Desert Nights

If Desert Nights had come out in 1926 instead of 1929 people would be far less critical of it. I thought it was a super sexy melodrama and romance, with great performances by John Gilbert, beautiful Mary Nolan, and Ernest Torrence, the perfect villain with a touch of humor.

My favorite scene is in the beginning, before the trouble begins, when Ernest is playing the piano and the young couple, played by Mary and John, waltzed on the front porch. John Gilbert could have been a professional dancer, he was that good.

The story is about a bunch of jewel thieves caught in the desert, but you really won't care. Just watch it for the stars, and to see just how gorgeous John Gilbert still looked in 1929. Sigh.

9 out of 10 stars.

Hugh Roland (John Gilbert) manages an African diamond mine. He is told that Lord Stonehill and his daughter Diana are visiting the mine. It's been three years since any white woman has joined them. The father and daughter turn out to be two diamond thieves. They kidnap Hugh and escape into the desert. They are abandoned by their black servants. With no way to survive, they are forced to depend on Hugh.

Gilbert was a silent film star. He's not well known today. One could see the dashing leading man in him. The turns in the second half are a little weak in terms of action. I was expecting something more thrilling. It seems to be trying for comedy which it didn't start out with. It's still fine. It's just not I was expecting.

Kidnapped by jewel thieves, the manager of a British diamond mining operation in Africa spends long DESERT NIGHTS plotting his escape...

John Gilbert is most enjoyable in this lively yarn, his last starring performance in a silent film (he would appear in the William Haines' picture A MAN'S MAN, which was released a few months after DESERT NIGHTS, but that was in a cameo role as himself). His verve & vitality propel the (sometimes silly) plot and make the movie into a very enjoyable action picture.

Ernest Torrence - in a fine portrayal - makes a florid, hammy villain. Beautiful Mary Nolan enacts the sort of woman any red-blooded male viewer would gladly walk the Kalahari to gain.

By 1929 silent films were truly an art form in their own right. (Witness the piano sequence early in the picture, with Gilbert & Nolan waltzing on the porch, to see the kind of nuance possible in this not-so-silent medium.) MGM was at the apex of the industry & Jack Gilbert was the Studio's greatest male star. Which is what makes DESERT NIGHTS so poignant. Before the year ended silent cinema, that most emotionally penetrating of all the photo dramas, would be dead & Gilbert's career would be dying. A new crop of stars would be on the rise & Noise would be king.

The great John Gilbert stars as manager of a diamond company in South Africa. He is kidnapped by a pair posing as English aristocrats (Mary Nolan, Ernest Torrence) after they steal $500,000 worth of diamonds.

They head into the dessert and quickly get lost. Their accomplices soon perish after drinking from a poisoned water hole (poisoned by Torrence himself). Gilbert is tied up in a wagon pulled by oxen, but the power soon shifts as they get hopelessly lost and the water is used up. Gilbert is freed and gets the upper hand.

Terrific little action film with great bits of comedy, and the three stars are solid.

Gilbert's last starring silent film. He looks great and has great fun as the man who hasn't seen a white woman in 3 years. Nolan is beautiful, and Torrence has one of his best roles as the villain.

Gilbert had begged MGM to make this as a talkie but LB Mayer refused. Too bad. This might have been a real classic and a solid success for Gilbert in the new medium. Rather, they stuck him in a sappy romance, HIS GLORIOUS NIGHT, and he flopped. It was all downhill for John Gilbert after that. MGM's stupidity was cinema's great loss. John Gilbert was a great star and should have had a great career in the 30s.

The standard foci in John Gilbert studies have always been the early talkies and the great successes of the twenties. Everything has been directed to the great John Gilbert question: his precipitous fall from grace - did he fall or was he pushed? Seeing Desert Nights raises more questions than it answers. It certainly, to paraphrase Defence Secretary Rumsfeldt, lets us know that there are more secrets that we didn't know that we didn't know.

There is this last John Gilbert silent film for example. Very late. So there was something of a reluctance to commit to sound films for John Gilbert. Was this the reasoning of Louis B. Mayer or John Gilbert? This late silent film could only have added to the general high tension surrounding Gilbert's transition to sound. Was this a deliberate psychological ploy by Mayer who knew both how to make stars and unmake them or were other reasons such as changing tastes, a high pitched voice either in fact or because of a sabotaged sound recording, or the fact that Gilbert was now obliged to vocalize the romantic swill which had previously been expressed with his face and body.

Was Gilbert merely not as clever as he thought he was or were his weaknesses noted by Mayer and used to drive Gilbert off the cliff? Who was the driving force behind making this last silent film might go a good way to sorting these this questions out.

Certainly Gilbert gets to do a lot of the Gilbert schticks that made him a star. He waltzes the same way he did in the Merry Widow, his shoulder and his arm are as stiff as if set in plaster, his body gilding ever so smoothly across the floor, the lady inseparable from his force field. He appeared with his usual super macho devil-may-care persona, hands on hips, bending backwards and laughing loudly signature move, literally laughing at danger.

Still however good or bad he was and no matter how good or bad the film was, it's being released as a silent in 1929 doomed it to obscurity the moment it was first threaded into a projector. In the world where you're only as good as your last picture, a total and absolute flop like this made Gilbert's transition to sound just that much more problematical.

As it is Desert Nights isn't very good, what there is of it. Someone has written that it's copyright length is listed as 80 minutes and the version available on Turner Classic Movies, which I presume is the MGM library copy, is only 63 minutes. In the film as shown there are vast problems in continuity. Transitions from the automobile escape to a safari are strangely incomplete giving it something of the routine illogic which drove French Intellectuals wild for a time in the late 20s and early 30s as surrealism was the desired aesthetic. This of course wasn't a deliberate artistic decision. Later in the film even stranger things happen. Does he escape or doesn't he? Who has the drop on whom? Does he love her, does she love him or are they both playing a game which turns into love? With so many missing scenes, even with a bit more information, who would possibly care? Apparently in one scene John Gilbert gives Ernest Torrence, as the heavy, directions, which cause him to wander along a lush river for days until he arrives back at mine where he is promptly put in chains, but the scene has been dropped though referred to in the denouement. Time passing isn't expressed at all at any point in this picture. It all seems to just be happening then and now on the screen. Very surrealistic.

Even if it had been complete, even if it had been a talkie, it would have been a bad picture. Maybe something epic could have been wrung out of the desert sequences but this was shot on an intimate yet superficial manner.(Fantastic photography from James Wong Howe). Everything is pretty perfunctory and Gilbert can't pull this one out with his famous charm alone. These were perhaps the last fleeting shots of the old self confident Jack Gilbert, as the utter failure of Desert Nights and the changeover to sound seems to have sapped the Gilbert screen persona and cast him o'er with the pale cast of doubt forever.

So was this film actually released this way, or did it play a week full length and then go out to the nabes cut, perhaps as part of a double bill? Was it cut and dumped or did it fail and then cut and dumped? The Variety review might be the thing to see. So was this a disaster that Gilbert had been talked into or pressured to make or did he do it willingly and even enthusiastically and if he did was it something that Mayer use to his advantage in his plan to destroy Gilbert? Gilbert's next appearance was a cameo as himself in William Haines' A Man's Man, a dangerous title considering Haines was perhaps the most widely known homosexual leading man in the movies.

Gilbert would go on to make his first Talkie in a Romeo and Juliet sequence in The Hollywood Review of 1929 where he delivered the role of Romeo in the balcony scene in something less than dulcet tones but perhaps most damagingly wearing tights and rouged up in early color. Its the conceit of the sequence that Gilbert and Norma Schearer are being directed by Lionel Barrymore.

Barrymore would direct Gilbert in the famous disaster of His Glorious Night (of the famous I love you, I love you, I love you...) which, with Redemption, dug Gilbert a hole from which he could never get out. By this time he was a marked man with everyone referring to him in the past tense and leaving the foot note about his high voice to explain his fall.