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At the risk of incurring the wrath of Douglas Fairbanks, I thought I'd mention that today is Katie-Award winning actor Lon Chaney's birthday today. He is a robust 127.
I've written about him many times, and his dust-ups with Fairbanks in the pages of this blog are legendary. Perhaps you can take this as an opportunity to use the nifty search feature on the right hand side of the page and read all about it. You won't be disappointed. Unless, of course, you are.
In his honor, here is a public domain copy of perhaps his greatest performance, 1925's The Phantom Of The Opera. Enjoy.
In honor of Bela Lugosi's birthday today, I am moving my choice for the best fun-stupid movie of 1930-31 ahead by a few days.
The brain child of Oscar-winning producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., Dracula was the first of Universal Studios' classic "monster" movies, a series that included Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Black Cat and Bride of Frankenstein and continued well into the 1950s (see, e.g., Creature From the Black Lagoon). The title character was played by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian film actor who had had a huge success on Broadway with a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. Although Lugosi was not Universal's first choice to play the title character (Lon Chaney was reportedly set to play the role until his untimely death; also considered were Conrad Veidt and Paul Muni), he became so closely associated with the role, he rarely appeared in any other kind of movie.
The story, based more on the stage play than the novel, is by now a familiar one. A young British lawyer (Dwight Frye in the movie's other great performance) journeys to Transylvania to arrange Count Dracula's sea journey to London. Once there, Dracula begins to prey on beautiful young women, first Lucy Weston then Mina Harker—famously conflating sex, seduction, virginity and horror, soon to become staples of the genre—until that old vampire hunter Professor von Helsing arrives and divines Dracula's true nature.
The movie was a big box office hit upon its release in February 1931 and continues to enjoy acclaim today. Just last month, the London Telegraph included Dracula on its list of the twenty-five best book to film adaptations in movie history. The American Film Institute chose Lugosi's Dracula #33 on its list of the fifty greatest villains, ranked the movie #85 on its list of the 100 top thrillers and voted the line "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." one of the top 100 movie quotes of all time. In 2000, the Library of Congress selected Dracula for the National Film Registry.
Lugosi himself didn't fare as well. Although he continued to work right up until his death, even appearing posthumously in Ed Wood's camp classic Plan 9 From Outer Space, most of his roles after the early 1930s were in campy, low-budget horror films for poverty row studios. He did have a supporting role as a Russian commissar in the 1939 comedy Ninotchka and in the 1945 Val Lewton adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson's short story The Body Snatcher with Boris Karloff. Lugosi died of a heart attack in 1956.
Martin Landau won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lugosi in Tim Burton's comedy Ed Wood.
Will you find Dracula scary? Not unless you under the age of four. I mean, the guy's wearing a tuxedo for crying out loud—how scary can he be? I'm not even sure audiences in 1931 found this movie scary and certainly by the time Bela Lugosi reprised the role for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein he was playing the part strictly for laughs. But while it's true that one generation's horror becomes the next generation's camp, the appeal of Dracula has always rested not on its shock value but on its ideas and it's there you will find the lasting power of its horror.
You have to know what kind of a movie fan you are. If you're a sit back, arm's crossed "show me something" kind of viewer, you may find Dracula slow and campy. But if you're willing to give yourself up to it, particularly with Halloween just around the corner, I think you will find it fun. At least I did.
Gladys Brockwell is another of those names I confess I didn't know until I started working on this blog but now that I know it, I think you should know it, too.
Born to chorus girl Lillian Lindeman on this day in 1894, Brockwell started working on the stage in New York at the age of three and made her first movie at the age of nineteen. Brockwell made 115 movies during the Silent and Early Sound eras, but she's primarily known now for two performances, as the mad Sister Gudule in the 1923 silent version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (starring Lon Chaney), and as Janet Gaynor's brutally abusive sister in 1927's 7th Heaven, one of the three movies the Academy cited the year Gaynor won her only Oscar.
You can also look for Brockwell in Chaney's 1922 version of Oliver Twist, in the early talkie Lights of New York and in a bit part with Louise Brooks in Howard Hawks's A Girl in Every Port.
Brockwell died in 1929 of peritonitis after being seriously injured in an automobile accident.
For best supporting actor of 1929-30, I had my pick from several standout performances, among others, Louis Wolheim as a grizzled soldier in All Quiet On The Western Front, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as a cad with a conscience in Our Modern Maidens and Chico Marx as a particularly dim-witted con man in the comedy classic, The Cocoanuts.
Topping them all, though, was Wallace Beery as the unforgettable "Machine Gun" Butch Schmidt in the prison drama, The Big House, which was not just the best performance of the year, but the best Beery gave in a career that included work in classic movies such as Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight as well as an Oscar win for The Champ.
Yet as great as Beery was, he wasn't the studio's first choice for the role and it was only a sloppily-eaten plate of spaghetti that landed him the part at all.
The Big House is the story of three very different convicts thrown together by a deeply-flawed and indifferent correctional system: the young rich pretty boy, Kent Marlowe, played effectively by Robert Montgomery, recently sentenced to prison for vehicular homicide after a drunk driving spree; Wallace Beery as Butch, who is doing a life sentence for a trio of murders; and Chester Morris as John Morgan, a small-time forger, natural leader and the only man who can control Butch's homicidal tendencies.
In re- searching the back- ground for her story, screen- writer Frances Marion toured prison facilities and inter- viewed both prisoners and prison personnel, and while the screenplay exhibits her typical light touch, it is a scathing portrait of the American penal system. She won an Oscar for her efforts, becoming the first woman in a non-acting category to win an Academy Award.
Silent film star Lon Chaney was originally cast in the role of Butch but fell ill before shooting began and died later that summer. As his replacement, Marion persuaded MGM to cast Beery after seeing him eat spaghetti in the studio's cafeteria, saying later that something about the way he ate reminded her of the convicts she had interviewed at San Quentin.
Beery was a veteran of 183 silent movies, including The Lost World, Robin Hood, Beggars of Life and Buster Keaton's first feature length movie, Three Ages, but Paramount had dropped his contract as part of a wholesale purge at the end of the Silent Era and he hadn't worked in a film in more than a year.
Marion's choice turns out to have been inspired.
Although the story centers on Chester Morris, who must find personal redemption without betraying his fellow inmates, it's Beery who has the pivotal role. He must be menacing enough to present a very real danger while being charming enough to give the audience a rooting interest in his fate. Beery essays the part brilliantly, turning Butch into a hulking, conniving, yet likable sociopath who often seems perplexed at his own brutality.
"I shouldn't have slipped her that ant poison," Butch laments while reminiscing about his late love Sadie, "I should have just batted her in the jaw."
Beery is solid in his first few scenes, particularly when Montgomery's Marlowe gets off on the wrong foot by complaining to a prison guard that Butch has stolen his cigarettes, then takes command of the movie in a sequence that has been imitated and parodied many times since. At dinner in the prison mess hall, he explodes "I can't eat that stuff!" throws his plate, bangs his cup and starts a riot.
That a scene copied by everyone from James Cagney to Leslie Nielsen still holds its power nearly eighty later is a testament to Beery's ability as an actor.
The scene is typical of the movie as a whole, capturing the boredom and desperation of prison life, the casual cruelty, the lack of hope and purpose, yet so well-told and acted, that despite having a point to make, it never becomes a chore to watch.
The Big House is quite subversive, I think, as a study of the society that created such a prison system. The prison warden (Lewis Stone) is passive and ineffectual, rich kid Marlowe turns out to be a cowardly weasel, while two hardened criminals are strong, likeable and sympathetic.
The movie is also an indictment of a system that warehouses men in cells not much wider than Butch's shoulders without regard to the effect a sociopath such as Butch will have on a weak naif such as Marlowe, turning the later into a hardened criminal, a victim or both.
As Butch tells Marlowe on first meeting, "I'll learn you a lot of things before we're through with you in here." You just have to wonder whether they are the sorts of things we really want anyone to know.
During his years in Hollywood, Beery developed a reputation of being difficult to work with. Child actor Jackie Cooper (The Champ) called him "the most sadistic person I have ever known," and Jean Harlow, his co-star in Dinner at Eight, detested him. Louise Brooks, on the other hand, who could be scathing in her dismissal of those she didn't like, adored Beery, saying that while he was "the meanest bear alive on the set," he was "a honey bear" off it.
Maybe he was all of those things. Who knows.
In any event, after earning an Oscar nomination for The Big House, Beery co-starred with Marie Dressler in her Oscar-winning vehicle Min and Bill, won an Oscar of his own playing a broken-down boxer in The Champ, played key roles in Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight, and was unforgettable as Long John Silver in 1934's Treasure Island. He worked steadily right up until his death of a heart attack in 1949 at the age of sixty-four.
"When my time is up," Machine Gun Butch boasts in The Big House, "I'll still be standing on my feet." The same could have been said of Beery himself.
I have to confess, before I started writing this blog, I had never heard of Anita Page, but now that I've seen half a dozen of her movies and read a bit about her, it's clear that she was just as cute as the proverbial bug's ear and no doubt somebody you would have been lucky to know. Certainly Herschel House must have thought so—the Navy pilot was married to her for fifty-four years, until his death in 1991.
Mostly Page played sweet innocents who found themselves in a melodramatic load of trouble (see, for example, Our Modern Maidens), but her turn as a self-absorbed, gold-digging be-yotch in Our Dancing Daughters was unforgettable and should have presaged a longer career. Louis B. Mayer, a warped frustrated old man, and Irving Thalberg, a warped frustrated young man, saw to it that it didn't.
Well, you take what you can get.
She appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton, Clark Gable, Walter Huston and Joan Crawford; starred in the first movie musical (best picture winner The Broadway Melody); and most importantly, received a Katie nomination. (Make that Katie Award!—The Mythical Monkey (2/11/10)
She'll not soon be forgotten.
Those of you with sharp eyes and long memories are no doubt scratching your heads to see Anita Page listed here as the best supporting actress of 1928-29. Didn't I choose Olga Baclanova in Docks of New York that year? Well, yes. Yes, I did. But because of a technical glitch we in the trade call "changing my mind," I'm going back in time and choosing Anita Page instead.
The fact is, Anita Page's performance in Our Dancing Daughters still resonates for me nearly a year later whereas Olga Baclanova, despite a fine effort, has pretty much slipped the surly bonds of my memory, the only Katie winner I can say that of.
Moreover, Page's performance resonates with other movie fans as well, showing up more often on other "Alternate Oscar" lists than any other actress in the mythical supporting category for 1928-29 (supporting performances wouldn't be officially recognized until 1936).
Anyway, I have cobbled together a short essay about Anita Page from everything I've written about her over the course of the year and substituted it for the original essay on Best Supporting Actress of 1928-29, leaving the original essay about Olga Baclanova as an addendum.
Sue me.—The Mythical Monkey (2/10/10)
I have to confess, before I started writing this blog, I had never heard of Anita Page, but now that I've seen half a dozen of her movies and read a bit about her, it's clear that she was just as cute as the proverbial bug's ear and no doubt somebody you would have been lucky to know. Certainly Herschel House must have thought so—the Navy pilot was married to her for fifty-four years, until his death in 1991.
Mostly Page played sweet innocents who found themselves in a melodramatic load of trouble (see, for example, Our Modern Maidens), but her turn in Our Dancing Daughters as a self-absorbed, gold-digging be-yotch who tricks Joan Crawford's millionaire boyfriend into marrying her was unforgettable and should have presaged a longer career. Louis B. Mayer, a warped frustrated old man, and Irving Thalberg, a warped frustrated young man, saw to it that it didn't.
Well, you take what you can get.
Our Dancing Daughters was the first movie written specifically for Joan Crawford and it made her a star. It's the story of a rich, wild girl (Crawford) with an addiction to short dresses and the Charleston who loses the love of her life to an even richer, wilder girl (Page, also in a star-making role), all while soaking up Jazz and bootleg booze in fabulous art Deco palaces that could only have existed on the set of an MGM movie. None of this is meant to be taken seriously—just another Hollywood studio clucking its tongue at girls gone wild even as it exploited the phenomenon to rake in box office bucks.
What's not to like?
Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.
In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
"Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said years later. "I say that because I did the acting. Joan Crawford danced her way through it. I acted my way through it."
Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age flapper phenomenon. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever. Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.
Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was infatuated with the young actress.
"Are you starting to believe your own publicity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.
"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"
Our Dancing Daughters is one of those odd silent-sound hybrids of the very early sound era. Made not long after The Jazz Singer, the film has a soundtrack, including several prominently featured songs, but no dialogue, only title cards. I actually find this approach preferable to early talkies such as The Broadway Melody where, for example, Anita Page's dialogue competes with the rustling of her own dress.
Fortunately, sound technology improved rapidly over the course of a year.
MGM's The Broadway Melody, billed as the first "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" musical, was the top grossing movie of 1929 as well as the first sound picture to win the Academy Award for best picture, and further cemented sound's commercial future. The Broadway Melody was the top box office movie of 1929 and also featured "You Were Meant For Me" and "Give My Regards To Broadway."
Douglas Shearer out of necessity invented the concept of the "playback"—pre-recording a song that performers would then dance and lip-synch to—when the choreography on a huge dance number that had already been performed and recorded was deemed unsuitable. Rather than bring the orchestra back to the sound stage, Shearer figured out how to reuse the sound from the previous take, and the cast performed the dance number with its new choreography to a playback of the song. This technique became the industry standard for decades.
"I thought Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said later, "but Broadway Melody was Bessie Love's. I love good English, and I hated saying things like, 'Gee, ain't it elegant?' In my opinion, silents were much better than talkies. One thing you could have was mood music, which you could have playing throughout your scene to inspire you. The trouble with talkies was, they let you have the music, but they'd stop it when you had to talk, and that was always a let-down for me."
After The Broadway Melody, Page made two more movies with Joan Crawford, and appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton and Clark Gable.
Her final movie for MGM was 1932's Prosperity, starring Marie Dressler and Polly Moran. On the outs with studio head Louis B. Mayer after twice refusing to sleep with him (the second proposition made in the presence of Page's mother), Page served out the remaining years of her MGM contract on loan to poverty row studios, making such low-budget bombs as Jungle Bride and Hitch Hike To Heaven. It was an ignominious end for an actress who just a couple of years before had been second only to Greta Garbo as the studio's top draw.
Page left Hollywood and married Navy flyer Herschel House in January 1937. After his death, she began to make films again, mostly low-budget fare such as The Crawling Brain and Witchcraft XI. On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Page received a standing ovation at a special screening of The Broadway Melody. She was last surviving attendee of the first Oscar ceremony and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight.
(Original essay follows):
For the best supporting actress award, I've nominated a trio of superficially similar actresses—each blonde, beautiful, at the peak of their careers in 1928 or 1929, two playing hookers, the third playing a heartless gold digger—but who arrived on and departed from the Hollywood stage by very different paths. All of them turned in tiptop performances during what proved to be the last year when silent movies still had an outside chance of finding an audience and I'm sorry their careers, which cracked up for a wide variety of reasons, weren't longer or more celebrated.
The most visible of the bunch, at least at the time, was no doubt Anita Page whom I've nominated here for her performance as a gold digger who tricks Joan Crawford's millionaire boyfriend into marrying her in the Jazz Age flapper picture, Our Dancing Daughters. Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.
In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age phenomenon of young girls gone wild. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever.
Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.
Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was reportedly infatuated with the young actress.
"Are you starting to believe your own publicity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.
"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"
On the other hand, the least visible of my trio of nominees was Mary Nolan—and apparently she wanted it that way. Earlier in the decade Nolan, whose real name was Imogen Robertson, had been a Ziegfeld girl performing under the stage name "Bubbles Wilson." But she had the misfortune to fall in love with married comedian Frank Tinney who routinely abused her and finally beat her so savagely, she landed in the hospital.
She also landed in the tabloids, which battered her reputation nearly as savagely.
Robertson/Wilson fled the United States, and after two years working in the German film industry, returned to work under the name Mary Nolan. In Tod Browning's West Of Zanzibar, she plays a victim as ill-used as Nolan was in real life. Lon Chaney is crippled in a quarrel and takes revenge on Nolan, believing her to be the child of his late wife and her lover, not realizing she is in fact his own flesh and blood. First he forces Nolan to work in a brothel. Then he arranges for cannibals to burn her alive. Then he really gets mad.
Either of these actresses would be fine choices for a Katie but I'm reserving the award for the third beautiful blonde in this trio, Olga Baclanova, who co-starred in one of the best movies of the year, Josef von Sternberg's The Docks Of New York.
You might recall that I mentioned her as a potential supporting actress nominee for 1927-28 for her performance as a kinky countess with a fetish for the disfigured Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. In The Docks Of New York she plays Lou, an abandoned wife making ends meet as a prostitute in a waterfront bar.
Two of Hollywood's most successful writers, Jules Furthman and John Monk Saunders, wrote this story in the style of Eugene O'Neill, with all the action taking place in one evening and the following morning. A sailor on shore leave (George Bancroft) pulls a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) out of New York's harbor and over the course of an evening, takes a liking to her and proposes marriage.
It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, an early stab at Pretty Woman, say, but everyone involved handles the story soberly and realistically and the movie reminds me more than anything of O'Neill's Anna Christie which would be adapted the following year as a vehicle for Greta Garbo's first talkie. Baclanova in particular breathes life into what could have been a stock character, playing Lou as a hardened cynic when plying her trade in the dive bar that sees most of the movie's action but as a beaten down survivor in private, defeated and without illusions.
"Do you think he can make you decent by marryin' you?" she asks Compson after hearing of Bancroft's proposal. "Until I got married, I was decent!"
Lou surprises herself and us with a pivotal act of violence in the film's third act that reveals just how much her estranged husband's thoughtless cruelty still hurts her.
Soon after this film, director von Sternberg would enter into the cinematic (and personal) relationship for which he is best remembered, the six films he made with Marlene Dietrich. These movies, while highly-regarded by cinephiles and showcasing some of Dietrich's best work, were increasingly characterized by wretched excess and a voyeuristic interest in Dietrich (Literally. In The Scarlet Empress, for example, the royal wedding night consists of the groom watching the bride through a peephole) that's inaccessible to most audiences.
While The Docks Of New York is not as visually interesting or cinematic as von Sternberg's later work, it's more moving and from my perspective more worthy of attention. Here, the director was still in touch with the needs and interests of his audience, still trying to tell a story, still trying to connect with real universal human emotions. I think it's possibly the best work of his career.
As for Baclanova and my other nominees, all three were pretty much out of the movies by 1936.
Anita Page, who only just passed away last year at the age of 98, said late in life that her career was unfairly sabotaged when she refused to sleep with producer Irving Thalberg and studio chief Louis B. Mayer (hopefully in response to separate propositions and not as part of some twisted, resentment-fueled three-way). She left Hollywood in 1936, but came out of retirement a few years ago to take small parts in a few low-budget horror films, including one, Frankenstein Rising, which is listed on the Internet Movie Database as being in post-production and due out later this year.
Mary Nolan made a handful of fine movies at the end of the Silent Era, including Desert Nights with John Gilbert, but she didn't adjust well to the demands of sound and was soon out of work. She developed a heroin habit and died penniless at the age of forty-two.
When talkies became the norm, Olga Baclanova's heavy Russian accent limited her to "exotic" parts and B-pictures. She made one more unforgettable movie, playing the cruel circus performer Cleopatra in the cult-film Freaks, the role for which she is probably now best known. She returned to the Broadway stage in 1933 and had at least one big hit, Claudia, which ran for two years. Baclanova returned to Hollywood briefly in 1943 to make a screen version of her Broadway hit and then retired from the movies permanently. She died in 1974.
Note: I want to mention one other actress, Dorothy Mackaill, who was blonde, beautiful and turned in a well-received supporting performance as a tough-as-nails bad girl in 1928.
Once thought to be lost, a lone copy of The Barker languishes in UCLA's Film and Television Archive, unavailable on VHS or DVD. The handful of people who have seen it cite Dorothy Mackaill's performance as possibly the best of the year and certainly the best and most complex in this Oscar-nominated movie. As of this writing, at least, I'll have to take their word for it.
If you're in the mood for a road trip, The Barker will be shown at Noon on August 8, 2009, as part of the annual Capitolfest film festival at the Capitol Theater in Rome, N.Y.
Striving always for balance in our coverage of the ongoing feud between silent film greats Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks, we here at the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards present a movie poster of the latter's nominated feature, The Iron Mask.
Director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has called 1928 the greatest year in the history of movies, which is definitely saying something. If we expand the time frame a bit to include both 1927 and 1928, I will agree that he's on to something.
Between January 1, 1927 and the end of 1928, more than a dozen films were released which might reasonably make a list of the best movies ever made, including The General, Metropolis, Napoleon (released too early in 1927 to qualify for this year's Katies), Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, The Crowd, The Man Who Laughs, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, The Circus, Wings; Laugh, Clown, Laugh and a handful of late 1928 releases, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, The Wind, The Cameraman, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Docks Of New York and The Wedding March (eligible for next year's Katies). Greta Garbo was never more popular, Gloria Swanson was still doing great work, Emil Jannings hadn't joined the Nazi party. Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish gave the best performances of their careers. Directors Murnau, Chaplin, Keaton, Lang and Dreyer were at or near their peaks, and Lubitsch was emerging as the next great director. Movie audiences wouldn't see such an outpouring of quality again until 1939, the year most film historians fix as the best ever, and it's clear, at least in retrospect, that silent movies had reached their highest ever level of artistic achievement and were poised for even greater breakthroughs.
And yet, once The Jazz Singer hit theaters, studios couldn't pay audiences to see anything but talkies. Silent movies were better than ever but for the audiences of the time, they might as well have never been made. It's as if the "Mona Lisa" were hanging in Louvre unseen while art lovers rushed past it to crowd around a McDonald's placemat.
There wouldn't again be such a disconnect between quality and box office receipts until the present age.
Commercially speaking—in the long run, the only language Hollywood speaks—silent movies were dead and there was no going back.
Unfortunately, the new sound technology was primitive, relying on large, immobile cameras and unreliable microphones that glued actors in place and returned movies to that place from whence they had just escaped, the stage-bound theater. It took about five years for sound technology to become workable enough for directors to move the camera again and more than a decade for Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland to remember that they could.
In the meantime, in case you need reminding, this is my list of movies that I consider the must-see movies of 1927-28. Unlike my list of Twenty Silent Movies To Cut Your Teeth On, not all of these movies are equally accessible to a viewer unfamiliar with silent movies, but I do believe every one of them is worth the time and effort is you are so inclined.
The Circus—Charlie Chaplin's comedy of a tramp who finds love and work in the circus
The Crowd—King Vidor's gritty tale of the American Dream turned nightmare
Laugh, Clown, Laugh—Lon Chaney as a man destroyed by love
The Man Who Laughs—a macabre love story about a man with a face that inspired Heath Ledger's Joker
The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—a bittersweet romantic comedy about a prince who falls for a commoner
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans—my pick for the best movie of the year, about a marriage in crisis
Wings—a rip-snorting war picture about World War I flying aces and the girl they left behind
All but two of these movies, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg and Wings, are available on DVD.
You might also check out Sadie Thompson, the 1928 Gloria Swanson-Lionel Barrymore movie based on Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain." Time hasn't been kind to the print and the last reel has been lost, but film historians reconstructed the ending with the use of still photographs and what remains is very good. Sadie Thompson earned Swanson an Oscar nomination, the first of three, and might have earned her and Barrymore (the latter in a supporting role) Katies for their work if I could have been more certain of what I was seeing. Sadie Thompson is available on DVD.
What can I tell you? This whole business of handing out awards, even with eighty years of hindsight, is a frustratingly subjective business. It only gets worse the closer to the present we get.
While I've been busy working on essays about F.W. Murnau, Jean Hersholt and Clara Bow, as well as researching the Katie awards for 1928-29, two of my most famous readers, Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks, have been engaged in a bit of verbal smackdown in the comments section. Fairbanks claims Chaney "couldn't carry my saddlebags," while Chaney says Fairbanks "couldn't act [his] way out of a paper bag."
I invite all my faithful readers to weigh in on this most vital debate.
The Tale Of The Tape:
Lon Chaney
Birth Name: Leonidas Frank Chaney
Nickname: Man Of A Thousand Faces
Trademark: Master of early makeup techniques
Born: April 1, 1883
Height: 5'9"
Films: 161, including The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom Of The Opera (1925) and Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928)
Katie Awards: 1 win for Best Actor of 1927-28, 1 nomination for Best Actor Of The Silent Era
Other Awards: twice commemorated on U.S. stamps; first actor to be made honorary member of U.S. Marine Corps for his portrayal of a drill instructor in Tell It To The Marines (1926)
Other Achievements: directed 6 movies, wrote 6
Marriages: 2
Famous Children: Lon Chaney, Jr.
Salary: $3,750 per week The Unholy Three (1930)
Douglas Fairbanks
Birth Name: Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman
Born: May 23, 1883
Trademark: Stunt work
Height: 5'9"
Films: 49, including The Mark Of Zorro (1920), The Thief Of Bagdad (1924) and The Gaucho (1927)
Katie Awards: 1 nomination for Best Actor Of The Silent Era
Other Awards: Honorary Oscar (1940); Photoplay's Medal of Honor for Robin Hood (1922)
Other Achievements: co-founded United Artists, first president of AMPAS, produced 24 movies, wrote 18, directed 2.
Marriages: 3, including to Katie Award winner Mary Pickford
Famous Children: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Salary: $300,000 for Reaching For The Moon (1930)
Analysis: The film record indicates Chaney had tremendous upper body strength and likely could have carried anybody's saddlebags, let alone Fairbanks's. On the other hand, I have yet to see any movie where Fairbanks began a scene in a bag, so I can't say definitively whether he ever acted his way out of one. He did make one movie with Mary Pickford, though, 1929's The Taming Of The Shrew, so draw your own conclusions.
My personal opinion? A well-rounded film collection contains the work of both.
Keep it clean, gents.
Earning the nickname "The Man of a Thousand Faces" with his skill as an actor and as a makeup artist, Lon Chaney had a gift for making the grotesque look real then imbuing his creations with a humanity that reaches right off the screen. Better known for his roles in the silent versions of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and The Phantom Of The Opera, Chaney's performance in the tragic love story Laugh, Clown, Laugh may very well be the best of his career and is my choice for the best performance by actor for the year 1927-28.
Laugh, Clown, Laugh is the story of Tito Beppi, an aging circus performer who raises an abandoned child as his own only to find to his horror and his shame that when she grows to young womanhood he is falling hopelessly in love with her. Tito wrestles with feelings of guilt and, despite his enormous professional success, falls into a deep depression. The girl (played by a fourteen year old Loretta Young a full twenty years before she won an Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter) is unaware of Tito's feelings and complicates matters by falling in love with a close friend of her stepfather.
That by the end of the film the three participants of this unhappy love triangle are motivated by genuine affection and self- sacrificing concern for one another makes the tragic denouement all the more poignant.
Norma Desmond claimed silent stars acted with their faces—Lon Chaney really did. He had to. Often he was buried under layers of make-up and prosthetics and with the limitations of silent film that robbed him of a voice and a soundtrack to cue a mood, he was reduced to telling stories with his eyes. That he was able to convey deeply-felt transformations of character with little more than a look is a testament to his hard work and talent.
Here, Chaney moves from portraying the energy and contentment of a consummate professional in love with his work to the tears and self-loathing of a man in love with the girl he has raised as a daughter and is somehow able to make this troubled and troubling character sympathetic. It was the sort of delicate task he accomplished on film many times.
Years later, Loretta Young said of Chaney, who took great pains to help her with her first starring role, "I shall be beholden to that sensitive, sweet man until I die."
The same year Laugh, Clown, Laugh arrived in theaters, Chaney also starred in London After Midnight, a highly-regarded vampire thriller that may have been an even better showcase for Chaney's talent. Unfortunately, London After Midnight was destroyed in a fire at an MGM warehouse in 1967, an all-too-common end for many Silent Era films.
In 2002, film historian Rick Schmidlin produced a truncated form of London After Midnight for Turner Classic Movies from a series of still photographs and the film's screenplay. I've seen this version and while it's almost impossible to judge the movie itself from what's left, nothing I saw dissuaded me from my opinion that Chaney's work was the best of 1927-28.
After Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Chaney made one sound picture, a commercially-successful remake of one of his silent classics, The Unholy Three, and was slated to star in a number of other sound movies, including Tod Browning's classic Dracula and the Oscar-winning prison drama, The Big House. Shortly after his sound debut, however, he died of cancer. He was only 47.
Over the course of a film career that spanned eighteen years and 161 movies, Chaney developed into one of the greatest actors of the Silent Era. In addition to his film appearances, Chaney also directed six movies. In 1957, James Cagney starred in a movie about Chaney's life, appropriately named Man Of A Thousand Faces.
After Chaney's death, his son, Lon Chaney, Jr., carried on the acting tradition and appeared in nearly 200 movies and television shows, including a starring role in the 1939 classic Of Mice And Men.
A Side Note: It's easy to forget that before Hollywood began to censor itself in mid-1934 with the enforcement of the Production Code, movies were often as explicit and frank as anything we're accustomed to seeing now. In Laugh, Clown, Laugh, there's a scene where an aristocrat (Nils Asther) kneels to remove Loretta Young's stocking and kiss her bare foot, a scene of raw sensuality that helps explain both why he is obsessed with the girl and why she finds him simultaneously fascinating and repulsive.
I was reminded of scenes in other pre-Code movies I've seen recently—Clara Bow flashing her bare breasts in Wings, a woman breast-feeding a baby in The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, and Joan Blondell's tendency to strip down to her bra and panties in practically everything she starred in—scenes which serve as proof for those who need it that baby boomers didn't invent sex at Woodstock.
As I will eventually cover, the Production Code would soon forbid scenes such as those in Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Films from the pre-Code era would be bowdlerized or buried and, in either case, forgotten. It would take a later generation to reintroduce explicit imagery into the movies and then congratulate itself for inventing what had already been perfected—art, and its Siamese twin, exploitation.
PICTURE: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox)
ACTOR: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)
ACTRESS: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)
DIRECTOR: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Clara Bow (Wings)
SCREENPLAY: King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd)
SPECIAL AWARDS: The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin) (Best Picture-Comedy); Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer) (Best Actor-Comedy or Musical); Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd) (Best Actress-Drama); George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography)
MUST-SEE MOVIES OF 1927-28: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans; The Man Who Laughs; The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg; The Circus; Wings; The Crowd; Laugh, Clown, Laugh
The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing—and after plowing through dozens of silent movies in the past couple of weeks, I can't say I blame them. You forget how much information you process through your ears and how much pleasure you can get from a human voice—at least until you do without for a while.
Only one problem with The Jazz Singer: it's a terrible movie. Really. I mean, yeah, being able to put sound in a movie was a tremendous breakthrough and audiences ate it up with a spoon, but beyond it's importance now as a historical footnote, I can't recommend it.
As for everything else that was released between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928 (I'm following Oscar's convention of straddling the two years), the Academy actually did a pretty good job of distinguishing the wheat from the chaff even if the awards were largely parceled out as a result of insider politicking and studio manipulation.
Wings (Best Production) and Sunrise (Unique and Artistic Production) won the two best picture awards, Emil Jannings was a well-respected actor and won for The Way Of All Flesh and The Last Command (remember, the award in those days was handed out for a body of work rather than a specific picture), and best actress winner, Janet Gaynor, was the star of the best movie of the year, Sunrise.
There were two best director trophies that year, one for comedy, one for drama. Lewis Milestone, who would win another Oscar for directing the classic All Quiet On The Western Front, won for the former; Frank Borzage, another two time winner, won the latter.
All respectable choices. With the benefit of more than eighty years worth of hindsight, however, I think the Academy could have done better.
That's where the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards come in.
I've done away with the splitting of categories—one director instead of two, one best picture award instead of the unexplained and unexplainable Best Production and Unique and Artistic Production awards.
I'm also doing away with Academy's habit of spreading the award for writing across a wide variety of ever-changing categories, including best original screenplay, best adapted screenplay, motion picture story, story and screenplay, screenplay and even this year's award for "title writing." With the Katies, it's one award, Best Screenplay, regardless of whether it's based on another source, wholly original or, as is often the case, a thinly disguised rip-off of last year's popular movie.
As I did with the career achieve- ment awards for the Silent Era, I will explain my choices in a series of essays over the next couple of weeks.
I've also included here a list of what I think are the must-see movies of the year, and will include a must-see list for each year I hand out awards.
Finally, I have included choices for best supporting actor and actress even though the Academy did not create those categories until 1936. I felt I otherwise would have ended up ignoring too many performances worth recognition. Besides, it gave me another excuse to see even more movies—and what could be wrong with that?
Notes: I don't have an official Fun-Stupid movie pick for 1927-28, but two might fit the bill: Wings is overly long for a silent movie and a bit corny but it also has at least an hour's worth of some of the best stunt flying and aerial dogfights ever filmed; and Charlie Chaplin's The Circus features a lot of physical comedy and acrobatic stunts and is readily available.
I've put together a list of twenty silent movies that I like and that I think you will also like. The list is hardly ex- haustive, more like a sampler. Silent movies can be difficult and rather than give you a list of fifty movies that mixes titles aimed at both devotees and a general audience, I put together a list of movies any one of which would be a good one to start with if you're a novice thinking about taking the plunge.
Most of these movies are in the public domain and are available in their entirety on YouTube—a cheap way to test the waters. You might have to search for all eleven parts of The Phantom Of The Opera, for example, but it's there.
The best place to check out silent film without a heavy commitment of time and money is Turner Classic Movies, what Washington Post critic Tom Shales calls the classiest network on cable t.v. Every Sunday night at midnight (Eastern daylight savings time), TCM opens the vault and shows a classic from the silent era.In fact, on Sunday, April 19, 2009 (okay, April 20 for you East coast purists), TCM is showing one of the greatest of all silent movies, Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. Set the TiVo or the DVR and watch it at your leisure. I can tell you, if you don't like this one, you're not going to like anything else on this list.
Think of it as a nice test. Besides, if you've got basic cable, you're paying for TCM anyway. You might as well take advantage of it.
If you're really interested in silent movies, I recommend you visit Silent Era: The Silent Film Website. It's as comprehensive a site as you're likely to find on the subject of silent films—or anything else, for that matter.
For what it's worth, my list of silent movies to cut your teeth on, in chronological order:1920 - The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (German Expressionism meets The Twilight Zone)
1921 - The Kid (Charlie Chaplin rescues an orphan)
1922 - Nosferatu (the vampire classic that makes lupner tremble)
1923 - Safety Last! (Harold Lloyd climbs a building)
1923 - Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton stumbles into a Hatfield-McCoy-like feud)
1924 - The Thief Of Bagdad (Douglas Fairbanks's best swashbuckler)
1924 - Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton dreams he is a great detective)
1925 - The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin eats his shoe)
1925 - The Phantom Of The Opera (the best Lon Chaney movie)
1925 - The Freshman (a naive Harold Lloyd goes to college)
1925 - The Big Parade (blood and romance during World War I)
1925 - Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein's oft-imitated classic of the Russian revolution)
1925 - Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ (the second best chariot race in movie history)
1926 - Flesh And The Devil (Garbo and Gilbert get it on)
1927 - The General (my pick as the best movie of the Silent Era)
1927 - Metropolis (an early science fiction classic)
1927 - Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (won the first Oscar)
1928 - Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Buster Keaton's last great movie)
1931 - City Lights (the Chaplin classic and the other obvious choice for best silent movie ever)
and
1936 - Modern Times (which is not silent at all, but if you've seen it, you know what I mean).
If you want a comedy, try Keaton or Chaplin, if you want a romance, go with Garbo, and if you want a little excitement, I'd suggest Nosferatu. Personally, I like them all.
Note: For various reasons, I left off several movies that others might consider essential: The Birth Of A Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), The Last Laugh (1924), Greed (1924), Napoleon (1927), and many others. You might want to try them some day, but I can't really recommend them if you are approaching silent movies for the first time.
Or let's put it this way: any of the movies on my must-see list is probably a good first silent movie. The ones I've left off the list, well, if one of them is your first silent movie, there's a good chance it will be your last silent movie.
And that would defeat the purpose of the list.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of Douglas Fairbanks, I thought I'd mention that today is Katie-Award winning actor Lon Chaney's birthday today. He is a robust 127.
