The first volume in Del Rey’s awesome Fully Illustrated Library of Robert E. Howard.

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

• Author:  Robert E. Howard
• Published:  2003
• Contents Originally Published:  mostly 1932-1934 in Weird Tales
• Publisher:  Del Rey
• Pages:  463
• First Line  (sort-of):  ”Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs into dawn.”
• Film Version:  Conan the Barbarian  (1982  -  *** – dir. John Milius), Conan the Destroyer  (1984  -  **  -  dir. Richard Fleischer), Conan the Barbarian  (2011  -  *.5  -  dir. Marcus Nispel)
• First Read:  Fall, 2006

I sometime thinks I missed my proper age as a writer.  Not in terms of what I write about – I am glad to be situated here a good century into the history of film to have more to write about.  I mean for fiction.  If I had been writing 80 years ago, I have no doubt I would have been submitting short stories to Scribners.  But I think, under other names, I also would have been sending stuff into Black Mask, hard boiled detective stories in the style of Dash Hammett.  And I think I probably would have had fantasy stories, in yet another name, on the way to Weird Tales.  These are my types of stories.

I approach pulp fiction kind of the same way that I approach horror films.  Much of it is crap and much of it we would be better off without, even if people eat it up.  But the best of it, well the best of it has a kind of poetry that doesn’t really exist in the kind of mainstream fare of serious straight films and modernism literary masterpieces.  And it’s not just the great pulps of the late 20′s and early 30′s.  Look at the works of Ian Fleming, such great stuff to read and enjoy (the same way that Hammer Horror of the same period would also revive memories of the great Universal Horror Films that were from the same era as the original great pulps).

Now, I like my pulps to actually be pulps.  I have all the original James Bond novels, but I have them all in old Signet mass markets.  I searched for quite a while to find an old mass market copy of Princess of Mars rather than buy a new trade last year.  But sometimes I make exceptions.  And this is the best reason to make an exception: The Del Rey Illustrated Library of Robert E. Howard.

Howard was a king among the pulps, a master of fantasy writing and one of the few masters of the genre who clearly bears no influence from Tolkien, as he killed himself a year before The Hobbit appeared in print.  And there are plenty of pulp mass market versions of Howard’s work, notably the Lancer editions from the 60′s and 70′s which have wonderful covers.  What they don’t have, however, are faithful reproductions of Howard’s work.

Howard wrote in a variety of genres and for a number of magazines, but his most famous works are the Conan stories, many of which appeared in Weird Tales between 1932 and 1936.  But over the years, as copyright passed between hands, and the fall-off of the fantasy genre, and then the resurgence in the 1970′s, lead by the massive paperback sales of Lord of the Rings in the late 1960′s, Lancer Books started putting out collections of the Conan stories.  But by this time, they were collections of either heavily edited copies of Howard’s original stories or imitation stories written by a number of different writers (including Robert Jordan, which helped build him as a fantasy name well before Wheel of Time).  The original Howard stories were, by this point, very difficult to find.  But, finally, beginning in 2003, Del Rey, which has long been a major name in fantasy publishing, collected the original Howard stories, as Howard wrote them, along with early drafts, synopsis and other esoterica.  And so came the Del Rey Illustrated Library of Robert E. Howard, eleven wonderful trade volumes in three sets: the Conan books (in three volumes), the five-volume Adventurers Series (which includes Kull and Solomon Kane, two of his other well-known creations, the first of which actually lead directly into Conan as the first Conan story was a rewrite of a Kull story) and the three volume collections of his other stories.  As is stated in the Introduction, “until the present publication, Howard’s Conan stories had never been published as Howard wrote them, in the order in which he wrote them, in a uniform collection.”

This illustration from the book is by Mark Schultz and he owns the copyright. I hope he doesn’t mind me using it to promote his magnificent art for the book. I pulled this off his Tumblr page.

That was 10 years ago.  For a decade now, we actually can read them, exactly as Howard wrote them, with beautiful illustrations (one of the things about the original Weird Tales magazine was that it really drew in the reader with magnificent illustrations that really emphasized the only partially (or not even partially) clad females in the Conan stories as illustrated by Margaret Brundage – this collection does not skimp on those kind of illustrations, but it also has a magnificent illustrations of everyone’s favorite barbarian himself, as well as the numerous creatures that he encounters along the way, the most impressive of which might be the illustration of Yogah in “The Tower of the Elephant”).  And when the book says it is fully illustrated, it is not skimping on that – every break in the stories (and there are lots – nearly even Conan story has several small chapters to it) has an illustration to it.  There are 76 illustrations in all, 16 of which are full-page and 4 of which are plates (so, no text on the other side of the page) and they are magnificently done by Mark Schultz.

They also don’t skimp on the extras.  The first volume, which I am discussing here, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, covers all the Conan writing that Howard did, from the conception of the character, in early 1932, up to late 1933, the first phase of his Conan writing (as mentioned, the stories are presented in the order they were written, not in the order they took place – more on that later).  But it also includes the rejected first draft of the first Conan story “The Phoenix on the Sword”, some unfinished work, synopsis of a few stories, Howard’s essay “The Hyborian Age”, in which he outlined the world he was writing about, and most helpful, a long essay entitled “Hyborian Genesis”, which traces the history of Howard’s work on Conan that is covered in this first volume.

So that’s the book, as presented by Del Rey.  What about the stories themselves?  Well, if you have any interest in fantasy, they are some of the most seminal works in the genre’s history, almost the creation of Sword & Sorcery as a genre.  And they are first-rate, far above most fantasy writing, either at the time, or since.  Part of it is Howard’s descriptive abilities.  How could Schultz have done such a magnificent illustration without this description to work from: “Conan stared aghast; the image had the body of a man, naked, and green in color; but the head was one of nightmare and madness.  Conan stared at the wide flaring ears, the curling proboscis, on either side of which stood white tusks tipped with round golden balls.”  Or look at the first time we see Conan in the very first story, “The Phoenix on the Sword”: “Behind an ivory, gold-inlaid writing-table sat a man whose broad shoulders and sun-browned skin seemed out of place among those luxuriant surroundings.  He seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands.  His slightest movement spoke of steel-spring muscles knit to a keen brain with the co-ordination of a born fighting-man.  There was nothing deliberate or measured about his actions.  Either he was perfectly at rest – still as a bronze statue – or else he was in motion, not with the jerky quickness of over-tense nerves, but with a cat-like speed that blurred the sight which tried to follow him.”

This first time we see Conan he has already become King of Aquilonia.  But in the next published story (the third written, as the second story was rejected by Weird Tales) we meet him as a young thief.  Howard had scoped out his world, but not yet the biography of its chief resident and we move around in Conan’s history through the stories – king, young thief, pirate, mercenary for hire.  Through them all, we see Conan’s speed (“blinding speed and strength impossible to a civilized man” we are told in “The Pool of the Black One”) and we see him deal out death against the most extreme of odds (as in “Xutahl of the Dusk” where we read “He was never motionless or in the same place an instant; springing, side-stepping, whirling, twisting, he offered a constantly shifting target for their swords, while his own curved blade sang death about their ears.”).  He stumbles about sometimes in a world he was not born to: “He saw no particular humor in it, and was too new to civilization to understand its discourtesies.  Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

This is the very heart of the pulp world, the very soul of fantasy writing, the darkness and legacy of H.P. Lovecraft pulled away from the horrors of Cthulhu and brought out onto another age, one which easily flowed from Howard’s typewriter to the readers that now number in the millions.  While Tolkien’s legacy has been immense and much of it for good, there was a major influence before his writing had even been read outside the Inklings, the fantastical other side of the hard-boiled Dash Hammett mirror.

And don’t forget to read:

• The Bloody Crown of Conan
• The Conquering Sword of Conan

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. Nosferatu
2. The Wind
3. Steamboat Bill Jr
4. L’Argent
5. Lonesome

Analysis:  What does it say about this year that a couple of weeks ago I hadn’t seen two of those top 5.  In fact, of my Top 10 (the rest are October, Napoleon, The Docks of New York, The Fall of the House of Usher and Show People), 4 of them I hadn’t seen when I originally did my Year in Film and one of them got re-rated considerably higher.  But also look at the list and notice this is a terrible year for American film.  And an even worse year for the first full year of talkies.  Of my Top 10, five of them are foreign films (two of which are older films just making it to the states).  Of the five American films, three of them are directed by European directors, two of whom wouldn’t last long in America in the Sound Era.  And of the 10, 8 of them are completely silent, with two of them only having partial sound (though both of those use the sound to great effect).  It perhaps says everything about the second Academy Awards that the two best American films (by far), The Wind and Steamboat Bill Jr, weren’t nominated for any Oscars.

• 

  More astute observes may notice this is actually John Malkovich playing F.W. Murnau.

  Best Director

1. F.W. Murnau  (Nosferatu)
2. Victor Sjöström  (The Wind)
3. Abel Gance  (Napoleon)
4. Pál Fejös  (Lonesome)
5. Sergei Eisenstein  (October)

Analysis:  As opposed to the first year, where there were four American films but only one American director, here we only have two American films and no American director.  In order, we have a German film (from 1922), an American film directed by a Swede (one of his last before going back to Sweden), a French film (from 1927), an American film directed by a Hungarian (one of his last before going back to Europe) and a Soviet film.  To get to an American director, you have to go down to Buster Keaton at #8 and to get a second one, you have to go to Frank Borzage at #11.  Of the actual Oscar nominees, three of them were American, none of whom belonged anywhere near the nomination list, one was Lubitsch (whose film is lost) and the winner, Frank Lloyd, was Scottish.

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Nosferatu
2. L’Argent
3. The Wind
4. The Docks of New York
5. Street Angel

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. Steamboat Bill Jr
2. Lonesome
3. Spite Marriage
4. The Wedding March
5. Show People

• Best Actor:

1. Albert Dieudonne  (Napoleon)
2. Pierre Alcover  (L’Argent)
3. Lon Chaney  (West of Zanzibar)
4. Erich von Stroheim  (The Wedding March)
5. Buster Keaton  (Steamboat Bill Jr)

Analysis:  This is a big change from what I had before.  I have always had Max Schreck easily winning the Nighthawk for Best Actor.  But going back to Nosferatu again, I was struck by how little he actually is in the film – how late he appears for the first time, and how often he isn’t there.  So, while he has a great impact, he didn’t seem like he could possibly be the lead.  So I have moved him to supporting and instead of a German actor, we have a French actor here.  We also have the 10th overall (and final) nomination for Lon Chaney.  Of the five actual Oscar nominees, one of them isn’t worth noting (Chester Morris), the winner can’t quite break into my top 5 in the weakest year of the category (Warner Baxter), one of them is in a lost film (Lewis Stone) and the other two are in the films that might as well be lost given their availability (George Bancroft and Paul Muni).

• Best Actress

1. Lilian Gish  (The Wind)
2. Janet Gaynor  (Street Angel)
3. Louise Brooks  (Pandora’s Box)
4. Jeanne Eagles  (The Letter)
5. Greta Garbo  (A Woman of Affairs)

Analysis:  This was definitely the best of the categories at the Oscars this year.  How can I say that when there is only one nominee among my nominees, plus the winner from the year before?  (As mentioned in the previous year, since Janet Gaynor won her Oscar for three films and Street Angel earned Oscar nominations in two other categories in this year, I moved the whole film to this year).  Because this is the only category in which any “nominee” makes my list (and nominee Bessie Love comes in 7th and winner Mary Pickford in 8th).  In most categories, the Oscar nominees come nowhere near my list of nominees.  Gish easily wins this award by the way, with the best performance of her career.

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. Max Schreck  (Nosferatu)
2. Carl Goetz  (Pandora’s Box)
3. Clyde Cook  (The Docks of New York)
4. William Orlamond  (The Wind)
5. Lewis Stone  (A Woman of Affairs)

Analysis:  As mentioned above, Schreck, for a long time was my easy winner for Best Actor.  But I have moved him here and he easily wins this year.  It’s an interesting mix – the first three roles are filled with malevolence.  The last two are almost the opposite.  Stone was actually nominated for Best Actor for The Patriot.

• Best Supporting Actress:

1. Brigitte Helm  (L’Argent)
2. Olga Baclanova  (The Docks of New York)
3. Marie Glory  (L’Argent)
4. Zasu Pitts  (The Wedding March)
5. Dorothy Cumming  (The Wind)

Analysis:  We have two returning nominees from the year before, including Helm, who wins back-to-back Nighthawk Awards, this time for her scheming Countess.  It’s interesting to have Marie Glory and Dorothy Cumming on here for playing almost the exact opposite types of wives.

• Best Editing:

1. Nosferatu
2. Napoleon
3. Steamboat Bill Jr
4. Lonesome
5. October

• Best Cinematography:

1. Nosferatu
2. The Wind
3. October
4. Napoleon
5. L’Argent

Analysis:  Between the visionary shots in Sunrise (whose Cinematography is possibly the best in film until Citizen Kane), the amazing shots in Metropolis and the great move up the staircase in 7th Heaven, this is a very strong year.

• Best Sound:

1. L’Argent
2. Lonesome
3. In Old Arizona
4. Broadway

Analysis:  L’Argent and Lonesome are both partial sound films which make great use of the sound when they do use it (especially in the opening scenes of L’Argent).

• Best Art Direction:

1. Nosferatu
2. Aelita: Queen of Mars
3. The Fall of the House of Usher
4. Napoleon
5. The Docks of New York

Analysis:  The gritty lock of the docks in von Sternberg’s film are the only sets that can break into the European bunch here, including the amazing sets in Aelita clearly influenced by German Expressionism.

• Best Visual Effects:

1. Steamboat Bill Jr
2. Nosferatu

Analysis:  You don’t really think of special effects with Buster Keaton, but so much of the last 20 minutes of the film, with the hurricane, are so well done, it had to be the winner here.

• Best Costume Design:

1. Napoleon
2. Nosferatu
3. The Wedding March
4. Broadway
5. The Iron Mask

• Best Makeup:

1. Nosferatu
2. Spite Marriage

• Best Original Song:

1. “Lon Chaney’s Gonna Get You”  (The Hollywood Revue of 1929)
2. “The Broadway Melody”  (The Broadway Melody)

Analysis:  This is going to be very tricky in the years before the creation of the Best Song category at the Academy Awards in 1934.  I was yelled at for dismissing nearly all pre-1934 songs other than Marx Bros songs in my Best Original Song post for my History of the Academy Awards series.  But it’s hard figuring out precisely which songs were written for these films.  This gets much easier (though not perfectly clear) starting in 1954, when you can go to the Academy list for Song Title from all the films released in each year (not perfectly clear because some of them I’m fairly certain are wrong, but we’ll get to those in individual years).  As for this year, as far as I can tell, both of these songs were written for these films and I thought them at least decent enough to nominate.

• Best Foreign Film:

1. L’Argent
2. Asphalt
3. The Fall of the House of Usher
4. Arsenal

Analysis:  Though there are 10 films that are eligible, there are only 4 that I rate high enough to earn a nomination.  I’m sure the biggest complaint will come from Louise Brooks fans.  But I feel that Pandora’s Box doesn’t work as a whole and that the script is sorely lacking.  Brooks performance, like Pabst’s direction, is very good though, which is why she earned a nomination from me even though the film doesn’t.

By Film:

note:  They’re in points order.  You get twice as many points for a win as for a nomination.  Hopefully your math skills will let you figure out the system.

• Nosferatu  (545)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, Visual Effects, Costume Design, Makeup, Foreign Film (02-26)
• L’Argent  (320)
  • Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Actor,Supporting Actress, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Sound, Foreign Film  (02-26)
• The Wind  (290)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography
• Napoleon  (235)
  • Director, Actor, Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Foreign Film
• Steamboat Bill Jr  (230)
  • Picture, Original Screenplay, Actor, Editing, Visual Effects
• Lonesome  (180)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Editing, Sound
• The Docks of New York  (120)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Art Direction
• The Wedding March  (120)
  • Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actress, Costume Design
• October  (115)
  • Director, Editing, Cinematography, Foreign Film
• Street Angel  (75)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Actress
• Pandora’s Box  (65)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• A Woman of Affairs  (65)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• Spite Marriage  (40)
  • Original Screenplay, Makeup
• The Fall of the House of Usher  (40)
  • Art Direction, Foreign Film
• Show People  (40)
  • Original Screenplay
• West of Zanzibar  (35)
  • Actor
• The Letter  (35)
  • Actress
• Broadway  (30)
  • Sound, Costume Design
• In Old Arizona  (20)
  • Sound
• Aelita: Queen of Mars  (20)
  • Art Direction
• The Hollywood Revue of 1929  (20)
  • Original Song
• The Iron Mask  (15)
  • Costume Design
• The Broadway Melody  (10)
  • Original Song

Best Film Not Nominated for Any Nighthawk Awards:

• Where East is East

Analysis:  This is a good Lon Chaney film, one of his last.  But Chaney’s performance isn’t nearly as good as in many of his other films and though directed by Tod Browning, it’s not at the same level as many other Chaney films.

Biggest Awards Film Not Nominated for Any Nighthawk Awards:

• The Patriot  /  The Divine Lady

Analysis:  The Patriot was “nominated” (see below for explanation) for five Oscars – Picture, Director, Writing (which it won), Actor and Art Direction.  However, it is lost, so I can’t see it.  So I also list The Divine Lady, which won Best Director and was nominated for Actress and Cinematography, a mediocre effort from Frank Lloyd (who was a mediocre director).

Nighthawk Golden Globes:

Drama:

• Best Picture

1. Nosferatu
2. The Wind
3. L’Argent
4. Lonesome
5. October

• Best Director

1. F.W. Murnau  (Nosferatu)
2. Victor Sjöström  (The Wind)
3. Abel Gance  (Napoleon)
4. Pál Fejös  (Lonesome)
5. Sergei Eisenstein  (October)

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Nosferatu
2. L’Argent
3. The Wind
4. The Docks of New York
5. Street Angel

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. Lonesome
2. The Wedding March

• Best Actor:

1. Albert Dieudonne  (Napoleon)
2. Pierre Alcover  (L’Argent)
3. Lon Chaney  (West of Zanzibar)
4. Erich von Stroheim  (The Wedding March)
5. George Bancroft  (The Docks of New York)

Analysis:  Bancroft is the only actor in any of the four categories to get a Drama nomination without an actual nomination.  The comedies were so weak, that only Buster Keaton managed a nomination in an acting category, knocking Bancroft into 6th place, alongside his co-star Betty Compson, who doesn’t manage to move up here because there were no comedy performances in the top 5.  Annoyingly, Bancroft actually was nominated by the Academy, but for Thunderbolt, which is extremely difficult to find, as opposed to Docks, which is available in a beautiful Criterion set.

• Best Actress

1. Lilian Gish  (The Wind)
2. Janet Gaynor  (Street Angel)
3. Louise Brooks  (Pandora’s Box)
4. Jeanne Eagles  (The Letter)
5. Greta Garbo  (A Woman of Affairs)

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. Max Schreck  (Nosferatu)
2. Carl Goetz  (Pandora’s Box)
3. Clyde Cook  (The Docks of New York)
4. William Orlamond  (The Wind)
5. Lewis Stone  (A Woman of Affairs)

• Best Supporting Actress:

1. Brigitte Helm  (L’Argent)
2. Olga Baclanova  (The Docks of New York)
3. Marie Glory  (L’Argent)
4. Zasu Pitts  (The Wedding March)
5. Dorothy Cumming  (The Wind)

By Film:

• Nosferatu  (330)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor
• The Wind  (265)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• L’Argent  (215)
  • Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actress
• Lonesome  (175)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay
• The Docks of New York  (135)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• Napoleon  (115)
  • Director, Actor
• The Wedding March  (105)
  • Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actress
• October  (95)
  • Picture, Director
• Street Angel  (75)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Actress
• Pandora’s Box  (65)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• A Woman of Affairs  (65)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• West of Zanzibar  (35)
  • Actor
• The Letter  (35)
  • Actress

Best Drama Not Nominated for Any Nighthawk Golden Globes:

• The Fall of the House of Usher

Analysis:  This is a film that relies primarily on its direction and on the sets and cinematography.  The acting isn’t memorable in the slightest and it is a mood that is created, rather than relying on a top-notch script.  As a result, it can’t quite make it into any of the categories here, where the technical categories aren’t included.

Comedy:

• Best Picture:

1. Steamboat Bill Jr
2. Show People

Analysis:  As I said in the previous year, this is a weak bunch until we get to about 1933 or so and comedy starts picking up.  I’ve seen 49 films in this “year” and only 7 of them qualify as Comedy or Musical.  And two of them – the two Oscar nominees (Broadway Melody and Hollywood Revue of 1929) are among the worst films of the year.

• Best Director:

1. Buster Keaton  (Steamboat Bill Jr)
2. King Vidor  (Show People)

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

Analysis:  Unlike the first two years, I can’t provide anything here.  The only eligible film here is Broadway and the script is the weakest part of that film.

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. Steamboat Bill Jr
2. Spite Marriage
3. Show People

• Best Actor:

1. Buster Keaton  (Steamboat Bill Jr)
2. William Haines  (Show People)

Analysis:  Though I personally prefer Steamboat to The General, this film, and Keaton’s performance, is not up to the level set by the previous film.

• Best Actress:

1. Bessie Love  (The Broadway Melody)
2. Marion Davies  (Show People)

Analysis:  Neither of these is a great performance and neither even makes my top 6 in the regular Nighthawk Awards.  But Love is the best thing about the second Best Picture winner (and worst) and Davies gives the best performance of her career.

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. Ernest Torrance  (Steamboat Bill Jr)
2. Del Henderson  (Show People)

Analysis:  We have two very different portrayals of imposing father figures.  The first plays Buster Keaton’s overbearing father, pushing his son harder and harder, a thug and a criminal.  The second is the very proud father of Marion Davies, but a bit of a crazy Southerner, out of his depth in Hollywood.

• Best Supporting Actress

1. Marion Byron  (Steamboat Bill Jr)

Analysis:  This is as weak as it gets.  Byron barely qualifies for my awards as the young woman in love with Buster Keaton and there just isn’t anyone else in the other eligible films.

By Film:

• Steamboat Bill Jr  (460)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• Show People  (235)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor
• The Broadway Melody  (70)
  • Actress
• Spite Marriage  (40)
  • Original Screenplay

Best Comedy Not Nominated for any Nighthawk Golden Globes:

• Broadway

Analysis:  Broadway is far from a great film.  It has a fairly mundane plot and some decent song routines.  But in a year where Hollywood struggled to make quality films as sound started to take over, it is the best film that doesn’t earn any nominations here.  It does have some good sound and earned two regular Nighthawk nominations.  But too many of the comedies and musicals in the first full year of sound just aren’t very good.

Roundup for the Year in Film:

Eligible Films I Have Seen:  49

Oscar-Nominated Films I Have Not Seen:  *

• The Patriot  (Picture, Director, Writing, Actor, Art Direction)
• Drag  (Director)
• The Valiant  (Writing, Actor)
• The Cop  (Writing)
• The Leatherneck  (Writing)
• Sal of Singapore  (Writing)
• Skyscraper  (Writing)
• Wonder of Women  (Writing)
• Thunderbolt  (Actor)
• The Barker  (Actress)
• 4 Devils  (Cinematography)
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey  (Art Direction)

*   –  Technically, the only films on this list are actually The Patriot and The Bridge of San Luis Rey and their only nominations were their wins.  Let’s repeat the official disclaimer from the Academy: “There were no announcements of nominations, no certificates of nomination or honorable mention, and only the winners were revealed during the awards banquet on April 3, 1930. Though not official nominations, the additional names in each category, according to in-house records, were under consideration by the various boards of judges.”  Now, as I have mentioned before, various books, including Inside Oscar, lists nominees (sometimes slightly different) for this year.  In fact, Inside Oscar claims the following on page 15: “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG was the way Variety headlined the news on October 30, 1929.  The very next day, the trade paper announced the nominations for the second Academy Awards.”  Now, Inside Oscar is a very useful book and my copy is beat to hell and highlighted all over.  But it is an incredibly frustrating book because it HAS NO DAMN CITATIONS.  So we don’t know where any of their information comes from.  And this information is pure bullshit.  Variety was a weekly paper.  Yes, on October 30, 1929, they did indeed have that headline.  But there was no issue the next day, so it is impossible for it to run anything on the “nominees” the next day.  So I don’t know where the authors got their information, but it isn’t true.  And who knows where the notion of “nominees” for this year came from in the first place.

Oscar Quality:

Best Picture:  It ranks dead last for all the history of the Academy Awards.  And it’s not even close.  On the 100 point scale, it averages a 51.5, or a very low **.5.  That’s 4 points lower than the next lowest year and 13 points lower than the 3rd lowest.  On the ranking of all the films, it averages a 473.75.  The next lowest is 447 and no other year is lower than a 386.  To give an idea of how bad this year is, the best of the available nominees, Alibi, ranks lower than the worst of the nominees for 55 of the other 84 years.  Granted, part of this is because The Patriot, which was almost certainly the best of the nominees, is lost.  But the rest of the nominees are so bad that even if The Patriot was as good as Sunset Blvd, this year would still rank second to last.

The Winners:  I rank this in three different ways.  In two of them, this year again comes in dead last, because of the dreadful pick for Best Picture (The Broadway Melody) and because there are so few winners (7, two of which I haven’t been able to see).  In averaging out where I rank the winners among all the films for the year, it gets an 18.4, one of only a handful of years to average in double digits.  And when I factor out Best Picture (because I rank all films this can drastically affect the rank), it is the only year to average in double digits (11.0).  In terms of ranking the winners among the nominees, it comes out better, with a 2.6.  But that’s because the nominees where such bad choices, that they just didn’t do as badly picking the winners from the motley group, except in Best Picture.  They picked the best choice for Actor and the second best for Director and Cinematography.  But I factor them together, because in later years I have seen so many more films, than can affect the overall numbers in the first group (which says all the more about how bad this year is).  And this year again finishes dead last.  Part of it is that, while they didn’t do as bad for picking the winners among their nominees, the actual nominees were awful.  This is one of only a handful of years in which none of the Oscar winners wins a Nighthawk and one of only two years (along with 1930-31) where none of the Oscar winners even comes in 2nd.  Warner Baxter, the winner for Best Actor comes in 7th and that’s the best of the year and that’s just simply pathetic.

Top 5 Films of the Year:

1  -  Nosferatu  (see review here)

2  -  The Wind  (see review here)

3  -  Steamboat Bill Jr  (see review here)

4  -  L’Argent  (see review here)

The real great film about the loneliness in the crowd.

5  -  Lonesome  (dir. Pál Fejös)

Something struck me pretty early on in watching this film.  This is the film that everyone proclaims The Crowd to be – a great love story in the modern city with first rate production values and a visionary director.  But while the stories themselves, on a face value, are similar – the loneliness and isolation of the city, in spite of the large crowds, it is the details that separate the films.

The Crowd, I found to be boring, in spite of its incredible interiors and dazzling cinematography.  I found the acting to be terrible in The Crowd (Glenn Tryon and Barbara Kent aren’t great in Lonesome, but they aren’t bad either, and if I had considered it a comedy, they would have both earned Globe nominations from me).  I found the story, designed to pull at the heartstrings, to be simply trite (it reminds me of Romeo and Juliet, in that I always argue that Romeo brings on his own misfortunes by acting without getting permission from his brain and the same goes for the lead character in The Crowd).

Lonesome isn’t about the dismay of trying to make your way in the world.  It’s about the difficulty in finding someone to love in the crowd.  These two characters manage to find each other at the beach and have a lovely night together at the amusement park at Coney Island, scenes that make great use of visual flair (there are some color scenes and some great partial use of sound).  But then, circumstances intervene and the lovely couple are separated, and without last names, they both fear that they have lost each other forever.  What happens in the end, could perhaps be guessed, as this is a product of Hollywood, even if it was directed by a rather inspiring Hungarian director by the name of Pál Fejös.  But the way things come together at the end give it the ending it really deserves and really needs, unlike the ending of The Crowd, which I thought discongruent from the rest of the film.  So, the next time someone says I have it wrong on The Crowd, I’m just going to say that no, Lonesome gets it right.

5 Worst Films  (#1 being the worst):

1. Coquette
2. The Broadway Melody
3. The Godless Girl
4. Big News
5. Behind That Curtain

It was the first time that the Academy got Best Actress wrong. Get used to that.

Worst Film of the Year:

Coquette  (dir. Sam Taylor)

I read the Mythical Monkey a lot and I like a lot of what he has to say on films, especially films in the Silent Era.  And we agree on a lot of things.  But the relative merits of Mary Pickford and her films are not one of the things we agree on.  And I’m not simply talking about this film.  I’m talking about Mary Pickford in general.

Pickford was probably the most powerful woman in Hollywood in the 1920′s.  She parlayed her star power into one of the first celebrity marriages and became one of the four iconic founders of United Artists in 1919, along with Fairbanks, Chaplin and Griffith, forming their own studio to distribute the films they wanted to make.  She was a major star throughout the entire decade and capped it off by winning the second Best Actress award for her talkie debut, Coquette.

But just because Pickford was a major star, that doesn’t actually mean she was that great of an actress.  Certainly the level of stardom in Hollywood has never been directly tied to the quality of a performance.  Even in a film like Sparrows, regarded as one of the best Pickford performances, she isn’t really all that good.  She relied on a certain level of childishness about her looks (she was almost convincingly still playing teenagers well into her 30′s because she was so damn small).  Gloria Swanson might have had a face, but Pickford just had those little eyes that always seemed overwhelmed by the world.  And then came her performance in Coquette.

Now, lots has already been written about Pickford became the first person to ever campaign for an Academy Award, having all the Central Board of Judges over for tea at Pickfair, her mansion (see page 17 of Inside Oscar).  And Pickford was just beginning what many would do over the years and what Harvey Weinstein would eventually turn into an art form.  The bigger problem is that Pickford just simply isn’t that good in the film, isn’t believable in the role at all and that the film itself is just awful.

Pickford really wanted to win the second Oscar and wanted to make a good debut in the talkies and keep her career going (it’s interesting that what was so big in 1919 – those four united artists – would, by 1929, almost be dead, with only Chaplin’s very occasional films still making an aesthetic impact).  So she bought the rights to the broadway play and brought in Sam Taylor.  Now, Taylor at one time was a solid director, working quite well with Harold Lloyd on very good comedies.  But once Pickford got hold of her with My Best Girl, he became a disaster of a director, and Coquette is very badly directed and his follow-up with Pickford was the incredibly awful first rendition of Shakespeare on film in sound: The Taming of the Shrew (more on that in 1929-30).  But it didn’t matter what Taylor could do.  Pickford just couldn’t overcome how unbelievable she was as a flapper who would go through a smattering of men (yet, she was far more believable than she was as Shakespeare’s shrew).  She emotes her eyes off and manages to get a nod from me, but that’s not enough to get her above 8th place and certainly didn’t deserve the Oscar.  In fact, I would call it the worst film to win an Oscar for a long time if the Academy hadn’t one-upped it just two years later with the winner in the same category: Min and Bill (more on that in 1930-31).

Points:

• Most Nighthawk Nominations:  Nosferatu  (11)  *
• Most Nighthawk Awards:  Nosferatu  (8) *
• Most Nighthawk Points:  Nosferatu  (545) *
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Award:  The Broadway Melody
• 2nd Place Award:  The Wind  (Picture, Director, Cinematography)
• 6th Place Award:  The Docks of New York  (Director, Actor, Actress)
• Most Nighthawk Drama Nominations:  The Wind  (6)  *
• Most Nighthawk Drama Awards:  Nosferatu  (4)
• Most Nighthawk Drama Points:  Nosferatu  (330)  *
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Drama Award:  The Letter
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Nominations:  Steamboat Bill Jr  /  Show People  (6)  *
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Awards:  Steamboat Bill Jr  (6)  *
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Points:  Steamboat Bill Jr  (460)  *
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Comedy Award:  The Broadway Melody

Note:  * means a Nighthawk record up to this point

Progressive Leaders:

• Most Nighthawk Nominations:  Nosferatu  (11)
• Most Nighthawk Awards:  Nosferatu  (8)
• Most Nighthawk Points:  Nosferatu  (545)
• Most Nighthawk Awards without winning Best Picture:  Metropolis  (5)
• Most Nighthawk Nominations without a Best Picture Nomination:  Faust  (8)
• Most Nighthawk Nominations without a Nighthawk Award:  Faust  /  7th Heaven (8)
• Actor:  Lon Chaney  (240)
• Actress:  Lilian Gish  (210)
• Director:  F.W. Murnau  (180)

Breakdown by Genre  (Foreign in parenthesis, best film in genre following):

• Drama:  31  (5)  -  The Wind
• Foreign:  9  -  Nosferatu
• Comedy:  5  -  Steamboat Bill Jr.
• Musical:  3  -  Broadway
• Horror:  2  (2)  -  Nosferatu
• Adventure:  2  -  The Pagan
• Western:  2  -  The Virginian
• Crime:  1  -  Alibi
• Mystery:  1  -  Behind That Curtain
• Suspense:  1  (1)  -  Spies
• Action:  0
• Fantasy:  0
• Kids:  0
• Sci-Fi:  0
• War:  0

Studio Note:

In the first two “years”, there was a much better balance among the major studios.  But here, there is a clear move in favor of MGM.  Of the 49 films I have seen from this year, 16 of them, almost a third, are either produced or distributed (like Napoleon) by MGM while no other studio has more than 5.  And they cover a wide range – including three of the Top 10 (The Wind, Napoleon, Show People) and two of the bottom 6 (Best Picture nominee Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Best Picture winner The Broadway Melody).  And though MGM is associated with Musicals, those latter two are the only musicals of the 16.  Perhaps it’s because I have seen these films for a wide variety of reasons, whether they be Oscar nominees, whether they are some of the most acclaimed films of the year, whether they be directed by Oscar nominated directors (The Pagan, Madame X), or have one of my favorite actors (Where East is East, West of Zanzibar).

10 Films Eligible for Best Foreign Film (alphabetical, with director in parenthesis – red are ****, blue are ***.5 – both those colors qualify for my Best Foreign Film Award):

• Arsenal  (Dovzhenko)
• Asphalt  (May)
• The Fall of the House of Usher  (Epstein)
• The Ghost That Never Returns  (Room)
• L’Argent  (L’Herbier)
• The New Babylon  (Kozinstev  /  Trauberg)
• Pandora’s Box  (Pabst)
• Sex in Chains  (Dieterle)
• Spies  (Lang)
• Storm Over Asia  (Pudovkin)

Films Eligible in This Year But Originally Released in a Different Calendar Year:

• Easy Virtue  (1927)
• Napoleon  (1927)
• October  (1927)

Films Released This Year Originally But Eligible in a Different Year:

• Arsenal  (1929-30)
• Asphalt  (1929-30)
• The Ghost That Never Returns  (1929-30)
• The New Babylon  (1929-30)
• Storm Over Asia  (1930-31)
• Italian Straw Hat  (1930-31)

Note:  Because of the way the Academy’s “years” were drawn prior to 1934, years fell into two different Oscar years.  So this is not a list of all the 1929 films that fall into the 1929-30 category.  This list only consists of 1928 films that did not fall into either 1927-28 or 1928-29 as well as any film eligible for Best Foreign Film in this year, but eligible for other awards in a different year.  After 1933, this will get considerably less complicated.

One of the brilliant scenes in Murnau’s Nosferatu that’s not in the original source.

My Top 5:

1. Nosferatu
2. L’Argent
3. The Wind
4. The Docks of New York
5. Street Angel

Note:  There is only a top 5 for this year.  There were more than enough adapted screenplays to have a Top 10 if the quality of the scripts had merited it.  They do not.  And there wouldn’t even have been 5 if I hadn’t seen L’Argent last week.

Oscar Nominees:

• The Patriot

Sort-of Oscar Nominees:

• In Old Arizona
• The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
• Sal of Singapore
• Skyscraper
• The Valiant
• A Woman of Affairs
• Wonder of Women

Explanation:  If you thought the first year of the Academy Awards left a confusing history and records trail, it has nothing on this one.  First of all, according to the Academy “There were no announcements of nominations, no certificates of nomination or honorable mention, and only the winners were revealed during the awards banquet on April 3, 1930. Though not official nominations, the additional names in each category, according to in-house records, were under consideration by the various boards of judges.”  So, technically there aren’t any Oscar nominees for 1928-29, only winners.  Second, the Academy had done away with the different writing categories – from the categories of Adaptation, Original Story and Title Writing, they had gone to just Writing Achievement, which meant all films competed in the same category, whether original or adapted (though the only original ones “nominated” were Our Dancing Daughters, The Leatherneck and The Cop); the Academy would continue with just one category for the 3rd Academy Awards.  Third, like in the first year, there seems to be confusion between names and films.  In the first year, there were several films that used to be listed in several reference books (most notably Inside Oscar) as Oscar nominees, when it was only a specific writer who was nominated, with no specific film.  Here, those same sources list certain films, with their writers, but apparently don’t include all of them.  So, Inside Oscar lists the “nominations” (and more on that in the full year post) for In Old Arizona, The Valiant and Wonder of Women.  But, it doesn’t list The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (written by Hans Kraly, who won the Oscar for The Patriot), Sal of Singapore, Skyscraper (written by Elliot Clawson, writer of The Leatherneck) or A Woman of Affairs (written by Bess Meredyth, who also wrote Wonder of Women).  I don’t know how they did end up with both films written by Tom Barry (In Old Arizona and The Valiant).  So, there you have it.  There are 7 other nominees that were adapted.  Sort-of.  Of those 7, I have seen three – these days it is extremely difficult to find Sal of Singapore, Skyscraper, The Valiant or Wonder of Women.  Of the other three, A Woman of Affairs (based on the novel The Green Hat) is the best, a mid-range ***, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (based on the play by Frederick Lonsdale) is a very low-level *** film, almost a **.5 film and In Old Arizona, which was “nominated” for Best Picture and won Best Actor (based on the story “The Caballero’s Way” by O. Henry) is a **.5 film and doesn’t hold up to repeated viewings (as evidenced by its big drop when I did the Best Picture project – you can read more about it here).

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror  (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens)

The Film:

I have already written a review of Nosferatu, here.  But here are some key things to remember: 1 – it is one of the greatest Horror films ever made, ranking up with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Psycho, The Exorcist, Jaws and King Kong; 2 – it is one of the best concrete examples of what a talented director F.W. Murnau was and how much film lost when he died so young; 3 – it is, with considerable irony, the best film version of what might very well be the most filmed novel of all-time; and 4 – it is proof positive, along with the films listed above that compete for the best Horror film of all-time, that the key to a great Horror is not an attempt to suddenly scare you, but to create a mood and atmosphere of terror and horror such that anything can scare you.

The Source:

Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

I have written even more about Dracula than I have about Nosferatu, and you can read it here.  I ranked it among the Top 100 Novels of All-Time, the only horror novel to be ranked so high.  And this much to be read, not just in the novel itself.  The link above on the title is to the novel itself.  But, if you are more interested in the novel (like I am), you might also like The Norton Critical Edition, which comes complete with a number of scholarly articles and a history of the text.  And of course, if you want to get even more in-depth, you can try the Annotated Edition, whether the original edition by Leonard Woolf (which can be found used) or the New Annotated Dracula, another great Norton publication.

The Adaptation:

Much has been changed from the original source novel, as I pointed out in my review, because Murnau wasn’t legally using it.  But think about how much we owe to his adaptation – not only a film like Herzog’s Nosferatu, which went to this film as its source rather than the original Stoker novel, but also a film like The Horror of Dracula, the wonderful Hammer film which is much more an adaptation of this film than it is of the original novel.

The Credits:

Directed by F.W. Murnau.  Screenplay by Henrik Galeen.  The source is uncredited, of course, because Murnau didn’t have the rights to it.

L’Argent

The Film:

In each of my Year in Film posts, I listed those films on the Top 1000 at They Shoot Pictures Don’t They.  They use a complicated methodology to put together a list of the 1000 greatest films of all-time as chosen from various critics list through the years.  I have seen all 1000 of their films.  But they also have a starting list – a list of almost 8000 films.  While I haven’t seen every film on that full list (partially because it’s not possible – there are several lost films on the list), I am trying to pick up films from their list that I haven’t seen before doing these individual years – picking up films I might have missed among the 8500+ I have seen.  And there have already been some gems – I found The Love of Jeanne Ney in a different manner, but I would have found it through them, and I found L’Argent (both films also star Brigitte Helm, whose work in Metropolis I have been a fan of for well over 20 years).

L’Argent is a film that transcends the end of the Silent Era, a film that has the same kind of stylistic brilliance as the late Silent films, with beautiful camera movements, stylized Silent acting (which delivers with every movement) and a good flow that works with the intertitles and is not held up by early sound dialogue.  But, it also has some sound – in fact, the utilization of sound from the crowd at the beginning of the film might be the finest use of sound in the first couple of years of integrated sound on film.

It’s a timely story – one of two rival banks that use the stock market to boost themselves up or tear the other one down (filmed and released a year before the crash of the stock market that would eventually lead the entire world into the Great Depression).  The main one, an amoral huckster named Saccard who is determined to build himself back up after nearly being ruined by his rival, is played with fantastic aplomb by Pierre Alcover.  He’s determined to use the pilot Hamelin as part of a scheme to get back on top and kick off his rival (played by Alfred Abel with the same cold calculating manner that was such a vital essence of his performance in Metropolis), and if he can manage to get his paws on Hamelin’s beautiful young wife while he’s out of the picture, so much the better.  But he hasn’t counted on Baroness Sandorf.  She’s a scheming sort, a former lover of Saccard, who is spying on him for his rival and pushes Hamelin’s wife to fight back.  Helm, who was so great in the double role in Metropolis and so different from either role in Ney, is here again in a quite different role – making use of her sensuality, but also her brain and is determined that she will come out on top.

All of this is perfectly directed by Marcel L’Herbier, who never loses sight of what he is doing.  He moves the camera with deft skill, keeps the plot moving and never allows it to get confusing.  And at the end, when all is lost for Saccard and he is sitting alone in his prison cell, he still provides a brief glimpse of hope for him, and a reminder that we have actually been rooting for the wrong side all this time, because we can’t help but be fascinated with Saccard, with his audacity and his schemes.  This is a masterpiece, one of the best French films in the period before Jean Renoir would come along and rewrite all the rules.

The Source:

L’Argent by Emile Zola  (1891)

This was the 18th in Zola’s long-running series of Rougon-Macquart novels.  I actually delayed the post a day so I could read the book.  However, it turns out that both copies at my work were in French.  As are most copies that are readily available.  It is still in print in English, but is not readily available.  I have read other books in the series and have been impressed with Zola, with his writing, with his naturalistic look at the world.  At some point I hope to get a chance to read this, and to finish the entire series.

The Adaptation:

Not having read the book, mostly what I can say it what is well known – that L’Herbier decided to update the book from the late 1860′s, when it took place (heading into the Franco-Prussian War) to the present day.  As a result, when Hamelin heads off, he is an airplane pilot and his movements are being followed on radio.  Apparently the decision to update the work caused some controversy, but it works so well, and in fact would be even more timely than L’Herbier knew at the time, as the stock market would collapse the next year because of similar kinds of actions as those depicted in the novel and film.  Also, the final shot of the film seems to imply a certain kind of capitulation that immorality might indeed end up winning in the long run, something that was not present in the original Zola novel.

The Credits:

Directed by Marcel L’Herbier.  Screenplay by Arthur Bernède.  Adaptation by Marcel L’Herbier.

The Wind

The Film:

So, for the third time in a row we have a film in which a key part of the plot depends on the machinations of multiple men to get in Lilian Gish’s underpants.  But, there are a few things that make The Wind different than The Birth of a Nation and The Scarlet Letter (well, other than that it’s not horribly racist and not based on one of the most boring, over-rated novels in American literature).  First of all, instead of two different men who want to have Gish for their own, we actually have three different men who want her.  Also, this time it makes much more sense for these men to want her – she’s just about the only available woman in this dry, desolate part of western Texas.  And third, Gish provides a different kind of presence this time; Gish was the best actress of the Silent Era, giving solid and sometimes great performances time after time in D.W. Griffith’s films, and was a very good Hester in The Scarlet Letter, but in The Wind she shows that those were all just practice runs for the role of her career.

Gish plays Letty, a young woman from Virginia whose parents have died, so she has come out to live with her cousin in the desolation of the Texas wilderness.  But she hasn’t counted on three things – 1 – the lustful stirrings in Whit Roddy, who meets Letty on the train going west and immediately decides that he is interested in her, though in ways different than she things; 2 – that her cousin’s wife will be immediately seized with envy over the new arrival and her husband’s interest and the need to get this new, young woman out of her house and 3 – the horrible wind, the wind that stirs up the dust and will drive Letty out of her mind.

Though it is the first part that is directly brought up in the early moments and the third part that will become the overriding problem, things really begin with the second part.  Letty’s cousin can’t keep her at his house to tutor his children as planned – his wife just can not take the other woman, the one the children like and that he husband is so interested in (they had been raised as brother and sister).  So, Letty is forced to find a husband and get her own house.  She’s got three choices.  There is Roddy, who she seems to at least have an interest in, but it turns out that he actually just wants her for a mistress, as he is married already.  There is Sourdough, who is nice and harmless, but also much older.  Then there is Lige, who at least is younger and seems to really love her.  So she agrees to marry Lige and goes off with him.  But that can’t stop the wind, the wind that Roddy had warned her about on the train, the wind that is driving her out of her mind.

And that is where the brilliance of Gish’s performance really comes into play.  She is very believable as the young virgin who is out of her league out her in the dry chaparral.  But it is her descent into madness, partially because she doesn’t love her new husband, partially because Roddy won’t actually leave her alone in spite of her marriage, but mostly because of that ever-present wind.  Things will come to a violent end, and one which we, the viewers, are actually forced to ask ourselves what actually happened.  Do we, as Letty, believe that she imagined it all?

This film, one of the last directed by the great Victor Sjöström, only works because it is silent.  It’s not that dialogue would mar the film, but that the wind, that ever-present menace, seems to work so much better when we are forced to imagine what Letty is hearing, rather than being able to hear the actual sound of it.  And that is where Gish is so brilliant, so tortured by the wind itself.  This is a great film, proof yet again that Sjöström was a very good director who stepped out of the chair much too soon (he would continue to act and of course, is most well-known these days for being the star of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries).  It has magnificent cinematography, out there in the dust and the wind and a strong script that gives us characters we can believe in.  But make no mistake about it – it is Gish’s performance that is the real draw of the film.

The Source:

The Wind by Dorothy Scarborough  (1925)

Scarborough’s book is very good.  You understand every character in the book and can find some measure of sympathy for them, no matter what their actions may be.  She presents a perfect description of the desolate land that young Letty has found herself in and we never once question her descent into madness.  These days it is fairly neglected, but it still in print from The University of Texas Press as a good depiction of Texas during this time period.

The Adaptation:

It might say something about the endurance of the film and that the novel isn’t all that well-known, that 85 years after the film was made, the only version in print of the novel is one with a still of Lilian Gish on its cover.  My guess is that most people who will look for the book these days are those who are fans of the film.  So I wonder what they would make of the differences between the book and the film.  The key one, of course, is that the film provides an actual happy ending – a reuniting with Lige and the notion that Letty’s murder has been an act of her imagination.  The book never gives you that kind of out – there is no question in the book that she truly has descended into madness, but not a madness of illusions.  Rather, she is driven mad by the wind and seeks her death out in the wind at the end of the book.  But that’s not the only change.  In the film, Roddy is constantly around, trying to win over Letty as his mistress.  But in the book, though Letty still thinks of Roddy, after that initial trip on the train, she doesn’t seem him again until after she is married.  There is never any talk of him being married and though he does try to have his way with her, it is different than in the book.  In fact, the key thing that the filmmaking trio of Sjöström, Marion and Gish do (the same trio responsible for The Scarlet Letter) is make the film less about her descent into pure madness from the wind, but also a descent into madness partially as a response to sexuality – the question of sexuality, of Letty being a mistress, of her rejecting Lige and not wanting to be physically close to him – those are things in the film, not in the book.  And while the book may be very good (and it is), it is these decisions that help make the film great.

The Credits:

Directed by Victor Sjöström (as Victor Seastrom).  Scenario by Frances Marion.

The Docks of New York

The Film:

This is what The Criterion Collection is for.  In 2010, Criterion put out a box set called 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg.  Included were Underworld, The Last Command and The Docks of New York.  This, I believe, was the first time on DVD for any of them.  And they were done with pristine transfers, looking far better than they ever had on video.  Underworld and The Last Command had both received attention over the years because of winning Oscars in the first year of the Academy Awards (Original Story and Actor, respectively), but Docks, released in a much weaker year, had been ignored at the Oscars and consequently had often not gotten as much attention over the years.

Well, Docks might not be as great a film as The Last Command, but it’s a better film than Underworld, and easily one of the top 10 films of 1928-29.  It’s a gritty film, about the working class (and not so-much working class) members of society existing down at the edges of the city, a sailor who is just in for the night before heading out on another ship (though sailor’s not really the right word to connotate what he does – he is a coal shoveler in the boiler room) and a woman, down on her luck, who throws herself in the water to end it all.  They find each other through circumstance and then find more within each other, especially when they see the other options – like the bitterly unhappy couple they interact with through the night.

Much has been written of the collaboration between von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, of all the films they made together and how good they were, and while Dietrich was always good, von Sternberg’s direction wasn’t as sharp and the films weren’t as interesting as they three films he made just before the advent of sound.  They are gritty and bleak and unrelenting (there is a sort-of happy ending tacked on to the end of this film, which actually works better than most people want to admit, but that doesn’t make up for the bleakness that has preceded it all the way to the last minute), but they have a directorial vision, they have solid acting, they have first-rate cinematography and they still hold up after over 80 years.

The Source:

“The Dock Walloper” by John Monk Saunders

Argh.  It’s really easy to discover that The Docks of New York is based on the short story “The Dock Walloper” by John Monk Saunders.  It’s not so easy to find anything about the story itself.  After pages and pages of Google, after looking through all sorts of books by Saunders on Worldcat, I was unable to determine – 1 – when the story was actually published and 2 – where it was published, if at all (lots of films are made from unpublished materials).  So, I can’t say anything about the original story.

The Adaptation:

Of course, I can’t possibly know what is different between the story and the film.  It is my suspicion that the story doesn’t have anything that might qualify as a happy ending, but that is only supposition.

The Credits:

Directed by Josef von Sternberg.  Story and Screenplay by Jules Furthman.  Titles by Julian Johnson.

Street Angel

The Film:

One of the great DVD box sets of the last decade was Murnau Borzage and Fox, a 12 movie set that released a whole slew of films that had never been released on DVD, and included a Best Picture winner, all three of the films for which Janet Gaynor won Best Actress in 1928 and Borzage’s second Best Director winning film, Bad Girl.  This, of course, was one of the three films that Gaynor won that initial Oscar for.  So, why is it here in the 1928-29 among my Best Adapted Screenplay nominees?  Well, as mentioned above, the Academy didn’t quite have their shit together in the early years.  Street Angel had been one of the three films for which Gaynor won that initial Best Actress Oscar, but the next year it was one of the unofficial nominees for Best Cinematography and Best Interior Decoration.  Since it was included in both years and since she already had two films in 1928, I decided to include it here instead.

Now, what about the film itself?  Well, it was better than I remembered it as being, as the first time I was so focused on the Gaynor performance, I clearly didn’t pay enough attention to the film as a whole, which is very good.  Frank Borzage directed films all the way into the late 50′s.  And he would never again come anywhere close in quality to the three films that he made with Janet Gaynor from 1927-29.  They all had solid enough scripts, but they all had great performances from Gaynor, a magnificent talent who didn’t make nearly enough films.  And they all had very good (or even great) direction from Borzage, clearly influenced by the presence of Murnau at Fox, with German expressionism creeping into the sets and the cinematography.

In this film, Gaynor is desperate to get medicine for her mother, but when her mother dies, ends up running away with a travelling carnival.  There she meets a painter, played by Charles Farrell (who would actually star opposite Gaynor in 12 films overall, including all 3 of the Borzage films).  They fall in love, but the police come knocking and end up taking her away.  With silent melodrama working at its hardest, Farrell doesn’t know why she’s gone, she doesn’t really deserve to be taken away, and in the end, their love will manage to find a way to conquer all.  But the script itself is okay, while it’s the other aspects of the film – the direction, the technical achievements, and of course, Gaynor, that are really the main reason to watch (Farrell was decent enough in all of these films, but not really worth noting).

The Source:

The Lady Cristilinda by Monckton Hoffe  (1922)

There seems to have been at least some confusion here.  The IMDb listed this film as based on a novel called Cristilinda, unaware, apparently of either the correct title or that it was a play and not a novel.  The play itself, when originally on Broadway, starred future film stars Fay Bainter and Leslie Howard.  The play focused much more on what happens later, after they meet – how the painter paints a portrait of his lover that is later sold and assumed to be a 12th Century masterpiece by the church that ends up owning it.

The Adaptation:

While the plot point about the painting and its origins would play into the plot of the film, it only comes in to the later part of the plot – the main focus of well over half the film is how they first meet and fall in love (with some influences, it would seem, from the previous collaboration between all three – 7th Heaven).  The film definitely expands considerably the romance at the core of the film – clearly wanting to get in more of a film audience than a Broadway audience, and the film provides a happy ending that the original play does not.

The Credits:

Directed by Frank Borzage.  Written by Marion Orth.  Adaptation by Philip Klein and Henry Robert Symonds.  Titles by H.H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker.

The Patriot

The Film:

I have already written about The Patriot here.  I didn’t review it, of course, because I haven’t seen it, because it’s the most sought-after of all the lost films.

The Source:

The Patriot by Ashley Dukes, Der Patriot by Alfred Neumann and “Paul I” by Dmitri Merezhovsky

I can’t really write much more on the sources than I can on the film.  I haven’t had a chance to read either play (interestingly enough, I have seen some things that suggest that Neumann actually wrote a novel and that Dukes adapted it as a play, though many places say it was a play that Dukes adapted into English – it may have been a novel first, then a play).  As for the original short story by Merezhovsky, I have been unable to track down a copy of it.

The Adaptation:

The film was originally silent, though it later had some dialogue added to it, after it was finished.  Certainly, in that case, it looks like it was like many plays at the time – condensed in that many of the lines from the play were cut rather than have massive amounts of intertitles.  But without a copy of the film to see, it’s hard to know precisely how close it follows the play.

The Credits:

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  Adaptation by Hans Kraly.  Titles by Julian Johnson.

Other Noteworthy Adaptations:

• October  -  Though it has great direction (from Sergei Eisenstein), editing and cinematography, the screenplay of this film is the weakness.  It is ostensibly based on 10 Days That Shook the World by John Reed, but it focuses much more on the events rather than the politics of the Russian Revolution.  Reed’s book is so unfilmable that when Warren Beatty made his film about Reed in 1981, he wrote an original script rather than attempt to adapt the book.
• The Fall of the House of Usher  -  Like October, this French film from Jean Epstein is very well directed, with great sets, but also like October, the script is really beside the point.
• Aelita: Queen of Mars  -  Even more than the previous two films, the script is the weakness here.  It is based on a novel from Alexei Tolstoy and functions as both an early science-fiction film and Russian propaganda.  A very good film with incredible sets, but not much of a script.
• Pandora’s Box  -  The script is definitely the weak point here, and what keeps it from rising above *** for me.  The focus here, again, is the direction (from G.W. Pabst) and from star Louise Brooks.
• The Letter  -  Based on Maugham’s play (based on his own story), this is the first film version of what would later be a great Bette Davis / William Wyler film in 1940.  It is notable for Jeanne Eagels performance, which earned her the first posthumous Oscar nomination, but the film itself is considerably weaker than the later version.
• The Iron Mask  -  The Douglas Fairbanks version of the classic Dumas novel is enjoyable, but not all that great and a far cry from his Three Musketeers.
• Alibi  -  Only notable as an Oscar nominee for Best Picture, from the play Nightstick.
• Coquette  -  A terrible film, adapted from the play.  It was brought to the screen by Mary Pickford expressly to try to win her the Oscar in the second year of the awards.  She did win, but the film is quite bad.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. Sunrise
2. Metropolis
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Circus
5. 7th Heaven

Analysis:  Doesn’t have nearly the impact as the first year, because that had 15 years worth of films and this has a year and a half.  On the other hand, both Sunrise and Metropolis rank higher on my list than any film released before them – it’s a shame that I have to choose and you can consider this the first of a few virtual ties (1958 will also have one, as will 1977, 1984 and 1992).  This is also the second time already that I have switched my Best Picture and Director winners with the brilliant and innovative Sunrise, directed by the brilliant and innovate F.W. Murnau just beating out the similarly brilliant and innovative Metropolis and Fritz Lang.  There are also two more films I must mention here – the other two **** films that fall outside the top 5 – The Last Command and The Love of Jeanne Ney.  It will take until 1932-33 before we again have a **** film that doesn’t get nominated for Best Picture.

• Best Director

1. F.W. Murnau  (Sunrise)
2. Fritz Lang  (Metropolis)
3. Paul Leni  (The Man Who Laughs)
4. Charlie Chaplin  (The Circus)
5. Frank Borzage  (7th Heaven)

Analysis:  Though four of these films are made in Hollywood, only one of these directors was actually American – Borzage.  The list continues – my next several spots are G.W. Pabst (The Love of Jeanne Ney), Paul Leni (The Cat and the Canary), Alfred Hitchcock (The Lodger) and Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command).  Three of those films are in English and two of them are made in Hollywood, but again, no Americans.  You have get to William Wellman in the #10 spot with Wings to find another American.  Chaplin was originally nominated for Best Comedy Director before his nominations were pulled.

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Sunrise
2. 7th Heaven
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Love of Jeanne Ney
5. The Cat and the Canary

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. Metropolis
2. The Circus
3. The Last Command
4. Cameraman
5. Two Arabian Knights

Analysis:  It’s a much better year for Adapted than Original scripts and that would stay the case for a long time.  Original Screenplays wouldn’t really start to come in great quantity and quality until the rise of Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder in the early 1940′s.  Note, that The Circus was originally an Oscar nominee until all of Chaplin’s nominations were revoked to give him the Special Award.

• Best Actor:

1. Emil Jannings  (The Last Command)
2. Conrad Veidt  (The Man Who Laughs)
3. Charlie Chaplin  (The Circus)
4. George O’Brien  (Sunrise)
5. Lon Chaney  (Laugh Clown Laugh)

Analysis:  Jannings also won the Oscar for The Way of All Flesh, which is a lost film.

• Best Actress

1. Janet Gaynor  (Sunrise)
2. Maria Falconetti  (The Passion of Joan of Arc)
3. Janet Gaynor  (7th Heaven)
4. Gloria Swanson  (Sadie Thompson)
5. Lilian Gish  (The Scarlet Letter)
6. Louise Dresser  (A Ship Comes In)

Analysis:  There are definitely those who will say I have Falconetti too low.  So imagine what they must think that I have the film rated at only ***.  Yet, I watched again before this post and hold to my rating.  I find the film too overwhelming, that the use of close-ups actually hurts the film rather than helps it.  And Falconetti is great, but I still have her edged out by Gaynor.  Gaynor actually won her Oscar for three performances, and the only reason that Street Angel is not also among the nominees is because since it was also nominated for 2 Oscars in 1928-29, I moved it there for eligibility purposes and Gaynor will be nominated again for that.  Dresser makes it because of the two nominations for Gaynor – I always nominate 5 different performers.  This category and Best Supporting Actress are the only two categories where, as a whole, this year is better than the first year.

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. William Powell  (The Last Command)
2. Lionel Barrymore  (Sadie Thompson)
3. Adolf E. Licho  (The Love of Jeanne Ney)
4. Rudolf Klein-Rogge  (Metropolis)
5. Sig Arno  (The Love of Jeanne Ney)

Analysis:  This may be faulty memory, but I don’t really remember seeing Powell play the villain in any other film.  He could a charming cad, cynical, sardonic, but not a villain.  And here, as the villain, he wins my award for Best Supporting Actor (he would never end up winning an Oscar).  Don’t miss the performances, by the way, in The Love of Jeanne Ney, with her lecherous uncle as my #3 and his chief inspector at #5.

• Best Supporting Actress:

1. Brigitte Helm  (Metropolis)
2. Evelyn Brent  (The Last Command)
3. Olga Baclanova  (The Man Who Laughs)
4. Brigitte Helm  (The Love of Jeanne Ney)
5. Martha Mattox  (The Cat and the Canary)
6. Molly O’Day  (The Patent Leather Kid)

Analysis:  Brigitte Helm plays two very different roles in Metropolis and yet, neither is like her performance in The Love of Jeanne Ney.  There’s a big drop, by the way, in quality between #4 and 5 – but there’s not a whole lot of noteworthy supporting actress performances in this year.

• Best Editing:

1. Sunrise
2. The Circus
3. Metropolis
4. The Love of Jeanne Ney
5. 7th Heaven

• Best Cinematography:

1. Sunrise
2. Metropolis
3. 7th Heaven
4. The Man Who Laughs
5. The Circus

Analysis:  Between the visionary shots in Sunrise (whose Cinematography is possibly the best in film until Citizen Kane), the amazing shots in Metropolis and the great move up the staircase in 7th Heaven, this is a very strong year.

• Best Original Score:

1. The Circus

Analysis:  This may again be considered cheating, as Chaplin wrote the score for the 1969 re-release.  But it means that two years in a row, Chaplin earns 6 nominations from me (he also edited), though this time he doesn’t win any of them.

• Best Sound:

1. The Jazz Singer

• Best Art Direction:

1. Metropolis
2. The Man Who Laughs
3. Sunrise
4. Tartuffe
5. 7th Heaven

• Best Visual Effects:

1. Metropolis
2. Wings
3. Sunrise
4. 7th Heaven

Analysis:  This category was called Engineering Effects in this, the initial year of the Oscars.  It was dropped after that, only to be revived as Special Effects in 1939.

• Best Costume Design:

1. The Man Who Laughs
2. Tartuffe
3. The King of Kings
4. The Circus
5. Tempest

• Best Makeup:

1. London After Midnight
2. The Man Who Laughs
3. The Passion of Joan of Arc
4. Laugh Clown Laugh

Analysis:  Two more makeup jobs for Lon Chaney, with another win, bringing him up to 4 Nighthawk Awards and 9 nominations total so far.

• Best Foreign Film:

1. The Love of Jeanne Ney
2. October
3. Napoleon

Analysis:  As noted below, I have only seen 5 films that are eligible for this award in this year.  By this point, many of the best European directors had left for Hollywood and were making films in English.

By Film:

note:  They’re in points order.  You get twice as many points for a win as for a nomination.  Hopefully your math skills will let you figure out the system.

• Sunrise  (515)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, Visual Effects
• Metropolis  (435)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, Visual Effects, Foreign Film  (02-26)
• The Man Who Laughs  (285)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup
• The Circus  (285)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Editing, Cinematography, Original Score, Costume Design
• 7th Heaven  (260)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, Visual Effects
• The Last Command  (200)
  • Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• The Love of Jeanne Ney  (195)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Editing, Foreign Film
• The Cat and the Canary  (70)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress
• Sadie Thompson  (65)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• Laugh Clown Laugh  (45)
  • Actor, Makeup
• The Passion of Joan of Arc  (45)
  • Actress, Makeup
• Cameraman  (40)
  • Original Screenplay
• Two Arabian Knights  (40)
  • Original Screenplay
• The Jazz Singer  (40)
  • Sound
• Tartuffe  (35)
  • Art Direction, Costume Design
• The Scarlet Letter  (35)
  • Actress
• A Ship Comes In  (35)
  • Actress
• The Patent Leather Kid  (30)
  • Supporting Actress
• London After Midnight  (20)
  • Makeup
• Wings  (20)
  • Visual Effects
• The King of Kings  (15)
  • Costume Design
• Tempest  (15)
  • Costume Design

Best Film Not Nominated for Any Nighthawk Awards:

• The Lodger

Analysis:  I already discussed The Lodger in the Best Adapted Screenplay post.  It is a very good film, my #10 of the year, but never manages to get higher than 8th in any category.

Also Not Nominated but Don’t Miss:

• The Kid Brother  -  a very enjoyable collaboration between star Harold Lloyd and director Ted Wilde – much better than Speedy, which would earn Wilde a Best Comedy Director nomination in the only year of the category
• The Hands of Orlac  -  a very good German horror film from the director of Caligari, made in 1924, but just reaching the States here
• The Unknown  -  always watch the Chaney films, especially the ones directed by Tod Browning

Biggest Awards Film Not Nominated for Any Nighthawk Awards:

• The Crowd

Analysis:  Nominated for Best Artistic Production and Best Director, it would have won the former had Louis B. Mayer not wanted such a depressing film from his studio to win the award.  I find it to be massively over-rated (see below).

Nighthawk Golden Globes:

Drama:

• Best Picture

1. Sunrise
2. Metropolis
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. 7th Heaven
5. The Last Command

• Best Director

1. F.W. Murnau  (Sunrise)
2. Fritz Lang  (Metropolis)
3. Paul Leni  (The Man Who Laughs)
4. Frank Borzage  (7th Heaven)
5. G.W. Pabst  (The Love of Jeanne Ney)

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Sunrise
2. 7th Heaven
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Love of Jeanne Ney
5. Tartuffe

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. Metropolis
2. The Last Command

• Best Actor:

1. Emil Jannings  (The Last Command)
2. Conrad Veidt  (The Man Who Laughs)
3. George O’Brien  (Sunrise)
4. Lon Chaney  (Laugh Clown Laugh)
5. Richard Barthelmess  (The Patent Leather Kid)

Analysis:  Barthelmess was nominated for Best Actor for The Patent Leather Kid and The Noose (which has a copy at MOMA which I haven’t seen).  I only recently got a chance to see Kid, and it’s maybe the best performance of his career.  It just missed out on the regular Best Actor category, but manages to slip in here with Chaplin in the Comedy category.

• Best Actress

1. Janet Gaynor  (Sunrise)
2. Maria Falconetti  (The Passion of Joan of Arc)
3. Janet Gaynor  (7th Heaven)
4. Gloria Swanson  (Sadie Thompson)
5. Lilian Gish  (The Scarlet Letter)

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. William Powell  (The Last Command)
2. Lionel Barrymore  (Sadie Thompson)
3. Adolf E. Licho  (The Love of Jeanne Ney)
4. Rudolf Klein-Rogge  (Metropolis)
5. Sig Arno  (The Love of Jeanne Ney)

Analysis:  For the Drama / Comedy split, I go by the film.  So, here, in the Drama category we have Sig Arno nominated for a performance that is comedic genius (he would play a similar role to similar effects in Pandora’s Box) because he gives it in a very dramatic film (the scenes with Arno provide really the only light moments in the film).

• Best Supporting Actress:

1. Brigitte Helm  (Metropolis)
2. Evelyn Brent  (The Last Command)
3. Olga Baclanova  (The Man Who Laughs)
4. Brigitte Helm  (The Love of Jeanne Ney)
5. Molly O’Day  (The Patent Leather Kid)

By Film:

• Sunrise  (375)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Actress
• Metropolis  (265)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• The Last Command  (250)
  • Picture, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• The Love of Jeanne Ney  (175)
  • Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• 7th Heaven  (170)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actress
• The Patent Leather Kid  (65)
  • Actor, Supporting Actress
• Sadie Thompson  (65)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• Tartuffe  (40)
  • Adapted Screenplay
• Laugh Clown Laugh  (35)
  • Actor
• The Passion of Joan of Arc  (35)
  • Actress
• The Scarlet Letter  (35)
  • Actress

Best Drama Not Nominated for Any Nighthawk Golden Globes:

• The Lodger

Analysis:  see above

Comedy:

• Best Picture:

1. The Circus
2. The Cat and the Canary
3. The Kid Brother
4. Cameraman

Analysis:  To be eligible for my Best Picture awards you have to be a ***.5 or **** film.  So, there are other films I have seen that are the Comedy or Musical category, like Running Wild or Two Arabian Knights or, of course, The Jazz Singer.  But none of them are better than *** and so they don’t make the cut here and I go with four nominees.  This will be a weak category (and all the overall Comedy awards will be a problem) until the advent of the Screwball comedies in the mid-30′s.  But this isn’t the weakest stretch – in the late 40′s, when Musicals were running dry and Comedies seemed to have run out of humor (Wilder was being dramatic or not at his best, Sturges was basically gone) there is a much worse dearth of films in the Comedy awards.

• Best Director:

1. Charlie Chaplin  (The Circus)
2. Paul Leni  (The Cat and the Canary)
3. Buster Keaton  (Cameraman)
4. Lewis Milestone  (Two Arabian Knights)
5. Ted Wilde  (The Kid Brother)

Analysis:  This is Chaplin’s second win here in a row.  Get used to it.  He’ll be back in the top spot in 1931, 1936, 1940 and 1947.  His career record for points in the Comedy Director category won’t be surpassed until 1994.

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. The Cat and the Canary

Analysis:  Like the first year, there isn’t much here.  Most of the good comedies from the era were original, in stark contrast to most of the other good films being made.

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. The Circus
2. Cameraman
3. Two Arabian Knights

• Best Actor:

1. Charlie Chaplin  (The Circus)

• Best Actress:

Analysis:  This is, again, partially a function of the comedies I have seen.  Some have no lead female.  Some have a lead female who isn’t all that good.  But none had a lead actress performance I thought was worthy of a nomination.

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. Tully Marshall  (The Cat and the Canary)

• Best Supporting Actress

1. Martha Mattox  (The Cat and the Canary)

By Film:

• The Circus  (340)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor
• The Cat and the Canary  (295)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• Cameraman  (135)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay
• The Kid Brother  (95)
  • Picture, Director
• Two Arabian Knights  (85)
  • Director, Original Screenplay

Best Comedy Not Nominated for any Nighthawk Golden Globes:

• Running Wild

Analysis:  Running Wild is a good film from Gregory La Cava (one of his best, actually) that almost, but doesn’t quite make it into the ***.5 range.  But, as you can see, only one film ranked below ***.5 earns nominations – Two Arabian Knights, which had some good direction (Lewis Milestone actually won the initial Best Comedy Director category) and a good script, but doesn’t hold together enough to get up into the ***.5 range.

Roundup for the Year in Film:

Eligible Films I Have Seen:  60

Top 5 Films of the Year:

1  -  Sunrise  (see review here)

2  -  Metropolis  (dir. Fritz Lang)

I first discovered this by accident before I was seriously interested in films.  As such, it might have been the first Silent film I ever saw.  It was the Spring of 1986, and the new issue of All-Star Squadron, the comic book about the Golden Age heroes of DC was out.  In it, was a robot who had come from the future, back in time.  Over the course of the next couple of issues, this robot explained about her future, about her creator Rotwang and the girl Maria who would overthrow her masters.  There was clearly more here than I understood and it was soon explained in a note about how these were all references to the film Metropolis, the title of which, of course, was also the name of Superman’s city.  So, at age 12, I went looking for the film and I found it at a video store.  And I watched it.  And I was thunderstruck.

Of course, I didn’t know much about film back then.  I had no idea who Fritz Lang was, didn’t know anything about German expressionism, certainly didn’t know that the film I was watching was truncated and that it would be 25 years before I would be able to see the most complete version of the film (in the theaters no less – I have seen Metropolis in the theaters 3 times, the only Silent film I have seen in the theaters more than once).  But I could tell how amazing it was – the architectural highs of the city above (complete with titles designed to express that), the incredible detail of the workers lives below.

And so it kills me to knock Metropolis off the top of the list for the year.  As I said above, consider it really a co-winner of Best Picture and Director, because I don’t really want to be choosing between Sunrise and Metropolis, between Murnau and Lang.  It does not diminish this film in the slightest that each time I see Sunrise it goes up in my estimation.  This film had been way high in my estimation since that initial time I saw it.

And it wasn’t just the look of the film that did it.  It wasn’t just the very ideas behind it – the crazy machines that have to be spun around, the robot that transforms into a woman (that part didn’t make it into the comic).  It wasn’t just the brilliant direction that very clearly had a vision.  There were other things – the way the titles, like in Sunrise, reflected parts of the film itself, or the two key performances – that of Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the crazed Rotwangs, delightfully over the top, and the brilliant Brigitte Helm in the harder role of both Madonna and whore all at once.

If you have never seen a Silent film, there are two places that are great to start, that allow you to see them in the majesty of a movie theater as they should be seen (if you can) and yet never feel that anything is slowed down or distracting.  You can start with Chaplin, with any of his great features, that will keep you laughing from start to finish and keep you stunned in amazement at his myriad of talents (see below).  Or you can watch Metropolis, one of the most visionary films ever made and a film that, even though it has been knocked to #2 here, I am not prepared to say isn’t the great Silent film ever made.

3  -  The Man Who Laughs  (see review here)

Beware of monkeys on the high wire.

4  -  The Circus  (dir. Charlie Chaplin)

I used to have The Circus as a ***.5 film.  I knew, when comparing it to The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times and The Great Dictator, that it couldn’t equal the sheer brilliance of those four masterpieces from Charlie Chaplin.  Watching it again, for the first time since I taped it a decade ago (I have all five of those films on one tape), I was reminded that while it isn’t up to the same level, that’s a different thing from saying that it’s not a **** film.  This is a **** film, a film of wit, intelligence, great deals of humor, both sharp and warm, and talent.

The plot is simple, as the plots always are with Chaplin.  The tramp ends up at a circus, at first just looking around, then in the midst of everything, chased by the police, in a misconception over whether or not he is a thief.  Then, astounded at the laughs that the tramp is getting when chased as opposed to his clowns who were resoundingly booed, the ringmaster hires the tramp.  The tramp kind of falls in love with the high-wire girl, but in the end, makes sure that she gets the man she really loves and all ends well, with the tramp again on his own, heading off into another adventure.

But of course, all of this is just a set-up for Chaplin to work his magic.  We get scenes like where the tramp has to go up on the high-wire (he has a wire holding him up) and things get screwy and he ends up with monkeys climbing on him and a tail in his mouth, inches from death.  Or the brilliant chase scene that gets so much applause from the crowd (here Chaplin illustrates a key rule of humor – that trying to be funny often isn’t funny, while trying to be serious and failing is often hilarious – this is why Chaplin films are still funny and most modern comedies will never be funny).  This film even has what might be my favorite Chaplin moment.  Not the hall of mirrors, which is brilliant, and I used as this picture up above because I couldn’t find the picture I wanted.  But the part where he pretends he is part of the exhibit, and then, confronted with the man who has gotten him into all this trouble, who is also forced to fake being part of the exhibit, he is able to continually beat him about the head, and then, after turning, roar with laughter.  I have a feeling that’s Chaplin’s true self shining through – the desire to beat someone about the head who deserves it and then laugh hysterically, without the world ever realizing what he is really laughing at.

The film moves well, edited by Chaplin, with a very good musical score added by Chaplin in 1969 for a re-release.  It of course, is written with great warmth and humor by Chaplin and was directed by him as well.  It is a reminder of his myriad of talents.  He never made a lot of films, but he poured his heart into each of them and they often gave the rewards worth the wait.  The Circus is not a high-level **** film, not one of the greatest films of all-time like Modern Times.  But it is a great film, a great comedy, and a great time to be had, even now, 85 years later.

5  -  7th Heaven  (see review here)

5 Weakest Films  (#1 being the weakest):

1. The Crowd
2. Noah’s Ark
3. A Girl in Every Port
4. The Racket
5. The Love Trap

Weakest Film of the Year:

The Crowd

I have already discussed before here how my opinion on this film goes against the grain of critical consensus.  So be it.  I have seen the film three times.  No matter how many times I am told or read it is brilliant, I hold to my ranking of **.5 and therefore the weakest film of the year that I have seen.  The other four films are all low-level *** films from directors I saw for the Best Director project (Curtiz, Hawks, Milestone, Wyler).  In fact, you have to go all the way up to #48 on the year to find a film not directed by a future Oscar nominee (The Gosta Berlings Saga).  By the way, I used the term “weakest” here as opposed to “worst” which I used the year before.  That’s because, at **.5, I don’t think The Crowd is a bad film, just a mediocre one.  So, if the weakest film I have seen for a year is **.5 or better, it is weakest.  If it is ** or worse, then it’s a bad film and it gets the description “worst”.

Points:

• Most Nighthawk Nominations:  Metropolis  (10)  *
• Most Nighthawk Awards:  Sunrise  (6) *
• Most Nighthawk Points:  Sunrise  (515) *
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Award:  The Jazz Singer
• 2nd Place Award:  Metropolis  (Picture, Director, Cinematography)
• 6th Place Award:  The Love of Jeanne Ney  (Director, Supporting Actor)
• Most Nighthawk Drama Nominations:  Sunrise  /  Metropolis  /  The Last Command  /  The Man Who Laughs  /  The Love of Jeanne Ney  (5)
• Most Nighthawk Drama Awards:  Sunrise  (4)
• Most Nighthawk Drama Points:  Sunrise  (375)  *
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Drama Award:  The Passion of Joan of Arc
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Nominations:  The Cat and the Canary  (5)
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Awards:  The Circus  (4)
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Points:  The Circus  (340)
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Comedy Award:  Two Arabian Knights

Note 1:  * means a Nighthawk record up to this point

Note 2:  I will get crap for listing The Passion of Joan of Arc.  I still rank it at ***.  It’s just that all the other films that earn Drama nominations I have ranked higher.

Progressive Leaders:

• Most Nighthawk Nominations:  Metropolis  (10)
• Most Nighthawk Awards:  Sunrise  (6)
• Most Nighthawk Points:  Sunrise  (515)
• Most Nighthawk Awards without winning Best Picture:  Metropolis  (5)
• Most Nighthawk Nominations without a Best Picture Nomination:  Faust  (8)
• Most Nighthawk Nominations without a Nighthawk Award:  Faust  /  7th Heaven  (8)
• Actor:  Lon Chaney  (205)
• Actress:  Lilian Gish  (140)
• Director:  Erich von Stroheim  /  F.W. Murnau  /  Charlie Chaplin  (90)

Breakdown by Genre  (Foreign in parenthesis, best film in genre following):

• Drama:  41  (4)  -  Sunrise
• Comedy:  8  -  The Circus
• Foreign:  6  -  Metropolis
• Suspense:  2  -  The Cat and the Canary
• War:  2  -  Wings
• Crime:  2  -  Underworld
• Sci-Fi:  1  (1)  -  Metropolis
• Mystery:  1  -  The Lodger
• Horror:  1  (1)  -  The Hands of Orlac
• Musical:  1  -  The Jazz Singer
• Adventure:  1  -  Trail of 98
• Action:  0
• Fantasy:  0
• Kids:  0
• Western:  0

5 Films Eligible for Best Foreign Film (alphabetical, with director in parenthesis – red are ****, blue are ***.5 – both those colors qualify for my Best Foreign Film Award):

• The End of St Petersburg  (Pudovkin)
• The Love of Jeanne Ney  (Pabst)
• Napoleon  (Gance)
• October  (Eisenstein)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc  (Dreyer)

Films Eligible in This Year But Originally Released in a Different Calendar Year:

• The Gosta Berlings Saga  (1924)
• The Hands of Orlac  (1924)
• Metropolis  (1926)
• The Scarlet Letter  (1926)
• Tartuffe  (1926)

Films Released This Year Originally But Eligible in a Different Year:

• Easy Virtue  (1928-29)
• Napoleon  (1928-29)
• October  (1928-29)

Note:  Because of the way the Academy’s “years” were drawn prior to 1934, years fell into two different Oscar years.  So this is not a list of all the 1928 films that fall into the 1928-29 category.  This list, until 1932-33, will include films from the earlier year that have later eligibility (such as Easy Virtue, which was released in Britain in 1927) or Foreign Films eligible for my Best Foreign Film award in the present year but eligible for the rest of the categories in a different year.  After 1933, this will get considerably less complicated.

One of the beautiful and haunting images from Sunrise. Nothing to do with the script, but great to look at.

My Top 10:

1. Sunrise
2. 7th Heaven
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Love of Jeanne Ney
5. The Cat and the Canary
6. Tartuffe
7. Sadie Thompson
8. The Lodger
9. Laugh Clown Laugh
10. The Scarlet Letter

Oscar Nominees  (Best Adaptation):

• 7th Heaven
• Glorious Betsy
• The Jazz Singer

Oscar Nominee  (Best Title Writing):

• The Private Life of Helen of Troy

Oscar Note:  This first year of the Academy Awards is a bit confusing on the writing front.  There were three categories: Best Original Story (which clearly isn’t relevant to this post), Best Adaptation (nominees listed above) and Best Title Writing.  Now, older Oscar sources will list several films nominated for this category.  But apparently, later research determined that there Joseph Farnham won the Oscar and George Marion, Jr. was nominated, but neither were cited for any particular film, no matter what older books might say.  The only actual film cited for the category is The Private Life of Helen of Troy (which was adapted, so is mentioned here).

There will be other issues with the writing categories in upcoming years.  I will deal with each one as it arises.  And once we start getting to writing awards from other awards groups or critics societies, I will start mentioning those as well, but that won’t start until 1947.

Note:  There is going to be some trickiness for the next several years because of source material.  Many of the films in this year and through the 30′s and 40′s are based on plays rather than novels.  That makes it much harder to track down source material – a lot of the plays are out-of-print and many were never printed in the first place, at least in a commercially available printing.  Which means I won’t have as much to say about the source material for a lot of these films.  But I’ll do the best I can.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

The Film:

I already reviewed Sunrise here, for the Best Picture project.  But I feel I should also mention something more.  Every time I watch this film, I admire it more and more.  This time it did what I didn’t think was possible – nudged Metropolis out of its spot in Best Picture and Best Director that it has held for close to 20 years.  Which means, I guess, that Sunrise is now my #1 film of the Silent Era.

The Source:

“A Trip to Tilsit” by Hermann Sudermann.

I have never had a chance to read the original story by Sudermann.

The Adaptation:

In The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930, Scott Eyman writes: “Murnau and Carl Mayer began to write the script and outline the production of his first American film in Berlin, shaping the material to their own ends.  The film that was eventually called Sunrise was an adaptation of Hermann Sudermann’s A Trip to Tilsit.  In Sudermann’s original, the third leg of the romantic triangle is merely a new maid at the farm, but, in keeping with Murnau’s pantheistic bent, she was changed to make her an urban intruder in the idyllic country environment.  Throughout, the city was to be treated as a strange, alien environment capable of both destruction and redemption.  It was the city that would supply the woman that threatened the happy marriage, and it would be the city, massive, intimidatingly bizarre, that would provide a healing balm to the wounded relationship.  Murnau and Mayer used points from Sudermann’s story as islands, set pieces – the seduction, the woman’s suggestion that the man murder his wife, the boat trip and the amusement park – and constructed new narrative incidents as bridges.” (p 82).  It’s interesting that this should be the case (and I see no reason to doubt Eyman’s idea), because City Girl, which I will write about in 1929-30, takes the opposite approach.  The city wears people down, but it is the girl from the city who is more brutalized by the people in the country.  Eyman also mentions that some of the things in the script never made it on the screen and that Murnau improvised many shots that hadn’t been in the script (and thus likely not in the original story) like the barber sequence and the peasant dance.

The Credits:

Directed by F.W. Murnau.  Scenario by Carl Meyer.  From an original theme by Hermann Sudermann.  Titles by Katherine Hilliker and H.H. Caldwell.

7th Heaven

The Film:

I already reviewed 7th Heaven here, for the Best Picture project.  It’s a great film, anchored by a magnificent performance from Janet Gaynor, with amazing shots moving up the staircase to the apartment.

The Source:

7th Heaven by Austin Strong  (1922)

The original play only has three acts, and only covers three days – the first day that Diane and Chico meet, four days later in their apartment, and then four years later, after Chico comes back to her from the dead of the war.  The opening act is effective, as is the second one.  But the third one feels much too rushed, and then Diane gives up and then suddenly there is Chico alive, with just a few lines left before the play ends.  It seems like it could be effective somewhat on stage, but not nearly to the extent that the film is.

The Adaptation:

Things happen much quicker in the film than they do in the play.  That’s not just a function of having intertitles rather than spoken dialogue.  The screenplay focuses much more on the relationship between Diane and Chico right from the start.  They meet less than 15 minutes into the film and by 30 minutes in they are already agreeing they are married – something that doesn’t happen until the end of Act I, almost half-way through the play.  But the bigger thing is how much things are opened up.  In the play, we jump from their apartment, only a few days after they have met, to after she thinks he is dead and the war is about to end.  Here, we get to see more of their relationship, more of the war.  And of course, because it is a film, and because we have been able to actually see the apartment, “Heaven”, that they occupy, we have those masterful shots up the stairway, especially the one at the finale.  In the play, she is succumbing to the charms of another man when suddenly we are all surprised to find Chico alive.  But in the film, it is a much more desperate race against time, as we know he is racing against time but he doesn’t.  It is one of the best examples of taking a play and transforming it properly into a film in the Silent Era.

The Credits:

Directed by Frank Borzage.  Screenplay by Benjamin Glazer.  Titles by H.H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker.  Uncredited writing work by Bernard Vorhaus.

The Man Who Laughs

The Film:

Here it is, the single biggest cultural impact made by any silent film and one of the biggest cultural impacts made by any film ever.  Why, you say?  How many people have ever even seen this film? (2359 voting members of the IMDb apparently.)  Well, you can find this information from many sources, but I will quote E. Nelson Bridwell from the Introduction to Batman: From the Thirties to the Seventies: “The Joker!  Or all the villains The Batman has ever faced, this is the greatest.  He is the perfect blend of clownish humor and malevolent evil.  I have heard Bill Finger tell just how the character came to be created.  It seems Bill got a call from Bob Kane.  He had an idea for a villain Bill could use in the comics.  He was a clownish-looking man, but a killer.  However, when Bill saw Bob’s sketch, he decided it looked too clownish.  He happened to have a movie edition of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, with stills from the 1928 film starring Conrad Veidt.  The story concerns Gwynplaine, an English nobleman stolen as an infant and turned into a carnival freak by having a perpetual laugh carved on his face.  The makeup used by Veidt was perfect, and this inspired the Joker’s countenance.”  (You can find that edition here.  They don’t come cheap.)

But it’s all fun to talk about the accidental cultural impact that the film has made.  What about the film itself?  How good is it?  Well, better than I remembered it to be, actually.  I had it ranked as a lower level ***.5 film and at #7 for the year.  It has gone up to #4 and has made it into the **** films, a well-directed, well-acted film, with good production values all around.

It is the story of a young man, who is scarred permanently in response to his father’s perceived insult to the king.  Having been abandoned in a snowstorm and rescuing a baby girl from death, he grows up in a carnival sideshow, but he is actually the heir to a title.  He makes his living with his freakish look, loving the girl he saved as a child, but trying to think of her more as a sister, especially since he feels he is unfit for her, with his horrible scars (which she can not see, having been blinded by their experience in the snow as children).  If there’s one weakness in the film it is with Mary Philbin, who plays Dea, the, sister and love interest for Gwynplaine.  Philbin’s main goal is to provide a lovely face, and to love blindly and that’s pretty much all she’s able to muster (she had a similar role in Phantom of the Opera, except there she was turned off by the deformity that here she can not see).  But she is more than made up for by Conrad Veidt, who had been so perfect as the somnambulist in Caligari and as Ivan the Terrible in Waxworks (also for director Paul Leni, before they both came to America).  And there is also Olga Baclanova as the woman who now lives in the land that rightfully belongs to Gwynplaine.  She is fully willing to use sex as a weapon and she is both fascinated and repelled by this scarred man who stands between her and security.  She is both beautiful and entrancing and bedeviling all at once.

And let’s not forget about the look of the film.  You could argue that the film doesn’t really look like late 17th Century England, but it really isn’t supposed to be as such.  This is German expressionism married to a story and the look of the film is right for the film, the feel of horror creeping over you (even in the early shots, where the makeup is done so very well on the boy who plays the younger Gwynplaine).  The makeup is done well, the costumes are very good, the sets always provide the right kind of eeriness.  This is basically the forgotten brilliant Universal Horror film, partially because it’s not really a Horror film (the same with Leni’s The Cat and the Canary, below), and partially because it’s easy to overlook a film that comes in between the great Lon Chaney films that started it all and the Golden Age of Horror that seemed to emerge suddenly out of nothingness with the release of Dracula.  But this is one film that shouldn’t be forgotten.  It of course won’t be, but that’s something different.  Let’s remember this film for how good it really is.

The Source:

L’Homme qui rit by Victor Hugo  (1869)

Oh, this book.  Several months ago I took it out of the library to read and couldn’t get into it at all.  But when I started this project, I grabbed it again, figuring that since I had just re-watched the film for the first time in years, it would be easier to get into the book.  I was wrong.

One thing I have always said about Les Misérables, is that it is the one book I recommend to people that they read abridged.  It is a great story, but Hugo meanders so, so, so much that it gets very hard to read.  I have read it twice and both times I enjoyed the story and really struggled through the 50 and 60 page digressions.  But, I have also read his Notre Dame de Paris twice and both times I really enjoyed it – I found it worked much better for what he was trying to do and he made the city and the cathedral the focal points of the novel.  But this is much more like Les Mis, only worse.  I am certain there are those who will say the problem is just me.  But look at how many times Les Mis and Notre Dame have been printed and then look at how often this is printed.  I don’t think it’s just me.  There’s an interesting story in there somewhere, struggling to get out, but the novel just becomes impenetrable.

The Adaptation:

Thankfully, the writers managed to find that story and help it out.  It perhaps says enough that this 110 minutes movie took a 730 page book (in the edition I have tried to read twice) and didn’t seem to lose a minute of the story.  They cut through all of the unnecessary Hugo prose and found the characters and found the story at the core of it and brought it to life.  Yes, there are some changes – in the film, we know the story from the outset, while in the book you learn it in pieces later when the characters learn it, and most notably, the ending is drastically changed.  There is a happy ending in the film, whereas in the book, Dea dies on the boat (rather unexpectedly and without much of an explanation) and Gwynplaine then commits suicide to join her in death.  But overall, the film does a great job of taking an overlong, overwritten book and turning it into a first-rate film.

The Credits:

Directed by Paul Leni.  Adaptation and continuity by J. Grubb Alexander.  Titles by Walter Anthony.  Uncredited writing by May McLean, Marion Ward and Charles E. Whittaker.

The Love of Jeanne Ney

The Film:

As recently as a couple of weeks ago I am not certain I had ever even heard of this film.  I saw it as I was preparing for this series and scrolling through Netflix, looking at every film they have from before 1930 that I hadn’t yet rated.  And I saw the director and I saw that it starred Brigitte Helm, the actress who gave such a magnificent performance in Metropolis.  And Tufts had a copy of it, so I brought it home.  And I was stunned at how good it was and how somehow I had been missing it all of this time.

This film deals with the Soviet revolution in Russia, it deals with a murder, it deals with a love story, and yet, in some parts it is almost pure comedy.  That is manages to balance all of these and with considerable cinematic effects, is due to the masterful direction of Georg Wilhelm Pabst, known today mainly as the director of Pandora’s Box.  The film never feels overwrought in spite of the melodrama, it never feels confusing in spite of all that is going on, it never feels propagandistic in spite of some of the intentions of the original novel and it never feels like too much of an art film in spite of the stylistic flourishes that Pabst throws into it.

The plot is anything but straight forward.  Jeanne returns home to Paris after her father is killed during the Russian Revolution.  Also on the way to Paris are Andreas, her lover, and Khalibiev, an oily man who helped set up her father’s death and wants Jeanne and money and pretty much anything he can get.  Jeanne is taken in by her uncle, a rather lecherous detective who is more than happy to throw her out on the street but wants to make his blind daughter happy (played very well by Helm in a role very different from either of her roles in Metropolis).  Part of the fun here is watching the ongoing actions in the uncle’s agency, including the (rather amusing) discovery of a lost diamond.  Aside from Helm, there are very good performances from Adolf E. Licho as the uncle and Sig Arno as the uncle’s main sidekick (Arno would later come to Hollywood, leaving the Nazis and have a long fruitful career).  Things get more complicated when Andreas arrives and there is another murder and confusion over who might have done it and what will happen with Jeanne, but I don’t want to give too much away.

I was stunned at how well made the film was.  The two leads do a solid enough job, but it’s really all about the editing style (the way things are cut when the two lovers first see each other in Paris is magnificent), the way Pabst frames his shots and the variety of character actors always lurking in the background (Fritz Rasp, who plays Khalibiev just seems so magnificently off it’s hard to put into words).  It’s a reminder that not all the great German directors came to America – some of them stayed in Germany as well.

The Source:

The Love of Jeanne Ney by Ilja Ehrenberg  (1924)

There is some irony here.  Ilja Ehrenberg was a Soviet writer and poet, and, many would say, propagandist.  During World War II he advocated strongly for the death of German soldiers who had invaded the Soviet Union.  And after the war, he was one of the authors of the famous Black Book, which was one of the first books to detail the atrocities of the Holocaust.  And here, in the days before the Nazis, we have a German director making a film of his novel which works both well as a film and well as propaganda (a director who would actually return to Germany before the war and stay through the war, making two films there).  Trying to research him I came across a rather disgusting white supremacy website that attacked him as their favorite kind of target – a Communist and a Jew.

I haven’t actually read the original novel because I hadn’t planned to read it (because I had never heard of it a couple of weeks ago) and didn’t have time to get a copy of it, but from the story and from what I can tell, the novel deals much more with life under the new Soviet regime than the film does, which deals much more with the love and murder stories.

The Adaptation:

Since I haven’t read the book, I don’t know how close the film keeps to the book.  But as I say, I’m guessing the book comes across as more slanted in favor of the Soviets than the film does.

The Credits:

Directed by George Wilhelm Pabst.  Written by Rudolf Leonhardt and Ladislaus Vajda.

The Cat and the Canary

The Film:

The Cat and the Canary is so many things all at once.  It is a comedy, at times almost like a Keystone Kops comedy (complete with cops roaring in at top speed and chasing a milk wagon) with all sorts of zaniness going on.  It is a mystery, a drawing room style puzzler as to what is going on and who is behind it all.  And, directed by Paul Leni, influenced by the German expressionism that directors like Leni and Murnau were importing to Hollywood, it has some of the hallmarks of a good solid horror film, complete with disfigured hands coming out the darkness and reaching around someone’s neck.  But most of all, it’s just really good fun.

I’ve just started a new series where I review films I saw a lot as a kid.  One of the movies I will certainly get to at some point is Clue, a silly little film that’s a whole bundle of fun because of all the good characters created from such a solid group of actors.  Well, this is almost like the Silent Era’s version of Clue, though with a much more talented director, it is several levels of quality above Clue.  But watching this again, I was struck by how much must have come from the various versions of The Cat and the Canary when they set out to make Clue.  We have a surprise death, a house full of people who don’t trust each other and who all could be the killer and a mystery that doesn’t come out until the very end (or ends, if we’re talking about Clue).  It is perhaps the best mark of this film that the play has been filmed three other times and all three films focused on different things – the 1930 version, The Cat Creeps, emphasized the horror, the 1939 version with Bob Hope went with the comedy (obviously) while the 1979 British version was more about the mystery.  But this version does the best of covering all three, and does it all quite succinctly.  You could say that’s because it doesn’t have dialogue, but this film seems to have more intertitles that are specific lines of dialogue than almost any silent film I can remember.

And all of it works so well because of the direction from Paul Leni, from the sets he chose to work with, emphasizing that expressionism (just like he would in The Man Who Laughs) and from the atmosphere he creates.  Leni had been a good director in Germany and he came to the States and was a very good director and then suddenly he was dead in 1929 at the age of 44, a loss that would be considered much bigger were it not for Murnau’s untimely death just a couple of years later.

The Source:

The Cat and the Canary by John Willard  (1922)

Sadly, this is going to be a recurring problem all the way through into the 40′s, but I have never read the play.  So much of what was good in Hollywood during this era came from plays and I just haven’t read a lot of them.

The Adaptation:

Clearly I don’t know how much of the play was changed.  One main thing, of course, is that this was still the Silent Era, so there wasn’t any spoken dialogue.  But, as I mentioned above, this film seems to use more lines of dialogue as intertitles than any other silent film that I can think of.  And yet, for all of that, the film still moves quite well.

The Credits:

Directed by Paul Leni.  Adapted by Robert F. Hill and Albert A. Cohn.  Scenario by Alfred A. Cohn.  Titles by Walter Anthony.  Story Supervision by Edward J. Montagne.

Tartuffe  (Herr Tartüff)

The Film:

Though made before Faust and released in Germany nine months before it, this film didn’t make it to America until seven months after Faust debuted here, and was in time to be eligible for the first Oscars, though it wasn’t nominated for any of them (certainly this could have been added to the two films that Emil Jannings won the initial Best Actor award for).  It often gets overlooked because it comes after the initial success of Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, but before Faust and Murnau’s departure for America and the artistic triumph of Sunrise.  There is also the problem that while this is a very good film those are all magnificent films, among the best of the Silent Era (if Sunrise isn’t the best of the Silent Era).  So it really gets lost in the shuffle.

But it’s good enough not to be lost in the shuffle.  It takes a play that was already old hat by this time (over 250 years old to be precise) and finds a way to make it a bit new and interesting again.  Rather than just simply film the play, Murnau is more interesting.  Instead, we have the story of a young actor, whose grandson is on the verge of disinheriting him.  Realizing that his grandfather’s housekeeper is simply after the fortune, he presents, in disguise, a film for his grandfather, a dramatization of the play.  This film within a film provides a story and moral for the grandfather and things turn out well in the end.

This is almost a little side project for Murnau – the same way that later directors like Steven Soderbergh or Kenneth Branagh would make little, more personal films, in between much bigger projects.  It makes good use of Jannings in between two key roles as the doorman in The Last Laugh and Mephistopheles in Faust (and before they both would leave for America following the conclusion of making Faust).  It is well-made, smart and funny, and yet never really seems like a fully realized film (it also quite short).  So it gets over-looked, but it is another very good film in what was too short of a career for the great director.

The Source:

Tartuffe, ou l’Imposteur by Molière  (1664)

This is one of Molière’s great satires.  It was so shocking that it was immediately banned.  My Modern Library copy seems to say it all: “The first three acts were performed at the Court of Versailles in 1664: the conjoined action of all religious factions – from Jesuits to Jansenists – suppressed it.  Its first public performance was in 1667 and again it was suppressed after a single night.  Finally, it regained the stage in 1669, and held it . . . The movement, upon Molière’s death, to deny him Christian burial is a good index to the immense bitterness which this quiet play induced.”  It is a great play, a short satire (it is five acts, but it moves quickly), the story of a man who deceives those around him, who harbors deep immorality, cloaked in the guise of religious piety.

The Adaptation:

The first thing I am going to point out is that same thing that everyone points out: that Murnau’s first big change is to actually have the Molière play be a film within a film rather than the actual action of the film.  It is being used by the grandson, as said above, to try and get the message through to his grandfather.  Of course, that gives Murnau some leeway of how much of the actual play he would put in the film.  And for that, he really didn’t actually include all that much of it.  The original play has 12 characters and involves a number of attempts by the family to convince Orgon that his guest Tartuffe, whom he idolizes, is not the man he thinks he is.  This includes a son and a daughter (and in a mother for Orgon, who is as taken in as he is).  But the film simply condenses all of the action, cutting everything down to three characters and eliminating some of the more extreme actions that Tartuffe takes towards the end of the play, but also the suddenness of his downfall, rather allowing it to come with earlier actions (and discovered by the husband, prompted by the wife, rather than simply having a policeman arrest him).

The Credits:

Directed by F.W. Murnau.  Manuscript by Carl Mayer.

Sadie Thompson

The Film:

Gloria Swanson was the creative impetus for Sadie Thompson, wanting to get a success under her belt.  Her first independently produced film, The Love of Sunya, had flopped.  But she also wanted creative control and she chose the play Rain, based on the short story by Somerset Maugham.  Her first struggle was getting it by the censors, a film about a prostitute, stopping in Pago pago, and forced by the zealous Reverend Davidson to be placed on the next boat to San Francisco, where she will be thrown in jail, with Davidson eventually trying (or possibly succeeding) to rape her and then killing himself afterwards.  And even after she managed to get approval to make the film, she still had to get it made, encountering problems with pushback from Hollywood and just getting a cameraman to complete the film.

But all of it, when put together, is quite a film.  Raoul Walsh was a good director at times and he made a lot of interesting films, the best of which, like this and High Sierra and White Heat, allowed great actors to do what they did best.  Swanson, here and in Sunset Blvd, managed to at the same time, project an aura of complete confidence and audacity combined with a quiet, almost desperate vulnerability.

It was a good move of Swanson to retitle the film, whether it was forced upon her or not.  The original story, “Rain”, focuses much more on Davidson, as seen through the eyes of the doctor who is also forced into staying on the island with them while waiting for their next boat to be cleared for them to continue their journey.  It is the doctor’s viewpoint of Davidson, and his eventual realization of the dead man’s actions which drove him to suicide that colors our perceptions.  But here, it is Sadie who is the focus, and that’s the right move.  Though Davidson is very well played by Lionel Barrymore (in a role that works much better as a silent role – though we lose out on a great speech in the book, as I note below, his pious pontifications work better as intertitles than they do as actual speechs in later film versions of the story like Rain and Miss Sadie Thompson, both of which are also inferior films because neither Joan Crawford nor Rita Hayworth can come close to matching the emotions wrought in the eyes of Swanson in every one of her scenes – she was right when she said they had faces then), it is Swanson’s performance that is the key to the film.  She was nominated for Best Actress in this, the initial year of the Oscars, and though she rightly lost to the amazing Janet Gaynor, she absolutely deserved to be nominated.

The Source:

“Rain” by W. Somerset Maugham, adapted as a play by John Colton and Clemence Randolph.

The notion for the story came to Maugham on a boat, where there was a Miss Thompson.  He wrote a description of her in his journal and later that sentence made its way verbatim into the story as the first description of the unhappy prostitute, sidetracked in Pago Pago while waiting to move on.  It is one of Maugham’s better stories, showing the world around him to be entirely corrupt.  It convincingly portrays both Thompson and the fanatically pious hypocrite Davidson (how appropriate for this and Tartuffe to be from the same year).  There is a great speech, that we only get a single title of, where Davidson talks about how he has to teach the natives exactly what sin is so they can realize the magnitude of what they have been doing to their souls.

The Adaptation:

There are definitely some changes, though because I haven’t read the play, I assume they were probably made for the play and not just for the film.  In the story, all of Sadie’s actions are described from outside the scene and we don’t actually witness much of what she is doing, though that would make for a boring film.  The bigger change is the addition of the character of Sergeant O’Hara, providing a key acting role for director Raoul Walsh (one of his last before losing his eye), even to the point where he’s right there on the cover with Sadie.  The doctor, who is the main character in the actual story, figures in a much smaller role here as a result.  We also don’t have any gap before Davidson knows about Sadie – in the book he has to go interrupt a party before he realizes what her profession is, whereas here, he’s headed for the governor right off the boat.  The film gives a happier ending, with her going off with O’Hara and changes the death scene – a much less grisly end for Davidson, who ends up drowned rather than his throat slit.

The Credits:

Directed and adapted by Raoul Walsh.  Titles by C. Gardner Sullivan.  The credits do not mention the play.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

The Film:

The Lodger would pave the way for much of Alfred Hitchcock’s career as a director.  Look at what he would become known for later on, and you can see it all here.  There is the master of suspense, finding suspense throughout the film.  There is the question of an innocent man, being hunted for something he hasn’t done (and yet, with this one, we linger much longer with the thought that perhaps he isn’t innocent).  There is even what would later become the obligatory cameo from the director himself (begun with this film because the actor who was supposed to play the role didn’t show up).

And yet, this, in some ways, is much different than what would soon come from him.  This is a very good film and one that shows Hitchcock’s talent for creating mood and atmosphere, creating an aura of suspense.  But it is far from a masterpiece – only the first real glimmering of talent.  Seven years later, Hitchcock would make his first great film, The Man Who Knew Too Much, using much of what he had first showed in this film.  And yet, in between, what was there?  There were a couple of films that showed some promise, Blackmail and Murder, both of them suspenseful and both of them good.  But much of his other work was entirely forgettable.

This is a very good film, as I have said, a story of a Jack the Ripper type killer, with a mysterious lodger who may be the killer, or may be just someone who is interested in the killer.  The suspense begins right from the start, with a body being fished out of the Thames and the suspense continues through, with a romance budding between the lodger and his landlord’s daughter (with the daughter also in a romance with a local policeman who is hunting the killer).  But, watching it this time, I was struck by this notion: if Hitchcock’s career hadn’t gone anywhere would we look at this as the first showing of talent, or just another suspense film from a director who didn’t do much?  And I wondered, watching it this time and lowering it just a bit from the evaluation I had of it previously, if we don’t all over-rate it just a little because it is the first really good work from Hitchcock and because it is so much better than all his other pre-1934 films.

The Source:

The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes  (1913), adapted as a play by Lowndes titled Who is He?

As noted above, The Lodger paves the way for much of Hitchcock’s later career.  That includes the source material itself.  I, at one point, had this notion that any great film that was adapted from a novel must be worth reading in the original source.  Hitchcock films helped to cure me of that.  What Hitchcock proved is that pulp material, sub-par writing combined with a quick pace and maybe some interesting dialogue (though the better dialogue usually came from a scriptwriter rather than the source material) made for a better film than first-class literary material.  Only two of his films really come from literary material that is a step up – Rebecca and Sabotage (and Sabotage didn’t make for as good of a film as the ones made from pulp).  The Lodger is no exception to any of this.  The novel is very readable, moves very quickly and adheres to plot and dialogue with not a whole lot of time spared for characterization.  In short, it was perfect material for the man who would later be dubbed the Master of Suspense.

The Adaptation:

The big change from the novel to the film isn’t one that Hitchcock wanted to make.  The novel has an ending that is intended to be much more ambiguous.  But, as Hitchcock has noted, once Ivor Novello was cast, Hitchcock wasn’t allowed that option.  He had to make it clear that this wasn’t the killer.  So, he gave it a suspenseful ending and kept things going all the way to the end, and in the end, though forced to make it clear that Novello wasn’t the killer, he didn’t bother to show the actual killer.  Other than that, the novel paved the way straight to the screen, with titles making use of what little dialogue was needed to help convey the key points of the plot and the mood set by Hitchcock’s direction.

The Credits:

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  Scenario by Elliot Stannard.  Uncredited writing by Hitchcock.  The credits do not mention the play.

Laugh Clown Laugh

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film here, noting it as my Overlooked film of 1927-28.

The Source:

Laugh Clown Laugh  (1923), a play by David Belasco and Tom Cushing – adapted from the story “Ridi, pagliaccio” by Faurto Martini

I haven’t read the play.  I was going to read the story, but I can only seem to find it in Italian.

The Adaptation:

Though clearly I haven’t read the play, I have the feeling that they followed it pretty closely.  There certainly isn’t anything in the film that screams out that it wouldn’t have been in the original play.  There was a happy ending that was shot (which is now, thankfully, lost) at the studio’s insistance, so I believe that the more tragic ending is what the original play had.

The Credits:

Directed by Herbert Brenon.  Written by Elizabeth Meehan.  Titles by Joseph Farnham.  The titles by Farnham may have been an Oscar nominee.  Farnham won the only Oscar ever given for Title Writing, in this initial year of the Oscars (the category was made redundant by the advent of sound).  According to older Oscar sources (like Inside Oscar), Farnham won for Telling the World, a Sam Wood film that is now lost.  And those sources also list Farnham as having been nominated for Laugh Clown Laugh.  But current Academy records say “The award was not associated with any specific film title.”  So who knows where the old information came from.

The Scarlet Letter

The Film:

In the first Adapted Screenplay post, in my review of Birth of a Nation, I quoted the Mythical Monkey on how the plot hinges on two different men and their attempts to get into Lilian Gish’s underpants, and how that doesn’t really work that well because of how Gish played the role, and because of Gish’s acting personality in general.  So, what a refreshing change it is and a mark of Gish’s talent that she is able to pull off so well the role of Hester Prynne, someone whose sexual sin is the key point in the film.  If we don’t believe that Hester would sleep with the man, then nothing else in the story will work.  And rest assured (though it is surprising), that Gish is actually up to the role.

As I note below, the film moves away from the original novel by presenting us the story from the beginning, and tracking the arc of her love affair rather than simply inserting us into the story after her child has been born and she is held up as a sinner.  This allows us to see how their affair unfolds, how pity moves into love, or at least lust, and how things move forward from there.  Gish actually provides a little spark of sensuality and playfulness to her role, something that wasn’t needed in many of her early performances in Griffith films, but which she finds here, in the direction from Sjöström.  And perhaps his direction is the key difference, for she is able to find even more of it in her next role, the best performance she would ever give, as the tormented woman in The Wind.  Aside from Gish, we also have the rather hypnotic performance of Henry B. Walthall as her long-lost husband.  Walthall had been one of the men after her in Birth, but he is better here, in a performance that seems like it was copied from all the things written about the Mad Monk, Rasputin.

This film, in the latter days of the Silent Era, shows what can work best about the whole era.  How well would any of these performances have worked in a sound film?  Lars Hanson, who was playing Dimmesdale, is actually speaking in Swedish.  Gish and Hanson have lines that would seem overly melodramatic if they were actually forced to speak them but work well enough as intertitles.  And Walthall doesn’t ever have to speak, but rather project a presence.

The Source:

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne  (1850)

I became rather well-known in my 19th Century Lit class, my Junior year of college.  We had to write a paper on one of the books we had read in class and then read a critical article, discuss the critical approach and how well it works.  I asked if I could write about the new film that had just come out with Demi Moore.  The new film was being excoriated by critics for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that they had tacked on a happy ending to a story that everyone knew ended tragically (well, tragically depending on your point-of-view, I suppose).  I mentioned that this was a critical approach, even if it was a piss-poor one, and that they must have had reasons for the approach (based on interviews) and so could I write on that?  I was told yes.  So I wrote a paper comparing the novel and the film.  When our papers came back and I had a 93.  My friend Chris had a 92.  And since our professor had mentioned there were only two A’s on the papers, that meant I had received the highest grade in the class.  What many students knew, but my professor did not, was that I had neither read the book nor seen the film.  I had been able to listen to enough conversation in class and grasp enough from reviews of the film to write the paper, and write it well enough that it earned an A, without doing any of the actual work.

Well, I have read the book now.  I may not have wished I had read it, may never be a fan of Hawthorne, but at least I have read it, so there is no bullshit in this piece.  Well, unless you disagree with my notion that the novel is boring, that Hawthorne’s prose is turgid and mind-numbing and that while there may be an interesting character at the heart of it in Hester Prynne, the moralizing and righteousness gets too much to bear long before the end.

The Adaptation:

For a film that runs only 97 minutes, it is interesting that it takes over a third of that to actually get to the starting point of the novel – Hester receiving her scarlet A.  Rather than start with the beginning of the novel and allow the tale to unfold from there, writer Frances Marion decided to go with a more straightforward narrative approach, showing a Hester who runs free before the Reverend takes pity on her and a love affair begins (an affair, it must be said, the Reverend is unaware is adultery when it begins).  The child, Pearl, the actual proof of the adultery, doesn’t appear until after the 35 minute mark.  It makes for an interesting choice though – instead of waiting to find out who the father of the child is, we know long before the child is even born who the father is going to be.  It also means that instead of seeing a strong and defiant Hester right from the start, we get a different look at her character, one that shows her as a person before it shows her as one who refuses to cow before the crowd.  And the film, unlike the wretched 1995 version (yes, by now I have seen it, and good lord I wish I hadn’t), this one has the courage of its convictions and actually has the proper ending.  Or at least, it has Hawthorne’s ending, and it’s as proper as it can be for this story.

The Credits:

Directed by Victor Sjöström (as Victor Seastrom).  Adapted, scenario and titles by Frances Marion.  According to The Speed of Sound, Katherine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell worked on the titles at one point, but asked (and received) to have their names taken off because of what they perceived as “bad grammar” that was “open to misconstruction” in the titles used in the film.

The Award Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10:

The Jazz Singer

The Film:

The Jazz Singer is an important film, a milestone in the history of film.  That does not make it a great film.  It was made ineligible for Best Production in that first year of the Oscars, but do we really think it would have been nominated?  (Well, possibly – it’s better than The Racket, which was nominated).  But this film is more important for what it did than for the film itself.  It is a decent enough musical, the story of a young singer who doesn’t want to be a cantor like his parents want (and like generations have been before him).  Al Jolson was never that great of an actor and they wisely didn’t try to have him do too much sound acting.  He sings and his singing is fine.  But in the more dramatic scenes, he just doesn’t really cut it.  And of course, these days it’s awkward to watch, with the blackface and the outdated method of acting and performing.  But it will always be an important moment in film.  It’s too bad it’s not better and more worth remembering for what it is.

The Source:

The Jazz Singer by Samson Raphaelson (1925) – adapted from his story “The Day of Atonement” (1922)

There isn’t anything particularly special about the original short story, although the magazine it first appeared in proclaims “So Sound and Dramatic Is this Tale That a Manager Plans to Make a Play of It.”  Well, that was certainly true, although it took a few more years before the play actually came to be, turning a story that was only a few pages into something long enough for the stage (don’t believe what you read about Raphaelson on Wikipedia – if he supposedly did the play in a weekend after the story was published, explain the line above the story I just quoted from its original magazine publication, when the play wasn’t produced until 1925 – and Raphaelson himself said in the program for the film that he wrote the play three years before, which means he was writing the play in 1924).  There wasn’t much to be done for turning the play into the film – they could use the original musical scenes without any problems and almost all of the dialogue simply became titles.  The advent of sound meant that film versions of plays no longer were going to be so drastically shorter than they were before – you could actually have dialogue (or songs) instead of just a title that would sum up key lines.

The Adaptation:

And all of that said above makes it odder that this would be an initial nominee for the initial Best Adaptation category.

The Credits:

Directed by Alan Crosland.  Adaptation by Alfred A. Cohn.  Titles by Jack Jarmuth.

Glorious Betsy

The Film:

Because Glorious Betsy survives in various archives, but has never been released in any sort of format viewable outside those archives, I have never been able to see it.  This is the first of luckily only a handful of films nominated in this category which I have never seen (and which we’ll be done with by the next year).  But what Arne Anderson, a passionate fan of silent films who has seen far more silent films than I ever possibly could, says about the film is “There is no reason to see this quite boring adaptation of the play of the same name if you are not a Dolores Costello fan.”

The Source:

Glorious Betsy by Rida Johnson Young  (1908)

I have never read the play by Young.  But I have seen a later adaptation of the play calling Hearts Divided, directed by Frank Borzage, and it doesn’t fill me with inspiration.

The Adaptation:

Of course, because I have never seen the film, I can’t really comment on the adaptation.  They don’t seem to have done much more than film the play, with a bit of opening it up.

The Credits:

Directed by Alan Crosland.  Written by Anthony Coldeway.  Titles by Jack Jarmuth.

The Private Life of Helen of Troy

The Film:

Well, it’s actually more difficult to see any of The Private Life of Helen of Troy than it is to see any of Glorious Betsy.  There is about a half hour of it still available at the BFI Archive.  And that’s it.  So, we have the only film actually nominated for Title Writing (the other two nominations were for specific writers and don’t have specific films attached to them, in spite of what you may read in Inside Oscar) and it’s pretty much impossible to ever see it.

The Source:

The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine  (1925) and the play The Road to Rome by Robert E. Sherwood  (1927)

I have never read either of these two books.  And, since I can’t ever see the film, I’m not real inclined to go seek out either work.

The Adaptation:

I am, however, a bit confused as to how the film can be based on Sherwood’s play.  Sherwood’s play specifically deals with Hannibal at the gates of Rome while Hannibal never appears in the film (which makes sense since there was almost a millenium between the Trojan War and Hannibal).  But, the play is a comedy, dealing with Hannibal’s love for a woman as to the reason that he doesn’t sack Rome.  So, my thinking is that perhaps the concept (and perhaps even some lines) from the Sherwood play got lifted and moved to the Trojan War (since this is supposed to be a comedy).  That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

The Credits:

Directed by Alexander Korda.  Written for the screen and produced by Carey Wilson.  Titles by Gerald C. Duffy.  The IMDb lists the titles as being by Casey Robinson, though it was Duffy that was nominated for the Oscar.

Other Noteworthy Adaptations:

• The Hands of Orlac  -   a very good German horror film more notable for the direction than the script
• The Racket  -  notable only in that it was a Best Picture nominee and was lost for a long time

Greek Mythology meet the king of stop-motion effects – Ray Harryhausen

Clash of the Titans

• Director:  Desmond Davis
• Writer:  Beverly Cross
• Producer:  Ray Harryhausen  /  Charles H. Schneer
• Stars:  Harry Hamlin, Judy Bowker, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Burgess Meredith
• Studio:  MGM
• Award Nominations:  none from groups I track
• Length:  118 min
• Genre:  Fantasy
• MPAA Rating:  PG
• Release Date:  12 June 1981
• Box Office Gross:  $41.09 mil  (#11  -  1981)
• Ebert Rating:  ***.5
• My Rating:  ***
• My Rank:  #29  (year)
• Nighthawk Nominations:  Visual Effects, Makeup
• Nighthawk Points:  30
• Nighthawk Notable:  Highest Attractiveness / Acting Ability Ratio
• First Watched:  August 1981 at a drive-in in Fullerton, CA in a double feature with Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Number of Times Watched as a Kid:  @50

Thoughts as a Kid:  When I first watched this film, we had just moved to California about a week before.  We went, as a family, to the drive-in for a double feature of Clash of the Titans and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  As I remember it, though my siblings may dispute it, it started with Clash, which we arrived part-way through, then had Raiders, which was our main reason for being there, then played Clash again, which we stayed till where we had come in and then we went home.  Clash just seemed at the time, to a kid about to turn seven, as some good fun (it’s possibly it gave me nightmares – every film until I was about 10 seemed to give me nightmares and I’ll be damned if I know why).  But all I really remembered was that we had seen it.  And then about a year or two later, it came to HBO.

By then, things had changed.  I had started reading what became probably my most read book throughout elementary school, one that I kept coming back to, probably having weeks where I read it every single day: D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. This is an absolutely wonderful book, one that gives the story of all the most well-known Greek myths but in a way that kids can easily understand and enjoy, and filled with wonderful illustrations (the married pair, Igrie and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire also did other books that were similar that I never knew about until decades later, like their Book of Norse Myths, which was re-issued a few years ago with an introduction from Michael Chabon).  So, this time when I watched this film about the myth of Perseus, I still enjoyed the fact that here were the Greek myths alive, in living color.  And yet, it was wrong.  It was available to read right on page 114 – Danaüs, Perseus and the Gorgon.  The beginning was correct – how Perseus and his mother were set adrift by his grandfather in response to her pregnancy (though not because she was pregnant but because her son was fated to kill his grandfather).  And some of the other parts of the film were right – how Perseus seeks out Medusa to claim her head, the gifts from the gods, the three Witches, what happens in his battle with Medusa, that he rescues Andromeda and marries her.  But so much of it was also wrong – not just stuff that was clearly added for the film like the silly mechanical owl, but problems with the myth.  Like how it was Perseus who accidentally kills his grandfather, rather then the wrath of Zeus, or how Perseus comes upon Andromeda coming back from his mission for Medusa’s head rather than going on the mission to save her, or how Pegasus actually springs from the neck of Medusa when he beheads the Gorgon (it was really Bellerophon who would tame and ride Pegasus when he battled the Chimera, while Perseus had winged sandals).

I still enjoyed the film for what it was (indeed, I felt enough fondness for it that in April of 2010, when Veronica and I got a date night while visiting my sister we saw the remake in the theater), but I was also irritated at what it was not, and that was a faithful retelling of the myth that I had read so many times by this time.  What the hell was this Kraken that had nothing to do with Greek mythology?  Why does Medusa’s head turn him to stone when it is the blood of the sea creature after Perseus stabs him that gives the Red Sea its name?  And where were the rest of the gods, this rather unobtrusive crew that never got directly involved in the film while Athena and Hermes (who never even appears) actually came to Perseus?  Who is Thetis, this supposed major goddess who is not a holder of one the seats in Olympus (she’s a Nereid, a daughter of Poseidon’s predecessor, which makes her, I suppose a demi-Titan and she’s the mother of Achilles)?  I still kept watching the film, for the fun parts – the battle with the scorpions (nowhere in the myth), the evil of Calibos (who really comes more out of Shakespeare than Greece), the beauty of Andromeda.  But I knew it wasn’t really all that good and by the time I started rating films, it managed to pull of a low *** or sometimes even a **.5, depending on how I felt at the time.

Thoughts Now:  I am a some-what believe in the Auteur Theory.  But one thing I go with is that sometimes it’s not the director who’s the auteur.  Look at David O. Selznick and his passion for a film like Gone with the Wind and you know who’s the auteur there.  And in this case, we also have an auteur, whose vision heralded this project from conception to release and it’s not director Desmond Davis, whose directorial career was mostly uninspired and unnoteworthy.  No, the real creative force here is, of course, Ray Harryhausen, that master of stop-motion effects, which he called Dynamation.  For years Harryhausen stop-motion effects had dazzled viewers, most notably in Jason and the Argonauts, which I wish I had seen as a kid because it has some of the same issues as Clash but also the same strengths and its strengths are better than its weaknesses.  It’s those effects that are the real star of the film and watching this film again, for the umpteenth time, I was maybe more impressed than ever, even in the age of amazing computerized visual effects (maybe because of those effects).  I can look at an early shot, like when the flood comes and wipes out the city of Argos and I know that the water is from a miniature but that the people are real and I am amazed at how Harryhausen managed to set up that shot.  Or the way the stop-motion figure of Calibos can be in the same shot with a real actress (all sarcastic comments aside) and  it looks more integrated an effects shot than films from last year.

The fantastic stop-motion Medusa from the 1981 Clash of the Titans.

That is not to say that all the effects shots on the film are perfect.  The opening titles sequence, which seems bizarrely pointless until you realize that you are following Poseidon, has some nice shots of a real seagull combined with a pretty ridiculous looking model seagull.  And there are two different scenes of the Kraken being released from his underwater cavern and both shots are obviously the same shot recycled.  But overall, there are a lot of really good effects shots in this film, effects shots that look much better than they do in the remake and the sequel because they integrate actual characters into the scenes.

I talk so much about the effects of the film because they are the best thing about the film and they are the reason to see it.  Harryhausen had done amazing effects for decades (not the the Academy ever seemed to notice – they didn’t so much as nominate him once before they gave him the Gordon E. Sawyer Award in 1992) and this was his swan song.  Though he is still alive at the age of 92, this was his final feature film.  And he left it all there on the screen – the giant vulture, Calibos, the Kraken, the scorpions, Pegasus, Medusa, even the silly little mechanical owl.  They still manage to bring the film to life in a way that the remake and sequel can’t come to life.

Not that there aren’t problems with the film.  The producers decided to use the exact same kind of casting that had worked so well for Star Wars, which was still in theaters when this film went into production – they took complete unknowns for the two stars (Judi Bowker had done some work but wasn’t well known and this was Harry Hamlin’s first starring role) and backed them up with a group of major British actors, including Maggie Smith (who had just won her second Oscar), Siân Phillips (who had recently been in I, Claudius) and the most distinguished actor of the century, fresh off an honorary career Oscar, Laurence Olivier.  But what had worked so well in Star Wars didn’t work nearly as well here, partially because it turned out that Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford had loads of charisma and chemistry, Peter Cushing had the perfect level of villainy and Alec Guinness was the most sublime mentor ever and partially because everyone just falls dead on the screen in Clash.  Hamlin would have enough charisma for a television lawyer and Bowker could look pretty (and show off her very nice butt – I was stunned going back and seeing the two different nude scenes – the other being Vida Taylor at the beginning – that nothing got said about this growing up) but neither could do much in the way of acting.  And while the major stars had their own reasons for being in the film (Olivier was in bad health and wanted to provide a nest egg for his kids, as per Robert Osborne in his introduction to this on TCM this month, as Olivier is the star of the month, and Maggie Smith was married to the writer), none of them actually add much.  The lines are, for the most part, ridiculous.  Ironically, the mythology that Lucas created added more heft to his silly lines and created a new mythology out of one film than the actual mythology was able to do here.  We have even the original Bond girl, Ursula Andress (who never could act), who stands around and even gets on the poster but only has one actual line.  Indeed, the only performance really worth remembering is Tim Pigott-Smith, who seems to enjoy the film he’s in, has good reaction shots and has the great moment that I have always remembered where he yells out “Perseus!” and throws him his sword before being stabbed in the back.  Although, to be fair, they also got great actors for the remake and they still couldn’t give them a script worth a damn and so it was again a waste of great casting.  And Hamlin is a better actor than Sam Worthington, who would get two movies to show off his bad acting.

There are also other problems.  Most of the direction is pretty bad, much of the dialogue is ridiculous and some of the cinematography is badly done.  And some of the scenes don’t make any damn sense.  Perseus chases the vulture in the same direction that he later races on Pegasus to get back to Joppa, even though they are opposite ways.  And it seems like Perseus walks faster from the amphitheater to the city than it takes him to fly when he desperately needs to be there.  And where the hell did the third scorpion go to?  But there is some talent there as well.  The score works very well for the kind of film it is.  And the editing, I noticed, is particularly well-done, often working around shots that can’t be done, hiding things in the effects, or blending quite well the effects with the real action shots.  And the makeup works just as well as the Harryhausen effects, blending well the made-up actor playing Calibos with the full-body shots which are always stop-motion.

And there is some cleverness at work in the film as well, some ideas that don’t come from Greek mythology but seem particularly inspired.  The whole idea of all the people of Greece being statues up on Olympus that the gods can manipulate as they will is brilliant.  That allows for one of the subtlest shots in the film, when Zeus, when no one is looking, takes the collapsed Perseus and simply stands him back up so that he can race to the heroic finish.  And since they didn’t want to bring in the nymphs of the north who give him the magical bag they come up with an idea for how Perseus’ cloak can hold the head of Medusa.

So, overall, I was more impressed with the film as a film than I had been in a long time.  It is what it is – a fantasy film that provides some good entertainment.  Now, in a year when it could end up on a double bill with Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s not that impressive of a film, and it takes some silly liberties with the Greek mythology that it is portraying.  But it also provides some wonderful moments that showcase the talent of a truly remarkable filmmaker, and it’s a good reminder that if you have never seen any of the work of Ray Harryhausen then you could be much worse off than starting here.

Look forward to a review. It won’t be as complimentary as one from Seth MacFarlane would be.

Why, you ask, are you starting a new series when you just started two new ones and have barely done any?

Well, for two reasons.

The first is that I had this idea before I even started the two current series (Adapted Screenplay and the Nighthawk Awards) and I want to be able to parse it in at certain points.

The second is that those two series are taking an agonizingly long time to write.  So, along with the Great Reads, I want something to be appearing other than long stretches without posts.  Plus, these are easier to write, and so they can be popped out quicker than the other posts.

So what is this series?  Well, I want to go back and look at a certain group of films.  These are all films which I watched a lot and had opinions regarding before I ever started thinking critically about film, before I had a rating system, before I started writing down all the movies I had seen.  So, to qualify, these have to be films that I first saw before February of 1989, and preferably saw a lot before then.  So, for the most part, films from the early to mid 80′s; I can’t imagine anything released after 1987 will qualify.  They will also be films I haven’t already written about with a critical eye.  So, there won’t be new reviews of Star Wars and Raiders, because what’s the point of that.  Some of them will be films I loved as a kid (Battlestar Gallactica, say), some will be ones I didn’t love so much as a kid (Superman III, perhaps) and some will be ones I enjoyed when I was younger, but dropped my opinion considerably when looking at them from a more critical eye (see that poster up above, for example).  Some of them will be movies I haven’t seen in a really long time that I’ll be going back to (The Secret of Nimh comes to mind).  But I’ll be trying to look at them anew and I’ll be writing about them both in terms of what I thought as a kid and what I think now.  They’re not Oscar nominees and not **** films (probably – I don’t know for certain what I will write about, we’ll have to see how it goes).  They’re fun films from when I was a kid.

So, while I try to get back to finishing reading The Man Who Laughs and getting my post on 1927-28 done, next up will be the first RCM film: Clash of the Titans.

The wonderful debut novel out now.

The Golem and the Jinni

• Author:  Helene Wecker
• Published:  23 Apr 2013
• Publisher:  Harper
• Pages:  496
• First Line:  ”The Golem’s life began in the hold of a steamship.”

The Novel:  One of the benefits of working in a bookstore is getting to read books before they get released.  Some of them are complete duds.  But some really catch your eye.  This one included lines on the back like “If you were bewitched by The Night Circus” (well, I put it in my second 100 list, so yes, I was) and “If you were enthralled by Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell” (well, I call it the best book of the 21st Century so far, so yes, I would say I was), so that really caught my eye.  ”You will be enchanted by The Golem and the Jinni.” it promised.  Those were bold words.  But it had good praise.  And it had a fantastic title and a magnificent cover (admit it, some books you read because of the cover).  So I picked it up and took it home.

And I was enchanted by it.  From the very first page, I was enchanted by it.  Of course, I already knew what a Golem was, not just because I have read the Terry Pratchett books, not just because I have read Kavalier and Clay, but also because I have seen the old classic German film The Golem.  So even the title was already intriguing me, with it promise of a mixture of Jewish theology and Middle Eastern mythology, of the powerful meeting of two ancient creatures, clearly coming to life sometime in New York City, with the Washington Square Arch right there on the cover.

We don’t begin in New York though.  We begin in the old country, in the area around Danzig, with the young funeral maker who decides that he wants a bride and that the best way to get one is to have one created for him (not exactly the general use for a Golem in most tales, but intriguing right from the start).  And he wants to take the creature with him, across the sea, to the new world.  But, within a few pages, he has died on the boat and the Golem is left on her own, without a master, without guidance, without the commands that she desperately needs.  That alone would be a curious enough story.  But to also have it coming to life in late 19th Century New York, the same world that Caleb Carr made so riveting in The Alienist, is even more fascinating.

And then into that mixture comes the Jinni, trapped in a flash for 1000 years, suddenly sprung to life in the streets of that same bustling city, with life teeming all around him and his beloved sand an entire ocean away.  And then there is more – the Golem’s creator, with his fascinating back story, suddenly finding himself called across the ocean, to find what has become of his creation, to find, perhaps, the secret to life everlasting.

To compare The Golem and the Jinni to Night Circus and Jonathan Strange is apt in several ways.  First, they are all first novels, and yet, they are written with depth of characterization and strength of narratives that bely that fact.  They never feel like debut novels.  Second, they all manage to combine the fantasy genres with the more literary exploration of characters.  What I so denigrated in another well-known first time fantasy novel, The Historian, was that it was kept by many bookstores (including my own) in Literature, when, in fact, it was written as a genre novel, with emphasis on plot and quick-moving story rather than characterization or language.  Yet, Golem, like Night Circus and Jonathan Strange, never feels the need to stress plot over character, to force actions which do not flow from the characters themselves.  It is a fantasy novel, yes, and that may turn many away who would otherwise enjoy it.  But it also is a historical novel, alive in its fascinating detail of life in the teeming metropolis at a fascinating time.

I don’t want to mention too much of what happens for the same reason that I didn’t include the last line, like I did on the Top 100 posts.  Let the story unfold before you and see what you think and let this world come alive for you.  It certainly came alive for me.  And I hope that Wecker writes more, because this is a fantastic debut.  After a disappointing 2012 in fiction, for me at least, it’s great to have a book for this year that I can just hand to people when they ask me for a good book to read.

We weren’t cowering because we don’t cower.  And we don’t wish we had any guns because we didn’t need them.  We stood back and let law enforcement do their job and they did it.  And as a result, we have a captured live suspect instead of a dead one.  For, as Richard Russo once wrote “He’d been shot at before and guessed that my mother wasn’t really trying to hit him, but those were precisely the situations that got you shot.  He knew from his experience overseas that if you only got shot by people aiming at you specifically, war wouldn’t have been nearly such a hazardous affair.”  Instead, we didn’t have to have any guns whatsoever.

But, aside from the gun issue, it was an insult to this city.  To my city.

I have strong feelings about living here and that was why I came back in 2005.  There are strong undercurrents of violence here – this is the kind of place where I have been threatened when crossing the street for daring to stop the light and be irritated when people don’t stop and I have been threatened by shoplifters as they were stealing things.  But there are great things here.  There are the ducks in the Boston Public Garden.  There is the bas-relief at the Common for the 54th.  There are my beloved sports teams, those teams that Chicago embraced on Tuesday morning because they showed the kindness of human compassion.

Boston is both large and small.  There are well over a million people in the metro area.  So I didn’t know anyone who was directly hurt this week.  But, we are also a small place.  I worked at Copley Square for 3 years.  I have stood in that spot that was bombed, stood there on a Marathon Monday with my son, who is 8.  My favorite steak place is Jimmy’s Steer House in Arlington and I’m pretty sure Krystie Campbell was working the last time we went there.  I have one former co-worker who was friends with Sean Collier.  One current co-worker’s mother was having her house in Watertown searched when the police reacted to the shots last night.  None of this touched me directly and all of it did.

But I love where I live, for much the same reasons that Dennis Lehane does.  And I love that the people of this city came together yesterday and did what needs to be done and let those who needed to do their job do it.  And I love that Dunkin stayed open to give donuts to all the law enforcement.  And I marvel at the video I saw yesterday out someone’s window of the shots going off and one cop hearing it and sprinting towards it.  They did their job and we let them do it and now maybe we can get some answers.  And then we can all go on.

It has been both hard to live here, far from family, in a place where the people sometimes scare me.  But I also love to live here and think of all the mornings where, instead of getting out at Copley, I got out at Park Street and walked through the Common and the Gardens to work in the snow.  The Standells said it first, though the Dropkicks sing it better.

I love that dirty water

Boston you’re my home

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture:

1. Greed
2. The Battleship Potemkin
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
4. The Gold Rush
5. The Phantom of the Opera

note:  A good year for films because there are so many.  The next five, in order, are The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Birth of a Nation, Faust, The Last Laugh and Foolish Wives and the **** films go all the way down to #16.

• Best Director:

1. Erich von Stroheim  (Greed)
2. Sergei Eisenstein  (The Battleship Potemkin)
3. Robert Wiene  (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
4. D.W. Griffith  (The Birth of a Nation)
5. Charlie Chaplin  (The Gold Rush)

Analysis:  In spite of all the great directors of the era (or maybe because of it), there is very little doubling up.  Only two directors make the Top 10 twice – von Stroheim at #1 and #9 (for Foolish Wives) and F.W. Murnau, who amazingly doesn’t earn a nomination, but comes in at 6th (Faust) and 10th (The Last Laugh).  But this is it for von Stroheim, whose only remaining film, Queen Kelly, wouldn’t actually get released until 1985, while Murnau will make some more appearances before his untimely death in 1931.  This is also it for Wiene and Griffith.

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Greed
2. The Phantom of the Opera
3. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
4. Faust
5. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. The Gold Rush
2. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
3. The Battleship Potemkin
4. Foolish Wives
5. Our Hospitality

• Best Actor:

1. Lon Chaney  (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
2. Emil Jannings  (The Last Laugh)
3. Charlie Chaplin  (The Gold Rush)
4. Lon Chaney  (The Phantom of the Opera)
5. Erich von Stroheim  (Foolish Wives)
6. Emil Jannings  (Faust)
7. Lon Chaney  (The Penalty)
8. Rudolph Valentino  (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)

Analysis:  I have a rule where I nominate five actors in the acting categories, and if I have to more than 5 nominations because the same actor or actress appears more than once in the top 5, then so be it, I keep going until I get to 5.  That’s because the Oscars don’t allow multiple nominations – they simply lump all the votes together in one performance.  So, since Jannings is one here twice and Chaney three times, we have to get down to #8 before we get a fifth actor.  Also, the same for Actress.  But I don’t this with the Globes (possibly because the Globes themselves don’t have the same rule), so they’re limited to 5 below.  Unlike Actress, which will be very different, this is a very similar lineup to Best Actor in 27-28.  And Chaney, aside from the 3 nominations, also makes it in at 10th place for He Who Gets Slapped.

• Best Actress:

1. Lilian Gish  (Broken Blossoms)
2. Hilda Borgström  (Ingeborg Holm)
3. Lilian Gish  (The Birth of a Nation)
4. Aileen Pringle  (The Mystic)
5. Gloria Swanson  (Male and Female)
6. Marie Dressler  (Tillie’s Punctured Romance)

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. Donald Crisp  (Broken Blossoms)
2. Conrad Veidt  (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
3. Sessue Hayakawa  (The Cheat)
4. Lon Chaney  (Oliver Twist)
5. Pomeroy Cannon  (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)

Analysis:  For a long time, I never really thought about supporting performances in the Silent Era and I don’t really know why.  I had Crisp winning here and Pitts winning below, but nothing else.  So, before I did this post (and part of why this post is late in coming), I went back through a lot of films and looked at the supporting performances.  But I really must point out the Silent Oscars over at the Mythical Monkey.  I got a good head start from his detailed look at every year from the Silent Era as to where to start looking.  I didn’t always agree, but it always gave me a good place to start.  In fact, while I go in depth for every year all the way up to 2012, he goes a lot deeper in the early years of film, especially for the Silent Era, and his stuff is always good to read.  Hayakawa will be back (and will the Nighthawk) in 31 years.

• Best Supporting Actress:

1. Zasu Pitts  (Greed)
2. Camilla Horn  (Faust)
3. Alice Terry  (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)
4. Sylvia Ashton  (Old Wives for New)
5. Bebe Daniels  (The Affairs of Anatol)

• Best Editing:

1. The Battleship Potemkin
2. The Birth of a Nation
3. The Gold Rush
4. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
5. The Last Laugh

• Best Cinematography:

1. Greed
2. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
3. Faust
4. The Birth of a Nation
5. The Last Laugh

Analysis:  While Greed and Cabinet finish 1-2, it’s the next three cinematographers themselves who were the star cameramen of the era.  Carl Hoffman, the cinematographer for Faust, would also films three Fritz Lang films: the two parts of Nibelungen and the first Dr. Mabuse film.  G.W. Bitzer was D.W. Griffith’s regular cameraman and his work on Broken Blossoms makes the Top 10 for the year and a number of his other collaborations with Griffith were under consideration.  And there is Karl Freund.  He filmed The Last Laugh for Murnau, as well as both Spiders films for Lang and The Golem (and will show up in 27-28 for his work on Metropolis and Tartuffe) and will later earn a Nighthawk for shooting Dracula for Universal before they allowed him to move into the directors’s chair with The Mummy.

• Best Original Score:

1. The Gold Rush
2. The Kid

Analysis:  You could say that this and the next award are cheating.  Chaplin re-issued The Gold Rush with sound in 1942 and it actually earned nominations for both the sound and score.  He also later added a score to The Kid.  Otherwise, there would be no nominees, since this is obviously the Silent Era (and thus, why there are also no nominations for Best Sound Editing or Best Original Song).  If I have Chaplin getting the nomination for the score for The Gold Rush (the Academy only nominated Max Terr), then he earns 6 nominations for The Gold Rush (he also edited it) and 1 for The Kid and wins two awards (Screenplay and Score).

• Best Sound:

1. The Gold Rush

• Best Art Direction:

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari
2. The Phantom of the Opera
3. Greed
4. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
5. Faust

Analysis:  Possibly the hardest category outside of Picture.  The winner was easy.  The nominees were not.  The next five films, in order, were Foolish Wives, Cabiria, Nibelungen: Siegfried, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.  And that means that the brilliant sets in the Fairbanks Robin Hood and Thief of Bagdad don’t even make the Top 10.

• Best Visual Effects:

1. Thief of Bagdad
2. Ben-Hur
3. Nibelungen: Siegfried
4. Faust
5. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

• Best Costume Design:

1. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
2. The Phantom of the Opera
3. Cabiria
4. Intolerance
5. The Birth of a Nation

• Best Makeup:

1. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
2. The Phantom of the Opera
3. The Golem
4. Faust
5. Nibelungen: Siegfried

Analysis:  Hopefully you know enough about film to know that the makeup artist for those top two is Lon Chaney himself.  So, in this initial year for awards, he wins Best Actor and Best Makeup.  And earns two other nominations for Actor and a nomination for Supporting and Makeup.  So, 6 total nominations for Chaney.

• Best Foreign Film:

1. Metropolis
2. The Battleship Potemkin
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
4. Nosferatu
5. Faust

Analysis:  Partially because this covers a wide swath of years, and partially because we have the best of German expressionism, this is probably the second best group of five Foreign Films in any year of the Nighthawk Awards.  The #6 and 7 films are both **** films (The Last Laugh and Crainquebille).  There wouldn’t be another **** film that fails to get a nomination until 1957, which is the best year for Foreign films in film history.  Please note that Metropolis will be eligible for other awards in 27-28 and Nosferatu in 28-29.

By Film:

note:  They’re in points order.  You get twice as many points for a win as for a nomination.  Hopefully your math skills will let you figure out the system.

• Greed  (400)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Art Direction
• The Gold Rush  (325)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Editing, Original Score, Sound
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  (275)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, Foreign Film
• The Battleship Potemkin  (205)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Editing, Foreign Film
• Faust  (200)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Art Direction, Visual Effects, Makeup, Foreign Film
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (180)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup
• The Phantom of the Opera  (160)
  • Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup
• The Birth of a Nation  (145)
  • Director, Actress, Editing, Cinematography, Costume Design
• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (135)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• Broken Blossoms  (120)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• The Last Laugh  (85)
  • Actor, Editing, Cinematography
• Foolish Wives  (75)
  • Original Screenplay, Actor
• Our Hospitality  (40)
  • Original Screenplay
• The Thief of Bagdad  (40)
  • Visual Effects
• The Penalty  (35)
  • Actor
• Ingeborg Holm  (35)
  • Actress
• The Mystic  (35)
  • Actress
• Male and Female  (35)
  • Actress
• Tillie’s Punctured Romance  (35)
  • Actress
• The Cheat  (30)
  • Supporting Actor
• Oliver Twist  (30)
  • Supporting Actor
• The Affairs of Anatol  (30)
  • Supporting Actress
• Old Wives for New  (30)
  • Supporting Actress
• Nibelungen: Siegfried  (30)
  • Visual Effects, Makeup
• The Kid  (25)
  • Original Score
• Ben-Hur  (20)
  • Visual Effects
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea  (20)
  • Visual Effects
• Cabiria  (15)
  • Costume Design
• Intolerance  (15)
  • Costume Design
• The Golem  (10)
  • Makeup

Best Film Not Nominated for any Nighthawk Awards:

• The General

Analysis:  I rate The General as a **** film and it comes in 11th place on my list for the year.  I fully realize that there are people who would put at #1, that there are those who rate Keaton above Chaplin.  I think it’s a great film, well made, entertaining, and that Keaton is very good in it.  But to me, it doesn’t come anywhere near The Gold Rush.  And I will fully admit that I can never quite get over the fact that we’re supposed to be rooting for a Confederate soldier.  It nags at me every time I watch the film.  The General comes closest to a nomination in Original Screenplay, where I have it at 7th.  But it does earn several Comedy nominations below.  The only other **** film not to earn any nominations was Crainquebille, the brilliant Feyder film that I only actually saw for the first time this past week, which comes in 7th in Foreign Film and 8th in Original Screenplay.

Also Not Nominated But Don’t Miss:

• Crainquebille  -  a brilliant heart-wrenching French film
• Tillie’s Punctured Romance  -  Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film
• He Who Gets Slapped  -  a very good performance from Lon Chaney and a very young and beautiful Norma Shearer

Nighthawk Golden Globes:

Drama:

• Best Picture

1. Greed
2. The Battleship Potemkin
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
4. The Phantom of the Opera
5. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

• Best Director

1. Erich von Stroheim  (Greed)
2. Sergei Eisenstein  (The Battleship Potemkin)
3. Robert Wiene  (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
4. D.W. Griffith  (The Birth of a Nation)
5. F.W. Murnau  (Faust)

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Greed
2. The Phantom of the Opera
3. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
4. Faust
5. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
2. The Battleship Potemkin
3. Foolish Wives
4. The Last Laugh
5. J’Accuse

• Best Actor:

1. Lon Chaney  (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
2. Emil Jannings  (The Last Laugh)
3. Lon Chaney  (The Phantom of the Opera)
4. Erich von Stroheim  (Foolish Wives)
5. Emil Jannings  (Faust)

• Best Actress:

1. Lillian Gish  (Broken Blossoms)
2. Hilda Borgström  (Ingeborg Holm)
3. Lillian Gish  (The Birth of a Nation)
4. Aileen Pringle  (The Mystic)
5. Gloria Swanson  (Male and Female)

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. Donald Crisp  (Broken Blossoms)
2. Conrad Veidt  (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
3. Sessue Hayakawa  (The Cheat)
4. Lon Chaney  (Oliver Twist)
5. Pomeroy Cannon  (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)

• Best Supporting Actress:

1. Zasu Pitts  (Greed)
2. Camilla Horn  (Faust)
3. Alice Terry  (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)
4. Sylvia Ashton  (Old Wives for New)
5. Miriam Cooper  (The Birth of a Nation)

By Film:

• Greed  (330)
  • Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  (205)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (160)
  • Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Actor
• Faust  (150)
  • Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actress
• The Battleship Potemkin  (135)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay
• Broken Blossoms  (130)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• The Phantom of the Opera  (125)
  • Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Actor
• The Birth of a Nation  (110)
  • Director, Actress, Supporting Actress
• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (100)
  • Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
• Foolish Wives  (75)
  • Original Screenplay, Actor
• The Last Laugh  (75)
  • Original Screenplay, Actor
• J’Accuse  (40)
  • Original Screenplay
• Ingeborg Holm  (35)
  • Actress
• The Mystic  (35)
  • Actress
• Male and Female  (35)
  • Actress
• The Cheat  (30)
  • Supporting Actor
• Oliver Twist  (30)
  • Supporting Actor
• Old Wives for New  (30)
  • Supporting Actress

Best Drama not Nominated for any Nighthawk Golden Globes:

• Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages

Analysis:  Part of this is that while Intolerance does manage to make it to the level of ****, it’s not quite on the same level as so many of the other films here (it ranks 11th in Picture and 10th in Director among the dramas).  Part of it is that because of the structure of it (various stories told across different time periods) it uses a lot of different actors and doesn’t use them a lot or to great dramatic effect, so the film doesn’t rank at all in any of my acting categories.  And that episodic nature also hurt it in the screenplay category.

Comedy:

• Best Picture:

1. The Gold Rush
2. The General
3. Our Hospitality
4. Seven Chances
5. Safety Last

Analysis:  I haven’t actually seen a whole lot of silent feature-length comedies.  Only 23 of the 167 films I have seen from this era do I classify as a Comedy for its primary genre and only a handful of films with other primary genres also make it into this field.  And care to guess what most of those are?  Most of them are Buster Keaton simply because Chaplin spent so long on each film that he only has two films from the era (plus one he starred in but didn’t direct).

• Best Director:

1. Charlie Chaplin  (The Gold Rush)
2. Buster Keaton  (The General)
3. Buster Keaton  (Our Hospitality)
4. Mack Sennett  (Tillie’s Punctured Romance)
5. Buster Keaton  (Seven Chances)

Analysis:  This looks a little uneven in favor of Keaton, but I feel I should point out, that in my point system, Chaplin’s direction of The Gold Rush is pretty much even with the other four films nominated here.

• Best Adapted Screenplay:

1. Tillie’s Punctured Romance

Analysis:  Part of the problem here, as I said above, is that I haven’t seen a lot of comedies in the Silent Era, and a lot of what I have seen are either Chaplin or Keaton and neither one of them adapted material – they wrote their own.  Tillie isn’t the only adapted comedy I’ve seen (there are also, for example The Plastic Age and The Affairs of Anatol), but it’s the only one I considered worthy of a nomination.

• Best Original Screenplay:

1. The Gold Rush
2. Our Hospitality
3. The General
4. Three Ages
5. Seven Chances

• Best Actor:

1. Charlie Chaplin  (The Gold Rush)
2. Buster Keaton  (The General)
3. Charlie Chaplin  (The Kid)
4. Charlie Chaplin  (Tillie’s Punctured Romance)
5. Wallace Reid  (The Affairs of Anatol)

• Best Actress:

1. Marie Dressler  (Tillie’s Punctured Romance)
2. Gloria Swanson  (Why Change Your Wife)
3. Gloria Swanson  (The Affairs of Anatol)

Analysis:  One of the disadvantage of having watched mostly Chaplin and Keaton films is that there isn’t a whole lot in the way of lead actress performances (or supporting male performances).  So, it’s not that there probably aren’t performances of being worthy of this list.  But if there are, they have somehow eluded me.

• Best Supporting Actor:

1. Mack Swain  (The Gold Rush)
2. Theodore Roberts  (The Affairs of Anatol)

• Best Supporting Actress:

1. Bebe Daniels  (The Affairs of Anatol)
2. Agnes Ayres  (The Affairs of Anatol)
3. Mabel Normand  (Tillie’s Punctured Romance)
4. Bebe Daniels  (Why Change Your Wife)
5. Clara Bow  (The Plastic Age)

By Film:

• The Gold Rush  (400)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor
• Tillie’s Punctured Romance  (260)
  • Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress
• The Affairs of Anatol  (190)
  • Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actress
• The General  (170)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor
• Our Hospitality  (135)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay
• Seven Chances  (135)
  • Picture, Director, Original Screenplay
• Why Change Your Wife  (65)
  • Actress, Supporting Actor
• Safety Last  (50)
  • Picture
• Three Ages  (40)
  • Original Screenplay
• The Kid  (35)
  • Actor
• The Plastic Age  (30)
  • Supporting Actress

Best Comedy not nominated for any Nighthawk Golden Globes:

• The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks

Analysis:  This is actually a pretty amusing propaganda film about what happens when a westerner comes to the Soviet Union.  It is well made and amusing, a lower ***.5, which isn’t enough to get into the Best Picture – Comedy and the script doesn’t really compare to Chaplin or Keaton and the acting is nothing to specifically notice.  But a good film if you have the time.  It is the only comedy that is ***.5 or higher that failed to earn any Globe nominations.

Roundup for the Year in Film:

Eligible Films I Have Seen:  167

Top 5 Films of the Year:

1  -  Greed  (see review here and here)

2  -  The Battleship Potemkin  (see review here)

The ultimate in German expressionism.

3  -  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  (dir. Robert Wiene)

Is it possible that in the 93 years since this film was released, Horror as a genre has still never been better?  Could sound, which opened up all sorts of new avenues in a variety of genres, actually have negatively impacted Horror?  How rare it is that the dialogue is vitally important in genre – and in this film, it works so much better because we don’t hear the dialogue (instead, we get those wonderful titles, which are just as bizarre and twisted in their design as the rest of the film).  And so many Horror films try too hard to scare you with their quick sounds and a score designed to make you jump (though, outside of Psycho, Jaws and Halloween, rarely does).  This film is all the more disturbing because we can’t hear it – we have to imagine the sounds in our heads.

There has been much written about German expressionism, and its influence on Hollywood and filmmaking as a whole.  From Caligari to Hitler, published in 1947, was one of the first vitally important film books.  Part of that was the brilliance of the films themselves while part of it was the rush of great German filmmakers to Hollywood – Murnau (who was to make the best American silent film, Sunrise), Lang, Lubitsch.  And part of it was just how brilliant it all is.  Outside of Truffaut, I think the French New Wave gets overrated and I think too much gets written about the 70′s American films.  But I eat up German expressionism in all its artistic brilliance.  And this is really the key film to seeing where it comes from, ironically directed by Robert Wiene, who never did come to America (though he did flee the Nazis and died in Paris in 1938).

There are two things about this film that are absolutely brilliant and have echoed down through the last century of film.  The first is the look of the film.  While D.W. Griffith was trying to recreate massive historical looks and bring realism to the world and Chaplin was mocking the world around him with a heightened sense of realism tinged through satire, the look of Caligari is deliberately world away from reality.  Buildings come together at odd angles.  Rooms come to a point in the back.  A bridge arches away from the nothing and comes back to nothing more.  The brilliant inspiration in the creation of the look of the film has rarely been matched in the years since.  And yet, the rest of the film fits the look.  The actors deliberately move in stilted ways, nothing like realism.  And even the look of the titles echoes the look of the film (hell, even the poster does – look at it if you somehow haven’t seen the film and then go anywhere on line and watch the film because it’s in the public domain and if you haven’t seen it that’s just wrong).

But then there is the story itself.  Watch this short little film about the demented doctor who uses his somnambulist to commit crimes and the man who accidentally discovers it when the sleeping man makes off with his love.  And then come to the end of the film and decide what has happened.  And then wonder if that’s really what has happened.  Because you may have to decide not to believe anything that came before.  Or, possibly worse, you may have to decide to absolutely believe everything that has come before.  We often take away from a film with the ending that it leaves us.  So, what then can we take away from Caligari?  That it’s a brilliant film, definitely.  But the rest?  Well, I’ll leave that up to you.

You know you want to dance with your dinner rolls tonight.

4  -  The Gold Rush  (dir. Charlie Chaplin)

By 1925, Charlie Chaplin was one of the most famous men in the world.  He had been directing his own short films for a decade, ever since just after his feature debut in Tillie’s Punctured Romance and his departure from Keystone.  But while he had made plenty of shorts, he had only made two feature films.  The first one, The Kid, is charming and sweet and funny and is a very good film, but doesn’t really rise to greatness.  His second, A Woman in Paris, didn’t star Chaplin himself and was a romance, steering away from comedy.  Then came the film that he worked on for two years, the one he would later say he wanted to be remembered for.  And Charlie Chaplin had made his first truly great feature film.

What do people remember about this film?  My guess is that they remember the dance of the dinner rolls (which seems so in character for Chaplin but actually takes place in a dream), the Thanksgiving dinner where he eats a boot and the collapse of the cabin over the cliff.  And yet there’s so much more.  There is the tramp’s desperate attempt at romance which comes out well in the end (Chaplin was a romantic and the tramp usually ends up happy and romantically involved, but yet, you go into every film surprised to see him actually succeed – one of the great things about the happy endings to Chaplin films is that they work so well in relation to everything that has come before).  There is the wonderful way that Chaplin moves – like Lon Chaney, his movements are almost like dancing (and even when he is dancing they are wonderful, as his pants keep slipping, so he manages to grab a rope to tie them up, not realizing there is a dog tied to the end of that rope).  There is the fight in the cabin, where Chaplin is desperately hanging on the much bigger man, and then actually ends up hanging on to a bear.  And there is the cabin scene.  The tramp wakes up hungover and is certain that the room is spinning because of his hangover.  In fact, the room is spinning, but that’s because the storm has sent over the edge of the cliff and it is reacting to all of his movements (Chaplin, the 1992 film, may be just an okay film, but it does a good job of showing exactly what Chaplin as a filmmaker had to do in order to make this scene work).

Chaplin would never be a prolific feature filmmaker – he was too much of a perfectionist and took far too long to complete each film (indeed, he planned The Great Dictator before the Anschluss and yet World War II had been reigning for over a year before the film was released).  But he brought perfection to his films – in the writing, the directing, the editing, the composing, the acting.  Chaplin was the consummate creative force in his films, rivaled in Hollywood history only by Orson Welles.  There has been a tendency in recent years for people to let Chaplin slide on by and prefer Buster Keaton.  But while Keaton is enjoyable and was good at writing, acting and directing, Chaplin was a talent like no other.  After all, just take your pick.  Ask someone what the best Chaplin film is and you’ll get a whole lot of different answers (and some of them will be short films).  There are many who would pick The Gold Rush.  I don’t blame them, and yet I would rank it behind Modern Times, The Great Dictator and City Lights.  Because that’s how amazing Chaplin was.

5  -  The Phantom of the Opera  (see review here)

5 Worst Films (#1 being the worst):

1. The Doll  (dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
2. The Poor Little Rich Girl  (dir. Maurice Tourneur)
3. Peter Pan  (dir. Herbert Brenon)
4. The Wildcat  (dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
5. I Don’t Want to Be a Man  (dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

Lubitsch at his worst

Worst Film of the Year:

The Doll  (dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

I’ve written before about my feelings on the over-rating of Ernst Lubitsch and his films.  I covered him not that long ago in my ranked list of all the directors who have ever been nominated for an Oscar, noting that while some of his films work wonderfully, I prefer von Stroheim and “the realism of his films to a fanciful romantic version of the world that Lubitsch gave us.”  He just missed out on the Top 100 Directors list, but that’s because he earned 145 points from the two external categories, far more than any other director who didn’t make the list.  And in my review of his The Smiling Lieutenant, I wrote “I really couldn’t take any more.  The film had reached such a point of ridiculous stupidity that even being a musical was no excuse.”

And so here we have The Doll.  I have seen 167 feature-length films from the pre-Oscar era.  This is the only one that I rated below **.5.  Why?  Well, because, like The Smiling Lieutenant, it’s so unbearably stupid.  It has a very basic (and ridiculous premise) – a young man must get married because his rich uncle says so.  The local monks, who he has been staying with, convince him to marry a mechanical doll instead.  But the doll was just broken and so the dollmaker’s daughter stands in for the doll and the man marries her instead.  And then we go on with the Lubitsch touch from there.

I suppose this could have been a camp classic if not for the fact that Lubitsch doesn’t really fall into the camp category and the fact that I hate camp.  But it doesn’t even work for that.  While there are some artistic flourishes to the film (shades of German expressionism in Lubitsch, where I wouldn’t have expected to find it), the main problem is that, aside from the ridiculous premise, the film just falls flat.  Lubitsch’s direction is incredibly flat, there is no wit to the film and, here’s the key, some of the worst acting you could possibly imagine.  One of the thing about silent films is that the actors had to act with their eyes, with their gestures, with their faces (back then they had faces).  So, a bad performance doesn’t necessarily mar a film like it does in the sound era, when a horrendous line can bring things to a crashing halt.  But here, the acting is just so incredibly bad from everyone involved, that I can’t bear to watch it.

Points:

• Most Nighthawk Nominations:  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  /  Faust  (8)
• Most Nighthawk Wins:  Greed  (5)
• Most Nighthawk Points:  Greed  (330)
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Award:  The Affairs of Anatol
• 2nd Place Award:  The Phantom of the Opera  (Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup)
• 6th Place Award:  The Last Laugh  (Original Screenplay, Foreign Film)
• Most Nighthawk Drama Nominations:  Greed  /  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  /  Faust  (4)
• Most Nighthawk Drama Wins:  Greed  (4)
• Most Nighthawk Drama Points:  Greed  (330)
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Drama Award:  The Cheat
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Nominations:  The Gold Rush  /  Tillie’s Punctured Romance  /  The Affairs of Anatol  (5)
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Wins:  The Gold Rush  (5)
• Most Nighthawk Comedy Points:  The Gold Rush  (400)
• Worst Film Nominated for a Nighthawk Comedy Award:  The Affairs of Anatol

Breakdown by Genre  (Foreign in parenthesis, best film in genre following):

• Drama:  99  (27)  -  Greed
• Foreign:  43  -  The Battleship Potemkin
• Comedy:  23  (5)  -  The Gold Rush
• Adventure:  11  -  The Mark of Zorro
• Fantasy:  7  (4)  -  Faust
• Crime:  7  (3)  -  The Unholy Three
• Horror:  6  (2)  -  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• War:  5  (1)  -  The Birth of a Nation
• Western:  3  -  The Iron Horse
• Kids:  2  -  His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz
• Mystery:  2  (1)  -  Sherlock Holmes
• Sci-Fi:  1  (1)  -  Metropolis
• Suspense:  1  -  Ace of Hearts
• Action:  0
• Musical:  0  (obviously)

51 Films Eligible for Best Foreign Film (alphabetical, with director in parenthesis – red are ****, blue are ***.5 – both those colors qualify for my Best Foreign Film Award):

• The Adventures of Prince Achmed  (Reiniger)
• Aelita: Queen of Mars  (Protazanov)
• Anna Boleyn  (Lubitsch)
• The Battleship Potemkin  (Eisenstein)
• The Burning Soil  (Murnau)
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  (Wiene)
• Cabiria  (Pastrone)
• The Cigarette Girl of Moscow  (Zhelyabuzhsky)
• Crainquebille  (Feyder)
• Cyrano de Bergerac  (Genina)
• Destiny  (Lang)
• The Doll  (Lubitsch)
• Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler  (Lang)
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks  (Kuleshov)
• The Eyes of the Mummy  (Lubitsch)
• Faces of Children  (Feyder)
• Faust  (Murnau)
• The Golem  (Boese)
• The Gosta Berlings Saga  (Stiller)
• The Hands of Orlac  (Wiene)
• Haunted Castle  (Murnau)
• I Don’t Want to Be a Man  (Lubitsch)
• Ingeborg Holm  (Sjostrom)
• J’Accuse  (Gance)
• Judex  (Feuillade)
• La Roue  (Gance)
• The Last Days of Pompeii  (Caserini)
• The Last Laugh  (Murnau)
• Leaves Out of Satan’s Book  (Dreyer)
• Madame DuBarry  (Lubitsch)
• A Man There Was  (Sjostrom)
• Metropolis  (Lang)
• Michael  (Dreyer)
• Mother  (Pudovkin)
• Nana  (Renoir)
• Nibelungen: Kriemheld’s Revenge  (Lang)
• Nibelungen: Siegfried  (Lang)
• Nosferatu  (Murnau)
• Othello  (Buchowetzki)
• The Oyster Princess  (Lubitsch)
• Phantom  (Murnau)
• The Phantom Chariot  (Sjostrom)
• Queen of Atlantis  (Feyder)
• Sir Arne’s Treasure  (Stiller)
• The Spiders Part I: The Golden Lake  (Lang)
• The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship  (Lang)
• Strike  (Eisenstein)
• Tartuffe  (Murnau)
• Waxworks  (Leni)
• Whirlpool of Fate  (Renoir)
• The Wildcat  (Lubitsch)

Films Released This Year Originally But Eligible in a Different Year:

• Flesh and the Devil  (1927-28)
• The Gosta Berlings Saga  (1927-28)
• The Hands of Orlac  (1927-28)
• The Magician  (1927-28)
• Metropolis  (1927-28)
• The Scarlet Letter  (1927-28)
• Tartuffe  (1927-28)
• Aelita: Queen of Mars  (1928-29)
• Nosferatu  (1928-29)
• The Adventures of Prince Achmed  (1930-31)
• Mother  (1934)