Four Sons

Made under the heavy influence of German Expressionism and especially the recently emigrated F.W. Murnau, John Ford's Four Sons represents one great director being deeply affected by the work of another, letting the spirit of Murnau's cinema infiltrate and blend with Ford's own still-developing style. Murnau had just made Sunrise at Ford's studio, Fox, and Ford shot parts of his film on leftover sets from Murnau's classic. Four Sons opens in a small German village, where the postman (Albert Gran), immediately seen in the first shot, strongly recalls Emil Jannings' mustachioed doorman from Murnau's The Last Laugh. Ford follows the postman in a graceful tracking shot that winds around the village, occasionally pausing for the man to exchange friendly banter with people he meets along the way, or for a wagon loaded with hay to cross the frame. This lengthy traveling shot instantly establishes the atmosphere of this comfortable, happy little town, where everyone knows everyone else, children gleefully scamper underfoot, and there's a warm communal vibe to this place and its people. In this idyllic small town, the elderly Mother Bernle (Margaret Mann) proudly raises her four sons, who love and idolize her with the characteristic Fordian adoration for parents.

Indeed, though this film takes place primarily in Germany and draws on the influence of Murnau, its affectionate, sentimental depiction of family life amid a tightly knit community is purely Fordian, a precursor to his Irish films like How Green Was My Valley. The domestic bliss of the Bernle family is soon shattered, though, as the arrival of World War I casts a pall over their family and their town. One of the four sons, Joseph (James Hall), has already departed for America, where he's done well with his own restaurant and his own happy family. Two more of the sons are sent off to war in the German army, leaving behind only the youngest son, Andreas (George Meeker), to stay home with his mother. The film is remarkably even-handed in its depiction of war and patriotism. The only real villain here is the German major Von Stomm (Earle Fox), a caricature of Prussian rigidity and sneering evil, but the rest of the German officers and soldiers are portrayed as ordinary, decent people fighting for their country. Ford takes care to never let Von Stomm's villainy overwhelm the picture: immediately after Von Stomm's vilest scene, when he forces Andreas to enlist in the army, another German officer kisses Mother Bernle's hand on the way out, as though acknowledging his disapproval of his superior's actions.

The film's plot basically piles up one tragedy after another, as the war claims one son after another from this family. In the end, only Joseph, who has gone to war in the army of his adopted country rather than for Germany, is left. Ford's sentiment can be overwhelming: several times throughout the film, Mother Bernle sits at her table and says a brief grace before eating with her sons, and each time the scene recurs this ritual becomes sadder and sadder, more and more tinged with loss, with the repeated composition calling attention to those missing from the table. The final time the scene appears, the table is empty except for Mother Bernle, and she imagines her four sons as ghostly presences, superimposed over their empty chairs; the image is unbearably sad, and unbearably maudlin.


Elsewhere, Ford's direction more economically conveys grief and tragedy without resorting to such forced sentimentality. The postman's delivery of letters with black borders, signifying a dead soldier, provide a heartbreaking shorthand for loss, and the postman, reluctant to be the bearer of such bad news, makes each step towards his destination seem like it takes tremendous effort. The second time he delivers this kind of letter to Mother Bernle, he appears in a deep focus shot through her window, while inside she kneels in front of the window, looking through a chest, preparing for the homecoming of a son who will never return. As the postman slowly approaches the house, framed by the window, she finally looks up, sees him, and freezes, immediately knowing what news he brings. Equally powerful is the shot of the mother watching as Andreas is inducted into the army; she watches at a window, then places her palm against the glass, as though raising her hand in a wave goodbye, an image that Ford fades into a shot of soldiers on the march.

The war itself is minimally conveyed with a foggy, bleak wasteland in which the soldiers crouch and hide. Ford mostly focuses on the faces of the soldiers in extreme closeups, streaked with dirt and sweat, their jaws clenched and their eyes furtive. Ford uses very few titles, only cutting in some minimal text when it's absolutely necessary; his visual style is extremely expressive, and generally no words are needed. The performances of the four Bernle sons are mostly overstated and overacted, but Mann delivers a rich, naturalistic performance as the loving, suffering mother, and there are numerous scenes that display Ford's feel for subtle gestural communication. In one scene, Joseph and his wife (June Collyer) chat while she holds their baby next to her head, creating a very resonant image of the happy family clustered around the child. While the couple is speaking, Joseph's wife casually kisses the baby's head while listening to her husband, a little gesture of tenderness that's easily missed but adds to the scene's touching depiction of domestic bliss.

The film's final act plods on a bit too long after the natural climax, with an extended and rather unnecessary sequence of Mother Bernle emigrating to America and struggling with US immigration laws at Ellis Island. These scenes lay on the pathos a bit too thick, even for a film that's already slathered in sentiment. Despite this over-long finale, Four Sons is a rich, evocatively shot melodrama that explores Ford's fascination with family, war and tragedy.

Seven Chances

Seven Chances was, unlike his previous features, not a project of Buster Keaton's own choosing. It was selected by producer Joseph M. Schenck, based on a hit Broadway show, and this goofy romantic comedy is not especially well-suited to Keaton's talents. The story is very familiar, because it's been made and remade countless times since then: the lawyer Jimmie Shannon (Keaton) learns that he is set to inherit seven million dollars from his grandfather, but only on the condition that he gets married by seven o'clock on his twenty-seventh birthday, which happens to be precisely the day he receives this news. He immediately proposes to his longtime girlfriend Mary (Ruth Dwyer) — who he'd endlessly, shyly dithered in confessing his love to in the prologue, filmed with a very early Technicolor process — but she's understandably peeved when he admits that he's only proposing because of the inheritance. As a result, he has to scurry around, proposing to any girl he vaguely knows or runs into on the streets, desperate to find someone to marry by the deadline so he can receive his badly needed inheritance.

Much of the comedy in the first half of the film is fairly limited, and doesn't play at all to the physical, formally inventive strengths of Keaton. He does manage to liven up Jimmie's series of proposals and rejections with some clever visual gags, like having him toss up a note to one girl and getting a "no" response when a shower of shredded paper falls back down on his head. In another shot, he proposes to one girl on the way up a staircase, and another on the way down. Best of all is the scene where his friend (T. Roy Barnes) proposes to one girl on Jimmie's behalf, pointing over to where he thinks Jimmie is standing, except that Jimmie has wandered away, leaving behind the wrinkled old lawyer (Snitz Edwards) to smile sweetly and shyly at the girl.

Several of the proposal gags revolve around comic misunderstandings, some of them wildly inappropriate and racist: Jimmie thinks about proposing to a Jewish girl and a black maid until the former holds up a Hebrew newspaper, revealing her heritage, and the latter turns towards him, revealing her black face. There are also some unfortunate blackface shenanigans involving a dopey manservant who doggedly pursues Jimmie with the news that Mary wants to marry him after all. In another scene, Jimmie sees a woman on a poster at a stage show and sneaks into the backstage area, hoping to propose to her. While he's inside, a crate is removed from the front of the theater, revealing that the "woman" is actually Julian Eltinge, a then-famous female impersonator, so that when Keaton wanders out of the theater a moment later, looking baffled and put off, with his hat smashed around his neck, that would have been all audiences at the time would have needed to know to get the joke.


The film picks up its pace in its final twenty minutes, when Jimmie's friends place an ad in the newspaper announcing the situation and asking a bride to step forward. Understandably, more than one bride shows up, and for the remainder of the film Jimmie's on the run from a swarm of angry women in bridal veils, an army that stampedes through the streets like a massive human wave, crushing everything in its path. This is when Keaton's brand of wild physical comedy really pays off with this material, and the whole rest of the film keeps up a frenzied, manic pace that hardly lets up for a second. This elongated chase sequence is packed with great gags, like the scene where the woman stop by a brick wall and begin stripping it of bricks to throw at the runaway groom; when the women move on, the wall has entirely disappeared. They also race across a rugby match, with Keaton vaulting athletically over the line of players and the women simply crushing them flat, leaving behind a field littered with bodies, the medics bringing out stretchers to pick up the flattened athletes.

Keaton shows off his athleticism and daring throughout this chase, grabbing onto a crane and flying through the air, hanging above the women. The best sequence, though, is his half-controlled slide down a massive hill with huge rocks tumbling down after him. He dodges and ducks, racing back and forth across the slope, as the rocks careen by all around him, and even if they're very obviously not real boulders, the kineticism of the sequence is viscerally exciting in the way that Keaton's best action/comedy always is.

Keaton himself thought Seven Chances was one of his weakest features, and it's certainly not one of his strongest as a whole, but it's still fairly charming and eventually builds to that looney extended chase sequence, which makes the film worthwhile in itself. If the rest of the film doesn't have the density or consistent brilliance of Keaton's best work, it's only because that's such a high standard to uphold.

M (1951)

Fritz Lang's M is such an enduring classic that it's hard to imagine a Hollywood remake of it, but that's exactly what director Joseph Losey did, twenty years after Lang's original film about the hunt for a child killer. Losey's remake of M, made under the aegis of the original film's producer Seymour Nebenzal, is extremely faithful to its source, following more or less the same script and at times even recreating scenes virtually shot for shot. It would be easy to dismiss the film as an inferior copy of a classic, and many have: the remake was a flop at release and doesn't have much of a reputation even now. But, though it unquestionably does not match the power of the Lang film, it's still a compelling noir in its own right, transplanting Lang's richly ambiguous social parable to 1950s Hollywood at the height of Red hysteria, which is clearly a prominent subtext here.

For Lang, the film was an anti-death-penalty treatise, a somber and timely warning of the dangers of widespread fear and paranoia, and, of course, a plea to watch out for one's children. For Losey, it's a psychosexual thriller and a parable for the McCarthyite anti-Communism that would soon drive the director out of the United States for the remainder of his career. At one point, in a scene that also appears in Lang's film, two witnesses are arguing over whether a kid's dress was red or blue. Losey adds a key detail: the witness who insists the dress was blue angrily asks the other, "what are you, a Communist?" That loaded question, which was already being casually tossed around at the least pretext in the US of this era, hangs over the film, with Losey subtly reinterpreting Lang's persecution parable, replacing 1930s Germany with 1950s Hollywood to suggest a link between the rise of the Nazi party and the rise of McCarthy. The change in context resonates throughout the early scenes, as random innocent people are persecuted in the streets by a public worked up into hysteria by the child killings.

Losey also subtly changes the film's meaning by making the motive for the child murders implicitly sexual; the film is loaded with sexually charged symbols in a way that Lang's original wasn't. The opening credits show the killer (David Wayne), seen only from behind, approaching little girls, luring one with a string toy that he suggestively pulls and teases with his hands, the framing often hiding the toy altogether so that it's not clear what he's doing, just that he's walking up to a little girl with his hands pumping around at his hips. Another shot shows him turning on a water fountain for a girl, who bends over to drink, her head obscured by the mysterious stranger standing in front of her. Already, Losey, dodging the censors, is suggesting a transgressive sexual component to the murders, a creepy subtext that distances Wayne's killer from the more famous portrayal by Peter Lorre.


Indeed, Wayne plays killer Martin Harrow with a bland-faced intensity and mommy-fixated sexual dysfunction that prefigures Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho more than it looks back to Lorre. Most chilling of all is the scene of the killer sitting in the dark, his face shrouded in shadow, tightly grasping the dangling cord of the lamp hanging above him, wrapping it around his fist, breathing heavily and pulling his hand further and further up the cord. It's such an obviously sexual scene that one wonders how Losey got away with it, especially when the killer "climaxes" by finally pulling the cord and putting out the light. (That the cord is later revealed to be a shoelace taken from the shoes he collects as fetish objects from his victims only confirms the sexual metaphor.) This is immediately followed by a scene where he goes over to his desk, still panting breathlessly, and begins molding a clay sculpture of a child, wrapping a cord around its neck and squeezing to pop its head off, while Losey prominently highlights the photograph of a matronly older women behind the sculpture, a mise en scène detail that suggests the killer is a sexually frustrated mama's boy.

Such scenes proliferate throughout Losey's remake, suggesting that the killer instinctively makes a connection between masturbation and strangulation; at one point, he finds a wounded bird and picks it up between his fists, its head popping out between his fingers as he squeezes it, before letting it go and sobbing with guilt. His final confessional speech is significantly different from Lorre's version of the scene, too, as he talks about a childhood dominated by his mother's tyrannical insistence that all men are evil and need to be punished — a speech comically punctuated by his aside that she's "a good woman."

In this way, Losey makes the material his own even while largely sticking to the template of the original film. He can't match the overwhelming formal beauty of Lang's film, but he has his own minimalist, low-budget aesthetic that gives his take on this material a rough, shot-on-the-streets realism very different from the shadowy expressionism of Lang's M. Losey shot a lot of footage on the streets of Los Angeles, and staged the climactic search for the killer in the instantly recognizable Bradbury Building, an iconic location for many movies, its angular staircases and multiple levels used well in the scenes of the city's criminal underworld tracking Harrow. Losey's austere aesthetic — only occasionally broken by diversions like the Hitchcockian cut from a mother worrying at home to a screaming, cackling clown — puts the emphasis on Wayne's increasingly unhinged performance and the slightly comic efforts of the police and criminals to catch him. Losey dared to remake a classic, and though the remake is not on the same level as Lang's masterpiece, it should be remembered as a noir classic in its own right, with its substantial differences from its source marking it as a worthy extension of Lang's themes.

Hangman's House

John Ford's Hangman's House is an overlooked expressionist classic from the director's silent era, a moody and evocative melodrama in which revenge, guilt and suppressed desire flow through the foggy Irish moors. It's a film that's swathed in fog, set in and around a creepy Gothic mansion that seems like it should be housing a 1930s Universal horror flick, populated with mad scientists and lurching monsters. Instead, it's the home of the bitter old hanging judge James O'Brien (Hobart Bosworth), who Ford introduces in a remarkable shot with the camera looking out from inside the old man's fireplace, the flames flickering up at both the aged, stooped judge and the proud portrait of him in his prime, hanging on the wall behind him. The fireplace stands in for Hell, its flames passing fiery judgment on the bitter old man's life, a life spent sending men to their deaths. He sees visions of the men he's hanged, acted out in silhouette dioramas within the flames, or the faces of the men and their families floating in the fire, summoning him to join them.

O'Brien, on his deathbed, ends his life with one last ugly act, forcing his daughter Conn (June Collyer) to marry the no-good John D'Arcy (Earle Foxe), rather than her longtime sweetheart Dermot (Larry Kent). The plot's a bit of a mess, actually, and the script rushes through the set-up so that any emotional motivations seem clipped and obscure. For that reason, it's hard to say why Conn's father pushes her off on D'Arcy, who he seems to think will give his daughter a successful life even though a title card comes right out and all but calls D'Arcy a sleazeball, or why she goes along with it so easily. In any event, she's soon trapped in a marriage to a man who goes out of his way to prove he's a villain: drinking, gambling, snitching, and in one horrifying scene, actually shooting his wife's beloved horse after it had won a race where he'd bet on another horse.

This Gothic melodrama is juxtaposed against the presence of the outlaw Citizen Hogan (future Ford regular Victor McLaglen in his second appearance for the director), who has returned to Ireland from a stint in the Foreign Legion in order to get revenge on D'Arcy for the scoundrel's treatment of Hogan's sister. Hogan, in the film's opening scene, gets as good an introduction as O'Brien does, receiving a telegram at the dinner table, apparently giving him the news about his sister's suicide. "I've got to kill a man," an intertitle reads, and then the camera tracks back woozily to the end of the table, as all the men toast to him, wishing him luck. Hogan is a cheery and exuberant spirit of vengeance, an exile from Ireland whose return makes him misty-eyed with nostalgia and a love for his home country, even as he sets out on his dark errand. In that he seems like a surrogate for the director, who's using this lurid story to express his own love for the country, to capture some of its romance in these expressionist landscapes. Hogan drifts through the fog in a series of near-comical disguises — a monk, a blind beggar — that never quite fool anyone, what with his hulking form and his infamous reputation. He's death come calling with a ready smile and a twinkle in his eye, a distinctly Irish Grim Reaper.


The film is visually sumptuous, with Ford liberally applying fog and shooting through a hazy soft focus to disguise the minimalist studio set and lend a dreamy atmosphere to the surroundings. There are several contemplative scenes set in the area around O'Brien's Gothic home, with the house's towers looming up through the fog, twisted trees erupting from the rocky soil, and colorful local characters appearing on the foggy paths. At one point, Conn and Dermot go to see Hogan, taking a boat ride through a beautifully eerie swamp, surrounded by reeds, the hazy fog swallowing up everything around them. The film's fuzzy aesthetic is enthralling throughout, paying tribute to Ford's German Expressionist influences and foreshadowing the continuation of that line of influence in the later Hollywood horror cycles.

When the film ventures out into the daylight, as it does for the central horse race, it remains compelling, capturing the traditions and activities of the Irish countryside. At the race, a very young John Wayne makes his first visible appearance onscreen, as an extra watching the race. But more importantly, the race is viscerally thrilling, much of it shot from below with the horses seeming to jump over the camera, and Ford's cutaways to an excited Hogan are charming. There's charm, too, in Conn's sweet romance with Dermot, which strangely enough continues unabated even after she marries another man, at least in part because Conn, who dresses in masculine, androgynous clothes, seems more interested in taking endless strolls through the fog than actual romance or sexuality.

The film ends by cycling back to the beginning's evocation of Hell in a fireplace, exploding in a fiery climax that lights up the night and at least temporarily clears the fog. It's a beautiful resolution, communicated entirely in hellish, harrowing images of the titular mansion being engulfed in flames, the fire making it look like a cathedral glowing in the darkness, giving it a bright stained glass quality, shimmering in the hazy night. Hangman's House is silent Ford at his best, taking a less-than-coherent melodrama and making it a moving ode to the director's beloved Ireland with a gorgeous visual style that channels and magnifies the story's potent emotions.

The Woman in the Window

Fritz Lang's 1944 noir The Woman in the Window is in many ways a meta-noir that examines the tragic allure that draws so many doomed noir heroes into situations that are bound to end up in murder and worse. The aging professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) is a pretty unlikely noir hero, and he seems to know it. He's settled into routine and domesticity, and even when his wife and children go away on vacation, leaving him on his own, he doesn't have anything planned beyond drinking quietly at his club, reading and smoking cigars. Naturally, he's going to be shaken out of this routine in a rather startling way, and in true noir fashion his downfall is practically preordained from the moment he sees a painting of a lovely, elegant woman in a gallery window adjacent to his club. He and his friends cheerfully discuss the woman in the painting, their infatuation with her virtually the only outlet for the sexual feelings of these thoroughly domesticated middle-aged men.

Wanley's conversation with his friends at the beginning of the film lays on the foreshadowing pretty thick, with his friends warning him that they're now too old for adventures, while Wanley insists that he has no interest in anything but going to bed early. He even tempts fate by saying that, should he encounter the beautiful woman from the portrait in the window, he'd walk right by, not even letting her sway him from his quiet, eventless night. It's of course immediately obvious what destiny has in store for Wanley, so it's no surprise when he walks outside, peering at the portrait one last time before he goes home, only to have the woman herself appear, reflected in the window. Lang telegraphs what's going to happen long before it does; even the framing and composition of the shot as Wanley looks in the window seems to be primed for the woman's inevitable appearance. Her face floats in the reflection in the glass, hovering in the blackness right next to her painted doppelganger, two alluring images superimposed. She briefly exists only as this hazy, wavering ghost image, her reality uncertain, before Lang's camera turns, with Wanley's gaze, towards the flesh-and-blood woman.

This woman, Alice Reed (Joan Bennett), leads Wanley, in total innocence, into a shadowy nightmare of murder, suspense and intrigue. The pair spends an innocent, pleasant night together, their flirtations barely edging past politeness — Wanley is married and scrupulous — when suddenly one of Alice's lovers bursts in, immediately flies into a rage, and begins strangling the shocked professor. Of course, it's the other man who ends up dead, and Wanley and Alice must dispose of the body, covering up their crime before morning comes. Lang draws out the process of cleaning up after this accidental murder, not skimping on any details, emphasizing what a difficult, physical, tense procedure it is. Every moment is loaded with the possibility of getting caught: lugging the body, wrapped in a sheet, out to the car in the rain, then driving out to the country to dump the corpse in the woods. The empty, rainy nighttime streets are eerily quiet and empty but seem loaded with danger, like a taxi dropping off a passenger just as Wanley is about to carry the body outside, or all the cops who suddenly pop out of nowhere, threatening to pull the professor over and discover his sinister cargo. One cop actually does pull him over, before Wanley has picked up the body, and sneers suspiciously at the professor's ethnic origins, in a sequence that surely must have resonated with the immigrant Lang: "Wanley, huh, what's that, Polish?" "No," Wanley replies, "it's American."


This attention to detail enhances the film's nightmarish atmosphere. Wanley is a man who's totally unprepared for this kind of intrigue, and Lang rigorously emphasizes each step of the process, as well as calling attention to all the little details of the evidence trail that Wanley leaves behind. After the murder and cover-up, the film becomes an interesting kind of forensic mystery in which the hero is the killer, watching his friend, district attorney Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey), piece together the clues and form a startlingly accurate picture of the crime. Throughout the film, Wanley's conversations with his friends, especially Lalor, keep him updated on the inexorable progress of the police, who uncover more and more evidence, all of which would point directly to Wanley if they ever got on his track. Moreover, these conversations work on a meta level to signal future plot points in an almost playful way: when his doctor prescribes Wanley medicine for nerves but warns him not to take too much, Wanley exclaims, almost excited, "poison!" It's as though he can't wait to see who will inevitably be getting poisoned via this new plot device, and neither can the audience.

This meta playfulness is carried over into the series of ironic twists that constitute the finale, with the last of these twists purportedly forced on Lang by a studio displeased with the director's original tragic ending. The studio-favored ending might seem like a cop-out if it weren't also so consonant with the film's theme of a man chasing his modest fantasies into danger and ruin. The film is a dreamlike journey through the dark side of the American city — in that respect, it would make an ideal double feature with Martin Scorsese's later After Hours — only to pull back at the last moment into safety, security, and a lack of risk. The urban environment and young women like the lovely Alice embody excitement and danger, contrasted against the stability and the safety, but also the boredom, of the nuclear family. At a key moment towards the end of the film, Wanley receives a phone call from Alice about another problem with their plans, and Lang shoots him sitting in an armchair with photos of his wife and two children prominently placed on a table beside him, reminders of everything he stands to lose, but also everything he was running away from into this dark fantasy.

The Woman in the Window is beautifully shot, bathed in shadows, with exceptional performances and witty dialogue. Robinson and Bennett make a great central couple, with Robinson playing a restrained, sophisticated man slowly being overtaken by fear, while Bennett radiates femme fatale glamour. Also notable is Dan Duryea as a sleazy blackmailer who seems to be constantly talking out of the side of his mouth. Lang shoots with precision and formal rigor, his camera constantly tracking either in or out of a scene, as though continually alternating between psychological intimacy and the forensic observation of distance. At one point, he shoots Wanley and Alice walking alongside an iron railing, the metal bars falling across their figures like prison cell doors, a familiar noir visual shorthand for a trap closing in, that's nevertheless effective nearly every time it's used. This is a potent noir that writes the subconscious psychological desires of the protagonist onto the dark, lonely city streets, suggesting that one's fondest fantasies can also be — and often are — traps. The shy, sly smile of a woman in a painting can be an invitation to adventure and romance, but also an invitation to be swallowed whole by the city's deep pools of darkness.

The Navigator

In The Navigator, Buster Keaton plays Rollo Treadway, a wealthy society heir with a very unsentimental idea of love. He simply decides one day that he'd like to get married after seeing a happy newlywed couple outside his window, and he promptly makes all the arrangements before strolling across the street to tell the woman he has in mind (Kathryn McGuire), another socialite. She says no, and Keaton, his deadpan expression never changing, just turns around and returns home without another word.

Through a mishap, the pair then winds up together on a drifting ocean liner, the only people aboard as the giant boat floats out to sea. For a while, they're unaware of each other's presence on the boat, and Keaton makes the most of the sequence where they wander around the boat, constantly missing each other by just a second, one going up a ladder while the other goes down a different ladder, darting through corridors at cross purposes, crossing paths but never so much as catching a glimpse of the other person. Keaton's sense of timing is impeccable: his comedy has a precise geometric formalism that's perfectly timed and laid out. He places his camera in ways that emphasize this timing, shooting down a long corridor with the characters running in circles, one bounding into the frame in the foreground at precisely the moment that the other disappears around the far corner, out of view.

When they finally collide into one another and realize that they're not alone on the ship, there follows a lengthy, brilliant and ultimately touching sequence in which these two spoiled rich youths struggle to fend for themselves. Earlier, Keaton's Rollo had gotten into his limo for a simple ride across the street — the car only had to make a U-turn to arrive at the destination — and had obliviously tried to take a bath in his clothes, suggesting just how helpless he is, how dependent he is on servants and luxury. When he's left on his own, the results are predictably comical, and the film's funniest sequence is the one where the two hapless socialites try to prepare breakfast, making "coffee" with a few uncrushed beans and seawater, throwing a handful of eggs into a massive pot of boiling water and then fishing around to find them again, trying and failing to open cans of food with a butcher knife.


It's unrelentingly hilarious, and it pays off in a big way later in the film when a title card provides an ellipsis of several weeks, after which time the couple have adapted to their circumstances and evolved a whole succession of Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions to perform their morning chores. It's great stuff, with these wealthy, sheltered socialites learning to do things for themselves, to make inventive use of their surroundings. They perform the same tasks that they'd earlier struggled with so comically, now having remade the ship's kitchen in clever ways that demonstrate how they've learned from their mistakes, transforming the place into a complex series of levers and makeshift devices that help them through their morning tasks. They've also found shelter, after the slightly melancholy comedy of the sequence where they'd wandered all around the ship, trying to find a comfortable and safe place to sleep, spooking themselves with fireworks mistaken for candles and a creepy portrait of the ship's captain (co-director Donald Crisp) that Keaton mistakes for a sinister-looking man peering in through a porthole. Keaton's attempts to comfort and help his companion reveal a tenderness and compassion not revealed by his characteristic stoic expression and the deadpan way he'd approached romance earlier in the film. This undercurrent reaches its apex with a wonderful shot in which Keaton and McGuire struggle to light some candles while their shadows seem to kiss on the wall behind them, enacting the romance that they never quite consummate in the flesh.

After all this equally poignant and hilarious build-up, the film's final act is a bit of a letdown, as Keaton and McGuire run into an island full of cannibals and have to fend off the vicious natives. The racial caricatures are unfortunate, but mostly these sequences are disappointing simply because they're not at the same level of formal ingenuity and hilarity as the rest of the film. One exception is the famous scene where Keaton, in a diving suit, goes underwater to repair the ship's hull before the natives can reach them. It's an example of Keaton's physicality and preference for realistic stunts, as he really dives under and enacts a series of pantomime gags, like washing his hands in a bucket and then drying them off with a rag. Best of all is his fight with a pair of swordfish, one of which he wrestles into submission and then starts using its nose to duel with a second, bigger fish that appears. The submarine gag at the very end of the film is also a nice final note, especially the dazzling 360-degree spin in which everyone within the sub struggles to stay upright.

Coming after the viscerally exciting Our Hospitality and the absolutely brilliant Sherlock Jr., The Navigator feels like a bit of a step down for Keaton, but certainly not a big one. Its best gags have the director's characteristic precision and unparalleled sense of space, as well as being side-splittingly funny and thematically resonant. The film's theme is awareness: these sheltered people, locked off in a world of privilege at the beginning of the film, gradually become aware of the necessity of paying attention to the world around them, caring for other people, and working together to survive. By the end, these hapless socialites have become inventive and lively, propelled into constant motion and constantly ingenious use of everything they can lay their hands on. This includes each other, too: in one very suggestive shot, McGuire uses Keaton, in full diving gear, as a boat, straddling him and paddling back to the safety of their ocean liner.

Foolish Wives

Erich von Stroheim's third film, Foolish Wives is anything but a modest effort from the always grand director. A film about excess, it takes excess as its guiding principle and its entire raison d'etre. The stories about the film's production are legion, as Von Stroheim was so concerned with realistically depicting a life of privilege and luxury onscreen that he made sure the cast lived a similar life offscreen, importing real, rare and very expensive caviar and champagne instead of faking the high-class meals that appear in the film. He constructed elaborate sets of Monte Carlo gambling palaces and mansions, and filled the sets with silks and furs. And he sent the whole bill to Universal, his studio, before turning in an impossible-to-screen eight-hour film that the studio promptly hacked apart into a far shorter cut. Thus the film, even restored to its current length of nearly two and a half hours, is unavoidably compromised, chopped down from its director's expansive, overblown vision into something much more manageable, though its ambition and its potency are still very much apparent.

The film concerns a trio of con artists, the self-proclaimed Count Wladislaw Sergius Karamzin (Von Stroheim) and his cousins, or "cousins," Olga (Maude George) and Vera (Mae Busch), at least one of whom is also one of his many lovers. Karamzin and the two "princesses" live a lavish life in decadent Monte Carlo, peddling counterfeit cash and using their grand personae and the Count's infamous way with women to ingratiate themselves into high society. It's an interesting bit of self-mythologization, because the Count is such a resonant echo of the actor who plays him, the writer/director behind this story. Von Stroheim was, much like Karamzin, a pretender, a role-player who carried over his performances as sinister aristocrats into his real life, passing himself off as an Austrian general and dignitary. He entered the United States claiming to be a count, and he added the aristocratic "von" to his name soon after becoming a director, effectively transforming himself into precisely the character he plays here, a man pretending to the aristocracy, adopting the fine manners and grand style of a European noble. In one of his signature displays of egoism, he even inserts a novel called Foolish Wives into the film, supposedly written by him, and the passage that he highlights extols the virtues of good, courtly upper-class manners.


Karamzin sets his sights on Helen Hughes (Miss DuPont), the wife of the US ambassador Andrew Hughes (Rudolph Christians), though because of the film's patchwork structure, his motivations for pursuing the woman change without warning several times. His seduction of her is most ravishingly realized in the central sequence set during a violent rainstorm, in which Karamzin and Helen are trapped out in the rain during a walk. This is all part of his plan, though, allowing him to sweep her sodden body up in his arms, carrying her past sparks of lightning and rowing her across a lake in a small boat to the dilapidated cabin of a wizened hag (Louise Emmons). In one fantastic shot, Karamzin uses a hand mirror to spy on Helen as she undresses, her bare back glimpsed in the corner of the mirror as he leers in the foreground.

There's a real sensuality to this film, which seems to link sexuality to the decadent, expensive lifestyle of the main characters. Even as Karamzin seduces Helen, he also desires the mentally handicapped daughter (Malvina Polo) of the counterfeiter (Cesare Gravina) who keeps him supplied with fake bills. In a disturbing scene that sets the tone early on, she appears hugging a doll and gaping at Karamzin's dandified manners, but her obviously slack-jawed mental capacities and girlish immaturity don't stop the lecherous count from looking her up and down with blatant lust. Later, he looms over her bed while she sleeps, slatted shadows stretched across the room, the Count's shadow hanging over the girl and cast ominously on the wall above her. While all this is going on, the Count is also romancing his maid Maruschka (Dale Fuller), in a subplot that, in the extant versions of the film, abruptly pops up towards the end and has great significance for the climax.

Von Stroheim's visual style is rapturous throughout, but especially at the frenzied climax, which abruptly becomes a suspenseful action sequence with the rapid cross-cutting that Von Stroheim presumably picked up during his time as an assistant for D.W. Griffith. His images have a hazy but iconic power: flames engulfing a cross; a woman standing on a rocky outcropping, framed against the waves crashing in the background; countless gauzy and ecstatic closeups of the film's women. Von Stroheim contrasts this visual extravagance against the comparatively straightforward and prosaically shot scenes between Helen and her husband, juxtaposing their comfortable, boring marriage against the lush, sumptuous wealth and corruption of Karamzin and his cousins. Karamzin is introduced in an especially memorable way, perched on a rock above the ocean, casually shooting at targets with a pistol as long as the cigarettes that he habitually smokes throughout the film. With his scarred forehead, his monocle, and his smug smirk, he cuts a distinctive figure, an absolutely magnetic screen presence that later in his career he'd bring to countless caricatured Teutonic villains. Here he's a more nuanced character, his exaggerated pride masking an elusive vein of insecurity that shows itself especially in the scene at the end of the film where Hughes confronts the Count, causing Karamzin to look around the room at the other officers, anxious to see what they think, anxious that he not lose face.


One interesting subtext in the film is the implicit comparison between Karamzin the false military officer and the real soldiers he's imitating. Early on in the film, he sees a number of soldiers passing by, and he salutes them each in turn — but pointedly fails to salute the wounded soldiers who are pushed by in wheelchairs, acting as though he doesn't even see them. Karamzin's glamorous vision of the military has little room for casualties or blood, and he seems subconsciously uncomfortable with the sight of these injured men, sporting their evidence of the real warfare that Karamzin has certainly never experienced. He projects a flashy, scrupulously clean image of military grandeur, all brass buttons and epaulets, surface rather than substance.

There's an intriguing scene where the Count looks down upon a military officer who doesn't pick up Helen's book for her, obliging the Count to do it himself while casting a disgusted glance at the other man; there is nothing that he finds more despicable than the lack of manners, the lack of surface politeness even though the surface is as deep as his own niceties extend. Later, though, the officer returns, standing outside the hotel, where Helen sees him standing with his coat at his feet. For a moment, she looks at him with the same scorn that Karamzin had, until she realizes that the man's sleeves are empty, that he's a veteran who has lost both of his arms. In one of the film's most tender and sentimental moments, she picks up his coat and wraps it around him, kissing his empty sleeve, a rare burst of sincerity and emotion in a film that otherwise revels in the cynical exploits of the manipulative Count.


There's also some subtle dark comedy woven throughout the film, like the title cards that continually sneak bleak ideas — "suicides" and "brutality of man" — into the otherwise idyllic word collages describing Monte Carlo. At one point, Karamzin's romantic schemes are interrupted first by a goat that keeps sticking its rear in his face and then by a monk whose stern, disapproving gaze keeps the Count from making his move. Religion haunts the film in the images of crosses that are often hidden within the mise en scène, silently judging the decadent ways of these con artists.

Foolish Wives, even in the heavily edited and reconstructed version that survives, is a fascinating and engrossing film, a sharp and cynical examination of wealth and the appearance of wealth. Decadent, sexy, darkly funny and visually stunning, it's a marvelously fragmented classic.

The Gold Rush

There's a reason Charles Chaplin's The Gold Rush is still such an enduring comedic masterwork, almost 90 years after it was made. It's a delightful, charming, irresistible movie, as funny today as it was when it first made audiences roar with laughter. It's a near-perfect movie, with not a wasted moment, balancing its cleverly staged humor with the pathos of Chaplin's little tramp character suffering because of his poverty, his decency, and his large capacity for love.

The tramp is an iconic figure, an everyman for the lower classes, with his beaten-up bowler hat, his cane, and his bedraggled clothes. Despite his impeccable sense of humor, Chaplin's tramp is a melancholy figure, wandering a hostile environment that offers him scant nourishment. He duck-waddles around, his gait uneven, one shoe swaddled in rags so that he seems to have a misshapen foot. He's constantly coming up with tricks to get by on his minimal means, stealing drinks in a bar or feigning frostbite to get a friendly stranger to feed him a hot breakfast and some coffee. Chaplin's tramp seems especially out of place in the context of The Gold Rush, roaming across the tundra as "the lone prospector," trying to make his fortune in the frozen North — though curiously enough Chaplin never actually does any prospecting. He's never less than funny, but he's also desperate and downtrodden, and later in the film, his romantic longing for the beautiful but casually cruel Georgia (Georgia Hale) is downright heartbreaking.

Before that plot is introduced, though, it's just the tramp alone in the cold, soon to throw his lot in with two other lonely souls, the newly successful prospector Big Jim (Mark Swain) and the brutish outlaw Black Larsen (Tom Murray). This trio gets locked into a cabin together during a bad storm, and the antics that ensue constitute some of the best, purest comedy in the cinema. The scene where Chaplin first arrives at the solitary cabin is a masterpiece of formalist physical comedy, using the two doors of the cabin as a wind tunnel which sends Chaplin, Big Jim and Black Larsen flying through the air, whipping them out of the room only to have them come crawling and trudging back through the snow. Chaplin's playfulness with space provides the scene's comedy, with perfect timing of doors opening and closing, unleashing the wind that propels the scene's constant movement and reversals of position.


Geometry is often the locus of comedy for Chaplin, as in the brilliant sequence where Jim and Larsen wrestle over a shotgun, while Chaplin scurries around the room, the barrel of the gun following him wherever he goes, always angled directly at his head whether he's ducking under a table or comically trying to climb the walls. The invisible line from the gun's bore to Chaplin's head, the prospective path of a bullet if the gun should go off, is never broken no matter how much Chaplin darts back and forth or the other two men struggle, which is quite a feat of choreography as well as a grimly comic bit of business.

That playful use of space returns in the later scene where a starved Big Jim stalks Chaplin with an axe — because his fevered brain sees the tramp as a giant chicken — while Chaplin fends him off with a shotgun. They dart in and out, from door to door, circling the cabin inside and out. Best of all is the way Chaplin begins slamming into wooden beams and walls, rapidly spinning around to point his gun at empty space, careening back and forth across the cabin. These confusions continue as he struggles with Big Jim over the gun, Chaplin's face covered with a blanket so that he doesn't realize when Big Jim flees the cabin, a black grizzly bear taking his place, with Chaplin hanging off his leg. Chaplin's double take when he sees this is priceless, as is his baffled look when the fur-clad Jim returns, as though for a moment Chaplin is wondering if he'd just imagined the bear.

Naturally, when the tramp and Big Jim return to the cabin towards the end of the film, it is once again the site of spatially precise comedy that hinges upon geometry and the locations of the two characters. An avalanche pushes the cabin to the edge of a cliff, teetering on the brink, and the whole cabin see-saws drunkenly as the two prospectors obliviously walk around inside. Chaplin, a master of staging and movement, extracts sublime comic suspense from the way the men walk back and forth across the cabin, balancing each other's actions for a time so that the cabin remains stable, but of course it's inevitable that they'll soon end up on the same side and send the cabin tipping over. Chaplin even playfully stutter-steps at one point, briefly suggesting that he's going to double back and join Jim on the side of the cabin that's hanging over the ledge, before continuing the opposite way to keep the balance.

The film has too many funny scenes to mention; Chaplin's keen sense of timing and feel for visual humor is present in both his performance and his direction. One of the film's most iconic moments is the scene where Chaplin "dances the Oceana Roll" for Georgia, piercing a pair of dinner rolls on forks and playfully dancing them across the table. This tabletop choreography is dazzling enough, but what's really mesmerizing about the scene is the subtler choreography of Chaplin's eyes, rimmed with black and somewhat feminine, rolling and flitting from side to side in counterpoint to the rolls' footwork. There's a lot of choreography in Chaplin's comedy; another great scene involves the tramp, dancing with Georgia, accidentally tying a dog's leash into his belt so that the dog follows the couple around the dance floor. A film of great formal precision that nevertheless gives the impression of being breezy and loose, The Gold Rush is one of the finest comedies the cinema has produced.

Sherlock Jr.

Sherlock Jr. is one of the cinema's greatest tributes to itself, a dazzling, relentlessly inventive ode to the movies as an escape, a source of dreams and a fantastical reflection of the real world. Buster Keaton's five-reel, 45-minute short is crisply, quickly paced, with not a second of waste, not a frame that isn't absolutely essential to the film's hilarious and strangely moving vision of the cinema's magical power. Keaton plays a hapless young movie theater projectionist who's also studying to be a detective and scraping together whatever cash he can get to woo his girlfriend (Kathryn McGuire). When he's framed for the theft of a pocket watch belonging to the girl's father, Keaton tries to catch the real crook (Ward Crane) in a hilarious scene where he shadows the taller man, walking immediately behind him and mimicking his every gesture. When this fails, he returns to the movie theater, dejected, a failure as a detective and miserable over the loss of his girl.

He then falls asleep, and what follows implicitly links the cinema to dreams, as Keaton nods off in the projection booth and has an out-of-body experience, his ghostly doppelganger stepping out of his sleeping form and into the movies. It's a fantastic, and fantastically funny, sequence, as the projectionist imagines the figures on the screen transformed into ones from his real life, enacting a mystery drama derived from his own experience with the purloined watch. Except, in this dream/movie, he can actually be the hero, the world's greatest detective, Sherlock Jr., dapper and sophisticated in a top hat and nice suit, a master intellect who can outwit any criminal. It's pure wish fulfillment, as the young loser imagines that he can catch the crooks and get the girl — and then, in Keaton's master stroke, he wakes from the dream movie into another movie, the movie Keaton's making, and he gets the girl after all.

Before he can get to this point, though, he has to pass through a cinematic gauntlet in which his greatest enemy is not a petty crook but a basic cinematic tool, the edit. Once Keaton steps up onto the movie screen, he's not fully integrated into the film that's playing. He's immune to the cut, so he remains the one constant as the scene changes, which leads to some hilarious visual gags. For a few minutes, the movie on the screen, following absurdist dream logic, ceases to be a coherent drama and starts randomly cutting from one strange locale to another, always with Keaton propelled across the cut into one outrageous situation after another. He balances on the edge of a cliff, runs from hungry lions, almost gets run over by a train and the traffic on a crowded street, and gets soaked by waves while perched on a rock in the middle of a choppy sea. It's both a devilishly clever comic showcase and a lovingly meta ode to the power of this cinematic tool, which can seamlessly bridge such tremendous gaps in location, having Keaton jump into the air to dive into the water but instead land headfirst in a snowbank, his feet kicking in the air.


Keaton's projectionist eventually manages to slip into this cinema dream world, inhabiting the role of the detective, fending off the sinister maneuvers of the crooks who concoct endless death traps that he flawlessly slips around, always intuiting their evil intentions before they can spring the trap. In the movies, the hero always wins, the bad guys always fail, and one senses that this young projectionist, like so many others, was first seized by his desire to be a detective while watching screen detectives much like this one. He inhabits an archetypal role, taking on a character type that had inspired him to try to shape his real life to match the movies, to become a detective like the ones on the screen — but only in dreams or the movies can such archetypes actually exist.

The whole dream sequence is remarkably fun, and occasionally surreal, as when a mysterious cross-dressing vendor helps Keaton evade the crooks by inviting the detective to jump through his chest and somehow flip through a false wall hiding behind the vendor. That's a bit of pure movie magic that doesn't really make a shred of sense; it's a flight of fancy that could only work in the movies. The same goes for the hilarious scene where Keaton leaps through a window in which he'd previously set up a readymade disguise. Jumping through the window, he also jumps through the clothes and lands outside dressed up as an old woman. That transformation is an echo of the one that propelled Keaton into the movie universe in the first place: he passes through a screen and comes out the other side magically changed, the usual rules suspended.

The ending, in which Keaton covertly watches a movie hero to figure out the right gestures to romance his girl, suggests that, though the movies are dreams, they're dreams with tremendous power. Keaton is exploring how we learn to act by watching the movies, how we derive our templates, both romantic and professional, from the things that happen up on the screen. In this way, the movies become, not only dreams, but wellsprings of reality, feeding back into the world models of behavior, the dream influencing and reshaping reality itself.

Four National Film Preservation Foundation shorts

[This post is a teaser for the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running from May 13-18. This year, hosts Marilyn Ferdinand, Farran Smith Nehme and Roderick Heath have dedicated the week to Alfred Hitchcock, whose early (non-directorial) work "The White Shadow" will be the beneficiary of any money earned during the event. The following post provides capsules for some of the films currently screening at the National Film Preservation Foundation website's Screening Room. Be sure to donate!]

Ramona is an early D.W. Griffith one-reel short, an adaptation of a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson that dramatized the mistreatment of Native Americans throughout history via an inter-racial love story, not the kind of message movie that one would associate with the future director of Birth of a Nation. A young Spanish girl named Ramona (Mary Pickford) falls in love with a Native American improbably named Alessandro (Henry B. Walthall), with predictably tragic results. The young couple elopes, fleeing her disapproving family, but everywhere they turn, they only encounter "the whites" who keep pushing the Native Americans aside, claiming, "this is our land!" wherever Alessandro and Ramona show up.

The acting is extremely over-the-top: when Ramona is trying to resist her attraction for Alessandro, she sees him playing a guitar, listens briefly, and then recoils in terror, running away with her arms in the air, and throws herself down at an altar to pray. If a title card hadn't already prepared viewers for the fact that she was going to fight against her growing love for the young man, one would be hard-pressed to guess just why she was so suddenly hysterical. There are horror movie heroines who react more sedately to the sight of invading alien monsters. There's lots of hand-waving and dramatic gesticulating here; Ramona's mother (Kate Bruce), reacting with horror to her daughter's dalliance with a Native American, seems to have abruptly contracted epilepsy, her hands shaking and flailing about, locked into claws as she points in random directions all around her head. Most of the cast just runs around through every scene with hands raised, pointing dramatically off towards some unseen point beyond the camera.

This histrionic acting style aside, the film is well-directed, and Griffith's staging within the static frame is impeccable. He frequently frames some foreground action against a dramatic natural backdrop of hills and mountains stretching off into the distance, contrasting the human-scale romantic story against the imposing grandeur of the landscape, as though suggesting that this one little story is part of a grander historical struggle. One scene that suggests this especially well is the one where Alessandro's village is destroyed by white settlers who are driving off the natives. Griffith's camera is angled down from a high cliff, looking down at the village in the valley, mostly obscured by clouds of smoke as wagons rush by and the slaughter commences. In the foreground, Alessandro throws his arms around in despair and tears at his hair as a few white cowboys run past with guns drawn, casually killing another Native American man as they pass. These striking compositions provide some interest in an otherwise rather slight film that rushes through its narrative as a series of clipped moments, seemingly under the assumption, very reasonable at the time, that virtually everyone in the audience would have been familiar with the story already.


The Lonedale Operator is a one-reel Western actioner directed by D.W. Griffith and written by future Keystone mastermind Mack Sennett. The film demonstrates Griffith's famous development of suspense-building, cross-cutting action montages, in this case built around a simple scenario of a train station payroll robbery. A young girl (Blanche Sweet) takes over telegraph duties for her sick father, while a pair of criminals plan to steal the payroll bag that's been dropped off into her care. The first half of the very short film builds a little character through some flirtatious sparring between the girl and a train engineer who's courting her, and then the second half settles into a propulsive editing rhythm as the crooks try to break into the telegraph office.

Griffith cuts quickly back and forth from the girl in the office, sending out a message for help, to the criminals trying to break down the door outside, to the engineer rushing to her rescue on his train. The rhythm of the editing gradually speeds up as the criminals get closer to breaking in and the train gets closer to the station. It's a simple but effective way of ratcheting up the tension. The payoff is a nice last-minute gag in which the crooks break in before the rescue party has arrived, but the clever girl manages to outwit the robbers by making them think she has a gun. The ending defuses all the tension with some low-key humor, having the robbers exaggeratedly bow to the girl once they realize they've been outsmarted, and this resolution hints at Sennett's comedic sensibility, abruptly replacing the sense of impending danger with a witty sight gag.


Robert C. Bruce was a premiere director of what were known in the early cinema as "scenics," short documentary travelogues from exotic locales. Bruce's Tropical Nights is a prime example of the genre, the first film released from a 1920 expedition to the Caribbean, where he traveled through the islands and shot numerous brief, poetic, beautifully photographed little slices of reality.

The film is purely about the sensory experience of a locale, presenting one gorgeous, blue-tinted image after another of this tropical island paradise. The photography is lovely: trees swaying in the wind, scenic vistas looking out over the ocean, moonglow rippling on the water, dramatic storm clouds gathering on the horizon, but never any rain. The prosaic title cards only interrupt the poetic flow of these images with bland objective descriptions. Bruce's images hardly require the accompaniment, because there's obviously a keen photographic sensibility to these static views of beautiful natural scenes. People only occasionally enter the shot, but when they do they're often looking off in the same direction as the camera, as awed as the photographer by these lovely views. The presence of these spectators within the film merely confirms the "hey look" attitude of the film, which builds a contemplative mood as it chronicles the progress of the moon across the sky, the gentle flow from sunset to sunrise, with nothing but moody blue beauty in between.


Keystone comedienne Mabel Normand was a prolific comic actress in the silent era, and in 1914-15 she made the transition to director as well, making her one of the earliest female directors in Hollywood. Won In a Closet was her second directorial film (her first is presumed lost) and it's a madcap, silly farce that displays the fledgling director's likeably goofy screen presence and her feel for slapstick. The fluffy little story of Mabel's romance with a dopey-looking neighbor (Charles Avery) is just set-up for the extended sequence where her father and his mother get trapped in a closet together, prompting a ridiculous series of misunderstandings and slapstick pile-ups.

The slapstick is all but completely unmotivated here, with little connection to reality: everyone's just constantly running around, falling on their asses, colliding into each other for no apparent reason, and Normand herself switches on a dime from a sweet, coy young lover to a manic hysteria case. It's all pretty silly, of course, but there is one nice shot along the way, an inventive split-screen in which Mabel and her boyfriend walk towards one another, the two sides of the screen eventually coming together when they wind up on opposite sides of the same tree. That shot suggests a witty visual sensibility that matches Normand's charming screen persona.

The Lawless

Joseph Losey's second film, The Lawless, is an inelegant liberal polemic about racism in a small town divided between a middle class white community and a poor, ramshackle neighborhood of Mexican-American fruit pickers who work on the local farms. Tensions are high between the young white kids and the Latinos, and they explode at a dance in the Mexican neighborhood when a few white guys crash the party — they hate the Mexicans but aren't above hitting on their women, joking that "those tomato-pickers have some pretty tomatoes." In the ensuing riot, the young Mexican Paul (Lalo Rios), scared of what will happen to him, goes on the run, stealing a car and, through a series of increasingly unlikely mishaps, making himself look more and more guilty, like a guy on a crime spree.

It's an obvious message movie about the eagerness of white America to railroad a poor young immigrant who they're only too willing to believe is an incarnation of malice and violence. Tied up in this drama is the newspaperman Larry Wilder (Macdonald Carey, coming off as a budget Jimmy Stewart), who had once been a crusader for controversial causes and big stories, but had now abandoned that for the quiet small town life he thought he wanted. He struggles with his conscience, trying to stay out of it, as he watches the racist passions of his town inflamed by unscrupulous reporters, thugs and bullies, and hatemongers. The film's script (by Daniel Mainwaring, adapting his own novel) is on-the-nose and obvious, hammering its points in with a complete lack of subtlety. The performances are also, for the most part, flat and amateurish, contributing to the sense of a clunky drama that's got its heart in the right place but falters in the execution. Only Gail Russell really shines as the young Mexican journalist Sunny Garcia, who serves as the sweet, wide-eyed, sensual voice of conscience gently nudging the jaded Wilder back towards engagement and activism.

Still, it's an effective polemic, and at times also a genuinely interesting movie. Losey forgoes music for long stretches, letting much of the film play out in ascetic silence, a sure sign of a low budget, but he uses this spartan aesthetic very effectively. The scene where the fugitive Paul is tracked to a riverside farm by the police is stunning and tense, as the increasingly frenzied Paul stumbles and runs, growing desperate, while lines of deputies advance steadily in pursuit. The terrain is rocky, covered in gravel, and the soundtrack contains only the clinking sounds of footsteps kicking the pebbles around. The camera tracks across the open field, taking in the bleak, wasted landscape of rocks and dirt as the men with shotguns spread out on their search. Losey's compositions are simple but striking, like an unbalanced closeup of Paul, his face shunted to the bottom of the frame beneath a rock ledge, while the focus is wracked from his terrified face in the foreground to the pursuers closing in on him and then back again.

Later, after his capture, as Wilder goes to see if he can convince the police to let Paul's parents see the boy, Losey remains with the parents, waiting on a bench. Everything remains silent, and Losey's camera simply sits still and watches, until Paul's father, without exaggeration or melodrama, lowers his head into his hands, overcome by the fear and emotion of this moment. When Wilder comes out and says that they can see Paul, Losey's camera remains out in the hall, watching from a distance, through the frame of a doorway, as Paul embraces his parents, leaving some respectful space for this intimate moment. This scene is followed by a confrontation between Wilder and Sunny, as he says he's bowing out and she accepts it, saying she understands while her face subtly conveys her disappointment. As he walks away down the staircase, Losey shoots from behind Sunny, watching him from the railing above, until he disappears from view; the angle of the shot places the two figures briefly side by side even though they're separated by the stairs, moving apart. The quiet and simplicity of these shots only makes them more affecting, unshowy but powerfully staged.


In other scenes — incidental moments, really — Losey is charmingly attuned to the low-key sensual pleasures of small town life, the things that make places like this so appealing when they're not self-destructing in orgies of racist violence. In one scene, Wilder and Sunny walk down an empty suburban street at night, and pass an old man burning autumn leaves by the curb. They stop briefly to watch, with Wilder cheerfully inhaling the smell and relishing it, then stroll on, seriously discussing the loss of Wilder's journalistic drive. But as they walk and talk, the fire lingers in the background, glimpsed in a reflection in the windows of the shops along the street, its smoke drifting into the frame over the heads of the two journalists.

There's also a surprising sensuality to a shot of Paul walking into his backyard, the camera following him, looking out past the clothesline to the freight train running past on the nearby tracks, then following him back to the crude shower hidden behind some scrap wooden boards by the house. Losey then cuts to a silhouette of a young man seen through the frosted glass of his shower, while a woman offscreen tells him to fill the ice bucket. It's a pointedly ironic cut, juxtaposing the poverty of the Mexican neighborhood, where what modern conveniences they have are jerry-rigged, against the wealth and luxury of the white neighborhood, which might otherwise have been taken for granted. The house in the white neighborhood is utterly ordinary, the kind of basic suburban home that might appear in countless other Hollywood movies without anyone thinking twice; Losey's class conscious juxtaposition of this everyday luxury against the poverty of those on the other side of town is a radical gesture for its time, as is the choice to tell such a racially charged story in the first place.

These racial themes explode most wildly in the scene where Paul supposedly assaults a young white girl, but in fact simply startles her by his mere presence — and presumably his race — causing her to turn around and start to run so blindly that she slams her head off a wooden beam. It's a darkly comical and jarring slapstick bit, delivering a sad joke about race and sex, and about the unsettling potency of stories about dark-skinned men assaulting white women. At the film's tense climax, all these prejudices finally erupt into exactly the lynch mob that seemed to have been simmering into formation all along. The destructive finale is then tempered by, refreshingly, just a hint of hope, a suggestion that the willingness to speak out against injustice is the first step on what's sure to be a long and difficult process of change. As an early effort from Losey, The Lawless is rough and sometimes clumsy (as in a fight scene where everyone is very obviously not landing any punches) and most of its cast is undistinguished. It wears its B-movie production values on its sleeve, alongside its bleeding-heart politics, but it's an interesting little film that already suggets the director's political interests and his keen photographic eye.

The Boy With Green Hair

The Boy With Green Hair is a moving, unique fable that deals with the aftermath of World War II through the perspective of a young boy whose life had been irrevocably altered by the war. Peter (Dean Stockwell) was orphaned by the war, although nobody bothered to tell him; he was passed from one relative to another, each of them eventually having some reason why he could no longer stay with them, all of them perpetuating the illusion that someday his parents would return from Europe and he'd be reunited with them. Finally, he goes to stay with Gramp (Pat O'Brien), not his real grandfather but some older relation or friend of the family, one more place for Peter to live, for however long. With Gramp, Peter finally starts to settle down, to realize that he might have a semi-permanent place to stay and be happy: Gramp is a perfect companion for a little boy, a former entertainer who's always cheerful and always has far-fetched, fanciful stories to tell. But the war's grim reality still haunts the boy, and when he finds out that his parents are actually dead, that he's a war orphan just like the poor children that his school class has been helping with donations and fliers, it shakes him and changes him in a strange way.

He wakes up one morning and his hair has turned green. The film then becomes a parable dealing with the effect of war on children, as Peter faces ridicule at school and fear from adults, who wonder if the effect is contagious and might spread to their own children. Peter has been marked out as different, because subconsciously he wants to be noticed, he wants people to know that he's different, that he's a war orphan, someone marked in a very profound way by the war. At one point, he imagines that he is haunted by other war orphans — obviously projections of his own mind — who tell him that it's good to be noticed, that it's good to have people paying attention to him. Because, of course, so many of these tragically affected boys and girls are not noticed, their plight forgotten. Peter cannot be ignored in this way, and though he's initially horrified by the green hair, he soon comes to think of it as a sign with great meaning, a visible reminder of the horrible effects of war.

This was the first film for director Joseph Losey, an unlikely but also somehow appropriate start to his career. This bright, blunt children's movie is unique in that it focuses so intensely on the perspective and inner life of a child, privileging his reactions and his thoughts about his own experiences. The adults in the film, even the well-meaning Gramp and a kind teacher (Barbara Hale), try to understand but can't fully grasp what this boy is struggling with, and eventually even Gramp, who tries to put a good spin on the new hair color at first, gives in to the community's pressure and encourages the boy to shave his head. This is a great betrayal, a failure to recognize how much this symbol means to Peter, how much it means for him to be able to embrace his difference and use it to spread his anti-war message. The head-shaving scene is staged with the townspeople anxiously looking on, and the mood is tense and melancholy, with each lock of green hair that falls from Peter's head increasing the somber mood in the observers, who seem deeply ashamed of what they've done by the time Peter's scalp has been shorn to a shiny bald cleanness.


The film's message is bluntly delivered but nonetheless affecting, perhaps because the war was still so fresh when Losey made this in 1948. In one scene, Gramp and Peter reflexively flinch when they hear a plane go rattling by overhead. Gramp reassures the boy by saying that it's just a mail plane that must have a heavy load, but he doesn't seem so sure, and his words hide the fear, rational or not, that the plane's cargo is actually a bomb. In another extraordinary scene, Peter, before his hair turns green, goes to the grocery store and overhears two women talking about the war and their fears that there will be more wars to come. As is often the case in this film, the adults are filmed from the shoulders down, so that Peter, below their level, can't see their faces. It's a good way to convey the child's eye perspective of a boy scurrying about, unnoticed, while the adults converse, unmindful of the effect their words are having on Peter. It's as though they don't even know he's there, but their terror about nuclear war and more young people being sent off to die is affecting him deeply, especially when they explicitly reference him, expressing their fear that his generation will also grow up to be sent off to war. Peter, startled by this grim speculation about his future, drops the milk bottle in terror, but the adults don't realize what has happened, and they only laugh affectionately at his clumsiness.

This adult obliviousness is a big part of the film. Peter, in his youthful naïveté, wants to break through the adults' seeming certainty that war is inevitable, to convince them that there's no reason to go to war and kill more young people and their parents. He's the logical one, the one who reacts to the horror and losses of war with the common-sense proclamation that there shouldn't be any more wars, but he's met with head-patting condescension and blank stares when he delivers this message. He can't understand: why does nobody else seem to agree with him that war could or should be stopped?

The film's polemics provide a hint of what was to come for Losey, who would never flinch from politically engaged cinema, a fact that would send him into exile following the McCarthyite purges of Hollywood. But The Boy With Green Hair was different, both from Losey's later work and from virtually everything else in Hollywood, because it was so focused on these issues as they pertain to children. Because of that focus, it can approach complex, emotionally fraught issues with the simplicity and directness of a child. The film's aesthetics mirror that simplicity, cutting away the excess to emphasize Stockwell's naïve performance in tight closeups. Stockwell delivers a very charming performance, capturing the extreme shifts in mood that the confused Peter goes through; in a more unguarded moment, he makes funny faces in the mirror, but more often he's overcome with wide-eyed fear. As a children's parable about war, loss, and hope, The Boy With Green Hair is a memorable and moving work that uses its surreal central conceit to explore some surprisingly weighty emotional subtexts.

The Docks of New York

Moody, rowdy, and sensuous, Josef von Sternberg's The Docks of New York is a beautiful work of romantic expressionist cinema. Set on the docks on a one-night shore leave, the film is drenched in atmosphere. The bulk of the film takes place in a wharf tavern, crowded to the rafters with drunken revelers: sailors and stokers on leave, hard-partying women and prostitutes, drunks and tramps. Around the bar, the docks themselves are limited to a few minimalist planks of wood and a whole lot of fog, a thick soup hanging over the wharf, the water a dense black shimmering just below. It's a constrained and claustrophobic film, confined to these few minimally defined areas, essentially a rough sketch that evokes a mood. It's a place populated with rough men and easy women, all of them drifting rather aimlessly through life, desperate to grasp a few moments of pleasure before the next ship sails, before morning comes and they inevitably forget everything that happened the night before.

Bill (George Bancroft) is a stoker, and the film opens in a ship's hold, where Bill and the other men are streaked in grease and ash, their faces smeared with black, sweating and laboring hard in the heat. Bill's a hard, crude man, pushing around the wharf bar, always looking for a fight, pouring barrels of alcohol down his throat. He's somehow, subtly, changed when he rescues a desperate, lonely woman named Mae (Betty Compson) from the harbor after she's jumped in, trying to kill herself. Bill carries her to safety, a dark silhouette in the fog with her limp body in his arms, and when she wakes up, they develop a hesitant, charmingly unsentimental mutual attraction as these two hard-edged people trade sly banter. Over the course of a riotous night at the bar, Bill impetuously proposes to Mae, and they're married in an informal ceremony with the bar patrons cheering and shouting throughout — one of the remarkable things about von Sternberg's bar scenes is that his mise en scène is so perfect that it's easy to forget that there's no sound, that one can't actually hear the clamor that's so vividly conveyed through the silent images. There are few silent films that seem so noisy.

Von Sternberg parallels the developing relationship between Bill and Mae with the marriage of Bill's shipmate Andy (Mitchell Lewis) and his wife (Olga Baclanova). Andy's a man very much like Bill; his mannerisms are the same, he has the same crude, violent way of moving about a room by pushing everyone bodily out of his way. He's married but obviously doesn't see his wife very much. When he runs into her by chance in the bar at the beginning of the film, she's dancing with and passionately kissing another man. This unhappy couple looks at one another with nothing but resentment and contempt, their hatred of one another simmering behind every glance. They're obviously one vision of a possible future for Bill and Mae, a future that's very easy to imagine because the two couples mirror each other so perfectly: the actors are even the same types, with Bill a slightly younger echo of Andy and Mae a younger, less worn-out echo of Andy's wife.


It's thus no surprise when Bill wakes up the next morning and barely remembers his wedding or his grand promises from the night before; in one chilling shot, he throws a bill down on the dresser after getting out of bed, thinks about it a moment, and drops another bill, as though he's decided that his wife at least deserves a little extra payment for his night of pleasure. It takes a long time for Bill to realize that this night wasn't so transitory after all, as this solidly unsentimental man keeps getting drawn back into Mae's orbit, for the first time finding it difficult to leave shore. For such a gritty, rowdy movie, there's a real vein of romanticism here, much of it expressed through von Sternberg's gorgeously moody dockside imagery. Bill and Mae's wedding night is capped off with a phenomenal scene of the newlyweds pausing by a railing, looking out into the fog, with Bill wrapping his coat around his bride and placing his cap on her head at a jaunty angle, as she looks up at him with those big eyes and that wry smile. It's an intoxicating moment, sweet and sad, and it only makes the subsequent scenes of an oblivious Bill waking up the next morning even more heartbreaking.

Mae is such a sweet, sad character in general, and von Sternberg's camera seems to fall in love with her long before Bill belatedly realizes that he'd like to stay with her after all. She looks up at the camera with wide eyes, the whites of her eyes shining, her mouth twisted into a sad smile that conveys the depth of her tragic life experiences. She's wise to the ways of the world, and a part of her never really expects Bill to stick around, but a much more tragic part of her hopes that he will, and it's this that comes out when, as she sews Bill's jacket, a cigarette dangling between her lips, a few crystalline tears drip down her cheeks. Von Sternberg's portrayal of her is boldly sexual and sensual — in one scene, she pulls on her dress, her long bare back to the camera as she stretches her arms up over her head. She's so perfectly comfortable in her own skin, like everyone here: the bar scenes especially are models of languid, casual posing, bodies stretched out and leaning against the railings of the bar. One of the reasons this film feels so casually realistic despite its chiaroscuro stylization is the sublimity of the body language throughout, the way every character's pose, particularly Bill's, seems to suggest imminent violence.

This is a beautiful, bittersweet film with a great deal of poetically expressed emotion in its tender depiction of a sad romance and its foggy images of the docks. Silhouettes fade in and out of the fog, the parties last all night, and in the mornings, when the alcohol has been exhausted and everyone's waking up half-naked and alone, the regrets and the sadness only return, even more overwhelming than before. If occasionally, and maybe temporarily, there's a happy ending, it's only an exception.

Bucking Broadway

Bucking Broadway is a very early Western from John Ford, one of his earliest surviving works; it was once lost before being rediscovered in France in 2002. It's an hour-long Western melodrama about the ranch-hand Cheyenne Harry (Harry Carey), whose romance with the farm owner's daughter Helen (Molly Malone) is interrupted when the wealthy urban businessman Thornton (Vester Pegg) steals her away and takes her to New York. Harry, heartbroken, follows her to the city in order to get her back. It's a potent examination of the opposition between the folksy, noble West and the decadent, sleazy urbanity of the East.

The story is very simple, almost iconic in its application of broad archetypes, but Ford's presentation of this elemental tale is extraordinarily poetic and sensuous. It's a gorgeously shot, moody and melancholy Western; one title card, appearing as Harry moons around the ranch in Helen's absence, economically read, "Loneliness, dreams and memories." Ford uses a lot of closeups here, probing the intense emotions of this story through the actors' faces. The closeups have a raw, shadowy beauty that sears away any trace of melodrama in this story, leaving behind only the very real underlying emotions. When Harry proposes to Helen, in the cabin that he's built for them to live in, the flickering candlelight sculpts her face, alternately serious and delighted, into a sweetly pretty icon of youth and innocence, moved by Harry's proposal and only a little worried about what her stern father (L.M. Wells) will think. This scene, so sweet and sensual, makes it a little puzzling why Helen would then so quickly be swayed away from Harry by the smooth-talking man from the city. The portion of the film dealing with his seduction of her seems more than a little clipped and rushed, and Helen's change of heart is unconvincing, beyond a rather offensive insinuation that all women are weak-willed and susceptible to flashy manners.

Indeed, the closeups of Helen on her trip to New York suggest that she's already realized what a mistake she's made, as Ford captures the haunted expression in her eyes, glaring up at the camera. In one affecting scene, Ford juxtaposes Helen's face, half-shaded with deep black shadow, against an image of a woman (Gertrude Astor) who a title says that Thornton "introduces as" his sister (which of course suggests that she's anything but). Ford shoots this other woman in a way that, oddly enough, seems to anticipate film noir all the way back in 1917: she's sitting by a lampshade, which casts a gauzy, striped shadow across her face as she looks at the new girl. The suggestion is that this is an old lover of Thornton's, used up and imprisoned by her decadent lifestyle, a hint of the future for Helen should she stay with this no-good man.


Ford is making the city a place of corruption and sexual iniquity, all dark interiors in contrast to the hilly fields of Wyoming from the first half of the film, with animals spread out across the plains and cowboys making photogenic silhouettes in the foreground, smoking and squinting out at the horizon from horseback. When Harry arrives in the city, Ford makes much of the fish-out-of-water comedy of the cowboy in the city: he mistakes a steaming water heater, which he's obviously never seen before, for a rattlesnake, and pulls a revolver, frightening the bellboy as he searches for the snake. Later, continuing the parallels between West and East, he finds "a seasoned guide" to the city in a prostitute and her pimp, who attempt to rob him before the city woman is moved by his down-home tale of love and loss.

Ford's feel for comic relief, always a prominent characteristic of his work, is also apparent in the earlier part of the film, when Harry tries to win Helen back from Thornton by buying some fancy clothes, so he can dress like the city slicker. Harry gets behind the counter at the store to try on his new pants, glancing anxiously out towards the front of the store hoping that no one will come in — although the way Ford cleverly stages the shot, it looks as though Harry is glancing at the camera, breaking the fourth wall, as though wondering if the audience will see him undressing like this. (Ford unfortunately follows this scene with a wince-inducing racist gag, when Harry sees a black man wearing the same outfit as him and grows angry with the store owner.)

The film climaxes when Harry and his cowboy pals get into a frenetic brawl with Thornton and his friends at a hotel, after the sequence that gave the film its name, a few blue-tinted shots of the cowboys roaring through the center of New York on horseback, weaving through traffic and waving their hats in the air, Wyoming having truly come to the big city. The brawl itself is frenzied and fast-paced, utterly chaotic, a flurry of half-comic action to cap off the film's conflict between East and West.

This was an early, budget Western for Ford, from a period in his career when he was cranking out economical little Westerns like this in a few days of shooting. With that in mind, it's surprising that the resulting film, despite its clichéd story, is anything but inconsequential. Bucking Broadway is an emotionally compelling, beautifully shot film that proves the director was already a supreme visual talent even this early in his career.