In My Glass Coffin, I Am Waiting...

Allow me cut right to the chase with my thoughts on Blancanieves (2012, directed by Pablo Berger). Such was my delight in this movie that I saw it in the theater twice in the span of four days. I don't remember the last time I did that. This is a film that ran a needle-fine wire into the pleasure center of my brain and jolted it unmercifully for a hundred and four minutes. It's a film that plays like a lost Tod Browning film, rediscovered and restored by Pedro Almodovar. It's a film that's so intoxicating to my filmgoing sensibilities and appetites that I hardly know how to convey how much I loved it.

Nota bene: here be spoylers beyond the cut.

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Rising as the Sun Sets

This was written for the Muriel Awards Hall of Fame vote this month. This was among my nominees for inclusion, so I got the job of writing about it.

I always think of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans with a fair degree of melancholy. It’s one of the glories of the cinema, sure. But it’s also a kind elegy for silent films as they were about to be swept into the dustbin of history. Silent film had developed to a high degree of visual sophistication by the time Sunrise appeared and that sophistication is imprinted on every single frame of the film. Unfortunately, Sunrise appeared a month after The Jazz Singer. It was obsolete on arrival, arguably the last fireworks display of the era. The camera that Murnau had liberated from its moorings on the floor of the studio was remounted there as film had to learn everything over again to accommodate sound.

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Stormy Weather

When KC over at Classic Movies invited me to participate in the Mary Pickford Blogathon, I had to make a shameful admission. I'd never actually seen a Mary Pickford movie. I mean, I profess a knowledge of movies and haven't seen anything by the movies' first superstar? It embarrasses me to even write this. Oh, I've known about Mary Pickford. I knew that she was one of the founders of United Artists and that she and her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks invented the Hollywood celebrity power couple. I knew that she won the second Academy Award for Best Actress (for Coquette). I "knew" that she occasionally played children and that she was "The Girl with the Curls" and that she was "America's Sweetheart." I know all of this. And it's not like I have an aversion to silent movies. Not at all. But I still hadn't seen any of her movies.

And so, head hanging so as to hide my shame, I picked one of the available films at random. The movie I wound up with was Tess of the Storm Country (1914, directed by Edwin S. Porter), in which Pickford plays the titular daughter of a fisherman whose entire community of squatters is being squeezed out of their homes by the local land baron. Finding that he has no grounds to evict them, the baron conspires with the local government to outlaw net fishing, thus depriving the squatters of their livelihood. When they turn to poaching, Tess's father is arrested. It's up to Tess to save him from prison and the gallows. Having accomplished this, she then falls into a romance with the handsomest (and richest) man in town, who is attracted to her pluck, her perseverance, and her steel. But she has to fight for her man, because, well, she's totally from the wrong side of the tracks.

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Alfred's Centennial

My friend, Lokke Heiss is the programmer behind my local art house's classic film series (including the recently concluded Return to Forbidden Hollywood 3). After last night's final screening, I had the chance to discuss the Film Preservation Blogathon with him and he expressed an interest in participating. Unfortunately, Lokke doesn't have a blog, so I offered to host his thoughts on the Silent Hitchcock program he saw at the Pordone Silent Film Festival some years ago. So here's the first guest post in my blog's history:

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In 1999, I had the opportunity while attending the Pordenone Silent Film Festival to see all of Hitchcock’s surviving films in chronological order. Here is my review of the films as I saw them—from his earliest silent to his transition to sound:

Alfred Hitchcock would have been 100 in 1999 and in celebration of his centennial the Pordenone Festival screened all his available silent films in the order they were filmed.

Hitchcock made important, albeit late, contributions to silent films before crossing into the talkies with Blackmail and in this very thorough review of ‘silent Hitchcock,’ the festival also screened films such as The Blackguard (1924, directed by Graham Cutts), where Alfred emerged as a talented assistant director. The Blackguard, partly shot in Berlin, gave Hitchcock a chance to soak up German cinema technique, including an invaluable opportunity to watch Murnau shoot Die Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh). When Hitchcock saw the finished film, he was impressed by both the moving camera and Murnau’s ability to tell the story with images rather than intertitles. Hitchcock quickly grasped the power of the moving image, and the manipulation of these graphic elements in the service of the story would soon become a trademark component in a Hitchcock film.

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

And the film preservation blogathon rolls on...

Alfred Hitchcock was trained as a draftsman and an engineer. His early career saw him working as a graphic designer, a skill he took with him to the movies. He began his film career in 1921 as a title designer. Over the course of the next five years, Hitch took on more and varied jobs as he moved up the pecking order at Islington Studios (subsequently Gainsbourg Pictures). He got his first chance at directing in 1922, when he was assigned Number 13, a film whose financing fell apart before Hitchcock could shoot more than a couple of scenes. Afterward, Hitchcock worked as an assistant to Director Graham Cutts, who took Hitchcock with him to Germany to make Die Prinzessin und der Geiger. While in Germany, Hitchcock observed F. W. Murnau working on The Last Laugh and probably a number of other German productions. They left an impression and Fritz Lang's influence in particular can be seen all over some of Hitchcock's early films. Cutts and Hitchcock had a falling out when Cutts refused to let Hitchcock direct The Rat (1925). As a consolation, producer Michael Balcon assigned Hitchcock to The Pleasure Garden (1925), which filmed in Munich, London, and Italy. The film had a troubled production, running afoul of customs in Italy and sitting unreleased for two years after it was finished. It wasn't released until after Hitchcock had his first great success with The Lodger. It wasn't a success.

What is to be made of Hitchcock's first film? It's hard to see the director Hitchcock would become without squinting. It's there, but it's not fully formed. The Pleasure Garden has interesting similarities to some of the director's melodramas, but there's no hint of the master of suspense.

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A Windy City Melodrama

Of the 2002 version of Chicago, I once wrote that I might enjoy watching the makers of that movie devoured by dingoes. It would be more entertaining, I think, than watching the actual movie. To say that I hated it almost understates my reaction. Longtime readers of this blog might be surprised at the intensity of that hate, given that I try to be fair to the movies I see regardless of their limitations. Sometimes a movie just rubs me wrong, though, and Chicago 2002 was such a movie. The original silent version of Chicago (1927, directed by Frank Urson) showed at my local art house this week as part of their spring Pre-Code series. I liked it a bit more than the remake, in so far as I did NOT walk away from it wanting to see the filmmakers devoured by marsupial predators. Perhaps that's faint praise.

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Hollywood Plays Itself

As one who shares much of the blame for casting another shadow—the shadow of Susan Alexander Kane—I rejoice in this opportunity to record something which today is all but forgotten except for those lucky enough to have seen a few of her pictures: Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen. She would have been a star if Hearst had never happened. She was also a delightful and very considerable person.

--Orson Welles, Forward to The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst by Marion Davies

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It's hard to escape Hollywood's mythmaking machine when it turns its eyes upon you. Such was the doom of Marion Davies, who is today more famous for having "inspired" Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane than she is for anything else she might have done in the world. Ask anyone who dabbles in movies. This is true in the same way that Lizzie Borden gave her mother forty whacks. Everyone knows it, so it MUST be true*. This has another urban legend attached to it, too, in so far as the word in movie space is that William Randolph Hearst's fury at Citizen Kane stems from the fact that "Rosebud" was allegedly Hearst's pet name for Davies's clitoris. I don't know if that's true, but in this, as with everything else about Hollywood, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

All of which is grossly unfair to Marion Davies. Welles was right about her, if a bit belatedly. She was a remarkable woman. She didn't need Hearst. She was rich in her own right, her fortune having accrued through her own talent and hard work. She was intensely involved with her own productions. If anything, Hearst's meddling harmed her, both as an actress and as a legacy. Welles calls Davies a delightfully accomplished comedienne, and that's absolutely true. In another reality, Davies is thought of in the same breath as Harold Lloyd or Laurel and Hardy as one of the great silent comics (though perhaps not in the same breath as Keaton or Chaplin). In this reality, Hearst wanted to see her in dramatic roles. Comedy never gets any respect. Davies, it turns out, was also self-aware and self-effacing, and you can see her waging a kind of guerrilla campaign against Hearst's meddling in Show People (1928, directed by King Vidor).

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American Landscapes

It took me a while to come around to F. W. Murnau. I've never really liked Nosferatu, which certainly brands me as a heretic in both horror spaces and among film critic types. I didn't much like the second film I saw by the director, either. That was The Haunted Castle, made a few years prior to Nosferatu. I liked Faust quite a bit. It had that grandiosity that only silent mega productions seem to have had and it was chock full of special effects. The young horror punk I used to be really dug all of this, but it didn't illuminate Murnau for me, not in any substantial way. Sunrise, on the other hand, blew me away. I came to Sunrise as an adult. I'm glad that I came to it after I had grown enough as a film-watcher to really "get" it, but even so, watching Sunrise was a surreal experience for me. All the while I was watching it, I was trying to reconcile the fact that this deliriously romantic reinvention of cinema was the work of the same man who made Nosferatu. I think the barrier was the fact that Murnau was a horror director in my then-insufficient understanding of film. I hadn't seen the quantum leaps the director was taking in films like The Last Laugh, because they were outside my tidy little personal taxonomy. In other words: in this as in many other things, the younger me was an idiot.

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