1922 - ROBIN HOOD, a spectacular film from Douglas Fairbanks.

An action adventure film from the man who invented the action hero, Douglas Fairbanks.  The film is in many ways an attempt to out do his previous action films, The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. 

The story of Robin Hood is told on an amazingly larger than life level.  Gigantic sets were built and then augmented with special effects to make them completely dwarf the actors.  It looks like hundreds it not thousands of extras were employed for the crowd scenes.

Douglas Fairbanks was known for doing a lot of his own stunts and this film is not an exception.  Fairbanks was a superb athlete and many of the action scenes were clearly thought out and executed by Fairbanks himself.

 

The director of Robin Hood was Allan Dwan but the real driving force and creative person in this film is Fairbanks himself.  Not only was Douglas Fairbanks the producer who had complete control of the film, he also wrote the screenplay.

 

Robin Hood is an entertaining and important film in the Hollywood film cannon.  It made Fairbanks a lot of money.

Written by Douglas Fairbanks, the running time is 127 minuets.

1929 - MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, an art film out of Soviet Russia

An arty silent film sort of a documentary from the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertog real name David Abelevich Kaufman.  This film is a completely plotless piece and has no titles in it since there is basically no story.

The cameraman who appears throughout the film is Mikhail Abelovich Kaufman the brother of Dziga Vertog.  There is some interesting film making going on here involving split screen effects and very frenzied editing iand at times interesting optical stuff.

 

Apparently Vertog's film was fairly controversial when it came out.  Unsurprisingly considered this was Communist controlled Russia which wasn't a place that was all that hospitable to individual artistic expressions.  The film was shot around Moscow and in some ways this is the most interesting aspect of it since you get a look at life in Moscow before World War I. 

 

I would have to say that all of Vertog's photography tricks only goes to show that when it comes to film in many ways people are still creating films in much the same ways as they were back in the 1920's before sound came in, editing is editing after all.

The film was written by Dziga Vertog and the running time is around 68 minutes.  It exists on YouTube in  a fairly decent copy if you are so inclined.

1923 - THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, first DeMIlle version

There are film historians who think that Cecil B. DeMille's first version of the biblical story about the Jew's exodus from Egypt,  is a lot better than his Vista Vision epic which he filmed in 1956,  the older version  certainly moves along story telling wise much better than the ponderous and very long version he remade with Charlton Heston.

DeMille and his writer Jeanie MacPherson sure keep things hopping along.  A decision to essentially split the film into two different stories allowed for DeMille to pour on the spectacle of the Bible story with large sets and impressive special effects for 1923.

 After the parting of the Red Sea in the first half of the film, the story jumps ahead to the present day and we get a tale that dramatizes the different Commandments as they apply to modern life. The modern tale is about two brothers, one who follows the Commandments and the other who doesn't and even  bad mouths God.  You know how he is going to end up.

 

Silent film brought out the best in DeMille, his staging and direction of the film is at times quite impressive.  Silent film also helped rein in the worst aspects of his film making, essentially sparing the audience from having to endure the ponderous dialog and wooden performances that usually plagued his sound films.

 

This film is an impressive achievement.  The running time is 136 minutes.

1926 - THE STRONG MAN, Frank Capra's first film a real winner.

Frank Capra's first major film is a very good comedy with silent film actor Harry Langdon.  For a time Langdon was considered as important an artist as Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd.  

The Strong Man is full of  many inventive bits of comedy. You can definitely see that Capra was a talented young director to watch.

The film expertly combines humor, pathos and a large scale action scene toward the end.  It also knows not to over stay it's welcome and runs just a little over an hour.

A real pleasure to watch and possibly a comedy masterpiece from the silent era.

75 minutes, written by Arthur Ripley, Hal Conklin, Robert Eddy and Reed Heustis.

1925 - THE BIG PARADE, a classic war film, maybe.

Considering the high reputation of this famous film, I was little surprised to see how much comedy relief there was in the first hour of this film.  I had always assumed that this was for the most part a very serious war drama.  

MGM's big star from this era, John Gilbert always seemed like a pretty boy actor for the most part.  However King Vidor or someone had him trim his mustache and he actually looks like a real person for a change.  He gives a decent performance as well.

King Vidor was one of those American film directors who could impose a person style even in a cookie cutter studio like MGM.  The battle scenes are very impressive and have an interesting visual style to them.

After consideration The Big Parade is a very good film somewhat hampered by some of the usual Hollywood storytelling, a love story, funny soldier buddies, settings that look like studio backlot sets, etc.

141 minutes, written by Laurence Stallings and Harry Behn.

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.

1938 - TOO MUCH JOHNSON, the lost Orson Welles sort of silent film comedy.

Not a whole lot to say about this one.  Probably for Orson Welles fans only.  Welles was interested in doing a farce and had the idea to stage silent movie like scenes in between or during acts of the play Too Much Johnson.

Welles filmed for 10 days and edited the film.  Apparently the entire film part of the play was to run around 30 minutes.  Due to a number of reasons, most of which involved money, the film sequences were never shown with the play.   Too Much Johnson was not a theatrical success.  However the idea of merging film and theater while not a new one was another typically audacious one from Welles.

Young Welles directs Too Much Johnson

Welles lifelong friend actor Joseph Cotton was certainly game during the film sequences.  Running around, climbing up on rooftops, zipping down fire escapes.  He certainly went beyond the call of duty when it came to performing for Welles.

Too Much Johnson is proof that Orson Welles was exposed to filming and editing 3 years before Citizen Kane came out.  Welles always portrayed himself has a self taught filmmaker who just magically stepped on a sound stage and produced a masterpiece like Kane.  Finally, it should be noted that this edited version of Too Much Johnson is quite delightful.  Welles was apparently a great admirer of silent films.

66 minutes (edited down around 30 minutes)

1929 - WOMAN IN THE MOON or FRAU IM MOND

Another fascinating film from Fritz Lang and his wife the writer Thea von Harbou.  Woman in the Moon is about the first flight to the Moon for the purpose of locating gold.  The complicated plot kicks into gear almost immediately.  A group of businessmen who control the world's gold supply want to stop the flight.  There is an espionage plot, a love story and a fairly crazed idea of what the Moon is like which in this film turns out to have a breathable atmosphere. 

 Since this is a Fritz Lang film made at the UFA studios it is an extremely well done production.  The model and miniature work are very impressive.  The photography and editing are very good, it's hard to find anything that looks substandard in this film.

Woman in the Moon is not considered one of Lang's best silent films.  The chief issue seemed to be the extremely crazy turn the script takes once the spaceship "Friede" lands on the Moon.  There is a young boy who has snuck into the Friede prior to the launch in the great movie cliche tradition of the stowaway.  Further craziness comes with the search for gold on the Moon which involves using a divining rod of all things.

In spite of these last act plot situations the film does have a fascinating ending and while it's no Metropolis, it's not the big disappointment that it is usually labeled as.  Woman in the Moon is an excellent finish to Fritz Lang's silent film period.

156 minutes.

2002 - SLAPSTICK ENCYCLOPEDIA VOL 9, THE RACE IS ONE, VOL 10 TONS OF FUN THE ANARCHIC FRINGE.

Two discs in a row is a lot of silent slapstick comedy to watch in one sitting, still there is a lot of good stuff:

1.  Charlie Chaplin stars in Easy Street, one of his famous shorts.  This is fairly funny stuff with Chaplin appearing as his little tramp character, taking on a gang of bullies.  A typical but well done Chaplin short film.

2.  Laurel and Hardy star in Big Business a film with a very high reputation however it seems kind of overrated to me.  The film has some big Hollywood talent attached,  George Stevens photographed it and Leo McCarey directed.   Laurel and Hardy are Christmas tree salesmen who end up destroying the house of a potential customer.  It's supposed to be funny as the destruction slowly builds up but it seems to never end. 

3.  Monty Banks shows up in an excerpt from his film Play Safe.  The runaway train sequence excerpt is really something to see with some pretty wild stunt work.

4.  Probably the outstanding film in this collection is Buster Keaton's One Week.  Keaton and his new bride have a prefab home which they assemble incorrectly.  This setup allows for some incredible surreal sequences,  an amazing film.

For the Keaton and Monty Banks films alone these DVD's are worth checking out.

1927 - THE CAT AND THE CANARY, a brillant horror comedy.

Take every old haunted house cliche and mix it with humor.  Hire Paul Leni one of Germany's best expressionist directors and you have a film that is a practically perfect genre piece.

The setup is the deceased relative in a spooky old house bit.  The family members have arrived for the reading of his will and one of them is a murderer who wants all the inheritance.  Even in 1927 this was a bunch of cliches but as they say it's not the story but how you tell the story.

 

A moving camera, witty title cards and a perfect blend of humor and scares really work here.  In some ways the fact that this is a silent film adds to the fun. The anachronisms that are silent films these days indirectly contributes to the stylish mood of this film. 

The Cat and the Canary is a lot of fun.


82 minutes.

1915 - THE CHEAT, early silent film from DeMille

The best of Cecil B DeMille's films are his silent ones.  In these films he literally ran amok with lots of unsubtle sexuality and at times sadism.  In the last 10 minutes he would stick in some hooky morality lesson to appease the censors but who was he kidding?

The Cheat is a very early DeMille film and doesn't exactly have a lot of his visual style but it does show the beginning of his technique. 

The most interesting aspect of The Cheat is the casting of Sessue Hayakawa as the oriental businessman who brands everything he owns.  In this case it's the wife of a businessman who steals money from the Red Cross in order to sustain her lavish lifestyle.  The wife also borrows money from Hayakawa who wants his pound of flesh and it's bring out the branding iron for her.   Hayakawa is remembered as the Japanese commander in The Bridge on the River Kwai, but in this film he's the dashing cad.

The Cheat is loaded with racism, sexism, misogyny and lots of sick stuff.  DeMille is clearly trying to get away with as much as he possibly can in this film.  He crams in a lot for a film that is under an hour

59 minutes

1926 - THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH, a large scale western epic

This is an epic silent western film from classy producer Samuel Goldwyn and director Henry King.  The film is well cast with Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper and silent actress Velma Banky in one of those romantic love triangles, he loves her, she loves another guy, the other guy thinks she loves the other guy, etc.  

The Winning of Barbara Worth has large scale production values and much of the film was shot on location on some hell hole Nevada desert location. Watching the film today you can't help thinking this was nobody's idea of a fun production. 

The end of the film features a spectacular flood sequence which is a good example of mixing models and optical effects integrated together.  The effects still hold up very well a film that is over 80 years old.

 

  As usual what shoves pictures like The Winning of Barbara to the back of the bus is it's status as a silent film.  But this is as good a film as anything John Ford directed.  The director Henry King was  a complete pro behind the camera and had a long run making successful entertaining films for 45 years.

89 minutes, written by Frances Marion.

1925 - BEN HUR, the spectacular silent version

My DVD is the restored version of the silent film complete with color sequences and scenes tinted to achieve a special visual mood. 

Anyway you look at it, this is quite an incredible film.  The two large scale action sequences, the battle at sea with the pirates and the famous chariot race are very exciting and impressive sequences. 

The story does change things a bit from the 1959 remake with Ben Hur raising an army to place under the command of Jesus in order to expel the Romans from Judea.  The 1959 version dropped this subplot probably for the better but it does give this version a fascinating twist.

The 1925 version of Ben Hur took 2 years to film with lots of production problems which included, a change of directors and leading men.  The production started filming in Italy and was closed down and relocated to Hollywood.

This is still a pretty incredible film even compared to the remake which is a very good film as well.

143 minutes.

1924 - KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE, the conclusion of Lang's Die Nibelungen saga

Stills from the conclusion of Lang's Die Nibelungen saga two years in production at UFA studios.  An amazing fantasy film.

 Hagen of Tronje

Attila the Hun

The Cathedral at Worms.

The tomb of Siegfried

145 minutes, written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou.

1924 - SIEGFRIED, first film in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen.

Some images from Siegfried, directed by Fritz Lang and written by Thea von Harbou.  An amazing fantasy film series.

Brunhild the Amazon queen of Iceland.

Siegfried and the dwarf.

Entering the castle of Die Niebelungen.

The famous full sized dragon.

Amazing stuff.

143 minutes.

1925 - THE FRESHMAN, Harold Lloyd's classic comedy

Finally got around to watching this Harold Lloyd film which is considered one of his greatest and certainly most famous films.  The film is pretty good it not hilariously funny.  Lloyd is on his way to college but seems more concerned about being accepted socially than getting an education.

As with just about every Harold Lloyd production this is an extremely well made film, with the comic situations integrated very carefully into the story.  Along with being the star Lloyd was also  the producer and he seemed to be able to get the best out of everyone he worked with. 

The Freshman is funny but it also strikes a real nerve with the desire to be one of the "cool people" particularly in school.  Lloyd and his team seemed to understand this, the humiliation and clueless nature of his character is painful to watch.  The importance of being part of a group is still very relevant in our culture today.

A couple of other points to mention, the crowd scenes at the football game climax were filmed at the 1925 Rose Bowl during half time.  The film is also very well cast with Jobyna Ralston playing Lloyd's girlfriend, she's a real charmer.

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

1960 - THE NAKED ISLAND, is a film about watering plants

The director Kaneto Shindo wants to pay tribute to the "simple people."  The Naked Island is about a family struggling to survive by growing crops on an island off of the coast of Japan.  To water these crops the viewer gets to watch a lot of scenes of the mother and father traveling by boat to the mainland to fetch water in buckets.  Essentially the first 30 minutes of the film are scenes of two people carrying water buckets up the hill and down the hill up the hill and down the hill up the hill and down the hill.

The black and white photography in this film is quite stunning to look at, the island may not have any water but it is very photogenic.  The film contains no dialog so there are none of those pesky subtitles to read.

I don't doubt the sincerity of this film for one minute I just question the concept of it.  It seems that if you are going to spend your life working like a dog you might want to farm on a piece of land that maybe has a well on in.  Why deliberately attempt to survive in such a hostile environment?

This film has been lauded as a masterpiece by many critics, it's always easier to watch people suffering in the comfort of a movie theater where you get free refills of popcorn and soda when you super size.

96 minutes

1911 - DANTE'S INFERNO, or L'INFERNO

Supposedly an important and trendsetting film in the history of cinema.  Dante's Inferno based on Dante's The Divine Comedy is a chore to sit through even with a Tangerine Dream score ladled over the film to try to make it accessible to contemporary audiences.

The film seems to be about 2 guys wandering around hell or somewhere while title cards and I mean lots and lots of title cards blab on about about religion and what not. 

The supposedly "cool" special effects are primitive optical effects which look interesting in stills but are not really that impressive to watch in the actual film.  Even for a film made in 1911, the special effects can't really make up for what is a very static looking film.

Dante's Inferno is pretty much an endurance contest to sit through.  No undiscovered silent classic here.

68 minutes.

1922 - GRANDMA'S BOY, silent classic from Harold Lloyd

A perfect silent comedy from Harold Lloyd.  Harold plays a coward who can't get the girl and is pushed around by his rival for her affections.  His Grandmother gives him a lucky idol to give him courage.

Harold Lloyd was one of the true masters of comedy and Grandma's Boy is about as good as it gets for a silent comedy.  Lloyd and his team carefully create their characters and make sure to integrate them into the comedic situations. 

There isn't an ounce of padding in this film.  It moves along briskly and ends an hour later, something comedies today have not even begun to figure out.

This is an extremely well made and impressive film. 

60 minutes.