The Love Light (Frances Marion, 1921)

Watching Mary Pickford in The Love Light is exhausting. She is continuously on, rough-and-tumbling with her brothers, gamely sending them off to war, grieving their deaths, rescuing a sailor from drowning, hiding him from the villagers, flirting with him, discovering to her horror that he's a spy and that he may have made her the inadvertent cause of her brother's death, sending him off to the mercy of the villagers and his death. And just when it seems like she can't suffer (or act) any more, she has his baby (they were secretly married), goes mad and sees it adopted by another woman, gets it back, loses it again in a fiendish plot by the other woman, goes mad again, regains her sanity when her childhood boyfriend comes home from the war blinded, teaches him how to cope with his blindness, and eventually rescues her child from the clutches of the other woman by boarding the storm-tossed vessel in which the woman had tried to abduct the baby. It's one of those soaped-up melodramas we think of as typical of silent films, but it works, mostly because Pickford is amazing, but also because Frances Marion was such a skilled director and writer. Marion later became  the first woman to win an Oscar for something other than acting, with her award for writing The Big House (George W. Hill, 1930), though by that time she had given up directing. (As a writer, the IMDb credits her with 188 titles, though some of those are remakes of her earlier films.) Still, it's primarily a showcase for Pickford's special brand of hard, determined acting. She resembles in her determination such later stars as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, though they lacked Pickford's façade of softness (a softness masking steel). Davis would, of course, somewhat cruelly parody Pickford later in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). One great plus to The Love Light is the fine cinematography of Charles Rosher and Henry Cronjager.

The Blot (Lois Weber, 1921)

Louis Calhern and Claire Windsor in The Blot (Lois Weber, 1921)

One of the prolific and once-celebrated Lois Weber's few surviving films, The Blot makes me wish that there were many more. The IMDb credits her with 137 titles, almost all of which seem to be lost. She had a reputation for "message" films, and The Blot is no exception: It was apparently inspired by articles in Literary Digest that denounced the poor payment of teachers and clergymen as a "blot" on our civilization; we even see excerpts from the articles on-screen near the end of the film. As unpromising as that sounds, Weber (who co-wrote the screenplay with Marion Orth) uses humor and deft characterization to make her case. She focuses on Professor Griggs (Philip Hubbard) and his wife (Margaret McWade) and pretty daughter, Amelia (Claire Windsor), who are just barely scraping by on his salary plus some extra money he makes by tutoring and that Amelia brings in from a job at the library. But they also have next-door neighbors, the Olsens, who are prosperous middle-class types from the money he earns making shoes; Mrs. Olsen snubs the Griggses, thinking them stuck-up, but their son, Peter, is smitten with Amelia. So is Phil West (Louis Calhern), one of Prof. Griggs's students. Phil is a rich young playboy whose father is on the board of trustees of the college at which Griggs teaches. Another suitor for Amelia is the Rev. Gates, a young minister. Weber skillfully interplays all of these characters in ways that are sometimes comic, sometimes heart-tugging. The effect is almost novelistic: I kept thinking of Booth Tarkington's  dated but still effective books as I watched it. Moreover, after the story crisis is resolved Weber doesn't give us a pat ending: We still don't know which of the several suitors Amelia will wind up with. An extra delight for me was seeing one of my favorite character actors from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, Calhern, as a romantic leading man. Though it's clear that his magnificent nose is going to doom him to character parts, he makes a credible go of it as a young swain -- he was only 26 at the time.

Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy

As part of a series about pioneering women directors this month, Turner Classic Movies devoted an evening to the films of Alice Guy (or Guy-Blaché, as she became known after she married Herbert Blaché in 1907). Said to have been the first female director, she made more than a thousand films, first in France, where she rose from a secretarial job to become the head of production for Gaumont, and then in the United States, where she and her husband founded a production company, Solax, that was located in Fort Lee, N.J., then the center of movie production in America. Her first film, a short called La Fée aux Choux (1896), is said to be the first narrative movie, though the narrative barely exists: The minute-long film simply depicts a well-corseted young woman (the titular "Cabbage Fairy") plucking several babies from behind some painted cabbages. (In France, apparently, children are told that babies come from cabbage patches instead of being brought by the stork.) In 1906, she made The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ, a half-hour series of vignettes that deal rather more with the death of Jesus than with the life. It doesn't contain such notable events as the baptism, the temptation in the desert, or the Sermon on the Mount, but it does feature the raising of the daughter of Jairus. The vignettes are a series of tableaux, with sets designed by Henri Ménessier and costumes by Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset. The scenes are filmed from a fixed point of view, as from an audience looking at a stage, with no cuts or close-ups -- except for one striking exception: In the vignette dealing with St. Veronica, who wiped Jesus's face with her veil as he was carrying the cross to Calvary, with the result that the veil retained an image of his face, Guy inserts an image of Veronica standing alone, displaying the imprinted veil. After moving to the United States, Guy made Falling Leaves (1912), a sentimental tale of a young girl dying of tuberculosis. Told by the family doctor that her sister would live only until the last leaf has fallen, young Trixie (Magda Foy), goes outside and tries to tie the leaves on the trees. There she is seen by a passing physician who has just developed a "serum" that cures TB, and thereby saves the sister's life. The sets are again by Ménessier, who followed Guy to America. Guy also had a deft hand for comedy, evident in Canned Harmony (1912), a farce about a man who tricks his girlfriend's musician father by posing as a musician by hiding a phonograph under a table while pretending to play a violin. The film contains a remarkably sophisticated use of a three-way split screen, in which the man and the woman hatch their plot on the telephone. The left-hand image shows the man, the right-hand image the woman, and in the middle is an exterior shot, designed to show that they're in different houses. A House Divided (1913), in which a squabbling married couple try to live together by communicating only in writing, contains some deft comic acting by Fraunie Fraunholz and Marian Swayne; the latter had played the tubercular sister in Falling Leaves. TCM also showed The Ocean Waif (1921) by Guy, but the print is deteriorated beyond satisfactory restoration, with so many continuity gaps and images obscured by scarring, that I found it hard to watch.

The Tales of Hoffmann (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1951)

Opera and film are two well-nigh incompatible media, with different ways of creating characters, evoking mood, and telling stories. The handful of good opera films are those that find ways of replicating the operatic experience within a cinematic framework, the way Ingmar Bergman does in his film of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1975), which takes liberties with the original libretto and casts the action in a theatrical setting. The Powell-Pressburger Hoffmann also tinkers with the libretto, and with perhaps somewhat more justification: Offenbach didn't live to see his opera performed, and it exists in several variants. Opera companies rearrange and cut its various parts, and even interpolate music from other works by Offenbach. Like The Magic Flute, Hoffmann has fantasy elements that lend themselves to the special-effects treatment available to the movies, and Powell and Pressburger took full advantage. It is usually thought of as a companion piece to their film The Red Shoes (1948), in large part because it used many of the stars of that earlier film, including Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine, and Ludmilla Tcherina, as well as production designer Hein Heckroth. The opera is sung in English, though the only singers who actually appear on screen are Robert Rounseville as Hoffmann and Ann Ayars as Antonia. Unfortunately, some of the singers whose voices are used aren't quite up to the task: Dorothy Bond sings both Olympia and Giulietta, and the difficult coloratura of the former role exposes a somewhat acidulous part of her voice. Bruce Dargavel takes on all four of the bass-baritone villains played on-screen by Helpmann, but his big aria, known as "Scintille, diamant" in the French version, lies uncomfortably beyond both ends of his range. Rounseville, an American tenor, comes off best: He has excellent diction, perhaps because he spent much of his career in musical theater rather than opera -- though he originated the part of Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in 1951. He is also well-known for his performance in the title role of Leonard Bernstein's Candide in the original Broadway production in 1956. It has to be said that the film is overlong and maybe over-designed, and that it sort of goes downhill after the Olympia section, in which Heckroth's imagination runs wild.

A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

David Niven and Marius Goring in A Matter of Life and Death

Peter D. Carter: David Niven 

June: Kim Hunter 

Bob Trubshaw: Robert Coote 

An Angel: Kathleen Byron 

An English Pilot: Richard Attenborough

An American Pilot: Bonar Colleano 

Chief Recorder: Joan Maude 

Conductor 71: Marius Goring 

Dr. Frank Reeves: Roger Livesey 

Abraham Farlan: Raymond Massey 

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger 

Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger 

Cinematography: Jack Cardiff 

Production design: Alfred Junge 

Fantasy, especially in British hands, can easily go twee, and though Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had surer hands than most, A Matter of Life and Death (released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven, long before Led Zeppelin) still manages occasionally to tip over toward whimsy. There is, for example, the symbolism-freighted naked boy playing a flute while herding goats, the doctor's rooftop camera obscura from which he spies on the villagers, and the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream being rehearsed by recovering British airmen. And there's Marius Goring's simpering Frenchman, carrying on as no French aristocrat, even one guillotined during the Reign of Terror, ever did. Many find this hodgepodge delicious, and A Matter of Life and Death is still one of the most beloved of British movies, at least in Britain. I happen to be among those who find it a bit too much, but I can readily appreciate many things about it, including Jack Cardiff's Technicolor cinematography (Earth is color, Heaven black and white, a clever switch on the Kansas/Oz twist in the 1939 The Wizard of Oz) and Alfred Junge's production design. On the whole, it seems to me too heavily freighted with message -- Love Conquers Even Death -- to be successful, but it must have been a soothing message to a world recovering from a war.  

The Confession (Costa-Gavras, 1970)

Ideologies are only as workable as the people who believe in them, which given the human drive toward power isn't very much. Costa-Gavras's film hasn't really dated much since its release 45 years ago. We are still faced with ideologues whose sole aim is to increase their own power in the name of some group or faction -- witness the current disarray of the Republican Party caused by the recalcitrance of the Tea Party faction in Congress. Which is not to say that the purge of John Boehner is anything as grave as the purges in the communist party in the Soviet Union under Stalin in the 1930s and in Czechoslovakia under Stalinist puppets in the 1950s. Yves Montand plays Gérard, a Czech communist official, based on a real figure, Artur London, who was accused of being a Trotskyite and a Titoist and of collaborating with American spies. He resisted torturous interrogation as long as possible before confessing. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was released after serving several years in prison. The film ends with Gérard, still a disillusioned but hopeful communist, witnessing the 1968 Soviet crackdown against the "Prague Spring" reformists. It's an overlong but often effective movie, with fine performances by Montand, Simone Signoret as his wife, and Gabriele Ferzetti as the interrogator Kohoutek, a former Gestapo agent recruited by the communists to crack the people they want to purge.

A Lon Chaney Double Feature

He Who Gets Slapped, Victor Sjöström, 1924
The more I see of the young Norma Shearer, the more I like her. I recently watched The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927), in which she's paired with Ramon Novarro, and was struck by how fresh and natural she was as an actress, and the same holds true in He Who Gets Slapped, where her love interest is John Gilbert. Both movies are silents, of course. It was only after the advent of sound that her husband, MGM's creative director Irving G. Thalberg, decided to make her into a great lady, the cinematic equivalent of Katharine Cornell, putting her into remakes of Broadway hits like The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sidney Franklin, 1934), which had starred Cornell, or Strange Interlude (Robert Z. Leonard, 1932), which had featured another theatrical diva, Lynn Fontanne. She was also miscast as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor, 1936), a role that, at 34, she was much too old to play. She is barely in her 20s in He Who Gets Slapped, however, and she's delightful. This is not a film for coulrophobes (people with a fear of clowns), however. It's crawling with them, performing antics that are supposed to be, to judge from the hilarity they induce in the audiences shown in the film, side-splittingly funny. The film is based on the highly dubious premise that watching someone get slapped repeatedly is one of the funniest things ever. There may be people who think so -- to judge from the perennial popularity of the Three Stooges -- but I'm not one of them. The whole movie is an artificial concoction, anyway, and only the brilliance of Lon Chaney gives it some grounding in real-life feeling. It was one of the films that launched the MGM studios on the road to Hollywood dominance, and the first one to feature Leo the Lion in the credits.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Herbert Brenon, 1928
This is a grand showcase for Chaney, whose reputation as the man of a thousand faces was somewhat misleading. Chaney had one well-worn face that, no matter how much he distorted or disguised it, shone through. Here he's given an opportunity to perform without disguise through much of the film, and the range of expressions available to him is astonishing. The leading lady is 14-year-old Loretta Young. That she often looks her age is one of the more disturbing things about the film, in which she's supposed to be in love with both Chaney, who was 45, and the improbably pretty Nils Asther, who was 31. The cinematography is by James Wong Howe. Laugh, Clown, Laugh was eligible for Oscar nominations in the first year of the Academy Awards, and Chaney should have received one. The closest the film came to an award was the one that Joseph Farnham received for title writing (the one and only time the award was presented). But Farnham's award was for the body of his work over the nomination period, and not for a particular film.

House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

This manic Japanese horror film has achieved something of a cult status. It was the feature film debut of its director, Obayashi, who began his career as a director of TV commercials, which shows in the film's continued barrage of brightly colored images and in the loud (and banal) pop music soundtrack. The story deals with a gaggle of Japanese schoolgirls (with nicknames that translate as "Gorgeous," "Fantasy," "Kung Fu," "Melody," "Prof," "Sweet," and "Mac") who find themselves trapped in a haunted house. They do a lot of running, yelling, giggling, screaming, and dying -- one of them is literally eaten by a grand piano. Ultimately, the film had a huge impact on music videos, but it remains a one of a kind movie experience -- for which some of us remain thankful while others of us relish yet another instance of the unfettered imagination of a Japanese artist. In this case, the imagination was not just that of the director but also of his pre-teen daughter, whose ideas about things that frighten children were worked into the screenplay. A great deal of credit (or blame, if you will) goes to production designer Kazuo Satsuya and cinematographer Yoshitaka Sakamoto.

Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

Anne Wiazemsky in Au Hasard Balthazar

Marie: Anne Wiazemsky
Jacques: Walter Green
Gérard: François Lafarge
Marie's Father: Philippe Asselin
Marie's Mother: Nathalie Joyaut
Arnold: Jean-Claude Guilbert
Grain Dealer: Pierre Klossowski
Priest: Jean-Joel Barbier
Baker: François Sullerot
Baker's Wife: Marie-Claire Fremont
Gendarme: Jacques Sorbets
Attorney: Jean Rémignard

Director: Robert Bresson
Screenplay: Robert Bresson
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet

In his book Watching Them Be, James Harvey calls Au Hasard Balthazar "probably the greatest movie I've ever seen," and goes on to quote a number of others, including Jean-Luc Godard, who pretty much agree with him. I can't deny the movie's excellence, though I wouldn't quite go as far as Harvey does. It's a film that will try your patience unless you're willing to take Bresson on his own terms, which means not spelling anything out explicitly about his characters and their relationships. You're left to surmise a great deal about what they're doing and why. In fact, the only character in the film who gets a more or less fully fleshed-out story line is Balthazar himself, and he's a donkey. As usual, the performers are people we've never seen before on screen, and as usual with Bresson, that works out well, especially in the case of Anne Wiazemsky, who plays Marie. Only 19 when she made the film, she brings a freshness and vulnerability to her role that radiates through the deadpan non-acting that Bresson imposed on his performers. (The following year, she made  La Chinoise with Godard -- which may help explain the extent of his enthusiasm for Balthazar -- and became his second wife after his divorce from Anna Karina.)  I happen to be somewhat averse to films that center on animals, particularly if they carry the symbolic freight that Balthazar (whom one character refers to as "a saint") does, but even I couldn't help being touched by his story. This was Bresson's first film with Ghislain Cloquet as cinematographer, and the contrast with his previous film, The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), shot by his longtime director of photography, Léonce-Henri Burel, is startling. Burel tended to follow Bresson's lead in providing austere images for austere stories, whereas Cloquet brings a romantic edge to his work. I think it only emphasizes the purity of Bresson's intentions.

The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson, 1962)

There are two great Joan of Arc films: The other one is Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). But comparing them is tricky: Dreyer's film was made in a different medium. Silent movies are not just movies without sound: They necessitate entirely different narrative techniques. Dreyer let the stunning quality of his images of the suffering Joan and the cruel and often grotesque interrogators and the crowd at her immolation do much of the business of characterizing and story-telling. According to an admirer of Bresson's, screenwriter-director Paul Schrader, Bresson disliked this about Dreyer's film, and it shows in the deliberate blandness of face and image in The Trial of Joan of Arc. The settings and costumes are generic and undistinguished, and they are lighted flatly, giving the film the banal look of the era's television dramas. As usual, Bresson has chosen unknown or non-professional actors, starting with his Joan, Florence Carrez. (Carrez was her mother's surname; she later took her father's surname, becoming Florence Delay, the name under which she became a successful novelist, playwright, and actress.) Compared to Renée Falconetti's magnificently haunting Joan in Dreyer's film, Carrez's performance is almost deadpan: She unemotionally responds to even the most provocative of her judges' questions, which Bresson took verbatim from the transcripts of the trial. On the whole, I think Bresson's austere style serves the material: When Carrez sheds a tear or even slightly raises her voice, it makes an emotional impact. By withholding so much dramatic visual information throughout the film, Bresson makes a few incidental moments the more powerful, as when we see a member of the crowd stick out a foot to trip Joan on the way to the stake, or when, as she is ascending the steps to the pyre, a small dog comes out of the crowd and stares up at her. On the whole, I prefer Dreyer's film, but I'm glad to have Bresson's as a contrast.