Overdue

It’s now been six months, I believe, since I posted a review to this blog. There are a lot of reasons, most of which are unimportant, why this is the case, but the gist of it is that maintaining this site no longer “sparks joy” as someone once said. It seems best to let it go rather than struggle.

I’m not going to take the site down, at least for now, though I am going to cancel my paid account which means those of you foolish enough to surf the internet without an adblocker will see the usual annoying crap from WordPress. I have already disabled comments on older posts, because moderating them was the biggest time waster for me, but you’ll have sixty days to respond to this one if you’re a fan and feel a need to say goodbye.

When I first started out blogging, I visited a lot of silent- and classic-movie blogs and observed the trend that many people start out posting daily, then slowly taper off until they “go dark,” permanently or just irregularly. I got the impression that the average blog lasts about five years before the author loses interest. That was ten years ago; maybe the norm has changed by now, either for the better or the worse. Either way, I made it nine-and-a-half years before burning out, and I’m chalking that up as a minor win. I also met some great people, mostly through the Classic Movie Blog Association, and learned a lot about early film, which was always the goal. If you’re reading this, I hope it’s because you enjoyed taking that ride with me.

Spiritualistic Photographer (1903)

A trick film from Georges Méliès that plays upon the fact that his magic shows are now entirely dependent on trick photography. Everyone knows there is nothing “spiritualistic” going on here – but it’s a fun ride nonetheless.

The backdrop to this movie looks like an old ruin or abbey of some kind, perhaps an appropriate atmosphere for spiritualism. Two stools are on either side of the stage, propping up a board, and there is an ornate picture frame visible in the background. A male assistant in modern dress comes out holding two signs – one in English, one in French – that serve as intertitles announcing the coming illusion. Then Méliès, in his magician’s outfit comes out and sets up the frame, placing a large sheet of paper inside. A female assistant is now produced, wearing one of the uniforms from “A Trip to the Moon.” She takes a bow, then steps up onto the plank, in front of the blank paper. Méliès places a brazier of burning coals beneath her her and gestures, causing her to become an image of herself on the paper. To demonstrate that she is now a two-dimensional image, Méliès removes the picture from the frame and places it on the floor. He then removes the frame, then picks up the paper, rolling it so the audience can no longer see the image. When he opens it, the real girl is once again standing there. He throws a fancier costume to her, which magically dresses her, and the two take their bows together.

What I liked about this film, which is little different from dozens of other Méliès trick films, is the fact that it claims to be about “photography,” although no camera or apparatus is visible. Our “spiritualistic” photographer simply gestures and uses magic to cause an image to appear and disappear. But we know that a camera was at work to make this possible – an invisible camera that serves as our point of view throughout the film. Méliès is winking at us with this one. Perhaps there is also a bit of a wink in the Star Films Catalog, which claims this movie was made “by a process only recently discovered.” Technically, I suppose, all motion picture photography qualified in 1903, but what seems to be at issue here is “a dissolving effect upon a background absolutely white.” To us, that just looks like yet another substitution splice, but for audiences in Méliès’s time, the few frames in which the image is halfway between living person and flat image was enough of a selling-point. The white background, which would seem to make it easier to do a dissolve (because there is nothing behind the dissolving image to match with) is also sold as a technical success. The ballyhoo around the technical wizardry, rather than the content, might be said to presage special effects films of later eras as well.

Director: Georges Méliès

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Georges Méliès, unknown

Run Time: 2 Min, 20 secs

You can watch it for free: here (no music) or here (with music).

Bucking Broadway (1917)

This early feature was directed by a very young man named John Ford, who we haven’t yet spent time with on this project. It’s a Western with comedic and melodramatic elements we’ve seen before, but with a remarkable visual acuity for a period when some folks were still locking a camera down and trying to simulate a proscenium experience.

Harry Carey is Buck Hoover, a typical idealized ranch hand who works for L.M. Wells and is in love with his daughter Helen, played by Molly Malone. He gives Molly a hand-whittled heart, telling her to send it to him if ever she is in trouble (someone alert Chekhov – I think I detect his gun here!). He builds a house, proposes, and then awkwardly asks her father for permission to marry her. Pa gives him a bit of a hard time, but happily approves. Meanwhile, a city fellow (Vester Pegg) comes to visit the ranch to inspect the horses for a buyer. The ranch hands make fun of him, but Helen is instantly charmed, and he wins over everyone’s approval when he’s able to tame a horse that has earned the nickname “the Cowboy Killer” due its violent refusal to be ridden. Plans are made for a big to-do at the house to announce Buck’s engagement to Helen, but she skips out with the city slicker, leaving a note to say farewell.

The Love Nest (1923)

Buster Keaton at the height of his powers was still willing to put together a solid two-reeler for release at a time when other hit slapstick comics were only putting out features. This one uses everything he’d learned to this point effectively and feels like a fully professional production from a man who’d only been in pictures for about six years.

This movie, like a lot of Keaton’s stories, begins with a breakup. Keaton’s girl (Virginia Fox) has dumped him and he decides to take a cruise around the world in his small boat, the “Cupid.” First, he writes her a long farewell note, closing with, “If you do not receive this letter, write me.” Weeks later, a bearded Keaton polishes off the last of his supplies mid-ocean and is only saved from death by starvation or thirst by being shanghaied by the whaling vessel “Love Nest,” whose captain (Joe Roberts) maintains strict discipline through frequent executions. Soon after Keaton is brought aboard, the steward accidentally burns his hand with hot coffee in a choppy sea, and that man is thrown overboard, shortly followed by a wreath the captain keeps a supply of in the life boat. Now, Keaton gets his job.

The Dog and His Various Merits (1908)

This short film from Pathé depicts various hard-working dogs at their labors. The movie could be seen as a kind of actuality or nature documentary, but really it is probably meant to entertain dog lovers.

The first animal is “a working dog.” This dog is put inside of a large wheel, like a hamster-wheel, and begins to run. The force of his running turns a crank, which presumably runs a machine of some sort on the other side of a wall. The next dog is “a beggar’s dog.” This dog pulls a cart which carries a man with no legs towards the camera. The beggar assists the dog by pushing the ground with his hands. Next, the more traditional “shepherd’s dog” patrols a large flock of sheep. Actually, if you pay attention, you’ll see there are two dogs – one small and brown, the other larger and white, and they “herd” the still larger sheep by barking when they start to go astray. Towards the end of the clip, the sheep are running quite fast to get away from the dogs. Finally, we see “a milkman’s dog,” which is pulling a cart with a large container of milk on top. We see him hitched to the cart by a boy while a woman secures the milk. The boy leads the dog to a house where another woman holds out a pitcher to the boy, who fills it with milk from a ladle while the dog sits.

It’s interesting that the “merits” of all of the dogs shown is their ability to provide cheap labor rather than companionship. There is some sign of affection between some of the owners and their animals, although no one actually pets his or her dog in the course of this film. This is a fairly simplistic movie for 1908: it’s just a sequence of shots strung together with forward-facing intertitles. There are some edits within scenes: we go from a long shot of the “working dog” and its wheel to a closer shot of the dog running, and the hitching sequence of the “milkman’s dog” cuts to the scene with the woman and the pitcher. These techniques were pretty well established by the time, however, and their use here is more typical than innovative. It also appears that this movie was made in France, but presumably distributed worldwide – it’s interesting to speculate how an American audience might have responded to its depiction of milkmen or beggars.

Director: Unknown

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Various unknown dogs and dog owners.

Run Time: 2 min, 10 secs.

You can watch it for free: here.

Broncho Billy’s Squareness (1913)

This fairly typical “Broncho Billy” Western may be missing some footage, or at least an intertitle or two, but is nevertheless fairly easy to follow. It shows the kind of simple storytelling and morality that early Westerns largely dealt with.

The movie begins by establishing a Western town, through the simple expedient of showing a handful of extras in Western garb sitting on the stoop of a building, dressed with hand-chalked signs that indicate a general store. A man with a gunbelt hauls a barrel and checks a pocket watch, letting us know that the stage is late. We then cut to G.M. Anderson, as Billy, snoozing under a blanket in the woods somewhere. Back at the store, two travelers are showing off the expensive locket that one woman wears. Billy mounts his horse and rides offscreen. Finally, the man from before jumps up and signals that the stage has arrived, and the entire crowd follows him into a new shot, where the stage patiently waits while they load their luggage and climb aboard – apparently the whole town has somewhere to go today. We see a shot of the stagecoach at a distance, crossing the screen from right to left, and then a reversal, showing us the Billy is following its progress with interest.

Suddenly, we cut to a new character coming out of a shack and mounting his horse, and then we see Billy creeping through the underbrush. Four men are tracking him – the lead with a star on his vest. Seeing Billy, that man fires his gun and Billy loses his hat. He darts off and they pursue him through some fairly thick nitrate damage. We soon see Billy riding his horse in a gallop, evidently making good his getaway. An intertitle tells us “The sheriff gives up the search” (although future events suggest the opposite). The next thing we see is the sheriff talking to the woman who had the locket earlier, but she does not wear it now and he goes to another shack and knocks on the door. Another woman comes out and she is wearing the locket! The sheriff puts out his hand and she takes it off and gives it to him. We now see Billy emerge from a shack with a sign labeling it as a saloon, and then the sheriff goes to question a man who is grinding coffee. That man becomes angry and a deputy restrains him from hitting the sheriff. The sheriff shows him the locket and he becomes frightened and nods his head several times before the sheriff arrests him. We now see Billy sit down in the woods and pull a small bag out of his shirt, which he opens to count the contents. The sheriff, deputy, and prisoner ride past him and he looks concerned. The next scene shows them locking the prisoner in jail and a jump cut shows Billy in the same location, turning over the pouch from his shirt. The sheriff looks surprised, locks Billy up and frees the first prisoner, who shakes hands with Billy on the way out. He then embraces the girl who had given the locket to the sheriff.

As I said above, it’s pretty obvious what is missing here. Billy robbed the stage, got away, presumably hid out with the young couple and give the girl his locket as a token of appreciation. The young man didn’t want to squeal on Billy, so was willing to take the fall even though he hadn’t done anything, and Billy couldn’t let that stand so he turned himself in. The movie as it exists is about seven minutes long, about half of a reel of film, so it seems likely that it was damaged in the middle and re-edited as best it could be for preservation. It stood out to me how well the world was represented through minimal imagery. The Western town is implied by close shots of the fronts of buildings that don’t let us see the real world in which the film was made. The outdoor shots are sometimes more generous (especially the one of the stagecoach in motion), but still we see little besides trees and dirt roads. The only place this really fails is in the jail, which is supposed to have stone walls, but they look very fake. Otherwise, the story works fine with just a sketchy location. It’s also interesting to note that Broncho Billy is an outlaw in this piece, although he still lives by a code that won’t let an innocent man suffer for his actions. If all Western outlaws had been like that, sheriffs would have had it pretty easy!

Director: G.M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson

Camera: Unknown

Starring: G.M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson, Marguerite Clayton, True Boardman, Fred Church, Evelyn Selbie, Victor Potel

Run Time: 7 min

I have not found a free version of this film on the Internet. If you do, please comment.

Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter (1904)

An incomplete fragment which shows Georges Méliès using advanced camera techniques years before others would claim to have invented them. There isn’t enough here to draw much of a review from, but it still demonstrates a bit of Méliès’s style and whimsy.

We see a man, almost certainly Méliès himself in disguise, in closeup, puffing on a cigar with a wild look in his eyes. He has a wild disheveled beard and hair, and he draws a puff and blows it out with evident satisfaction. The entire clip lasts only about eight seconds, just long enough to see that character and form an impression of him.

This is not the first use of the closeup that I’ve seen in this project. Méliès had used it, in connection with “zooming” the camera (by moving it closer to the subject, for example in “The Man with the Rubber Head” (1901). Even earlier, the actors in the famous/infamous movie “The Kiss” (1896) are in a close-in two-shot in order to make their kissing more visible. Still, such shots were still very unusual in the early twentieth century, and most of Méliès’s movies framed an entire stage, from floor to ceiling, with room for actors to move about without the camera have to move to track them or miss anything they were doing, from their head to their feet. This movie fragment confirms that it wasn’t that no one had ever thought of doing this, it simply wasn’t desired most of the time. The opportunity to see Méliès acting with his face in close-up gives us a better sense of his presence as an actor. In these few seconds he comes across as the sort of whimsical, silly, but dedicated performer that his body of work describes. The short description in the Star Films Catalog suggests that most of this film was just a standard trick film, centered around a man unable to find a match, but conjuring a doppelganger of himself to provide one, so this may have been a concluding shot, similar to the famous ending shot of “The Great Train Robbery” (1903).

Director: Georges Méliès

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Georges Méliès

Run Time: 8 secs (extant)

You can watch it for free: here.

A Lover’s Lost Control (1915)

Syd Chaplin, in the year after his more famous brother’s departure from Keystone, attempted to build a slapstick career of his own at the studio with his character of “Gussle.” Running through similar situations to those faced by the Little Tramp, how does Syd fair as an early comedian? This short is one example.

The movie begins by showing us Gussle and his wife, played by Phyllis Allen, arriving by auto in front of a department store. The exterior shot gives us a look at Los Angeles of the day, with Syd’s car looking a bit antiquated compared to the sedan across the street – which is parked behind a horse & buggy, reminding us of the transitional nature of technology in the teens. He and Phyllis indulge a few pratfalls before moving on to the main center of action. Gussle, like Charlie, wears ill-fitting clothes and carries a cane. His mustache is small, but it does have small handlebars that cover more of his lip. His wife approaches the counter in what seems to be the ladies’ underthings area of the store while he tries to hit on shopgirls and customers. In the process, he gets a rather suggestive item caught on his cane and tries to conceal the mannequin’s less-dressed state. Phyllis becomes annoyed with him and boxes his ear before dragging him back to the counter by it.

Oracle of Delphi (1903)

This short from Georges Méliès depicts a supernatural event in an exotic time and place, but really boils down to a typical trick film using a few well-established gimmicks with a new set design to distinguish it from others.

The scene is that of a Pylon or temple in Egyptian style, with hieroglyphics visible in the background and two stone sphinxes set to either side of the door. A man in Egyptian-style dress approaches with a large set of keys and opens the temple doors, and two women bearing a litter with a large ornate chest on top follow him and wait while he presents the offering to the temple. He locks the door and departs, but another man has been watching, crouched behind one of the sphinxes, and he now breaks into the temple to steal the chest. He doesn’t get far, however, before he falls to the ground in terror, looking at the temple door as the image of a bearded man fades into existence. This man, evidently the Oracle, points his finger at the thief, who returns the chest. Then the two sphinxes become women and they restrain the thief while his head turns into a donkey’s head. The sphinxes return to their normal state as statues and the Oracle disappears, but the man is still cursed as the movie ends.

Méliès seems to have been a bit confused in his mythology here. The Oracle of Delphi was a woman, not a man, and more importantly her shrine was in Greece, not Egypt. Ancient Egypt was very important for Greek mysticism, especially for followers of Pythagoras, so I thought perhaps at first that the conflation was a deliberate speculation that a Greek temple might have appeared Egyptian, but close examination reveals the temple to be just in front of the Great Pyramid, so apparently Delphi has relocated to Giza. Sphinxes do appear in Greek stories like Oedipus (no doubt borrowed from Egypt), so that’s OK. Archaeological nit-picking aside, the movie is a brief example of Méliès using substitution splices and fades to show some typical magic tricks in the context of a narrative. Unlike some of these films, there is a distinct story, not just a man in fancy dress doing a magic show, though the end leaves the lock on the door unrepaired, and the thief with no apparent way to make restitution for his crime. Justice was harsh in ancient times!

Director: Georges Méliès

Camera: unknown

Starring: Georges Méliès

Run Time: 1 min, 34 secs

You can watch it for free: here (no music) or here (with music).

The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920)

Subtitled “A Story of the KKK,” this is another response by African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux to the glorification of that organization by the likes of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” and a reminder that some folks knew, even then, how objectionable that was. While it may be seen as polemical, this movie is a testament to the work of minorities in American cinema since the very first years.

The movie begins with the death of an “old prospector,” and the emigration of his young, light-skinned granddaughter Evon (Iris Hall) to “Oristown” which is located somewhere in the Northwest. The proprietor of the local inn is Driscoll (Lawrence Chenault) a man of mixed racial background who discriminates the more viciously against Blacks because of it. We see in a flashback how he lost the love of a white woman when she saw his mother and realized he was not pure white. He tells Evon and a Black traveling salesman (E.G. Tatum) that they have to sleep in the barn because the inn is full. That night, there is a terrible rainstorm and both are discomforted, but Evon flees in terror when she sees the man grimacing in the dark at her, evidently having thought she was alone in the place. She spends a wretched night wandering in the rain, but the next day she meets Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson), who is the neighbor of her grandfather’s cabin. He takes pity on her, gives her some food and takes her back to her new home, allowing her to nap in his cart on the way. When he helps her move in, he leaves her with a gun, telling her to shoot twice if she needs assistance of any kind.

At this point in the movie, the villain, a white man named August Barr (Louis Dean), is introduced. He is assisted by an Indian “fakir” called Tugi (Leigh Whipper) and, of course Driscoll, the “mulatto” from the hotel. They buy stolen horses from some bandits and manage to sell them to Hugh, who is honest enough to return them to their rightful owner when challenged. Their bigger plan, however, is to find out where Evon’s grandfather hid documents in Evon’s cabin (from the footage and intertitles on the existing print, it’s unclear what is so valuable about these documents at this point in the film). When their accomplice sneaks into Evon’s cabin at night, she shrieks so loud that Hugh comes running, although she didn’t use the signal, and the man runs back to their “hideout” in the woods. Hugh now tracks down the former hotel manager at the saloon, and the two brawl over the stolen horses. Hugh wins fair and square, of course, but now the villain has another reason to have it in for Hugh, and vows revenge as he departs. Evon finds work in the field of her new cabin to be difficult, and goes for help to Hugh, who digs a hole for her in return for coffee and a meal. A mail carrier drops an important document, and Driscoll discovers it on a run to check the mail. He learns that it demonstrates the value of Hugh Van Allen’s land. The trio plot to frighten him if he refuses to sell to them. Meanwhile,  Driscoll’s mother shows up and immediately moves in with Evon, the one nice person in town.

When Hugh refuses to sell, the villains hire Bill Stanton, “who knows how to make people do what they don’t want to.” He comes up with a plan to terrorize Hugh by making him believe he has been targeted by the KKK. This is portrayed on the screen by showing a single robed-and-hooded rider on horseback bearing a torch and charging toward the camera in a black background, the white of the robes and sparks from the torch popping out in contrast to the Stygian darkness. After the meeting, Hugh starts to get threatening letters from “The Knights of the Black Cross” who tell him to “watch out for your life” if he does not sell out and leave town. A final letter comes while he is out of town and Stanton rallies the conspirators to dress up and ride to finally terrorize him away from the property. Driscoll tries to back out of being the lead rider, telling Barr he will be “somewhere in the vicinity.” Barr’s wife gives the alarm to Evon and Driscoll’s mother, and Evon rides off seeking help. A strange sequence follows in which we see many hooded figures now riding through the night while Evon rides through the woods in daylight in intercut scenes.

Unfortunately, a substantial amount of footage is missing from the surviving print that prevents us from seeing the climax, in which “a colored man with bricks” evidently fights off the Klan riders and the conspiracy is broken. We get to see the oil fields established on Van Allen’s old land, and the large office Hugh now works from. He greets Evon there, and finally realizes that she is also African American, and therefore marriageable to him. The two embrace at last as Abraham, now in the garb of a traveling salesman, briefly looks in at them in a comic moment as the curtain falls.

It’s a shame that we miss out on what is probably the big “action sequence” of the movie, but there is enough here to see what Micheaux was doing with the story. Here, the KKK is depicted, not as a historical organization defending the Old South against Carpetbaggers and Scalawags, nor as some “Klan revisionists” might have it today, as a populist organization on a moral crusade for Protestant values, but as linked to corruption and dishonesty in its very nature. This depiction might even seem to be a critique of the link between white supremacy and capitalism, but for the fact that Hugh is able to be a successful “oil king” in the final reel, implying that Micheaux and his audience accepted egalitarian ideas about equality in the “American Dream” so long as African Americans were not cheated out of their heritage by dishonest whites and white allies. You’d think at least some would have questioned this – after all, how many Black millionaires could they name? And perhaps some did, but we see no sign of a deeper critique here.

It’s also interesting that the relationship between Evon and Hugh is dependent on his realizing that she is Black. This is not because Hugh would refuse to date a white woman, but because he fears any white woman would reject him. This parallels Driscoll’s rejection by the white woman when she sees his mother in the flashback at the beginning of the film. Micheaux points out the pain of this rejection twice, but again does not use it as a means to challenge the racial order directly. It’s possible that this kind of criticism (and that suggested above) would have insured censorship that would have prevented the movie from being seen by the audiences he made it for (mostly African Americans living in segregated cities). Possibly by raising the issue, Micheaux made it possible for audiences “in the know” to carry the conversation forward where he wouldn’t have been allowed to go.

At any rate, this movie is one of the stronger surviving examples of “race film” from the era, and is more complete, and more watchable, than many other such examples. Certainly worth a look for those interested in the period.

Director: Oscar Micheaux

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Iris Hall, Walker Thompson, Lawrence Chenault, Louis Dean, Leigh Whipper, E.G. Tatum

Run Time: 58 minutes (surviving)

You can watch it for free: here (no music) or here (with music).