It (1927)

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

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

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


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

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

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

Napoléon

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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

College

Buster Keaton's penultimate independent film before signing with MGM, College is not one of the silent comic's better efforts. Credited to director James W. Horne, it was, like Keaton's other silent features, actually directed almost entirely by Keaton himself, but it's a little lackluster and pedestrian compared to his other work, especially considering he'd just made his absolutely brilliant masterpiece The General.

Keaton plays a high school graduate who's eager to impress Mary (Anne Cornwall), the girl he loves, by demonstrating that he's not just a bookish intellectual but can also excel at athletics. That's certainly casting himself against type, since Keaton's primary attribute had always been his physicality and athleticism, so the fact that he spends the bulk of the film clumsily failing to pull off athletic feats might account for its lesser status. Some of the gags are amusing, but not uproariously funny by any means, and not enough of a compensation for the lack of Keaton's daring stuntwork. The middle of the film is dominated by a long section in which he tries his hand at a number of sports and track events, comically failing to clear hurdles, crashing into the pole when attempting high jumps, and best of all, doing a pole vault in which he attempts to climb the pole when it's briefly standing straight up.

It's faintly amusing, but it all lacks the clever staging and precision of Keaton's best comedy; these are simple jokes about physical incompetence and clumsiness that any slapstick comedian of the era could have pulled off, when Keaton is capable of so much more. The crew race that serves as the film's climax is also lacking in the typical excitement of Keaton's best chases and races, though there's a nice sight gag when the boat's rudder comes loose, causing Keaton to tie it to his backside and stick his rear in the water to steer. That gag pays off again after the race when Keaton's fin repeatedly slaps girls in the ass every time he turns around, causing one of them to slap him.


This film also has the dubious distinction of having the most uncomfortable blackface sequence of any of Keaton's work, with Keaton himself donning blackface to pose as a "colored waiter." It's a stupid and painfully unfunny scene that climaxes with the other, genuinely black waiters chasing after Keaton when some of his makeup rubs off.

The best part of the film is undoubtedly the very end, when a contrived rescue scenario with Mary causes Keaton to finally, belatedly display his athletic abilities. The earlier scenes of his failures now pay off as the whole world becomes an obstacle course, with Keaton dodging around pedestrians, hurdling and high-jumping over hedges, and finally pole-vaulting up through Mary's window — the latter is the one stunt Keaton himself didn't perform, subbing in an Olympic pole vaulter for that one task. This is an enjoyable and frenzied few minutes in which Keaton remakes the world as a sporting arena, taking ordinary objects and transforming them into baseball bats, discuses and javelins.

Even better, though, is the utterly unexpected and morbidly hilarious final seconds of the film, in which Keaton and Mary get married, and Keaton inserts a short little montage that rushes through the rest of their lives: coming out of the chapel together, sitting surrounded by babies and rambunctious kids, growing old together, and then a cut to a pair of side-by-side gravestones. That final image mocks and tears apart the conventional romantic ending, subverting the guy-gets-the-girl happy ending by suggesting that the end point for all this romance is ultimately only death. It's a surprisingly funny and savagely clever conclusion to a film that had otherwise been a rather slight outing for Keaton.

Downhill

[This post is a contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running from May 13-18. This year, hosts Marilyn Ferdinand, Farran Smith Nehme and Roderick Heath have dedicated the week to Alfred Hitchcock, whose early (non-directorial) work "The White Shadow" will be the beneficiary of any money earned during the event. Be sure to donate!]

Downhill was Alfred Hitchcock's fourth silent film, made at a time when he was still mostly making melodramas rather than thrillers. This is an especially overcooked and pedestrian melodrama, the story of the student Roddy (Ivor Novello), who's expelled from school after taking the blame for his friend Tim's (Robin Irvine) bad behavior. The story is fairly ridiculous and over-the-top, taking this ordinary young man and suggesting that he's descending into ruin and vice because of a simple misunderstanding. Seen now, it comes across as hopelessly old-fashioned, but one suspects that this moralistic story, derived from a stage play co-written by Novello and Constance Collier, wasn't exactly modern even when the film first came out.

The incident that propels Roddy into his "downhill" journey involves Roddy and Tim's dual flirtation with a shop girl (Annette Benson), who they both dance with one day, each of them jealous of the other over the girl. She dances with both of the boys in the shadowy back room, their romantic silhouettes overlaid with barred shadows from the beaded curtains. She finally settles on Tim, but when she gets in an implicitly unspoken but nonetheless obvious sort of trouble after their dalliance, it's Roddy, who comes from a wealthy family, on whom she pins the blame. (Of course, maybe it's not so obvious, since most descriptions of the film say that Roddy is accused of theft, not of getting the girl pregnant.) Hitchcock is able to leave it all ambiguous and unspoken because he hardly uses any title cards, even as the characters talk and talk; the scene where the girl accuses Roddy plays out with very few words, her accusation mostly communicated by a sequence in which her angry closeup is superimposed over images from the night that both boys spent with her. Hitchcock includes a shot of Roddy passing her a bill, which had been innocent in context, earlier in the film, but here, especially without any dialogue, it makes the whole thing seem like a sordid transaction.

Roddy gets kicked out of school as a result of this scandal, and he takes it badly; "won't I be able to play for the Old Boys, sir?," he moans, in an unintentionally hilarious intertitle. Novello, a good fifteen years too old for the part, only makes the whole thing even more laughable, especially in the earlier scenes where he and Tim don their swirled schoolboy caps and prance around like the world's most overgrown youngsters. After his departure, Roddy finds no comfort at home and sets out to make his own way in the world, descending away from home and school on an escalator that literalizes his fall.


He soon falls in with a theater troupe, though Hitchcock cleverly holds back this piece of information with a closeup that first makes it seem as if Roddy has landed on his feet as a man of society, then pulls back to reveal that he's a waiter, then reveals that after all he's just playing a waiter in a performance. He's part of the theater troupe of the couple Archie (Ian Hunter) and Julia (Isabel Jeans), though he obviously has his own designs on the waifish actress. He hangs around with her in full view of her other lover, never quite making headway with the other man around. In one of the cleverest scenes, Roddy and Julia are about to kiss, seemingly alone for once, when she stops him with a wry glance to the side, and Hitchcock cuts away to a chair, turned away from the camera, the smoke wafting over the top of it the only sign that the other man is sitting there. When an unexpected inheritance makes Roddy briefly rich, though, it's a whole other story, and Archie all but pushes Julia at the boy now, handing him a stack of bills and saying, "they're yours, dear boy, regard them as an entrance fee," followed by a sidelong glance over at the girl, as though the double entendre wasn't obvious or naughty enough already.

Roddy pays his "entrance fee" — another sexual transaction — and marries the girl, and presumably gains entrance, but he's not the only one, as evidenced by a comic scene in which Roddy goes searching for his new wife's lover in a closet, peeking in one door while the other man peeks his head out of another. Roddy's fallen even further now, and Hitchcock makes sure to emphasize him pressing the "down" button in the elevator as he leaves his wife. He then dances for money with dowdy old women in a Parisian nightclub — "the world of lost illusions," a title card dramatically announces — and eventually winds up, ill and crazed, in a rundown wharfside bar.

Along the way, Hitchcock composes some striking, moody images, like a very romantic, shadowy shot of Roddy and Julia embracing and kissing — although, comically, the romantic mood doesn't last very long, as she quickly gets up and begins darting around the room, avoiding her new husband. The film's final act is its best part, as Roddy, having fallen as far as he can, returns home in a zombified daze. He relives his downfall in feverish, fragmented flashes, having nightmare visions of the people who led him to this point and the things he'd done along the way. Hitchcock employs many shaky, wavering point-of-view shots that show the streets of Roddy's hometown as a blur, everything rushing past, images superimposed over one another to show how the whole experience runs together for him.

Despite such moments of technical inventiveness, which Hitchcock always used to enliven and enrich even the weakest of his early films, Downhill is a pretty dull, old-fashioned melodrama. It's a plodding film with a sappy, unsubtle performance from its lead, who cringes and mugs his way through his schematic fall from grace. Despite flashes of interesting filmmaking and noirish imagery, this film is only sporadically worthwhile as an indication of the great director Hitchcock would go on to be.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

[This post is an early contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running, starting tomorrow, 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 Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was one of Alfred Hitchcock's first films, and certainly his first really major work — Hitchcock himself considered it his first true feature. This moody, slowly paced silent is a variation on the Jack the Ripper tale. A mysterious killer called the Avenger is murdering blonde girls in the London night, creeping through the fog, killing women and then vanishing without a trace. The only witnesses who have seen him say that he wraps his face in a scarf, obscuring his features. So when a young new tenant (Ivor Novello) arrives at the Bunting family boarding house, his face wrapped in a scarf, the family naturally becomes suspicious of him. The Buntings (Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney) come to suspect that the new lodger could be the slasher, even as their daughter Daisy (June Howard Tripp) falls for the handsome young man, pushing away her parent-approved current boyfriend, the policeman Joe (Malcolm Keen).

Novello's introduction is calculated to generate suspicion: he appears framed in a doorway, wrapped in a trenchcoat and scarf, his wide eyes glaring above his hidden nose and mouth. It's an introduction worthy of Nosferatu, and he briefly seems like a supernatural being, gliding into the boarding house, bringing with him the foggy air and the threat of murder. Soon, he starts behaving in less supernatural but equally suspicious ways, carrying around a suspicious bag and asking his new landlords to take down all the paintings in his room. Hitchcock stages several scenes that hint at the new lodger's sinister intentions towards Daisy — gesturing at her with a knife and a fire poker — but turn out to be utterly innocuous.

Despite the premise, though, the film is far more about sex and romance than it is about the is-he-or-isn't-he suspense centering on the killer's identity. The love triangle gives Daisy a choice between the mysterious stranger who her parents seem to dislike and the familiar, stolid Joe, who her parents like — of course this isn't much of a choice at all. There's plenty of indication that she's already getting tired of Joe, and the new lodger just provides an additional distraction. At one point, she's kissing Joe, and Hitchcock cuts to a tilted angle from above, looking at the couple as Daisy peeks over Joe's shoulder, bored of his affection, her eye catching the movement of the chandelier that dangles down in the foreground, its shaking a sign of the lodger pacing around upstairs. Joe's idea of romance is pretty unsatisfying, anyway, tied up as it is with his work and his obsession with death. "When I've put a rope around the Avenger's neck," he says in one of the film's infrequent title cards, then continues in another, "I'll put a ring on Daisy's finger." In between the two cards, Hitchcock playfully inserts a closeup of Joe sticking out his tongue and miming a hanging, making a grotesque face of death.


This perverse vision of sex and death as an interconnected pair is contrasted against the lush romanticism of the scenes between Daisy and the lodger, though of course death hangs over this pair too in the form of the suspicions about the lodger's identity. There's a beautiful image of the lodger and Daisy walking through a tunnel at night, silhouetted in the midnight blue, a street lamp shining by a bench at the end of the tunnel. It's a very romantic image, and they sit by the lamp, embracing, gradually moving in for a kiss, while Hitchcock defuses the sensuality of the moment by cutting away to the jealous boyfriend lurking nearby. The potential kiss is interrupted here, but the tension resumes when Daisy and the lodger return home, and again ever so slowly seem to fall towards each other, their movements hesitant but graceful, a sexy slow-motion waltz of restrained passion and delayed gratification. Hitchcock then shoots their actual kiss in such an extreme closeup that their faces seem to tower on the screen, two planets being sucked into one another's orbit at a glacial pace. Then there's a high angle shot that mirrors the earlier one where Daisy was kissing Joe, her eyes glancing upward, but here she has nothing to see above her, no greater desire than what she already has with this man; she's not looking for something else, just rolling her eyes towards Heaven, and after a moment she closes her eyes again, satisfied.

The film's sensuality is joined with its low-key suspense in the scene where Daisy takes a bath, stripping out of her clothes as steam from the water swirls around her, Hitchcock's editing playfully suggesting her impending nudity while cutting away just a second before she'd actually show anything immodest to the camera. In a distant hint of the bathroom terror of Psycho, Hitchcock then suggests that the lodger is going to break into the room: there's something so vulnerable about getting naked to bathe, and even at this early point in his career Hitchcock hints at what it would be like to get attacked like this. But of course, everything in this film is a feint, a misdirection, so once again the lodger's initially sinister-seeming actions turn out to be innocent. Hitchcock wanted to leave the resolution of the story ambiguous, as it was in the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel it's based on, but in a pattern that would recur several times in Hitchcock's later star vehicles, the studio didn't want to imply that a handsome matinee idol like Novello could be a killer.

Before the tidy and predictable resolution, though, The Lodger is an interesting early suspense film from the man who would soon become the master of the form. The pacing is a bit slow at times, especially in some of the scenes with Daisy's parents, who provide a little out-of-place comic relief and spend many plodding scenes speculating about the mysterious, slightly strange lodger. A few flaws aside, this silent remains a worthy early example of Hitchcock's future brilliance.

Paid To Love

Howard Hawks' Paid To Love is one of the director's early silent films, made before his style really crystallized during the transition to talkies. The film revolves around an utterly silly plot: the poverty-stricken imaginary kingdom of San Savona is trying to get a loan from the American banker Peter Roberts (J. Farrell MacDonald), but before it can, the King (Thomas Jefferson) must marry off his son Prince Michael (George O'Brien), who is more interested in cars than women and whose perpetual bachelorhood represents a threat to the kingdom's stability. The King and Roberts thus try to find a woman to attract Michael's attention, an "alarm clock" to wake him out of his disinterest in love and sex. After a trip to Paris, the King and Roberts locate the performer Dolores (Virginia Valli), who acts like a wild woman in Parisian bars to entertain gullible tourists, and they decide that she'll be perfect to seduce the Prince and draw his attention to the pleasures of women.

There's an obvious gay... well, it can't even be called a subtext it's so obvious. The clear implication initially is that Michael is gay: a bachelor, uninterested in women, who prefers to do guy things like fix cars and shoot at target ranges. In one early scene, he's contrasted against his cousin, the lascivious ladies' man Prince Eric (William Powell, delightful as ever even without the use of his voice). The two men enter the throne room in turn, each of them passing a pretty maid in the hallway. As each man passes, Hawks playfully inserts a closeup of the maid's legs below her skirt as she sashays past. Eric of course turns his head to look, so the closeup suggests his lecherous point of view, admiring the female beauty he sees everywhere (earlier, his face is hidden for the first few moments of his first scene by the girl who's passionately kissing him). Michael, however, seems blithely unaware of the maid and her legs, so when Hawks cuts to the closeup of the maid's legs, it's no longer a point of view shot but a reminder of what the Prince is missing as he walks by, barely looking at the maid. Michael seems totally oblivious to female charms, but naturally all it takes to change him will be a glimpse of the right woman, and immediately he'll fall in love.

The film's premise is the stuff of goofy sex comedy, but Hawks only delivers on the promise of sexy mayhem in small, concentrated bursts and some particularly effective sight gags. For the most part, the physical comedy is stiff and unfunny, and the film's pace is a little on the languid side for such a lightweight comedy. Hawks' slapstick is inert, though there are early signs of his interest in a comedy of humiliation, especially in the scene where Roberts is discomfited by his inability to straighten out his uncomfortable-looking suit for his first meeting with the royal family.


The film is at its best in the isolated moments when it displays bursts of naughty invention and sly humor. In one scene, Eric waits in hiding for Dolores, who, through some tortuously set up misunderstandings, has been seducing him instead of Prince Michael. As Dolores walks into the room, not noticing Eric sitting in the corner, she begins undressing, and Hawks keeps cutting between tantalizing glimpses of undergarments and flashes of fabric being pulled off and Eric, sitting quietly in the corner, leering and, hilariously, peeling a banana, suggestively touching its tip as he watches. It's one of those jokes so blatant in its symbolic sexuality that one can hardly believe the filmmakers dared, and those moments, though spread out thinly through this film, represent its best bits.

Hawks' style is simple and direct, though hardly static. He makes interesting use of slow pans and tracking shots, subtly suggesting connections and characters' thoughts with movements of the camera. In one scene, Dolores has arrived at Michael's home unaware that he's the man she's being paid to seduce — because, of course, the conventions of such romances require that the bad girl genuinely fall in love with the man she's planning to con. It's a rainy night and her car stalls out, and after a struggle through the mud and steep slopes outside she collapses at the Prince's doorstep. When she wakes up, she's naked in bed, a sheet draped across her body, and the camera pans around the room from her point of view, taking in the sight of her clothes strewn around the room, on the floor and draped on chairs, until finally her gaze settles on Michael. Without a hint of overt sexuality or nudity, this pan economically suggests the mental picture that's certainly running through Dolores' head at this point, of this stranger undressing her and slipping her naked body into bed.

Paid To Love represents a time when Hawks was still more or less a novice director rather than the fully formed master he'd develop into soon after the switch from silents to talkies. The mostly functional intertitles occasionally contain a wry pun or punchline, but the bulk of the film's humor is visual and physical; Hawks' gift for verbal banter couldn't really develop in text form, particularly since so many of his best later films featured torrents of words in a constant, fast-paced rush. This film isn't even as indicative of the director's future direction as the marvelous A Girl In Every Port, though there are certainly hints, here and there, of Hawks' sensibility forming even at this early point. For that, and for its moments of unsubtle sexual humor, it's worth seeing for Hawks' admirers, though the director's true breakthroughs were still several years ahead of him.

Underworld (1927)

Josef von Sternberg's remarkable silent Underworld was a template for virtually the entire gangster film genre, an archetypal film that established much of the mythos and visual language of the genre. It is also, on its own merits and regardless of its subsequent influence and importance, a bracing and powerful film, a searing melodrama with a bluntly poetic visual style. The film's story is familiar now, focusing on a brutish gangster improbably named Bull Weed (George Bancroft), a man who believes he is above the law, that he can never be caught. He literally laughs in the face of law and propriety: a big, full-throated laugh, one that requires him to throw his head back and roar with forced hilarity when confronted with those who, unlike him, fear the law, or think he needs any help. Bancroft's performance is deliberately oversized, a big, bold performance for a big, bold man whose every gesture is theatrical and exaggerated. Bull is always performing, always putting on a show as a big man — he revels in handing out money, making a show of his generosity, and an equally big show of his toughness, as revealed by his habit of ostentatiously bending coins into U shapes, his face crunched up as he strains with the metal coin, demonstrating his strength and dominance. Bancroft's broad performance is perfectly suited to this gestural, hammy, outrageous figure.

This performance, and this character, was obviously a towering inspiration for the gangster genre in the years to come, as Bancroft's Bull Weed was echoed in later gangsters played by James Cagney and Paul Muni. Howard Hawks' Scarface, in which Muni broadly mugs as a similarly unflinching gangster, was especially influenced by von Sternberg's film. This influence on Hawks would reverberate into later works, and Hawks nodded to Underworld in Rio Bravo by naming his own heroine Feathers, after Evelyn Brent's character here, and paying homage to the sequence where a bully tries to get a drunk to go fishing for money in a spittoon. In von Sternberg's film, Feathers is Bull's girl, the bully is Bull's criminal rival Buck (Fred Kohler), and the drunk is ironically dubbed, by Bull, Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), a washed-up lawyer who still hasn't sunk so low that he'll go scrambling in filth for a few dollars. Rolls Royce isn't so proud, however, that he won't take Bull's money; when Bull befriends this drunk, perhaps seeing the nascent dignity and potential in him, he sets Rolls Royce up with some money and makes him his right-hand man.

Feathers is similarly indebted to Bull, even though she quickly falls in love with the cleaned-up, intelligent Rolls Royce. She asks Rolls Royce what he was before he was picked up by Bull, and after acknowledging that he was a bum and a drunk, he turns the question around on her. The look in her eyes says it all, without any intertitle to clarify: she was obviously a lowly character, perhaps a prostitute, and now she's a woman who, covered in feather boas and dressed in glamorous clothes, can turn the head of everyone in a room when she enters. Von Sternberg stages moments like this in glossy but expressive closeups, glistening with light that reflects off the shiny eyes of the protagonists as they grapple with loyalty, desire, and shame. Feathers and Rolls Royce are deeply conflicted, in love with one another but also feeling loyalty to Bull, and simultaneously ashamed of their reliance on this gangster. They know that their lives are built on illegal activity, and Rolls Royce even helps Bull with his crimes, instructing him on how to frame Buck for a stick-up job.


Von Sternberg's aesthetic, with his intense closeups and strikingly framed medium shots in shadow-strewn back alleys and bars, is perfectly suited to this tale of pent-up and violent emotions. Bull, in contrast to Feathers and Rolls Royce, doesn't hold anything back. He expresses everything, alternating bouts of rage with fits of laughter and cheerfulness that are just as fierce. When he sees Feathers and Rolls Royce dancing, he flies into a rage, outraged not that they were dancing, necessarily, but that his assistant hadn't asked for permission first: he speaks of Feathers as though she were his property, as though Rolls Royce should have simply asked to borrow her. A moment later, the incident is forgotten and Bull is back to cackling hysterically, as though nothing had even happened. He burns hard and fast, never holding back his jealousy or his anger or his enjoyment of some bit of nonsense. Everything he feels is immediately embodied in his expressive face. At one point, while he's standing trial and awaiting his sentence, he's distracted from the judge's words by the sight of Feathers and Rolls Royce sitting together in the courtroom. Von Sternberg focuses on a closeup of Bull's face, his eyes continually shifting to the side, away from the judge, looking towards his friend and his girl together; it is a portrait of all-consuming jealousy, jealousy built from a seemingly innocent image of these two people simply sitting next to each other. In Bull's mind, it becomes an intimate moment between lovers, and von Sternberg shoots the pair as though subtly confirming Bull's suspicions in the closeness of their bodies, in the small comforting pat on the hand Rolls Royce gives to Feathers, in the confining intimacy of the way they're framed together.

What's so remarkable about Underworld is that it's a seminal film, the impact of which has hardly been blunted by all the films to follow its example. Like many of its successors, it frames its story of an unrepentant gangster in the thin gauze of a social message — and even has Bull repent in the final act, an out-of-character gesture that does little to change his essential nature. But also like many later gangster pictures, Underworld is far more convincing at establishing the fun-loving persona and larger-than-life vitality of this vicious character than it is at tut-tutting his excesses. The film is fun, and frequently quite funny, with flashes of wit in the titles, like Feathers' insult/come-on to Rolls Royce, a bit of naughty innuendo disguised with an automobile metaphor. Later, there's even a gangsters' ball where "everyone with a police record will be there," a cartoonish conceit that calls attention to the film's wry, fantastical perspective on crime and gangsterism. This is a brilliant, strikingly shot example of the American gangster icon in his early stages of development, his edges at their roughest, his nastiness cut with playfulness and joie de vivre, his brutality softened by an almost unthinking generosity and tenderness. He's the kind of gangster who will machine-gun a cop one moment and feed a kitten some milk from his finger the next, and kittens sporadically caper through the film, symbols of innocence and play, oblivious to the gunfire and violence. The film, like its laughing, scowling antihero, is rough on the outside but hides the playful, spirited soul of a kitten underneath.