UNDERWORLD. Paramount Pictures, 1927. George Bancroft, Evelyn Brent, Clive Brook, Fred Kohler, Helen Lynch, Larry Semon, Jerry Mandy. Based on a story by Ben Hecht, adapted by Charles Furthmann. Director: Josef von Sternberg, who replaced the fired and uncredited Arthur Rosson.

   The relevation of Cinevent 1979 for me was the silent film classic, Underworld. George Bancroft plays a self-confident gangster lord with a beautiful mistress (Evelyn Brent) and an educated, alcoholic friend (Clive Brook) who try to smooth his rough edges and find themselves drawn to one another in the process.

   The action is blunt and swift, but the genius of this film is in the direction of the actors (“My God, but they had faces then!”) and the superb playing of this unlikely trio, the kind of ensemble performance that also contributed greatly to the success of The Glass Key and all those other melodramas we doted on before television pulped the genre.

   There’s a final shoot-out that makes similar scenes in 1930’s gangster films look like well-laundered exercises in politesse, and the old melodramatic device of the secret passage is revitalized and made a necessary and believable part of the action.

   The camera work is remarkable (Sternberg was making great films long before he began to exploit Dietrich), with details that come from an older theatrical tradition that makes most recent melodramas look like uneducated exercises in bumbling.

   The film was meant to be shown with blue and yellow filters (for night and interior scenes), but this obscured the. photographic detail to such an extent that the projectionist abandoned the attempt after about twenty minutes.

   And anyone who thinks that silent films were primitive should be tied to a chair and forced to watch this and any number of other equally accomplished productions until he admits defeat.

PAID TO LOVE. Fox, 1927. George O’Brien, Virginia Valli, J. Farrell MacDonald, William Powell, Thomas Jefferson, Hank Mann. Photography: L. William O’Connell; director: Howard Hawks. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   J. Farrell MacDonald, an American banker, travels to a small Balkan kingdom for the purpose of making a financial investment to shore up the country’s faltering economy.

   He becomes chummy with the king (Thomas Jefferson) and they plot to marry off Crown Prince Michael (O’Brien), who seems unwilling to settle down.

   Their bait is Gaby, a cabaret dancer (beautiful Virginia Valli), but the machinations of Michael’s cousin (William Powell) threaten to thwart the pair’s plans and break up the budding relationship.

   Hawks was quoted in the program notes by his biographer (Todd McCarthy) as saying that he was influenced by German Expressionist director F. W. Murnau in his tracking shots, lighting and editing.

   It’s certainly an elegant, stylish film, with the expected polished performance by Powell, engaging characterizations by MacDonald and Jefferson, and an attractive portrayal of the developing romance by the forthright O’Brien and sultry Valli.

HE FELL IN LOVE WITH HIS WIFE. Pallas Pictures/Paramount, 1916. Forrest Stanley, Florence Rockwell, Page Peters, Lydia Yeamans Titus, Howard Davis. Director: William Desmond Taylor. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

    A charming film that, as the program notes pointed out, is one of the few surviving films of director Taylor, victim of a sensational ’20s murder that destroyed more than one career.

    A rustic comedy in which a widowed farmer (Stanley), after a disastrous series of attempts to hire a responsible housekeeper, in desperation enters into a marriage of convenience with Rockwell, fleeing a loveless and abusive marriage after she discovers that her husband is a bigamist.

    True love eventually develops, but only after some dramatic events, the most crucial of which is the arrival of Rockwell’s duplicitous husband to reclaim his wife.

    A superb print of a film that neatly balances comedy and drama, this has elements of Victorian melodrama that, under Taylor’s astute direction, take on a distinctly more modern look. One of the highlights of the weekend’s program.

TRIAL MARRIAGE. Columbia, 1929. Norman Kerry, Jason Robards, Sr., Sally Eilers, Thelma Todd, Charles Clary. Director: Erie C. Kenton. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

    Constance Bannister (Sally Eilers), a vivacious party girl, engages in a trial marriage contract with the reserved Dr. Thorvald Ware. When she slips out to a party while her husband is at work, he dissolves the contract, then marries her conniving sister Grace (Thelma Todd), who’s been scheming to ensnare Thorvald for herself.

    The film opens with a lively party scene, highlighted by a black bottom dance by Eilers, an eye-catching performance that clearly intrigues Thorvald but, at the same time, makes him a bit wary of the high-living Constance.

    The subsequent drama of rupture and eventual reconciliation is enhanced by first-rate acting and direction, making this a period piece that still charms. The sentimental twist that finally reunites the couple is the only major flaw in an otherwise engrossing period piece that retains much of its original charm and poignancy.

THE HOODLUM. Pickford/First National, 1919. Mary Pickford, Ralph Lewis, Max Davidson, Kenneth Harlan, Melvin Messenger. Photography: Charles Rosher; art director: Max Parker. Director: Sidney A. Franklin. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

    I have been told that William K. Everson considered this to be Pickford’s best film and I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment.

    Pickford plays a poor little rich girl who lives with her grandfather in a mansion while her sociologist father is away.

    When she decides to go live with her father in the ghetto where he is gathering material for a book, she quickly adapts to her new life, turning into a street kid and making friends throughout the neighborhood.

    She also befriends a lonely man who had worked for her grandfather and had gone to jail for financial misdealings for which he was not responsible. Learning that papers that will clear him are in a safe in her grandfather’s house, she helps him break in and retrieve the documents, only to be surprised by the police and her equally surprised grandfather.

    The ghetto set was designed by Max Parker and is a marvelous setting for the multiple story lines in this endearing film. Pickford was never better, playing a gamut of roles that culminate in her coming-out as a young woman and, finally, a bride.

Editorial Comment:   Obviously, then, the photo above comes from the end of the movie, not the middle or beginning. That’s Kenneth Harlan with Mary, in case you didn’t recognize him!

THE CARDBOARD LOVER. Cosmopolitan/MGM, 1928. Marion Davies, Nils Asther, Jetta Goudal, Andres De Segurola. Screenplay: F. Hugh Herbert, based on the play Dans sa candeur naive by Jacques Deval. Director: Robert Z. Leonard. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   A comedy to be classed with Davies’ performances in The Patsy and Show People. For much of her silent film career, Davies starred in costume dramas that her long-time lover William Randolph Hearst fancied.

   Her native gift, however, was for comedy and she established herself as a first-rate comic actress in the comedies that showcase her undeniable talent.

   In The Cardboard Lover she’s a vacationing American tourist who collects autographs and in the process of trying to snare the autograph of tennis star Asther (in photo) she becomes infatuated with him and sets out to separate him from the stylish vamp (Goudal) who’s been toying with his affections.

   Davies gets a chance to display her skill at impersonation when she does a dead-on imitation of Goudal’s slinky vamp and Asther, not noted as a comic actor, is a charming foil, caught between the two women, while Goudal, for much of the film, ably counters Davies’ moves with her not inconsiderable wiles.

   One of the delights of this year’s screenings and a major addition to Davies’ filmography, apparently copied from the sole surviving print.

K — THE UNKNOWN.   Universal, 1924. Virginia Valli, Percy Marmont, Margarita Fisher, John Roche, Maurice Ryan, Francis Feeny. Screenplay by Louis D. Lighton and Hope Loring, from the novel “K” by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Director: Harry A. Pollard. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   The credit for Mary Roberts Rinehart took fellow attendee John Apostolou and me by surprise, since neither of us had ever heard of the source novel. The St. James reference guide includes the 1915 publication not with Rinehart’s crime novels, but with her “Other Publications,” although if the screen version is at all faithful to the original novel it is, like much of Rinehart’s work, a romantic suspense drama.

   It draws on Rinehart’s early career as a nurse and her skill at dealing with small-town settings (with no use of “rube” humor as claimed in tile program notes) into which she injects a generous dollop of melodrama that centers around a mysterious stranger (Marmont) who is in love with Sidney (Valli), his landlady’s niece, also the object of affection of two adolescents and a famous doctor, the pride of the local hospital.

   Both the stranger and the doctor have secrets, as does the doctor’s chief assistant (Margarita Fisher), and at least one of them is capable of murder.

   This entertaining film succeeds thanks to its good cast and intelligent direction, and some fine photography that the American Film Index credits attribute to Charles Stumar.

   Stumar would remain at Universal into the 1930s when he would be principal photographer on The Werewolf of London, The Mummy, and The Raven (1935 version).

   Both John and I thought this was a genuine “sleeper.”

Editorial Comment: For what it’s worth, the novel “K” is not included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, not even with a dash. Is this an error? I shall ask and find out.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Universal, 1925. Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin. Norman Kerry, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Gibson Gowland, John Sainpolis.

Based on the novel Le Fantôme de l’Opera by Gaston Leroux. Directors: Rupert Julian; Lon Chaney, Ernst Laemmle, Edward Sedgwick (the latter three uncredited).

   October is the month I spend watching Monster Movies and reading scary books. I kicked things off with The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgwick and possibly others, and adapted by no fewer than seven writers from Gaston Leroux’s novel.

   Phantom has its moments, but overall it’s something of a mess — the result, no doubt of so many cooks at the broth, fingers in the pie, pigs at the trough or who-ever in the what-have-you.

   Universal did a lot of tinkering with this thing, adding and cutting scenes, restoring deleted parts and cutting added ones, and finally emerged with a rather disjointed film: a slow, mysterious first half capped by a horrific climax in the middle of the movie, followed by a colorful romantic interlude, trailed by some rather tepid serial-type chills, with a wild chase for the finish.

   A few pretty nice things creep out of the cinematic jungle though, mostly due to Lon Chaney and the incredible force of personality he brings to Eric the Phantom (Some reports aver that he directed his own scenes himself.) Chaney moves with a compelling balletic grace, and whoever directed his scenes knew how to play up billowing capes and staring skull-faces for all they might be worth.

   The Bal Masque scene is a riot of two-strip Technicolor dominated by Chaney’s Red Death, and the ensuing love scene among the statues achieves a fine romantic creepiness: the furtive lovers embracing under cool blue estuary in the night air, as a red-cloaked monster broods above them.

   Chaney’s acting is magnetic, and Mary Philbin puts visible enthusiasm — if no discernible subtlety — into heroine Christine’s histrionics.

   But it’s Norman Kerry as the nominal hero of the piece who walks off with the show: Aging, bland, over-groomed, dull and unimaginative, Kerry is everything the nominal hero of a Monster Movie should be.

   He has only to walk on screen to bore you to tears, and his declarations of undying love offer a listlessness that horror films were not to see again until the “living Dead” movies of the 70s.

   But wait, there’s more; where the heroes of most monster movies are merely dull and ineffectual, Kerry actually has to be led by the hand to rescue his beloved and finally faints dead away when things get tough.

   There are subversive tendencies in Monster Movies, where the bad guys we’re supposed to fear are always more interesting than the good guys we’re supposed to cheer, and there’s no better illustration of the concept than Norman Kerry in The Phantom of the Opera.

THAT CERTAIN THING. Columbia, 1928. Viola Dana, Ralph Graves, Burr Mcintosh, Aggie Herring, Carl Gerard, Sydney Crossley. Screenplay by Elmer Harris; photography by Joseph Walker. Director: Frank Capra. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

    Described as a “restoration in progress” (the film is is a blow-up from a 16mm print), this domestic drama tracks the fortunes of a hotel newsstand clerk (Dana) after she marries Graves, the son of a magnate, who promptly disinherits his son, forcing him to go to work as a day laborer.

    When his co-workers prefer his wife’s box lunch to their own lunches, he has a brainstorm and starts the “Molly Box Lunch Company,” which takes off and attracts the attention of Graves’ father, who doesn’t know that his daughter-in-law is the Molly designing the lunches.

    Molly uses her native sharp wits to outwit her father-in-law, roping him into a highly profitable deal (for the company) to which he responds by showing he’s a good sport and finally accepting his husband’s wife.

    A good-natured comedy drama that makes light fun of big business and the innate good sense of the Little Man (or, in this case, Little Woman). Capra’s first film for Columbia.

THE CAPTIVE. Lasky-Paramount, 1915. Blanche Sweet, House Peters, Page Peters, Jeanie Macpherson, Theodore Roberts, Billy Elmer, Marjorie Daw. Original story by Cecil B. DeMille and Jeanie Macpherson; director: Cecil B. DeMille. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   A Balkan drama about a Montenegrin/Turkish conflict and its unforeseen (well, meant to be unforeseen) consequences when the captured Turkish bey played by House Peters is given to Blanche Sweet to help her work her farm after the death of her older brother in the war.

   The writer of the program notes (Bob Birchard, one of the organizers of the convention and author of a recent book on DeMille) states that the film seems to have been “designed to take advantage of the costumes already used for The Unafraid,” another Balkan drama filmed in the same year.

   An irreverent (if somewhat amusing) comment that doesn’t really prepare the viewer for a nicely developed romantic drama that brings together an unlikely couple and makes their eventual reconciliation believable.

   Peters plays the role with a light touch that makes his character appealing and contrasts with the more intense performance of the attractive Sweet. Not major DeMille, perhaps, but an intelligent, hopeful handling of cross-cultural antagonisms that demonstrates that ancient enmities need not endure.