1928 - THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN, aka La Coquille et le Clergyman

 This surrealistic (avant guarde?) film runs only forty minutes and to paraphrase Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) " a great piece of art but nobody ever wished it a minute longer."  This early film is one of those mystifying things that show up with artists with pretensions get their hands on a canvas or in this case a movie camera.

The appears to have something to do with a clergyman who is attempting to stop maybe a love affair between maybe his wife and maybe an army general.  There is much running around and the symbolism is apparently rampant. Glass is broken, the clergyman drags himself down the street, the maybe wife ends up having to expose herself and the army general runs around for no particular reason.   

 

The author of The Seashell and the Clergyman Antonin Artaud claimed it was an attempt to photograph a dream and one has to give the director Germaine Dulac credit.  For an old movie she was certainly inventive when it came to weird camera angles and lighting effects.

 

This is the film where some British critic coined the phrase, that the film was "so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable".  The Seashell and the Clergyman is practically a companion piece to Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou another short film that is an obscure piece of confusing surrealism.  As another critic said "it's gotta be art because it sure as hell isn't entertainment."  If you so desire the film is on YouTube in a good copy

1928 - THE TRAIL OF 98, a spectacular silent film

Clarence Brown's spectacular epic about the Klondike gold rush was filmed on a large scale.  Almost every scene has a large scale quality to it.  The story involves a group traveling to Alaska in search of gold and encountering many hardships along the way.

 

The film was also a hardship to make behind the camera.  Thousands of men were employed in a spectacular scene climbing a mountain pass in -60 degree weather.  Another scene involved a river rapids stunt which ended up killing 4 stuntmen.  Watching the out of control river with boats sailing down it is impressive and rather frightening.

The film stars early Harry Carey and Dolores Del Rio.  Carey went on to be associated with John Ford early in Ford's career.  Del Rio was one of the most beautiful women to grace the screen.

This silent film has that weird synchronized sound track where there is music and background noise but no actual actors mouthing dialog.  Still, this is an extremely impressive film which ranks up there with other epic film.

The screenplay was by Joseph Farnham. Benjamin Glazer, Robert Service and Waldemar Young, the film runs 97 minutes.

1928 - THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK - excellence in all areas

Probably as good as you are going to get in a film.  Director Josef Von Sternberg a filmmaker who struggled in the Hollywood systems always struggled with his artistic intentions and the commercial considerations of the studio.  The Docks of New York is a rare example of both of these objectives being fulfilled for a change.

The story such that it is, is about lowlifes along the waterfront in NYC.  The screenplay was written by Jules Furthman who had a long career in Hollywood.  Furthman is mostly remembered for working with Howard Hawks.

The director Josef Von Sternberg was probably as close to an artist as Hollywood would put up with.   Von Sternberg was considered a difficult individual to deal with and his abrasive personality and lack of commercial success affected his career.

This is one of Von Sternberg's best films, with great photography and lots of atmosphere.  Highly recommended

76 minutes.

1928 - LONESOME, Boy meets Girl with a lot of style

This is a simple boy meets girl love story told with a lot of skill and style by the director Paul Fejos.  The nothing plot is an excuse to use about every cinematic trick that was known to film up to this period.

Lonesome was filmed during that period when silent films were beginning to transition into sound so there are several sequences where the two leads jabber on which are kind of out of step with the rest of the film.

The film has a lot of charm thanks to the two leads Barbara Kent and Glenn Tyron.  Their acting is very impressive considering all the camera razzle dazzle that Fejos uses.   Lonesome also doesn't wear out it's welcome as it runs just a little over and hour.  The viewer isn't overwhelmed with it's at times frenzied technique. 

The film is reminiscent of Murnau's work particularly City Girl which I reviewed earlier.  An impressive studio film.

69 minutes

1928 - THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES , entertaining drama from Griffith

A sneaky gold digger breaks up the family of Jean Hersholt (the Academy Awards humanitarian award is named after him).

As the gold digger, the actor Phyllis Haver is the whole show.  The first scene she appears in has her in a barber shop getting her hair bobbed while she is laughing at a copy of Little Women. Setting her sights on Hersholt a family man she expertly seduces him while modeling a bathing suit and asking him to tell her if she is bow legged.

 

This film was directed by the father of modern film technique D.W. Griffith.  The film is well photographed with one amazing shot of the camera showing the point of view of a suicide falling down a building.

Griffith has a lot of scenes in The Battle of the Sexes of Hersholt's family life.  The wife and children seem like a pretty drab bunch.  It's not much of a surprise that Hersholt would rather spend time with Haver than his dreary family.
 88 minutes.

1928 - NOAH'S ARK, silent religious allegory made on a spectacular scale

The story of Noah's Ark is used to illustrate the evil ways of modern man and a lot of stuff gets wrecked in this very impressive Warner Brother's production.

A big film for the studio.  Daryl F. Zanuck who was in charge of the production and the director Michael Curtiz used just about everything they knew about film making when it came to mounting this production.

Noah's Ark appears to have been conceived as an attempt to copy the success of Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 production of The Ten Commandments.  DeMille's film, had used a long prologue to tell the story of Moses and the Israelites escape from Egypt.  The Ten Commandments were used to dramatize the sins being committed in the modern world.

Noah's Ark shows that Zanuck and Curtiz had carefully studied DeMille's film and then attempted to out do it.  Their film opens with a modern story and then travels back into time to show how the story of Noah and the flood correspond to modern life. 

Michael Curtiz one of Hollywood's best directors filmed the story with his usual dazzling technique.  Curtiz used his skill with composition and editing to move the story along at top speed.  Noah's Ark has an amazing flood sequence towards the end of the picture that really pushed the boundaries of special effects.  The flood disaster was apparently a little too exciting, four extras were killed during the filming of this sequence.

The film features a couple of popular silent stars, George O'Brien and Dolores Costello.  O'Brien was a leading man of the 1920's and had done a lot of work for John Ford, he was sort of an early version of John Wayne.  Dolores Costello a major silent film star of the 1920's, was considered one of the great beauties of the silent screen, the woman certainly knew how to take a close up. 

Noah's Ark is really an impressive film.  Besides the flood sequence there is a spectacular train wreck and a World War I battle scene all filmed with tremendous skill.  Curtiz was a director who knew how to put a film together, there's not a dull moment in the entire picture

100 minutes.

1928 - WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS, good South Pacific adventure

An alcoholic doctor finds redemption on a remote south Pacific.  That's all the plot in this film.

Made during the period when movies were transitioning from silent to sound, White Shadows in the South Seas has music and some synchronized sound effects but not actual dialog.  MGM hired Robert Flaherty to film this story and sent him and a crew to Tahiti.  Flaherty was never a film maker who could develop or film a story with the usual cookie cutter production approach,  His pondering and indecision was a major frustration to the production team and he was eventually fired and replaced by W. S. Van Dyke a studio director. 

The film has impressive and very beautiful on location photography.  A lot of the actors appear to be actual natives.  The exception, the actor Rachel Torres a stunning woman with the very non native plucked eyebrow look.

Critical of the corrupt influence of white European culture on the natives, White Shadows in the South Seas for the most part contains the typical white man fantasy about living on a tropical island with a beautiful native girl worshiping everything about him.

W. S. Van Dyke may have been a studio director but he definitely put together an impressive film.

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1928, FOUR SONS, John Ford's very moving and impressive World War 1 drama

Another good John Ford silent film.  This is a tragic and sentimental story about the destruction of a family in Germany during World War I.  Ford found the story and this was apparently one of his favorite films.

Ford had studied the German silent films and had even made a trip to UFA studios where Metropolis had been shot to understand and absorb their methods. Ford used what he had learned to tell this story with lots of symbolism and expressionist photography.   Four Sons was made entirely in the studio so he could carefully control the lighting and mood.

 

Ford was never afraid to put lots of emotion and sentimantality in his films and in Four Sons he achieves a better balance than usual.

Society destroying a family, was a theme Ford was to return to several times in other films like The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley,  Four Sons is one of his best films on this theme.

1928 - THE CROWD King Vidor's story of ordinary people told on epic scale

Supposedly the greatest silent film ever made and one of the most impressive films I've seen lately. King Vidor had made a ton of money for MGM with his war film The Big Parade. Vidor was allowed to pick a topic for a follow up film. King Vidor decided to tell the story of an ordinary couple living in the big city. He had at his disposal all the resources of MGM to make his film.

John and Mary meet, fall in love, get married and have children. One of their children dies, John loses his job, and by the end of the film there is some question whether the marriage will survive. That's the whole film.

King Vidor's strong direction and careful attention to detail definitely made this domestic drama a special film. The character of John Sims is not a particularly likable guy and seems like kind of a loser. His wife Mary, puts up with a lot but seems committed to making the marriage work. Telling this kind of story in 1928 with actors who were not stars was fairly daring approach.

Vidor used lots of expressionistic camera work clearly influenced by UFA studios in Germany, but he was also able to stay focused on the family right through the bittersweet ending.

1928 - Male/Female relationships Von Stroheim's THE WEDDING MARCH

Von Stroheim's 1928 film is a love story about an impoverished Prussian Prince who falls in love with a lower middle class woman but is forced by circumstance to marry the daughter of a rich industrialist. The entire story was filmed with great detail and glowing photography, it's a sophisticated but perverted film. Although the Prince's love for the woman Mitzi appears to be genuine, the Prince is hardly a likable leading man in the traditional sense. Scenes throughout the film show the Prince spending time in a bordello and it's clear he has been sleeping with the chambermaid at his parent's home. Even the beginning of his love scene with Mitzi is played next to a statue of the crucifix.

The other major male character, the butcher, who is in love with Mitzi is deliberately photographed to look like a pig. His attempted seduction of her towards the end of the film involves lots of unsubtle symbolism with the camera cutting back and forth between the butcher and a live pig running around the butcher shop.

Both female characters have some sort of physical handicap throughout the film. Mitzi, after she first meets the Prince, breaks her leg and hobbles around on a crutch throughout most of the film. The other female character Cecelia, was born with a limp. These details further push Von Stroheim's theme of the exploitation of vulnerable women.

Originally a two part film, the conclusion of the story called The Honeymoon exists only in stills photos, an interesting intelligent film about corruption of the innocent.

1928 - John Ford's HANGMAN'S HOUSE is surprisingly a very well done silent film

John Ford's 1928 silent film Hangman's House was a big surprise. Clocking in at 76 minutes it was not a major ordeal to sit through unlike a lot of silent movies are. It was a sophisticated piece of film making showing off many of Ford's strong points. Thematically somewhat reminiscent of The Searchers and The Quiet Man it didn't have any of the pretentiousness and ponderous story telling that affect those films.

A love story and a revenge story set in Ireland, Ford seemed to be inspired by the material and setting. Visual composition had always been Ford's strong point. Here he had a lot of impressive scenes photographed and staged for maximum visual impact. Using studio sets, Ford was able to create a very special look and mood with light and shadows throughout the film.

Ford and his production team staged an exciting and very impressive fire sequence at the end of the film, I would bet that Alfred Hitchcock and David Selznick remembered it when they were filming Rebecca. The film is known today for having the first appearance of John Wayne in a John Ford film. Wayne's an extra in the crowd cheering on the racers in the steeple chase scene. He's on the far left in this blurry picture below. Hangman's House really deserves to be known as a very good picture rather than for that piece of film trivia.