A few silent films for June.

Lorna Doone (1922), directed by Maurice Tourneur. This adaptation of R. D. Blackmore’s 1869 novel is efficient, lively, nicely photographed and tinted, and over acted in ways familiar in silent cinema. The fight scenes are furious and exciting. The sets and locations work well. The story tells the rousing tale of a young Lorna (Madge Bellamy) kidnapped by the dastardly Doone clan, a band of robbers lead by the elderly disgraced nobleman, Ensor Doone (Frank Keenan). He adopts the young Lorna. When she is old enough, another Doone, the inebriate lout Carver (Donald MacDonald) wants to marry her. Lorna finds a saviour in the young farmer, John Ridd (John Bowers), someone she met before she was kidnapped years ago and who falls into her life again. These two have their ups and doones, including a frightening moment when Lorna appears to have been killed. But, finally this melodrama ends well, and everyone can rest easy knowing that doonseday has not arrived. While watching the film, I could not cease thinking of various ways to incorporate the word “doone” into the film. The characters are doone and out, or the action is doonright frantic, and so on. Worth a look.

 

Tartuffe (1925), directed by F. W. Murnau. I have several favourite film makers, and one of these is F. W. Murnau. Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1924), Faust (1926), and Sunrise (1927) are among the finest films ever made. The Last Laugh is remarkable for having just one intertitle. Anyway, here is Tartuffe, a worthy addition to Murnau’s filmography. Distinguishing features are: a movie within a movie and the breaking of the fourth wall. The movie within a movie works this way: an elderly man is slowly being poisoned by his housekeeper who pretends to be kindly and attentive, when she is clearly after the old man’s fortune. Along comes the old man’s grandson, but the housekeeper has convinced the old man that his grandson is a wastrel and an actor. Heaven forbid, an actor! To convince his grandfather that the housekeeper is a hypocrite, the young man puts on a disguise and plays the role of an itinerant showman who will screen a film in anyone’s home. He shows the old man and the housekeeper a film of Moliere’s seventeenth-century play, Tartuffe. This film within a film takes up most of the running time. Both the film of Tartuffe and the modern sequences that bookend the film of Tartuffe set out to expose hypocrisy. The housekeeper and Tartuffe are liars and hypocrites, and therefore suitable characters for our times. Tartuffe checks all, or most of, the seven deadly sins: gluttony, pride, greed, lust, sloth, possibly envy, and maybe wrath too. Certainly, the first five here are relevant. Now, the fourth wall collapses when the young man looks directly at us and mouths the words the intertitles tell us that he is going to expose the old woman’s hypocrisy. The camera work, as we would expect with Murnau, is clever giving us angles and close-ups and compositions that catch the eye and accentuate the action. We also have some amusing bits, especially in the first half of the film. Emil Jannings plays Tartuffe.

 

The Toll of the Sea (1922), directed by Chester M. Franklin. This is the second Technicolour feature film to come from Hollywood and it is a recasting of the Madame Butterfly story starring a 17-year-old Anna May Wong. Ms Wong could, and did, shed tears when necessary. She wears lavish costumes, as do many of the small cast of extras. The story is slight and familiar and the American man, Allen Carver, played by Kenneth Harlan, decides, largely because of his friends’ disapproval of his relationship with a “foreign” person, to abandon his Chinese wife and head back to America where his former sweetheart waits for him. Lotus Flower (Anna May Wong) mourns his departure, and then raises his young son after she gives birth. What makes the film worth seeing is the magnificent colour and the spectacular costumes. Not a lot happens, and therefore the viewer can concentrate on admiring the look of proceedings. This is an impressive use of colour some seventeen years before The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. The restoration is excellent, but the final reel is missing, not that we need it. The paintings used with the intertitles are also of interest.

 

The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), directed by G.W. Pabst. This melodrama follows the fortunes of the titular character, Jeanne Ney (Edith Jehanne) after her diplomat father is killed in the Crimea. Jeannne is in love with Andreas Labov (Uno Henning), a Bolshevik implicated in the death of her father. Jeanne goes to Paris to stay with her uncle Raymond (Adolf E. Licho), and his blind daughter, Gabrielle (Brigitte Helm). Before she leaves Crimea, Jeanne is harassed by the slimy conman Khalibiev (Fritz Rasp). This character chews scenery with the best of scene stealers. He is a lecher, a thief, a fraudster, and a murderer. The film will impress viewers who remember it was made in 1927. The camera is fluid. We have long tracking shots with the camera following running persons, and moving to take in various locations inside and out. The camera work here is very impressive. The lighting too impresses. Light and shadow compliment action and emotion. The scenes on the train are nicely done. Although this cannot match Murnau’s The last Laugh (1924) for silent storytelling, The Love of Jeanne Ney does tell its story with a minimum of intertitles.

 

The Beloved Rogue (1927), directed by Alan Crosland. This is a swashbuckler that stars John Barrymore as high-living poet Francois Villon who was around in the 15^th century during the reign of Louis XI. We have some good bits with a catapult, a flogging, a perilously hanging basket, a dangerous climb up the side of a high tower, and a gargoyle upon which M Villon sits. What makes this film exceptional, however, are the sets designed by William Cameron Menzies, the medieval streets and turreted buildings and lavish interiors, all caught by a camera that sits in various positions, including above and below the various places in which the action takes place. The costumes and characters reminded me of a later distinguished swashbuckler, Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. The plot too has similarities with Villon courting Charlotte de Vauxcelles (Marceline Day) who is betrothed to the villain of the piece, Thibault d’Aussigny (Henry Victor) who is under the thumb of the other villain, Duke of Burgundy (Lawson Butt). Louis XI is played by none other than Conrad Veidt. Villon is presented as a hail fellow well met who loves “France earnestly, Frenchwomen excessively, French wine exclusively.”