The Salvation Hunters

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

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

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


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

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

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

Lightnin'

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

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

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


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

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

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

Tartuffe

F.W. Murnau followed the daring, innovative masterpiece The Last Laugh with a much more modest, smaller-scale, but still interesting feature, his clever adaptation of Molière's Tartuffe. Murnau increases the distance from Molière's satire by making the actual Tartuffe story a film within the film, surrounded by a framing story that mirrors the one in the Molière tale. In this framing story, a young man (André Mattoni) is disinherited by his grandfather (Hermann Picha) because the old man disapproves of his grandson's choice of profession: a film actor. The old man is under the influence of a nasty housekeeper (Rosa Valetti), who's literally and metaphorically poisoning the old man and convincing him to change his will to make her the beneficiary rather than the grandson. It's a story that neatly mirrors Tartuffe, so the grandson, to convince his grandfather of the housekeeper's manipulation, disguises himself as a traveling projectionist and shows them both a film of Tartuffe.

This is the film within the film, in which Emil Jannings plays the titular con man, a religious preacher who convinces the wealthy Orgon (Werner Krauss) to shun material goods, even pushing away the affections of his wife (Lil Dagover) and eventually writing Tartuffe into his will. The choice to position this adaptation in this fashion, as a film within the film, is interesting because Tartuffe is all about exposing hypocrites, and for Murnau, whose films were almost always firmly grounded in moral messages, a primary vehicle for exposing hypocrisy and evil was of course the cinema. It's telling that the hero grandson of the framing story earns disapproval for pursuing a career in film acting, and yet it's through film that he exposes the evil of the housekeeper, delivering a fable that helps open the old man's eyes to the similar situation going on in his own film. Murnau opens and closes the film with text titles that implicitly direct the audience to similarly look for hypocrisy in their own experiences, thus extending the film's reach to a further layer.

Jannings, as always, delivers a stunning performance as the sinister Tartuffe, doing maybe too good of a job at evoking the false priest's slack-faced, dour malice, because he's such a horrible, vile creation that it's hard to believe that anyone could fall under his influence. He's continually scowling, his face always crooked: one eye bulging and another slitted, one corner of his mouth drooping below the other. His very face reflects his unbalanced, crooked nature, a hideous mask of menace, always frowning with disapproval and judgment, even as he secretly indulges in his own lusty appetites. This leads Orgon's wife Elmire to attempt a clever plan to seduce the manipulator, exposing him as a fraud by revealing his base, fleshy appetites. In one scene between them, Tartuffe disingenuously scolds Elmire while thrusting the edge of a bible against her cleavage, the holy book's proximity to the woman's ample breast enforcing the hypocrisy of this supposed holy man who denies the pleasure of others while illicitly thirsting for his own pleasure.


Murnau infuses these scenes with a strange eroticism, because eroticism is very much what's at stake in this story: when Orgon first returns home under the influence of Tartuffe, he won't even kiss his wife, who's obviously used to much more sensual and affectionate welcomes. And it's eroticism that eventually wins this game, as Elmire bares her shoulders and her cleavage for the monstrous Tartuffe, throwing her head back and caressing herself to break through his hypocritical façade of chaste religious devotion. Murnau shoots from a high angle, looking down on the woman as she reluctantly stretches and bares her skin to entice Tartuffe into betraying his denial of worldly pleasures.

Although this film is far simpler and more direct than Murnau's more elaborate expressionist masterpieces like The Last Laugh or Faust, it's still very visually expressive and evocative. Murnau's visual inventiveness is revealed in small but telling touches. Elmire, grieving over her husband's wayward devotion to the trickster Tartuffe, stares at a portrait of Orgon in a locket and cries over him, the tears falling on the picture and distorting it, creating a warped vision of Orgon that looks more like the melty-faced Tartuffe himself. Later, that prophecy seems to come true in the scene where Orgon spies on Tartuffe with Elmire, and the con man catches on to the trap by glimpsing Orgon's distorted, elongated face reflected in a coffee pot, staring out from between the curtains behind Tartuffe.

The film sticks to a few minimalist, claustrophobic sets, and Murnau fills them with dense shadows, the house encased in darkness because the spartan Tartuffe despises luxuries like lights. This provides an opportunity for striking shots like the one where the family's maid creeps up the stairs holding a candle, her profile extended onto the wall in front of her. Though Tartuffe is never as visually sumptuous or restlessly inventive as Murnau's best work, these kinds of striking images make it still an interesting, low-key film. It's also notable as Murnau's tribute to his chosen medium, positioning the Molière tale in a framework that confirms the cinema's power to explore morality and affect viewers' minds and hearts.

Go West (1925)

Go West is one of Buster Keaton's more low-key films, but also one of his strangest, focusing on a gently sentimental romance between a man and a cow. Keaton plays an out-of-luck drifter, tellingly named Friendless, who sells off all his possessions — but forgets to take his clothes out of his dresser first, forcing him to buy them back — and heads west to try his luck as a cowboy. For much of its length, the film ambles amiably along, carefully spacing out its modest gags about Keaton's hapless attempts to become a cowboy. His efforts are unsuccessful, of course, but he does succeeding in befriending a cow named Brown Eyes by taking a rock out of her hoof, causing the animal to follow him dutifully around for the remainder of the movie. When the ranch owner sends her off to the stockyards with the rest of his cattle, Keaton follows along, hoping to rescue the damsel in distress from her fate.

It's a goofy premise, and a likeably goofy movie. The pace isn't as non-stop hilarious as Keaton's best work, and structurally it's rather similar to his previous feature, Seven Chances, with two-thirds of it drifting along a bit slowly before picking up the pace for a wild chase sequence finale — although in this case, the herd of pursuing brides from Seven Chances has been replaced by a herd of stampeding cows, chasing Keaton through the streets of Los Angeles.

This finale is the film's best part, mainly because the sight gag of all these cattle swarming through the city streets, with people fleeing in every direction while Keaton strolls casually through the throngs, is just so inherently funny. There's a madcap quality to this whole sequence, which basically has one joke — cows wandering into inappropriate places — that Keaton elaborates and riffs on over and over again, to very enjoyable comic effect. The best gags come when he complicates the scenario, as when the cows enter a clothes store where Keaton and the cows careen around with a man on roller skates, another hapless customer who flies across the store on a zip line, and an out-of-control elevator. Keaton's impeccable sense of motion and timing brings all these elements together in satisfying ways, creating loopy slapstick action that's all about kineticism for its own sake. At one point, a barber shop employee, trying to escape the cows, leaps over a wall and lands on a cow, which runs out from the other side of the wall with the man on its back; as the cow trots out of the store, he reaches over and grabs his hat on the way out. Later on, in a gag so random it's almost surreal, this cow-riding shoeshine man suddenly appears in the middle of the police station, chasing the cops out into the street.


The whole sequence memorably climaxes with Keaton putting on a devil costume so that he can attract the cows with something red. The sight of this man in a devil costume running through the streets with a herd of cows racing after him is hilarious, especially when a drunkard, stumbling upon this sight, acts unfazed and simply begins directing "traffic." In the end, Keaton's Friendless is able to lead the cows to the stockyards, making him a hero to the ranch owner, who grants Keaton any wish he wants. "I want her," a title card reads, and Keaton seems to be gesturing towards the farmer's daughter (Kathleen Myers), who'd been hanging around the fringes of the movie as a rather lackluster love interest. Of course, Keaton's actually talking about Brown Eyes, who he leads out from behind the fence that had been hiding her, and this little gag underscores the strangeness of the film, which mocks the romantic subplot with this ending, pushing the girl aside in favor of the cow.

The film takes a while to build up to that gloriously ridiculous climax, and the earlier parts of the film are much more low-key, with few truly hilarious moments. There are a few nice sight gags involving Keaton's incompetence as a cowboy, like the fact that he's equipped his horse's saddle with a rope ladder to help the diminutive ranchhand get mounted, or the tiny gun that gets lost in his massive holster, requiring him to tie it to a rope so he can draw it without digging around in the holster. There's also a quasi-serious, if not very developed, subplot with the rival ranchers who are trying to stop the cattle shipment from reaching its destination, which leads to a prolonged shootout with Keaton haplessly trying to join in. Soon after, there's one of Keaton's beloved train sequences, with him doing his bowlegged cowboy saunter across the roofs of the train cars, running towards the engine to get the runaway train under control. This sequence is brief but still has some nice gags, notably a cow spearing a mail pickup on its horns as the train rushes by, and later dumping it on an unsuspecting passenger waiting on a platform.

Go West isn't one of Keaton's best features, but as with all of his silent work it's an enjoyable comedy, even with a somewhat slower pace and fewer brilliant jokes than his peak efforts. At the very least, it has a fantastic climax, and a memorably irreverent tone towards the predictable romantic resolution that, even in one of Keaton's more sentimental pictures, confirms the artist's distinctly unsentimental sensibility.

La fille de l'eau

La fille de l'eau was Jean Renoir's first feature, the melodramatic story of young Gudule (Renoir's then-wife Catherine Hessling), whose father dies, her uncle (Pierre Lestringuez) abuses and attempts to rape her, and she's left on her own to endure a series of torments. After settling in with a group of gypsies, she's left on her own again when a conflict between the gypsies and the local farmers escalates into violence. She's then taken in by Georges (Harold Levingston), a shy young man who cares for her when she has nobody. Only the return of her drunken, nasty uncle threatens the happiness she finds with Georges and his family.

The story is fairly prosaic, and Hessling's dramatic range seems to be limited to staring at the camera with her admittedly striking eyes wide and her lips parted in an expression of terror or sadness, but there are definite signs of the director's talents in this very visually inventive debut. Some characteristic Renoir attributes are already in place here, like the naturalistic depiction of the picturesque countryside and the emphasis on class inequalities. This is especially apparent in the farmer Crepoix (Pierre Champagne), who begins harassing Gudule and the gypsies after Gudule's dog accidentally spills his bike. This petty, vindictive man physically assaults them and shatters their fishing traps, then brags about his exploits in town. Crepoix and the other farmers aren't even rich, but they're clearly at a higher social level than the nomadic gypsies, and with the exception of Georges' family, the townspeople lord this power over those beneath them.

What's really interesting about the film, though, is Renoir's inventive editing and aesthetics. At several points within the film, Renoir employs a jagged, rapid cutting style that feels surprisingly modern. In one scene, Gudule witnesses the burning of the gypsies' caravan before fleeing into the woods to escape from the angry townspeople. The next morning, she falls down a quarry, and Renoir cuts to a closeup of her face, surrounded by a frizzy halo of wild hair, followed by a rapid montage of very brief shots clipped from the previous night's torment, a subjective flashback montage that emphasizes how traumatic these images are for her. Each image lasts only a second or two, calling back the haunting nighttime images of flickering flames, the faces of the locals watching happily as the caravan is engulfed by fire. Later, when Gudule's uncle returns and she runs into him on the road, Renoir cuts rapidly back and forth from one face to another, a technique that recalls the much slower, tension-building approach he'd used in the earlier scene where the uncle nearly rapes Gudule. In that scene, too, Renoir had used alternating closeups, with the uncle gradually approaching, his face filling the frame, with the camera creeping closer and closer to Gudule as well, until her face was a blurry smear of terror. Renoir also highlights just the uncle's eyes in one shot, enclosing them in a rectangle within the frame, surrounded by black, calling attention to the act of looking, the act of looking at his niece with sexual predation.


Also very noteworthy is a long sequence in which the abandoned, feverish Gudule sleeps in the woods on a rainy night and has a strange, surreal dream that provides an opportunity for Renoir to indulge in the kind of hallucinatory visual effects that he often employed in his early silents. This is an extraordinary sequence in which Gudule drifts across the countryside, superimposed in ghostly, washed-out white, while encountering a barrage of surreal imagery. She runs across her uncle — suggestively holding a snake while leering at her — and Crepoix, and the two men appear as evil sprites haunting her throughout this dream. Renoir uses multiple superimpositions, runs the film backwards to make it seem as if Gudule is flying from the ground up into a sitting perch on a tree branch, and, in one unforgettable sequence, has the two men running across the frame sideways or upside-down from Gudule's perspective.

This unsettling, effects-laden dream sequence stands out here, anticipating the even more dazzling way in which Renoir would use this kind of surreal dream in his heartbreaking The Little Match Girl. Here, it's a momentary break in the low-key reality of this film, which drifts along without much bombast despite the melodramatic plot. This is an auspicious debut for Renoir, a film that's as attentive to the beauty of nature as it is to the plight of the heroine. This is especially obvious in the tranquil early scenes of the girl and her father on their riverboat, punctuated by evocative closeups of Gudule, her hair ruffled by the wind. Despite its predictable plot, La fille de l'eau is worthwhile for its union, uncharacteristic of later Renoir, of naturalistic photography with choppy editing flurries and fantastical optical effects.

The Pleasure Garden

[This post is an early contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be officially 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. Be sure to donate!]

The Pleasure Garden was Alfred Hitchcock's directorial debut, following an apprenticeship in which he did virtually every job on the film set short of actually directing a picture. As with many of Hitchcock's earliest films, this is a lurid and rather conventional melodrama that shows periodic flashes of the young director's inventive visual sensibility — particularly towards the end of this debut, with its abrupt tonal shift into a psychological thriller. It starts extremely slowly, as the story of the chorus girls Patsy (Virginia Valli) and Jill (Carmelita Geraghty), both of whom are attached to men who work in a distant country. The girls are very different: Patsy is a deeply religious good girl who's faithful to her man, while Jill just wants fame and glamour, and quickly forgets about her fiancé once he's away from her. Of course, ironically, while the flighty Jill's fiancé Hugh (John Stuart) is a decent guy who remains true to her while he's away, Patsy's husband Levett (Miles Mander) immediately begins cheating on her even on their honeymoon.

The way it will all play out is pretty obvious, and the film's plot plods along slowly before the unexpectedly frenzied and rather crazy finale. Hitchcock has some fun along the way, though, interspersing comical sight gags and some clever visual flourishes. A blurry point-of-view shot that's then clarified as an old man puts on his monocle — to ogle the legs of the chorus girls in a leering closeup — would later be repeated by Hitchcock, sans the sexual voyeurism, in Easy Virtue. He also gets some enjoyable comic relief out of Patsy's dog Cuddles, notably in a slightly subversive sequence in which the dog interrupts the pious girl's prayers by licking her bare feet while she kneels.

Also notable is the scene where bad girl Jill, trying to manage the amorous advances of a suitor who's getting too handsy too quickly, uses a cigarette to repel him. This is a nice bit of pantomimed visual symbolism, as the man sits behind Jill, putting his hands on each side of her face, tipping her head back towards him, presumably so he can lean down and kiss her, though the way he does it is almost mechanical, forceful rather than romantic. She foils the attempt by putting her long cigarette holder in her mouth, so that by the time her head is tipped back the cigarette is jutting out from between her lips, preventing a kiss. When the suitor then decides to begin kissing her bare shoulder instead, she simply turns her head to the side, burning him with the ash.


The film then abruptly picks up its pace in the final act, when Patsy decides to travel abroad to find her husband, who she's heard has fallen ill. When she arrives, though, the drunken Levett has shacked up with a native woman, and Patsy discovers that it's actually Hugh who's sick and feverish. Naturally, she's eventually going to end up with the nice guy she probably should have been with all along, but to get there the script first assaults her with a barrage of ludicrous melodramatic occurrences that Hitchcock charges through at a frantic pace. The unhinged Levett drowns his lover, and Hitchcock films it as a flurry of limbs flailing above the water as the girl is held under. Then, in the film's craziest but most compelling section, the dead girl appears to Levett, compelling him to kill Patsy as well: the girl is superimposed over the image of Levett's native hut, walking towards the camera until her ghostly face fills the screen, with a wall full of pistols and criss-crossed swords visible through the translucent right side of her face.

This tense sequence shows the young Hitchcock already relishing suspense, separating Patsy and Levett with a wooden grating, with the crazed killer fumbling at her with a sword while she stares at him in terror. The sequence is a little clumsy, actually, and it ends with a totally unmotivated deus ex machina that clears the way for the predictable romantic ending, but Hitchcock stills generates some tension through the shots of Patsy's fearful eyes, glaring at her husband through the holes in the door grating.

The Pleasure Garden is an interesting debut for Hitchcock. Like a lot of his early films, particularly his silents, it's hampered by weak performances and a rather silly script, but even here, at the very beginning of his career, the director was already displaying his imagination in unexpected ways. The film has some striking images and a few compelling scenes, even if in the end it's a rather inconsequential melodrama.

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.

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.

Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein's propaganda classic Battleship Potemkin has been absorbed so thoroughly into both film history and pop culture that its real revolutionary power is easy to underestimate or overlook — it's all too easy to deem it a museum relic, but even now, it's much too potent, too emotionally raw and technically vital, for that sedately respectful fate. Eisenstein's dramatic recreation of a 1905 pre-Bolshevik mutiny on a tsarist battleship was deliberately calibrated as a piece of propaganda to be as affecting and as provocative as possible, and it succeeds in that respect even now, even with its impact dulled by years of distance and the countless references to this film that have been integrated into other works.

The film is a love letter to ordinary sailors, representatives of the working class, and there's real tenderness and even sensuality in the depictions of the sailors at work, before their revolt. They lounge, shirtless and muscular, in hammocks that sway with the rocking of the ship. They work with a near-mechanical precision, their faces serene with the knowledge of a job well done, whether they're oiling and washing the ship's big, jutting guns or performing kitchen duties with regimented choreography. When the first officer appears, he's immediately distinguished from the other men by his slightly effete manner, his remoteness and smugness; Eisenstein's closeup of this man immediately marks him as a villain, particularly as contrasted against the earthy, sweaty romanticism of the images of the working men. The immediate cause for the rebellion is the sailors' insistence that they should have better food, a demand that the officers summarily reject despite the maggots crawling on the meat, shown in squirmy closeups that leave no doubt about the contempt that these upper-class representatives have for those beneath them.

There follows a tense confrontation between officers and sailors that ends with the ship guards refusing to fire on their comrades, and the sailors overthrowing their superiors to take over the ship themselves. Eisenstein's famous command of fast-paced montage builds tension brilliantly, cutting from the faces of the guardsmen to the officers ordering them to fire to the sailors urging them to rebel, with shots from around the ship spliced into this frantic montage as a way of drawing out the suspense even more. Eisenstein also edits in closeups of a caricatured chaplain who provides an outrageously unflattering view of religion. Somewhat comically, the priest is depicted as a wild-haired mystic lunatic who, during the tense showdown between the officers and the sailors, beats his cross threateningly against the palm of his hand and prays for the sailors to change their ways. Religion, this suggests, is just a tool of the upper-class, the cross as much a weapon to beat down the sailors as the guns of the officers. The priest is made to look like a combination of a bible epic Moses and a frizzy-haired hobo, the wind shuffling his hair and thick beard into a disheveled mess, very disreputable-looking indeed. Of course, as imposingly crazy as he looks, his cross is no protection once the working class rebels.


The film's most famous sequence is the massacre on the Odessa Steps, an incident that was invented for the film by Eisenstein, drawing on the fact that there were riots in Odessa in support of the rebel sailors, and that tsarist troops did reportedly fire into the crowds. The scene is a dazzling showcase for Eisenstein's theories of montage, methodically cycling between long views in which crowds of bodies go tumbling frantically down the steps, fleeing the advancing lines of tsarist troops, and fragmented closeups in which various individual citizens scream in terror before being gunned down or trampled underfoot. The fragmentation enhances the suspense, too, especially in the now-iconic shot of a baby carriage's wheel teetering on the edge of a step. Eisenstein draws out the moment by repeatedly cutting away from it, so that without using actual slow motion he makes it seem as though the scene is playing out at half-speed, each second ticking by perceptibly, each little detail emphasized.

Despite its violence and its polemical message, Battleship Potemkin is also a strikingly beautiful film. Eisenstein lovingly photographs the faces of the sailors and the working class people who celebrate them in the streets of Odessa. The closeups are direct but somewhat romanticized. Even if few of the characters stand out — typical of Soviet cinema, this is a film about a class as a whole rather than about individuals — distinctive individual faces are often highlighted in the crowd. Eisenstein applies a similar romanticism to the ship itself, admiring its glossy hard surfaces, its sweeping curves, the way it looks silhouetted against the choppy ocean. The nighttime images of the ship gliding across the water, moonlight rippling on the water, everything cloaked in shadow or mist, are particularly sensuous and gorgeous, with a sharp photographic sensibility that only contributes to the feeling that the film is a documentary snapshot rather than a fictionalized propaganda piece. And that's why it remains so effective: its realism, its formal and cinematic beauty, only make the abuses it depicts seem even more vile. The film is as much about glorifying labor and rhapsodizing on the nobility of the working class as it is about vilifying the ruling classes.