West Point (Edward Sedgwick, 1928)

William Haines and Joan Crawford in West Point

Brice Wayne: William Haines
Betty Channing: Joan Crawford
"Tex" McNeil: William Bakewell
Bob Sperry: Neil Neely
Bob Chase: Ralph Emerson
Football Captain Munson: Leon Kellar
Coach Towers: Raymond G. Moses

Director: Edward Sedgwick
Screenplay: Raymond L. Schrock, story; Joseph Farnham, titles
Cinematography: Ira H. Morgan
Film editing: Frank Sullivan

For a silent film, Edward Sedgwick's West Point is awfully talky, by which I mean that it's heavily laden with intertitles. That's because it's partly a romantic sitcom and partly a patriotic tribute to the values of the United States Military Academy, and it needs the titles to carry the gags and repartee as well as the flag-waving endorsements of honor and probity. William Haines plays Brice Wayne, an entitled but charming jerk, and the opening scenes in which he establishes both the arrogance and the charm of the character are chopped up by titles feeding us his jokes. A sample: Meeting a fellow cadet with a Jewish name, Wayne quips, "Oh, an Eskimo!" Fortunately, Haines is a fine comic player and overcomes both the title interruptions and the lame dialogue, especially when Wayne meets the female lead, Haines's frequent co-star Joan Crawford, who has matching comic skills. Crawford lets us know from the outset that Betty Channing sees through Wayne's jerkiness to the attractively vulnerable guy beneath. If West Point stuck more to the interplay between Wayne and Betty, it might have been a more enduring classic comedy, but when it ventures into the area of esprit de corps, after Wayne becomes a star on the Army football team and stumbles over his own arrogance and entitlement, the movie becomes a predictable Moral Lesson. Fortunately, the vintage footage shot at West Point is interesting enough to keep us going through the dull parts. William Bakewell is good as Wayne's friend Tex McNeil, a naïf who worships Wayne to a point that's suggestively homoerotic, given what we now know about Haines's sexual orientation.

The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton, 1928)

Buster Keaton in The Cameraman

Buster: Buster Keaton
Sally: Marceline Day
Stagg: Harold Goodwin
Editor: Sidney Bracey
Cop: Harry Gribbon

Director: Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton
Screenplay: Clyde Bruckman, Lew Lipton, Richard Schayer; titles by Joseph Farnham
Cinematography: Reggie Lanning, Elgin Lessley
Art direction: Fred Gabourie
Film editing: Hugh Wynn, Basil Wrangell

The Cameraman, Buster Keaton's first film under contract to MGM, isn't quite up to the standards set by The General (Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926) or Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner and Keaton, 1928), but then what is? Keaton plays a sidewalk photographer who is smitten with Sally, a receptionist in the studios of MGM's newsreel department. To try to win her, he buys an antique movie camera and sets out to get a job with the studio. Of course he screws up his first attempt and is shown the door, but several adventures later he succeeds in getting not only the job but also the girl. Keaton would come to regret signing with MGM, a studio strongly producer-driven, and he fought with producer Lawrence Weingarten over the concept and script for The Cameraman, eventually getting his own way after persuading the studio's creative director, Irving G. Thalberg, to back him. But the relationship with the studio was fated to end, especially when sound arrived and Keaton came to be seen as a relic of a fading era. There are some masterly moments in The Cameraman, such as the scene in which he and a much larger man struggle to change into their swimsuits in a too-small changing cubicle, (The scene, incidentally, gives us a glimpse of a shirtless Keaton, revealing a strikingly toned athletic body, the product of years of doing his own stunts.) There are perhaps too many scenes that Keaton is forced to share with a very cute trained monkey, distracting us from his own work, but this is probably the last of the great Keaton films.