Screen Savour

The General (1927)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:25:00 +0000

d. Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton / USA / 75 mins.

"It's got to be so authentic it hurts," Buster Keaton is to have said to his staff before they began production on The General, his late-era silent comedy about a powerful locomotive and its hapless conductor who manages to deliver a strategic victory in the throes of the U.S. Civil War. The authenticity abounds: the mise-en-scene is steeped in it, as if there's a complete Mathew Brady photograph hovering just slightly off screen; the performances are sweet and playful, and Keaton the director and writer invokes his patented level of emotional simplicity that works well in his world of social and romantic abeyance.

And does it hurt? Anything but.

Today, and probably for the foreseeable future, Keaton will be remembered primarily for The General. Is this his best film? I don't know. It's not my personal favorite (Sherlock Jr. wins my heart), but then again, Keaton's tremendous talent is evinced by the fact that he made multiple masterpieces — each different from the rest, but nonetheless, discernibly his — and the title of his "best" is bestowed on different films by different critics.Where the conversation becomes tangled in respect to The General is sort of a strange place. I think you can read the film two ways: it's either a great film made by Buster Keaton, or it's a great Buster Keaton film.

The difference appears negligible or tenuous, but the two are profoundly different. I've found those who don't hold the film in the highest of regards typically don't believe it's the latter, and that position has been held for decades. When it premiered in 1927, audiences and critics rejected it because it fell below expectations for "a Buster Keaton film." They asked: where are the belly laughs, the pratfalls, the zany stunts and acrobatic high jinks that define the comedian's work, that make him truly great? When compared to his hilarious treasures before, the film stands the chance of appearing prosaic. Personally, I think there is enough of a thematic base (and certainly enough comedy) to argue it's a "great Buster Keaton film"; but even if it's not, I think its greatness as a film, one that happens to be made by Buster Keaton, is beyond dispute. It is clean and ambitious and efficient and enthralling, something that is both of this world and so exacting as to seem of a very different one as well. It has a structure and narrative flow that is largely outside anything else Keaton attempted.

That feeling seems rooted in its size: a genuine, and unexpected, epic. "What is surprising is not that there are so few [silent comedy epics]," Walter Kerr writes in The Silent Clowns, "but that there are any at all. For there had been no such form until these two [Chaplin and Keaton] saw a way to it." Chaplin, as usual, got there first, with The Gold Rush, released in 1925. It's a big and bold blend of pathos and silliness, plucking the Tramp from his normal territory and relabeling him as The Lone Prospector, searching for gold and love in the desolate North Slope. Although Chaplin's films until that time do not feel limited in the strictest sense of the word, they do feel comfortable in the boundaries of a singular community. The thrill of The Gold Rush, its perfection aside, is a filmmaking spirit as adventuresome and exploratory as the history it recounts.

So why then, to twist a phrase, does size matter at all? Kerr suggests it's because the epic and the comedy do not go hand-in-hand. Epics are fraught with "serious implications and historical moments and a hero who can withstand the strain by matching it with his ambition." Humor can crumple under massive scale because the comic hero becomes lost in a blur of his surroundings. And so much of comedy is played out in the nooks and crannies of narratives, detached from the world and relatively isolated. To make a silent comedy epic is to create something that candidly honors character and story in a way that is not as superficial as most comedy where such things are dispensable as long as there's a laugh at the end of the tunnel.

Chaplin may have officially gotten there first, but Keaton had been working toward it all along, in a more tactile and cinematic way than Chaplin. Most of Keaton short two-reel films, made and released between 1920 and 1923, have the vision and scope of something in the five- to six-reel range, and he'd been exploring the limits of space along the X- and Y-axes in nearly every film that preceded this. Our Hospitality, his first feature film that was not cobbled together from linked short films, was set in the nineteenth century and incorporated much of the technology and attitudes of its time. Sherlock Jr. rose up like a tower at the intersection of reality and celluloid, and Go West brought Keaton out into the unpopulated prairies of the American frontier.

This story came to Keaton by way of Clyde Bruckman, his chief prop-man and frequent writing and directing collaborator. Bruckman, serving here officially as co-director, had spotted William Pittenger's The Great Locomotive Chase, a historical account about a group of Union soldiers who planned to sneak into the South, hijack a train, and breakdown the Confederacy's abilities of transportation and communication. Anyone who knows Keaton even through his choice of films could have predicted an enthusiastic response: a plot set in the past (a favorite time-frame for him) and involving a train (a favorite mode of transportation). Keaton chose to invert the drama by setting the point-of-view from that of the Confederacy, a decision that works thematically and provides no contextual controversy because it's not rooted in any political motivation and instead thrives on the dramatic irony of the heroes being well-known losers. Keaton's character, train engineer Johnnie Gray, is in love with Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), who wants to see him enlist in the army at the outbreak of the Civil War. Johnnie suffers a double setback when the South determines that he is, ironically, more valuable as an engineer than as a soldier and his failure to be recruited is misread by Annabelle. Their relationship falls apart, and he and his beloved train, the General, go to work for the South. When she and the train are kidnapped, however, he must venture into enemy territory to save them.

To capture the era, the aforementioned attention to detail was staggering: Keaton's crew built railroad cars, trolleys, stagecoaches, wagons, and houses for the sets; he had intentions of filming in the South, securing an entire tract of railroad in Tennessee and, quite remarkably, receiving permission to use the original General locomotive. (They bowed out upon hearing the film would be a comedy.) Instead, Keaton found a place to work in Oregon, where he found equally suitable railway tracks, put two trains on loan and bought a third, which he destroys with technical glee in the film's grand and fiery finale.

The bizarre contradiction inside The General is that it feels both older than its production date of 1926 yet also years ahead of its time while possessing, as Kerr notes, "the peculiar quality of dating at all":

We quite forget that we are looking at work done in the 1920s and tend to identify the pictures we are watching with the period of the narrative. This is only in part due to the fact that it was a costume film to begin with; many costume films of the 1920s are transparently sham today. It was more nearly due to Keaton's integral relationship with his background. Both Keaton and Chaplin had developed personal images iconographic enough to be timeless. Chaplin had developed his—baggy trousers, mustache, cane, derby—resolutely, carrying it with him wherever he went. Keaton, more naked, had made a virtue—even a philosophical fetish—of his very adaptability; he could swap one costume for another and continue to ride with its outlines. He was wedded to matter, and no matter that the matter changed shape.

Past and present, comedy and epic, underdog and victory, North and South, expectation and delivery—the recurring motif of The General is its multiple genuine thematic contrasts, and perhaps the most noticeable is the tension between Keaton's desperately sought realism and inherent artificiality. If there's a case to be made that The General is not Keaton's funniest film, or his second or third funniest (and I think such a case can be made rather easily), there's an equally strong case to be made that it is his most expertly crafted and deftly geometric film, both in the cinematography and the plot. Keaton observes a remarkably strict and symmetrical five-act structure for the story—introduction, chase, rescue, chase, conclusion—that is so clearly delineated over the course of the film that it invokes an almost Shakespearean rhythm. It's often said that Keaton defied the odds and proved it possible to create a dramatic chase using only trains, which are limited in mobility by where the tracks go, although the reality should be considered as even more of a feat than that. Keaton delivers not only one good chase but two, into the North and out of the North, each unique and with fundamentally different obstacles. Neither ever seems to dissipate in excitement.

The symmetry and geometry of the plot are further reflected in the framing and cinematography. The General utilizes an entire countryside for its adventure, the dual directions of the train tracks and the world out into the fields. (In one brilliant shot, Johnnie chops wood for the engine while the Northern army advances in the opposite direction behind him.) Kerr says comedy and epic are diametrically opposing forces because "the little man becomes difficult to find in so much mass," but Keaton avoids this problem by letting the film alternate between spacious and claustrophobic. The camera makes good use of the small confines inside the trains and rooms, and goes out of its way to avoid losing the sight of Keaton. If the film doesn't feel like an epic at all, it's no doubt due to the fact that Keaton had already made a career of being the diminutive man against larger and more foreboding elements; The General is simply a natural extension of that.

As is the case with many of the films we treasure today, The General was a bit of a disaster upon its release. In her book Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, Marion Meade writes that its premiere kept being pushed back week after week. Test screenings went badly; it had been more than sixty years since the Civil War, but the topic touched a nerve with many audiences members, who recoiled at its use of war as prelude to comedy. Critics—most, though not all—seemed to need their thesauri to identify new and harsh adjectives. United Artists was seen as a poor distributor (a second blow to Keaton's producer, Joseph M. Schenck, as the film's production price tag ballooned to more than $750,000, or nearly twice the proposed budget), and the title was seen as inadvertently vague and elusive. Yet Keaton always held it in his highest esteem, and in the end he had good reason to do so. Whether you see The General as a sort of film expected from Keaton, or whether you see it as something below his typical comedic acerbity, this is a film for the ages—a true silent masterpiece.

Battling Butler (1926)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:15:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 71 mins.

Warning: Spoilers.

It was a simple and winning formula: Buster loves a girl but she doesn't quite feel the same, so he must embark on a journey that turns rather perilous, proving not only his love to her but his ability to withstand the elements as a man should, eluding forces of nature and other suitors, to win her affection. Ideal? Perhaps not, but in many cases it proved to be comic gold, and Keaton, who led his gag and prop team to reinvent the formula for film after film, did it better than many. He deviated from it rarely, and even when he did — in a film like Go West, for example, where the girl is replaced with a friendly cow and his journey is to protect her from the slaughterhouse shipyards — the overall effect was not too different. Battling Butler, however, is a significant exception. It is not among Keaton's great films, but it is notable for the way it inverts and redistributes his patented formula. This isn't a film about a low- or middle-income man who desperately tries to get the girl; it's a film about a rich man who wins her rather easily and then begins a lie that makes him work to keep her.

Much like The Navigator and a few shorts before it, Keaton plays his standard dandy character, this time a Mr. Alfred Butler. Butler's father, seeking to toughen his son, sends him out into the forest to rough it for a while — or what passes for roughing it when you're wealthy (a valet played by Snitz Edwards, hot baths, newspaper delivery, skinned animal rugs, etc.) He and the wild do not get along, and his inability to fire a rifle lands him in hot water with a country girl (Sally O'Neill), with whom he soon falls in love. The two are seen as an odd match by all, but they're sweet together; in a great scene he escorts her home at dusk only to find he doesn't know the way back to his tent and she then escorts him home. Her burly family is skeptical, and Butler's valet, attempting to talk up his boss to the mountain clan, says he is "Battling" Butler, a boxer who shares the same name. They then approve of the marriage, only to have the timing be perfect for them to rally around Keaton's character when "Battling" Butler is to participate in a high-profile bout.

Does the fact that the protagonist is trying to retain the girl's affection instead of win it make the stakes seem any less important? Perhaps a little, and maybe only negligibly because the story still fits nicely into the Keaton universe of wry takes and taxing chores. Keaton did play a stock character that changed sometimes dramatically from film to film. Whether he is down on his luck or well-to-do, his films possess a nihilistic quality as if the universe is actively working against his tenacity the way gravity works against his actual physicality. Keaton does give himself numerous tasks and challenges to overcome, including rigorous athletic training (and eventual bouts, including some sloppy footwork in the ring) that keep him on his toes until the facade.

There's a tendency to compare, or much rather contrast, silent comedy's most famous boxing sequence — the featherweight Tramp using a referee for cover in Chaplin's City Lights — to the boxing scenes in Battling Butler. Most of us cannot help the fact that we're all but certain to have seen a Chaplin masterpiece before we see a minor Keaton, so there's a tendency to temporally view Battling Butler as something in the shadow of City Lights, a ridiculous proposition since this film precedes Chaplin's by five years. Nevertheless, it's all too rare that the comedians overlapped in critical scenes. Keaton, the more physical of the two, predictably embraces the more painful elements of boxing, unlike Chaplin, who spends time deftly avoiding his opponent. Keaton becomes trapped in the ropes of the ring and finds himself on the receiving end of a few punches. And unlike Chaplin, according to scholar Marion Meade, Keaton's boxing work sidelined him a few times: once when he fell out of the ring and hit his head, and once when he strained a ligament in his leg jumping into the ring.

But the differences, as they exist, reach maximum distance at the end of the film. If Keaton began Battling Butler seeking to invert his traditional formula, then he also seemed intent on having its ending invert a traditional formula as well. In most of his comedies, his character would either evade the bad guy or comically come to defeat him. But when the real "Battling" Butler shows up at the end of the film and begins to move in the girl, Keaton emerges rather heroically — almost like a Fairbanksian swashbuckler — to put in a serious, dramatic boxing fight in the locker room. It should be no surprise to anyone to observe how fit and athletic Keaton really was (after all, there's no other way he could have performed all those stunts), but there is still something shocking and thrilling about watching Keaton throw himself into a serious fight that more than makes up for the rather muted stakes.

Still, it's quite bewildering that Battling Butler proved to be the most popular, thus most financially bankable, of Keaton's silent films. It was a vindication for Keaton, who considered it among his favorite films, but an astonishment to most critics today. Through the ways that it immediately shifts in an unexpected direction and lets the surprises move and build upon each other, Battling Butler is surely never a disappointment, just a curious chapter of Keaton's work. To invert his classic narrative structure, to insert an honest shot at genuine drama through a decisively unfunny boxing sequence at the film's end, is (oddly enough) almost a move toward the mainstream for Keaton. Battling Butler does invoke the aura of other adventure comedies from the era, and there are moments when it distinctly feels like something Harold Lloyd might have explored if given the opportunity. But when considered against his masterpieces, it doesn't pack the same punch. Then again, there's probably nothing more Keatonian than going against the grain — in all respects — and achieving success.

Go West (1925)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:28:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 69 mins.

Around the midpoint of Buster Keaton's western comedy Go West, our hero — a man from the east who is out of his element in the frontier, descriptively named Friendless — is asked to brand the cow for whom he has developed a sympathetic and convivial camaraderie. His approach is distinctly Keatonian: apply a little shaving cream to her hind quarter, trim away some of her hair, and let that stand instead of a painful branding. But the scene also reflects what's wrong with this middle-brow but not altogether problematic film. Keaton's own approach to the material mirrors his character's careful shave. It's a little here, a little there, and a gentle pat at the end. Compared to the fast and frenzied world of Keaton's more searing pictures, Go West is a little limp.

The film's strengths are in its themes in rather familiar territory: Friendless (Keaton) is a bit of a loner struggling to find fulfillment in an Indiana town who heeds the long-heralded advice of Horace Greeley: go west, young man! However, once he arrives, he realizes he's not much more of a success there than he is back east — maybe more so as the rancher cowboy lifestyle doesn't quite seem to fit his skill set. His one joy forms in the unlikeliest of places, a relationship with a Jersey cow named Brown Eyes, who he spends the rest of the film trying to save from a journey to the slaughterhouse.

Although the territory is familiar, the execution is not — or at least not as tight, focused, and inventive as Keaton's previous works. It is not so much that the film occasionally stumbles as it is that the film never seems to lift off. This is heavy with plot and story, frequently without any of the physical prowess that makes a Keaton film what it is. Some have theorized the film is a sly take on the romantic films coming out of Hollywood, but Go West is no more critical of conventional love and romance than the self-deprecating and outsider takes on romance in Keaton's other films. (Incidentally, Go West is the only Keaton film where he doesn't whisk off into the sunset with the female lead.) The behind-the-scene dynamics could explain why it lacks the impresario's touch. Keaton drafted the story and directed the film almost entirely on location in Mohave County, Arizona, but lost much of his regular creative and technical crew. Writer Jean Havez died unexpectedly, and writer Joseph A. Mitchell left Keaton to work for Universal; Keaton's loyal gagman Clyde Bruckman took meantime work on Harold Lloyd's For Heaven's Sake. All three had been instrumental from his short films through his early masterworks like Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., and The Navigator.

Most of the slapstick is handed off to others, with Keaton standing as the calm center, particularly when he lets a train full of cows out onto the streets of Los Angeles and attempts to nonchalantly avoid them. Keaton's on-screen relationship with Brown Eyes might be the most impressive stunt in a relatively stunt-free film (at least by Keaton standards). Marion Meade, in her essential book Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, notes that Keaton trained the cow with a rope halter and by feeding her tidbits. In a little more than a week, he and cow had bonded so well he could lead her around with sewing thread tied to his finger. Life began imitating art, and the cow wanted to follow Keaton as far as his dressing room. That anecdote alone is ample demonstration of how delightful the synergy between Keaton and Brown Eyes is. Go West is obviously not without its charms, but the fact that it is rather heavy and sentimental is unexpected and unfulfilling.

Seven Chances (1925)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:53:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 56 mins.

On the whole, Buster Keaton's films tended to be developed as original screenplays, with gags, scenes, or broad themes worked out well before he knew exactly what was going to happen in a narrative. Sherlock Jr. was to be about dreams, he knew, but how and why he didn't; The Navigator was to incorporate a $20,000 abandoned ship, but to what ends was not immediately clear.

Seven Chances, however, began as a previously written stage play, purchased for Keaton by someone on his staff. Keaton didn't care much for the play — its many plot complications did not suit the sort of bare-bones storytelling needed in silent comedy — but he took on the project obligingly and began morphing into something that was closer to his style. Unsurprisingly then, as it labors to set up the premise of a soon-to-be-27-year-old man (Keaton) who must be married by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday to inherit his grandfather's $7 million, Seven Chances leads off as a fairly conventional comedy by 1925 standards. Yet as it progresses, the film becomes something distinctly Keatonian, the focus on the narrative becoming looser and looser until he embarks on one of the greatest chase scenes in the totality of silent cinema.

The crux of the film's first half essentially hinges on repeated rejection. Keaton's Jimmie Shannon does love a girl, Mary Jones (Ruth Dwyer), and she loves him as well, but the courtship process has taken the two an inordinate amount of time (illustrated in an early and surprising two-strip Technicolor sequence that opens the film, where Keaton and Dwyer stand in front of a house as the seasons dissolve in the background and a cute Great Dane puppy grows and grows). Upon hearing the news of his potential fortune, he earnestly proposes to her, but errs in checking his watch as he does so and she kicks him out. Jimmie and his partner, Billy (T. Roy Barnes), desperately need the money to keep their business afloat, so Billy attempts to solicit any woman to marry Jimmie so the money can be his. But woman after woman rejects him (or, in the film's lousy ethnic humor, he recoils in a mistake of planning a proposal to women neither white nor Gentile). Finally, in an act of desperation, Billy places an ad in the newspaper detailing Jimmie's dilemma and saying he'll marry any woman who shows up at the church — and hundreds of eager and ruthless potential brides do.

The film has heart and moxie, even if it can seem disabusingly cynical on the subject of love. The one girl he does love rejects him on the basis of miscommunication; the girls he pursues simply to make it to the altar reject him on superficial grounds; and he rejects an entire mob of wedding-crazy and angry women to spare his own life. It is redeemed by its fairly predictable ending, which is necessary to illustrate that Seven Chances is not an entirely misanthropic affair and is ruled by its unmaterialized sentimentality. The beauty of Keaton producing this play instead of some other comedian (Charlie Chaplin might have just wanted the money, Harold Lloyd might have just wanted the girl, Groucho Marx would have wanted both but in a more lascivious way) is that he walks a tightrope of emotions. We as viewers sympathize with his plight of needing a bride to earn an inheritance, and we want to see him succeed, but Keaton portrays Jimmie as a character who is never satisfied with the journey and who keeps Dwyer's Mary close to his heart. By the time the final chase arrives, it earns its excitement and suspense because we have forged a connection with Jimmie.

Keaton has control over the first half, even if the premise isn't his, but the second half almost breaks apart neatly from the first to become unmistakably his. After the mob of women arrive at the church, he must escape them, and the chase scene that ends the film is among Keaton's best. He equals the sheer magnitude of the urban chase in his 1922 short Cops, but spreads the energy across a horizontal rural plane. He traverses a marshland and avoids the buckshot of hunters trying to bag a duck; he leaps objects and slides under cars; and most impressively, he evades an avalanche of rolling stones.

After a test screening of Seven Chances, during which the audience began laughing riotously after Keaton accidentally dislodged a few small stones while running downhill and caused them to tumble after him, he went back to the scene of the crime and filmed an entirely new sequence with what seems like hundreds of rocks, ranging in sizes from those about as large as a basketball to gigantic boulders. That scene alone is probably the most famous of the film, and a great example of Keaton's inherent comic instincts and his ability to improvise and deviate from the slated vision for the opportunity to earn more laughs. And it's here, in the miraculous finale, where the film's reputation is cemented.

The Navigator (1924)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:11:00 +0000

d. Donald Crisp & Buster Keaton / USA / 60 mins.

Buster Keaton, much like silent comedy's mega-star Charles Chaplin, liked to improvise, and perhaps his most expensive improvisation was The Navigator, a film that had all of its pieces before it knew what to do with them. Keaton's art director, had informed him that a soon-to-be dismantled ocean liner had become available, and Keaton convinced producer Joseph M. Schenck to invest $20,000 into the ship to secure it for a film. Schenck did (although a bit begrudgingly, it's been reported). So after an enormous expenditure and with an entire ocean steam-liner at his disposal, Keaton sat down with his chief gagman, Clyde Bruckman, and finally asked the big question: What are we going to do with it?

The result turned out to be The Navigator, an artistic and cinematic success that went on to be the comedian's most profitable film at the time. The story he and his crew created does not stray too far from typical Keatonian narratives; he plays a well-to-do and pampered rich man named Rollo Treadway who is struck with the urge to be married one day, but the girl (Kathryn McGuire) for whom he pines, named Betsy O'Brien, rejects his proposal. Through a series of mishaps he and she both end up on the empty ship, which is sent out to sea and leaves both the pampered characters to fend for themselves — make their own food (a decision to use six coffee beans to make a gallon proves disastrous) and try to find safety (they scare off a ship that could have helped them when they send up the quarantine flag for attention because it's the brightest flag).

Social status and technology then recur as key sources of Keaton comedy, and both leads carry their weight equally and seem tortured equally by the uncaring mechanics of the ship. Mechanics aside, they're both haunted by what they assume are ghosts on board the ship, including a brilliant sequence where a photograph of a frightening man is tossed out by McGuire and lands on a hook above a porthole, swinging back and forth while Keaton is trying to sleep, as if a face keeps looking in on him. (I'll also give a shout-out to a particularly funny, if Chaplinesque, struggle with a deck chair and a moment where Keaton tries to shuffle a soggy deck of chairs.) Although McGuire appeared in only two of Keaton's films — this and Sherlock Jr. — she brings to the screen a comic poise that you rarely see silent comediennes exhibit. Rollo may have proposed to Betsy in the beginning of the film, and slowly builds up a camaraderie with her as they spent time abroad the ocean liner, but it would almost be incorrect to label her a romantic interest. She lacks the chance to exhibit the physical humor Keaton could conjure out of seemingly nothing (she may or may not have had any), but she undoubtedly serves much more as a comic partner in The Navigator.

Donald Crisp, who made regular appearances in D.W. Griffith's films and served as an uncredited assistant director on The Birth of a Nation, was brought in by Keaton to direct the "straight" scenes of The Navigator. The decision turned out to be a mistake as far as Keaton was concerned when the rather humorless Crisp began meddling in the film. Consequentially, Keaton re-shot everything and is generally regarded as the sole director of the film although Crisp's name remains on the credits.

Even though the film is completely Keaton's, and is a success by any measure, I'm not sure the social satire and the man-versus-machine humor is quite as effective here than in other Keaton features. Certainly it cannot be forgotten for an absolutely bravura sequence that appears toward the end. When the ship stalls out near an island of cannibals that pose a clear and obvious threat to the two socialites, Keaton must don a diving suit and go underwater to fix the ship's broken propeller. It's among the earliest underwear scenes in cinema, filmed at Lake Tahoe because the studio tanks were too small for a life-size propeller. Keaton finds nothing lacking in terms of underwater humor: he washes his hands although he's at the bottom of the sea, and he uses the local fauna to his advantage (a lobster's claws help cut wires and one swordfish comes in handle to fence with another swordfish).

Nearly all of Keaton's films made and released between 1920 and 1929 possess the miraculous quality of blending entertainment, humor, and cinematic skill, but The Navigator has its fair share of ardent defenders; Walter Kerr, in his seminal book The Silent Clowns, calls it "one of Keaton's two perfect films" (the other being The General). Without a doubt I think the film is very good, although it falls short of of masterpiece status. It's always struck me as Buster Keaton's most mechanical film, and not just because one of the "stars" is an retired ocean liner. As I've written before, one of Keaton's surest strengths as a director is delivering a tactile atmosphere through the mise-en-scène; you can almost hear the groans of the hull and smell the cold, wet metal. But the joy of a Keaton film is the journey to a faraway and comic place while being able to feel close to Keaton on screen. He's distant in The Navigator, and though the film as an entire production is marked with distinguishing Keaton characteristics, his lead performance isn't. It's a small gripe for an otherwise splendid film.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:01:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 44 mins.

It is an exhausted but perpetually romantic cliche that the movies are perhaps the purest artistic incarnation of our sleeping hours. In both, we enter into the comfort of a dark room, relax, and find ourselves whisked away into an incomparable dreamlike state where our minds are alive and nothing is impossible. Every film, even the ones that attempt to evoke uncontaminated realism, possesses a fraction of this illusory quality, and some more than others. Spend just a few minutes with a Buster Keaton film and it's clear he is among the latter. He uses his body on-screen in ways that often shouldn't be possible, and uses the practically limitless capabilities of cinema's ability to deceive to create scenes that range from unlikely to just downright impossible.

The most ethereal of his films is Sherlock Jr., for the ways it disintegrates the boundaries between reality and cinema. It is essentially a film about (a) film, one of the earliest metacinematic experiences that was disguised as something much more ordinary. This was the earliest Keaton film I saw, and it continues to be my personal favorite — which, I suppose, shouldn't be all that surprising to those who know Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is my favorite film of all time. Like Hitchcock's, Keaton's is painstakingly crafted. Both are imminently accessible yet infinitely layered, and sing complex and unrestrained praises of the medium in which they appear while producing the most enjoyable work of art possible. Few experiments are more difficult than creating a work of art that adequately reflects, praises, and comments on its medium; few, if any, come as close as these films to creating such a work that also reaches perfection.

The triumph of Sherlock Jr. is the triumph of the quotidian and of the universal. Keaton plays a likable movie theater janitor and projectionist, hapless in life and love but aiming for something better. His dream is to become a detective and to win the affection of a girl (Kathryn McGuire), but his progress toward either dream is thwarted when a villain (Ward Crane) sets him up as a thief and attempts to win the girl. He returns to his job a distraught man, and as he falls asleep behind the theater's projector, he dreams his way onto the screen, where the characters have been replaced with the people of his own life and where, as his dream persona of Sherlock Jr., he is for once able to move deftly, skillfully, and acrobatically to solve the case.

Dream states were not new territory for Keaton by 1924. The early part of the decade was still a nascent age for film, and the narrative device of a dream had allowed him to get away with scenes and sequences that depart from reality while not profoundly disrupting audience interpretation. In shorts like The Love Nest and The Frozen North, Keaton used the dream as an excuse to explore an exotic location. But his short The Playhouse, in which Keaton uses multiple exposures to play more than twenty roles in the span of just a few minutes, has more in common with Sherlock Jr. in the opportunities it afforded Keaton to create in the netherlands of possibility.

The contrast works well. In the opening scenes, the primary comic emphasis is on slapstick and pure jokes. There's a wonderfully simple sequence where he finds $3 in the trash outside the theater but soon finds himself losing it in a series of unfortunate events. Shortly thereafter, his "How to Be A Detective" book suggests he follow his suspect closely, and Keaton and Crane perform a pantomime where Keaton mirrors his every step only inches behind him. But once Keaton enters the film, the other side of Keaton emerges: the stunt-work, the choreography, the diligent planning of nearly every moment. It is in these moments — in our dreams, when anything seems possible — that Keaton shoots a perfect game of billiards (all avoiding a single ball, which was planted as an explosive), jumps through a window and perfectly into the clothing disguise of an old woman, and makes a daring escape on the handle-bars of a motorcycle that zips through potential crash after potential crash, all while not knowing there's no one driving it.

The cinematic legacy of Sherlock Jr. may be less about its superb entertainment factor (at 44 minutes, it seems too scant to be a feature film, but it exists without an ounce of fat) than it is about its superb filmmaking factor. It is a complete synthesis of performance and form. Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, notes Keaton demurred all claims of intellectuality in his films and stubbornly settled with a classically stone-faced line of, "I was just trying to get laughs." But, Kerr notes, that doesn't negate the reality that Sherlock Jr. nevertheless shows Keaton to be a brilliant analyst of film, particularly in the early scene of Keaton being transported from one landscape to another (only to trip over, fall, or spin in the shock that he is somewhere new) with the speed of a splice. Writes Kerr:

... the sequence illustrates basic theories of continuity and cutting more vividly and with greater precision than theorists themselves have ever been able to do. But the analysis was in not Keaton's head. It was in the film. He went past celebration and worked only with the thing itself, creating what amounts to theory out of his body, his camera, his fingers, a pair of scissors. Art is often something done before it is something thought: Keaton's impulses were not only stronger but more accurate than any verbal formulation he might have chosen to offer for them.

It is tour de force filmmaking: special effects created purely with the aid of mathematics, celluloid, and scissors instead of computer rendering software. That scene so baffled audiences and colleagues that cameramen and directors were reportedly heard to boast around the corners of Hollywood that they'd seen it multiple times and still had yet to discover how Keaton had actually managed to create the illusion, to transport himself between locales without seeming to move a muscle. Two decades went by before he revealed the secret: first he meticulously measured the distance between the camera and himself, then he developed the last frame from the previous shot and placed it inside the camera's viewfinder, where his cameraman could coach him into lining up with himself. Thus the irony reveals itself: when you see the sequence play out on the screen, it appears to be the product of miraculous technology; but the technology was rather ordinary, and instead, it was Keaton's corporeal control and poise that proved to be more miraculous. (Sherlock Jr. tested the endurance of his body in other ways as well. While filming a scene where he falls from the trough of a water tower and lands on a set of train tracks with hundreds of gallons spilling out onto him, he broke several vertebrae. He suffered severe migraines in the years that followed but only realized he'd actually broken the bones when a doctor told him during a routine insurance examination that it had healed well.)

That tension between the film's outer narrative (Keaton the projectionist, trying to become the detective and win the girl) and the film's inner narrative (Keaton the detective, solving crimes with über-sleuth panache) does not drive Sherlock Jr. on its face. By the time of the climactic motorcycle sequence, it is possible that most people — myself included, practically every time I watch the film casually and do not force myself to track its machination — have become so consumed with the inner detective story that they have forgotten the film's narrative origin. But of course that's no accident. Robert Knopf calls the whole inner story "one of the longest narrative disruptions in Hollywood cinema," an altogether fitting description because films usually deliver two-hour disruptions in the human condition. They transport us somewhere new and allow us to become something we are not. Sherlock Jr. rejoices and relishes in that fact; by setting forth on an audacious journey to codify that sensation into the physical language of film, it delivers one of cinema's most flawless spectacles.

Our Hospitality (1923)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:33:00 +0000

d. John G. Blystone & Buster Keaton / USA / 73 mins.

If you enter Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality through the back door of time, you might not immediately appreciate it for what it is. Having now re-watched Keaton's works in chronological order, it is easier and more rewarding to see this film as a giant leap forward for Keaton, his first true feature film as a director even if it is technically his second (Three Ages, released earlier in the same year, was three shorts spliced together). The film has an entirely different rhythm and pulse than anything Keaton had done before; it is mature storytelling, with a straightforward and occasionally dramatic and satirical narrative positioned first and the comedy serving as a successful buttress.

Contextually, Keaton's films are often set on the cusp of something — the moment civilization is about to roll forward to something else, with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. That metaphoric straddling shouldn't be surprising considering how acrobatic Keaton was; his stunts occupy that same plane, always partially under control and always partially out of control. Our Hospitality is a riff on progress, refracted through the seeming absence of progress. It finds itself at a technological nexus, a time when bicycles didn't have pedals yet and trains (a Keaton favorite, this time a working model of Stephenson's 1831 "Rocket") bounced up and down on tracks.

The human story is also an on-the-cusp variety. Based on the famous feud between the Hatfield family and the McCoy family, Keaton plays Willie McKay, a surviving member of a family that has been feuding with the Canfields for generations. On the train-ride South, he strikes up a friendship with a lovely young woman named Virginia (Natalie Talmadge, at the time Keaton's wife), but neither knows the other is the member of an opposing family. Upon their arrival, Willie finds himself embroiled with Virginia's brothers and menacing father (Joe Roberts, a Keaton regular who suffered a stroke during production and died shortly thereafter). Willie manages to find a moment of eerie and foreboding serenity by becoming a guest in the Canfield home after the elder Canfield has decreed that as long as he is a guest, he will not be harmed. Once he steps outside, however, that's another matter.

Keaton intentionally set the film the antebellum South (to give himself the opportunity to play with the era's technology), but the decision also infuses the narrative with palpable geographic tension. Keaton's Willie may have been born in the South, but he was raised in the North and returns to his birthplace as a Northerner seeking to settle his family's estate. The story does not make clear what his subsequent intentions are: will he move to the South if he has inherited the mansion he dreams of, or will he merely handle all that is necessary and come back North where his family now lives? Either could be seen as an affront to the traditional respect of a culture. More pressing for the film is his connection to the Canfields as a McKay.

The title could be read as a mockery of Southern hospitality, yet the film does not venture to taunt a particular culture. Indeed, it is an undeniably grim title: what is hospitable about a family that wants to kill you but is being polite enough not to do it while you're in their home? But the human condition is undeniably grim as well, and as the final moments of the film demonstrate, it is not a cultural obstacle the characters must traverse but rather the human condition. An embroidered axiom that hangs on the walls of the Canfield estate converts the father — a standard message of loving thy neighbor — but that message is not directed at any one person or people, but rather people on the whole. It is not a victory of politics because the film was never interested in its characters as walking metaphors in the first place; instead, it's a personal victory, a victory for Willie who has not only saved the girl but managed to marry her as well. (The parting shot is rather hilarious, too: once the truce is called, Willie, who has until that point been the subject of a chase, begins unloading numerous firearms from his pockets. Although he might not have been willing to fight in the name of his tribe, he was ultimately willing to defend himself so he could be with the girl he loves.)

More importantly, there's not a flat note in the film. Our Hospitality possesses a forward momentum in its narrative that is generally lacking from Keaton's shorts, which possess more of a circular narrative that takes a situation and mines it for all its comic gold rather than pushing it to another place. But it doesn't venture too far away from what we could expect of Keaton — namely a good chase, some fantastic stunts, and a few simple gags, scaled back so as not to interfere with the plot. (In one of the best, Willie, trying to stall his departure from the Canfield home, repeatedly hides his hat under a seat but a feisty dog keeps retrieving it for him.) It is not one of Keaton's funnier films, but I don't see that as a strike against it. What it lacks in laugh-out-loud humor it more than makes up for with its charm and handsome character.

Writing about Keaton's stunts is in many ways as effective as writing about the choreography and performance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — at some point words begin to breakdown and oxidize into useless tools; the event simply must be seen to be believed. The breathless climax of Our Hospitality, set on a rushing river which ends in a waterfall, is one of the great scenes in Keaton's oeuvre. (And in one of his many brushes with death while making films, he actually almost drowned shooting his struggle of being sent down the river.) He finds himself dangling over the waterfall, a rope tied around his waist and attached to a log that has become jammed in some rocks. He is desperately trying to free himself and reach safety on nearby rocks when he is called into action to save the girl, who is caught in the current and headed toward the fall. Those who have seen it can't forget it, and those who haven't should as soon as possible.

Three Ages (1923)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:34:00 +0000

d. & Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton / USA / 63 mins.

Although considered to be Buster Keaton's first feature film, Three Ages is really no more than three short films about love during various eras of human civilization cut and woven together. Keaton admitted as much, too. Willing to perform outrageous stunts in front of the camera, behind it he was a rather shrewd and cautious businessman. If feature-length Keaton turned out to be a failure or unpopular with audiences, his thinking was that he could return to Three Ages, tear it down, and reassemble the pieces into three short films.

This fact does not diminish the overall enjoyment of Three Ages, which manages to build good will during its running time by coalescing into a tongue-in-cheek parody of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance — a film that billed itself as "love through the ages." For Keaton, the eras are the Stone Age, the age of the Roman Empire, and contemporary 1920s America; the relative constants are that Keaton plays his poker-faced paradigmatic character in each epoch, trying to win the affection of a young woman (Margaret Leahy, in all three) and butting heads with another suitor (Wallace Beery, in all three) and the girl's father (Joe Roberts, a crossover from Keaton's short films).

The Stone Age and Roman Empire segments both provide lighthearted entertainment, spoofing contemporary attitudes about love and society, particularly our technology, which always seems to fascinate Keaton. He sends up golf, parking spaces, automobiles, meteorology, gambling, and bicycles, which all tend to amount to nothing but throwaway gags. Although the Stone Age segment is imminently forgettable, the Roman scenes do contain a bit of wicked creativity on Keaton's part. In one gag he succeeds during a chariot race despite a freak snowfall when he attaches skis to the bottom of his chariot and forgoes the horses for sled dogs; in another, parodying the biblical tale of Daniel, he is thrown into a lion's den where he and the big cat become friendly after he volunteers a manicure. It is silly more than anything else (the lion is so patently fake and immobile you don't expect any harm or threat), but it's not without a certain charm.

Of the three, it is actually the modern era segment that proves superior. It is the closest in theme and style to the shorts Keaton and Cline had been making the preceding three years, and if it had been released on its own as a short, it would probably rank among Keaton's best from that period. The jokes in this section are far superior, including his participation in a football game that pre-dates Harold Lloyd's famous football game in The Freshman (it also provides more laughs than the sequence in that film as well). As one might expect, Keaton's size and fear factor heavily into the humor of the football sequence, but he also utilizes camera placement and spatial fields to create certain effects, such as distancing himself from the other players and allowing the unsteadiness following a particularly tough tackle to play out across the field. In another scene, he pulls the audience along as a phone booth that holds his character is picked up, moved out of a building, and onto the back of a pickup truck. In the best Keaton sequences, the mise-en-scène has been calibrated carefully and there is a tangible sense of objects, and although the camera doesn't move to reflect any wooziness or dread during the moving of the phone booth, the film nonetheless evokes such a response from the audience and by taking his time, Keaton winds up for a great punch-line.

After all, comedy, if it is anything, is part art and part science. While it was evident in his independently-produced short films that Keaton already had the dynamics of comedy under firm control, there's a particular scene near the end of Three Ages that I think demonstrates his mastery quite well. As with his shorts, the film is a balance of action and inaction, of measuring the situation for the right response — subdued, proportional, or overdone— and of targeting his performance to fit the particular space captured on film. Keaton does not merely attempt to circumnavigate our expectations, but to slice through them like a tornado-blown needle. In the scene I speak of, Keaton is being chased and is making his way across rooftops when he reaches a gap between buildings that is too wide to jump. From the moment he begins (in his performance) to process the distance between the rooftops and whether he could actually make such a jump to the actual moment he jumps, exactly seventeen seconds elapse. Such an amount of time feels rather insignificant, but the scene is performed in one unbroken take and is loaded with the suspense of what he will do coupled with the tension already felt in the pursuit. We are able to watch him as he (and we) are invited to solve the dilemma. Naturally, he being Buster Keaton and we being silent comedy spectators, there is an expectation that he will jump, and he does; there is also an expectation on our parts that the jump will not be perfect, but we are heretofore left guessing how exactly it will culminate.

What happens is ultimately beyond expectation. He jumps, but he misses the building, falls through a few awnings, grabs onto a gutter pipe which becomes unmoored and swings him down, sending him through a window, across the floor of firemen's quarters and to the firehouse pole, where he then falls through and lands abruptly onto the ground-level floor. This sequence is sharply edited with multiple cuts (but still not too many; Keaton always wanted the audience to know it was him on screen). Without missing a beat, he stands up, now as dazed as we, and sits down on the back of a fire engine bumper. The beat now is infinitesimally longer than the time between his landing and his move toward the fire engine, but it is nonetheless discernible, enough time for us comprehend what has happened. We are given just enough time before the fire engine, supposedly on this whole time, suddenly leaves the firehouse garage. That sequence — the film's most remarkable action sequence — is exactly twelve seconds, or five whole seconds shorter than the essential inaction that preceded. It is a crucial cinematic move for the comedian's part, and it is wondrous to see how deft Keaton at blending the art of his performance with the science of his editing to achieve the maximum comedic and disorienting effect.

Keaton always contended that such artistry was never at the front of his mind while he was making films. Fair enough. I'll take him at his humble word and say that perhaps what he was doing was not explicitly conscious. But there is little doubt in my mind that he was the sort of person who could naturally feel the pulse of an audience and had an internal timing mechanism that was virtually peerless. Because he wore all hats during production — actor, director, producer, writer, stunt coordinator, etc. — he was able to incorporate that timing into all facets of the film. The scene I described is one of countless moments in Keaton's work where a viewer can marvel at how well the viewing experience synchronizes with the film's creation, even more than eighty years later. And while Three Ages as a film in its totality is not among Keaton's best, what would have been the short film reflecting modern age romance certainly is. The other two, while not great, are at least fun and complement the overall intention.

The Short Films of Buster Keaton (1920-1923)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:34:00 +0000

d. Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton / USA / Nineteen shorts, 394 mins.

The short film is often a forsaken art, uncounted by many in catalogues of great movies and spuriously rejected on the premise that bigger equals better. When treated as a launching pad, the short film will feel like nothing but — a couple sets, small-scale slapstick, a limited cast. D.W. Griffith made almost 400 of them in the span of a few years; Charles Chaplin turned out one per week while working for the Essanay and Mutual studios. Once studios realized people would sit for an hour and a half to two hours, shorts began losing their luster; once the dawn of television occurred, mainstream shorts had become a near-relic.

But the short films that Buster Keaton made between 1920 and 1923 — nineteen of them, co-directed and co-written by himself and Edward F. Cline with occasional work by Mal St. Clair — are frequently an exception to the idea that shorts are inherently less satisfying and less accomplished than feature films. At their best they exhibit gusto and enterprise lacking in many feature comedies, from this or any other era. And at their best they dispel the theory that you can't do something grand on a small scale. Indeed, while Keaton's true masterpieces would come later in long form, his short films don't suggest he was holding back anything. In films like One Week (1920), The High Sign (1921), and The Electric House (1922) he constructed elaborate, expensive, and ingenious sets with no less attention to detail than his work in features. In The Playhouse (1921), he flashes his technological mastery of cinema by using multiple exposures to play more than twenty different roles, and in Cops (1922), dozens and dozens of extras fill out an entire police force that chases him through the streets. They're unique even in the world of short comedy and work in a way few other shorts either attempted or achieved.

This success is no doubt tied to two important elements. The first is incidental: Keaton's producer, Joseph M. Schenck, provided the largesse and independent approach that gave Keaton the opportunity to make the films he did, initially these two-reels and later five- to six-reels. The second is contextual, therefore perhaps more crucial: Keaton saw film as film. He would not have been able to do what he did in any other art-form, and this knowledge seemed to both liberate and invigorate him. Chaplin's shorts tended to be more performance pieces set around the Tramp persona, the benefit of film being that the Tramp could appear on the farm in one and backstage at a movie in another; although the sets changed, the straightforward and clean production pattern did not. As Chaplin began pushing the boundaries of the medium's presupposed limits — making four-reelers like A Dog's Life and Shoulder Arms in 1918 — his films grew not only in length and scope but prestige. Keaton, on the other hand, embraced the possibilities of cinema early. His first two films, One Week and The High Sign (the latter was released in 1921, but filmed before One Week) created wildly different scenarios. Whereas each Chaplin short felt like simply the next stop on the Tramp's long journey through the universe, each Keaton short was like a universe within itself.

Much like his feature films, the shorts provide a close-up inspection of Keaton's psychology and what fascinated him as a thinker. Certainly the most prevailing interest he had was with the tension between man and technology — specifically how such technology designed to provide comfort ended up causing so much pain. One Week, one of Keaton's best, follows him as a newlywed attempting to build a do-it-yourself house that he and his bride have been given on the occasion of their wedding. What seems like a sweet gesture is undercut by a grim sense of premature failure, a lopsided, oblique monstrosity that leads to sheer mayhem and must be moved to the correct lot after construction. But there's an intriguing disconnection between the technology gone awry on screen and the technology perfected behind the camera. The Scarecrow (1920) introduces us to Keaton's Goldbergian cleverness, where a house is filled with multi-tasking elements: a sink turns into a bench, a phonograph turns into a stove-top, and a bookshelf opens into a pantry, all designed to provide chuckles but none of which contributes to the ultimate goal of the film, to provide a chase sequence. The entire premise of The Electric House is that Keaton, mistaken as an electrical engineer, is put in charge of wiring a home in order to put it on the vanguard of technology. The staircase becomes an escalator, a mechanized billiards table funnels the balls into a display case and then re-racks them for the players, the food is served on a miniature train, and so on.

The electric house within The Electric House fails, at least as far as the characters on screen are concerned; it is a dangerous home that malfunctions, most notably in the way its escalator sends its inhabitants flying out of windows. The short itself rolls out resplendently, and it is executed with tactical brilliance by Keaton and his crew. Perhaps his most perfectly executed gag film is The High Sign, where an unemployed Keaton (he portrayed unnamed men in most of his shorts, so I'm going to use his name as something interchangeable with his characters) wanders into town looking for a job and accidentally becomes mixed up in a murder plot. The gags there are simple, ranging from an obscenely large newspaper that seems capable of unfolding infinitely to the antics caused by Keaton's clumsy handling of a rifle. His search for employment leads him to accept positions both as an assassin and as a guard of the same man. The centerpiece of the film is a rigged house, full of trap doors and secret walls, which come in handy for the spry and agile Keaton to evade the gang that has his hired him to do the hit-job when he decides to protect the target and the target's daughter.

What becomes evident watching a Keaton short is that, while all silent comedies seem oriented around the slapstick gag, the director differs from his contemporaries in one important way: he was as concerned about the role of technology on-screen as he was about utilizing technology in the process of making movies. He was an early master of cranking the camera at different speeds to create the illusion of frighteningly fast action, such as in Cops and The Blacksmith (1922), the latter of which continued his fascination with man's use of technology. In that short, he plays a blacksmith's assistant who takes over the busy with disastrous results when his boss is arrested. The Blacksmith is one of many films Keaton made where he rather seamlessly blurs the lines between time and technology, a conscious attempt to evoke the simplicity of a bygone era. There's a gentle and respectful humor in The Blacksmith when horses or manual labor are concerned, and a more sinister and destructive humor where luxury is present (the nice car he is called to work upon is destroyed through a Keatonian mix of oil, fire, and heavy devices crashing into it).

As an innovator, Keaton also explored double-exposure, and there's no better example of this than The Playhouse, his great short film from the second year of production. The film opens with a dream sequence in which Keaton attends a vaudeville show where all the performers and the entire audience are played by Keaton — no less than 25 characters by my count, of all ages and genders, appearing through clean editing and skillful use of multiple exposure. Of course The Playhouse also represents another Keaton motif: his self-denigration through a rather pointed take on socio-cultural masculinity. Keaton was fit and healthy (how else could he have done all his own stunts?), but he was a diminutive five-foot-five, drawn into exaggeration when standing next to his regular shorts co-star Joe Roberts, who was barrel-chested and stood six-foot-three. The Playhouse puts Keaton's stage-hand character in the position where he must act like an ape to cover up for the fact he loses a monkey meant to perform with the star of the show. Time and time again Keaton drew on his physical stature to create the set-ups for these jokes, much like Chaplin did regularly in his career. You can spot Chaplin's influence in Convict 13 (1920), an early Keaton short where he is wrongfully mistaken to be an escaped convict and is sent off to prison, where Keaton must survive against larger gentlemen. My Wife's Relations (1922), while not a particularly brilliant short, nonetheless sees the smallish Keaton accidentally wedded to a large and boisterous woman, whose large and boisterous family push Keaton around until they think he is the heir to $100,000.

But Keaton's films always possess a double-edged take on the notion of masculinity. Keaton aims for laughter because of his size, social status, class, or profession, and this is contrasted with other larger men, but he rarely loses based on size alone. In fact, size is often the contributing element in his (often momentary) victories. The chase, Keaton's third and final recurring device in his shorts, is dealt in his favor because of his size and fitness. In one way or another, all his films are a chase — Keaton chasing something (a girl, typically) or someone (an authority figure or upset father, typically) chasing him. His ultimate chase film, and perhaps his definitive short film, is Cops, where a rather innocent mistake on Keaton's part leads to a city's entire police force chasing him through the streets — although that might be simplifying it a bit too much. Cops is actually Keaton's most surreal film, a portent to later films that would capitalize on his dissociative brand of storytelling. It is almost two one-reel shorts glued together by the presence of a subtly metaphoric anarchist. It begins as most Keaton romances do, with an emphasis on culturally defined masculinity and a girl saying he must go out and make something of himself in order to earn her affection. In attempting to become a success he comes into possession of some belongings in a rather dubious way and then, while riding a wagon into the middle of a police parade, accidentally catches a bomb through by an anarchist. (Naturally, he uses the burning fuse to light his cigarette.) Then the short switches gears and he goes on the run from the entire force, evading them with the help of any and all found-objects — ladders, fences, cars, etc.

In addition to mastering the chase film, Cops reveals another intriguing aspect of Keaton's persona: his bleak humor. He outmaneuvers the police with his cunning and athleticism, but even after proving he is physically up to the task, the girl rejects him and he sadly allows himself to be embraced by the police. The short ends with the shot of a tombstone and his pork-pie hat setting askew atop it. Such bleak humor pervades many of his shorts. Convict 13 takes the notion of gallows humor literally. Hard Luck (1921) is a pitiful Keaton repeatedly failing in his attempts to commit to suicide, and The Frozen North (1922) features a scene where Keaton, riffing on the cold-blooded melodramas of William S. Hart, walks into a cabin and assumes his wife is with another man. He shoots them both, only to discover he's walked into the wrong cabin.

Lest I give the impression they're all jewels, I should note that of the nineteen, less than half are films I would strongly recommend (a full list is printed at the end of this essay). While such comparisons to Chaplin are ultimately fruitless and chiefly irrelevant, in their totality Keaton's shorts lack the general uniformity that Chaplin exhibited at Mutual Studios; but conversely and importantly, there are few if any genuine duds in the bunch, so even when they don't quite come together, there's a surprising amount of pleasure to be had along the way. Neighbors (1920) is often seen as one of the better films, but it only delivers half-way for me. In the film, Keaton is attempting to see a girl in an apartment across a courtyard but has a run-in with a police officer who thinks he's black after a mishap with soil and a mishap with black paint. The humor is strained, but the finale — a choreographed sequence in which three men are stacked on top of each other and bounce back and forth across the courtyard, going in and out of apartment windows — is one of the more inspired teamwork gags. In The Boat (1921), Keaton aims to take his family out onto the water in a craft he made himself except it's too hard to pull out of the garage, leading to the collapse of the entire house as he tries to squeeze it through the frame of the garage. The Boat takes Keaton's joy of large-scale property destruction to new levels; it's not every day that a short film shows an entire house, a car, and a boat virtually destroyed for the sake of a laugh. But there's a risk to humor like this in Keaton's universe, which has always been alluring because he world is tangible and often so realistic it invokes the conceit of surrealism. The Boat provides a set-up almost too fake for its own good: after the boat completely sinks, the title card "You can't keep a good boat down" appears and the boat, wonderfully dry and safe, reappears in the next scene as if nothing had happened. It's a distracting break in the traditional Keaton milieu of things that seem possible even if they aren't.

And although there is plethora of originality in these shorts, some have become dismissible because Keaton would refine a certain element in a better film later. The Balloonatic (1923) offers a vertiginous joy-ride as Buster accidentally climbs on-board a flyaway hot-air balloon, but the bulk of the short is him surviving in the wilderness alongside a girl with whom he's fallen in love — scenes and gags done better in the features Our Hospitality and Battling Butler. His short Daydreams (1922), of which only an incomplete version survives today, presents Keaton as a boy determined to make something of himself in the city so he can win a girl's affection, but in the end he becomes chased by police officers in a retread from Cops, released earlier that year. (Although the short is noteworthy for a single scene where Keaton dons a disguise and looks vaguely like Chaplin's Tramp.) The antics at sea in The Love Nest (1923) are in performed in a slightly different, but better, form in The Navigator.

But still, there are many who believe Keaton's shorts are better than his features. Considering them as a whole, I can't say I'm one of them; I will say, though, that One Week, The High Sign, and Cops should be essential viewing for anyone interested not only in comedy or silent films but cinema in general. They are masterpieces in their own right, more sophisticated than perhaps any other silent shorts I've ever seen, and represent on a small scale the already expansive and wild vision Keaton possessed and would bring to life in his features.

The shorts, ranked first by star and then chronologically:

One Week (1920): ★★★★★
The High Sign (1921): ★★★★★
Cops (1922): ★★★★★

The Play House (1921): ★★★★½

The Scarecrow (1920): ★★★★
The Goat (1921): ★★★★
The Blacksmith (1922): ★★★★
The Electric House (1922): ★★★★

Convict 13 (1920): ★★★½
Neighbors (1920): ★★★½
The Boat (1921): ★★★½
Daydreams (1922): ★★★½
The Balloonatic (1923): ★★★½
The Love Nest (1923): ★★★½

Hard Luck (1921): ★★★
The Frozen North (1922): ★★★
My Wife's Relations (1922): ★★★
The Haunted House (1921): ★★½

The Paleface (1922): ★★

Buster Keaton: An Appreciation

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:22:00 +0000

I first saw Buster Keaton on a snowy night in January, a few weeks into the spring semester of my freshman year in college. It was during an introductory film course, and weekly screenings were held Monday evenings in the biology building, which had an empty theater big enough to hold the approximately 150 enrolled students. As so often is the case with introductory film courses, we began with the origins of cinema. That night's screening included Sherlock Jr., one of Keaton's many masterpieces, although at the time I knew neither Keaton's name nor the possibilities in the world of silent comedy. It's now been many years since that night. I don't remember anything else we watched; probably A Voyage to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery, and maybe even a Griffith or Chaplin short, but I can vividly remember Keaton — Keaton and the dollars outside the theater; Keaton on top of the boxcars and taking a nasty spill when hit with a torrent of water; Keaton and the billiards table; and Keaton in the most memorable of sequences, straddling the handlebars of a motorbike and cruising down a highway of near-misses thinking there was someone actually driving the damn thing.

And I remember that I hadn't laughed so hard at a film in a long time. After the screening was over, I bundled myself back into my layers and made my way back to the dormitory. This was at a Midwestern university in the depths of winter, the trees heavy with ice and the patches of grass covered in wind-blown snow; the maintenance teams were out in the full force, dropping rock salt on the roads and sidewalks, but the results were hardly perfect. Shortly before reaching a key crosswalk, my left foot touched a spot of black ice and slipped out fast behind me. I stumbled but kept my balance, preventing myself from falling onto the sidewalk. And then I asked myself the sort of question I've come to ask myself time and time against when my klutziness got the best of me: How would Keaton have handled that?

It's a question a viewer comes to ask himself numerous times in a Keaton film. Perhaps not necessarily how such a thing will be done, but what exactly Keaton is going to do. Modern psychology teaches us that our understanding of humor — ultimately resulting, if all goes according to plan, in a laugh — is formed largely within a brain that isn't built for such a thing. We are always trying to solve something in black and white, our brains so focused on logic and reasonable prediction that when something incongruous to our expectations occurs, our brain has to shift gears in an attempt to make sense of the words or the action. It is a shift in expectation, so often formed through illogical behavior, that stimulates sections of our brains. It's why a Groucho Marx punch-line that can hit your mind so bluntly — the words steer you in one direction, the pun shocks you back to earth.

Keaton — born Joseph Francis, he earned the nickname "Buster" performing as a young man with his vaudevillian family, known for being able to "take a buster" in the way he could fall — plays this expectations game in his comedy. In the best of Keaton's films, things rarely turn out the way we expect they will. It is not simply that he will fall, flee, or fly, but it is what awaits him at the end of that momentarily airborne journey. This works because Keaton's is also a comedy of space, of expertly constructing and implementing set-pieces down to the millimeter so that everything goes according to plan. That plan, of course, is for everything not to go according to plan for the character on screen. When Keaton jumps from one building to another, for example, there is a good chance that Keaton-the-character has drastically underestimated the distance and fails in a gloriously funny fashion; Keaton-the-director, who performed all of his stunts, knows exactly the degree to which he will fail and has it worked out perfectly. In an important way this is different from standard slapstick. David Thomson notes that most silent comedies "did little more than film the comedian's 'act,'" which usually included some sort of slapstick or physical humor; but Keaton's films are elaborate works of art built with the camera in mind — in other words, films, not mere performances. Chaplin, who also made films and avoided simply performing an act, often fell as well, but in a way that tried to defy gravity. Keaton fell in a way that worked with gravity; his world is occupied with physical objects that have real weight and often real consequences.

I have no answer to the question of who was better, Chaplin or Keaton, nor do I have a specific answer to the question of whether I prefer one to the other. Most days I'm able to address the issue by saying my heart loves Chaplin and my head loves Keaton. I tend to agree with Andrew Sarris, who says the difference between the two is the difference between poise and poetry, that Keaton should be acknowledged as a "superior director and inventor of visual forms" (note the obfuscation of whether his films were better), and that unlike Chaplin, Keaton's films proved inimitable. But I also find myself agreeing with Walter Kerr in the sense that Chaplin is instantly accessible because "his comedy is contained entirely in his persona, a persona so multi-layered that it cannot be exhausted." Film critics split hairs when they try to decide who's better, but if Keaton is comes ahead for many, Kerr argues in The Silent Clowns, it's because he was more "compulsively analytical," a trait that speaks well to a critic's mind. Keaton is at once an observer and a participant in his own films. While Chaplin's persona has remained a relative constant in film appreciation, Keaton's films have produced ebbs and flows of attention, although today they have acquired as fervent a love among some as any auteur.

But perhaps no other auteur needs his works to be as delineated as Keaton. By today's standards, his career feels shockingly short. He began in the 1910s, playing second-banana to Fatty Arbuckle in a series of short films, and ended his career writing jokes for other comedians and appearing in cameo roles in film and television in the 1950s and 1960s. But these films do not encapsulate what is meant by "the films of Buster Keaton," the way we might mean something when we say the films of Hitchcock or Chaplin. Keaton's self-designed output — his true work as a cinematic auteur — was entirely constrained within one decade and made entirely in glorious silence. His first independent release (and thus the beginning of his filmography from most perspectives) came out in 1920; what is regarded as his last was released in 1929.

And as if that was not complicated enough, we must consider this peculiar (for Hollywood, at least) aspect of Keaton's personality: he was comfortable letting a co-director claim a title card all to himself. Toward the end of the silent era his name is strikingly absent from the films he made, at least from the director, producer, and writer cards; and yet, they were all cut of the same cloth, all blueprinted by Keaton himself. Take one look at Steamboat Bill Jr., with the character's furious struggle against a storm and that famous falling wall, and say with a straight-face that such a film is more the development of Charles Reisner instead of Keaton. Some might claim that is auteur theory run amok, but it is undeniable that Keaton was the mechanic behind all his contraptions, buoyed by his producer to choose most of his own paths and develop his own vision. Writes Roger Ebert: "[Keaton] usually used the same crew, worked with trusted riggers who understood his thinking, conceived his screenplays mostly by himself. ... Like Chaplin and Lloyd, he was a perfectionist who would reshoot sequences until the laughs worked, would take as long as necessary on a single shot, would supervise every element of his films. No filmmaker has ever had a better run of genius than Keaton during that decade."

This independence and artistry is documented in numerous Keaton biographies, and it is reinforced by fact. Keaton, like Chaplin, worked best in the realm of loose scripts, open shoots, and on-screen experimentation. Producer Joseph M. Schenck, Keaton's brother-in-law and the man behind Arbuckle's comedies who helped transition Keaton into a solo career, afforded the filmmaker an independence to develop his unique brand of comedy and filmmaking without much interference. That was the era of the Keaton masterpieces.

Critics and scholars mourn the fall of Keaton for the same reason we mourn the early fall of Orson Welles: they were geniuses crushed by the studio. Schenck and Keaton (against the advice of everyone, including Chaplin) sold Keaton's contract to MGM, where he was able to make two more films — The Cameraman and Spite Marriage — with relative freedom until the intersection of two disastrous developments: the indifference of the studio system's bottom line and the emergence of sound. Although someone like Alfred Hitchcock flourished in defiance of the studio system's often unreasonable constraints (often undercutting his producers and slyly playing a game of give-and-take to get what he wanted), Keaton was not the kind of artist who could hold up under such a boss. He was fired from MGM in 1933, an alcoholic who had lost his wife, and forced into joke-writing and cameos to make his living. Whenever he went behind the camera again in the sound era, the results were not the same.

And yet, could it have been any other way? As we shall see over the course of this month, Keaton is often revered as the most silent of the silent comedians. Kerr writes that Keaton was silent in the way of "stillness of emotion as well as body, a universal stillness that comes of things functioning well, of having achieved occult harmony." For film critic James Agee, the silence was critical in how Keaton sought to create his cinematic world: "He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood."

Maybe if silent films had not fallen out of favor as quickly as they did, and if the studio heads at MGM had been more appreciative of Keaton's creative process, he could have been able to continue making film after film, delighting audiences with his slapstick, his pratfalls, his intricately constructed set-ups, his masterful attention to detail behind the camera. Or maybe he, unlike Chaplin, could never have made the transition to sound, even if he hadn't foregone his independence. (Although certainly there are many who contend Chaplin never fully transitioned into the sound era, either.)

Keaton lived long enough to see a slight resurgence of interest in his films, driven in large part by a 1949 article Agee wrote for Life magazine that trumpeted "Comedy's Golden Era." He died in the mid-1960s without seeing the steps taken by the film criticism and academic communities to place him in the pantheon of great American directors. He did not suffer the egomania that Chaplin did — in Keaton's autobiography, he calls Chaplin the greatest of the silent comedians, whereas Chaplin's autobiography doesn't even mention Keaton — so perhaps he expected to float away into the cinematic limbo of Harold Lloyd or Harry Langdon. Perhaps, too, he could not have imagined that sixty years after Agee he would still be the subject of retrospectives, this time in the fields of film theory, history, and criticism in academic environments, articles and books, and blogs across the Internet.

Taking into consideration that I have already examined the films of Chaplin, my summer series on silent films must involve the works of Keaton. I have heard Keaton's voice, but I cannot hear it in my head now, the way I can call up the purring tones of Chaplin's well-spoken but faded accent. Keaton is silent in all the best ways. Today he is loved, but still not in the same way as other film directors or stars. Unlike the characters he plays on screen, Keaton as a director needs that extra boost from writers willing to lend it to him. In Agee's retrospective on silent comedy, he wrote: "Perhaps because ‘dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than ‘dry’ wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly." The next month on Screen Savour will be an act of not caring mildly, of diving into Keaton's films with the same energy he had when diving into water. Or a window. Or a car. Or between a man's legs. Or over a man's shoulder. Or any number of possible maneuvers that made Keaton unmistakably Keaton.

Screen Savour's First Anniversary

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:09:00 +0000

Today is the first anniversary of Screen Savour. Thanks to all my great subscribers, readers, and commenters. I hope you've enjoyed the last year, and here's to another.

If you'd like to catch up on what I've managed to accomplish in the previous 365 days, please feel free to peruse my archives, available on the right-hand side of your screen. There are complete filmographies of Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Chaplin. The decade list allows you to browse all my full-length reviews and essays available on the site, and for easier navigating, let me to say you'll find films from the 1910s through the 1960s (I haven't begun addressing cinema from the 1970s onward yet). You can check out my five-star reviews in the scroll box, or track my progress through the National Film Registry. There are even some top-ten lists available.

What I haven't loaded into easily navigable will soon find their way into the directory. Until then, thanks again for everyone who visits.

Der Letzte Mann (1924)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:34:00 +0000

d. F.W. Murnau / Germany / 90 mins.
Alt: "The Last Laugh"

Note: The following review discusses the ending of the film.

Emil Jennings, as the old hotel porter in F.W. Murnau's Der Letzte Mann, commands attention. He is tall and rotund, proud of his profession and regal in his presentation, the sort of working class employee who simply loves what he does and perhaps receives a paycheck only incidentally. The film is the story of his downfall, an undoing from disinterested boss who removes him from his position as doorman and relocates him to the washroom. And with that, the nameless porter loses his self-worth and the clothes that made him feel kingly even if he wasn't compensated as such. He goes to great lengths to hide this reality from those whose respect he desires, and as these things are wont to go, he will soon face the seemingly bottomless pit of his own desolation.

This is one of cinema's few films to be told in virtual silence, produced almost exclusively through its cinematography, editing, and performance, with only one intertitle and a few diegetic words in the actual inner-workings of the film. It was a bold and powerful experiment even in 1924, when silent cinema was the only possibility, and rightly it has found its place in the annals of history. But even if it had not found its way into canon, even if it were sitting on a dusty shelf in some rural German studio factory and only discovered through an accident and watched by those with little to no understanding of film history, I have no doubt it would still resonate as a profound experience. It is one of Murnau's masterpieces and, subsequently, one of cinema's great treasures.

I've never wavered in my contention that one of the most (if not the most) difficult film genres to pull off is silent melodrama. The stakes are often too high, the stories often too histrionic. In many silent dramas, the cogs don't turn at the same speed — the story spins in underdeveloped slowness while the acting, spinning bombastically, attempts to fill the void. Murnau earned his way into the pantheon of extraordinary directors for his ability to bring a crucial equilibrium to silent dramas, a balance and steadiness in the narrative and performance while confidently incorporating bold and audacious production techniques. For Der Letzte Mann he was aided by the great cinematographer Karl Freund, a workhorse of expressionism in Germany. The film is as well known for its famously untethered camera as it is for its lack of intertitles; in key moments of emotional development, Freund's camera leaves the tripod for an early makeshift version of a stedicam, moving across the floor of the hotel or down the street in luxurious and dreamlike tracking shots that follow the porter or display an avant-garde sensibility in point-of-view, the likes of which cinema had seen very little of until that point.

Much of Der Letzte Mann feels like cross-hairs positioned over your heart. It is an epic downfall of a modest man, and Jennings's performance is tremendously affecting, among the best because it is entirely in pantomime (with the assistance of a narrowly tailored film score, which Murnau oversaw to ensure it captured the emotion on screen). The screenplay, by longtime Murnau collaborator Carl Mayer, is tight, engrossing, and unrelenting. The film missteps once, and, this must be admitted, rather egregiously. Der Letzte Mann stands as pure tragedy, of the ilk where the ending is a foregone conclusion — except in this case it is not. The single intertitle the film possesses arrives after we believe we've witnessed the utter destruction to a man's soul to inform us, rather shockingly, we haven't:

Here the story should really end, for, in real life, the forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death. The author took pity on him and has provided a quite improbable epilogue.

The word "author" is questionable in this context. The film's bathetic ending is credited to both Murnau and to Ufa, the production studio. To whom it belongs is largely beside the point. The porter, surprisingly (even shockingly), is saved from his life of destitution by a fluke inheritance, which enables him to return to the hotel donning expensive threads and treating his co-workers and friends to champagne and caviar, riding away in a carriage with a hearty laugh filling the air. In some respects the intertitle drips with sarcasm — "quite improbable" indeed — and even if it was the idea of Murnau, the phrasing suggests a reluctance on his part, the sense that he knew much better as a storyteller. The decision affects the film as a total experience, but it doesn't negate the hard-fought production that comes before it, assuring masterpiece status regardless. Still, the overtly happy ending is inharmonious to the preceding narrative and to the nightmarish expressionism brought to life by Murnau and Freund, who used the tools of a dream to make a poignant and insightful observation on society's dispassionate cruelty. The final scenes completely and unwisely invert that dynamic, no matter how strongly Murnau suggests that life would not play out in the way of the film's finale.

This is why although the German-to-English translation of Der Letzte Mann is "The Last Man," the film is known in English as "The Last Laugh." For authenticity's sake, I do wish it was instead referred to as "The Last Man," but with more than eighty years since its U.S. release, I doubt the change will arrive any time soon. Both titles convey an important degree of ambiguity — the concept of "the last man" applies the porter as the actual last (or, previous) man to hold the job and applies both to his inner depression and the social statement Murnau makes about an industrial society that abandons its elderly. "The Last Laugh" holds that same degree of ambiguity in the way it first represents the absence of laughter (the porter's depression) and the one-upmanship bestowed on him through his inheritance (in his fortune he literally gets the last laugh against those who wronged him). But because I'm someone who doesn't believe the coda is necessary, if possible I would have preferred distributors stick to the more existential title of "The Last Man." It encapsulates the film, and perhaps Murnau's legacy, more appropriately.

Best Films of 2003

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:15:00 +0000

My list of the top ten films of 2003 is now up at Film for the Soul for the Counting Down the Zeroes series.

Frau im Mond (1929)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:05:00 +0000

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 169 mins.
Alt: "Woman in the Moon"

Note: The following review discusses key elements of the film's conclusion.

Frau im Mond is not cinema's first dramatized depiction of man's journey to the moon (see: Georges Méliès), but at its time it was the best that had been done. We'll begin with the science, which, for 1929 standards, isn't as bastardized as it could be. For this science-fiction tale of the first manned-mission to the moon (the title is translated: "Woman in the Moon"), Lang and his screenwriting collaborator Thea von Harbou brought in two noted scientists — writer Willy Ley, who become an émigré and help shape public policy for the U.S. space program; and Hermann Oberth, a mentor to Werner von Braun and one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. The move was crucial to lend the film a sense of authenticity. The two thinkers correctly predicted the sort of force that would be necessary for man to break through Earth's atmosphere and into orbit, the G-force that would affect humans inside a space craft, and the trajectory that would be required to make it to the moon, using the gravitational pull of the latter to "sling-shot" the rocket back toward Earth.

Of course, they got some things wrong as well, beginning most notably with the supposition that the moon would have a stable, oxygen-rich atmosphere and people could run around without any helmets or suits. (To be fair, the movies were still getting that wrong well into the 1950s.) There was also a small glitch in a key element of the film's plot: the moon is not some vast reservoir of gold deposits, but it is precisely that wealth that drives us into the heavens in the film.

The scientists should be commended, as should Lang, for their aspects of the film are perhaps the only reason it's interesting today. The plot is so bungled and trite in Frau im Mond that it is the science that drives the narrative, that makes the scenes interesting from moment to moment, up until its rather unexpected ending. When the plot turns away from the science, Frau im Mond is exposed for what it is really is: a minor Lang film with second-rate love story advised by first-rate thinkers.

The film is a hybrid of Lang's two favorite silent genres, the espionage thriller and the fantasy. A leading space scientist named Helius (Willy Fritsch) is in the process of developing man's first trip to the moon under the advice and counsel of his mentor, Professor Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl). But Helius's research is stolen by thugs who demand to be taken to the moon, where caves of gold are thought to exist. A criminal mastermind working with the thugs plots the trip and forces the participation of professor, Helius, and Helius's partner, an engineer named Windigger, who brings his scientist fiancée, Friede, for whom Helius has unspoken love.

After building Metropolis and watching the city in the film reach the brink of destruction, perhaps the moon was the only place left for Lang to go. Much like the former, Frau im Mond is a study in the fateful overreaching of mankind and the disastrous consequences that lay ahead. It should not a surprise to anyone vaguely familiar with Lang's cynical worldview that this trip to the moon cannot be called a success. The passengers' inner demons begin to get the best of them: the professor goes a little crazy when the discovery of lunar riches is correct. Windigger's fear of dying begins to creep into his consciousness and makes him become progressively unraveled, and the criminal mastermind who has prodded the whole flight also suffers a meltdown and pierces a vital oxygen tank with a bullet. This leaves the rocket capable of returning all the survivors sans one, and the men draw straws to see who stays behind on the moon. Naturally, that role goes to our valiant hero, Helius. (Eat your heart out, Michael Bay.)

Lang films aren't known for their happy endings. When the young man and young woman are united in Der Müde Tod, it is only in death; and when the two classes seem to have found their perfect mediator in Metropolis, the film nonetheless ends on a spooky note, a feeling of cyclical class warfare still looming on the horizon. Frau im Mond possesses the same vital nationalism that seemed to fuel Die Nibelungen; Helius is the sacrificial Aryan hero within the context of the film, a cog in the machinery who does his part not only for his surviving comrades but Germany. (We can't have man's first mission to the moon be a failure, of course.) It shouldn't be surprising that, like the rest of Lang's films, Adolf Hitler was quite smitten with Frau im Mond; and it shouldn't be surprising that, like the rest of Lang's films, Frau im Mond presents a surface that is thematically undercut by a pessimistic subconsciousness.

By staying on the moon, Helius is essentially sentenced to death, although not, as we think, alone. Once the ship has taken off we suddenly realize that Friede has stayed behind for Helius, the two finally united in love and without that pesky partner/fiance making the situation awkward. The revelation of Friede technically makes the ending "happy" and "romantic" — the man and woman meant to be together finally can be. And yet it also undercuts the supposed nationalism. Helius' sacrifice is altruistic for the others and for his country, but Friede's sacrifice is purely selfish and done for the benefit of her and Helius. It is fleeting glory at the sake of a larger cost, destined to fail even if it is a temporary success — much like, we can see, the entire moon shot inside the film.

But the film as a whole fails to come together as powerfully as its final statement. At nearly three hours Frau im Mond is far too long, particularly as the first hour is a miniaturized spy film where the driving narrative force is discovering who has stolen secret documents. (They're always secret documents in a Lang silent thriller.) The journey into space comes too late and ends a bit too easily, making the film ultimately a minor work not only within Lang's oeuvre but also within the realms of silent cinema and science fiction. The science makes it a curious artifact, and the ending is perhaps the shrewdest of Lang's silent films, but Frau im Mond falls short.

Spione (1928)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:24:00 +0000

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 178 mins.

The silent films of Fritz Lang can be divided rather clearly into two distinct categories — the espionage thriller and the dark fantasy. Lang is more famous for his fantasies certainly, films that explore the machinery of fate like Der Müde Tod ("Destiny"), Die Nibelungen and Metropolis. But just as he would leave the mark of his wicked sensibilities on the American noir in the 1940s and 1950s, there is no denying the importance and influence he left on the spy genre in the silent 1920s in films like Der Spinnen ("The Spiders"), Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and Spione.

Spione (translated: "Spies") is often held up as the greatest of Lang's early espionage thrillers, both for its own dynamics as a film and its influence on others. At times it can be a roar, such as the montage-heavy opening sequence where Lang cuts across to capture all the events in a heist of secret international documents, or in the well-done chase sequences, particularly the smashing finale. But as much as Spione can be a roar, it occasionally suffers from being a bit of a confounding bore. As Lang directed it, and as it was originally shown, the film is near three hours in length at 16 frames per second, and it operates off of a complex and convoluted script that makes first-pass accessibility rather difficult. In many ways Spione is an attempt to perfect the formula he began with Spinnen and Mabuse — start off excitingly, dip down into a steady plot with moments of energy, and zap the audience with a high-impact ending — but its downs are a little too sluggish and its energy is never quite as heart-pounding as it could be.

Although it takes a while to establish what exactly is going on, the story, written by Lang and Thea von Harbou, reveals itself to be deceptively simplistic. Agent 326 (Willy Fritsch) is in pursuit of a Russian super-villain named Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, done up to appear as much like Vladimir Lenin as possible) whose organization aims for world domination. Haghi dispatches his own secret agent, Sonya (Gerda Maurus), to throw off Agent 326, but the two fall in love and so the stitching has begun for complicated quilt of intrigue and threat. One of the film's strengths in this and a parallel subplot where it avoids the superficialities of love and lust and imbues a real sense of consequence for the characters as their relationships move forward. Although the characters themselves are drastically underwritten, particularly Haghi, who lacks the complexities of a villain like Mabuse, it is not difficult to see where a film like Spione fits into the Lang canon. He clearly wants to establish a balance between the pulpy occupational endeavors of a spy's life with the more artistic explorations of moral substance of a spy's personal life, but such a balance never seems reached and as one half relies on the other for support the whole film ends up on an uneven keel.

Today Spione lacks the inherent mystery of the espionage world because it led the way in establishing set-pieces that would become cliches in the genre. Its bearded villain, debonair agent, disappearing ink and bullet-proof devices and hidden microphones have all reappeared in spy film after spy film. Spione and Dr. Mabuse, were clearly influential pieces on Alfred Hitchcock, who in the following decade produced numerous spy thrillers in England, the pinnacle of which is undoubtedly The 39 Steps. That film and others like Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Secret Agent (1936) and Sabotage (1936) owe a lot to Spione, with their blends of romance and action. But Hitchcock at his best, as in The 39 Steps, could deduce the essential elements for the spy thriller and managed to boil them down and streamline the entire process into a film that is tighter and more pleasing. Lang's cut of Spione is almost twice as long as The 39 Steps but only half as thrilling; that's a deadly calculus, even for those who revere Lang.

Like many of Lang's films, this has been given a rather beautiful restoration (by the F.W. Murnau Foundation) and looks clean, crisp, and practically new. But just to make things difficult, there is a 90-minute version available (released theatrically in the United States in the late 1920s) that reportedly utilizes some trimming and tinkering and solves some of the pacing problems. For authenticity's sake, without a stamp of approval from a director, I wouldn't suggest viewing a film in any other form except as close to the original as possible. It's possible that the shorter, leaner version capitalizes on the higher points in the script to make a film that might be, for all I know, more functional in the midsections. But it isn't Spione as Lang intended. Although this version is not without its flaws, there's no better time than now to watch the film as it was intended. If nothing else it'll make you appreciate what Lang did the genre and how others, most notably Hitchcock, turned that into gold.

Metropolis (1927)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:05:00 +0000

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 123 mins.

Determining what is the most famous silent film of all time is surely an incalculable task; yet it seems fairly anodyne to nominate Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I doubt I am alone in that belief. Although the films of Griffith perhaps taught us more about making and reading movies; and although the visage of Chaplin in his bowler perhaps will be recognizable centuries from now; and although there are dozens of silent films that better synthesize production and substance; few, if any, have left such an indelible mark in triplicate — style, entertainment, and legacy — and few represent the best and worst of the auteur. For Lang, who would continue to direct great films (some greater) long after Metropolis and into the sound era, nothing else he would do topped the mania. He was at once the apprentice — an inventor, wide-eyed and audacious; and the sorcerer — a cinematic sophist, a perfectionist, pugnacious to his core.

Considered as a self-contained object, Metropolis is a film of staggering scope and execution, the first great science fiction tale in the history of cinema. It has been difficult for any film that has followed to attempt a projection the future — whether dystopian or not — and not channel Lang in some way. And through a unique and perfect storm of happenstance, Metropolis has grown in stature in most off-screen cinematic circles. For the purists, Metropolis has always represented the apogee of tension between the visionary director and yearning coffers of the distributor. After its production practically bankrupted Germany's Ufa Studios (which was then rescued by U.S. studios Paramount and MGM), Metropolis was butchered from Lang's conception. Its original 153-minute running length was trimmed to closer to 90 minutes, after whole subplots and scenes were cut and the frames-per-second were upped from 20 to 24. The theory was: the shorter the film, the more times it could be shown during the day, thus earning more money for the studio that gave it literally almost everything it had. No hyperbole about it, it was a crime against art, particularly when the cut footage remained missing for more than eighty years. (A complete print, albeit in horrible condition, was discovered in Argentina in 2008.)

But there's always been enough of the film for Metropolis work — or at least work in the way a fever dream works. The film fell out of U.S. copyright protection comparatively early, in the 1950s, and in the ensuing years it circulated widely and easily. Like Murnau's Nosferatu, public domain has been both kind and cruel to Metropolis. In the 1980s, coinciding with MTV and the rise of home video, Giorgio Moroder married a pop/techno score to the film, which gave it second life among audiences averse to silent films, and brought it closer to mainstream U.S. culture (there was even a slight uptick in homages to the film, in both science fiction movies and music videos). Getting your hands on a copy has perhaps never been easier; it streams free and legally across the Internet, and numerous DVD copies have flooded the market. But until the missing pieces found in 2008 are cleaned and restored and reinserted into the film, there is one and only one version any serious movie lover should consider, and that's the 2001 restoration from the F.W. Murnau Foundation released by Kino. (That version, it should be noted, is protected under copyright now. You must seek it out and view it appropriately.)

It would be trite to say the difference is like night and day, so I'll say the difference is like air and cheesecloth. The world of film is a better place with the 2001 restoration available on DVD, not only because it is as clear as I've ever seen the film but because it has assembled all of the known pieces of film into one single print, in its original crisp black-and-white and with its original score. Elegantly designed black title cards summarize action and dialogue in the missing sections, using information in the notes taken by the German Censorship Board. The only problem — if you can call it that — is Kino's decision to play it at 24 frames-per-second, the speed at which it was originally shown. Twenty-four f.p.s. is historically accurate (again, one of the many decisions made by the distributor for the purposes of keeping the film as short as possible), but it is believed that Lang intended it to be shown at 20 f.p.s. From scene to scene it's barely noticeable, although it does tend to the exacerbate the already overwrought expressionistic acting. (And, if you're an auteurist, it can break your heart a little.)

The importance of Metropolis, and the source of its greatness, lies in its atmosphere. It doesn't merely establish such a thing; it creates it, the way a meteor creates a crater or the way dynamite blows away solid masses and leaves pebbles in its wake. Its class warfare story is represented by two diametrically opposed sets: a great city that juts skyward, with suspended expressways, deco skyscrapers, its own proxy Tower of Babel, and pleasure gardens where the bourgeois cavort; and a subterranean hell, where the proletariat toil amid heavy machinery and keep the city moving. The sets were reportedly inspired by Lang's observation of the Manhattan skyline, and they are strikingly beautiful in their blend of artificiality and potential realism. Those with different world views and political philosophies can read the world of Metropolis as whatever ratio suits yourself; within the film they are a projection of the future, but are extraordinarily haunting in their potential. The Expressionism and deco aspects of their design keep the edifice exteriors from ever being fully believable, but the lengths which Lang aspires to make them believable, or at least possible in the future, are unsettling. The mechanized devices — airplanes, trams, cars, etc. — move with impeccable timing and fluidity. Lang used mirrors to allow thousands and thousands of extras (more than 30,000, it's been reported) to appear in proportion to their surroundings in a single shot, a seamless and majestic creation from the special effects supervisor, Ernest Kunstmann, and camerawork from the great cinematographer Karl Freund. On a smaller scale, too, the sets are as detail-oriented and sedulously crafted, and have lent themselves as fully to iconography as the soaring city and the industrious underworld. Consider Lang's vision of a scientist's lab, decorated with wires and tubes and levers and dials, and you'll see in it practically every cinematic science lab since 1927. Or consider the famous ten-hour work clock in the depths of the city, where workers are in a constant fight to fix the hands to a proper position. (Something which, has been noted by numerous critics, makes no logical sense but nevertheless leaves its mark.)

Metropolis then is every bit of its name: large, burgeoning, functional, and daunting. On the set, Lang was reportedly a bit of a directorial tyrant who insisted on real things (real fire, real water that really flooded the studio) to bring the science fiction tale of a futuristic dystopia to life. Although such a managerial style seems to ironically undercut the anti-authoritarian message of the film, it's difficult to see how he could have accomplished his goal as successfully as he did without such tight control and such stringent demands. In the final product it's clear that such an approach worked well for Lang, a director whose films has always been about more about image than story and more about theme than plot. If one thing is for certain about Metropolis, it's that it needs a gigantic, complex, and dynamic story to live up to its gigantic, complex, and dynamic imagery; but it ultimately doesn't have one. Maybe more than any movie I've ever seen, Metropolis embodies every iota of the definition of a flawed masterpiece in that it's pure and perfect cinema that offers an absurd story. The protagonist, Freder (Gustav Froehlich), is the posh son of Metropolis' ruler, who veers away from his father and his social status when he becomes enraptured by Maria (Brigitte Helm), a woman of the workers. We see Metropolis through his eyes, both the exquisitely rich aspects and the poor aspects, as he ventures into the underworld and attempts to help Maria save the workers. But plans go awry when a mad scientist named Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) creates a robotic version of Maria to lead the revolution in the wrong direction.

The pieces of the story, co-written by Lang and wife Thea von Harbou, move forward in a march toward inevitable collapse with typical Langian fatalism. The resistance toward the inevitable is stronger in Metropolis than in many Lang films, which appropriately reflects the grand setting at stake. But the details of the story are inconsequential for Lang; Metropolis is an analysis of class warfare performed with a meat cleaver. It is pedantic and a bit naive (it is ultimately a laborious search for "the heart" that will join "the head and the hand"), but interestingly vague enough to be read both as template for latter-day Marxism and on-the-rise Nazism. Lang's films through the 1920s and early 1930s always delved into the roiled emotions and crippled industriousness of Weimar Germany, and as such earned high praise from the likes of Adolf Hitler and his sympathizers, although they were lined with such pessimistic destiny that it's amusing today to think anyone could have read them objectively and believed any on-screen success, whether fleeting or not, would ultimately defy the natural order and avoid ending in complete breakdown. This theme works in Metropolis, as it does in many of Lang's other films, despite the lack of nuance to the story.

It is a testament to the film's strength in style that I'm willing to forgive it of its narrative missteps, an aspect of criticism that I do not allow lightly. But it is also a sign of consistency that this aspect has been derided since its release but forgiven as the viewer comes under its allure. I've seen both the pre-restoration and restoration versions of the film, and can say that it takes something very special to be revered and obsessed over despite its damaged and gnarled state, covered scratches and erosion, with entire sections and characters missing, and played at a false and occasionally cartoonish f.p.s. Still, it is an intoxicating experience and it is difficult not to be swept away in the torrent of Lang's imagination. Essential is a word like all laudatory adjectives that finds itself overused in the hand of the critic. But Metropolis, for all its inherent profligacy, is among the few films to be genuinely worthy of that word.

Die Nibelungen (1924)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:42:00 +0000

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 291 mins.
Alt: "Die Nibelungen: Siegfried" and "Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache"

The legacy of Die Nibelungen is a complicated one, ultimately apropos for its epic size, its mythic origins, and the accolades bestowed on it by fascists. It is one of the most ambitious silent films ever made — a two-part adaptation of a German myth running nearly five hours in length that was two years in the making by a veritable who's-who of Weimar film production. At its time it was the crown jewel from Ufa studios, which was intent on rivaling America as the cinematic powerhouse of the world. And it is for the most part a muscular film, particularly its astounding first half, even if its second half is often as arduous for the audience to endure as it is for the characters on the screen.

Director Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, his German-era screenwriting collaborator and wife, adapted the screenplay from a 13th-century Norse epic poem called "Nibelungenlied," the love story of a prince named Siegfried who wants to woo Kriemhild, the sister to a neighboring king, and her eventual vengeance of his murder. It is a tale of both fantasy and brutal reality. In the first part, as Siegfried is on his way to Worms to earn Kriemhild's heart, he slays a dragon and attains invulnerability after bathing in its blood (save one pesky spot), defeats evil dwarfs and attains riches, and finally helps the king win the love of the queen of Iceland so as he can win the love of Kriemhild. But the Icelandic queen's growing skepticism leads her to call for Siegfried's murder, and after discovering his weak spot, she orders the hit and draws the wrath of Kriemhild, who seeks to avenge his death.

To say this is not really to dispel too much of the film's plot, at least as far as it's understood that the story is abundantly familiar — Richard Wagner adapted the legend for a four-part opera between 1869 and 1874, which has since become one of opera's most famous stories. (It was prominently parodied by Chuck Jones in "What's Opera, Doc?") To watch Die Nibelungen correctly is to focus on the production itself, the thrill of the fights and the mysticism of the fantasy, to marvel at Lang's sublime craftsmanship when it is put on display. Perhaps more than any film Lang had made to this point (and soon to be surpassed by his next, Metropolis), Die Nibelungen is visually arresting. In all contemporary respects, the story takes a backseat to the nuts and bolts of cinema.

And yet ironically, it is the story that has made Die Nibelungen a component of world history. It carries some dubious historical baggage in the extent that it was beloved by German fascists; both Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, loved it for its projection of unabashed nationalism, for the courage and dominance of the German people, for the way the characters exhibit loyalty against reason. Die Nibelungen is dedicated "for the German people," and von Harbou — whose marriage with Lang ended when he fled Germany in the rise of Nazism and she, a national socialist, remained to work for the party — adjusted certain elements of the original myth in her screenplay to give the Nordic characters a superhuman quality, particularly in the second half, where a small band of men bravely fight the Huns although they are greatly outnumbered. Some, including Siegfried Kracauer in his book From Caligari to Hitler, consider Die Nibelungen to be "a key film in the nationalist uprising" primarily through its emphasis on the notion of Fate (a Langian leitmotif — twisted, it seems, beyond its auteur's original intent) and its narrowly tailored movement that sends all its abstract and mercurial elements — love, hatred, jealousy, betrayal, full-scale revenge, deadly loyalty — to a simmering culmination. As scholar Jan-Christopher Horak points out, it is no coincidence that Siegfried, the film's first half, was re-released in 1933 with a spoken prologue and a "Wagnerian soundtrack" only weeks after Ufa had fired all of its Jewish employees.

The history is so transfixing, I think, because what we know about Lang suggests this was not his intention, even if von Harbou's proto-fascism was. Given our understanding of Lang and von Harbou's world views, it's impossible not to regard the first half, Siegfried, as his and the second half, Kriemhilds Rache ("Kriemhild's Revenge"), as hers. Siegfried is far more mystical, with the inclusion of the dragon, the dwarfs, and multiple special effects; it more closely mirrors the dominant expressionism of its time, and tracks closer to the otherworldliness brought to life in Lang's Der Müde Tod in 1921. It is also the more austere of the two halves, more devoted to the careful set up of its tragedy. Kriemhilds Rache — in which Kriemhild moves to the far east, marries Atilla the Hun and plots her cold and implacable revenge against those who have done her wrong — is looser, messier, and with its principal interior sets, less interested in crafting a unique kingdom. From start to finish, Kriemhilds Rache is a hard slog, weighed down by the way it coils over and over on itself as it awaits the barbaric explosion at the end, which hardly proves satisfying after a two-and-a-half-hour wait.

It is the contention of some critics (including this one) that Lang's visual style, at least in Siegfried, largely undermines whatever fiery nationalism can be teased from van Harbou's script. More effective than any nationalist sensation is the overwhelming sense of fatalism that pervades Lang's oeuvre, this time brought to life on a gigantic and ancient scale. Lang's films always exhibit his geometric peculiarities, with symmetrical framing and painterly attention to the austere composition. For Siegfried, the camera works as a force of predestination: elements are so balanced that collapse seems inevitable. Scene to scene, there is an unmistakably palpable physicality, even if what could be touched never existed. Ufa, the studio, and Erich Pommer, the producer, gave Lang a gargantuan budget for 1924, and it shows. The dragon Siegfried slays, while somewhat silly in contemporary contexts, was nonetheless a feat of peerless puppetry, sixty feet long and controlled by no less than seventeen people. For all the theorizing that von Harbou and her nationalist cohorts saw Die Niebelungen as a torrential force in German uprising, Lang seems to capture an alternative sensation: suspension as an act of comfort, the awareness of anticipated implosion merely waiting out in the distance. If some historians believe Hitler, Goebbels, and others saw Die Nibelungen to presage the rise of the Übermensch, there's an equally compelling argument to be made that Lang presaged the downfall before it had even risen.

A final assessment is difficult because Siegfried and Kriemhilds Rache are two significantly unequal halves. Although they belong together, they were released two months apart and stand well separately, as long as the viewer enters with a working knowledge of the myth. Luckily, Siegfried is the first and better of the two (one of Lang's best silent films, actually), and not entirely dependent on Kriemhilds Rache to prove itself as a remarkable cinematic experience. But the total effect of Die Nibelungen is brought down by the unsatisfying qualities of Kriemhilds Rache, qualities that feel intentionally drawn to differentiate the two in style and theme but ultimately are inferior to Siegfried so that the contrast is perhaps too starkly drawn. As unfair as it is (or at least as much of a cheat as it is) to split the film in half when technically it is one large whole, it would be equally unfair to knock down the final grade of the film and do a disservice to its first part at the sake of its second. The film overall is recommended for its place in expressionism and the history of cinema, as well as being a crucial part of Lang's filmography. Siegfried is a must-see; but I excuse you from the Kriemhilds Rache if you're not interested.

Siegfried — ★★★★½
Kriemhilds Rache — ★★★

Screen Savour Now Available on Twitter

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:52:00 +0000

At the sage advice of my tech-savvy wife, and after Twitter proved itself to be indispensable for communication in the chaos of Iran's fraudulent election (thus not the sheer fad I originally envisioned), I have brought Screen Savour to Twitter.

What you'll get (besides spelled out words and proper punctuation) are notices when I have posted a new review or a preview of what might be upcoming; links to interesting film-related articles; brief thoughts on the film world and other reverie; and conversations with fellow film bloggers.

If you're on Twitter or looking for a reason to join, come find me.

Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:17:00 +0000

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 270 mins.
alt: "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler"

Those with the slightest exposure to Fritz Lang typically identify him through his three M's: Metropolis, M (naturally), and Mabuse. The last, to be precise, is Dr. Mabuse, the literary creation of novelist Norbert Jacques, whose thriller about the morally bankrupt criminal psychologist became a best-seller in Europe between the world wars. The timing and location of his appearance, in the pulsing boom of modernism on a continent already ravaged and unknowingly prepping itself for another leveling, is important, particularly in the connection to Lang. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is a classically lovable villain — a brilliant con artist who delights with disguises and hypnosis for selfish gains.

Lang made three Mabuse films, beginning in 1922 with this silent epic, whose title translates to "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler." The second film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), is generally regarded as the best, but der Spieler is important; granted, that importance translates more into its contributions to German cinema and Lang's career, as well as its influences on other directors, than for its sheer entertainment. The story, adapted by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, is more than a detective chasing Mabuse, who stalks the already seedy underworld and steals forthrightly from those at gambling tables through his use of hypnosis. It is a venture into Langian territory as an exploration of an amoral society and its general lack of salvation (insanity, it seems, proves to be an unsettling refuge for characters). It is also a question in free will and self-control; Mabuse's preferred method is the cracking open of another's psyche and controlling that person from the inside — an imperfect mode of manipulation, of course, but horrifying in its success rate.

Though actually one film, Dr. Mabuse was originally exhibited in two parts and continues to presented as such. That break is imperative for the film's enjoyment, primarily because its greatest liability is its slowness and sparsity. Size is by no means a harbinger of headache; in the sense that Dr. Mabuse upholds its commitment to the aforementioned themes and Lang's direction sustains an interest in the characters and their surroundings, the film is a success. But the thrilling moments — even the quieter moments that nonetheless can amaze — are too far apart and the story is stretched too thin to fill the film's four-plus-hour running length. The first half, perhaps ineluctably, proves to be the better half if only because the introduction of Mabuse is accompanied by self-activating mystery. The second half is more a brass-tacks police procedural and upper-class critique, with more chases and more Mabuse (this time, typically unmasked), but it lacks the general psychological depth that is introduced in the first half. The unevenness of the story is countered well by the even-handed direction from Lang. Dr. Mabuse lacks the visual surprises of Der Müde Tod, but the first half is peppered with optical delights, including a mesmerizing camera technique for a moment when Mabuse is seducing a victim under hypnosis and the lens slightly zooms toward his face while the rest of the scene fades to black, his seemingly disembodied glowing white head floating in the middle of the frame.

For contemporary lasting power, Dr. Mabuse has influence on its side. In some circles, it is referred to as the first film noir, which is a cinematic term I am dutifully careful not to overuse (I suppose you can draw the lines of your dictionary wherever you'd like). It's evident that this sort of film clearly presages the film noir style and many of the police films that would come after it; but I would wager that its more important influence, or certainly it's more apt influence, would be its lasting effect on Alfred Hitchcock, who as a young British man earned a crash course in filmmaking in Weimar Germany where he drew title cards and observed F.W. Murnau. Hitchcock claimed Lang's previous film, Der Müde Tod, as among his favorites, and Dr. Mabuse contains numerous elements that would become fundamentals in the Hitchcockian aesthetic, including: police procedural elements, the wry humor underlying or undercutting more serious moments, and the quasi-espionage angle of Dr. Mabuse sneaking around to commit his psychological crimes. The ending, and this isn't giving it away, comes down to a shoot-out the likes of which would be mimicked by Hitchcock in his 1934 career-launching classic, The Man Who Knew Too Much. And though this first Mabuse film is perhaps too unwieldy to be an unqualified success, Lang, like those he influenced, would learn later to crystallize his own filmmaking techniques and thematic explorations into condensed packages of compelling drama.

Der Müde Tod (1921)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:44:00 +0000

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 114 mins.
Alt: "Destiny"

For all intents and purposes, Fritz Lang's career begins here, with 1921's Der Müde Tod, released in the U.K. as "Destiny." In the United States, it found itself with different English translations — "Between Two Worlds" and its literal translation, "The Weary Death" — but none has stuck quite as well as "Destiny." Looking back over Lang's entire career, it's not difficult to see why: whereas Lang's previous film, the adventure serial Die Spinnen, is breezy and fun, Der Müde Tod sets course for a career of fatalism and determinism, the impending doom (and potentially subsequent resignation) captured by the eventual understanding of the inescapable. The arch-rival of the protagonist in this film is the personification of Death, and although people have tried for thousands of years to cheat him, there has been headway only in prolonging the inevitable.

This is one of the earliest examples of great expressionistic German filmmaking, shy of masterpiece status (like many of the early ones) but enthralling nonetheless. F.W. Murnau cited it as an influence, particularly on The Last Laugh; no less than Alfred Hitchcock would count it among his all-time favorites, and Luis Buñuel noted its fantastical nature helped draw him into film. I've not heard any words on Ingmar Bergman's thoughts on it, but the influence seems too striking to be unavoidable, even if it's merely tangential.

The story of Der Müde Tod, co-written by Lang and Thea von Harbou, is the story of cycles, fantasy, and fable. While riding into a small town in what appears to be nineteenth-century Germany, a young woman (Lil Dagover) and a young man (Walter Janssen) encounter a mysterious man (Bernard Goetzke). His presence and purpose soon become quite evident when he, later revealed to be Death, abducts the young man into the afterlife — seen here as a large windowless, doorless stone wall that keeps the living out while the spirit of the dead pass through. The woman, determined to retrieve her fiance, manages to slip the bounds of the wall and is given a brief tour of the ephemeral backstage of life by Death. She beseeches him to let her have her love again, and he strikes a deal: she will have three chances, in different eras and locales, to save a man (always played by Janssen, with Goetzke lurching in the background) who is destined to die. If she can merely save one of these men, she will get her own fiance back.

Like the best silent cinema, the story is not simplistic for the sake of being purely simple. The moral and narrative stakes are always higher in silence — extreme cases of life and death, love and loss, etc. — which either can allow the story to synthesize quietly with the art or create a situation where the story overwhelms the technical elements. It is a testament to Lang's talent that this early in his career he was capable of doing the former and doing it well. Although he had been unable to direct The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari due to other obligations, he wisely hired that film's production team (Walter Röhrig, Walter Reimann, and Herrmann Warm) to help bring to life the fantasy world of Der Müde Tod (which is not nearly as surreal or geometric as Caligari's, and instead stays closer to embellished visions of ethnic nations) to life. The film features five primarily exotic locations: first, the world of nineteenth century Germany and the castle of Death; then, as the young woman attempts to save men in order to save her own fiance, she is transported to Persia, circa One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; the Renaissance courts of Italy; and a far eastern trip to ancient China.

The cumulative appeal is broad. Like the best of Lang's films, Der Müde Tod is a visual exploration of the space within the lens, which stands as a filmic metaphor for our own limits and boundaries in life. The acting is slightly overworked, but there is balance from Lang in maintaining our interest in both the characters and their story and the ornamentation of the sets and the haunting composition. The special effects hold up even ninety years later. They are used strategically and infrequently so as to dazzle: transformations, materializations, a flying carpet, a horse riding in the sky, a burning home, etc., all lend power and mystery to the design. The effects were trailblazing enough by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who delivered the greatest argument in favor of Der Müde Tod through his fear of it. He purchased the rights to its distribution in America so he could effectively keep it from the public and stash it in cinematic limbo while he and Raoul Walsh co-opted many of the special effects for The Thief of Bagdad, a rewarding movie in its own right but not as powerful as Lang's. It's difficult to be upset with Fairbanks, however; they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Die Spinnen (1919-1920)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:19:00 +0000

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / Two parts, 124 mins.
Alt: "The Spiders"

The earliest surviving film from Fritz Lang (that we know of, at least) is his third, Die Spinnen, a two-part adventure serial released between 1919 and 1920 known commonly as The Spiders. It is a relatively simple film, bare-bones in its plot and very action oriented, and the influence from the already growing genre of the American western and from France's serial master Louis Feuillade are quite clear in the sense that "The Spiders" — a band of outlaws looking to reap treasure for themselves — are vaguely reminiscent of Feuillade's criminals in Les Vampires. Yet outside of the idea of Lang directing an uncharacteristically airy and chipper adventure serial, there's not much here to chew on.

The hero of the serial — which is divided into "The Golden Sea" and "The Diamond Ship" — is Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt), a wealthy and cavalier sportsman. He acquires a bottle found at sea that proclaims the possibility of Inca treasure in first episode and a powerful diamond in the second, and must race with The Spiders, led by Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) to be the first to reach the objects of their desire. What Hoog and The Spiders are searching for, of course, essentially doesn't matter; Lang, the film's screenwriter as well, happily employs the full force of the "Macguffin" practically a decade before Hitchcock. The plot serves only as a way to get characters from one exotic locale, or one fabulously decorated interior, to another — to put characters on trains, on boats, on balloons, on rocks, and in caves; to introduce kidnapping, espionage, gun-fights, and horse races; and to evoke as greatly as possible a sense of extravagance. There's nothing wrong with these sorts of things, but they're underdeveloped and occasionally gratuitous. The sense of exoticism linked to theme hadn't yet been developed in Lang's storytelling.

It should be of interest to those who regularly muse what might have been that Lang turned down The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to make The Spiders, which was originally envisioned to be a four-part series. It wouldn't be fair to suggest it was a bad career move for Lang, as he's obviously earned his own place in the pantheon through films much better than The Spiders, which is messy and unfocused and not as tight as it could be. The first installment ("The Golden Sea") is the better of the two, but both have soft strengths: lavish sets designed by Hermann Warm and above-average camerawork from the great cinematographer Karl Freund in one of his earliest films. There aren't many Lang fingerprints here, but The Spiders functions as a moderate thriller in spite of its insubstantial script. I wouldn't recommend it for attention outside the outlaw-ish band of Lang completists.

Best Films of 2002

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:43:00 +0000

My top ten list for Counting Down the Zeroes is now up at Film for the Soul. In a few days it'll be cross-posted here.

URL Note

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:10:00 +0000

Due to a glitch in the Google/Blogger system, any screensavour.blogspot.com URL isn't currently connecting in Internet Explorer or Safari and is prompting those with Firefox to proceed to an unprotected page.

If this is affecting your reading of Screen Savour, my apologies. Although I have never given it much thought, I've used two different URLs — both screensavour.blogspot.com and screensavour.net — for many of my in-site links; before the glitch, re-direction was not a problem. I'm doing my best to correct them all to screensavour.net where applicable.

Thanks.

Broken Blossoms (1919)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:58:00 +0000

d. D.W. Griffith / USA / 90 mins.

As a text, Broken Blossoms is perhaps D.W. Griffith's most rewarding film to experience. He dabbles in themes ranging from the large and complicated to the delicate and subtle (or as subtle as Griffith is capable of being), and combines those themes with Griffith's advanced approach to cinematic engineering. It is the story of two neglected souls — an adopted girl with a brutalizing father; a Chinese immigrant who experiences London for all its foggy demoralization — who have crossed paths numerous times before but finally come together and burst outward with the energy of mutual adoration. As a film, it is a tip toward greatness, tarnished if slightly by its stereotyping propensities and occasional mawkishness.

The film is a study of triumvirate of characters. Cheng (Richard Barthelmess) is leaving China for England to become an entrepreneur and bring the tenets of Buddhism — or, as Griffith seems to see it, eastern Christianity — to the English. He has fallen in love with a young girl named Lucy (Lillian Gish) from afar, but due to constraints on him from the culture and constraints he has put himself, almost never is close enough to say anything meaningful to her. She is a resident of a violent household, where her adoptive father, Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), is a drunken boxer who regularly turns to violence against her when he is upset. It is typical silent melodrama, though enriched by Griffith's small storytelling flourishes along the way (and a gorgeous array of expensive sets). He dips into nonlinear narration early on by allowing all three characters to have cutaways depicting scenes of thought — Cheng, depressed and alone in England thinking about life back in China; Lucy, reflecting on a married woman who warns her to avoid marriage unless she wants a lazy husband and bratty children and on prostitutes who warn her away casual relationships; and Burrows, given a moment of victory in the ring.

As with the rest of Griffith's works, Broken Blossoms is a study in comparisons and contrasts: masculine versus feminine, poverty versus wealth, peace versus violence, East versus West. Such dichotomies, often easy to glean from first impression, make the engine of silent drama churn more fluidly. The appeal of Broken Blossoms as a text exists in the way Griffith uses such contrasts and applies to the triangle of characters: Cheng reflects both in Lucy and Burrows, for example (and Lucy and Burrows each reflect in the two they are not). We immediately sense the differences between war in Burrows and tranquility in Cheng, who treat Lucy in categorically opposite ways, and what is even clearer is the way in which Burrows's ignorance will lead to certain doom for all involved. More interesting, however, is the subset meditation on masculinity and femininity viewed through the lens of war and peace, a recurring contrariety in Griffith's work, most notably — and explosively — in The Birth of a Nation. In this work it is not as explosive, but neither is particularly subtle. Cheng and Lucy draw visual likeness in their perpetual hunches, a posture in Gish's acting to reflect her submission to Burrows and her despondency in all aspects of life, and a posture in Barthelmess's acting that reflects a similar hopelessness and, more awkwardly, a cultural stereotype; Burrows, meanwhile, stands erect and barrel-chested, both at home and in the ring.

The masculine/feminine contrast is no more apparent than in the cross-cutting sequence between Burrows's boxing fight and Lucy's perceived threat of Cheng attacking her. Burrows finds out through a compatriot that Lucy is convalescing at Cheng's shop, but rather than leave his boxing match he sticks around to complete it before going to "save" her. Meanwhile, we constantly suspect Cheng will force himself onto Lucy (the film instructs us to read it as such, given its inherent xenophobia and its previous portrayals of male characters), but he never does. He is quick to act, quicker than Burrows in many ways; when he realizes Burrows has taken Lucy from his shop back to their home, there is no hesitation on Cheng's part to save her, as there was with Burrows earlier. Griffith's ultimate view of masculinity has less to do with the strength and power embodied in the male figure than it does with the strength and power to restrain oneself and act in an appropriate and timely manner when needed. (It should be noted, however, that the source of such restraint is spurious; it's not only the fact that a real man wouldn't force his way with a woman, but that a Chinese man couldn't be portrayed actually giving such love to a white woman. The only way such love would be possible would be in the metaphoric image that opens and closes the film, silhouettes of overlapping boats against the harbor. More on that in a moment.)

Gish is a peculiar actress, no more evident than her work in Broken Blossoms. Her performance is at once overwrought but highly effective, a sort of expressionistic acting that occurs at the edges of realism. When she and Griffith decide to portray Lucy as so unhappy that she can barely smile and must force her muscles upward with his fingertips to create the illusion of happiness, it borders on the overdone. And yet, the moment she willfully and authentically smiles later is affecting, nearly erasing what felt too stagy earlier. The emotion meant to be interpreted through her posture is almost too evident, and her earlier moments of fear (coupled with the occasionally sensational inter-title cards) are enough to draw suspicion; but again, near the film's end when Burrows's threats against her are deadly serious, a look of fear washes over her face that cannot be taken in any other way but true. If she hadn't made you afraid for her life in the film's first act, by its third she's become striking and convincing. Her acting is somewhere in between the laconic approach of Barthelmess and the fiery approach of Crisp, exemplifying her troubled state of mind.

Historians often label Broken Blossoms as perhaps cinema's first interracial love story, a definition that works as long as you acknowledge the lovers on screen are both of the same race. Of course, a Caucasian playing an Asian character was customary (though not essential), and continued long into the era of sound. "Yellow face" — which consists of a silken wardrobe, a straw conical hat, and eye-squinting — is not nearly as distracting as the horrendous black face in The Birth of a Nation. because it is not objectively racist, as it was with the ignorant and vicious portrayals in Birth, although surely Griffith and Barthelmess take considerable advantage of cultural stereotypes. (The line might seem arbitrary, but there is a distinguishable difference in the films' attitudes.) Barthelmess, though white, is not ineffective in his portrayal of Cheng. The exterior might be poorly and lazily channeled, but the character's interior struggle with loneliness and fear should be lauded. Still, when Barthelmess is given a close-up, the film unavoidably showcases the ersatz nature of the actor and subtracts from what could be a more organic narrative. We can be generous and grant the film this as a result of its time and place, but assessing art is always a balance between what it meant upon its debut and what it still means today; it might not have raised many eyebrows then, but today it does, and should appropriately be considered a flaw.

I've held back comparison to Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat until the end. In a way the films are so different it seems almost unfair to draw a comparison, except to elucidate the flaws of Broken Blossoms by way of suggesting DeMille's is better — or at least has aged better, due to its own innovations and emphasis on avoiding the pitfalls of silent melodrama by channeling genuine subtlety. DeMille's film is not an innocent bystander, and is indeed a product of the 1910s in the way that it doesn't steer clear of possible xenophobic interpretations. But its thematic transgressions are ultimately less than Griffith's. DeMille has an Asian actor (the grand Sessue Hayakawa) playing an Asian character, and realizing the potential theatricality of his story, opted to hew as close as possible to subtlety. As a result, DeMille's film is self-sustaining, playing as well outside of context as within, and that's something that can't quite be said for Griffith's film. Compared to his other works, Broken Blossoms does move in that direction to, but properly put into context of other films, it is still guilty of superficiality and few editorial decisions that draw inessential attention to its production. But in its multiplicity and push toward a subdued narrative and reined thematics, Broken Blossoms proves itself to be perhaps the top work in Griffith's canon.

The Blue Bird (1918)

screensavour@gmail.com (T.S.) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:36:00 +0000

d. Maurice Tourneur / USA / 81 mins.

Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird rests on the cinematic palette as some sweet and twisted hybrid of German expressionism and The Wizard of Oz — all the more impressive because it would two more years before the lead-off jewel in the expressionist canon, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, would find its way to America. L. Frank Baum's novel and its many filmic adaptations had already been percolating through American culture for almost two decades, but to compare Maurice Maeterlinck's fine stage play and Tourneur's equally fine film to Baum's creation is ultimately a bit unfair to both. True, both are stories of children whisked away to magical realms and searching for something; but if Baum's is a journey about finding yourself and returning home, then Maeterlinck's allegory of children with a home searching for "the Bluebird of Happiness" to make such a life bearable is incrementally more sinister. If the most sublime incarnation of The Wizard of Oz is Victor Fleming's lavish Technicolor vision as a reflection on the dream-like material at hand, then Tourneur's shadowy, unsettling silent vision of The Blue Bird must be noted for the way it suits its material with equal metaphoric faithfulness and, though less achieved, provides an enjoyable experience.

The pursuit begins when two young children, named Tyltyl (Robin Macdougall) and Mytyl (Tula Belle), are visited by the fairy Berylune (Lillian Cook), who accompanies them on a journey into wondrous lands to find the "the bluebird of happiness," but as with many journeys, it will not be until the end that the children realize what they've traveled for and why their views on life will perhaps not be the same. Along the way they are accompanied by their (now anthropomorphic) dog and cat, portrayed rather effectively by men in transparent costumes who smoothly scamper on all-fours, and by the incarnations of elements like Fire and Water.

The special effects here, if one can call them such, are inspiring. Equipped with only physical materials (which are used to create striking angular sets and loose, simplistic costumes that evoke the story's origins in the theater) and a knowledge of celluloid, Tourneur pulls off a distinctive world positioned with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy. No doubt Tourneur was heavily influenced by the cinema of Georges Méliès, where strategic cuts could make people appear and disappear from and into thin air; overlay images to create ghostly amalgams; and blend the real and the artificial into a gimmicky sort of cinematic pleasure. In the sense that they are conducted with the same skill as Melies they are tricks, but in the sense that enrich the story with child-like wonder they are successful bursts of brilliance. To those unacquainted Maeterlinck's play, it may seem as if Tourneur waits to reveal these special effects. It is fifteen minutes before a sense of fantasy even creeps in.

Contrast this to something like Snow White — the Famous Players Company production from 1916 — which all but erases its sense of wonder by spoiling the entire opening through an image (completely unrelated to the film, it should be noted) of Santa Claus leaving toys. Realism as a device, particularly in the faces and emotions of the young children who are our central characters, is treated with as much deference as fantasy, which is why this adaptation works well in the end. In what surely must be chalked up to accident, there is a blanketing effect of the silence — it suppresses favoritism, allows the children to exist as captivating characters and allows the fantastic sets, costumes, and characters to come to life with the delight of youthful imagination and the sheer terror of adult knowledge.