The Cossacks (George W. Hill, 1928)

John Gilbert and Renée Adorée in The Cossacks

Lukashka: John Gilbert
Maryana: Renée Adorée
Ivan: Ernest Torrance
Prince Olenin Stieshneff: Nils Asther
Sitchi: Paul Hurst
Ulitka: Dale Fuller

Director: George W. Hill
Screenplay: Frances Marion
Title cards: John Colton
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Percy Hilburn
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Blanche Sewell

Nobody comes off well in The Cossacks. Not even John Gilbert, for whom MGM made the movie, hoping the reteaming with Renée Adorée, his co-star in The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925), would strike fire at the box office. Gilbert spends much of the movie in a shaggy Astrakhan hat that makes his nose look big. Nor was the film much fun for screenwriter Frances Marion and director George W. Hill, who spent much of the production time fighting with studio interference and handling complaints from Gilbert and Adorée. Hill eventually quit and was replaced by an uncredited Clarence Brown. Nor does the film do much justice to the novel by Leo Tolstoy on which it's based. It completely inverts the story, in which Prince Olenin is the protagonist, an idealistic Russian who hates Moscow society and finds himself in the simpler, more primitive way of life in the Caucasus. In the film, Olenin has been sent by the tsar to mingle with the Cossacks and find a bride in some vaguely diplomatic attempt to cement relations between the urban Russians and the rural populace. Nils Asther is a very pretty Olenin, who of course lights on the equally very pretty Maryana, played by the very pretty Adorée, but she's in love with Lukashka, even though he's a "woman man" who doesn't like killing Turks, which is all that the male Cossacks seem to do. (The women, meanwhile, do all the work.) The film winds up as an absurd paean to the Cossack way of life, after Lukashka decides he really does like killing after all. True, The Cossacks is often fun to watch, and there's some spectacular stunt riding by a troupe of actual Cossacks brought to the United States for the film. But there's too much nonsense and too many clichés.

Min and Bill (George W. Hill, 1930)

Remembered today chiefly because it was the film that won Marie Dressler the best actress Oscar (for what was by no means her best screen performance), Min and Bill is a good example of the struggle Hollywood movie-makers went through in adapting to sound. Dressler and co-star Wallace Beery had both been stars in silent films, and screenwriter Frances Marion was one of the most successful writers of that era. Unfortunately, Marion and co-screenwriter Marion Jackson don't seem to have mastered writing the dialogue a sound film needs for exposition and continuity, so it often sounds as if  Dressler and Beery are ad-libbing just to keep the soundtrack alive. And director George W. Hill, a former cinematographer who had turned director before sound came in, doesn't quite know how to keep the pace from sagging. The result is a rather choppy movie with a few good scenes, most notably a knock-down, drag-out brawl between Dressler's Min and Beery's Bill.  At the beginning of the film, Min seems to be destined to be one of Dressler's slapstick comic creations: There's an extended chase sequence in which Min and Nancy are at the controls of a runaway speedboat that culminates with Min being thrown overboard and hauled out of the water with repeated dunkings. But the main plot is sentimental drivel: Min runs a waterfront speakeasy/barbershop and has raised a girl, Nancy (Dorothy Jordan), left her as an infant by the now-aging prostitute Bella (Marjorie Rambeau). Now that Nancy is of marriageable age and is being wooed by the wealthy Dick Cameron (Don Dillaway), Bella has shown up again to try to claim the maternal privileges that she fears Min is going to assert. The trouble with this twist to the plot is that we never see Min being particularly loving and maternal toward Nancy, so that the denouement, in which Min tries to keep the girl out of Bella's clutches, doesn't make a lot of emotional sense. Still, the public loved it, and Dressler was for a time MGM's biggest star.