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.

NICE WOMEN. Universal, 1931. Sidney Fox, Russell Gleason, Frances Dee, Alan Mowbray, Carmel Myers. Screenplay: Edwin H. Knopf, from a play by William H. Grew. Photography: Charles Stumar. Director: Edwin H. Knopf. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Some wit on the convention committee had the inspired idea of scheduling this acid-tinged drama to follow the warmth of Sidney Franklin’s The Hoodlum (reviewed here ).

   Sidney Fox is pressured by her family into accepting the marriage proposal of her father’s boss (Alan Mowbray), scuttling her plan to marry her true love (Russell Gleason). Frances Dee gives a splendid performance as the younger sister who coolly destroys her sister’s hopes for happiness, then flirts with her soon-to-be brother-in-law, further complicating the already impossible situation.

   Mowbray, who initially appears to be a man with nothing but his business and his fiancee on his mind, has a skeleton in the closet, a girlfriend (Carmel Myers) who doesn’t want to lose her sugar daddy.

   Mowbray is surprisingly cast as a romantic lead but he negotiates the tricky shoals with great skill, besieged on all sides by the “nice women” in his life. If it weren’t for the bite in the script and performances, this would be a forgettable soap.

   But even with a happy ending that finally takes the teeth (fangs?) out of the drama, it’s still an engrossing pre-Code sexual drama of dysfunctional relationships.

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!

TRANSATLANTIC. Fox, 1931. Edmund Lowe, Greta Nissen, John Halliday, Myrna Loy, Jean Hersholt, Lois Moran, Billy Bevan. Story: Guy Bolton; photography: James Wong Howe. Director: William K. Howard. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Another rough print (the program notes warned of this) and hardly of the interest of The Letter (reviewed here ) this “Grand Hotel on an ocean liner” (as the notes more or less put it) was an entertaining trifle, owing to a good cast, some fine photography by James Wong Howe, and a serviceable, melodramatic story.

   Edmund Lowe is a gent of dubious moral values who’s skipping out of the country but who ironically finds himself becoming the moral center of a series of little dramas, shot through with crime and attempted murder.

   The most striking part of the film is a climactic chase up and down and around the massive structures of the ship’s boiler room. A really nice print of this might show off the film to better advantage but I’m not convinced that it has (as the program notes claim) “all the ingredients for one of the greats!”

   N. B.:   Charlie Shibuk commented to me that he saw the screening of a beautiful 35mm print some 15 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art, and he still agrees with my summation.

THE LETTER. Paramount, 1929. Jeanne Eagels, O. P. Heggie, Reginald Owen, Herbert Marshall, Irene Brown, Lady Tsen Mei, Tamaki Yoshiwara, Kenneth Thomson. Producer: Monta Bell; director: Jean de Limur. Adaptation: Garrett Fort, with dialogue by de Limur and Bell, based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   Jeanne Eagels (1890-1929), a renowned stage actress of the 1920s (she appeared with great success in the stage version of Maugham’s Rain), made films for Thanhouser and World Pictures in 1916-1917 (one of the Thanhouser films, The Woman and the World, is available on DVD) and for MGM in 1927, but of the two sound films she made for Paramount, only The Letter is known to survive.

   The print is somewhat rough, with the early sound technology (between the dialogue and sound effects, accompanied by strong background “noise,” the sound drops out completely) initially distracting until the ear adjusts.

   In spite of this, the fragile beauty of Eagels (only 39 when she died of an apparent drug overdose and advanced alcoholism) and her vulnerable but compelling portrayal of the woman who betrays her husband and murders her lover make this a haunting film that largely overcomes its technical shortcomings.

   Herbert Marshall (seen above), who would play the deluded husband in the 1939 version directed by William Wyler and starring Bette Davis, here plays the lover whom Leslie (Eagels) shoots when he confesses that he’s in a relationship with a Chinese woman and that he no longer cares for his high-class, British lover.

   This version departs significantly from the Wyler film, and fellow Cinecon attendee John Apostolou confirmed (after an overnight reading of the original novella on which the play and films are based) that de Limur and Bell have largely followed Maugham’s concept.

   Gale Sondergaard was memorable as the Chinese lover Li-Ti in 1939, but the casting of an accomplished Chinese actress (Lady Tsen Mei) in the role leads to an equally memorable performance.

   In addition, the absence of a moral code in 1929 allowed the inclusion of a scene in Li-Ti’s gambling, drug and prostitution establishment that confronts Leslie with a cage filled with women of “pleasure” that highlights the immoral nature of of the Caucasian woman’s transgressions.

   Also, in 1939, Leslie, freed by the courts, was killed in a punishment that society could not impose. Here, she is condemned to remain in a loveless marriage with a man who knows everything about her deceit, in a setting that, like the cage crowded with imprisoned prostitutes, will become her prison.

   Some of the audience felt the film ended too abruptly as Leslie is given her sentence by her unforgiving husband and has little screen time to react to it although that could also be seen as heightening her realization of a life without hope of escape.

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.

   Got a wild hair up my brain last month and started watching Othello: the 1965 film-of-the-play with Laurence Olivier, and the 1953 version done by Orson Welles, and now some    *** SPOILER COMMENTS ***

   I’m going to talk about the ending here because I assume most folks are familiar with it, or if you’re not, the full title, “The Tragedy of Othello” might tip you off.

   Olivier’s film is entirely too slow and stagy, especially the acting, which is rather too broad for a movie. The actors never seem to sit down and relax; they’re always standing (or posing, rather) to declaim their lines. Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi and Frank Finlay (who plays Iago like a mean-spirited Peter Cook) inject some naturalism, but they’re woefully overridden by Laurence Olivier, grimacing gesticulating, eye-rolling, and yet somehow compelling as ever.

   Then the 1949/53 Welles film: Visually splendid, and for a bespoke egotist, Welles is very generous to his supporting players, but the film itself has the kind of dubbing one normally associates with Japanese rubber-suit-monster-movies, so given the tricky mise-en-scene and the floating sound track, it’s sometimes hard to figure out who’s saying what. Surprisingly, in the whole cast, Robert Coote stands out as a deftly comic Roderigo, cast effectively against Micheal MacLiammoir, who plays Iago like a petulant Dudley Moore.

   MacLiammoir wrote a book about the chaotic production of this film, which took about a year-and-a-half to make and another year-and-a-half to get released. Put Money in Thy Purse (Methuen, 1952) is required reading for fans of Shakespeare and Welles, and a treat for those who just love good writing.

   MacLiammoir masters that subtle, self-deprecating humor one finds in the best of Walter Albert, and his evocations of the film’s exotic locations (Rome, Venice, Casablanca, Morocco…) are vivid and hilarious at the same time.

   He also has a clever way with his anecdotes, setting up a situation, milking it for potential, then delivering the punch line like a witty prize-fighter. There’s an exceptional scene of a drunken actor with a thick Dutch accent auditioning for Roderigo, who keeps getting drunker, more energetic and less comprehensible as the audition goes on for hours, at the end of which, Welles turns to MacLiammoir and says, “We may have been in the presence of genius. However, I think what the part calls for is talent.”

   The most effective film of the story, however, may be Franco Zeffirelli’s 1986 Otello, from Verdi’s opera, with great sets, costumes, and color, plus fast pace and snappy performances. The music ain’t bad either.

   Verdi gives a fine duet to Otello and Desdemona (which is more than Shakespeare did) and Zeffirelli caps off the ending with cathartic energy — which, I’m afraid, is also more than Shakespeare did; the Immortal Bard had a tendency sometimes let his plays keep going when the story was over. (And I wonder: did savvy Elizabethans slip out of the Globe right after Hamlet died or Juliet croaked, to avoid the rush in the parking lot?)

   If I mentioned Peter Cook and Dudley Moore earlier, it’s because Othello is largely an extended double-talk routine between Othello and Iago, gullible stooge and fast-talking con man: like a Hope-and-Crosby “Road to…” movie gone tragically wrong without the comic timing, or Oklahoma! if Poor Judd had actually hanged himself in the first act.

   The story ends with Iago found out but basically triumphant, and Othello, who would have been a more compelling character if he had any brains, little more than his patsy. Some fine writing, but the story is weak at its core and ultimately unsatisfying.

   And if I can throw in just one more aside, my favorite Othello isn’t a film at all, but a radio production with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson as Othello and Iago, and Judy Dench as Desdemona.

   Brutally edited but fast-moving, it gives the listener no time to get bored, and those who only know Gielgud from his “old prig” roles in the movies will find his Moor simply astonishing: he sounds fierce, black and seven feet tall, and he and Richardson play off each other like … well, like a well-practiced comedy team.

SHARP SHOOTERS. Fox, 1928. George O’Brien, Lois Moran, Noah Young, Tom Dugan, William Demarest, Gwen Lee, Josef Swickard. Director: John G. Blystone. Shown at Cinecon 40, Hollywood CA, September 2004.

   A modest effort in which George O’Brien dallies with a French dance-hall girl (Moran) before he leaves her, protesting eternal love, with his comrades Young and Dugan for their next port in the states.

   When Moran finds him, he’s already dallying with another dilly and not too pleased to see her. Young and Dugan, exercising what passes for a moral example, maneuver him into an unwanted marriage.

   Then, as you might suspect, anger turns to something much warmer, and the film ends on a very happy note. Demarest is the cad who tries to separate the two.

   A nice, undemanding entertainment for the start of the first full day of screenings.

THE WEDDING MARCH. Paramount; 1928. George Fawcett, Maude George, Erich von Stroheim, George Nichols, ZaSu Pitts, Fay Wray. Erich von Stroheim, director; screenplay by von Stroheim and Harry Carr. Photography by Hal Mohr, Buster Sorensen, and Ben Reynolds; art direction by Richard Day and von Stroheim. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   After the cost overruns of The Wedding March and withdrawal of funding before von Stroheim was able to complete Part II as he had planned it, he essentially ended his directing career with Queen Kelly (1929, also incomplete). But what a tribute to his extraordinary skill the first part of The Wedding March is!

   Von Stroheim was, of course, popularly known as The Man You Love to Hate, but his role as Prince Nicki von Wildeliebe-Rauffenburg is almost sympathetic. He’s expected to marry properly (that is, a rich wife) but he falls in love with crippled musician Mitzi Schrammell (Fay Wray), much to his (and her) parents’ dismay.

   He woos the besmitten Mitzi in a flowered bower where she finally succumbs to his charms, then summarily abandons her when he goes along with his parents’ ambitions (to replenish the family coffers, constantly depleted by the family’s spendthrift ways) and, at the film’s climax, marries Cecelia Schweisser (ZaSu Pitts), the daughter of a wealthy merchant.

   The magic of the film (aside from the fine performances) is in von Stroheim’s detailed portrait of an ancient aristocracy largely going to lavish seed, hedonistic and opportunistic, interested only in perpetuating its indolent way of life.

   Prince Nicki seems to show some promise of breaking with his class, but if he is to marry a commoner, she must pay for the privilege of marrying him.

   Nicki and Mitzi first meet at an elaborate outdoor ceremony where the equestrian Prince is parading with his company in a reel that’s filmed in beautiful two-strip color. If only the quality of the print were as good for the black-and-white sequences that make up most of the cinematography. By the last reel, the print is almost unwatchable, washed out, grainy, with the intertitles unreadable.

   One of the Cinevent attendees I was talking to blamed the poor quality on the fact that the print screened was 16mm. My friend Charlie Shibuk has seen a good print of the film and told me that William Everson found his 16mm print to be of quite acceptable quality. It would seem that better prints are available, and I wonder if anyone screened this print before scheduling it.

   In addition, the writer of the program notes claims that although von Stroheim began to film part II, the film was taken away from him and given to Josef von Sternberg, who put together a poor version. He further claims that Henri Langlois, of the French Cinematheque, allowed his print to deteriorate.

   Charlie has told me that the writer was wrong on both counts. Von Stroheim did, in fact, edit a version of Part II (at the end of which Nicki tries to atone for his rejection of Mitzi), and the French print was destroyed in a fire. So it would seem that the von Stroheim legend endures, a mixture of fanciful fiction and fact.

EDITORIAL COMMENT.   For a three-minute glimpse of the wedding march itself — in color — see this YouTube clip.

LUCKY STAR. Fox Film Corp., 1929. Charles Farrell, Janet Gaynor, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, Paul Fix, Hedwig Reicher, Gloria Grey, Hector V. Sarno. Scenario by Sonja Levien; photography by Chester Lyons and William Cooper Smith; art direction by Harry Oliver. (Originally part talkie, but the soundtrack has been lost.) Director: Frank Borzage. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

    This was one of the films severely compromised by print quality. On its original release, the New York Times reviewer described a film in which “many of the scenes highly resemble etchings — dim portraits of aged shingle houses, with their shutters hanging askew,” and in which muted tones “play a large part.”

    Although the print quality left most of these details to the viewer’s imagination, it was apparent that the sets were expressionistic, often angled so that the architecture appeared slightly askew, off-center.

    It was clearly a studio (or a stage) set, a grim landscape with the houses widely separated and sparsely populated, a setting appropriate to the film’s minimalist drama, with the look of some remote European village rather than the American town it is supposed to represent.

    Timothy Osborn (Charles Farrell) and Martin Wrenn (Guinn Williams) go off to war together and while Wrenn returns to pick up his life where he had left off, Osborn comes back as a cripple who lives by himself in a cottage where he takes on odd jobs to support himself.

    Mary Tucker (Janet Gaynor) is the young girl they left behind, now a young woman to whom both men are attracted. Wrenn’s body may be untouched by the war, but his spirit is dark and violent, while Osborn’s bright spirit is undamaged by his experiences.

    Mary’s mother, in a telling performance by Hedwig Reicher, wants a better life for her daughter and forbids her to visit Osborn, supporting the suit of Wrenn, who plans to take her away but whose intentions are anything but honorable.

    This seems a much smaller film than Borzage’s earlier 7th Heaven and Street Angel, but the director’s handling of his actors is so sure that he makes the !miracles of the spirit he favors in his films believable and touching, even when the darkened print sabotages his intentions.