The Golem (1920)

The Golem is one of the classics of German expressionist horror. Released the same year as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it's neither as famous nor as great as that genre-defining landmark, but it's still an interesting film with a striking visual style. Directed by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, and shot by the always fantastic Karl Freund, The Golem has a moody gothic style and some rudimentary but nonetheless creepy special effects. The film's sets aren't as stylized or twisted as the famously angular designs for Caligari, but this tale of a Jewish rabbi creating a monstrous servant made of clay takes place in a Polish ghetto the design of which is balanced neatly between realism and expressionism. The sets seem more solid and historically grounded than in Caligari, but there are still unmotivated, spiky shadows stretched across the walls and angular design flourishes everywhere. In one of the most compelling flourishes, the centerpiece of the rabbi's home is a twisting spiral staircase that looks oddly like the fleshy folds of a human ear.

The story, derived from Jewish mysticism, is familiar: a venerable rabbi (Albert Steinrück) conjures a Golem (Wegener), a man shaped out of clay who comes to life to serve as a stoical servant and protector of the ghetto. Obviously, any pre-World War II German film dealing with Jewish religion and ethnicity is going to be automatically interesting for reasons having little to do with the film, and this one is especially fascinating in its contradictions. It is ostensibly a story that portrays the mistreatment of Jews sympathetically, though the film's message is ultimately more tangled than that. Towards the beginning of the film, the Jews in the ghetto receive a chilling edict from the emperor that orders them to evacuate, that they are being kicked out of their homes, a reflection of the pogroms and abuses endured by the Jewish people in Europe even before the Nazis came to power. This is a reflection of the historical roots of Nazism in deeply engrained anti-Semitism, and yet the film itself doesn't avoid these stereotypes and prejudices, either.

Notably, the emperor's edict lists among the Jews' crimes participating in "the black arts," and indeed the film itself passes that stereotype along rather than denying it. True, the story of the Golem is rooted in Jewish mysticism, but the film presents the Jewish elders as a cross between wizards and mad scientists, participating in the dark arts and summoning demons to do their bidding. In one of the creepiest scenes, the rabbi performs a ritual — later echoed by F.W. Murnau in Faust — to summon a demon, who appears as a disembodied head floating in the darkness, smoke pouring from his gaping maw. The Jewish temple is rendered as a place of mysticism where the worshippers ritually bow and sway while the rabbi, dramatically posed in front of a row of gleaming candles, exhorts them from above. The film's presentation of Judaism is unavoidably tangled in myth, empathizing with the ghettoization and punishment of Jews while also revelling in familiar stereotypes and libels about demon worship and dark magic.


That contradictory subtext aside, the film is mostly compelling but tonally imbalanced. The true creepy horror moments are few, and for most of the film the Golem is less a threatening monster than a curiously practical servant who's used to fetch groceries and fetch wood, scenes that are played for deadpan humor as much as anything. There's also a wan subplot with the rabbi's daughter Miriam (Lyda Salmonova) being wooed by the non-Jewish knight Florian (Lothar Müthel), a romance that's surprising in its sexual frankness — Florian places his hand on Miriam's breast and at one point wakes up by her bedside, both of them half-dressed — but otherwise serves simply to set up an expected tragic conclusion.

Not surprisingly, the most memorable scenes are those in which the film's expressionist horror gets free rein. Wegener's lumbering Golem was an obvious visual reference point for James Whale's Frankenstein, with his bulky, awkward form and the sentimental emotionality lurking beneath the monster's horrific visage. For a man made of clay, Wegener's Golem is very expressive, even hammy, always glancing around with an ironically arched eyebrow, gritting his teeth and widening his eyes to convey anger, his mouth horribly twisted into a hybrid of a grimace and a grin. He's undone, ultimately, by his sentimentality: like Frankenstein's monster after him, he's capable of love and warm feelings, and when he's moved by the sight of a little girl, she's able to innocently, playfully remove the amulet that gives him life.

The Golem, with its plodding pace and contradictory ideas about its Jewish subject, hasn't dated as well as some of its more famous contemporaries from the German silent era. But it's still a fascinating, visually striking film that, like Caligari, was a major influence on the horror films that would follow it.

It (1927)

Roaring Twenties sex symbol Clara Bow has always been most associated with It, the film from which she earned her most enduring nickname, as Hollywood's "It Girl." It's the film she's most remembered for today, though Bow's presence in it and its role in defining her fame are its primary points of interest. It's a slick, shallow, flimsy movie derived from the Elinor Glyn story that defined "it" as an alluring, magnetic, hard-to-pin-down quality that emanates from certain people. The film bears little relation to Glyn's story beyond that fascination with the elusive quality of "it," though it keeps referring to Glyn in a metafictional way, even having the author herself show up at one point in a hilariously clumsy promotional appearance to explain the concept of "it" to one of the characters.

The plot is beyond fluffy, with Bow playing the shopgirl Betty Lou, who falls in love with her boss Cyrus Waltham (Antonio Moreno) and doggedly pursues him, with some mishaps and misunderstandings artificially keeping the couple from truly connecting until the inevitable happy ending. It's a rather typical romantic comedy in every way, closely following a template that's become tiredly familiar, and must have been anything but fresh even when the film was new. It's all just a vague showcase for Bow, a love letter to her charms.

There's definitely something about her that could be "it." She's cute and perky, a lively if maybe over-eager screen presence whose every closeup, every winking flirtation with the camera, seems to come with an implied, "aren't I adorable?" Her cutesy mugging can be aggravating rather than endearing at times, and it's funny that part of the film's definition of "it" is a lack of self-consciousness, because Bow seems constantly self-conscious, very aware of her cuteness and her appeal, so that it often feels like she's trying way too hard to impress.


The most interesting thing about her, arguably, is her working class persona, derived from the actress' own troubled life and modest upbringing: she plays an unapologetically low-class girl who lives in a cramped apartment with an unmarried mother friend who she's helping. There's no glamour in her, except an accidental glamour arising from her natural beauty. She's also unapologetic about playing games, making love a contest of wits, flirting and pursuing the man she wants but then slapping him when she finally gets his attention and he dares to kiss her. She's flighty, silly, both fun and infuriating, in more or less equal measures. It's easy to see why she made an impact, and why this film in particular stuck as her defining moment, as she embodies a character who's a bundle of contradictions, a haphazard catalogue of feminine stereotypes: fiercely loyal to her friends, calculating in her seduction of men, dazzled by riches but offended when a man implies that's all she's after, resourceful and committed, above all, to simply having fun.

Director Clarence Badger brings an efficient, mostly straightforward aesthetic to this Cinderella fable. There are a few nice flourishes here, including, in the first shot, one of the very earliest appearances of a zoom lens, which at the time was a clunky and impractical invention that wouldn't become widely used until decades later. In another shot, Betty Lou looks around a crowded dining room for the man she's interested in, and when she finds him, the camera rushes towards him, signalling the rapturous focusing of her interest on this one point in the crowd. For the most part, though, Badger's style is unobtrusive, giving Bow lots of closeups in which to smile and bat her eyes, letting the magnetic starlet display her "it" without much interference. Josef von Sternberg, then still early in a slow-starting Hollywood career, was the assistant director and is sometimes identified as directing parts of the film uncredited, but there's little to no trace of von Sternberg's expressionist aesthetic or his sensual celebration of his leading ladies.

It is still remembered today for its association with its era and the heroine's sex symbol status, so closely tied to this film. Besides that historical interest, though, it's a pretty slight work, a curiosity that, when it doesn't feel like a barely disguised advertisement for Glyn's writing and Cosmopolitan magazine, is simply a vehicle for highlighting Bow's charisma and attractiveness. It's fluffy, but criminally for a romantic comedy, neither especially funny nor especially romantic.

Just Pals

Just Pals is a warm, pleasant, low-key early silent from John Ford, a simple and rather loose film about a town bum and the young rail-riding kid who he befriends. Bim (Buck Jones) is a layabout, reviled all around town as a good-for-nothing bum who will never trouble himself to do a bit of work that he doesn't have to do. In one nice shot early on, Ford shows Bim lounging around in a hayloft while, in the deep focus background, laborers work hard down below. Bim shouts out to them, in a title card, that even just watching them work is too much work for him, and that sums up his character pretty well. But his restlessness, shifting around trying to get comfortable after seeing the workers, suggests that maybe he isn't as content with his shiftless reputation and laziness as he tries to pretend he is.

Bim soon makes friends with a young kid named Bill (George Stone), who, like most other kids and no adults, instantly likes the laidback Bim. They have a warm friendship that Ford depicts in a few scenes — most humorously, a great scene when Bim tries to give the resisting kid a bath by dangling him from a barn rafter with a rope tied around his midsection — before the film ambles on to something else. The plot's surprisingly overstuffed for a film that's not even an hour long, and the second half builds much of the action around a crooked accountant (William Buckley) who gets his sweet schoolteacher girlfriend Mary (Helen Ferguson) in trouble by "borrowing" money from her. The film also crams in a suicide attempt, a bank robbery, a child kidnapping, a lynch mob, and some frenzied action scenes.

This means that the film switches tones every five or ten minutes, sometimes pitched as a light humanist comedy (in tone, anyway; there aren't many actual jokes), sometimes as a Western actioner with Bim trying to foil a gang of bank robbers, sometimes as a melodrama with the schoolteacher suffering for the crimes of her no-good boyfriend and Bim trying to save her from harm. The one throughline is the very Fordian Western theme that the lazy bum turns out to be a noble, decent man while the seemingly sophisticated businessman is actually a crooked scoundrel who reveals his true colors in the finale. It's a version of the noble-country-versus-corrupt-city dichotomy of many old-school Westerns — Ford's own Bucking Broadway included — even if here all the characters belong, geographically if not spiritually, to the country.


There are some excellent scenes along the way, too. In one scene, seemingly disconnected from the rest of the narrative, a young boy is supposed to throw a bag full of kittens into the river, but he can't go through with it, and he just dumps the cats out in the grass instead. Mary looks on in horror, instinctively turning her face away and covering her mouth, and in the next scene the town is abuzz because she's thrown herself in the river, distraught over the scandal in which she's stuck. The connection between the kid's act of mercy and Mary's suicide attempt is ambiguous but very resonant.

Later, during the bank robbery, Ford employs Griffith-like crosscutting to enhance the building tension as the robbers blow the vault, Bim races to save the day, and in the church, the rest of the townsfolk are totally oblivious. That includes the clueless sheriff (Duke R. Lee), the broadest comic caricature here, a gnarly old man who, when the collection box comes around in church, flashes his badge as though that exempts him from donating. At the very end of the film, he disrupts the romanticism of the finale with an almost surreal flourish when he pokes his head out of a hole in a tree like a cartoon animal.

This is a rather strange little film, and a very enjoyable one as well. Its arc of redemption is predictable, but still poignant, and Jones' heartfelt performance makes it especially easy to feel the heartbreaking regret that the seemingly easygoing Bim actually feels about his his lowly place within this town. And the film is just packed with so much, offering some lush melodrama one moment, a gang of thieves riding into town, kicking up dust, the next. Throughout his career, Ford would always combine genres and tones like this, often more smoothly than here, but Just Pals already shows the director deftly juggling comedy and drama, equally interested in tugging heartstrings and delivering brawling pile-ups and gunfights.

The Salvation Hunters

Josef von Sternberg's debut film, The Salvation Hunters, immediately gained him a reputation as a filmmaker worth watching and catapulted him to a position in Hollywood, even though this hour-long experimental project, shot by von Sternberg himself on a low budget in real locations, was anything but commercial. Purely by luck, the film got the attention of stars Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and the young filmmaker would soon become a Hollywood director. In this debut, the themes and aesthetics that would weave throughout the remainder of von Sternberg's career are already readily apparent in nascent form. The opening scenes, with various losers and lost souls aimlessly hanging around on the docks, would be echoed in the later classic The Docks of New York, and more generally the moody, melancholy atmosphere of this film proves that the director's aesthetic was fairly well-formed right from the beginning of his career.

The film is a loose, nearly plotless study of a trio of outcasts who number among "the derelicts of the earth," to whom von Sternberg dedicates the film in the text-heavy introduction. The film announces right up front that it's not about narrative but about attempting to photograph "a thought," and its minimal story concerns broadly defined types rather than specific characters, because what von Sternberg is really exploring is not a story happening to particular people but a universal state of being, a universal set of emotions. The characters aren't even named, they're just identified as a boy (George K. Arthur), a girl (Georgia Hale), and a child (Bruce Guerin), who together form a de facto family, united in their loneliness and their downtrodden existence. They're miserable and alone at the docks, surrounded by mud and garbage — von Sternberg captures the atmosphere of the docks so well, in closeups of rotting fish and junk barges, that one can practically smell it — so they decide to go to the city, but find that things are no better there.

The film's story is minimal, but its photography is gorgeous and haunting, and even in this first amateur work, it's steeped in von Sternberg's raw stylized emotionalism. Despite this, it seems obvious that the inexperienced young filmmaker was not yet confident enough in his visuals to let them drive the film, and the film is saddled with overbearing, pompous, self-consciously literary text scattered throughout its copious title cards. The writing drags the film down, explicitly identifying visual symbols — at one point, a title spells out that a mud-dredging claw was "a symbol of the boy's faith... that all mud could be brought up into the sun" — and hammering home the themes without the subtlety and ambiguity that would always characterize von Sternberg's subsequent films. It's a mark of insecurity; von Sternberg clearly knew what he wanted to say in this very personal debut, and though he says it very well in pure visual terms, he seemingly wanted to make sure that his message was not missed. It's unfortunate, and the constant barrage of text breaks up the flow of the images, marring the visual poetry.


This problematic wordiness aside, The Salvation Hunters is evocative and potent, and it's easy to see why it was such a hit with film artists like Chaplin and Fairbanks, if not with general audiences. Chaplin was so impressed by the film that not only did he help bring von Sternberg to Hollywood, but he immediately cast Georgia Hale as the bad girl love interest in his own masterpiece The Gold Rush, made later the same year. The Salvation Hunters itself has hints of Chaplin's influence on von Sternberg, especially in the scenes of sentimental comedy featuring the kid, a very Chaplinesque type whose sporadic antics infuse the film with an energy that's certainly not found in the downtrodden older leads.

Hale's performance, in particular, is intensely sad, her mouth permanently twisted into a frown, her eyes heavily lidded so that she seems to be staring at the world through thin slits, a cigarette lazily drooping from her lips — "good girls don't smoke," the boy tells her, taking her cigarette, and she promptly grabs it right back and resumes sullenly smoking. In one scene, she sees a dock bully get splashed with muck on a garbage barge, and she laughs for a moment before she suddenly seems to remember herself and forces her expression back to its sneering scowl. It's a focused performance of pure malice and depression, set off against Arthur's weak-willed everyman, who needs to overcome his cowardice and weakness and journey from "the mud" to "the sun."

The journey is blatantly symbolic, but what's interesting is that von Sternberg also grounds the film in a gritty, realistic depiction of the cruelties of the world. Though their story is couched abstractly in terms of "mud" and "sun," this downtrodden trio encounters all too real violence and corruption, with monstrous bullies who beat the kid and a slimy pimp who circles around the girl, trying to starve or seduce her into prostitution. That tension between expressionist, abstract symbolism and seedy realism would perhaps be more cleanly resolved in von Sternberg's later films, but here in its raw form it's still a potent combination. The Salvation Hunters is an excellent debut in general, still marked by the flaws and weaknesses that the director would smooth out with more confidence, but pictorially striking and wonderfully atmospheric.

The Black Pirate

The Black Pirate is a swashbuckling pirate adventure, a showcase for the daring stunts and swordplay of silent action star Douglas Fairbanks. Made in 1926 and directed by Albert Parker, it was one of the first films shot entirely with the two-strip Technicolor process, which makes it one of the rare surviving silents shot in color. Fairbanks plays a nobleman, the sole survivor of a pirate attack that kills his father. He vows revenge on the pirates, though his plan to achieve that revenge is anything but logical, since it consists of joining the pirate band, becoming their leader, and teaching them to be better, more effective pirates, even helping them to hijack a ship while plotting against them.

It never makes much sense, but the silly plot (from a story by Fairbanks himself) provides ample excuse for Fairbanks to show off his exhilarating stuntwork and obvious love of physical feats of daring. He makes a much more convincing pirate than a nobleman, and he seems to enjoy inhabiting this role altogether too much for a man supposedly seeking revenge. To prove his worth to the band of pirates, he hijacks a ship singlehandedly, pulling up alongside it in disguise as a fisherman and swinging around all over the ship, cutting ropes and sails, sending watchmen flying up into the rigging and finally holding the whole crew hostage with a pair of imposing cannons. He does it all with a big, infectious grin on his face, his teeth shining as he leaps and soars through the ship's rigging and swings from one perch to another, clambering around with the agility of a monkey, gliding down the sail with his knife thrust into its fabric or swinging on ropes. Fairbanks always seems to be having a blast when pulling off these stunts, and his enthusiasm is what makes him so fun to watch.

In between the action scenes, the film flounders a bit, and Parker's direction is mostly static and workmanlike. One exception is a great celebratory shot towards the end of the film, after the action-packed battle scene climax — which itself mostly consists of Fairbanks' allies comically jumping on the pirates en masse as if they're playing football — in which Fairbanks is hoisted aloft by his soldiers. He's in the bottom of the ship's hold and is handed up from one set of hands to the next at each level of the ship, the camera tracking up with him while he simply poses heroically, flexing his muscles and grinning proudly, passively letting himself be carried up to the top deck. It's a gloriously silly and self-conscious affirmation of the hero's potency.


Despite Fairbanks' grinning bravado and the flimsy scenario, some grit is provided by making the pirates — with the exception of Fairbanks' one-armed sidekick (Donald Crisp) — credibly sinister. The film is fairly direct about the brutality of the pirates, particularly with regards to their leering intentions towards a princess (Billie Dove) who the crew takes captive. A few of the pirates fight over her and draw straws to see who takes possession of her, just as earlier they'd drawn straws to settle a struggle over a monkey they'd found. The parallel between the two scenes suggests that these bloodthirsty pirates look at women as property, and it's all too obvious what they want to do with this particular piece of property. Of course, Fairbanks protects her from the pirates' lust, and of course the pair falls in love with one another, though it's funny that the princess is visibly relieved, at the end of the film, when she learns that her paramour is not actually a good-hearted pirate but a duke — a potential class crisis averted!

Early on, there's an offhandedly shocking grisly moment in which one of the pirates' captives, trying to keep them from getting a cherished ring, swallows it. But the pirate captain (Anders Randolf) sees this and gestures towards the man. One of the pirates then strolls offscreen with a knife, and moments later wanders back into the frame, the knife and the front of his clothes coated in bright, sticky red, holding out the ring for his captain.

The color is what makes it so startling, and it's one of the best uses of the film's primitive Technicolor. The clunky, unreliable two-strip process results in a restricted palette of mainly reds and blues, sometimes mixed with queasy greens or purples. There's no potential here for subtle color effects, which might be why color film didn't really catch on in a big way until the later three-strip process. Even so, the novelty of a true color silent film, no matter how basic the color scheme, helps to set this film apart as more than the routine pirate adventure it otherwise is.

Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box was director Georg Wilhelm Pabst's first collaboration with actress Louise Brooks, who the director had discovered in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port. As in that film, Brooks is a template for the femme fatale, a seductress who leads men into temptation and self-destruction while, strangely enough, retaining her own almost childlike innocence. Her character in Pabst's film, Lulu, was Brooks' most enduring and iconic creation, the part for which she will always be remembered. Pabst's film is built around her, and it succeeds almost entirely because Pabst is so adept at highlighting and channeling the actress' magnetic charm, her absolutely unparalleled ability to light up a screen with the sheer beauty and poignancy of her face.

Brooks' charisma is so vital to the film because Lulu could have been a very unappealing character if embodied by a less iconic actress. Lulu is a prostitute and aspiring dancer, a frivolous and cheery woman who's totally unconcerned with morals. When her latest wealthy lover, Dr. Schön (Fritz Kortner), tells her at the beginning of the film that he's getting married to someone else, she shrugs and tells him that's no reason not to kiss her. Lulu's all about pleasure, and about living in the moment: when she's with a man, her casual intimacy and ready smiles convey the impression that he's the only man in the world, but she's able to easily skip from one man to the next, turning that radiant charm on each in turn, without any compunctions about her amoral behavior. The film's opening scenes quickly convey what this woman is about, as she cheerfully parts with one of her clients, acting tender and accommodating with him until the moment that her beloved old "patron" Schigolch (Carl Goetz) shows up, at which point the client is forgotten as Lulu pours her affection onto her former pimp instead. And then, when Schön arrives, Lulu just tucks Schigolch in a corner and devotes herself to the doctor. The whole sequence is like seeing a microcosm of Lulu's serial bed-hopping, her whole life condensed into a few minutes.

Schön is a respectable upper-class man who knows all too well that his affair with Lulu is tainting his reputation, but he can't quite manage to disengage himself; even when he finally breaks off his affair with Lulu to marry a woman of his own class, he remains involved with Lulu's life, managing the variety show that marks Lulu's debut as a dancer. Schön repeatedly says that his affair with Lulu will lead to his death, driving home the foreshadowing of his end, and the knowledge of it weighs heavy on him, making him a lugubrious counterpoint to the sprightly and carefree Lulu.

Indeed, Lulu can seem downright cold-hearted in her selfishness. After the film's central tragedy, Lulu returns to the house Schön had kept for her, and far from seeming distraught by what had happened, she's delighted to be reunited with her clothes and possessions, happily rifling through her closet and posing in front of a mirror. While she ignores the meaning of this place and what had happened here, Pabst keeps highlighting the tragedy by calling attention to a striking sculpture of a woman twisted into a pose of suffering and prayer, a piece of art that had hovered portentously in the background of the earlier scenes of tragic violence. The woman, with her short hair echoing Lulu's distinctive bob-cut, seems like a foreboding sign of what's in store for the film's heroine, though Lulu, despite being a victim as often as an instigator, rarely seems to suffer, not truly — most of the time, she uses her tears and her tantrums as a tool, a way to sway men to her cause.


Despite that calculating streak, Lulu never seems really evil, just self-absorbed, and at times genuinely unaware of the volcanic effect that she can have on men. When she's placed on trial halfway through the film, the prosecuting lawyer compares her to Pandora, beautiful and irresistible but possessing a box full of evil that she somewhat haplessly unleashes upon the world. It's an apt comparison, because Lulu doesn't fully understand what she's doing to those around her, in part because she's not thinking about them — she only cares about her own comfort and happiness. Because she laughs it off every time she's caught in an indiscretion, she expects everyone else to be similarly accommodating.

And yet there's also an undercurrent of deeper emotion within Lulu, whose childlike emphasis on constant pleasure seems to stem from a fear of what might have happened if she stopped having fun for a moment. There's a definite desperation to Lulu's constant pleasure-seeking, which is explained several times in terms of her difficult childhood. Her most poignant scene is probably her trial, in which Pabst and Brooks cleverly suggest everything about Lulu's mental state through her manipulations of the thin veil she wears. Lulu feels the eyes of the crowd on her and instinctively pulls her veil down over her face, hiding from them, for once unhappy to be the center of attention. Mere moments later, though, she stands and holds the veil away from her face to deliver an impassioned plea for her innocence, and then, in a remarkable shot, she lets the veil fall back over her face as she sits down, the veil fluttering around her face as she gracefully descends. This simple moment is utterly poetic and beautiful, abstractly suggesting the effect of this situation on Lulu. Pabst also locates a strangely melancholy, even almost romantic, vibe in the film's closing scenes, when Lulu encounters the sinister but handsome Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) prowling the London streets. Lulu's appeal is so enticing that she even, for a time at least, calms the bloodlust of the notorious killer, and these scenes are infused with an unsettling tenderness, as though there's a deep and surprising connection between the notorious killer and the sweet, smiling prostitute who now seems sadder than ever behind her smile.

Pandora's Box is justifiably known as the defining role of Brooks' career. Pabst and Brooks would follow up this success with the equally great Diary of a Lost Girl, in which Brooks would play a more purely innocent suffering woman rather than the complicated mix of naïveté and conniving that she embodies here. Brooks' Lulu is a woman in trouble, a troubled woman, or maybe just trouble, but there's no question that she's utterly mesmerizing to watch, and Pabst perfectly captures her luminous qualities. The film's melodramatic narrative, which puts Lulu through a series of increasingly demeaning tragedies, is balanced by the combination of realism and stylized glamour in Pabst's aesthetic, making this one of the great collaborations between a director and an actress.

Lightnin'

John Ford's Lightnin' is a modest, low-key little silent comedy that concentrates entirely on the folksy humor that often populates the fringes of Ford's films. The prospect of an entire film that focuses on what serves as not-always-welcome cornpone comic relief in Ford's more serious works isn't necessarily appealing, but there's some modest enjoyment to be found in Lightnin' anyway, at least before it gets bogged down in sentiment and turgid courtroom drama in its second half.

The film opens with an extended introduction for the old-timer "Lightnin' Bill" Jones (Jay Hunt) and his pal Zeb (Otis Harlan), two amiable drunks who will go to any lengths to get a drink. Bill and his shrewish wife (Edythe Chapman) run a curious hotel that straddles the Nevada/California border, so that married women can stay in Nevada while awaiting a divorce but still get their mail sent to California to avoid the shame of staying at a Nevada hotel. Ford sets a meandering, somewhat ramshackle pace, focusing on the shenanigans of Bill and Zeb as they dig up various buried booze bottles while trying to avoid the disapproving eye of Mrs. Jones. There are some decent running gags here, especially involving Bill's dog, who dutifully tracks down hidden bottles of alcohol and fetches them for Bill.

Eventually, the film ambles along into an actual plot, involving a band of corrupt land barons who are trying to swindle the Joneses out of their property, with Bill resisting at the advice of his young friend John Marvin (Wallace MacDonald), who knows all too well that this deal isn't on the level, since the same gang swindled his family. Marvin's also wanted by the police, since he took his land back by force from the crooks. This provides an opportunity for Ford to establish a comic situation similar to that of Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality, with the local sheriff unable to issue his Nevada warrant on Marvin as long as he remains on the California side of the Jones hotel. Ford never really takes advantage of the comic potential of these situations; he's not a really great comic director, though he has an undeniable feel for this kind of folksy rural milieu, including the corny humor and stock types that come with the territory.


The film's sentimental plot and old-fashioned humor mean that its appeal is fairly limited, and its deliberate pacing doesn't help. In the second half of the film, the plot leads to a courtroom drama with Mrs. Jones requesting a divorce from Bill, talked into it by the crooked men trying to take her land. At this point, the film slows to a crawl and, at the finale, gets totally overwhelmed by predictably sentimental hokum, culminating with Bill's earnest speech in which he wins back his wife. Despite the lame plot and down-home humor, Ford provides some occasional visual interest and poignancy to the film, much of it focusing on the relationship between John Marvin and the Joneses' daughter Millie (Madge Bellamy).

At one point, Millie, playing up her anger at John, prepares a meal for him anyway, leaving a note beside it to remind him that she's still angry at him despite her gesture. While he eats at the table in the foreground, she's in the doorway in the background, facing away from him and from the camera. The composition dramatizes the conflict between the young lovers while also emphasizing that the girl's anger is to some degree theatrical, a pose, and that despite her turned back she's still connected to John. The doorway also adds to the tension of the shot; it's not the typical Fordian doorway shot with an outsider isolated from the home, but as always in Ford the threshold of the house is made to seem like a site of great import. Here, perhaps, because the girl is still inside the house, not separated from her lover by the doorway, it's a way of confirming that the break between them is not decisive. Soon after, she does lock him out so that he's on one side of the door and she's on the other — after he has the nerve to kiss her — but the way that she caresses the door in his absence once again confirms her longing for him. The staging of these scenes is consistently clever, delving into the contradictions between surface separation and subterranean connection.

Such moments reveal Ford's sensibility even when working with some rather weak material. Lightnin' isn't one of Ford's better or more revealing silents, but with its sporadically striking images and an early example of Ford's love of folksy comic archetypes, it's well worth seeing for devotees of the director.

Three Ages

For his first feature film after a string of shorts, Buster Keaton hedged his bets slightly by making Three Ages, a parody of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance that was designed so that, if the feature had failed at the box office, it could have been split into three of the shorts that were at that time Keaton's more familiar format. The presence of co-director Edward F. Cline, who worked with Keaton on many of the comic's shorts, also announces this film's continuity with the shorter works that preceded it. The film succeeded, though, and Keaton's feature career was launched. Like the Griffith film it's based on, Three Ages relates parallel stories in multiple historical eras, in this case three romances, set in prehistoric times, the era of the Roman Empire, and modern times.

In each of these three eras, Keaton runs through the same basic story: he's a good guy pining over a girl (Margaret Leahy), who loves Keaton but is for various reasons pushed towards a more successful but brutish rival (Wallace Beery). Keaton's the lover, the sensitive guy the girl really likes, but in each of these stories he's lacking the socially accepted status symbols of masculinity and success: most obviously, in the modern story, the girl's mother compares the two suitors' bank books and finds that while Beery has a hefty account, Keaton keeps his meager savings in the "Last National Bank." In the historical stories, there are different standards — brute strength in caveman times, army titles in the Roman era — but the concept is the same, that Keaton's sensitive little lover doesn't measure up to what's expected of men, especially men trying to win a woman.

Of course, that's part of the joke, and defying expectations is essential to Keaton's comedy: this unassuming little man with the stoical expression is capable of graceful feats of daring that are as exciting as they are funny. Here, Keaton has plenty of chances to display his stunning athleticism and genius for comic staging as the various stories come to a climax with thrilling chases and contests in which Keaton must defeat his rival and win the girl. There's a football game in which Keaton performs a series of acrobatic dodges around various tacklers and scores a touchdown with the ball clutched between his feet. The Roman story climaxes with Keaton using a spear to pole-vault off a horse into a window, a gag that he'd repeat for College, though there the pole-vaulting would be performed, at much greater height, by an Olympic athlete.


Keaton's inventiveness and carefully paced gags are best displayed here in the chariot race in the Roman sequence. For this frantic race, Keaton chains together a string of hilarious, clever gags, starting with the fact that he comes to the race ready for the snow with a team of dogs and sled runners instead of wheels. The gags flow fast and furious once the race begins, too. Keaton stops to grab a spare dog from his chariot's trunk to replace a tired-out "front wheel." The dogs go off-course to chase a cat, but Keaton turns this distraction around by tying the cat to a spear and dangling it in front of the sled dog team, urging them on. Keaton is always at his best in moments like this, displaying this kind of do-anything intelligence, a canny ability to turn anything into a tool, in ways that are not only richly funny but strangely practical.

Also dazzling is the chase climax to the film's modern story, in which Keaton runs from the police in a mad race to get to the church where the girl is set to marry Beery. The scene is built around an accident: Keaton tried to perform a daredevil leap from a wooden plank across the space between two buildings, but he fell short, slipping off the second building and falling into a net. He was injured in the fall, but he then proceeded to use his mishap as the foundation of a new sequence, elaborating on it with a complex series of secondary falls, through a series of awnings, onto a drainpipe, through the window of a firehouse and down the fire pole. This is Keatonian inventiveness at its finest again, making use even of a dangerous mistake and turning it into an opportunity for what wound up being an even better gag than if he'd actually made the jump.

Three Ages is consistently driven by this kind of daring and cleverness. It's not one of Keaton's very best films, and its three-part structure makes it feel like a collection of shorts woven together rather than a true first leap into feature filmmaking — that would come soon enough with the great Our Hospitality. But it's a typically funny and frenzied Keaton film with plenty to recommend it.

A Woman of Paris

Charles Chaplin's A Woman of Paris was a very conscious departure for the writer/director/comic. Chaplin had just begun making features, and now he was ready to expand beyond comedy, for the first time making a film in which he did not star, and which was a serious drama with virtually no humor whatsoever. It was also an attempt to provide a showcase for Edna Purviance, who had been Chaplin's most prominent leading lady since his Essanay period; Chaplin wanted to make her a dramatic star rather than just his comic foil. Chaplin was very aware that this change might not be welcomed, and he defensively prefaced the film with a letter handed out to audience members, warning them not to expect a typical farce with the Little Tramp. It didn't help: the film was a flop, and Purviance never became the silent star that Chaplin had wanted to make of her.

It's not hard to see why the gambit failed: under the weight of expectations, A Woman of Paris couldn't help but be a disappointment, or at least a shock to the system. It's a straightforward, subtly acted romantic melodrama that veers into tragedy several times over, with little in common with the famous Tramp's other films to that point. Taken on its own merits, though, it's a fine example of this kind of 1920s moralist tragedy, simple and direct and boasting a number of especially nuanced portrayals. It's only by comparison with the rest of Chaplin's oeuvre that one feels something missing, the supple balance of comedy and sentiment that characterized his best works, here with the comedy removed to focus exclusively on darker emotions.

Purviance plays Marie St. Clair, a young woman preparing to run off to get married with her sweetheart Jean (Carl Miller), a young artist, even though their parents disapprove of the affair and try to keep them apart. Their hopeful young love is shattered, though, when a tragedy prevents their elopement, and they wind up going separately to Paris and living very different lives. While Jean lives with his mother as a starving artist, Marie becomes the mistress of the playboy Pierre (Adolphe Menjou), who keeps her in a luxurious apartment and gives her a life of leisure and pleasure, even though he's due to marry someone else. She's a fallen woman now, but interestingly, Chaplin makes this life look fun, and Menjou delivers a surprisingly sympathetic performance as the corrupt, decadent ladies' man. There's real affection between them, maybe even something like love, and the chemistry between them complicates the film tremendously, pushing it beyond its moralistic melodrama.


The performances in the film are naturalistic and subtle, creating real pathos for these characters. The film may not have made Purviance a star, but it probably should have. She has a warm, unstudied humanity to her that was always evident in her work with Chaplin but is especially apparent here, where she finally gets a spotlight all to herself. Her character reacts to the twists and turns of her life with a laugh and a shrug, trying to project an aura of carefree indifference, but Purviance always lets the woman underneath the flapper shell shine through, more upset and hurt by the men in her life and their cruelties than she ever lets on. And yet Marie tries to make the best of it all, even when she's reunited with Jean and is torn between her life of comfort and the possibility of rekindling what they once had, if it's even possible. Marie is an interesting character, and only at the end of the film is she finally confined to the conventions of the 1920s melodrama, forced to pay for the misunderstandings that had ruined her life, giving up her partying for an existence dedicated to service, caring for orphans to replace the family that she might've once had with Jean if things had gone differently.

Before this disappointingly pat ending, and despite the more melodramatic contrivances of the script, Chaplin does a fine job of exploring the subtle, contradictory emotions at the heart of the film's relationships. Aided by the exceptional performances of Purviance and Menjou in particular, the film is awash in sadness and loss. It's not surprising that Chaplin, chastised by audience disinterest, returned immediately to comedies, and Purviance's career unfortunately all but ended here. It's not quite a shame — there's no question that Chaplin's comedies would always be his most enduring works — but A Woman of Paris represents a different and rather interesting side of Chaplin's art, focusing on the emotional richness that also always made his comedies so distinctive.

The Saga of Gösta Berling

Bleak, wintery and expressive, Mauritz Stiller's The Saga of Gösta Berling is a three-hour silent epic bursting at the seams with sturm und drang hysteria. The story of the disgraced former priest Gösta Berling (Lars Hanson), adapted from Selma Lagerlöf's novel, is a succession of tragedies, one after another, as the defrocked Gösta seems to bring bad luck to anyone who associates with him. The film is as much the story of the woman around him as it is of Gösta himself, since the former priest is often the least interesting figure in his own story.

Indeed, the women are the dominant figures here, from the scheming Mãrtha Dohna (Ellen Hartman-Cederström) — who sets Gösta up to marry her stepdaughter Ebba (Mona Mårtenson) merely because Ebba will be disinherited if she marries a commoner — to Margaretha (Gerda Lundequist), the domineering Major's wife who runs her castle with an iron hand and a fierce manner. Then there's Elisabeth (Greta Garbo), who marries Mãrtha's son Henrik (Torsten Hammarén), an overly formal stiff who's constantly gaping foolishly like a fish out of water. This was the 19-year-old Garbo's first major part: Stiller discovered her, renamed her, and cast her in the role that would first send her to fame. She's already electric here, projecting a raw quality that contrasts nicely against the rounded softness of her face — no trace here of the hard edges and stern expressions that she would be famous for later in her career. Garbo's Elisabeth starts out as a minor figure in the film, one woman among several whose lives are touched, generally for the worse, by Gösta's presence, but later in the film she returns and becomes increasingly prominent in the final hour.

Garbo is introduced in anything but a glamorous way, snacking and casually chatting with her new husband as they return from their wedding in Italy; she's eating the last of the food from her home country, and at one point she puts her fist over her mouth to cover a very un-lady-like belch. This little touch is characteristic of this film, which has a very uncouth, raw sensibility. The most appealing aspect of Gösta Berling is its rude, lewd approach to the stuffy period drama. The characters are all trussed-up and confined by billowing, extravagant clothes, the men choked up to their chins with high collars, the women hiding beneath massive floppy hats and layers of coats and dresses, thick furs shielding them against the winter chill. The Major's wife, trying to convince Gösta not to commit suicide, goes to great effort to untie the thick ropes wound around her torso, holding her heavy winter coat in place, and as she tells him the story of her love affair and her unhappy marriage, her coat and scarves hang down all around her, thick piles of clothes that seem to physically weigh her down. It's as though the fashion of the period and the layers amassed against the cold are trapping the characters, and they rebel against this stuffiness with outbursts of visceral bad behavior, drunken revelry and outrageousness, like Gösta's elaborate opening prank with a shaggy devil, or the food fight that interrupts a society banquet.


The devil at the beginning of the film, a dancing trickster who wouldn't be at all out of place in a contemporaneous German Expressionist film, is a harbinger of things to come, bursting into being out of a puff of smoke and a few flames that prefigure the fiery catastrophe of the climax. The film becomes really unhinged in its final hour, breaking free of the sometimes plodding chamber melodrama of the earlier sections in favor of a desolate, searing extended climax set almost entirely in the chilly wastelands around Margaretha's home. Stiller builds an absolutely stunning atmosphere throughout these sequences, as the castle is set on fire, smoke drifting everywhere in thick white clouds, the flames licking over everything. It's hellish and harrowing, the fire lighting up the night, igniting a series of melodramatic confrontations that clear the way for Gösta's last act redemption — everything has to be razed to the ground in order to rebuild, the sins of the past wiped clean.

The hellish fire of this climax is juxtaposed against the icy wastes of the surrounding area, the mountains of snow, the frozen lake across which Gösta and Elisabeth race in an eerie late-night ride, pursued by feral wolves, Stiller mostly focusing on Elisabeth's terrified face glowing palely in the darkness. Stiller makes excellent use of the icy territory, making the cold and the ice palpable. The characters are always bundled up, smothered in furs and blankets, and their breath makes icy puffs of condensation in the air in front of their mouths. Stiller makes the landscape bleak and foreboding, a snowy tundra with the wind whipping, knife-sharp, across the lake, the dark sky hanging low, the moon casting only a diffuse glow over the grim, grainy darkness. The scene where Gösta's sled is chased by the wolves is especially compelling, with Gösta determinedly whipping his horse to run ever faster, while Stiller periodically cuts to minimalist long shots, panning with the sled as the dark blots of the wolves give chase.

The film isn't always so bracing, and at three hours its pacing is sometimes slack, with one melodramatic twist after another. The performances, too, are mostly broad and stagey, especially Hanson's Gösta, but Stiller does make good use of the frequent poignant closeups of the film's many suffering, tormented women. In one of these shots, Elisabeth's gaze drifts rightward, flicking briefly up to look directly into the camera, as though seeking solace there, then turning back to her husband, who's upbraiding her for her interference in the relationship between Gösta and Ebba. This is a story of suffering and redemption, in which the moral hypocrisy of polite society creates a cycle of punishment and disgrace that's finally only broken with a happy ending that at last clears away the ice and snow, and the fire too, in favor of the blossoms of spring.

The Parson's Widow

Comedy is one of the last things one would expect from Carl Theodor Dreyer, but his second feature, The Parson's Widow, is in fact a gentle rural comedy. Of course, it's a comedy as directed by Dreyer, which means that it's a curiously slow and lethargic comedy, a moody and patiently paced tale of sexual frustration, poverty and religion. That is to say, it's not exactly a laugh-a-minute comedy, though its somber pace and austere visual style only makes its occasional bursts of goofy humor all the more bracing and startling.

The film's story is extremely old-fashioned, and must have been even when it was made in 1920. It's rooted in rural values and the power of tradition. The poor young man Söfren (Einar Röd) has traveled to a small village to try out for the position of village parson. He wants the post because then he'll be able to marry his sweetheart Mari (Greta Almroth), but in a cruelly ironic twist, he gets the job only to find out that by local tradition he'll have to marry the elderly widow (Hildur Carlberg) of the previous parson. He marries the old woman, partially tricked into it by drunkeness and, perhaps, an enchanted piece of herring, and passes Mari off as his sister, biding his time for the old woman to die so that he'll be able to marry his lover instead.

Dreyer exploits the scenario for some broad comic set pieces, the tone of which jars against the film's general melancholy. Söfren's attempts to evade the widow and get some time alone with his real beloved are comically satisfying, especially when he continually thinks he's flirting with his lover when actually he's accidentally making loving gestures at the widow's equally ancient servant. Also very funny is the early sequence in which Söfren observes two stuffy rivals who are trying out for the parson's job; he sabotages one of them by sticking a feather on his head so that his preaching inspires only laughter from the parishioners. The strangest moment, though, is the scene where Söfren dresses up as the devil, presumably to scare his elderly bride, wearing a sheet painted with a frightening face, with horns and big flopping ears.


Despite the many comic moments, the overall tone of the film is grim and melancholy. Dreyer portrays the widow mostly as a foreboding, exaggeratedly dour presence, her face heavily lined, her mouth permanently twisted into a scowl, captured in numerous closeups of her looking disapprovingly at her unhappy husband. Towards the end of the film, though, the treatment of the widow abruptly shifts to a much more sentimental depiction, pretty much without warning: at one moment Dreyer portrays her as a witch and a harridan, and the next he's suddenly treating her much more warmly, fleshing out the tragic details of her past and making her a much more sympathetic character. The shift to sentimental romanticism is clumsily handled, perhaps, but it makes the film's ending movingly poetic, unexpectedly exploring the pathos of the widow's situation rather than just using her attachment to Söfren as a source of comic relief.

At its best, The Parson's Widow is a tribute to rural tradition, capturing the feel of this small and tight-knit community where old ways are still dominant and life paths are decided by customs passed down through the generations. Dreyer shot on location in the countryside, and this lends the film a grounded, clear-eyed realism, with ascetically beautiful natural landscapes, billowing waterfalls, fields of waving grassy stalks. The locals dance and celebrate, and Dreyer shows real affection for these rural rituals, rooted as they are in ancient traditions and made necessary by poverty and limited means. This is an interesting early film from the future master, a comedy that neatly balances its humor with the darker emotions at its core.

Nana

Jean Renoir's second silent feature, Nana, is a tragic, melodramatic satire based on an Emile Zola novel about a failed actress who becomes an obsession of multiple upper-class men, corrupting the noble class with her crass, vulgar ways. For the role of this remarkable young woman, Renoir cast his then-wife Catherine Hessling, the star of several of his earliest films and an actress who was, to say the least, something of an acquired taste. Bold, brash, and extremely limited in her range, Hessling was nevertheless something of an inspired choice to play the corrupting influence Nana, who leads men to their doom with her pouting and mugging, her shameless flirting and her manipulative use of her own sexuality.

It's very interesting that Renoir would cast his wife in a role like this, and the film creates some bizarre subtexts surrounding this woman. Renoir is casting his wife as a terrible actress who's stereotyped as a tramp and a seductress, not fit for serious or "elegant" roles; when she tries out for the part of an elegant duchess, her fellow performers laugh her out of the room. When she gets the part anyway through the influence of her wealthy suitor, Count Muffat (Werner Krauss), she's booed off the stage, though Renoir at least spares her that indignity with an ellipsis, showing her running offstage in tears afterwards. Nana is brash and vulgar, defiantly lower-class, but somehow she manages to attract all these stuffy upper-class men who are seduced by her sour-puss scowl and her hip-shaking insinuations of sexual abandon. When Nana gets up on stage and dances lustily, she earns raucous cheers, and Renoir highlights the class divide in the audience by showing the lower rows recklessly getting involved in Nana's bold performance, while when some of the gentlemen in the more sophisticated regions of the theater get caught up in the act, those around them display their disdain for such unfettered shows of appreciation.

In many ways, Hessling's limited range actually makes her a perfect fit for Nana. She can be a frustrating actress, displaying the same sour expression and widened eyes for virtually every emotion from sadness to ecstasy, but Nana's not exactly supposed to be a subtle or likeable character herself. She's a force of nature, an embodiment of the lower-class invasion of the nobility, a theme that Renoir would go on to explore far more subtly and powerfully in later films, but is already at the center of this sophomore film. Nana revels in her humiliation of these wealthy men with their titles and their fortunes: in one of the film's most potent sequences, she actually makes Muffat beg like a "fat little puppy" for a piece of chocolate, placing his hands under his chin like a dog begging for a treat. She debases these men, driving them to crime and fetishism. One of her suitors, the effeminate, ineffectual young Georges (Raymond Guérin-Catelain), hides in her closet so he can smell her dresses, from which vantage point he witnesses Muffat's debasement, which seems to teach him something ugly about himself as well.


Though Nana quits the stage towards the beginning of the film, in many ways she remains an actress in her new "career" as a courtesan, performing for men, acting out a glamorous lifestyle that elevates her above her previous station into the company of sophisticated men with fancy titles. Renoir repeatedly films her luxurious room in wide shots that make it look like a stage, complete with proscenium arch. Nana leaves the theater but makes her whole life a kind of performance instead, another way in which Hessling's theatrical performance style fits this character so well.

Renoir, working under the strong influence of Erich von Stroheim, adopts a lush, sophisticated, self-assured style here, very different from the blend of naturalism and surreal visual effects in his debut La fille de l'eau. The film's style is big and lavish, capturing the trappings of wealth and privilege that Nana so incongruously wraps around herself. But Renoir also movingly depicts the emptiness and melancholy lurking at the center of this lifestyle: all this money, the manipulations and seductions, leaves this gaping emotional hole that's filled with suicides and psychologically motivated illnesses and the other usual melodramatic tragedies, but also with a general atmosphere of gloom that's communicated in Renoir's elegant visual style. There are numerous shots here that capture that melancholy undercurrent: Nana reclining on her couch, her face framed by flickering candles; Muffat strolling through a dark night that closes in around him, lit up only by a lamp post high above, barely piercing the inky blackness that smothers him.

Nana is an early indication of Renoir's satirical sensibility being directed at the bourgeois and the nobility, with Hessling's Nana serving the same casually destructive role that Michel Simon would later take on in more refined, fully developed films like Boudu Saved From Drowning. Renoir was still finding his voice here, but Nana is still both a fine film in its own right and an early glimpse of the director's developing style and concerns.

Napoléon

Abel Gance's Napoléon is an epic biography of the famed military leader and Emperor of France, a film as grand and ambitious as its subject, as indicated by the fact that this five-hour masterpiece was only the first of a projected six films that would have chronicled the entirety of Napoléon's life. Gance never made the subsequent films, but this overwhelming, technically stunning and passionate work — encompassing Napoléon's boyhood, his experiences during the French Revolution, and his invasion of Italy — is more than enough, an unforgettable monument of the cinema.

It is certainly one of the most innovative films of the silent era, with Gance restlessly inventing and combining multiple techniques, pouring everything into the film. Even before the famous climactic final reel, for which Gance created a widescreen three-camera shooting technique he called Polyvision, the film is a virtual catalog of everything that was possible in the silent cinema, and probably at least a few things that weren't possible before Gance. The camera shakes and sways, freed from static framings, and the film's approach to montage, controlling pacing by periodically building up to bursts of frenzied cutting and layered multiple exposures, is practically modern.

Gance opens the film with an extraordinary 10-minute-plus sequence that introduces the boy Napoléon's (Vladimir Roudenko) battlefield leadership in microcosm in the midst of a schoolboy snowball fight. It's a technically exhilarating sequence that, in addition to profiling the hero's character at an early stage of his development, introduces the sheer bravura virtuosity of Gance's filmmaking, with an increasingly frenetic barrage of shaky handheld shots, graceful traveling shots, and frantic montage that builds into a nearly abstract, hyper-modern assault on the senses. At the height of the battle's intensity, Gance even divides the screen into multiple smaller images, finally arriving at a nine-panel grid with the multiple images conveying the confusion of the battle scene, presaging the three-panel widescreen of the finale.


Gance seems to be consistently aiming for techniques that allow him to convey more information than the senses can take in at once, to use visceral fast cutting and superimpositions to create images that are felt as much as seen. The aesthetics of the snowball fight — the jittery handheld camera and speed-blurred shots that last only a second or two before being replaced by another disorienting snippet of action — prefigure modern action cinema and must have been positively jaw-dropping when the film was new. Gance later applies a similar style to the actual battles of Napoléon's military career, as the young officer (played by Albert Dieudonné as an adult) steadily climbs up the ranks and proves his prowess with his brilliant strategy and bold daring. The battles are all smoke and cannon-fire and messy scrabbling in the mud with swords and bayonets. While Napoléon and the other officers plan everything out in advance via geometric shapes laid out on maps, representing opposing armies, the actual fighting is frenetic, often with Napoléon himself standing stoically in the midst of the chaos, presenting a strong profile to the camera.

Gance spends a substantial portion of the film on the French Revolution, with his hero on the fringes, watching and waiting for his moment of glory. The "three gods" of the Jacobins — Danton (Alexandre Koubitzky), Marat (Antonin Artaud), and a creepy, sunglass-wearing Robespierre (Edmond van Daële) — are shown stirring up crowds with their revolutionary rhetoric, perhaps inspiring the younger Napoléon. The peak of this segment is the sequence where Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle leads the National Convention in a stirring rendition of his song, "La Marseillaise," soon to become the French national anthem. The sequence builds to a stirring patriotic fervor, culminating with a rapid-fire barrage of shots lasting barely a second, each flickering shot a closeup of a face in the crowd, their mouths open in song, shouting and singing their pride in their country and their revolutionary zeal. One can practically hear the song, and would even if it weren't frequently referenced and quoted in Carl Davis' score, so visceral is Gance's staging of this moment, daring to make an emotional musical moment so important to the film.


What's crucial here is that Gance's technical mastery never amounts to mere showing-off. The film is dazzling in the array of techniques and formal devices it employs, but its inventions are always intimately married to the story, to the emotions and ideas that Gance wishes to communicate. As Napoléon makes his perilous ship journey back from Corsica, Gance cuts back and forth from the stormy seas, tossing the ship on the waves, to the debates in the National Convention in Paris. As the storm worsens, Gance further parallels the two sequences by making the Parisian scenes rock and sway with the same tempo as the waves, the camera swooping and soaring. It seems as if the whole building is rocking, buffetted by the storm of history, bringing Napoléon back to his destiny even as the violence and paranoia of the French Revolution increasingly shakes up the new government, making it as unstable as the stormy seas that the future Emperor is braving to return to the center of power.

The film's second half documents Napoléon's imprisonment, his sidelining, and then his sudden ascension to a position of great power, leading an army to conquer Italy. Gance's Napoléon, for much of the film, is a surprisingly shabby and ordinary man, living in poverty, puttering around in his cold and ramshackle apartment, struggling to cook on an uncooperative stove and papering over his broken windows with a map of Italy to keep the rain out. These scenes of the future great man's prosaic struggles serve as a contrast to the film's epic mythologization of this famed figure. The same goes for the scenes establishing Napoléon's romance with Joséphine de Beauharnais (Gina Manès). There's not much room for romanticism, sensuality or sexuality in Gance's sweeping chronicle of historical forces in motion, but those softer emotional currents are embodied in both Joséphine and Violine (Annabella), who admires Napoléon from afar and even builds a shrine to him in her room.

The film's sensual streak reaches its apex in a grand ball celebrating the end of the Jacobins' Reign of Terror, at which Napoléon and Joséphine, who'd crossed paths briefly several times throughout the film, meet once again. When Napoléon sees her, Gance edits in a sensuous, associative montage of the woman's previous appearances, reinforcing the way she weaves through the film and through the hero's thoughts. This party, after the violence and horror of the years under Robespierre and Saint-Just (who's played with glowering intensity by Gance himself), is a release of long-suppressed sensual feeling, and Gance lets that sexual energy flow in the shaky, visceral images of women dancing in various states of undress, images of startling eroticism in a film that is otherwise concerned largely with far more abstract and less personal ideas and feelings.


This detour into romance and personal drama provides a brief intermission in the film's second half, before the film ends with Napoléon's triumphant charge into Italy at the head of his new army. At this point, Gance expands the frame using his innovative three-camera Polyvision system, giving the final fifteen minutes of the film a stunning grandeur that truly conveys the scope of the director's vision. Gance uses this revolutionary technique for both panoramic vistas — albeit imperfect ones with visible seams — and triptychs of images, often framing central images of Napoléon with columns of marching soldiers or stormy, dramatic skies on either side of him. Several times, Gance even uses the triple images for sensory-overload collages that juxtapose the conquering general with images of his bride back at home, his soldiers, maps of his military plans, and other layered images, suggesting Napoléon's divided thoughts as well as the frenzy of battle.

Gance's epic is one of the greatest masterpieces of the silent era, an indisputable technical achievement that summed up everything the young medium was capable of at the time, and which remains bracing, thrilling, visceral, and modern-feeling even over 80 years later. It's a work of potent hagiography that expresses its sense of historical scale in the quality and vigor of its images, using the full breadth of the cinema's expressive potential in order to get at the towering stature and importance of this complicated figure.

The Finances of the Grand Duke

Though The Finances of the Grand Duke was F.W. Murnau's second straight literary adaptation in collaboration with screenwriter Thea von Harbou, it is a very different film from its moody, poetically melancholy predecessor, Phantom. It's a peculiar film for Murnau, a rapidly paced comic adventure that packs an epic serial's worth of action, disguises and revelations into a short, breezy comic thriller. The plot is chaotic and confused, obviously greatly condensed from Frank Heller's source novel, and most of its chapters begin with a lengthy title card introducing the new characters being added to a large and ever-growing cast of conspirators, counter-conspirators, dukes and princesses in disguise, financial speculators, revolutionaries and tricksters.

The plot concerns the impoverished and debt-plagued kingdom of Abacco and its cavalier Grand Duke (Harry Liedtke), who goes on the run with his financial minister Don Paqueno (Adolphe Engers) in order to avoid his debtors and possibly arrange a marriage to the far richer Princess Olga of Russia (Mady Christians). These royal plots are surrounded by a baffling array of shenanigans with various players trying to get control of Abacco or make money off the confusion that reigns in the struggling kingdom. The action is frantic, the film's humor arising mostly from the sheer overwhelming profusion of interlocking plots and strange occurrences, like one conspirator who's distracted at a key moment by a pair of animal impersonators. They're not the only characters in the film who engage in masquerade and disguise, as Olga is on the run from her notoriously cruel brother, falling in with the name-shifting Philipp Collins (Alfred Abel), a smirking spy, forger and con man who comically disguises her with drawn-on facial hair and sunglasses.

The film's madcap pace and slightly goofy pile-up of intrigues makes it very entertaining, but it's also a typically stylish film from Murnau, with his usual meticulous mise en scène. Murnau, together with cinematographer Karl Freund, shot much of the film in natural locations, with occasional expressionist two-dimensional sets mixed in, and the gorgeous seascapes, rocky vistas and Mediterranean locales add to the film's sense of globe-trotting adventure. There are numerous striking shots: images of sailing ships isolated in endless expanses of water, rocky coastlines with picturesque old ruins crumbling into the cliffs, underground grottoes where unscrupulous schemers discover mineral lodes and plan to exploit them.


There are also some very compelling, shadowy urban images that create a mood of late-night scheming and diplomatic espionage. When Collins meets Olga for the first time, rescuing the mysterious woman from her pursuers, Murnau cuts away several times to atmospheric images of the foggy, shadowy city. Fog rolls across the frame, obscuring the streetlights that cut through the darkness, as pedestrians stroll through the smoke across a bridge. The naturalistic cityscapes and sunny shorelines are contrasted against scattered moments of expressionist stylization, like a scene where Olga and Collins conspire against a backdrop of jagged, painted houses silhouetted on the set behind their car. In other scenes, cars cut through the night, speeding through the crowded city in a frantic chase, and a train sits waiting to depart, unleashing rolling clouds of steam before chugging slowly forward out of the station, nearly filling the frame with its black bulk.

At times, Murnau's imagery is playfully striking, as when a story about a "saucy little woman" is followed by a jaunty closeup of the woman in question, turning her head to smile at the camera, before her face fades into an image of the circus big top where she works. The film is fast and frenzied, packed with this kind of visual panache, making it a very pleasurable experience, uncharacteristic of Murnau in its story and tone but not in its style.

The Iron Horse

John Ford's epic silent Western The Iron Horse was the director's first major statement in the genre that, more than any other, would become synonymous with his career. He'd made many Westerns before, churning out low-budget B-movie oaters throughout the silent era, but this was his first large-scale statement in the genre. His ambition seems obvious in the title cards that introduce the film, paying tribute to Ford's hero Abraham Lincoln and announcing that the film's chronicle of the construction of America's "first transcontinental railroad" would be "accurate and faithful in every particular of fact and atmosphere." This isn't just a film, he seems to be announcing, it's history.

That's bunk, of course, and as history the film is utterly suspect from virtually the moment it begins. Typically of the Hollywood Western, this is a mythological, romanticized depiction of the westward expansion, one in which the white heroes must struggle against the odds, fending off Indian attacks and the cruel assaults of the elements in order to fulfill their destiny of pushing into the unpopulated wilds of the west. The film's tone towards the Native Americans who are actually in those lands is obvious in the way the title cards keep announcing how "inevitable" it is that the white man should take over the entire country. The Native Americans who resist this expansion, the film suggests, are merely standing in the way of destiny, which means they're destined to be crushed. How dare they oppose "the inevitable"? How dare they oppose progress?

The film's ahistorical steamrolling of the non-white is obvious throughout. The title cards casually announce at one point that "there is no white labor" for the building of the railroad, so "it is necessary to bring in Chinese for the task." There's no mention, of course, of the fact that the Chinese laborers were paid less than white counterparts, and despite the acknowledgment that most of the laborers were Chinese, most of the onscreen work actually shown within the film is performed by white Irish and Italians. The discriminatory laws that applied to the Chinese are made into a joke in a courtroom scene where Ford makes light of the fact that shooting a Chinaman is a lesser offense than shooting a white man. The mass killing of buffalo to feed the railway employees — one major source of Native American anger at the rail's invasion of their lands — is also glossed over.


Ahistorical and ideologically suspect as it is, The Iron Horse is also often a grand piece of entertainment. Its scope is truly epic, and Ford's images have a real grandeur to them, a feel for landscape and crowded scenes. The hard work of the railroad workers is viscerally felt, and there's a sense of realism in Ford's recreations of their struggles. Horses trudge through deep snows, pulling locomotives. Men hammer rhythmically at large spikes. One sequence documents the process by which the movable railroad towns settle in one place for a while before leaving it behind as a ghost town, always moving with the forward advance of the tracks. As the town moves, Ford shoots a wagon train running side-by-side with an actual train, the soon-to-be obsolete form of cross-country travel helping to build its own replacement.

The film is dominated by sequences like this, which focus on the big picture at the expense of individual characters. There is an individual story here, built around Davy Brandon (George O'Brien), a Pony Express rider whose father had dreamed of building a transcontinental railroad before being killed by Cheyenne, led by the sinister white outlaw Deroux (Fred Kohler). After a prologue in which Davy appears as a boy before his father's death, the character doesn't return as an adult until almost an hour into the film, confirming the dominance of large-scale historical storytelling over character-based drama. Davy's presence provides at least a hint of the usual Hollywood hero-centric drama, but the film is about historical processes and feats accomplished by groups and societies rather than individuals. Even Davy's romance with Miriam (Madge Bellamy), the childhood sweetheart he was separated from, is eventually paralleled with the building of the railroad. Only when the tracks are completed can their love be consummated, the two lovers coming together from opposite ends of the country at precisely the moment the tracks are joined.


At its best, the film's epic storytelling is very satisfying. There's a sense of scale here that's truly exhilarating, particularly in the inventively staged battle scenes — one Indian attack is staged with the shadows of the attackers projected onto the side of a train, while the climactic battle is all dust clouds and sweeping overhead shots that take in the whole battlefield. Ford similarly pulls back for a grand cattle cattle drive sequence, whereas the countless images of men at work on the rails are invariably captured in densely packed frames that emphasize the sweaty, choreographed simultaneity of their labors. Indeed, the film is at its best when it's abstract like this, since the usual Fordian diversions into ethnic comic relief are especially grating here, and the characters, mostly treated as cogs in a massive machine, aren't well-developed enough for the sporadic shifts to dramatic narrative.

What the film is really celebrating is the moment that the United States became truly united, when it began to take on something like its modern form — pushing further and further into the so-called "wild" lands populated by non-whites, slowly absorbing the entire expanse from east coast to west, linking it all via technology. It's no coincidence that Ford makes sure to note that, when the rails are finally connected in the middle of the country at the end of the film, the news is rapidly spread around the country via telegraph, instantaneously alerting people way back on the east coast to the news. The modern America is forming here. Within the course of the film, which spans years, the Pony Express and the wagon train are made largely obsolete by the telegraph and the locomotive. In the last shot, Ford has people posing for a photograph by the side of a train, a precursor of the cinema, which would be another of those world-shaking, transformative technological leaps forward. This is, after all, a film about technology more than anything else, about the way in which a country was built through a unique combination of rapid technological advances, hard work, and, buried in the film's subtext but rarely acknowledged, exploitation and genocide.

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. is another of Buster Keaton's absolute best films, a brilliant masterpiece of physical comedy with a premise perfectly tailored to Keaton's penchant for death-defying stunts, blending humor and action to such a degree that those two aspects of his work become inextricable. Keaton's physical feats of daring at the climax of this film represent some of his best stuntwork, both irresistibly funny and shocking in the very real sense of danger that's continually present in these obviously carefully timed and designed stunts, where just a second or an inch off could've meant disaster for the actor. It's obviously Keaton's very precise, utterly logical genius driving these stunts and gags, which is why it makes no difference that he's not the credited director; it's Keaton's unmistakeable intelligence at work here, not that of credited director Charles Reisner.

The film has a quite poignant thematic emphasis on fathers and sons, as Keaton plays an effete, intellectual college kid who tries to impress his tough, masculine riverboat captain father Steamboat Bill (Ernest Torrence), who he is meeting for the first time. When Bill first realizes that Keaton is his son, Keaton is prancing around with a violin in a manner that's obviously meant to be a parody of homosexuality — he's trying to quiet a crying baby with his antics, but his father doesn't realize this and simply looks at this spectacle as the first manifestation of his son's unmanly ways. In his beret and fancy clothes, with a wispy mustache that earns the withering contempt of his father, Keaton recalls the inept snobs of some of his earlier films, though here he's not a son of privilege. The subtext is Bill's desire that his son — even a son that he hasn't seen since he was a baby — should be an echo and a mirror of the father, hence the comedy of the scene in which the captain walks around the train station trying to figure out which man is his son. At one point, he mistakenly walks up to a black man in a gag that recalls Keaton's mistaken proposal to a black woman in Seven Chances, both jokes essentially reflecting some skittishness and subtextual discomfort with the prospect of inter-racial romances.

The heart of the film is this troubled father/son dynamic, with the father disappointed in the son he'd hoped would be a rugged tough guy like his dad, and the son who just wants to impress his dad without having to discard his entire persona. Keaton fits in better, it seems, with his father's rival, J.J. King (Tom McGuire), who runs a much more modern and fancy steamboat operation, and whose daughter Kitty (Marion Byron) is Keaton's girlfriend, much to the chagrin of both the rival fathers. This Romeo and Juliet tale of forbidden romance provides the impetus for some of the best jokes, as Keaton keeps trying to sneak away to see Kitty under the watchful and disapproving eyes of both fathers. There are countless inventive and funny sequences here, particularly an extended bit of Keaton keeping various clothes hidden under his bedrobe so he can sneak out. Byron's also a dynamic, adorable presence here, one of Keaton's best leading ladies, her cutesy energy and almost Chaplin-esque shuffling walk a nice contrast to Keaton's infamous stoicism and restraint.


Keaton has a way of enlivening even minor scenes with subtle little gestural touches, like the way he discreetly leans in to smell Kitty's hair while she's talking to him, or the way, after he's knocked out by the sheriff and thrown into the back of a car, with only his legs sticking up, he casually crosses his legs as the car takes his supposedly unconscious body to the hospital. Also hilarious is the scene where he tries to bust his father out of prison with some tools baked into a massive loaf of bread, a scene in which Keaton's whimsically pantomimes various hand signals for escape to his father while the sheriff's back is turned.

The peak of the film, though, is unquestionably the lengthy climax, one of the best of Keaton's typically frenzied final act extravaganzas, as a storm sweeps through the town, with Keaton wandering dazed and baffled through one dangerous situation after another. This whole sequence is a marvel of split-second timing and perfectly realized stunts, with whole buildings and houses falling down or blowing away with Keaton right next to them, the town being torn apart all around him, with him as the mostly untouched center of the storm, always just in the right spot to avoid otherwise certain death. Most famously, at one point the whole front wall of a house falls down and Keaton survives because he's standing precisely in the spot where the window lands. There are countless more similarly startling moments, like a house that lands on top of him and then collapses as soon as he steps out of its door, or a wall that falls as he steps through its door. At one point, he wanders onto a theatrical stage, where he pulls a chain that causes him to disappear into a trapdoor. He then tries to dive into a lake that turns out to be a painted backdrop, a realist echo of the magical dream at the center of Sherlock Jr.; the theater isn't as permeable to magical intrusions as the cinema's screen.

As these incidents pile up and the wind blows, Keaton's unceasing physical artistry becomes absolutely hypnotic, especially during the daring chain of rescues that caps off the film, with Keaton athletically leaping from one level to another on the steamboat and rigging a series of mechanical contrivances of the kind he's always loved. His bravado wins over everyone — his father, Kitty's father, and Kitty herself — so that his character wins the admiration he so intensely desires even as Keaton himself wins the admiration of any audience witnessing the very real stunts and gags he executes so flawlessly here.