Notes on Some Movies Made Before 1930

The Knockout (1914, 1.5 stars) in which Arbuckle attempts to impress his girlfriend by enrolling for a boxing match. Charlie Chaplin appeared as a referee who was hit more than either of the fighters and was slightly more funny than Arbuckle and the Keystone Cops..

The Rounders (1914), directed by Chaplin, 2 stars) in which Chaplin and Arbuckle go on a drinking binge.

Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day (1915, directed by Arbuckle, 2 stars) in which henpecked husband Arbuckle's innocent friendship with a married woman (Mabel Normand) leads to chaos-with laundry strewn about.

Wished on Mabel (1915, directed by Normand, 2.8 stars) a mildly amusing comedy of a park loiterer/thief (not Arbuckle).

Fatty's Tintype Tangle (1915, directed by Arbuckle, 2.4 stars) has more pratfalls plus jealous husbands (and Arbuckle as a henpecked one).

Fatty at Coney Island (1917, directed by Arbuckle, 3.4 stars). Trying to evade his wife (Agnes Neilson) at the beach, Arbuckle first buries himself in the sand and later, when told to "get a tent" by the man renting bathing costumes, steals that of a large woman with fairly funny results (though "Some Like It Hot" it ain't). Buster Keaton, with some facial expressions (before becoming "the Great Stone Face," he mugged-and even cried) has a significant supporting role, and nearly as many falls as Arbuckle. It also has the Keystone Cops falling all over themselves and documentation of Coney Island as it was in 1917.

Leap Year (1921, directed by James Cruze, 1.4 stars) An unfunny feature-length farce, the first movie of any length I saw with Arbuckle (and the last he completed before his star was eclipsed: the movie was not released because of the "orgy"/"murder" scandal, though Arbuckle was exonerated. In the movie, he played a spoiled heir-in-waiting with three fianc _ es plus the nurse he really wanted to marry. Few of the pratfalls are funny, though there is one flip into bed that is.

Das fidele Gefangnis (The Merry Jail, 1917, directed by Ernst Lubitsch). Not for the first time, "the Lubitsch touch" mystifies me. Even with Emil Janning mugging as a simple-minded and seemingly homosexual jailer, there is little that I find funny, let alone witty in this silent comedy of a wife (Kitty Dewall) wearing a mask seducing her drunkard caddish husband (Harry Liedtke), while someone else has an enjoyable night in jail to avoid compromising her. (2 sars?)

"Der Golem" (The Golem , 1920, directed by Paul Wegener) looks marvelous. The sets by Hans Poelzig remind me of the Barcelona constructions of Antonio Gaudí-more curvaceous than the expressionist sets in movies such as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"- and the camerawork was done by the legendary Karl Freund (who shot "Metropolis" and the first Hollywood "Dracula" movie and directed the original "The Mummy" and "Mad Love"). The plot is simple, though it simplifications in/for inter-war Germany are not. The golem (played by director Wegener) looks to me like one of the Xian terra cotta warriors with a face somewhat like Mao Zedong.

Nanook of the North (1922, Robert J. Flaherty, 3.4 stars) is one of the most famous documentaries ever made, a pioneering one that was more staged than observed on the eastern shore of Hudson's Bay. (The wives and children were cast by Flaherty and were not Nanook's real wives and children.) Although it provides a record of an Inuit family ca. 1920, kayaking through icebergs, driving a dogsled, constructing an igloo (with a piece of ice as a window), capturing a walrus, a seal, and some fish, and although the family members have considerable charm and there are some striking ice formations, I find the movie (which I had not seen in a long time) somewhat boring. The DVD includes a very stilted BBC interview of Flaherty's widow, very much maintaining the cult of her husband that he built and nourished during his lifetime (1884-1951; Nanook starved to death on a failed inland hunt for deer in 1922).

Our Hospitality (1923, starring and directed by Buster Keaton, 5 stars) is probably my favorite Keaton movie. I think that "The General" is more profound with more impressive cinematograhy. Both have great sequences of trains (very narrow-gauge in "Hospitality"), and "Hospitality" has a love interest closer to seeming like a human being (Natalie Talmadge) than in any of the other Keaton silent movies. (I also watched the hilarious but suspect-of-racism end of "The Navigator.")

Sherlock, Jr. (1924, starring and directed by Buster Keaton, 4.6 stars) is one of the greatest (and most postmodernist... or Pirandellian) silent comedies. The opening is conventional and a bit doltish. The brilliance is when the movie theater projectionist (Keaton) falls asleep and climbs into the movie, where he puts to work what he has been reading in How to be a Detective. As often, the romance is of Victorian propriety. The screen Keaton often ends up with the girl (young woman) he adores, but it's difficult to imagine how he could live with someone on such a tall pedestal. (There is one where he has a nagging wife, I seem to recall, but, in general, the young women are unreal-and slow to recognize that he is their champion. The movie has a hilarious chase scene and a pretty funny sequence of the theater projectionist (Keaton) climbing into the screen and being thrown with each cut from scene to scene. The framing romance (with Kathryn McGuire and caddish rival Ward Crane) is routine. (I was much more enamored with this movie the first time I saw it, many years ago, but it still seems Pirandellian, which to me is good.)

Body and Soul (1925, directed by Oscar Michaux, 2.5 stars) is a Victorian melodrama about a preacher/seducer (Paul Robeson in his film debut) who is not just a hypocrite, but a complete scoundrel. The movie is only of historical interest-both for showcasing Robeson (whose charisma comes across even without his famous voice) and for being a movie made by African Americans for African American audiences that was as stereotypical in its presentation of African Americans as "Birth of a Nation" was a decade earlier. Interestingly, it showed a "Reverend" who made Elmer Gantry look saintly in comparison. Like "The Emperor Jones," a part which Robeson had already played on stage and would recreate on film in 1933, the Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkin is a swaggering con man who has lorded it over other colored people (using the locution of that day), falls, and flees in desperation. The New York state censors condemned the movie en toto. Micheaux cut it from 9 reels to 5 and somehow made the false Reverend not the villain (I can't imagine how!). The restored version (8 reels in length with drinking but not gambling scenes restored) has endings that make no sense. The mise-en-scène is remarkably static (except for the big Dry Bones sermon driving the congregation into delirium) and is as much like a filmed stage play as early talkies in which the camera was immobilized by sound equipment. The actors seemed largely also to be rooted in place, whether in the small church or in the parlor of Sister Martha Jane (the light-skinned mother eager to marry off her daughter to the Reverend). There is very little camera movement. There is no lack of jump-cuts, although the purpose of them escapes me. Many are to minor figures sitting more or less still.

"Geschlecht in Fesseln - Die Sexualnot der Gefangene" (Sex in Chains , 1928, directed by and starring William Dieterle, 2.6 stars) was a protest movie seeking conjugal visits for prisoners. Defending his wife's honor (more than she bothered to do, Grouch Marx might have sail the anguished wife was played by Swedish actress Mary Johnson; this was the last of her 32 appearances on screen), the underemployed man played by Dieterle is sentenced to prison for three years. Supervised visits by his wife drive him (and her, the movie stresses) crazier. It would be possible to miss that he forms an erotic liaison with a cellmate (talk about not graphic! The earlier Different from Others at least makes it clear who is with whom). I hate the ending. There are some expressionist compositions and edits. The movie is a historical curiosity, not least for showing that Dieterle, who became a director of prestige biopics at MGM, was a handsome and expressive leading man in the silent era. The print was cobbled together from different archives (different parts had been censored in different countries) and supplied with an uninteresting period piano score by Pasquale Perris.

I thought the VHS version that I saw of "Spione" (Spies,1928, directed by Fritz Lang, 2.6 stars) was too long. There is a DVD version that is an hour longer. Lang aficionado that I am, I'd rather watch his WWII spy movie Ministry of Fear again rather than seek out the longer version of "Spies," having found the streamlined version implausible and boring (in the middle; it starts fast and ends satisfyingly).