motion picture in both its epic destruction of man's hope and the redemptive nature of his resolve.  Beautiful and dangerous indeed, but there is something else in these films that make them even more beautiful, and ultimately one might say, even more dangerous.  That something is the lithe yet sturdy frame of the most famous actress in 1920's German cinema, and eventually the most despised woman in all of film history, miss Leni Riefenstahl.

Riefenstahl, who would go on to become a director herself (1932's The Blue Light, one of the last mountain films, was her debut behind the camera) and later one of the most infamous people in the world as Hitler's favourite filmmaker (and some refuted sources, his lover) and the woman behind the supposedly propagandist Triumph of the Will and Olympia, was merely a girl who wanted to climb mountains with the man she loved.  Strangely attractive, Riefenstahl was the standard bearer of the female form in both pre-Hitler and post-Hitler Germany.  Shapely and athletic, she was a true nature girl.  Her eyes were set ever so slightly too close to one another, but this just gave her a sort of otherwordly beauty.  Her brown hair and broad yet feminine shoulders, her muscular legs and strangely pristine feet (she would climb mountains, the non-iced ones, barefoot!?), her narrow European nose, her wide exuberant smile, her inset eyes that could work wonders on a young man's soul, her seemingly endless energy.

These are the qualities that made the young Riefenstahl such the perfect figure to play these mountain-climbing heroines of yore.  These are also the qualities that would eventually bring the sexy budding director to the notice of one Adolph Hitler, and hitherto, the most hated woman in film history.  Whether this infamous moniker is deserved or not really depends on one's thoughts on whether an artist is responsible for how their art is used.  I am not really going to get into such a debate here and now, for this is the story of Riefenstahl as an actor and not the director she would become, other than to say that her work is some of the most vibrant and most visually groundbreaking in cinematic history and she should be held accountable for the aesthetic value of such, and nothing that may have been out of her own hands.   Did she know the breadth of Hitler's plans?  His antisemitism?  His final solution?  Riefenstahl was just trying to make the best, the most beautiful film she could.   If nothing else, Riefenstahl was a director of perfection and thus showed that ideal through her camera.  Needless to say, Hitler and Goebbels (who incidentally was not fond of the uncontrollable director) also held to this ideal of perfection and therefore would use these films as propaganda.  But I digress.

Recently, Germany produced a new mountain film with 2008's North Face (directed by Philipp Stötzl), whose plot was rather similar to The Holy Mountain, and though its modern day style lacks something of the artistry of the silent era (or perhaps that is just my own sense of classic film snobbery) it does play out as a surprisingly well-honed homage.  When all is said and done it is the mostly forgotten mountain films of Weimar Era Germany that even within their rather restrictive storylines - again, men  (and women) go up a mountain, some do not come back down - when seen on a big screen, which I have been lucky enough to have seen just that way, are giant creatures of cinematic bravura that deserve more than a bit more recognition than what they normally receive.  The chilling agonies of those trapped on the mountain make our hearts race unlike any cheap action flick of today (there's that film snobbery again).  These are not studio films.  These are movies not only set in the mountains but also filmed there.  Riefenstahl laughed about how Fanck had brought down an avalanche upon her, only to do it a second take.  Harrowing is indeed the perfect word to describe such brilliantly naturalistic subversive films as these, and especially of that apex of them all, The White Hell of Pitz Palü.

My 25 (or so) Favourite Classic Films First Seen in 2011

Inspired by the always charming, always enjoyable and always cinematically knowledgeable (and always alliterative, nomenclaturally speaking) Self-Styled Siren, I send forth a list of my 25 favourite classic films seen for the first time in 2011.  Classic, of course, being any movie made prior to 1960.  And in keeping with the Siren's choice of keeping the descriptions to a bare bones minimum (actually inspired in turn by Clara at Via Margutta 51) I will try to hold my typically long-winded ramblings to a relative bare bones minimum as well.  So without further ado, here are my favourite classic films seen for the first time in 2011.

Oh wait!   I do have some further ado to put forth - and possibly some rambling (see, I have already begun breaking promises).  In order to keep this list to a nice and tidy twenty-five (yeah, right) I would like to preface said list with a pair of special mentions.  

Powell/Pressburger: It is a rather sad fact but before this past year I had only seen three films by this brilliant British filmmaking duo known collectively as the Archers (Black Narcissus, Tales of Hoffman & of course The Red Shoes - my all-time favourite film if one wishes to keep track of such things).    In 2011, I almost doubled my Powell/Pressburger film viewing prowess, by seeing five of their films for the very first time.   These five films (in order of preference) are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, Gone to Earth, A Matter of Life and Death & Oh...Rosalinda!!.  Any one of these films could feasibly take the top spot on the below list, so since they are so many and so superior (at least mostly), I have decided to put them in a class all their own.   In actuality this is merely a ploy (a clever ruse if you will) to make more room on the list for even more films since I could not narrow my list down very easily.  The other special mention (just below) is another ploy to do the same damn thing.

Douglas Sirk:  Believe it or not, prior to 2011, I had never seen a film directed by Herr Sirk.  This sad fact was remedied last year by seeing five of his great melodramas (again, in order of preference) - Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession & A Time to Live and a Time to Die.  Again, I believe these to be the proverbial head and shoulders above most of the films I saw in 2011, so they too will get a class all their own.  And again, this is merely part of the aforementioned ploy.  But enough of this.  I promised not to ramble on, so now, (really) without further ado, I give you my 25 favourite classic films seen for the first time in 2011.  I have tried to list these films in relative preferential order, but I think we all know how that ends up, so take the numbering order in any manner you see fit.  Now here they are.

1) Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945) - Beautiful and sinister as hell, and with the sexiest overbite in the history of Hollywood, this is Gene Tierney at her wicked best - and the glorious Technicolor (wonderfully and appropriately artificial) looks almost as good as she does.  If you do not believe me, just check out that look she is giving you right now.

2) Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958) - Very possibly the least known film on this list, this Egyptian film noir(ish) masterpiece (yeah!  I called it that!) is like having Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Curtiz and Antonioni all rolled into one.

3) Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) - Taking its place as my new favourite crime caper movie (my new second favourite of the genre can be seen in the number eight spot below), this French heist film is , to borrow an attitude from Mae West, great when it is loud but even greater when it doesn't say a word.

4) Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952) - The best thing to come out of Lang's Hollywood years, and a campy deeelight full of Marlene mayhem (looking a bit older than what she wanted to) and Mel Ferrer and his toothy, snarky grin.  Fun stuff indeed.  My review can be read here.

5) The Last Flight (William Dieterle, 1931) - If the Siren can wax poetic about Edmund Goulding then I can turn critical cartwheels over William Dieterle.  What a great forgotten film (a loving piece in Film Comment made me seek it out), highlighting the equally forgotten (sad as that may be) Richard Barthelmess, David Manners, John Mack Brown and Helen Chandler.  My review can be read here.

6) Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936) - How could it not be gorgeous - it's Renoir - but even by Renoir standards this forty minute film, based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, and centered around the drop dead gorgeous Sylvia Bataille as an objet d'art, is a complete stunner.

7) Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagen, 1931) - Even taking the sexy lesbian schoolgirl factor out of the mix (I am a guy after all), this early German sound film is more than well worth a look - a long look indeed.  In fact one could (and should) call this film haunting - a term that could go all cliché if one is not careful, but that is not the case here.  Seriously though, this is a very powerful film indeed.  My review can be read here.

8) The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956) - Kubrick's rather demanding style has always appealed to me, and in this early work (his third) you can see that style hidden inside a more classic style.  A great crime caper movie (my second favourite of the genre - see number 3 above) and easy to see the influence on Tarantino later on.

9) The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941) - Another Gene Tierney vehicle (I suppose I was going through a Tierney phase in 2011), this rather sleazy, giddily B-grade picture was a delight from beginning to end.  And not just Tierney (and that overbite) but also Victor Mature (I did say sleazy) and Ona Munson as Mother Gin Sling.  Great stuff indeed.

10) The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921) - One of the creepiest and greatest silent films ever made.  Who knew the Swedes could pull of as much silent era intensity and visual bravura as the Germans.

11) 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) - It is kind of shocking that I went through the first 43 years of my life (the first few understandably so) without ever seeing this film.  Intense and brilliant, this film is the perfect blend of writing, directing and acting.  And the scene where everyone, even the assholes in the group, turn their backs on the racist played by Ed Begley, is simply perfect.

12) The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli, 1955) - One of the great Minnelli's lesser known works, and a film that is seen as too melodramatic by many, but I was blown away (as they say) by the damned thing.  Granted, I like pretty much anything with Richard Widmark in it, and Gloria Grahame is ooh la la great just about every time out, and I prefer the overly melodramatic, so it was probably a forgone conclusion that I would love this picture.  My review (actually more a list of my 10 favourite things about the film) can be read here.

13) Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935) - Swashbuckling at its very best.  I think I can call this the greatest pirate movie ever made and I would not get much argument.  Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (their first of an eventual eight films together) and Basil Rathbone as the villain.  What more need be said.  Ahoy mateys, ahoy.

14) Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) - A cool and pretty keen fifties sci-fi classic (based on The Tempest of all things) that shows a young, pre-parody, Leslie Nielsen as the heroic but somewhat hapless captain of a spacecraft trapped on the titular planet and a very highlighted, and very leggy Anne Francis as the object of the Captain's (and everyone else's) affections.  Oh yeah, and Robby the Robot too.  My review can be read here.

15) The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953) - This is the movie that has Brando in leather, with a revving, hulking machine roaring between his legs.  No, not Last Tango in Paris.  THis is the one with the motorcycles (get your mind out of the gutter).  Cool as can be - and with Lee Marvin to boot.  My review can be read here.

16) The Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951) - Just Fuller's third film and already that growling Fullerian intensity is fully intact.  Thanx to Criterion's great Eclipse series for getting this one two me in such pristine form.  I think I would have to include this in any 10 Favourite war movies list I were to make.

17) The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) - Seen during my summer kick of 1950's sci-fi/fantasy films, this is one of the creepiest movies I saw all year. It just goes and goes and never lets up - not even in the end.

18) Bienvenido Mr. Marshall (Luis Garcia Berlanga, 1953) - I must admit to never having heard of the director before coming across three of his films during My Quest, but I sure am glad I have finally found him.  A screwball kind of film, Berlanga can be called a Spanish Billy Wilder without much fuss.

19) Caged (John Cromwell, 1950) - Subversive and more than bordering on the exploitative, this is a harrowing film and Eleanor Parker hands in a frazzled, frenzied but oh so chilling performance as an innocent turned jaded caged bird.  My review can be read here.

20) The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958) - Forget Ozu.  Forget Kurosawa.  Forget Mizoguchi and Naruse.  2011 was the year that turned Keisuke Kinoshita into my favourite classic Japanese director.  This film is just beautiful as Kinoshita does wonders with colour.

21) The Silver Chalice (Victor Saville, 1954) - Mockingly nicknamed Paul Newman and the Holy Grail, and hated by Newman himself (this debut film would be the scorn of the actor's career), I quite enjoyed this rather laughable movie just for the very fact that it is so laughable.  And at the top of this laughability - Jack Palance at his most campiest (no need to shut the closet on this performance).  My review can be read here.

22) The Hurricane (John Ford, 1937) - Aside from the fun I had watching this while an actual hurricane was raging outside (or at least the more inland version of such), this is a very fun film in and of itself.  Plus we get to see Dorothy Lamour tied to a palm tree.  My review (or at least some thoughts on the film) can be read here.

23) Fig Leaves (Howard Hawks, 1925) - Howard Hawks does The Flintstones.  This was a surprisingly fun film to watch.  Granted, it was Hawks and I am certainly what one would call a Hitchcocko-Hawksian, but I still did not expect as much out of this silent film as I got.  Seriously, did Hanna and Barbara see this film before creating The Flintstones?  And if you watch, you will see that Howard Hawks invented the snooze alarm.  My review can be read here.

24) The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1943) - I think the fact that Howard Hughes invented the underwire bra specifically for Jane Russell (in her film debut) to wear, makes this a very interesting behind-the-scenes tale.  The movie itself is rather simple (Hughes is not a great director), but Russell makes it her own with her very own pair of great assets.

25) My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940) - I think the most fun about watching this screwball comedy is watching how nervous the muscled, mostly naked body of Randolph Scott seems to make Cary Grant - especially considering the real life relationship between the two.  It doesn't hurt that Leo McCarey wrote the thing as well.

I could easily keep this list going with such first time fun as Designing Woman, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Blessed Event, Criminal Code, So Young So Bad, Detour, The Miracle Woman, Run For Cover, Untamed, Crossfire, The Egyptian, Ceiling Zero, Girls of the Road, The Hitch-Hiker, The Medium, East of Borneo, Land of the Pharaohs, Side Street, Stranger on the Third Floor and both versions of Dawn Patrol. 

Also, I suppose a special mention should be made for a great double feature I saw for the first time in 2011.  The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, both directed by Frank Tashlin and the first two starring roles for Jayne Mansfield, are a great pair of self-referential comedies - and I do love self-referential comedies.

One last thing before I shuffle off.  As I made mention to above, I spent a lot of film-watching hours this past summer in the genre of 1950's Sci-fi - most of which I had never seen.  Some of these were really good (The Man From Planet X, Invaders From Mars, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers) while some were pretty laughable (The Monolith Monsters, Robot Monster, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) but they were all pretty darn fun - even if in the cheesiest kind of way.  In fact I liked these films so much that I even did a 10 Best 1950's Sci-Fi list for them over at Anomalous Material.

Once again I would like to thank the Self-Styled Siren for her inspiration in making this list.  I hope to do it again next year, and that may include some of the films I have gleaned off of the Siren's list, and will watch for the first time in 2012.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)

Steamboat Bill Jr. is #579 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 11/17/10 on TCM

Ranked #392 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).

The debate rages.  Chaplin vs. Keaton.  I have always been a steadfast Chaplin man myself, but in no way does that mean I dislike Keaton.  Chaplin has the pathos, the sentimentalism that makes his films work on a much deeper level than those of Keaton.  Keaton on the other hand is a better gag-writer and his films, though never as deep, are straight-up funnier than Chaplin's.  Still, the debate rages.

My favourite Keaton has always been my first Keaton, The General.  I would surely call it one of, if not the funniest movie I have ever seen.  Not a single word is spoken, but it annihilates me every time.  Keaton did not need the added words of the later screwball comedies of Hawks and Lubitsch, he did it all with his brilliant visual audacity.  If I were to compile a Top 5 Keaton List, after his Civil War-set Masterpiece (with a capital M), I would place the oft-forgotten Our Hospitality, followed by Sherlock Jr., The Navigator and then this movie, Steamboat Bill Jr. 

Mostly remembered for its famed falling house gag (where the facade of a house falls on top of Keaton as he stands precariously - and very strategically - in the perfect spot to be saved by an open window, the frame of which falling just around him) and the scary fact that this was no trick photography or body double, but Keaton himself, just inches away from being crushed to (most likely) death, the movie is full of great physical gags - just as Keaton had done in all his previous works, becoming an influence to many future comic actors, most notably Jackie Chan, who has cited Keaton as a big influence on numerous occasions.  

Unfortunately for the world, this was the last film Keaton would ever have control over, leading to eventual obscurity (though with bittersweet roles in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. and Chaplin's Limelight in the early fifties) until future critics would one day rediscover the great stone-faced clown of the silent era.

On Howard Hawks' Silent Proto-Screwball Comedy Fig Leaves and How It Was Way Ahead of It's Time

Made in 1926, and just the great auteur's second film (his first, Road to Glory is thought lost, though he did remake it a decade later), Fig Leaves is the story of Adam and Eve - or at least an Adam and Eve prototype couple - and already shows both the comic timing Hawks had as a director, and one of the defining forces of the Screwball Comedy, and the twisted chauvinism that would show both the male bonding of his characters and the against-the-grain feminism of the "weaker sex" trying to one-up their male counterparts, all of which would one day become synonymous with Hawks' directorial style.

The film opens in the supposed Garden of Eden ("the only fashionable part of town" a title card reads) where we meet the first happy couple, on the throes of the proverbial fall, played with quite a bit of cheeky charm and winking aplomb by muscle-rippled George O'Brien and cute flapper-esque Olive Borden, nicknamed The Joy Girl.  But these aren't your grandparent's Adam and Eve.  A sort of meta-Adam and Eve, this couple live in what appears to be the artistic guiding force behind the creation of the Flintstones some thirty-three or so years later.

Not exactly sticklers for either historical or biblical accuracy, Hawks has his Adam and Eve living alongside pet dinosaurs who nibble at the Tree of Knowledge, stone-carved newspapers with ads for the forbidden fruit and stories on the feud between Cain and Abel, and a series of modern machines made to act as prehistoric comedy relief, including a laughingly ingenious alarm clock, with an even more ingenious snooze alarm (Howard Hawks invented the snooze alarm!?) and a smoke-billowing triceratops-pulled mass transit system.  We are even given a snake who acts as the busybody neighbor across the street, all the while, Eve nibbles on her trouble-making apples.

At this point, we jump ahead "896 or 97 million years" (another title card reads ever so accurately) and find Adam and Eve Smith living in the modern world (well, modern for the Jazz Age), but still not much has changed.  Men are brutes (though O'Brien's Adam is a surprisingly sensitive brute) and women are second class citizens, looked upon as either maids for their husbands or sex objects for everyone else.  Of course, as the times dictate, Eve's main problem, in the Garden of Eden or in the roaring twenties, is that she has nothing to wear.  Hence her dalliance with the fashion industry via a lecherous clothing designer who hits the young bride with his car only to make her one of his models - and wouldbe trophies - and therefore allowing the story to become something more than the typical comedy of the day.  There is even a Technicolor scene that was filmed, though supposedly that is lost as well.

The whole story is quite funny in a screwball kinda way (even without the usually prerequisite dialogue that comes with the genre) and Hawks shows the abilities that will eventually turn him into the greatest and most versatile studio director Hollywood has ever seen.  I could add a rather bold statement and claim that Fig Leaves is the best silent comedy not made by either Chaplin or Keaton.  Perhaps that is quite the bold, perhaps even too bold (one cannot leave out Lubitsch) statement, but, going too far or not, Hawks' Fig Leaves is a solid work of comedic timing and both visual and storytelling prowess - the earliest extant example of Hawksian filmmaking.

Show People (King Vidor, 1928)

"With me it was 5 per cent talent and 95 per cent publicity." 
-Marion Davies

If you have ever seen any of Marion Davies comedies, you know the above quote is total balderdash, and most likely, at least partly, quite tongue-in-cheek.  Yet that is the perception many have of Marion Davies.  Well, at least those who even remember the long forgotten actress.   For those few who do remember her, she is known mainly as the paramour of a wealthy mogul who had a film studio created just for her.  But there is more than just that.  Much more.

In one of those stories just dripping with irony, it was infamous newspaper tycoon (and later movie mogul) William Randolph Hearst who gave his young mistress, Marion Davies, her first big break in Hollywood, yet (and here is the irony dripping part of our story) it was his insistence on Davies starring in lavish period dramas (something she was not very good at) instead of the quick-witted comedies the actress was so adept at playing, that led to her eventual decline in popularity and even more eventual fading into obscurity - a mere scandalous footnote in film history.

Famously (or is that infamously?) thought of as the inspiration behind the ill-fated (and quite talentless) Susan Alexander character in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (just as Hearst was the model for the titular good ole Charlie Kane) Davies has indeed had her share of Hollywood Babylon-like tall tales told about her.  Welles, though obviously using Hearst as the model for Kane, has denied Susan Alexander was based on Davies (at least not completely on her) and has been quoted as saying "Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  Though there is the rumour that Hearst's nickname for Davies nether regions was Rosebud - that's neither here nor there I suppose.

Another tale has Davies having an affair with Charlie Chaplin right under Hearst's fat cat nose and being involved in the murder of Thomas Ince aboard Hearst's luxury yacht (a tale that is retold in Peter Bogdanovich's 2002 film The Cat's Meow, featuring Edward Herrmann as Hearst, Eddie Izzard as Chaplin, Cary Elwes as Ince and Kirsten Dunst as Davies).  The fact that Ince died on land, a day after leaving the yacht, of heart problems, is still not enough to put this urban legend to rest though.  But enough about Davies supposedly sordid lifestyle (mostly exaggerated of course), let us get on with why we are here.  To reuse part of Mr. Welles' quote from above, we are here to talk about Marion Davies being "one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  Namely, her work in King Vidor's 1928 silent comedy, Show People.

Though a loose interpretation of the early career of Gloria Swanson (that ill-fated young starlet who would one day play an almost mirror image of her forgotten self in the great and tragic Billy Wilder noir, Sunset Blvd.) could also have quite possibly been based on Davies herself.  The story of the wonderfully named Peggy Pepper, a young Southern girl (Davies of course) who comes to Hollywood, along with her father (the typical blow hard Southern Colonel type), to become a great star of gorgeous, flowing epics.  Yet, just like Davies, the girl finds herself the star of slapstick comedies (though Davies' comedies were far from slapstick, one gets the coincidental idea) and completely unhappy with what she perceives as a failure on her part to become the dramatic star she had always dreamt of being.  Though in actuality, Davies loved doing comedy (it was only Hearst, in his desire to see Davies at her most glamourous, who pushed her toward the dramatic) Show People can be construed as being similar to Davies own career problems in many ways.

In many ways, this is a feminine take on the classic Hollywood story of Merton of the Movies (eventually made into 3 movies, in 1924, 1932 and finally in 1947).  After being tricked into doing comedy (her screen tests, as they were, though meant to be dramatic, were hilarious enough to be cast in what she thinks is a dramatic motion picture) Peggy Pepper becomes unhappy with her slapstick stardom, even though she finds true love in comic co-star Billy Boone (played with the usual glee by star William Haines, whose own career would plummet only a few later, due mainly to his insistence on living life as an openly homosexual actor - an act that Louis B. Mayer would not stand for) and turns instead toward the dramatic films she so desired to make.  Of course this only made her unhappier as she loses (temporarily of course) Billy during this foray into the "more legitimate" kind of moviemaking. 

Yet through all this unhappiness we find (of course) quite a bit of laughter, and a lot of said laughter is brought on by Davies and her willingness to do anything for a laugh.  A beautiful woman (a sex symbol even!?), Davies was not afraid to contort that gorgeous face into something that would make even Buster Keaton bust a gut.  Show People was the second of three films she would do with King Vidor (The Patsy, a great comic film in its own right, where we get to see Davies impersonate Lillian Gish, Mae Murray and Pola Negri - all of whom she was famous for mimicking at her Hollywood parties - and Not So Dumb were the others) and it was he who seemed to bring out the best in Davies.  One thinks of melodrama when they think of Vidor but it was his gift at directing comedy (a sort of Chaplinesque comedy usually) that made Davies' own gift for comedy come out stronger than it had in other films.  We also get to peek Chaplin in a particularly hilarious cameo in Show People (was the rumour true?) and it is just another nod to Davies' gift that the great comic genius would do her film.

Davies was what one could call a born comedienne (much like Lucille Ball would be called years later - another beauty willing to play it for laughs) and it is a shame her career faded so quickly.  A tragic irony indeed.  To use Mr. Welles quote for my own purposes just one more time, it is a shame that more people do not know of Marion Davies and her being "one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  A shame indeed.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924)

The Saga of Gosta Berling is #569 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films 

Screened 01/11/10 on DVD from GreenCine

Ranked #931 on TSPDT

 

Much like the last entry in my Quest (see here) this is a film that had to wait several months before getting it's moment in the spotlight as it were.  Be that as it may (better late than never, eh?), here are my random thoughts on said film.

The Saga of Gosta Berling is mostly known as being the film that began it all for the elusive movie star, Greta Garbo, long before she just "vanted to be left alone".  Filmed in 1924 in Sweden by Mauritz Stiller, the film itself is not all that remarkable outside of Garbo frolicking around in the woods and on the beach.  Luckily there is quite a lot of said frolicking.  But that is pretty much it.

Much like his film, Stiller has never been much known for anything outside of discovering and bringing Garbo to the states.  Sure, The Saga of Gosta Berling has a sense of Greed at times.  But alas, none of this promise is gathered for long enough to matter - and on top of that Stiller died in 1928, after being essentially kicked to the curb by MGM (and probably Garbo too) hence never coming to the potential he at first exhibited. has its moments (even outside of Garbo) and even has slight innuendo that lean toward a filmmaking style such as Griffith or Von Stroheim, or his fellow countryman Sjostrom.  It weven Reminds one of

Overall, not my favourite of the 1000 (or even close) even though it did give us Garbo, which should be worth mucho points in itself.  Without Stiller (who had remade the ugly duckling teenage Greta into a ravishing beauty!) there would have been no Flesh and the Devil.  No Anna Christie.  No Grand Hotel!  No Queen Christina!!  No Ninochtka!!!  Without Stiller there would have been no Garbo, and that would have been terrible.  It is an interesting enough film though for me to search out the director's other works (Sir Arne's Treasure and Erotikon) and raise my knowledge (somewhat lacking in such) some on early Swedish cinema.  Oh yea, and there is Garbo (did I mention that?).