Downhill (1927)

After taking the blame for an indiscretion he was innocent of, young Roddy’s (Ivor Novello) life heads in some sort of negative slope analogy.

Produced directly after the success of The Lodger, Alfred Hitchcock returned to his star, Ivor Novello. Unfortunately, Downhill wasn’t nearly as successful, and it shouldn’t come as surprise. All the mystery and intrigue of the previous film was replaced with “bad stuff happens to good guy”. No mystery, no suspense.

Metadata on IMDb implies gay coding with the Roddy character, but I don't see it. Novello himself was openly gay, but I sense this is commentary on Roddy not responding to Mabel's advances. I don't see that interpretation anywhere else.

Novello is an interesting character. A bona fide matinee idol at the time, the 35ish Novello believably played a high school boy. Ah, what acting talent, pancake makeup, and grainy film stock can do. He co-wrote the play on which the film is based, along with many other plays and songs. His film career would be fairly brief, but would continue to write. The Ivor Novello Awards are still presented for songwriting and composing.

Hitch wasn’t quite Hitch, not just yet. He played with elements of visual style uncommon of the day (some of which he would later criticize) but the film is a bit of a snoozer. Not a painful watch, but not a very compelling one either. AMRU 2.5.

Wings (1927)

Two men, one from a rich family, vie for the affection of a woman (not Clara Bow). When duty calls, they both sign up as pilots for the Great War.

Clara received top billing despite not being the lead. Having made a huge splash earlier in the year with It, the twenty two year old’s star power was at an all-time high. The studio capitalized on her fame, giving her a “topless” scene. She would go on to appear in nothing else of interest. She didn’t transition to talkies very well or to thirty at all. Clara married a cowboy star and retired to a comfortable life of mental illness. She would die at the ripe old age of sixty. And so it goes.

Gary Cooper appears in a very short scene, one of his earliest credited roles. It was enough to kick start his career into lead roles. The real leads are Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen as Jack and David, whose relationship begins as rivals but evolves throughout the film. Arlen would actually marry the object of his affection in real life.

Some state of the art visual effects trickery was employed to show the leads flying the airplanes. What the filmmakers did was to strap a camera to the front of an old airplane and tell the actors to fly it. This technique worked surprisingly well.

Wings is a lavish, expansive, and expensive film. The 2016 restoration, which reunited it with the original score, is breathtaking. A two and a half hour silent film is a tough sell and I would be lying if I said it didn’t occasionally drag, but it is amazingly engaging. Hand painted frames highlighted the flames of crashing planes and the flash of the gunfire. It is quite the spectacle. AMRU 4.

Easy Virtue (1927)

Larita Filton, embroiled in a scandalous divorce, flees to the south of France to avoid the press. There she meets and falls for the young John Whittaker. When back in England and polite society, her new in-laws are suspicious of her past.

Ranked by IMDb as Hitchcock’s fourth worst film, it is a tedious and sometimes visually confusing mess. It does not help that my copy is a poor transfer. The film was thin with very poor contrast, and the score was damaged along with it. While a fully restored edition would have been more pleasant to watch, It would not have saved the film.

This is not to say there weren’t a few creative elements. A long shot of a tennis court starts through a tennis racket then progresses to the first volley. Another scene wordlessly communicates important information by watching the reaction of a telephone operator who is listening in on the phone call. Hitchcock is experimenting in a way we see much more of later in his career.

Based on a Noel Coward play, there is a 2008 version that didn’t fare much better. Prior to this the only Coward adapted film I have seen is 1933’s Cavalcade, which was dull as dishwater. I don’t know much about Coward and theater in general, but it appears he struck the zeitgeist of his time but his works became very dated very quickly. But I’ll leave that to someone’s Theater Philistine blog to explore.

As mentioned, Easy Virtue is ranked pretty low on Hitchcock’s CV, with the bottom three coming up if I continue chronologically. We will see what happens there. But as for this one, I found the characters hard to engage with, some of the action confusing, and the story tedious. But if you must watch it, find a much better copy. AMRU 2.

The Ring (1927)

The boxing champion hires a circus boxer (that’s a thing) as his sparring partner, and has eyes for his girl.

One of four Hitchcock films released in 1927, we follow ‘One-Round’ Jack from circus side show up the ranks of organized boxing to become a legitimate contender. All for the love of a woman. Shades of Rocky, anyone? The first Rocky, not the others were he fights space robots, or whatever foolishness. Lillian Hall-Davis plays ‘the girl’ that the men, for some reason, desire. Her career faltered in the early sound era, then she ended it all at age 35.

While never uninteresting, The Ring (not that Ring) drags a little, a victim of a one hour story with a two hour runtime. The twenty-something Hitchcock wasn’t yet the master of suspense he would later become. A more mature Hitch would have tightened it up a bit. Oh, and have left out the N word. AMRU 3.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

A man calling himself The Avenger is murdering “fair haired” girls, causing panic in London. When a strange man matching his description rents a room, they begin to suspect him.

Set in current day (well, 1920’s) London, The Lodger is based on a book about Jack the Ripper. The book and the movie differ particularly in the ending in ways and for reasons that spoil. This is Hitchcock’s third film and first thriller. Having done his first two in Germany, he experimented with expressionist style to good effect.

The story centers around the husband and wife running the house, their fair haired daughter, her detective boyfriend, and of course, the lodger. Detective Joe is obsessed with catching The Avenger and doesn’t care much for this odd stranger, but pretty Daisy likes him just fine. Daisy is billed as being a “mannequin”, meaning she modeled clothes in a department store for rich people.

Hitch did his first ever cameo, and it came by accident. He didn’t hire enough extras for an early newsroom montage, so he sat in, back to the camera. A tradition is born. Assistant director and script supervisor Alma Reville had a quick cameo as well.

The expressive style and tense storytelling make The Lodger a compelling watch. The animated title cards were imaginative. One declaring Murder “Wet from the press”, which I presume to be the 1920’s London version of “Hot from the press”. But this film showed what Hitchcock could, and would eventually do. In fact, it would be years before he produced it’s equal. AMRU 4.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

A farmer is secretly cheating on his wife with a woman from the city, except everyone knows. The woman convinces the man to drown his wife, sell the farm, and move to the city with her. And everyone lives happily ever after.

F.W. Murnau is better known for Nosferatu and Faust, and was brought to America to recreate his magic touch. He was given complete creative control and a giant budget, and the result was arguably his best work, winning three Academy Awards. But it lost money, so budget and control disappeared for his next film. Welcome to Hollywood. He would die in a car accident before he could make his mark on sound cinema.

Twenty one year old Janet Gaynor played ‘The Wife’, looking more than a little bit like Tweety bird’s Granny, and won an Oscar for her performance. Remember her from ‘A Star is Born’. Her Oscar from here made a cameo there. Margaret Livingston played the woman so wicked as to tempt a married man. The Vamp! George O’Brien played ‘The Man’ victimized by her womanly wiles. He went on to appear in many westerns, apparently.

The visual storytelling in Sunrise is amazing. There are great overlay scenes done in-camera that are remarkable. Few title cards were needed to tell the story. Margaret’s ‘The Woman’ takes much of the moral blame for ‘The Man’s transgressions, and that storyline does not age well, but let’s consider the period. This was the Jazz age and women had the right to vote for only seven years at this point. And it’s a great film. We can let this slide.

I didn’t want to pay Amazon another four dollars so I found it on YouTube. The quality was excellent. I suggest you do the same. AMRU 4.

The Kid Brother (1927)

Harold Hickory (Harold Lloyd) is the youngest son of the Hickory clan, the most influential family in Hickoryville. They don't include him in their manly dealings and he has to prove himself to them and this girl ... wait, are all silent comedies the same?

Pretty much. OSHA unapproved stunts, "believing in yourself" mantra, and pancake makeup. Only difference between this and a Buster Keaton film is Lloyd's glasses and expressive face. The details of the story don't matter. We root for Harold and laugh at some of the bits. And some of the bits are pretty funny.

Seven of Lloyd's eighteen feature films were talkies. This was his second to last (or penultimate in fancy-talk) silent picture. He did a million shorts. Usually listed third behind Chaplin and Keaton for silent comedians, I was unaware he did as many features as he did.

Heavier on story and lighter on stunts as his other films (or so I am told), this was Lloyd's personal favorite. I mentioned in my last post about Clark Kent being modeled after Cary Grant, but apparently the comic modeled him directly on Lloyd's Glasses character.

Interesting if unoriginal story, funny bits, and well filmed, if a bit tedious, Lloyd is second to Keaton for silent comedians as far as I am concerned. For now, at least. AMRU 3. Way past time I got onto horror, don't you think?

"I do not believe the public will want spoken comedy. Motion pictures and the spoken arts are two distinct arts."

London After Midnight (1927)

Five years after the suicide of a wealthy man, strange people lease his mansion. Maybe they're vampires!

Lon Chaney and Tod Browning made ten movies together and London After Midnight was their most successful, if not the highest praised. Come the sound era, it fell into obscurity, and was remade by Browning as Mark of the Vampire in 1935. The only known print was destroyed when an MGM vault caught fire, making it the most sought after lost film. Imagine my excitement when TCM put it on their Halloween schedule! Imagine my disappointment when I learned that I was to watch forty-five minutes of production stills and title cards.

There are a large number of high quality photos of the production and the producers did a fair job of combining them with new title cards and a better than fair score. However, the stills were frequently reused causing the story to became muddled. A noble effort for the materials at hand, but it came off as cheesy at times.

Interesting to film historians and recovering philistines like myself, but fairly hard to watch by any measure. If you have difficulty with movies that don't talk, movies that don't move is a non-starter. Glad I watched it, I suppose, and will wait for a copy to be rediscovered. Check your attics! AMRU 3.

The Unknown (1927)

Alonzo (Lon Chaney) is an armless knife thrower in a travelling gypsy circus. He is in love with the owner's daughter, the hot Nanon (Joan Crawford). Lucky for Alonzo, Nanon has a terrible fear of being embraced by men, and therefore feels safe around him. But he has a competitor: Malabar the strong man (Norman Kerry). Surely she would never fall for him.

Here is where we learn some secrets. Alonzo is not who, and what, he appears. The cops are searching for a man with two thumbs on one hand who has been committing thefts wherever the circus goes. And as Alonzo's obsession for Nanon grows we learn more of what he is willing to do to get her.

Here is the best silent movie I've ever seen.

Sound, I feel, is essential to telling a story. Silent cinema is a serious handicap that is almost impossible to overcome. But Lon Chaney was it's master. Dialog is unnecessary when looking at his expression. There is no doubt what is going through his mind. I wish I hadn't deleted it from my DVR.

Apart from Chaney's uncanny acting talent, what else is interesting? Until 1973 the only copies that existed were very poor quality bootleg versions, when it was revealed that a quality copy was found five years earlier but was hard to find because it was marked "Unknown". There are a couple scripted scenes that I'm unsure were ever filmed. If they were, I would love to see them. The movie is barely an hour long. Crawford long said that watching Chaney is where she truly learned to act.

There is not much more to say. Had Lon been born ten years later, and lived twenty years older, he would have been the undisputed king of Hollywood, but his lifestyle would be the end of him. Lon Chaney died of lung cancer three years after the movie's release. Director Tod Browning intended on using him in the title role of Dracula. The 6'2" Creighton wasn't a shadow of his 5'9" father. AMRU 4.5.

"Hands! Men's hands! How I hate them!"

The Jazz Singer (1927)

Young Jackie Rabinowitz is the son of a Jewish Cantor (apparently the dude who sings at Temple). He is expected to take over the family business, but young Jackie has different plans. After being punished for singing in a pub, he runs away and recasts himself as jazz singer Jack Robin (Al Jolson). Over time his new life as a rising star and his family ties collide when he must make a choice.

This is the movie that heralded in the era of the talkies, and overnight they became a craze. Interestingly enough, The Jazz Singer is not a talkie. Here is a little movie knowledge, courtesy a film philistine: sound films are not sound films because of spoken dialog. What distinguishes them is that the audio track is encoded on the film itself and synchronized with the moving pictures. Later Charlie Chaplin movies had no recorded dialog but were technically not silent because a synchronized sound system was used.

What happened here is that between songs, Jolson had to open his trap. He was supposed to go straight into his next song, but instead said a few words to the crowd. Those words? "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" Truer words were never before spoken. Studio head Sam Warner insisted it be kept in the movie. Warner would die one day before the movie was released. He was 40.

As for the rest of the dialog: title cards. Seems obvious now to record ALL the dialog, but they didn't. There was a second scene were Jolson chats with his mother between songs. Which leads to another interesting aspect of the movie. The depiction of Jewish life. Not just having Jewish people, and admitting that they were Jewish, but actually depicting issues that matter to Jews regarding their culture. Remember, in To Be or Not To Be, fourteen years later, they never even used the word Jew once, and I considered it brave.

Another thing ... well ... let's just say that the logic and appeal of the minstrel show is lost on modern audiences. Me, in particular. Was it the collision of the realization that black music was pretty awesome and the fear of allowing them to play to white audiences? Was it meant to mock black performance? I don't even aspire to understand. But apparently Jolson in blackface served another purpose. It illustrated the dichotomy between the character's Jewish heritage and his desire to succeed in the wider American culture. Or so Wikipedia says. What do I know? The neighborhood I grew up in had about the same number of minorities as your average country club.

Anyhow, this was a movie worth seeing. Maybe worth seeing again. AMRU 3.5. Thank you Pub-D-Hub.

"He sounds like Jakie, but he looks like his shadow!"

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

Rich man is judged insane by his relatives, because, he believes, they want his money. Always scheming against him, he feels like the proverbial caged canary. When he passes, he arranges for his will to be read twenty years from his passing. The relatives and their decedents meet in his spooky old house just before midnight for the reading. Nice setting.

The pretty lady in the poster (Laura La Plante) is named as the sole heir. But there is one catch. She must be declared sane by a psychiatrist or the estate will go to someone else named in this other letter. Things are further complicated when it is learned that the other person named has learned this and may be plotting against her. Next, we insert an escaped lunatic ...

This bonafide haunted house movie is based on a 1922 play and was remade several times, most notably by Bob Hope twelve years later. It was made most recently in the late 70's as, I think, soft-core porn. That should be interesting.

Anyhow, it's a well made silent horror (with comic subtones) that could use some restoring. The netflix version is more than a little scratched. Still, enjoyable and well worth my time. AMRU 3.

Next up will be a challenge for me. I will try to get in as many of one line of film as possible before Halloween. Let's see what I can do.

Metropolis (1927)

Back when I got my collection of horror movies, there were a couple films on it that I was very much looking forward to watching. First was Nosferatu, which I found disappointing. Secondly was Metropolis, which amazed me. The video quality on that public domain was very poor and it made me long to see a restored copy. Finally I have.

Those looking for a restored copy of Metropolis will find many. The most authoritative version is the Kino edition, which includes the most footage and uses the original score (and no, it wasn't done by Queen). Why so many versions? The original film was long. Too long, studio execs felt, for American audiences. They also had little regard for it. The film was edited, reorganized, and rescripted. Many times by many different people. Trying to piece together the original masterpiece was quite an undertaking.

The Kino edition is a little over two hours. I had the boys watch. Someday they will forgive me.

Here's the basic story: rich guy runs the plant, the Metropolis. They workers are drones who live a brutal existence in the depths. Freder, the owner's son, is a playboy who spends his time ... well, playing. The mysterious Maria brings the children of the workers into realm of the privileged to see their "brothers and sisters". Freder is captivated. He goes down below and takes the place of a worker for a ten hour shift. He learns that Maria holds illegal meetings deep in the catacombs. She is looking for a mediator between the hands and the head. Perhaps this could be Freder? Good 'oll dad will have something to say about this.

What I saw in the public domain version was a visual work of art, obscured by scratches. The story didn't make a damn bit of sense. The title cards were sometimes clipped, unclear, and some seemed to be missing. But the special effects, given the time and technology, were wonderful. A machine the men operate has a breakdown and people are killed. In Freder's eyes, the machine transforms into a giant pagan god, consuming the people. A featurette on the disk describes what Fritz Lang had to go through to make that happen. It's worth watching.

One thing I found out was that approximately a quarter of the movie is lost. They inserted title cards to describe the missing scenes as best as they can piece them together. So, the full film was, what, close to three hours long? Seriously?

Oh, the religious imagery. The virginal Maria is waiting for a mediator, which seemed like something of a messianic character. Maria speaks of the story of Babel from the old testament, there is a reference to a character named Hel (from Norse mythology, not the double-hockey sticks place), and a character named Josaphat. Oh, and the pagan god monster mentioned earlier and pentagrams everywhere, especially in evil inventor Rotwang's house. Rotwang creates an evil robot version of Maria, maybe a reference to the whore Magdalene? (I know Mary Magdalene wasn't really a whore!)

Silent films are tedious. Two hour long silent films with missing scenes are doubly so. I put the family to sleep. There were moments where I myself found my eyes closed. The amazing art work and imagery could take it only so far. That's when I learned that an almost complete version of Metropolis was discovered in a film library in Argentina. A restoration is expected to be ready in 2010. Could I sit through another, even longer viewing? That is something I will have to consider.

In the meantime, AMRU 3.5.

It (1927)

This is the Clara Bow silent film. Let's not confuse It with the Stephen King work or the 1966 Roddy McDowall horror film. The title does lend Itself to the horror genre, ala Them! and The Thing. In this case, It's a story of a poor salesgirl with "that special something".

And she does. Clara Bow is hot. Elinor Glyn wrote a book called "It", where she describes this special quality some people posses. This story is not an adaptation of the book. It's a story about people who read the book and then go mad for Clara. Glyn actually appears as herself.

Silent movies are weird, what with the exaggerated reactions and all. The story isn't much. Business upper-muck reads about "It", identifies the quality in Clara (and, mistakenly, himself), and tries to woo her. His dashing friend is too preoccupied to notice, falls for her, hard feelings, comic mischief, misunderstandings, bla bla bla, you know the drill.

I long knew that Clara Bow was the "It" girl long before I knew what the hell that meant. It's good to see the film that started It all off, but I don't need to see It again. AMRU 3.