Steamboat Bill, Jr.

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

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

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


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

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

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

The Circus

Charles Chaplin's fourth feature, The Circus is also one of his funniest and liveliest, a dazzling comic showcase for the tramp's antics at their best. Like Chaplin's previous film, The Gold Rush, this delivers one fast-paced, irresistibly funny gag after another, with barely a pause for breath. It's also one of Chaplin's most focused features, set almost entirely in a single location, generating its jokes — and its subtle but genuine pathos — from the tramp's interactions with a small circus troupe.

Chaplin arrives at the circus through one of the greatest set pieces in his oeuvre, a manic chase in which he's mistaken for a pickpocket and pursued by both a cop and the actual pickpocket, who wants to get back the wallet he planted on the tramp. This chase leads into a hall of mirrors and pretty much just stays there because Chaplin has so much fun playing with the prism-like reflections and multiple tramps running around the screen in different directions. It's brilliant, and brilliantly minimal, because Chaplin has managed to capture the feel of a chase sequence while mostly remaining in one very small confined space, conveying the impression of a complex labyrinth through the refracted doubles of himself packed within the frame. He's interacting with himself, bumping into his doubles and politely doffing his cap, and in one hilarious bit of pantomime, he drops his bowler hat and keeps trying to retrieve one of its reflections before finally hooking the real thing with his cane. When he throws in other characters to further complicate this fragmented composition, it just becomes even more delightfully mad.

He finally escapes the funhouse and races into the circus, where he becomes an accidental hit with the crowds by running around the ring, fleeing a donkey that hates him on sight and getting mixed up in a magician's disappearing act. There's a lot of spatial fun here, as Chaplin and the magician's assistant continually switch places under a sheet and in a large box, running back and forth through trap doors to take each other's place on one side of the stage or the other.


There is also a strong element of melancholy running through the film, as the tramp falls in love with the circus ringmaster's (Al Ernest Garcia) mistreated stepdaughter (Merna Kennedy). The tramp witnesses the ringmaster's brutality towards the girl, beating her and denying her dinner when she doesn't master the tricks for her acrobatic performance. Chaplin, sweet and empathetic as always, slips the girl some food — hilariously, in one scene, by throwing it up to her as she sits in the rings above the big top — and cares for her. But as is often the case with the romance in Chaplin's films, the tramp is not destined to get the girl; he's too much of an outsider, an eccentric comic figure rather than a romantic hero, and soon enough the girl's fallen in love, not with the tramp, but with a dashing tightrope walker (Harry Crocker).

Thus there's a touching, heart-rending sadness to the final act of the film, even as Chaplin's antics become more and more frenzied when he stands in for the tightrope walker during a high-wire performance. The film closes with the tramp gracefully stepping aside, foregoing his own romantic ambitions to take on more of a fatherly role, the kindly and compassionate father that the girl hasn't had. There's a beautiful, aching quality to the final images, as the tramp brings the couple together and restores them to their place in the circus before stepping aside. The circus pulls away without him, the caravans leaving one by one until the tramp is left behind in an empty field. It's a sublime image of loneliness and isolation, with the tramp choosing not to stay with the circus, not to remain in the company of others but to head off on his own again. The final image, an iconic shot of the tramp heading off alone towards the horizon as the black irises in around him, is both tragic and jaunty, because the tramp's independence, his selflessness and goodness, are also what keep him lonely and isolated, left behind in the dust as the circus leaves town.

The Last Command

The Last Command is a remarkably clever and poignant Hollywood story, a moving tale of war, doomed love, and the ways in which Hollywood's dream factory can resonate with reality. The exiled Russian Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings) comes to America as a poor, haunted old man, his head involuntarily shaking, reflecting an old mental trauma. Struggling to survive and make some money, he takes a job as a Hollywood extra, one of countless small-timers waiting in crowds for the chance to be a fleetingly glimpsed face on the silver screen. The irony is that, in Russia, he was a general, a cousin of the Czar himself, until the 1917 Russian Revolution toppled the czarist regime in the name of the Bolsheviks (here referred to as "revolutionists").

Josef von Sternberg infuses this tragic, melancholy story with a beautifully hazy soft-focus aesthetic, honing in on Jannings' heartbreaking performance in sensuous closeups that capture the nuances of the actor's embodiment of this crushed, broken man. Jannings delivers a real tour de force performance, his body shaking uncontrollably, haunted by the war and his humiliation, his face retaining just a trace of his former haughty grandeur in the extra's shuffling walk and heavy-lidded eyes. Then, when the film leaps into a flashback to 1917, in the days leading up to the general's downfall, he seems to be swelled with life and vibrancy, a man of pride and honor, by turns vivacious and intimidating. It's such a great performance because the shell of this man is already apparent in his shattered present-day self.

The flashback reveals how Alexander is outdone by the foolish decisions of the Czar — who seems as out-of-touch as the Bolsheviks claim, unworthy of the service of a truly honorable man like Alexander — and by the plots of the revolutionaries Lev Andreyev (William Powell) and Natalie Dabrova (Evelyn Brent). Later, in 1920s Hollywood, Andreyev has emigrated as well, serving as a director; it's Andreyev who casts Alexander as a Russian general, recreating their real life conflict, a twist that's either utterly cruel or a grand tribute to their rivalry.


The lengthy flashback sequence is especially compelling, as Alexander falls in love with Natalie, even while knowing that she's his enemy and could betray him at any moment. In one fantastic scene, he visits her in her room and notices the handle of a pistol sticking out from under her pillow, but he remains quiet, doing nothing about it, fatalistically waiting for whatever's going to happen. It's doomed romance at its best, embodied in Natalie's sad glances at this man she's growing to respect and maybe even love, while he looks at her with adoration, blinded by her dark beauty and danger. Von Sternberg has a feel for this kind of potent romantic melodrama, highlighting the tiny snub-nosed gun in a charged closeup, and then of course, instead of shooting, the woman throws herself down, her head in her arms. "From now on you are my prisoner of war," Alexander says in a title card, "and my prisoner of love."

The film reaches its climax with the tragic end of the flashback and a return to the Hollywood backlot, where Alexander is preparing to reprise his historical role in a Hollywood production that Andreyev obviously intends as a propaganda piece for the Bolsheviks. Instead, it becomes Alexander's last chance to shine, his last chance to inhabit the grand role of the heroic general, his face framed against a billowing czarist flag, his eyes wild and wide, losing himself in the past. It's a great moment, the movies providing a kind of tragic closure for this man's sad life, art imitating life in every way. He's still being manipulated and defeated by his enemy Andreyev, in a way, but he's also breaking free, refusing to be confined by the movie's boundaries, briefly making it seem as though he's back at the front, rallying his troops to battle. And then he collapses, and gets a typically Hollywood epitaph from a bystander: "too bad — that guy was a great actor."

That tragicomic send-off suggests that The Last Command is a sly commentary on Hollywood's glossy approach to reality, subtly satirizing the ways in which film's power can deceive as much as inform, reducing the emotional complexity of history as it's lived to extras running around the trenches. But at the same time the movies do have great power, and Alexander's brief moment of fantasy glory suggests that this power is the power to dream, to remake reality, to transform tragedy into a profound aesthetic triumph.

Four Sons

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

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

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


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

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

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

Easy Virtue

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

Although Alfred Hitchcock would come to be known primarily as the master of suspense, he would not truly earn this reputation until the second half of the 1930s. Before then, and certainly in his formative years during the silent era, Hitchcock's material often tended more towards melodrama than thrillers. His sixth completed feature, Easy Virtue, is a romantic melodrama based on a Noel Coward play, the story of the divorced woman Larita (Isabel Jeans), who travels to Europe to escape the scandal of her broken marriage. Hitchcock does what he can with this rather lame material, but it's mostly a pretty slack, intermittent (not to mention incredibly sexist) drama in which the young director is still experimenting and finding his style.

Despite its brevity, the film could not exactly be called tight, and its pacing is wildly unbalanced. It takes nearly twenty minutes to get past the introductory courtroom sequence that essentially serves as set-up for the plot that consumes the remaining hour. Thankfully, Hitchcock crams this sequence with visual experimentation, flashes of his characteristic biting humor, and technical flourishes that help to spice up the rote courtroom dramatics. He seems to have purposefully elongated this segment because it's the part of the film that gives him the most opportunity to play, to indulge some genre flourishes, including even a brief turn to violence with a gun. Even at this early point in his career, it's already clear where Hitchcock's interests lie: far more with the courtroom theatrics and the blend of humor and violence that he finds there than with the somewhat routine melodrama that comprises the bulk of the film after this prelude.

The second shot of the film (after a newspaper clipping) already indicates Hitchcock's playful sensibility, with an extreme closeup of a fuzzy white ball that's soon revealed, humorously, as the top of a judge's white wig, slowly curving up as he raises his head. Hitchcock then inserts several point-of-view shots from the judge's perspective as he looks around the courtroom, seeing everything as a blur until he holds up his monocle to bring a little circle within the frame into focus. Later in the sequence, at the climax of Larita's account of her husband's run-in with her artist friend — related through flashbacks — a policeman calmly strolls up to Larita and begins taking notes while her husband rolls around on the floor, apparently suffering from a gunshot wound, while the cop studiously ignores the man's thrashing. Hitchcock's deadpan humor is very apparent at moments like this, infusing the scene with a faint air of the surreal.


Hitchcock also enhances the drama of the courtroom scenes, as in the sequence where he fades between alternating profiles of Larita and the lawyer, each facing in different directions as he interrogates her, or the shot of a watch dissolving into a clock's pendulum to indicate the passage of time. Soon enough, though, this section is over and Hitchcock has to move on to the real meat of the film, as Larita flees her ugly, scandalous divorce and goes abroad under an assumed name. Once there, she meets the young, wealthy John (Robin Irvine), who immediately falls in love with her and asks her to marry him. John's stuffy upper class family isn't too happy with this unknown foreigner's intrusion in their sprawling mansion, and his witchy mother (Violet Farebrother) is especially suspicious. The film mostly slows to a halt at this point, and Hitchcock seems rather unengaged by the love story with its personality vacuum of a male lead.

That's why he leaps at the opportunity to mock the lovers at their most romantic moment, when John proposes to Larita in the back of a horse-drawn carriage. As Larita and John kiss, the horse pulling their carriage nuzzles with a horse attached to another carriage, with Hitchcock playfully cutting from the lovers to the horses as though he finds the two images equally romantic. The scene's romance is further compromised as, behind the lovers, a car pulls up, the driver angrily honking the horn because the stopped carriages are blocking the road. This pivotal romantic moment is undercut by Hitchcock's wicked sense of humor. He follows it by showing Larita's phone call to John not directly, but through the delighted reactions of a phone operator who's listening in, a clever way of showing Larita's acceptance of the proposal.

Throughout the rest of the film, there are only periodic moments when Hitchcock's budding formal ingenuity redeems the film, as in the scene where John's mother finally discovers the truth about Larita's past. Hitchcock alternates between a bracing closeup of the woman abrasively yelling at Larita, and a somewhat aloof shot of Larita, holding herself straight as a board, her posture stiff and unflinching, her face stoic against her mother-in-law's onslaughts. Hitchcock suggests the differences in the two women's temperaments not only with their demeanor but with their respective distances from the camera.

The end of the film, after much aimless meandering and emotional flatness, finally generates some real poignancy from Larita's plight, as she sadly bows out — though not before there's an unexpected spark of lesbian subtext with Sarah (Enid Stamp-Taylor), the more class-appropriate woman who's poised to step in once Larita lets John go. At the film's finale, as the score builds up to a frenzied, bombastic climax, Larita speaks in the sublimely melodramatic final title card, "Shoot! There's nothing left to kill," as she faces the tabloid photographers eager to catch a glimpse of this notorious woman. That's an unexpectedly lurid and grandiose conclusion to a film that, with the exception of Hitchcock's occasional flashes of technical or aesthetic interest, is too often restrained and lackluster when it really demands the go-for-broke emotional intensity of that last line.

Hangman's House

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

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

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


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

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

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

The Docks of New York

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

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

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


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

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

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

A Girl In Every Port

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

Howard Hawks' 1928 silent film A Girl In Every Port is both a singularly fascinating glimpse into Hawks' early aesthetic and thematic development, and a massively entertaining action/comedy romp. It is, as befits the director who later became known for his dramas about tight-knit groups of men in high-pressure situations, essentially a buddy comedy. More than that, it is practically a love story, a romance, about the development of a masculine friendship closer than any traditional romantic relationship. It's the story of the sailor Spike (Victor McLaglen), who in his travels around the world is plagued by a mysterious other sailor who keeps leaving his mark (an anchor within a heart) on the girls who Spike tries to romance when he goes ashore. When he finally runs into this other sailor, Bill (Robert Armstrong), the two predictably brawl and butt heads, but they soon find camaraderie in their shared distaste for the police, who arrive to break up the fight. After a night spent drunkenly wandering the town — Hawks economically suggests a lot with a great shot of the pair's wobbly legs walking down the street together — they become inseparable friends, enlisting on the same ship and always carousing as a pair from then on.

So the film's real story is actually not about the sailors' quest to get girls. Despite the title, the "girls" in question are mostly disposable, forgotten by the time the sailors get to the next port; what endures is their affection for one another, and the fun they have getting into fights together. Hawks continually films them in ways that suggest a romantic couple, in tight close-ups or with their arms wrapped around each other. When they have an argument, the reconciliation is filmed as a series of sheepish back and forth glances, the two of them gradually shifting closer together from their initial standoffish positions across the room, the shot getting tighter and tighter as they make up. There's a suggestion of homosocial undertones here, particularly in the eye-rolling single entendre involved whenever Bill has Spike pull his finger after a fight to put his joints back into place. Even when the film isn't quite as blatant as that, there's a tenderness and compassion between the men that they never show with the women they meet.


Spike and Bill's friendship and their journeys from port to port provide Hawks with a simple but dynamic foundation on which to build any number of comic and adventure sequences. The film is frequently a riot, keeping the use of intertitles to a bare minimum and communicating its bawdy humor through the raw physicality of the action. The bar fight sequences are especially hilarious and effective, slightly sped up to give the action a frenetic, unhinged slapstick quality. Hawks rarely resorts to a title to sell a joke, and the few titles there are mostly just deliver necessary exposition or set up a change of location whenever the ship moves on. In the absence of dialogue or text, the humor comes across instead in the comic wildness of the action, or in the nuances of the actors' performances. Both lead men tend to mug broadly, especially McLaglen, who spends much of the film with a huge smile slathered across his friendly, open face. And yet their exaggerated actions are frequently packed with subtleties of gesture and emotion that would otherwise not be communicated without dialogue, like the way that McLaglen's courtship routine (slicking back his hair, adjusting his collar) has become a ritualized series of gestures that's triggered automatically whenever he sees a pretty girl. McLaglen is especially great in a pair of scenes that play on the sailor's fear that one of his "girls" has delivered his child while he was away. Twice he comes across old flames who now have babies in tow, and Hawks boldly accentuates the sailor's fears; it's some fun business that would disappear from Hollywood film a few years later, once the silents started to give way to sound film and then the Production Code.

In fact, the film's attitude towards sex is, in general, refreshingly candid and straightforward. The script makes no secret of the fact that Spike and Bill are going to bed with numerous different women in every town they visit. At one point, Spike knocks out his compatriot, who keeps interrupting him while he's trying to make time with a girl. A cut then elides some unspecified amount of time before Spike returns to wake up his buddy and cheerfully lead him out of the bar. Hawks leaves his audience to make the not-so-great leap as to what transpired in between the two scenes.


The film's attitude towards sex is even more apparent in the depiction of the women themselves, who of course never get beyond the status of empty sex objects, but who are nevertheless given the chance to be exceptionally alluring and open in their sexuality. Maria Casajuana, as a local girl in a South American port city, is a particularly electrifying femme, a dazzling dark beauty who glowers and grins her way to a sensational impact in just a few short minutes of screen time. There are other tantalizing glimpses of intriguing women in one port or the other, but none of them match the simmering intensity of Casajuana or, even more so, Louise Brooks, who appears as a Parisian carnival performer and weaves through the final third of the film. This is the role that essentially propelled Brooks to fame, leading directly to her subsequent part in Pabst's Pandora's Box, and she plays exactly the kind of man-eating prototypical femme fatale with which she came to be synonymous.

In fact, Brooks' character provides the drama in the film's final act, when Spike falls in love with her and abandons ship to stay in Paris by her side. It's obvious from the start that she's a gold-digger, her eyes lighting up when Spike tells her how much money he has saved up. Things only get worse when Bill meets her and realizes that he used to run around with her back in New York, and that she still has a thing for him rather than Spike. So Brooks' characterization doesn't amount to much more than a wedge to be driven between the two men, threatening their idyllic friendship, but she does the best she can with the flimsy, misogynist caricature she's given. She is always an electric presence, doing most of her acting with her expressive eyes. It's so easy to admire the way her glances suggest her emotions and thoughts that one nearly misses the even more powerful way she rations these moments, keeping her eyes veiled with the downward tilt of her head and her fluttering lashes. Her demeanor shifts fluidly between reticence and a bold sensual quality, her generally retiring shyness evaporating into moments of sexual frisson, her dark eyes flashing with mischief and lust whenever she looks up. One thinks of her as a bad girl, and forgets that she is often able to disguise her bold sensuality with a sweet façade.

This is a remarkable early effort from Hawks, already possessing his signature rollicking roughness, the good-natured raggedness of his finest films. A Girl In Every Port blends comedy, adventure, and masculine bonding in a speedily paced story whose rough edges are left endearingly intact.