The Headless Horseman

Can't think of an awful lot to recommend this picture to any viewers, except that you can see a youthful Will Rogers perform. This being a silent movie, you can't hear his voice or any of his folksy aphorisms. So, we are left with his image and his pantomime ability, and it's not enough to satisfy.

Thanks to the Disney studio, this Washington Irving story has already been brought to life on the silver screen, and to much better effect. The cartoon had some humor, some suspense, some rooting interest, some more definition in the characterizations. The cartoon, in short, was more interesting. (Didn't see the Tim Burton feature).

This picture is about a group of mean-spirited, shabbily-dressed locals unattractively photographed and who seem to wander about without definite purpose. Nothing of great import happens, and day for night is used for the climactic sequence involving Ichabod Crane's confrontation with the Headless Horseman - the opposite of scary. This picture was filmed on the Rockefeller Estate in Pocantico Hils (Tarrytown), N.Y. It still exists today and in comparatively pristine condition as depicted in the movie. This, and the appearance of Rogers, may be the only reasons to watch this dull affair.

This is an early telling of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and runs 71 minutes. Considering that this film starred Will Rogers, I had very high hopes for this silent picture and assumed it would be a comedy. However, I soon noticed that the print was extremely horrible and often difficult to watch. Then I noticed that although Rogers was very talented and funny, in this film he was about as funny as Walter Cronkite. And then I noticed that I kept falling asleep during the film--strike three! The bottom line is that although this is a relatively faithful retelling of the Washington Irving short story, there just isn't any life in it. Plus, given that practically every viewer knows what happens at the end, there isn't any suspense either. It's watchable and interesting to note that they actually filmed it in Upstate New York, but that's really about it.

Sadly, the film is bundled another silent,THE MECHANICAL MAN, on DVD. This Italian film manages to be even less interesting or entertaining that THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN and so I strongly caution all sane people from buying this DVD. Fortunately I got it from Netflix--otherwise, I'd be feeling pretty angry now!

Today's viewers of early silent movies might think that actors-and especially actresses-all applied a thick application of lipstick and eye-liner since those areas were so dark. And the skin tones looked like they never had been in the sun, so pale were their faces. The real truth is the film stock used in early movies was orthochromatic, invented in 1873 for still photography, and is still used by photographers today for landscape and some portrait photos.

Technically, orthochromatic consists of silver halide crystals, which are sensitive to the color blue. One can notice movies in the late 1800's and early 1900's where daylight scenes have white skies on a cloudless day. In close-up shots, actors with blue eyes appeared to have nearly white eyeballs. In addition, orthochromatic film can't detect red light; it converts reds simply to black. So actresses appeared to wear black lipstick even though on the set they wore red.

A German chemist, Herman Vogel, tinkered with several ingredients knowing the weaknesses of orthochromatic film. Others built on Vogel's work, inventing in 1906 the panchromatic process for still photography. By 1913 Eastman Kodak, the supplier of motion picture film stock, was able to introduce the advanced process to flexible celluloid, but it was high unstable and expensive. Finally in 1922, Kodak's panchromatic film quality was much improved and the cost to manufacture it dramatically dropped.

The first movie to be entirely shot using panchromatic film was November 1922's "The Headless Horseman." It may appear the new process didn't make much difference since the surviving prints of "The Headless Horseman" are worn and washed out. This was a major problem with early panchromatic motion picture film since it had such a short shelf-life. By 1926, more refinements in stability were introduced. With an extended preservation of its sharpness and depth of visual tones, panchromatic became the movie industry standard, forcing Kodak to discontinue orthochromatic movie film stock by 1930.

Showman Will Rogers headlined "The Headless Horseman," appearing as the stern teacher, Ichabod Crane. The movie is the earliest surviving film version based on the Washington Irving's short story. Rogers went against his normal friendly and homespun persona by acting as the harsh, rigid school taskmaster. His character didn't quite mesh with the small Sleepy Hollow, New York, villagers, who were about to railroad Crane out of town.

Rogers was in his fifth year in cinema when he appeared in "The Headless Horsemen." Samuel Goldwyn had signed the Broadway star to a multi-year contract in 1918 to appear in silent movies, an unusual move since the Oklahoma-born performer was known more for his verbal witticisms rather than his pantomiming. A 10th-grade high school drop-out who had spent time learning the ranch ropes in Argentina and in South Africa, began performing tricks with his lassos. Catching on to vaudeville circuits in the United States beginning in 1905, he became popular performing his horse and pony stunts. Ten years later, as a performer for Florenz Ziegfeld's 'Midnight Frolic,' in New York City, he mixed his lasso tricks with chitchat about the days' events gleaned from the daily newspapers. "All I know is what I read in the paper" became Rogers' trademark opening line.

His real personality, despite appearing in 48 silent films, wasn't fully appreciated until the advent of talkies in 1929, where he was able to express himself verbally.

I can't remember seeing a film starring Will Rogers any time in the past. This is a dull, endless version of the famous Washington Irving story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." It follows the plot pretty well, but Rogers seems kind of a well-fed lummox which doesn't really follow the story's description. The townspeople hire him to teach in their school. He is a harsh master, alienating the kids and causing the parents to believe he practices witchcraft. Mostly, the quality of the show is lacking and hard to watch. Even for 1922, it is weak and tiresome. Why Katrina has any interest in him is a bit of a mystery.

For those of us who live in Tarrytown, New York, a town whose northern neighbor is called Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving's tale of Ichabod Crane and his encounter with the Headless Horseman is never far from our consciousness. Irving lived here, wrote here and set many of his stories in the area. The image of the Horseman is used in logos for a number of local businesses, and the souvenir shops are chock-a-block with Sleepy Hollow memorabilia, especially since Tim Burton's 'Sleepy Hollow' came out a couple of years ago. The Horseman has decidedly edged out Rip Van Winkle as Irving's best remembered tale, or at least his most heavily commercialized one. The Disney studio produced a terrific Headless Horseman cartoon in the late '40s, by far the best screen adaptation to date, but when it comes to live action the tale doesn't seem to lend itself readily to the cinema, and this silent feature film starring Will Rogers demonstrates why.

The Oklahoma-born Rogers was a most likable screen figure, and on a purely visual level his offbeat casting as Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane works surprisingly well, though he couldn't have played an Easterner convincingly in a talkie. (Although come to think of it, Will did just that in the 1931 version of Twain's Connecticut Yankee; perhaps his casting in that case was something of an inside joke). But anyone expecting a comic rendition of this story featuring Rogers' characteristic wit will be disappointed, for the filmmakers followed Washington Irving's story all too faithfully, giving us an Ichabod Crane who is deeply unsympathetic. We expect comedy when we first see Will dressed as Ichabod, looking so gawky in his 18th century clothes and funny little pigtail, but Rogers plays it straight; his Ichabod is a pompous nerd, just as the story dictates. When the schoolroom sequence begins we expect Our Gang-style gags with pea-shooters or something similar, but this Yankee schoolmaster is self-righteous, prissy and stern. When a boy makes a sassy comment about the local flirt, Ichabod beats him briskly. What humor there is comes from the title cards, generally at Ichabod's expense, as he makes one foolish, arrogant remark after another.

All of this serves the story Washington Irving wrote, but it doesn't serve our nominal star, Will Rogers, or the demands of entertaining cinema. We don't like our "hero" Ichabod Crane very much, in fact he comes off as a jerk: the title cards make it explicitly clear that his courtship of local belle Katrina Van Tassel is driven by greed for her money and property. What a guy! So if we don't like the leading man, who else is there? We are told, again by one of those convenient title cards, that Ichabod's rival Brom Bones isn't such a bad sort, but the next thing we know, Brom is enjoying a cockfight with great enthusiasm -- and shortly afterward, inflamed by jealousy over Katrina, he attempts to use fake evidence to establish that Ichabod is in league with the devil, and nearly gets the guy tarred and feathered by local hotheads. So much for Brom Bones. And as for Katrina, she prefers Brom.

So, we've got a story with absolutely no one to root for, where even the charismatic Will Rogers comes off as a greedy, conceited little schnook, in a town full of rubes, dupes, and superstitious fools. (I should add that where my fellow citizens are concerned, to paraphrase Monty Python, "We got better.") This adaptation of The Headless Horseman does have nice period detail and some amusing touches along the way, and the climactic chase is well-handled and stirring. In sum, however, this film suggests that Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow is inherently off-putting material for a live action feature film, and it did so long before Tim Burton proved the point, once and for all.