SHOOTING STARS. British Instructional, UK, 1927. Brian Aherne, Annette Benson, Chili Bouchier, David Brookes, Donald Calthrop. Director: A. V. Bramble, assisted by Anthony Asquith. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   A stylish silent film, with Annette Benson as the wife of actor Brian Aherne and his co-star, who has a fling with film baggy-pants comedian Donald Calthrop.

   She wants to leave Aherne for her lover, but fears it will destroy her career. She substitutes real bullets for blanks in the gun that will be fired at Aherne in their thriller, but even though she decides not to go through with it, a series of misadventures results in the shooting of Calthrop and Benson’s withdrawal from films and her marriage.

   There’s a final sequence in which, several years later, she has a walk-on in a film directed by Aherne, unrecognized by him or anyone else in the crew, with a poignant fade-out as she appears to walk away walks away forever from her former husband and the movies.

   The behind-the-scenes look at the filming of silents, made this absorbing, ironic drama of unusual interest.

  CLUB HAVANA. PRC, 1945. Margaret Lindsay, Tom Neal, Don Douglas, Marc Lawrence, Eddie Hall, Renie Riano, Ernest Truex, Eric Sinclair, Gertrude Michael, Paul Cavanagh, Pedro DeCordoba, Carlos Malina, and Isabelita. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   The program notes referred to this as a bargain basement Grand Hotel, with direction by Ulmer continuing his tradition of making sparsely budgeted films look good. (Maybe somebody should do a book on directors who were consistently better than the films they directed.)

   The setting is a vaguely Art Deco night club, with a Latin band, and undistinguished musical numbers that add little to the interlocking stories.

   The main plot involves a gangster (Marc Lawrence), suspected of a murder but released when a witness goes missing.

   Club Havana is his hangout and he learns that a young musician (Eric Sinclair) saw the murder, has called the police and will identify Lawrence when they arrive.

   The mounting suspense as Lawrence arranges for a hit on Sinclair is interspersed with music and comic turns (rich, ugly widow Renie Riano agreeing to marry gigolo Paul Cavanagh and both knowing exactly what they’re getting into; Ernest Truex attempting a reunion with his indifferent wife) prolonging the thin plot.

   This is entertainment by the ’40s numbers, with a little cinematic gloss provided by Ulmer’s ingenious camera and smooth direction of his competent cast.

Editorial Comment:   This somewhat hard to find movie has also been reviewed by James Reasoner over on his blog.

THE COMING OF AMOS. Cinema Corp. of America/PRC, 1925. Rod La Rocque, Jetta Goudal, Noah Beery, Richard Carle, Arthur Hoyt, Trixie Friganza, Clarence Burton.

Screen adaptation: James Ashmore Creelman & Garrett Fort from the novel by William J. Locke. Director: Paul Sloane; producer Cecil B. DeMille. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   This is the perfect Saturday matinee movie, with a climax in an island castle where the heroine (Jetta Goudal) is imprisoned by her villainous husband Ramón Garcia (Noah Beery) in a basement rapidly filling with water.

   With a Russian Princess and a noted portrait painter (the hero’s uncle) figuring in the cast, and a ’20s jet set crew of party-loving characters, there’s ample reason to crowd the screen with lavish sets and fantastic costumes, especially when an important scene takes place during a joyous carnival.

   The hero is naive but persistent, the heroine beautiful and constantly in peril, and the smirking villain doing everything but twirl his nonexistent moustache.

   There are touches of humor throughout, with some witty satire, the sharpest of which is the portrayal of two French policiers as consummate bureaucrats, stopping every other minute as they lead the “chase” into Garcia’s lair to take notes of the information they’re being given.

   This is a matinee film for adults, but the kid in the fun-loving viewer will have a grand time, too.

Editorial Comment: This film is available on DVD, but be aware that two of the three reviewers on Amazon disagree noticeably as to the quality of the print.

CHAD HANNA. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Henry Fonda, Dorothy Lamour, Linda Darnell, Guy Kibbee, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Fred Shepely, Roscoe Ates, Olin Howland. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by Walter D. Edmonds. Director: Henry King. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   This handsome Technicolor production, screened in a stunning print, and based on a popular novel by Walter D. Edmonds, also author of Drums Along the Mohawk, recounts the saga of a small, one-ring circus setting up in rural communities in upper New York state in the mid-19th century.

   Chad Hanna (Henry Fonda), after helping an escaping slave evade capture, runs away with the circus, accompanied by Caroline Tridd (Linda Darnell), daughter of an abusive slave tracker. The family circus, run by Guy Kibbee and Jane Darwell, with its star attraction equestrienne Albany Yates (Dorothy Lamour), is competing with a larger circus that will stop at nothing to eliminate its competition.

   This rivalry provides much of the drama of the film, with the romantic triangle formed by Fonda, Darnell, and Lamour, a potent attraction for the movie-goers of the time. And it might be added that the trio is as attractive and charismatic 70 years later.

   However, it’s the affectionate portrayal of the inner workings of the small traveling circus, now a historical curiosity, that is responsible for much of the appeal of this episodic film. Henry King’s skill at these rural dramas dates back to the silent classic Tol’able David (1922), with a notable sound film, State Fair (1933), starring Will Rogers, attesting to his continuing command of the medium.

   I will add that my enjoyment of the film was enhanced by some personal history. My father’s brother ran away from home and joined Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus, where he appeared as a clown for some 20 years and, like Chad, married an equestrienne.

   When I knew him decades later, his marriage had failed, and he was a rather dour middle-aged man. At the time, I didn’t know of his background, and one of my regrets is that I didn’t and missed the opportunity of hearing from him first-hand his stories of his days with the circus.

THE SORROWS OF SATAN. A Famous Players-Lasky Corporation production, distributed by Paramount, 1926. Adolphe Menjou, Ricardo Cortez, Lya De Putti, Carol Dempster, Ivan Lebedeff, Marcia Harris.

Screenplay by Forrest Halsey, based on the novel by Marie Corelli (1895). Directors of photography, Harry Fischbeck & Arthur De Titta; art director, Charles Kirk. Director: D. W. Griffith. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   In this modern morality play, urbane Prince Lucio de Rimanez (Menjou) promises Geoffrey Tempest (Cortez), a struggling writer, great riches if he will surrender his soul. Tempest abandons his pregnant fiancee Mavis Claire (Dempster) and falls under the spell of the debauched Princess Olga Godovsky (Lya De Putti), whom he subsequently marries.

   The Prince is, course, the Devil, and Tempest is the Faust who sells his soul not for youth or knowledge, but for worldly success. Menjou is impressive, both charming and sinister, and Dempster is touching as the abandoned Marguerite.

   Lya de Putti, a Beardsley-like siren in a performance that seems molded on one of DeMille’s seductive vamps, captures the coldness of the often deceived searcher of forbidden pleasures and the almost desperate yearning for a pleasure that will prove more than fleeting.

   The weak link in the casting is Cortez, who seems too much the self-absorbed matinee idol to convincingly portray the adoration for the guileless Dempster and the lustful pursuit and conquest of the worldly De Putti.

   The film is greatly enhanced by the artful cinematography that is particularly effective in portraying the opulence of the world to which the Prince introduces Tempest. It may not have the power of Griffith’s use of the traditional materials of Victorian melodrama that he demonstrates in Way Down East, but it renews the time-worn themes of the Faustian tale with sensitivity and pictorial beauty.

HENRY JAMES – The Aspern Papers. Macmillan, hardcover, US/UK, 1888. First published in three parts in The Atlantic Monthly, March-May 1888. Reprinted many times since.

Filmed as The Lost Moment: Universal Pictures, 1947. Robert Cummings, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Joan Lorring, Eduardo Ciannelli, John Archer. Screenplay: Leonardo Bercovici. Director: Martin Gabel.

   Well I got around to Henry James again and landed on his 1888 novella The Aspern Papers, probably his most accessible work except for Turn of the Screw. Which ain’t saying a whole hell of a lot, because James never uses one word where he can put twenty, and his notion of objectivity is to invariably leave his characters disappointed.

   Yet there is, withal, an easy grace in his prolix prose and a muted yearning in his plots that keeps me coming back. James’ characters long for the heroism their author denies them, a theme that doesn’t appear this consistently again in American Lit until David Goodis, and maybe it’s this that keeps drawing me back.

   Whatever the case, Aspern, as I say is a bit more engaging than most James, with something like a real plot, about a publisher/literary enthusiast looking for material relating to a romantic poet who died in the last century.

   It seems that a young woman with whom the poet had an affair still lives, incredibly old now, in a decaying mansion in Venice with her niece, and she may have love letters from her legendary paramour. In short order the poetry sleuth inveigles himself into the house, only to find he has entered their lives as well.

   It’s a fine, romantic premise for a book, and James handles it competently, with a realism in his characters that threatens at times to bleach all the excitement from the idea, but manages to keep it alive somewhere just under the surface of his inhibitions. The conclusion is typical of James as well: disappointing and yet somehow satisfying in its context.

   Universal studios, home of Abbott and Costello and the Wolfman, brought this to the screen in 1947. Or at least they brought the premise; James’ placid plot and wan protagonists are replaced in The Lost Moment by a noirish romanticism the author would hardly have recognized.

   The pusillanimous publisher is portrayed by an earnest Bob Cummings, and the reticent niece by sultry Susan Hayward, who seethes with pent-up passion even at her most spinsterish. A kindly dowager who sets the plot in motion on the first page becomes a venal painter with plans of his own (played by John Archer in a Melvyn Douglasmode) and the aged muse/lover of the dead poet is portrayed by a rasping Agnes Moorehead — at least they say it’s Agnes Moorehead; under all those veils and wrinkled makeup it could be Lon Chaney Jr for all I know.

   All this could easily have led to a massive betrayal of James’ novel, but it’s saved by a literate script by Leonardo Bercovici (a subsequently-blacklisted author who worked on off-beat romances like Portrait of Jennie and The Bishop’s Wife) and lush, romantic direction by Martin Gabel, of all people.

   Gabel always played it cold and constipated in the movies, and his work here as a smooth, moody auteur in the style of Max Ophuls is one of those minor miracles with which the cinema is occasionally blessed.

MADAME X. MGM, 1937. Gladys George, Warren William, John Beal, Reginald Owen, Henry Daniell, Phillip Reed, Jonathan Hale, George Zucco. Based on a play by Alexandre Bisson. Director: Sam Wood.

   I don’t know which Lana Turner movie I was thinking of when I started to watch this one, but it obviously wasn’t Madame X (1966), which equally obviously I have never seen. What I was expecting to see was a murder mystery, but while there was a murder, and Jacqueline Fleuriot, a wayward wife played to perfection by Gladys George, is suspected of the crime, there is little or no effort onscreen to solve the crime.

   POSSIBLE PLOT ALERT: Some of what follows will tell you more than I knew when I started to watch this film, and to tell you the truth, more than I personally wanted to know, so take the next few paragraphs off, if you feel the same way.

   The shooting death of Mme Fleuriot’s lover by another rival is instead the first step in an nightmarish series of events in her life, leading her ever downward into poverty (pawning first her jewelry, then her clothes) and prostitution (all but assuredly, but the film of course never quite says so).

   It seems that while Mme Fleuriot was having her fling — out of boredom rather than real desire — her son unexpectedly fell seriously ill, and her husband (Warren William), a highly respected and influential attorney, throws her out of his house and his life.

   When the husband relents, it is too late, and his wife cannot be found. This was Gladys George’s only starring role, and I do not pretend to understand why.

   She plays the world weary Mme Fleuriot perfectly — and more and more weary at each step of the way, on her downward path of self-inflicted destruction. Frowzy and embittered, and yet innately likable throughout the movie, she is no stranger to either men or the bottle – semi-adept in warding off the first but not the latter.

   The final blow comes when a cheap con-man named Lerocle (Henry Daniell) comes to her rescue – a man to whom she inadvertently reveals her real identity, initialing a series of events that leads to a courtroom scene in which she is on trial for murder, an accusation for which she cannot defend herself, else it will ruin her reason for being accused in the first place.

   The histrionics run high in these final scenes, all but the calm and mostly controlled performance by Gladys George, who was relegated to small and bit parts for the rest of her career, and unfairly so. Warren William also allows his character’s stony facade to crumble in the end, to good effect. If this is pure soap opera, then so be it. It’s also highly effective, and I enjoyed the movie immensely.

COMMENTS: This version of the movie is easily available on DVD. Warner Archives has, for example, released on a double bill with the 1929 version. For a clip on YouTube of the tavern scene shown above, go here.

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THE GIRL WITHOUT A SOUL. Metro Pictures, 1917. Viola Dana, Robert Walker, Fred C. Jones, Henry Hallam, Margaret Seddon. Director: John Collins. Shown at Cinesation 1993, Saginaw MI.

   Another Viola Dana rural melodrama, directed by her husband, John Collins. She plays sisters, one a talented musician in love with a bounder, the other a rambunctious, untamed young girl loved (discreetly) by a carpenter, who resembles a young Abe Lincoln.

   Dana plays the two roles superbly, and the film climaxes with a taut trial (presided over by future Lord of Mongo, Charles Middleton). This plot probably played well on the stage in the 19th century, and the skill of the treatment of the material makes it possible to understand the appeal of East Lynne for a supposedly unsophisticated audience.

   At any rate, a charming film that doesn’t deserve to be buried as a footnote in film history. (The print was a bit rough, but it has been maintained, if not restored. Some of the longer intertitles flash by too quickly for reading, and there is one major continuity lapse, where a portion of the film could not be saved.)

Editorial Comment:   It’s not relevant to Walter’s review, I grant you, except that an article by Dave Kehr in today’s New York Times is about silent films, and if you are a fan of silent films, it is Big News indeed.

   The piece begins thusly:

    “A late silent feature directed by John Ford, a short comedy directed by Mabel Normand, a period drama starring Clara Bow and a group of early one-reel westerns are among a trove of long-lost American films recently found in the New Zealand Film Archive.

    “Some 75 of these movies, chosen for their historical and cultural importance, are in the process of being returned to the United States under the auspices of the National Film Preservation Foundation…”

IDIOT’S DELIGHT. MGM, 1939. Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn, Joseph Schildkraut, Burgess Meredith, Laura Hope Crews, Harry Van’s “Les Blondes”: Virginia Grey, Virginia Dale, Paula Stone, Bernadene Hayes, Joan Marsh, Lorraine Krueger. Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, based on his own Pulitzer Prize winning play. Director: Clarence Brown.

   Not only was Robert Sherwood hired to write the screenplay, but he expanded on it by creating a long prelude to the play itself.

   Some back story for both of the two stars is filled in, detailing their first encounter as vaudevillians Harry Van and Irene Fellara, whose paths cross and meet again some 20 years later, just as rumors of war are rumbling across Europe.

   Clark Gable plays Harry Van, of course, and Norma Shearer is Irene. He’s a stooge for a phoney mind-reader when first they meet, and she’s an acrobat who hangs by her teeth in the act before them. They spend one wonderful night together (but not a bed) before their trains take them in opposite directions in the morning.

   The next time they meet (and of course they do) is in a snowbound lodge somewhere in the Alps.

   Unable to cross the border from one country to the next because of international tensions, a large number of passengers from a wide assortment of countries are also stranded.

   Harry is now the manager and lead dancer for a troupe of female dancers (Les Blondes). She’s the mistress (we presume) of an important European munitions mogul. She’s also now a blonde and claims to be a refugee Russian countess. His jaw drops.

   In fine overdramatized fashion Irene goes into much detail about her former life:

   There is a lot of comedy in this film, and in fact it is quite remarkable – I wouldn’t have known it until reading about it later on IMDB – that this is the only time Clark Gable did a song and dance routine in a movie: “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

   He does it well – but then again everything Clark Gable did in a movie he did well. He was, as far as I am concerned, the quintessential Hollywood actor, with a presence before the cameras that was second to absolutely nobody else.

   The movie is itself is a time capsule trapped in amber, as Idiot’s Delight is, and you have to watch this movie as if you were in the theater in 1939. It is in itself a plea for peace, not war; laying the blame for the incipient hostilities on munitions manufacturers, unfortunately, not the plans of national glory of Hitler and others. Hitler himself is not mentioned, I do not believe.

   So there is a lot of anxiety hidden behind the long-delayed romance and the songs and quick and easy patter of Harry Van.

   Lives are about to be disrupted for many and for good. A honeymooning couple are emblems of loves that are (most likely) going to be torn apart.

   Many of the people who have left comments seem to feel that the film is outdated, which it is, and corny, which it is and is not, both at the same time. The movie is entertaining, no doubt about it, but watching it in the present day there is a sense of unease or disconnect between its several components, and all I can do is tell you about it. More than this, I haven’t defined it further, no more than I have.

   There are two endings for this film. One is a happier one, shown in the US. The other, shown in Europe, which is the one I’ve just watched, ends on a bright note, but one wrapped up in a solid container of reality.

NOTE: Credit for the dialogue quoted goes to the IMDB website, from which I copied and pasted.

 TELL IT TO THE MARINES. MGM, 1926. Lon Chaney, William Haines, Eleanor Boardman, Eddie Gribbon, Carmel Myers, Warner Oland. Director: George Hill. Shown at Cinesation 1993, Saginaw MI.

   This was a big hit for Chaney, and as in While the City Sleeps (MGM, 1928) it showcases Chaney in a non-horror role. Chaney is a tough sergeant, charged with the unenviable task of whipping unwilling recruit William Haines into shape before the unit ships out.

   In both the 1926 and 1928 films, Chaney’s girl is won away by the younger man (criminal he’s trying to reform, recruit he’s trying to save), which allows Chaney to reveal the heart under the crusty exterior.

   Superb entertainment, and, according to the notes, was just behind the studio’s Flesh and the Devil! at the box-office. Warner Oland has a small non-speaking role as a Chinese warlord, a role he was playing as early as 1920.