East Side, West Side (Allan Dwan, 1927)

Holmes Herbert, June Collyer, and George O'Brien in East Side, West Side

 
Cast: George O'Brien, Virginia Valli, Holmes Herbert, J. Farrell MacDonald, Frank Allworth, June Collyer, John Miltern, Dore Davidson, Sonia Nodell, Frank Dodge, Dan Wolheim, William Frederic, Jean Armour. Screenplay: Allan Dwan, based on a novel by Felix Riesenberg. Cinematography: Theodore J. Pahle, George Webber. 

In Allan Dwan's silent East Side, West Side, big, likable George O'Brien plays big, likable John Breen, a naïf in the city. O'Brien also played a naïf in the city in his other big film of 1927, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Murnau's film is an acknowledged masterpiece and Dwan's isn't, though Sunrise is melodrama striving to be art, whereas East Side, West is unabashed melodrama, rags to riches, interrupted romances, secret parentage, self-sacrificing heroism, sneaking villainy, happy ending and so on. Somehow Dwan manages to stuff all that, plus a subway cave-in and a sinking passenger liner, into a tidy 90 minutes. It all begins with O'Brien's Breen looking at the Manhattan skyline from the barge he lives on with his mother and stepfather, and longing to be part of it all. He gets his wish, sort of, when the barge is swamped by a passing ship and his parents drown. He swims to shore and hides out in the cellar of the Lipvitch family's home. They take him in and put him to work assisting Papa Lipvitch in the tailor shop, and he begins a shy flirtation with the Lipvitch daughter, Becka (Virginia Valli). A suitor for Becka's hand, known as Flash (Frank Allworth), spots Breen's talent for fisticuffs and helps him get a start as a prizefighter. When he begins to make a name for himself, he catches the attention of the wealthy developer Gilbert Van Horn (Holmes Herbert), who soon recognizes that Breen is his long-lost son -- he was forced to annul his marriage to Breen's mother, who decided never to tell her son about his father. Uncertain whether to reveal the truth to Breen, Van Horn asks Breen what he would do if he ever met his father: "I'd kill him!" Breen replies. (The italics are in the title card.) Van Horn decides to keep the secret, but he takes Breen in and tries to fulfill his desire to become a builder in the city he loves. He also introduces him to his pretty ward, Josephine (June Collyer), setting up a rivalry with Becka. Dwan never wastes time putting all this plot into place, which proceeds as you might expect, the story flavored with evocative shots of the city. The film touches only lightly on the ethnic character of the East Side: The Irish are seen as pugnacious and clannish, and the Lipvitches are obviously meant to be Jewish. There's some stereotyping in the penny-pinching character of Papa Lipvitch (Dore Davidson), but the issue of intermarriage is never raised in the case of Becka and Breen. East Side, West Side is the only silent film in the Criterion Channel's retrospective of Allan Dwan's work, but it makes me wish there were more.

Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929)

Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929)

Cast: Ruth Chatterton, Lewis Stone, Raymond Hackett, Holmes Herbert, Eugenie Besserer, Ullrich Haupt, Mitchell Lewis. Screenplay: Willard Mack, based on a play by Alexandre Bisson. Cinematography: Arthur Reed. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William S. Gray. Music: William Axt, Sam Wineland.

Perhaps because Lionel Barrymore had directed a few silent films and because he had acted on stage before giving over his career entirely to movies, MGM drafted him into directing Ruth Chatterton, making her own transition from stage to screen, in this remake of the old chestnut Madame X. Alexandre Bisson's 1908 play had been a hit starring Sarah Bernhardt and was filmed twice as a silent before being dusted off for the novelty of the talkies. The 1929 film was enough of a hit to put Barrymore and Chatterton in the running for the second annual Academy Awards. There were no official nominations that year -- only winners were announced -- but Academy records show that they were under consideration for the Oscars that went to Frank Lloyd for The Divine Lady and Mary Pickford for Coquette (Sam Taylor). That they were considered at all is a sign of how weak the direction and performances of the year were -- it was the first time talking pictures were allowed to compete for the awards. Barrymore boasted of one feat he achieved as a director on the film: He improvised a boom microphone with a fishing pole. But even that claim has been contended by others, and it's likely that MGM's novice sound engineer Douglas Shearer was as responsible as Barrymore for the innovation. Otherwise, Madame X is stiffly staged and filmed, betraying not only its theatrical origins but also the difficulty filmmakers were having with recorded sound. Scenes are often badly framed, with a character's nose and mouth peeping into the shot or the lower half of a face disappearing at the bottom on the screen. In a scene in which Lewis Stone and Holmes Herbert are at a table for an intense discussion, Herbert keeps standing up and sitting down, and you can sense the cameraman's effort to tilt the bulky sound camera up and down to follow him. As for the acting, Chatterton starts off badly in the opening scenes in which her character is still a lady. She retains the intonations of stage elocution, with "cruel" coming out as "crew-ell" and her voice pitched and her mannerisms exaggerated so they can reach the recesses of the theater.  But later in the film, after she has "fallen," she's often quite effectively naturalistic as the weary, tough woman of the world, and she pulls off her drunk scene well. The plot of Madame X is familiar stuff: Woman sins, woman suffers, woman achieves a kind of redemption, and woman dies. But it's substantial enough that it continued to be remade, as soon as 1937 with Gladys George directed by Sam Wood, in British, Philippine, Greek and Mexican versions, in a glossy Ross Hunter-produced version starring Lana Turner directed by David Lowell Rich in 1966, and even in a 1981 TV film with Tuesday Weld. 

When a Man Loves (Alan Crosland, 1927)

When a Man Loves (Alan Crosland, 1927)

Cast: John Barrymore, Dolores Costello, Warner Oland, Sam De Grasse, Holmes Herbert, Stuart Holmes, Bertram Grassby, Tom Santschi. Screenplay: Bess Meredyth, based on a novel by Abbé Prévost. Cinematography: Byron Haskin. Film editing: Harold McCord. Music: Henry Hadley.