The Headless Horseman

This is not a great film. It is very slow. The book was very scary. The 1999 film Sleep Hollow based on the same book Legend of sleepy hollow by Washington Irving. The short cartoon the Legend of sleepy hollow is very entertaining. This is badly written. It is also badly acted. There try to makes short story into a long movie. By adding stuff that just for the sake of making it long. So they could make a full length movie. They did not capture the fear of the book. The book is one of the scariest stories ever. And this is just boring and slow. It is not scary at all. There should have made it a short film then it might have been fun. Instead of being just boring.

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!

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.

This adaptation of the Washington Irving story is watchable, and it has some good moments, but that's the best you can say about it. It makes you feel as if somewhere it missed the opportunity to be a little better. While it tells the story in a clear and capable fashion, that's about all it does. There is never really a distinctive atmosphere or any sustained tension, and there are only a few brief moments of comic relief, despite ample opportunities for any or all of these.

It seems a bit of a shame to have the thoroughly likable Will Rogers portray a smug and rather petty character like Ichabod Crane. Rogers does a satisfactory job, but he is limited by what the role has to offer. The other characters likewise are believable, and are recognizable from the story, but it needed some atmosphere or creative touches to make the characters and the situation more compelling.

It's probably still worth seeing for silent movie fans. The climactic sequence - which offers material much more cinematic in nature than the rest of the narrative - is done well, and it allows the movie to end with some energy.

Merely adequate retelling of the famous story. Its chief interest lies in the location filming in New York's Hudson River Valley, including the actual Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow. The screenplay introduces a non-Irving subplot of Ichabod Crane being accused of witchcraft in a prank by Brom Bones. None of the comic scenes are particularly funny; one can imagine what Buster Keaton might have done as Ichabod. Some attempts are made at pictorialism, aided by the panchromatic film used here. But the valley's autumnal colors described by Washington Irving are sadly missing in black and white. And the day-for-night scenes of the climactic chase look like pure daylight without the deep blue tinting undoubtedly used in original prints.