DVR Diary: THE VALIANT (1929)

Future Oscar-winner Paul Muni made his movie debut in William K. Howard's Fox Film production, adapting a Broadway play. Watching it at the time, you might not have predicted an award in Muni's future. It's not that he's bad in the lead role, but that everyone speaks their lines in that stilted early-talking fashion exemplified by the legendary  "take him ... for ... a ride" from The Lights of New York. No one, it seems, can speak a full sentence without at least one pause, pregnant or otherwise. The artificial cadences are bad enough, but the implausible situation makes things worse. The Valiant is an exercise in the pathos of renunciation that thrilled Twenties audiences. The idea here is that our protagonist, a confessed and convicted murderer who's kept his real identity secret since turning himself in, will not identify himself to his sister when she visits Death Row, their aged, ailing mother suspecting from photos that "James Dyke" (he took his pseudonym from a commercial calendar at the precinct station) is the son she hasn't seen since before the Great War. He's stuck with the Dyke name despite the cops immediately recognizing the fakery in order to avoid disgracing his family, and thinks that his people will be better off believing he'd died long ago rather than say a real goodbye to a murderer. The title tells you what the filmmakers think of this. All of this sets up the centerpiece scene when the sister (Marguerite Churchill) interrogates the prisoner, hoping that he'll betray some memory of their shared youth. Instead, Dyke contrives a story of witnessing her brother's heroic death in the war as a comrade-in-arms. Believing that her boy died a decade ago supposedly will make the old lady feel better than knowing that her daughter got to see and talk to him. That's the psychology at work here, in a time when popular fiction was committed to concepts of honor that seem alien from the almost a century's distance.  Muni can't do much with the material and was clearly still learning how to act for the screen; a few years would pass before he fully figured it out. The film itself is dull and stagebound except for the opening sequence. After the Muni character kills his man offscreen, he staggers onto the street, already remorseful. He looks for a cop to arrest him, wandering through several slices of city life with adults and children going about their business or play with Brueghelian indifference to the protagonist's torment. Ironically, it's in these essentially silent bits that Muni shows promise as a film actor and Howard shows some skill as a director. The rest of the picture has that obsolete quality that doomed so many early talkies to actual oblivion.

DVR Diary: RIO RITA (1929)

The legendary Flo Ziegfeld opened the Broadway theater bearing his name with the premiere of Rio Rita in February 1927. It was a massive hit and as such was ripe for adaptation in a Hollywood just learning to talk and sing. Comedy relief actors Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey were brought west from Broadway to recreate their roles as a divorcee and his lawyer, with the slight change that Wheeler's character now was a bootlegger. Bebe Daniels had the title role as Rita, a Mexican beauty in love with a Texas Ranger (John Boles), yet anxious to keep him away from her brother, who is suspected of being that notorious bandit, the Kinkajou. He may sound like a Pokemon, but he actually takes his formidable name from the Central American "honey bear." In the comedy plot, Woolsey tries to arrange a Mexican divorce for Wheeler so he can marry another woman (Dorothy Lee), but some mix-up leaves Wheeler in legal jeopardy as a bigamist. Fortunately, his first wife (Helen Kaiser) appears and promptly falls in love with Woolsey. It's a double score for him since she's also come into an inheritance. Their story has very little to do with the Kinkajou story; the two plots seem merely to occupy the same space in this mostly stagebound production, directed by the undistinguished Luther Reed. Rio Rita's massive success revived Daniels' career and made Reed briefly Radio Pictures' (aka RKO) musical specialist, but the massive flop of Dixiana, which reunited Daniels, Wheeler and Woolsey a year later, put a stop to that. That setback notwithstanding, Rita made Wheeler and Woolsey in Hollywood, and rightly so. The film is alive only when they're on the screen, or during the song and dance number Wheeler and Lee share. Their best moment is their last big scene. While their girlfriends sing their love song at opposite ends of the foursome, Wheeler and Woolsey play pattycake with each other, but the play inexorably escalates into slapping and prodding until the two throw each other into the Rio Grande, with the girls tumbling after. This bit, like the last half hour of the picture, was shot in two-color Technicolor, which adds at least some visual interest to the main story. The loss of color in many early musicals really hurts their reputation as cinema because it flattens out the compositions. Seeing a comparison between a black and white print of such a musical and footage in restored Technicolor is almost like seeing a 3-D movie in its original format for the first time after years watching it on TV. Back in the day, though, color wasn't enough to keep the public interested in musicals, as long as they were feeble operettas like this one. They regrettably left their imprint on many comedy films subsequently burdened with insufferable singing romantic leads in an effort to please those parts of the audience presumably unsatisfied by comedians' antics. It's a testimony to Wheeler and Woolsey's success that they were able to escape that formula, and after seeing them in Rio Rita you can understand why everyone left the doors unlocked.

DVR Diary: WINGS (1927)

On the day of the latest Academy Awards ceremony I rewatched the first ever Best Picture, William Wellman's World War I flying epic. Wings was one of two "best pictures" that year, officially recognized as the "outstanding production" of 1927-8 while F. W. Murnau's Sunrise received the first and only award for "unique and artistic" effort. Film buffs today regard the Murnau as the superior film and I'd most likely agree with them, but the distance between the two pictures really isn't as great as some may think. Both films are spectacles showing silent film at its peak of technical virtuosity, and both have plenty of corny moments. If Sunrise showed what a proven expressionist master could do with a Hollywood budget, Wings is arguably more of a revelation because Wellman really hadn't done anything distinguished before. Finally matched with the right subject, the young director went at it with every trick in the book and achieved unprecedented and arguably unmatched effects. While it flaunts supremely mobile late-silent camerawork and attacks the air war from almost every possible angle, Wings is above all the ultimate statement of silent cinema's primitive authenticity. Richard Arlen and Charles "Buddy" Rogers literally take to the air for the film's dogfights, and even jaded modern audiences are likely to be captivated if not awestruck by the unmistakable reality of it.

Arlen and Rogers are the leads in the film's tragic bromance of frenemies. They're from the same town, where David Armstrong (Arlen) is a privileged rich boy and Jack Powell (Rogers) is a car enthusiast. Both pine for rich girl Sylvia Lewis (Harold Lloyd leading lady Jobyna Ralston), but Jack does so almost as a matter of one-upmanship with David, and in spite of the obsessive attention paid him by his neighbor Mary, his neglect of her all the more inexplicable by the fact that Mary is played by top-billed "It" girl and legendary sex symbol Clara Bow. Maybe Mary comes on too strong, as Bow often does in her films. She does score a point with Jack by naming his homemade race car "the Shooting Star" and creating a logo he'll also use on his fighter plane.

The audience will be all for Bow because Mary also enlists, joining the motor corps as an ambulance driver. There's a scene nearly midway through the film that may remind today's moviegoers of Wonder Woman's exploits in a French village, down to the climactic destruction of a church steeple. Of course, all Mary can do is cower under her truck as that steeple crashes down point first almost on top of her, provoking what probably was some salty language from our star, though my lip-reading isn't good enough to verify it. As an aside, there's at least one "Son of a bitch!" during a dogfight scene that absolutely no one will miss. In any event, Mary's really big adventure takes place in Paris (some actual second-unit shooting was done there), where she's tasked with dragging a sozzled Jack from a bar because his leave's been cancelled. This is part of the scene that includes a famous tracking shot including two lesbians at a table, for what that's worth to you. On one hand, this is one of the film's dumbest scenes, sinking to the level of idiot comedy as Jack becomes obsessed with champagne bubbles and begins hallucinating them everywhere in special-effect form. On the other, the whole bubble business has a brilliant payoff when Mary, having changed from her chic uniform into a sequined cocktail gown to get Jack's attention, shimmies a blizzard of bubbles at him that finally wins him away from a predatory French woman. Of course, he's so stinking drunk that he never recognizes her through the whole experience, finally passing out in a hotel room just before some MPs show up to arrest Mary in mid-change back into her uniform. Her war ends with the grim irony of dismissal for immoral conduct, and when Jack reads about her "resignation" in a hometown paper, still none the wiser about Paris, he remarks that Mary didn't seem like the quitting type.

It's remarkable that Wings made Buddy Rogers a star when Jack is such an obnoxious character. Not only does he treat Mary like dirt, only to win her at the very end of the picture, and not only does he delude himself about Sylvia when she really loves David (as Ralston did Arlen), but on top of everything else he kills David. Not intentionally, mind you, or not in the "I want to kill David" sense, but because, believing David dead behind enemy lines, he goes on a berserker rage during the big American push, breaking from his formation to go on a solo rampage against any German plane he can find. So of course David has survived, and of course he steals a German plane in a desperate effort to get back to his own lines, and of course Jack isn't going to realize that it's his buddy in a German plane flying toward the American lines. This is all a big tragedy, of course, but Wellman takes it beyond tragedy to outright horror, milking David's hopeless helplessness for all it's worth as he knows exactly who's after him from the shooting star logo on the pursuing plane. This isn't a moment of valorous resignation but a sustained fit of despairing terror, and Arlen makes the most of it. Sure, the boys reconcile before David finally expires, after he's shot down and crashes into a house, but while Wellman strives to restore a sentimental tone -- the symbolic cut to a plane's propellers slowing to a halt outside a military ceremony is a nice touch echoed in the epilogue by Sylvia's mournful stillness in the swing she and  David used to swing on -- that play for pathos can't erase the memory of one of the most terrifying moments in all silent film, all the more terrifying, of course, for knowing that Arlen is up in the clouds, theoretically as helplessly vulnerable as the character he plays.

It's quite an achievement by both Wellman and Arlen that that scene of one man in peril is so memorable after some massively detailed scenes of land and air battle, nearly as definitive as the trench warfare scenes from All Quiet on the Western Front. Wings is more of a patchwork than that film, with wider variance in tone than Sunrise, to return to the original 1927 comparison, in an effort to please every part of the audience. Somehow it's a film that elevated everyone involved, including Gary Cooper in his famous few minutes as a doomed trainee pilot. Wellman knew star power when he saw it, and while Cooper doesn't have quite the godlike emergence here that James Cagney gets in Wellman's Other Men's Women, you can tell from the way the director dissolves to a closer shot of Cooper as he prepares to leave his tent for the last time that the young actor would make an indelible impression. But hell, this film even elevated El Brendel. Brendel really became a big deal in talkies, when his Swedish accent was judged inherently hilarious, if nothing else about him was. What on earth did he have to offer in silent film? Apparently Wellman found his face funny, having used him in an earlier picture, and in the meantime silence freed the presumptive comedian from the confines of his own shtick, so that here he can play a German-American, Herman Schwimpf, who has to fend off disdain for his enemy ethnicity by displaying an American flag tattoo on his bicep. Apart from that, he gets beat up during an aggressive demonstration of hand-to-hand combat and is forgotten about for most of the rest of the picture until he turns up firing an anti-aircraft gun before the climactic battle. He was there for someone's benefit, I guess, though I'd wonder about anyone who found him the highlight of the film. He's what you get when you try to have something for everyone in a movie, and that just goes to prove that Wings is more -- far more -- than the sum of its parts. Parts of this film are probably still the best air-war movie ever made.

DVR Diary: WHERE EAST IS EAST (1929)

This was the end of the line for Lon Chaney Sr. and director Tod Browning after a legendary run of films during the 1920s. Browning went on to make his sound-film debut later in 1929 with The Thirteenth Chair, which featured Bela Lugosi in a teaser of things to come. For Chaney, you could say Where East is East is the beginning of the end. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer kept its "Man of a Thousand Faces" silent for another year, making him one of the very last major stars to make his speaking debut, perhaps because they were unsure of how to present Chaney as a talking star, and perhaps because the health problems that killed him in 1930 were already apparent. In any event, East is a typical Chaney-Browning production, though creepier in its insinuations than in explicit content. It seemed creepy to me, at least, because I inferred a quasi-incestuous subtext in the close relationship between the white hunter Tiger Haynes (Chaney) and his daughter Toyo (Lupe Velez). Toyo is a grown woman, which makes the father-daughter horseplay at points seem just a bit excessive -- but maybe I'm just reading stuff into a Browning film (Waldemar Young adapted an original story by the director and pulp writer Harry Sinclar Drago) because you're supposed to. Even if you suppress such speculation, there's something creepy about the way Toyo's mother and Tiger's ex, the half-caste Madame de Sylva (Estelle Taylor), becomes Toyo's romantic rival for the affections of Bobby Bailey (Lloyd Hughes), who's come to Laos to buy tigers for his father's circus from Haynes. And because this is a Tod Browning film, Tiger keeps what I take to be an orangutan, though it might be a runt of a gorilla, in his house -- an orangutan with a grudge against de Sylva. That sounds familiar. The Chaney character is going to unleash the ape to kill his wife but something will happen, he'll change his mind and get himself killed, right? Not quite. It looks like Tiger Haynes is done for after locking himself in the room with the ape to keep it from getting loose and attacking the young lovers, but not before the avenging orangutan did what he had to do to the half-caste vamp.

Considering some of the unfilmed ideas Browning had -- he told a doozy to Herman Mankiewicz about Chaney as a violinist/mad scientist grafting women's heads onto gorillas' bodies -- this is fairly mild stuff, though it makes you confident that the Browning-Chaney team could have taken their act into the Pre-Code era with little trouble. There's really no reason for East, a May 1929 release, not to be a talkie except that the studio and/or director and/or star weren't ready just yet. Chaney's scarface makeup wouldn't have gotten in the way of dialogue and he wouldn't have had to attempt a foreign accent for his role. Yet I suppose the Chaney-Browning world worked according to a kind of dream logic, at the slightly unnatural speed of silent action, that would not translate, despite wishful thinking about Chaney as Dracula, to the gravity of sound. They belong to another universe the way the silent clowns did, and as a male star at M-G-M circa 1929, Chaney probably was doomed anyway.

DVR Diary: THE BIG PARADE (1925)

Ever since Wonder Woman stormed through No Man's Land earlier this year I've wanted to take a fresh look at World War I movies, including those I'd seen before. It had been a while since I looked at King Vidor's 1925 blockbuster, the first major film about the war made after the armistice, with no need for propaganda. It made a superstar of leading man John Gilbert, real stars of romantic lead Renee Adoree and comic relief Karl Dane, and a bankable name of Vidor himself. I didn't remember it being as hard a slog back then. More than half the film is over before we get a battle, and most of that first half is seemingly interminable service comedy stuff with Gilbert, Dane and Tom O'Brien in France. That probably reflects the sensibility of Lawrence Stallings, whose novel Plumes formed the basis of the screenplay. Roughly speaking, Hollywood gave us two kinds of World War I movie between the world wars, not counting the German-point-of-view picture All Quiet on the Western Front. John Monk Saunders, the writer of Wings and many subsequent war pictures, brought a sort of "Lost Generation" post-traumatic sensibility to his work that makes his pictures more accessible today. To be cynical about it, his 1940 suicide probably gives Saunders additional street cred in our time, though if you want to play that game take note that by little more than a decade after Big Parade was completed Gilbert, Adoree and Dane were all dead. Stallings brings a different sensibility to war literature. His major contributions were Plumes and the play he wrote with Maxwell Anderson, What Price Glory, adapted into another blockbuster movie that inspired a spinoff comedy series about its bromantic heroes, Flagg and Quirt. Judging from Big Parade (assuming it to be a faithful adaptation of Plumes) and What Price Glory, it looks like Stallings saw the war as an occasion for the loosening of inhibitions as well as a perhaps pointless slaughter. Hence the girl-chasing in Big Parade as well as the notoriously salty "dialogue," available only to lip-readers, of the What Price Glory film. Saunders covers some of that territory as well, especially in Wings, but his stories always remain more grim than Stallings'. That's not to say that Big Parade doesn't get grim. In fact, it probably came across to its original audiences as very grim, since after building up Gilbert's buddies through that long first half of the picture Vidor promptly destroys them in his one big battle scene.

To back up a bit, Gilbert plays Jim Apperson, wastrel son of a successful businessman who enlists at the spur of the moment when the U.S. declares war on Germany without really thinking about it much. His dad thinks he's become a man at last -- an older brother stays home to help run the business -- but Jim doesn't want to make a big deal of it because he realizes, on his first second thought, that his mother will be horrified. Nevertheless, he leaves home and girlfriend behind to ensure basic training and the many indignities of military life (especially stable cleaning) alongside construction worker Slim (Dane) and bartender Bull (O'Brien). In France, they all have the hots for Melisande (Adoree), but Jim's an easy winner in that contest over his grotesque pals. Finally their unit is called to the front (the intertitles get hysterical about it: "Front! FRONT!" etc.) and Melisande can't stand to see Jim go. In a melodramatic high spot, she clings to the rear fender of the truck taking the men away until she can't hang on anymore, and then lies there abjectly after everyone else has left.

There isn't really any trench warfare in Big Parade unless you count the dark night Jim and his buddies spend in a shell crater. Instead, the Americans advance on the enemy through a forest in a scene famously choreographed by Vidor to establish a rhythm of footsteps, gunshots and falling bodies. In its deliberateness this scene is far from the machine-gun pacing of Lewis Milestone's All Quiet  battles or the relentless tracking shots of Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, but it's a great way to build up tension as the Americans approach their baptism of fire. At a more intimate level, the night scene with the three soldiers in the crater must have been terrifying to the original audience as the men lose each other in darkness and light can mean death. The intertitles go over the top again in their own way -- blame them on movie writer Harry Behn rather than Stallings -- as Jim loses his buddies. "GOD DAMN THEIR SOULS!" he thunders at the Germans as he realizes that they've killed Slim. He gets a bit more explicit than that later, and while I recall seeing a version in which "bastards" is spelled out on screen, the version I saw on TCM (presumably more authentic) bleeps it down to "B---!" In any event, Jim barely survives, taken away in a singular burst of color by a Red Cross truck and sent home minus a leg. He learns that his girl has Dear Johned him with his brother and promptly heads back to France -- whether to stay with Melisande or bring her home to America is unclear. My gut feeling is that he stays, and I suppose there's a message there about the war experience for many Americans. You probably need a sense of Big Parade's place in film history to fully appreciate it now, or at least forgive the patches that have grown dull over time, but it's still essential viewing if you're interested in how Hollywood presented the war supposed to end all war.

DVR Diary: SPEEDWAY (1929)

William Haines is a recognizable ancestor of the boy-men who continue to infest Hollywood, and as such he was one of the biggest stars of the late silent era. Sound and scandal snuffed out his career soon afterward, and the former alone might have done it -- Haines was gay and refused to go through with a studio-arranged marriage to cover it -- because, on the evidence of the talkies of his I've seen, his shtick came on too strong in sound. He is possibly at his most obnoxious in Harry Beaumont's racing melodrama, but his obnoxious qualities -- he seems to have been arrested in development at adolescence -- were packaged to be tolerable to movie audiences. The archetypal Haines story portrays him as arrogant and selfish, albeit with an innate harmless charisma that makes women warm to him, but while today's boy-men stop right there, Haines usually suffers some comeuppance that leads him to redeem if not necessarily mature himself. In Speedway he's part of the pit crew for Ernest Torrence's long-suffering Indy-car driver, a sort of savant with engines and ambitious to race himself yet neither very ambitious nor disciplined. In Indianapolis he spends most of his time hitting on Anita Page, who turns out to be an aviatrix and inflicts a comic comeuppance on our hero by taking him on a wild, ultimately destructive plane ride. Haines makes a spectacle of himself attempting to seduce her at a diner, and later stages a fake auto accident to get her attention. I guess the girls in these pictures are supposed to be bowled over by his good looks once they realize that he means no harm, but I don't know if I buy it.

Meanwhile, Haines grows estranged from father-figure Torrence, who hopes to finally win the 500 in his final race. Our hero is seduced himself by John Miljan's dirty driver, Torrence's longtime rival, who promises that Haines can drive his car in the big race but only wants the naive young man to soup up his engine. The melodrama really kicks in when Torrence's doctor tells him his heart won't last 500 miles. With Haines now allied with his enemy, Torrence has to hand the wheel to his other pit man, Karl Dane. Miljan reclaims his car just before the race, and when Dane can't hack it as a driver, Torrence pulls a switcheroo and lets Haines drive for him. Most of the film was shot on location and while this is no Ben-Hur with motors there are a few money shots of Haines and Miljan driving on the actual race track. Haines overcomes a four-lap deficit, and just as he's poised to pull away he fakes an eye injury in an act of filial piety, the idea being to let Torrence finish the race and take the long-coveted checkered flag. This he does, only to pass out in the winner's circle, but the film isn't so melodramatic that it will kill the man off. Speedway was Haines' last silent film -- he had already spoken on screen -- and it's enlivened by racing sound effects in place of music during the climax. It is not the picture to explain Haines' appeal to modern viewers, but I don't know if any of his films can explain it now. As a very late silent, premiering in the fall of 1929, it was destined to the memory hole, but unlike some other Haines vehicles from this period, at least Speedway survives to play sometimes on Turner Classic Movies. It's arguably even more obsolete than many late silents when you consider that within five years of its release William Haines was finished as an actor and Ernest Torrence and Karl Dane were dead.

THUNDERBOLT (1929)

 

Josef von Sternberg's career can be divided into two phases. He's best known for the period when he was identified with his protege Marlene Dietrich. In the earlier stage, he was identified with George Bancroft. There's a contradiction for someone to reconcile. Sternberg became a star director putting burly Bancroft through his criminal paces in Underworld, and starred him again in his seedy romance The Docks of New York. He depended on Bancroft, who had since become the Wolf of Wall Street, to put over his talkie debut. Sternberg reportedly wanted to work as creatively with soundscapes as he had worked with images, and you can hear that in Thunderbolt's diegetic soundtrack and in occasional thematic devices like a sort of hyena laugh that hovers in the atmosphere of the Black Cat nightclub. Inevitably, however, a Sternberg film works best on the visual level, and to an extent Bancroft's voice limits this one. Most of the time he has an unusually smooth delivery as the title character, a gangster named for his lethal punch, but as I've noticed in other Bancroft talkies, the star has a bad habit of slowing...his lines...down...very...deliberately in his big dramatic moments, to the point that you can imagine him intoning the infamous "Take him ... for ... a ride" line from Lights of New York. That's a shame because Bancroft gives an interesting performance overall as a rather peculiar gangster.

 

Above: Thunderbolt enters the Black Cat.

Below: Fay Wray as the woman Thunderbolt has lost, and 

Theresa Harris as the dream of another possibility.

 

What's peculiar about Jim Lang is his detachment, or his ability to detach himself from his concerns to dwell in moments of pleasure or play. You notice how he hangs out at the Black Cat, apparently an integrated nightclub with black entertainers, and how he lingers before leaving to take in the uncredited Theresa Harris's song, "Daddy Won't You Please Come Home?" Sternberg and Bancroft convey Thunderbolt's appreciation of Harris's voice and figure, but just as interesting as his appreciation of black beauty is his readiness to stop everything and enjoy the moment. Later, Jim enters an apartment building to kill Bob Moran (Richard Arlen), the new lover of his erstwhile moll Ritzy (Fay Wray). He's followed inside by a stray mutt from the street that's attached himself to the gangster. Thunderbolt wants to be rid of the yapping dog and tries to attract it back downstairs by getting on all fours, shaking his rump and sliding with a weird smoothness across the carpet. You get the impression that despite his mission of death Jim will take as long getting the pooch's attention as he needs to, that now all that matters is getting that dog to come to him. And as we'll see, he doesn't really want to be rid of the dog at all, even if the dumb animal gets him pinched. Thunderbolt is used to doing whatever he wants, and in moments like these there's an almost endearing modesty to his whims.

 

Above, Thunderbolt acts as virtual executioner for "Bad Al" (Fred Kohler).

Below: Bob confronts his enemy at last.

Inevitably, Thunderbolt is a melodrama typical of its decade. As noted, Thunderbolt wants to destroy Bob, the man he assumes is cuckolding him. Even on death row -- it's unclear what exactly he was convicted of -- he has enough influence to take belated revenge on Moran. He has his men lure Bob to the bank from which he was recently fired -- his relationship with Ritzy came to light and might have harmed the establishment's reputation -- and plant a gun on him while robbing the place. Lives are taken and Bob promptly finds himself on death row across from Thunderbolt, even though you'd think the bank president's testimony would have substantiated Bob's defense that he was lured to the bank by a crank call. Bob is so thoroughly railroaded that he's scheduled to burn before Thunderbolt. Everybody takes for granted (even though no one can prove it in court, presumably) that Thunderbolt framed Bob, but despite entreaties from Ritzy and Bob's mother (Eugenie Besserer, who couldn't be more different from her Jazz Singer mom in a wonderful scene where she and Bob are playfully roughhousing in their bathroom) Jim refuses to fess up. It's only when Ritzy and Bob have a death-house wedding that Thunderbolt relents and admits to the frame. This is where such stories usually end, with the pathos of renunciation as Jim gives up Ritzy once and for all, but Sternberg and the screenwriting Furthman brothers create fresh suspense by having one of Jim's cronies confide that Thunderbolt is still playing a long game. What he really wants, we're told, is a chance to kill Bob with his super punch, which we've already seen knock another con into a coma. To do this, he needs Bob to stay in his cell (while the paperwork for his release is prepared) until the day Jim himself is scheduled to die. Jim will get a chance to shake hands with all his death row playmates, and when it's Bob's turn, POW! Everything leads to a climactic long take that's both corny and brilliant, as Jim and Bob say their farewells while Sternberg calls our attention to Thunderbolt's deadly hand moving from bar to bar of Bob's cell. Then Bob hits Jim with a final revelation: it turns out that he'd been Ritzy's childhood sweetheart, but that Jim had fairly won her away from him until she tired of gang life. This idea tickles Thunderbolt, and he moves on to the death chamber in good humor.

 

Watch that hand, Bob!

What happened here, exactly? There's room to see it two ways. It may be that something about Bob's story made Jim relent, but for all we know that other gangster was talking through his hat and Jim never had any intention to kill Bob after the wedding scene. Conceding some ambiguity makes the moment somewhat less corny, and my overall impression of Jim Lang is that he is too easily amused by things to be as deadly as everyone assumes, and that even his frame-up of Bob is little more than a practical joke. At the very end we leave him laughing at a guard having the name Aloysius. You could almost believe that Thunderbolt is tired of his life without actually realizing it. I may question Bancroft's line readings sometimes, but there's a subtlety to his performance that makes my view of Jim's bemused ambivalence seem plausible. Whatever Sternberg's intentions, Thunderbolt isn't one of his characteristic spectacles, though it is nicely shot. That may be because his camera doesn't really worship Fay Wray the way he'd worship Dietrich, or the way he worships Theresa Harris during her song. In the end, it's Bancroft's imperfect but intriguing performance that makes the film worth seeing.

Pre-Code Parade: UNTAMED (1929)

Joan Crawford's first talking feature, directed by Jack Conway, doesn't live up to its title, and it definitely doesn't live up to its cable-guide synopsis, which led me to expect Crawford as something closer to a female Tarzan. She's no jungle girl, alas, but from the perspective of Hollywood South America may as well have been Darkest Africa, and that's where we find "Bingo," the daughter of a down-on-his-luck oil prospector raised among the common people, whom she entertains with the untamed sounds of Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown's The Chant of the Jungle. Jungle music it isn't, just as The Pagan Love Song wasn't very pagan. I suppose Bingo (nee Alice) is untamed insofar as she's been raised on the streets and has a certain rough manner. When some slob tries to grope her during a dance she yells out, "Somebody give me a knife!" The same slob later kills her dad, just as his old pal Murchison (Ernest Torrence) was going to tell him that one of his mines has finally paid off, making him (but now Bingo) a millionaire.

You can see where this is going, and the idea of the looming, lunkish Torrence, who made his name as a psycho hillbilly in Tol'able David and was rendered still more exotic by sound's exposure of his Scots burr -- acting as Bingo's Henry Higgins to make her fit for society has some potential. Unfortunately, Untamed doesn't go there. Instead, her social education is presented as a fait accompli so the picture can take up a new subject. On the boat back to America Bingo had met cute with Andy McAllister (Robert Montgomery), who unfortunately already has a date for the voyage. That doesn't stop Bingo, who after bopping her rival on the nose on the ship hooks up with Andy again in New York, where practically the last untamed thing Bingo does is goad Andy and a rival suitor into a boxing match in the middle of a swanky party at her mansion. From this point, Untamed really becomes Andy's story, driven by a male-pride melodrama. The young man has been bred for society but has no immediate prospects. This means that, should he marry Bingo, he won't be able to give her the lifestyle to which she has but recently become accustomed. For Bingo this isn't a problem, as she doesn't see why they couldn't live off her money, as managed by Murchison. This is where male pride comes in; it would be shameful for Andy to live off his wife, especially when Murchison suspects him of being a gigolo -- even though the straitlaced old man can't bring himself to utter the word. Recognizing that psychology at work in Andy, Murchison tries to manipulate him out of Bingo's life by appearing to consent to a wedding while offering Andy a "wedding gift" of $30,000. He sweet-talks Andy, assuring him that it won't be like living off Bingo's money because this will be his by virtue of the gift, but he depends on Andy pridefully rejecting the offer and walking out on Bingo once and for all. What he doesn't depend on is Andy grabbing the check with a threat to flaunt it (and a former girlfriend) at the party where Bingo plans to announce their engagement and call it a bribe to make him quit her. What Andy doesn't expect is that Bingo will respond to this scene by shooting him. Fortunately the bullet only grazes his collarbone; it's the kind of wound that makes shooter and victim realize how much they still love each other. But if that wasn't a fatal blow to the audience, now Murchison decides that if Andy wants to work and earn the means to support Bingo, there's a mine-engineering job available, for which Andy just happens to have the college qualifications. That's one head-slapping way to close a movie, since you can only ask why Murchison didn't offer Andy that job in the first place.

There's no guaranteeing that Untamed would have been any good if it had continued along the lines of its first half-hour, but the way it did continue guaranteed that critics would declare it brain-dead. A Pittsburgh reviewer called it "the most amazing burlesque ever to come from the sometimes deluded wanderings of a scenario writer," and I don't think I can top that.

DVR Diary: THE VIRGINIAN (1929)

Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian is one of the ur-texts of the western genre. It contributed a phrase to the American language -- "When you say that, smile!" usually paraphrased as "Smile when you say that!" and formed the basis for at least four movies and one long-running TV series. I happen to be more familiar with the TV show than the book, which the show of necessity adapts very loosely in order to last for nine years. While the TV Virginian is one of the greatest westerns in that medium, it very quickly ceased to have anything to do with Wister's story. It can be jarring to watch an adaptation that comes closer to the source, though Victor Fleming's 1929 film is twice removed from the novel, being adapted from a more action-oriented 1904 play that Wister co-wrote. The essence of the story remains: the ever-nameless Virginian (that wouldn't be allowed to stand in a modern TV show) feuds with the rustler Trampas (who on TV was never anything but the hero's pal, and often the hero of his own episodes) and is forced to hang his feckless friend Steve (who was written out of the TV show, presumably still alive, after two seasons). The hanging complicates his courtship of Molly Wood, the new schoolteacher from the east (on TV a journalist until she's murdered offscreen in the second season) but everything turns out right after the archetypal showdown in the street with Trampas.

What surprised me about the 1929 Virginian is how much of a coming-of-age story it was. This comes through the most when the film focuses on the title character's friendship with Steve. As the Virginian -- he's never called by that title but is once referred to as "that Virginia boy" -- Gary Cooper is approximately the same age James Drury was when he commenced the role on TV, but compared to Cooper, who shows some early-talkie rawness here, Drury's Virginian seems like a much more mature man. My impression was that this was the film that typed Cooper as a cowboy, but his Virginian isn't the laconic Cooper cowboy ("Yup.") of caricature, and in any event Louella Parsons suggests that Cooper got the part because he was typed already, as a he-man if not a cowboy.

Still, Cooper's Virginian is a flirtatious prankster in the first half of the film, fond of practical jokes like switching a room full of babies awaiting baptism so they'll get the wrong names. For all that, he has an ambition that Steve (Richard Arlen) lacks, perhaps because Steve has a fatalism the Virginian lacks, a feeling that it makes no difference what you do when you end up dead anyway. Like many a modern gangster or gangbanger, Steve drifts into crime because he doesn't really give a damn about anything, not even himself. There's something about him I think audiences would recognize today, while by comparison Trampas (Walter Huston) is a stock villain. The best part of the 1929 film is the sequence leading to Steve's lynching, and this is where Cooper really shows his acting strength. The Virginian is doubly horrified by the necessity of hanging a rustler and his friend's apparent indifference to his feelings or his own imminent death. The scene is softened when someone slips him a note from Steve explaining that he actually couldn't face his friend without "playing the baby," and it closes on a bromantic note when our hero after the hanging hears the call of a quail, which had been his and Steve's private code, as a kind of epitaph for Steve's untamed nature. Corny, but effective.

"Virge," as I call him, is going to take it all out on Trampas, but the bad guy drygulches him first, forcing our hero into a recuperation period under Molly's (Mary Brian) anxious care. The showdown when it comes is a nice climax to some well paced build-up of tension as Virge wanders the streets and Trampas builds up liquid courage. It can't live up to the same scene in the novel, which is the one substantial section of it that I've read, in which Wister gives us a psychologically convincing look into the mind of a man watching the minutes drain away before possible death, from Trampas's point of view. But it's still nicely put together by Fleming, and the film as a whole is pretty fluent for a 1929 all-talking picture mostly shot outdoors. I like it better than the bland 1945 remake with Joel McCrea and Brian Donlevy as hero and villain. On the level of pure story and performance, there are some episodes of the TV series I like better still -- but that's another story.

DVR Diary: TWO ARABIAN KNIGHTS (1927)

"One flash of that pan and she'll yell for Allah!"

"I've had more broads yell for me than you and this Allah guy put together." 

Q. What World War I movie starring Louis Wolheim won director Lewis Milestone his first Oscar? It wasn't All Quiet on the Western Front. It was this film, long thought lost, that won Milestone the first and only Academy Award for Comedy Direction. It may dismay viewers today that none of the era's slapstick masters, or their directorial collaborators, took this prize -- and that may indeed have been a factor in the category's quick abolition -- but Two Arabian Knights proves to be a fairly funny film. That's mainly because Wolheim and William (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd have a blast playing unrepentant Ugly Americans -- and Wolheim is literally ugly! -- running amok in wartime Europe and the Middle East. Cynicism about "the war to end all wars" had quickly taken hold around the world, but while All Quiet finds Milestone in despairing mode over the slaughter, Two Arabian Knights rejects all pity or piety. Irreverence reigns right from the start as Boyd and Wolheim, as private and sergeant respectively, face death in a crater in the middle of No Man's Land. If they're going to die, Boyd decides, then by God, he's going to pay the sergeant back for all the time he pushed me around! Before long, German soldiers ring the rim of the crater, like spectators at a pit fight, as our heroes try to beat each other's brains out. Thus begins a picaresque tail that next delivers our warriors to a POW camp. Also imprisoned here are Arab soldiers who fought for the Allies, presumably from one of France's imperial possessions. Apparently these Arabs fought in their traditional white robes, which make great camouflage when you're going to escape into a snowy wilderness -- except it's our imaginative Americans who do the escaping, after first clobbering two fellow prisoners. They barely make it under some electrified wire -- it's actually a clever piece of direction that we can clearly see the tiny twig propping up the wire tottering as the boys squirm across -- before they blunder into another group of Arab prisoners and German guards. Great job!

The German policy apparently was to put Arab prisoners in the hands of their Turkish allies. Thus our heroes end up on a train to Constantinople, where they manage to dodge their captors and stow away aboard a civilian ship (with a Russian crew) bound for the Ottomans' Arab territories. Boris Karloff is the purser on this vessel but doesn't get much to do. Of more interest to the boys is a genuine Arab princess (Mary Astor) returning home from her studies in the imperial capital. She's sort of traditionally dressed -- it's Hollywood's (or producer Howard Hughes's) idea of such dress -- but she has a modern education. Repeatedly, Boyd and Wolheim underestimate Arab learning, making cracks about their plans for the girl -- these include the exchange quoted above -- until they realize that, despite her early dumb show, Mirza knows English all along. The gag is repeated to greater effect when the soldiers have an audience with Mirza's father and his vizier. Wolheim makes an idiot of himself in a parody of the pantomime that was a staple of silent comedy, only to have the vizier ask, again in perfect English, "And exactly what is your business here today?" The Arab characters are still largely stereotypes, but so are the Americans, and in a world of universal caricature there's no reason for anyone to take offense. Eventually the boys will take Mirza away with them, of her own will, to a life in America in a time when no one thought twice about Muslims in the country. But if it is a sort of fantasy of liberating Americanism, it's also a learning experience for our American heroes -- or at least Wolheim learns the meaning of the word eunuch. There's an interesting lesson here in how intertitles could illustrate relative intelligence. Boyd knows what a eunuch is and identifies one to Wolheim, the title card spelling the word correctly. Wolheim is innocent of such things and asks what a "yunick" is. In this film's quaintly ribald way, Boyd whispers the answer to Wolheim -- no intertitle this time -- and Wolheim's face acquires an expression of queasy horror. As they pass the eunuch on their way out of town, on their way to freedom, the film closes with a reprise of Wolheim's sick gaze, as if he's lucky to leave the story intact. It's an odd way to end the show but overall Two Arabian Knights is a welcome reminder that silent cinema didn't depend entirely on pratfalls and special effects to be funny.

THE DAUGHTER OF DAWN (1920)

Like the buffalo and the Native Americans, The Daughter of Dawn was nearly lost. An independent production of the Texas Film Company, this all-Indian cast film had few known showings before disappearing for decades. Now you can stream it on Netflix, and now that the film is much closer in time to the epoch it portrays than it is to our own it probably looks more like an authentic historical document, simply by virtue of age and wear, than it may have to whoever saw it 95 years ago. Back then, the film's cornier aspects may have stood out more. While they still stand out now, they matter less than the idea that here is a movie of Indians hunting buffalo in which the actors probably had living knowledge of how it was done. Daughter of Dawn puts us one degree of separation from the legendary Old West; two of its main actors were children of the famous Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Its historical value is indisputably, almost immeasurably greater than its aesthetic value.

Norbert Myles and Richard Banks's scenario is self-consciously archetypal in a generic way. He's less interested in a narrative grounded in the authentic details and rhythm of Native life than in "the eternal triangle" that could appear anywhere, at any time. This time it's a triangle of a woman and two men. The woman is our title character (Esther Labarre), named for the time of her birth but in fact the daughter of a Kiowa chief. She has two suitors. One, Black Wolf (Jack Sankadota), is rich in goods. The other, White Eagle (White Parker) is a hunk compared to the pot-bellied Black Wolf. White Eagle is also a good citizen; he locates a buffalo herd and leads the Kiowas on a successful hunt that highlights the picture. The chief knows that Black Wolf can offer more for his daughter but he also respects her opinion and her emotions. Knowing her preference for White Eagle, the chief decides to let a trial of courage decide her future.

Black Wolf and White Eagle are to jump off a cliff. It's more steep than high but it promises a rough landing. Whoever survives will win the Daughter of Dawn. I'd hate to think any actual tribe settled such disputes that way, but no one claimed that this is an anthropological text. Anyway, both men survive, but Black Wolf survives by cowering on a ledge while White Eagle nobly takes his lumps all the way down. He'll be fine, while Black Wolf is shamed out of the tribe. On the rebound, he finally accepts the loyalty of Red Wing (Wanada Parker), who's been pining inexplicably for this lout through the whole picture and now volunteers to share his exile.

Rather than take his punishment like a man, Black Wolf turns traitor, betraying the Kiowas to this film's bad guys, the Comanches. He shows them the way to the Kiowa village, promising them horses and women, so long as he gets Daughter of Dawn. To cut to the chase, a recovered White Eagle leads the rescue mission, setting up a final showdown with Black Wolf. This climactic fight is reasonably well staged for 1920, Myles gradually moving closer, cut by cut, from long shot to close-up. But he follows it with a corny, clunky anticlimax as Red Wing knifes herself out of implausible grief for this dead Bluto of the Kiowas and an intertitle comments: "Constancy, thy name is Red Wing."

 

As a Native critic might have said, "Ugh." But while the story is the stuff of pulp fiction, with apologies to pulp fiction, Daughter of Dawn is fascinating even more as a piece of cinematic history than as a relic of Native folkways. For silent film buffs there's inherent drama to every rediscovery, and Daughter deserves its place on the National Film Registry (Class of 2013) regardless of its dramatic limitations. With so many major-studio Hollywood pictures from the silent era still missing or unlikely to be found, it's a wonder that an outlier project like this one can be seen so easily today, and that shouldn't be taken for granted.

On the Big Screen: THE GOLDEN BED (1925)

Cecil B. De Mille is identified with a certain kind of movie spectacle exemplified by his second version of The Ten Commandments (1925), now the oldest movie regularly shown on network television. Back when he made the first version, in 1923, he had a different reputation. In both phases of his long career he was widely perceived as a vulgarian, but while late De Mille, the director remembered today, is identified with historical or Biblical spectacle, and with reverence disguising sex, violence or overall sleaziness, early De Mille -- it's really middle De Mille, following a period where he was perceived as a pioneer cinematic artist -- goes straight to the sleaziness, but with style. In the early to mid 1920s a De Mille picture meant scandalous behavior among the opulent classes. Increasingly he covered his preoccupations with a veneer of archetypal ambition. His big gimmick was to interrupt his modern sex stories with interludes set in olden times to illustrate his themes more vividly. The 1923 Ten Commandments was different only insofar as the Moses material went into a long prologue, after which came a modern story in which the penalties for violating the commandments were illustrated with a winking earnestness. The Golden Bed comes at the end of this phase of De Mille's career -- it marked the end of his first stay at Paramount Pictures before he became an independent studio head -- and is perfunctory in its gimmickry. An intertitle equates the film's belle fatale with the legendary Lorelei and De Mille dutifully demonstrates by showing us a possibly-nude maiden urging a shipwrecked sailor to climb up out of a storm-tossed sea and onto her rock. The shot lasts less than a minute and then it's on with the show. There are plenty of characteristic De Mille moments yet to come, but Golden Bed strikes an overall tone that seems atypical of the great showman, and it's unclear whether audiences or reviewers -- one contemporary called it De Mille's worst film -- knew what to make of it. Since its release it's been largely forgotten and unseen. The organizers of the De Mille festival at the Madison Theater in Albany called their showing a world premiere of a George Eastman House restoration of the picture, and chief organizer Michael V. Butler put a distinctive stamp on it by compiling, with a collaborator, a new score that proved surprisingly effective given its dependence on Soviet composers, above all Khachaturian and in particular his Spartacus ballet music. But if it worked for Caligula it was certainly going to work for De Mille. It was still a strange juxtaposition since Golden Bed itself is very much a product of its own time and place, De Mille and his regular writer Jeanie MacPherson tapping into American literary influences above and beyond the Wallace Irwin source novel. Call it De Mille's Magnificent Ambersons and you may get the idea.

The Golden Bed is about the fall of an American family and how they nearly take a rising family with them. In Atlanta live the increasingly shabby yet ever genteel Peakes and the aspiring hardscrabble Holtzes. Papa Peake (Henry B. Walthall of Birth of a Nation fame) was bred to spend money but not to earn it, a title tells us. He's staked his family's future on his beautiful, spoiled, blonde daughter Flora Lee (Lillian Rich), while neglecting still-pretty but definitely second-best Margaret (Vera Reynolds). Flora has been bred to land a rich husband; early proof of her talent is the way young Admah Holtz, a candymaker's son (who grows up into Rod La Rocque) will give Flora free peppermints while making Margaret pay. As Papa patiently explains to a jealous Margaret, when Flora lands the right husband there'll be candy for everybody. Everything works out just in time; Flora lands a European aristocrat and Papa hosts the wedding the same day that the bank repossesses his furniture. As it is, Margaret still has to go out into the world and get a job. She goes to work for Admah, who has inherited the store and the name of "Candy" Holtz. Margaret hits the ground running with ideas for Admah to spruce up his slovenly shop, e.g., take the used flypaper off the candy shelves. Admah appreciates her entrepreneurial sense but is almost cruelly oblivious to the way Margaret plainly pines for him. He jokingly orders her to leave by the employees' back entrance after hiring her, not realizing how humiliating the moment is for her, though she pluckily jokes about noblesse oblige. Worse, he'd gone to Flora's wedding and hovered at the margins like a neglected puppy, except that Flora didn't neglect him. She saved him a flower from her bouquet and threw it to him while her new hubby wasn't looking. He still has a chance.

Now that Margaret has civilized the place and Admah isn't pulling taffy in the shop window anymore, the Candy Holtz business picks up. With Margaret as his conscience Admah rejects schemes to adulterate his produce by using sugar substitutes. As they condemn Atlanta to Type 2 diabetes, Flora is abruptly widowed during an Alpine vacation when her hubby and a rival with whom she'd started an affair fight their way off a cliff. I guess you can call that a De Mille touch, down to a primitive version of the Saboteur effect as the two men take the plunge. Now that Flora's free again, not to mention left out of hubby's will "for some reason," Margaret doesn't have a chance with Admah. Flora becomes Flora Holtz virtually by fait accompli and Margaret practically vanishes from the picture for an hour. Candy Holtz has achieved his dream, but he's also cut his own throat. Like father, like daughter; Flora lives to spend and is determined to rule Atlanta society, even if Admah can't really afford it. When she loses her bid to be hostess of the Peachtree Ball, she browbeats Admah into hosting a rival ball, playing on his class insecurity by blaming his working-class background for her defeat. Admah has been warned by his banker, whose wife won the right to host the ball, that he'll get no more credit if he continues his extravagance, but he blows practically all of his latest $40,000 loan on staging an insane candy-themed ball. This is the true De Millean showstopper, a nutty (and chocolatey!) masterpiece of demented set design (topic for future discussion; De Mille's true heir in our time is Tim Burton) garnished with hostesses in costumes made of candy -- that is to say, edible costumes. C.B. doesn't mean that in a purely theoretical sense, either. Censors reportedly went nuts over scenes of men nibbling near sensitive areas on those outfits. So which ball would you go to? Most of Atlanta society agreed with you, but Admah and Flora's moment of triumph is about to turn to ashes like many Cinderella stories. You see, after all that party planning Admah is running on fumes and Flora's dressmaker won't let her have her party gown until she pays her back bills. In a Dreiserian moment of decision (read Sister Carrie, or read about it if you're in a hurry), Admah takes the day's sales receipts out of a safe to pay the dressmaker, and that, children, is what we call embezzlement. Oh, and Flora is practically cheating under his nose with social butterfly Bunny (a young Warner Baxter). With Flora walking out on him and the police closing in, Admah may think the world has turned against him but this is really a moment of self-destruction, perfectly illustrated by De Mille in what should be this film's signature shot. In a self-parody of Samson and Delilah a quarter-century in advance, an enraged, self-pitying Admah brings a full-sized candy gazebo crashing down behind him by pushing the pillars apart. Next on his schedule: five years in prison.

It would be too brutal if the film ended here, so we get a final act in which Flora is punished and Admah is reformed through labor, while Margaret reopens the original Candy Holtz store and proves herself a successful businesswoman in her own right. This sets up a sad, almost chilling emotional climax that anticipates not only Orson Welles's Maginificent Ambersons but the mad pathos of southern gothic literature. In short, Bunny kicks Flora to the curb at the first opportunity, and with her youth gone and her looks going its only downhill for her. On the day Admah is released from prison a threadbare, moribund Flora makes her way to the old Peake mansion, which is now a boarding house. She has a poignant reunion with her old pet monkey, now working for an organ grinder -- I could write a whole post on the monkey as her totem animal going back to a childhood doll, the way its mischief at the Candy Holtz store embodies Flora's destructive rivalry with Margaret, and whether the monkey's name, Louella, is a dig at Parsons the gossip columnist -- before the new mistress of the house reluctantly lets her tour the place. How far Flora has fallen is hard to say; she may be homeless, but there's no hint of prostitution, and I might have found her comeuppance excessive except that I know that Hollywood actresses actually did fall that far if not further. Anyway, Flora's old Golden Bed is still in its old place -- I should explain that Admah had bought the house for her, and presumably refurnished it, as a wedding present -- but its crowning swan's head is broken and tied to the bed, upside-down, with wire. Meanwhile, as I mentioned, Admah is getting out of prison, and Margaret has put together a nice dinner to welcome him back. But he -- can't -- let -- go! Some morbid instinct draws him, too, to the boarding house, where he finds you-know-who in the Golden Bed. She recognizes him, but seems to have forgotten, in her decrepitude, that she and the "Candy Man" had been married. You'd like to think that her calling out for Bunny in her last moments would be the ultimate deal-breaker, but I think she actually has to die before Admah will finally quit her. Of course, Margaret has no clue about this nearby deathwatch and sadly falls asleep at an untouched dinner table. But the film does us the kindness of closing on a things-could-yet-be-worse note. After all, neither Admah nor Margaret commits suicide. Instead, he finally shows up about twelve hours late, and "your sister died in my arms" proves a satisfactory excuse. The Golden Bed actually closes on a note of bittersweet perseverance as the two survivors watch a construction crew reporting for work across the street and realize that the only thing to do is start over.

I feel justified in giving a detailed synopsis because most of you are never going to see this film. I hope the synopsis conveys that you're missing out on something because Golden Bed packs a wallop that's probably unexpected in a Cecil B. De Mille movie. It's as anti-romantic a movie as C.B. ever made while retaining considerable emotional power. In fact, it's an all-out attack on a certain romanticism, in movies and the wider culture, that Walthall, D. W. Griffith's Little Colonel, may have purposefully symbolized. Golden Bed is a vindication of bourgeois virtues, as forgotten by Admah but learned under pressure by Margaret, against an aristocratic romanticism of leisure and conspicuous consumption that Flora Peake was shaped to embody and Admah Holtz could not help idolizing. Knowing that Flora was consciously shaped by her father into the creature she becomes justifies the pathos of her wretched end if we realize that by spoiling her, her father victimized her while guaranteeing the victimization of others. Amid the often outlandish set design there's surprising seriousness of purpose, or else an on-the-nose satiric impulse. But whatever message you take from it, artistically Golden Bed demonstrates how good a visual storyteller De Mille was in the silent era. We'll have a chance shortly to discuss his struggles in early talkies, but when he didn't have to worry about staging dialogue the director was, on this evidence, quite good at getting emotions on screen and finding the right images to keep the story moving and its meaning plain. His three lead actors deserve a lot of the credit. Earlier this year Rod La Rocque impressed me as the heroic idiot in The Log of the Jasper B., and now I'm more impressed by his range. Neither Lillian Rich nor Vera Reynolds had much of a career, so maybe C.B. does deserve more credit with them, but Reynolds especially is very good and seems to have deserved better than she got. So does this film; I consider myself lucky to have seen it.

DVR Diary: WHY BE GOOD? (1929)

Colleen Moore was one of the biggest stars of 1920s Hollywood and the person who pretty much defined the look of the archetypal flapper -- you can take F. Scott Fitzgerald's word for it -- but show people with a non-specialized knowledge of film history a picture of her and they'll probably mistake her for Louise Brooks. Apart from their shared hairstyle, there was no comparing the two in 1929, but Brooks's films for G. W. Pabst have endured in the cinematic canon in a way nothing of Moore's has, and even Brooks's memoir gets more literary respect than Moore's. Life enhances art retrospectively to an extent, and Brooks led a more dramatic life than Moore, whose career didn't really survive the coming of sound but who died rich from wise investments. It's most likely also true that Pabst's Pandora's Box is better than anything Moore made. But does Moore deserve to be as completely eclipsed as she has been?

Last year Moore was given a chance to stick her foot in history's door when a restoration of William A. Seiter's Why Be Good? did the film-society circuit. The title was certainly inviting, suggesting that Moore marched mutely to the beat of the Pre-Code Parade -- mutely because Moore, in a rare move, had retreated to silents (albeit with Vitaphone music tracks) after making her talking, singing debut the year before. I haven't seen her first musicals -- in fact, they're lost films -- so I can't say whether she had good reason to retreat. But I can see how sound may have weighed her down; on the silent screen she has the perky exuberance of the era's clowns. I can also see that Moore was getting a little old, at 30, for her typecast flapper role; Flaming Youth had made her a superstar six years earlier. She tries to make up for that with manic energy. Moore helped popularize the Charleston and Why Be Good? makes much of her dancing, but to the modern eye it looks like she's having a manic conniption fit. She could be trying too hard at this point, but once she's off the dance floor she's much more palatable.

Moore also lives up to our expectations for flappers by asserting her character's rights against both her father and her boyfriend Winthrop (Neil Hamilton). When Dad questions the aptly-named Pert Kelly's nightlife, she reminds him that the year is 1929, not 1899, and that she's earning nearly as much for the household as a department-store salesgirl as Dad does, so she's entitled to make some decisions for herself. She has a more substantial complaint against the boyfriend. He's the new personnel director at her store, and the owner's son, whom she happened to meet cute at a jazzed-up boiler room turned speakeasy before their professional relations are established. He has to reprimand her the following morning for coming in late -- his waiting room is full of leggy employees who plan on coming in late more often if it means a trip to the handsome man's office -- but Pert has him to rights when she blames him for bringing her home late. On the other hand, he made it in on time, didn't he? Anyway, when Winthrop's dad notices his interest in Pert he decides she should be fired, even though her supervisor says she's one of their best salesgirls. Naturally Pert blames Winthrop, but he promises to get her job back and plies her with gifts. The mating dance begins in earnest, each careful to check the other's intentions. The climax comes when Pert confronts him over male double standards after a succession of mixed signals. Her message remains all too relevant today: men expect women to come on strong, loosen up, etc., but the next thing you know they condemn you for doing just what you think they want. Fortunately, her tirade convinces Winthrop that she's a good girl after all and a happy ending is assured.

In short, Why Be Good? is a romantic comedy and the genre doesn't age well. In fact, it dates quickly. Compared to the mechanical brilliance of slapstick comedy, romantic comedy seems trifling, and you have to pay attention to the intertitles. As a star vehicle, however, it's good testimony to Colleen Moore's star power. She's pretty and charismatic and has a physical grace peculiar to the silent era when she isn't going berserk on the dance floor. Moore will never be the icon for the modern age that Louise Brooks became, but Why Be Good? should resonate in our time as a snapshot of a young woman struggling with the odds stacked against her to live on her own terms. Not many films survive to testify to Moore's stardom -- only one reel of Flaming Youth is known to exist -- but this one at least gives us a clue to what all the fuss was about. It's a reminder that Colleen Moore was an icon of her time, at least, and a part of Hollywood history who deserves to be remembered.

DVR Diary: THE TOLL OF THE SEA (1922-85)

Chester M. Franklin's film was neither the first color feature nor Anna Mae Wong's film debut, but its place in history depends on its early use of both Technicolor and Wong. It's not just a technological milestone but a document on race relations spotlighting a pioneer Asian-American actress. Wong was only 17 when Toll of the Sea came out, making male lead Kenneth Harlan a transgressor by modern standards as well as one, for different reasons, by the standards of his time. The story, by future Oscar winner Frances Marion, is kin to stuff like D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms in its presentation of a sympathetic Oriental as an object of pathos. It's more obviously kin to Madame Butterfly in its portrayal of an American who loves and leaves an Asian woman. The redundantly named Lotus Flower (Wong) gets Harlan virtually dumped in her lap when he washes ashore without explanation in her coastal village. He's handsome, she's pretty, and in 1922 Hollywood lets nature take its course. Inevitably the white man's idyll must end and he must take up responsibilities, including marriage, back home. He must leave Lotus Flower, and their son (who takes after the father) behind with a blithe promise of his eventual return. Lotus Flower's faith in that promise, and her hope that he'll take her to America with him eventually, makes her something of a laughingstock in her village, where one woman boasts sardonically that she's been forgotten by four American husbands already. LF doesn't help her situation by writing fake letters to herself to read to her boy, in which "hubby" boasts of his success and promises anew to return. Who's laughing now, however, when Harlan does return? Unfortunately, he's brought his wife along with the thought of making a clean breast of everything to both the women he's loved. Naturally, LF is crushed, but selflessly she seeks to avoid further embarrassment for Harlan by denying that the little white kid who clings to her is her (and thus his) son. He's the kid of the neighborhood missionaries, she says -- but Mrs. Harlan (Beatrice Bentley) isn't buying that. Fortunately, she's a good sport, and the film, to its credit, emphasizes that both women are good women whose natural empathy allows the American to understand the truth without rancor. The right thing to do seems to be for LF to turn the boy over to the Harlans, her noble lie now being that she was only ever his nurse. That done, we come up against the title of the film. The white man had been the sea's gift to Lotus Flower, and now she must pay the sea's toll with her life. In the new footage shot in 1985 (with 1922 tech) to replace a missing final reel, we have tasteful shots of the ocean waves and a title card explaining what LF is going to do. I don't know whether the original ending was as tasteful, and in any event this resolution can't help but be distasteful by modern standards.

In its own time I suppose the film was progressive in its solicitation of sympathy for a Chinese girl, though it is also inescapably condescending toward her naivete, which extends to her antiquated notion of American fashion. But insofar as Toll of the Sea is a tearjerker and a textbook example of silent-era pathos, it exposes the complacency behind pathos. Whether it's the hopeless dream of a Chinese girl or the hopeless dream of a tramp, the point of pathos seems to be: you don't have a chance; you never can; you never will. Pathos stands quietly weeping at the insurmountable social barrier separating otherwise deserving heroes and heroines from their due. There may have been something realistic about it, but it's the sort of realism that often takes too much for granted. It's one thing to pity Lotus Flower, as 1922 audiences certainly did, and another, most likely, to think she deserved better and should have demanded it. It's the difference between watching this and thinking it's sad and watching it and thinking it's wrong. That Marion and Franklin didn't necessarily intend the latter response doesn't make Toll a bad film --especially given Wong's precocious star quality and the spectacle of its blazingly restored (or enhanced) Technicolor -- but it does mean they could have made a better one, morally if not aesthetically. But if you concede that they could do no better back then, I suppose that only adds to the pathos of the thing.

On the Big Screen: OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS (1928)

Harry Beaumont's flaming-youth film was billed as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's first sound film -- the studio's first with a pre-recorded soundtrack. Filmed at a time when silent film, at the brink of extinction, had reached a peak of expressive artistry, Our Dancing Daughters is a silent that feels like it should have been a talkie. Consider its signature moment, Joan Crawford's wild dance scene at a sort of wild party. The scene did for Crawford what the dance scenes in Saturday Night Fever did for John Travolta; the film as a whole made her a superstar and a sex symbol. But by the standards of sound cinema something isn't right about it. The dance music wasn't recorded live; the scene was filmed silent and scored in a studio afterward. Crawford moves at silent-film speed, filmed by Beaumont with little sense of style or choreography. She looks frantic, almost more spastic than sensual, and for all I know this was the desired effect and the way the flapper's era saw her: crazed energy bursting to express itself in wild motion. But from here Crawford calms down quite a bit, to the point where this, her star-making movie, is nearly stolen from her by the film's real bad girl, Anita Page.

The attempted theft may seem more obvious now; modern audiences may be more attentive and responsive to her character's fearsome dysfunction. Bred to be a gold digger by a mother so mercenary that she's an outright kleptomaniac, Page steals Crawford's millionaire boyfriend (as an Alabama football star with a fortune, John Mack Brown plays a wealthier version of himself) but isn't happy and is probably incapable of happiness. I thought Page had shown me something with her one-punch KO of Buster Keaton in Sidewalks of New York that had been hidden in her now best-known picture, The Broadway Melody, but Our Dancing Daughters shows her in full rage mode. Her jealous drunken tirade against Crawford and Brown is a sustained bit of suspense set against open windows and steep staircases; you expect her to fall or throw herself to her doom at any moment as she releases all the pent-up bile that may have kept her alive all along. The sequence climaxes with her mocking (and self-mocking) chiding, from the top of that perilous staircase, of three scrubwomen cleaning the floor at the foot of the stairs for failing to raise pretty daughters to keep them from having to work. If Page had been able to speak during the scene, she may well have stolen the film completely from Crawford. Her mad scene is still the highlight of the silent film.

Crawford still earned her fame with a performance that plays for pathos the way Twenties audiences liked, and Dorothy Sebastian, who completes an actress troika that went on to make two thematic sequels, is fine in the least showy role of a newlywed struggling to live up to her love for and responsibility to a husband (Nils Asther) who proves a bit of a stick in the mud. Beaumont's direction is mostly overshadowed by the film's art-deco production design, but he achieves at least one coup de cinema, opening the first party scene by parting a frame-filling screen of balloons to reveal the dance floor as seen from the ceiling. Until recently that shot opened Turner Classic Movies' "Silent Sunday Night" intro montage, and it set the tone quite nicely.  Our Dancing Daughters was indisputably a success on its own terms in its own time, but it may have gone over even bigger as a talking picture. It would have been better objectively had it not been burdened, as many late silents and part-talkies were, with an insipid love theme. The turgid ballad, "I Love You Now As I Loved You Then" is the antithesis of the jazz rhythm that possesses Crawford on the dance floor; it has no business on the soundtrack of a flapper film, but juxtapositions of that sort were all too common in the late Twenties. They shouldn't surprise us in as obviously transitional a film as this one.

On the Big Screen: THE WILD PARTY (1929)

Imagine, if you're a film buff, The Blue Angel if Marlene Dietrich was a student in Emil Jannings' class, and Jannings was more of a hunk than a hulk, and you get an idea of what The Wild Party might have been. It was, above all, the talking debut of Clara Bow, the superstar "It Girl" of silent cinema. Bow is one of those silent stars whose trouble with talkies became legend. There's nothing wrong with her voice this first time -- if anything, she sounds less trumpet-like here than she would a few years later in Call Her Savage -- but we can safely assume that she didn't sound the way fans expected Clara Bow to sound. Maybe they expected something higher or cuter, boopier or doopier. The ultimately damaging thing, perhaps, was that, like John Gilbert, there was nothing special about her voice, but that seems appropriate for the mostly brainless character, a college student, she plays in Dorothy Arzner's film.

Like most of her schoolmates, Clara's character seems to be in college because she can -- that is, she can afford it. The only girl who worries about expenses is the studious, mousy but pretty wallflower (Shirley O'Hara)who has to hit the books hard and often to stay in the running for the academic scholarship that alone keeps her in school. Clara is a special friend to this character and that's her redeeming quality, whether you see subtext in it or not by virtue of Arzner's sexuality. Our heroine seems to recognize that her friend really deserves a college education, not to mention a break or more, and ultimately Clara will sacrifice her own academic ambitions, such as they were, to keep this good girl in school.

The main event of The Wild Party -- the title event is a mere episode -- is Clara's war of wills with her new anthropology professor. The first act of the picture climaxes, after Clara recounts to her suitemates her tryst with a stranger on a train, with the revelation that the new teacher (Frederic March in his second credited screen role) is that same stranger. The mutual recognition makes classes uncomfortable for both people, though most of the discomfort is theoretical on March's part. He doesn't want her to think that he's showing her any favoritism, so he goes to the opposite extreme and singles her out for embarrassing criticism. He drives her from the classroom in tears after he accuses her of plagiarism in an admittedly hastily thrown-together essay. But circumstances keep throwing them together. Both, we realize, are restless spirits. While Clara just likes to go out in search of fun, especially when the authorities at school and in the dorms frown on it -- she and three friends head for a rough roadhouse after getting thrown out of a "stag" party for wearing identical skimpy showgirl costumes -- March likes to go out nights for walks on dark roads. That gets him into trouble when he rescues Clara from roadhouse mashers and later gets shot by one of them. The reluctant lovers seem to be in a race toward self-destruction that accelerates when Clara decides to take the fall when the class tattletale discovers letters that could get Helen, the wallflower, expelled for dating a man. The letter is unsigned, enabling Clara to say it's hers, even if the context -- Helen writes of the importance of that academic award -- makes Clara an unlikely author. The authorities buy her confession, nevertheless, but her departure has an unintended consequence. March resigns his professorship, eliminating the hierarchical complications that had compromised his relationship with Clara. Ironically, he promises her a future of intellectual adventure; they'll be doing fieldwork in Malaya for their honeymoon.

For those who aren't movie buffs, Clara Bow was the "It Girl" because she was said by the novelist Elinor Glyn to be one of the very few people in Hollywood to have "It," an otherwise indescribable magnetism. "It" seems to have been relative or chronologically specific, like Elinor Glyn's own fame, rather than a timeless quality. Bow is attractive but to me, at least, she's far from the most magnetic female of silent cinema, much less talkies. Her vapid character in Wild Party and the chaotic shrubbery she sports on her head in parts of the picture further diminish her vaunted magnetism, more of which is on display in her more assured (or more manic) turn in Call Her Savage. She's also sabotaged by the primitive nature of early talkies. While Arzner is credited with innovating a "fishpole" microphone to accommodate the restless Bow Wild Party isn't much less stodgy than the immobile pictures parodied in Singin' In The Rain. With Wild Party Arzner and Bow caught up with film technology but their frivolous film remains something that very soon would be very much a thing of the past. The Thirties required a different kind of wild that Bow eventually proved herself capable of but unwilling to sustain. By the end of the Pre-Code era she had retired from cinema to become a relic of the Roaring Twenties. In that sense, despite the uncomfortable novelty of sound Wild Party is a representative work, though the silent, stylized Bow is probably the best one to see.