Storm Over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928)

Valéry Inkijinoff in Storm Over Asia

Cast: Valéry Inkijinoff, I. Didintseff, Aleksandr Chistyakov, Victor Tsoppi, Fyodor Ivanov, V. Pro, Boris Barnet, Karl Gurniak, I. Inkizhinov, V. Belinskaya, Anel Sudakevich. Screenplay: Osip Brik, Ivan Novokshenov. Cinematography: Anatoli Golovnya. Art direction: M. Aronson, Sergei Kozlovsky.

The great silent Russian propaganda films depended heavily on two things the nascent Soviet Union had in abundance: faces and landscapes. This reliance on closeups and sweeping views of fields and plains sometimes resulted in a loss of narrative coherence, but put the emphasis on the people and resources that the Bolsheviks needed to exercise control over. Storm Over Asia is no exception, beginning with the windswept land and Asiatic faces of the Mongol peoples of eastern Russia, which at the time depicted in the film was still a vast battleground for the Bolsheviks and European forces. After establishing the location, the film focuses on Bair (Valéry Inkijinoff), a young hunter whose father sends him off to the bazaar to sell a silver fox pelt. In the vividly filmed bazaar, Bair is cheated by an unscrupulous European fur trader (Viktor Tsoppi), who might as well be wearing a label: bourgeois capitalist. Beaten by the henchmen for the trader, Bair escapes and joins a group of Soviet partisans fighting the occupiers. The occupation forces seem to be British, who were never a significant presence in this part of the Soviet Union, but the film is vague about such details. They manage to capture Bair, who is sent out with a soldier to be shot, but when they examine Bair's belongings they discover an ancient document indicating that he's a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. (The original title of the film, in Russian, was The Heir to Genghis Khan.) They find the wounded Bair, restore him to health, and set him up as the puppet ruler of a Mongolian state. In the end, Bair turns against the imperialists and the film concludes with a literal storm sweeping them away. It's a film full of great set-pieces, including a montage mockng the imperialists and their wives as they put on their finery and then are driven on a muddy road to meet the new Grand Lama. After an elaborate ceremony (actually filmed at a Tibetan Buddhist celebration) the lama turns out to be a small boy, not at all impressed with his visitors.   

The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)

Betty Compson and George Bancroft in The Docks of New York

Cast: George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova, Clyde Cook, Mitchell Lewis, Gustav von Seyffertitz. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, based on a story by John Monk Saunders; titles: Julian Johnson. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Film editing: Helen Lewis. 

Josef von Sternberg is mostly remembered today for his fetishization of Marlene Dietrich in romances with glamorous settings like Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932), but The Docks of New York shows that Sternberg could handle grit as well as glamour. If it's not as well known as the Dietrich films, it's partly because it was largely overlooked at the time of its release because of the flurry of interest in talkies -- it's one of the last important silent movies. But it's as strikingly visual in its way as the more opulent Sternberg movies, with the collaboration of director, cinematographer Harold Rosson, and art director Hans Dreier giving a solid story by Jules Furthman -- who also wrote Morocco and Shanghai Express -- the right flavor. Bill Roberts (George Bancroft), the burly stoker on a tramp steamer, goes ashore for a one-night leave in New York, after being warned by the engineer, Andy (Mitchell Lewis), not to come back drunk. Not one to follow his own advice, Andy then goes to a waterfront dive called the Sandbar where he is surprised to meet his wife, Lou (Olga Baclanova), whom he has abandoned. Meanwhile, Bill rescues a suicidal prostitute named Mae (Betty Compson), when she tries to drown herself, and takes the unconscious woman to a room above the Sandbar. Lou comes to the room to aid in reviving Mae while Bill goes to find some clothes for her. He steals them from a closed pawn shop and returns to find a revived Mae, who turns out to be quite pretty. They go down to the bar, where Andy puts the moves on Mae and gets into a fight with Bill, which Andy loses. Two lost souls, Mae and Bill are attracted to each other, and in a kind of what the hell way, he proposes marriage. They talk wistfully about his giving up the life at sea, and she accepts. A waterfront missionary (Gustav von Seyffertitz) performs the ceremony in the bar. But the next morning Bill has second thoughts and leaves for the ship while Mae is still asleep. Andy, however, still smarting from the beating Bill gave him, goes to the room, where Mae has discovered Bill has left her. She refuses Andy's advances and he tries to rape her, only to be shot by Lou, who has arrived just in time. Seeing the commotion outside the Sandbar, Bill returns to the scene, where he and Mae say their farewell. But when the ship sails, Bill thinks better of it, jumps overboard and swims to shore, where he finds that Mae has been arrested for stealing the clothes from the pawn shop. He confesses to the crime and is sentenced to jail, promising to Mae that he'll return once he serves his sentence. This is solid melodrama stuff, elevated by the performances, which establish the essential loneliness that unites Bill and Mae, and by the fine production values.   

The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)

Joan Crawford and Lon Chaney in The Unknown

Cast: Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Norman Kerry, Nick De Ruiz, John George, Frank Lanning. Screenplay: Tod Browning, Waldemar Young, based on a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart; titles: Joseph Farnham. Cinematography: Merritt B. Gerstad. Art direction: Richard Day, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Harry Reynolds, Errol Taggart. 

One of the kinkier movies in the Lon Chaney filmography, The Unknown betrays its pre-Code nature very early. It's set in a circus where we see women in the audience ogling a performance by the strong man, Malabar (Norman Kerry). But the mother of one of the oglers, sitting across the aisle, hisses at her son to "go home and take off that dress." Chaney plays Alonzo, whose knife-throwing act involves his lovely assistant, Nanon (Joan Crawford), the daughter of the money-grubbing Zanzi (Nick De Ruiz), owner of the circus. What makes Nanon's job more perilous is that Alonzo throws the knives with his feet, being armless. Eventually Alonzo's attraction to Nanon will involve murder, dismemberment, and a love triangle in which Alonzo almost tears his rival, Malabar, to pieces. Chaney's gift for physical transformation reaches a new peak in the movie, which requires him to do everything from throwing knives to drinking from a teacup with his toes. In fact, although Chaney learned to do many of these things, some of the actions were performed by his body double, Paul Desmuke, who was in fact armless. Careful camera manipulation kept Chaney's upper body in the frame as Desmuke actually lit cigarettes and threw knives with his feet. The Unknown was one of Crawford's earliest featured performances, in a role that MGM originally wanted Greta Garbo to play. She's still a little raw as an actress, but her presence outshines that of her leading man, Kerry, whose career fizzled as hers ignited. The Unknown, one of eight movies director Tod Browning made with Chaney, lacks the sympathy for the physically divergent of Browning's most notorious film, Freaks (1932), although Alonzo's dwarf assistant, Cojo (John George), sometimes serves as the moral corrective to Alonzo's schemes.  

October: Ten Days That Shook the World (Grigoriy Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein, 1928)

Cast: Nikolay Popov, Vasili Nikandrov, Layaschenko, Chibisov, Boris Libanov, Mikholyev, Nikolai Podvolsky, Smelski, Eduard Tisse. Screenplay: Sergei Eisenstein, Grigoriy Aleksandrov. Cinematography: Eduard Tisse. Production design: Vasili Kovrigin. Film editing: Esfir Tobak. 

A whirlwind of action and film editing, October was created to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution that put the Bolsheviks in power and gave birth to the Soviet Union. From the beginning it was subject to ideological scrutiny, withdrawn and re-edited -- to eliminate, among other things, references to Trotsky, who had recently been purged by Stalin. Released internationally as Ten Days That Shook the World, lifting the title of John Reed's bestselling 1919 book, it was compared unfavorably to director Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, and even an admirer like Vsevolod Pudovkin, a director who was no stranger to the kind of pressures under which Eisenstein labored in walking the line between art and politics, acknowledged that October was regarded as a "powerful failure." The film fails for us today to craft a clear-sighted account of the critical moments leading up to its spectacular climax, the storming of the Winter Palace. Eisenstein's montage techniques, used so powerfully in Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin,  sometimes feel obvious and superficial, as in the anti-religious montage linking an image of Jesus with images from other religions, concluding with a prehistoric idol, or the juxtaposition of Alexander Kerensky with a mechanical peacock. But as an action movie, it's compelling, from the scene in which the Provisional Government raises the bridges to shut off the protesters, trapping some of them, along with an unfortunate horse, in the machinery, to the final assault on the Winter Palace. Never subtle, and never convincing as an accurate version of history, October still has an aura of epic grandeur. Perhaps it's only for us to feel the irony in the film's opening sequence, pulling down a statue of Alexander III, which echoes for us not only the images of Saddam Hussein's statue being toppled but also Vladimir Putin's dedication of a new statue to the same czar in 2017.

The Eagle (Clarence Brown, 1925)

Vilma Banky and Rudolph Valentino in The Eagle

Cast: Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Banky, Louise Dresser, Albert Conti, James A. Marcus, George Nichols, Carrie Clark Ward. Screenplay: Hanns Kräly, based on a novel by Alexander Pushkin; titles: George Marion Jr. Cinematography: George Barnes. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Hal C. Kern. 

It's easy to overlook the absurdities of the story of The Eagle because the filmmakers embrace them, and everyone seems to be having so much fun. Rudolph Valentino is Vladimir Dubrovsky, a dashing (what else?) lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Guard, who catches the eye of Catherine the Great (Louise Dresser) when he rescues a pretty young woman (Vilma Banky) and her aunt (Carrie Clark Ward) from a carriage pulled by a runaway horse. Catherine wants him for herself, of course, but Vladimir is shocked by her advances and flees. Meanwhile, he learns that his father has been victimized by a wicked aristocrat, Kyrilla Troekouroff (James A. Marcus), who has confiscated his lands. When his father dies, Vladimir vows vengeance against Kyrilla, and assumes the identity of the Black Eagle, a Zorro-like figure who wears a mask and rights the wrongs of Kyrilla against the peasantry. (In fact, the Black Eagle wasn't in the Pushkin story on which the movie is based; he was inspired by the success of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro directed by Fred Niblo.) And wouldn't you know it, Kyrilla's daughter, Mascha, turns out to be the pretty young woman he rescued in the runaway carriage. Disguising himself as a French teacher, he works his way into Kyrilla's household and woos Mascha. Meanwhile, the empress has put a price on Vladimir's head for desertion, so when he manages to win Masca and defeat her father, he still faces a firing squad. This is probably Valentino's most light-hearted performance, and he gets fine support from Banky and especially Dresser as the randy czarina.  

The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)

Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad

Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Julianne Johnston, Anna May Wong, Snitz Edwards, Sojin Kamayama, Brandon Hurst, Tote Du Crow, Noble Johnson. Screenplay: Lotta Woods, Douglas Fairbanks, Achmed Abdullah, James T. O'Donohoe. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: William Nolan. 

Back when Bagdad was synonymous with flying carpets and not prolonged international conflict, Douglas Fairbanks produced what is either a magical romp or an example of Orientalism at its worst, depending on your point of view. But for the purposes of film history, let's suspend political and social consciousness and appreciate The Thief of Bagdad for what it accomplished: an amusing spectacle, with marvelous sets and (for the time) remarkable special effects. Add to that Fairbanks's energetic performance -- if you can endure the balletic pantomime he often slips into -- and you've got a classic for the usual kids of all ages. It holds up well even today, in part because it's all spectacle: Sound would be superfluous. And yes, Sojin Kamayama's Mongol prince adheres to the "yellow peril" stereotype, a foreshadowing of Flash Gordon's Ming the Merciless, with Anna May Wong slinking around as his partner in malfeasance, but we're treating this as camp, right? Julianne Johnston's princess is a little vapid, not quite the astonishing beauty who's supposed to sweep the thief off his feet and turn him away from larceny toward love. The movie is a shade too long, and it loses some momentum when the thief goes off on his quest to find the thing that will win the princess's love. Even though it helps him save Bagdad from the Mongol hordes, I found his box of magic powder (if that's what it is -- the movie is a little vague about it) less impressive than the Persian prince's (Mathilde Comont) flying carpet, the Indian Prince's (Noble Johnson) crystal ball, and the Mongol prince's golden apple that gives him power over life and death. But even when the story lags, there's always something fun to watch.   

The Great White Silence (Herbert G. Ponting, 1922)

Cast: Robert Falcon Scott, Herbert G. Ponting, Henry R. Bowers, Edgar Evans, Lawrence E.G. Oates, Edward Adrian Wilson. 

Back in the 1980s, Ted Turner provoked an outcry with his proposal to colorize the black-and-white films in his library. Filmmakers, historians, and critics protested, and with good reason: I remember watching Turner's colorized Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and being startled by the paisley print on a blouse worn by Ingrid Bergman; I had never noticed it before the added colors made it stand out, which was certainly not the intention of the director, cinematographer Arthur Edeson, or perhaps even the costume designer, Orry-Kelly. Eventually, legislation put restrictions on such manipulation of old movies. But colorization was not a new thing: From the very beginning, filmmakers tried to add color to movies, usually by tinting the film stock a solid color: blue for night scenes; reds, oranges, and yellows for hot settings like Death Valley in Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924); even pink for love scenes. Most silent movies after 1920 were colored in this way. But there were also attempts at more realistic coloring: For some of his short films, like A Trip to the Moon (1920), George Méliès used a technique devised by Elisabeth Thuillier, a kind of factory assembly-line of colorists who painstakingly added colors to the actors, costumes, and sets in each frame of the film. The technique proved too cumbersome and expensive as movies reached feature length. But it's one of the hallmarks of Herbert G. Ponting's documentary about the fateful Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott in 1910-13, The Great White Silence. Even though the whiteness of ice and snow is Antarctica's dominant feature, Ponting decided to hand-tint the footage he had shot ten years earlier, and thereby accentuated the contrast between human and animal life and the deadly whiteness of the continent. Color provides the life in the life-and-death struggle to reach -- and return from -- the South Pole. The images Ponting captured as the photographer for the expedition, using photographic equipment that now seems primitive, are the essence of the movie, and they often seem as fresh as if they were shot yesterday. Ponting was not allowed to accompany Scott from the base camp to the pole, which is from our point of view fortunate, as we might not have the record he made of the expedition now. But he filmed Scott and his fellow explorers as they rehearsed for the journey, trekking through the snows, setting up tents, bedding down, so he was able to give us at least some sense of what the men endured. Too bad that The Great White Silence is accompanied by a narrative that seems antique in ways that Ponting's images aren't. There's a lot of rather jingoist rhetoric about how Scott's expedition is a tribute to the English spirit, a credit to what Ponting calls "the Race," by which he seems to mean Anglo-Saxons. (One of the crew members has a pet black cat with an unfortunately racist name.) Ponting seems unconcerned with the irony that the doughty Englishmen of Scott's team failed to reach the South Pole before their chief competitor in the race, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Ponting's images of the animal life of Antarctica, seals and gulls and penguins, are accompanied by coy, condescending, anthropomorphic commentary that sets the tone for nature documentaries that followed. Still, it's an astonishing and invaluable film that fully merited the careful reconstruction that makes it available to us a century later. 

The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924)

Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh

 Cast: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Max Hiller, Emilie Kurz, Hans Unterkircher, George John. Screenplay: Carl Mayer. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Production design: Edgar G. Ulmer. Film editing: Elfi Böttrich. 

F.W. Murnau's landmark film The Last Laugh tells a simple story: An elderly, preening doorman (Emil Jannings) at a luxury hotel struggles to unload a large trunk one rainy evening, and the hotel manager (Hans Unterkircher) takes notice. The doorman goes home to his apartment building where he's greeted with the usual deference accorded to his regal bearing and his brass-buttoned uniform. But when he returns to work the next day he finds a new doorman wearing a copy of the uniform. The hotel manager tells him that he's been replaced, and to turn in the uniform and report to his new job: lavatory attendant. Appalled and crushed, he swipes his old uniform and goes home that night wearing it as if nothing has happened. His niece (Maly Delschaft) is being married. and the ex-doorman celebrates well into the night. Still tipsy the next day, he goes back to the hotel and his new job, stashing the uniform in a checkroom at the railroad station. He bumbles through his duties, but when he returns home he's mocked by his neighbors, who have discovered his fall from grace. The next day he's even more disenchanted with his new job, and incurs the anger of a patron who reports him to the hotel manager, who reprimands him. That night he stays in the washroom, where he's found by the night watchman (Georg John), who helps him retrieve the old uniform and return it to storage. Exhausted, he falls asleep in his chair, and the night watchman tenderly covers him with his coat. And that's where the one and only intertitle occurs: It proclaims that this is where the story would most likely end in reality, with the lavatory attendant living out the rest of his days with "little to look forward to but death." But instead, "The author took pity on him ... and provided quite an improbable epilogue." In short, the protagonist inherits a fortune and invites the night watchman to join him as they're wined and dined by the hotel. It's an audacious ending to a remarkably innovative film. The innovations have received most of the attention, especially Karl Freund's camerawork, which involved far more movement than was usual for the day, with Freund sometimes mounting the camera on a wheelchair or strapping it to his body and riding a bicycle through the sets. The doorman's drunkenness is simulated with a subjective camera, double-exposures, and focus changes. The absence of intertitles is also striking, with no loss of narrative coherence and only a little uncertainty about who some of the characters are: I wasn't sure about the identity of the bride until I saw her listed as his niece in the credits on IMDb. But it's the provision of an alternate ending that strikes me as most audacious. The English title, The Last Laugh, seems to derive from this "improbable epilogue." (The German title,  Der letzte Mann, means "the last man.") Does the last laugh really belong to Murnau and scenarist Carl Mayer, mocking the audience's sentimentality in wanting an unearned happy ending? 

La Roue (Abel Gance, 1923)

Ivy Close and Séverin-Mars in La Roue

Cast: Séverin-Mars, Ivy Close, Gabriel de Gravone, Pierre Magnier, Georges Térof, Gil Clary, Max Maxudian. Screenplay: Abel Gance. Cinematography: Gaston Brun, Mac Bujard, Léonce-Henri Burel, Maurice Duverger. Art direction: Robert Boudrioz. Film editing: Marguerite Beaujé, Abel Gance. Music: Arthur Honegger.

The plot is operatic, the technique is novelistic, and the aim is tragic. Abel Gance's La Roue (aka The Wheel) never satisfies on any of those counts, but it's not without a lot of effort on his part as well as his actors and technicians. At its premiere, it ran for somewhere between seven-and-a-half and nine hours (depending on which source you trust), spread over three days, and was a success, earning praise from Jean Cocteau among others. Gance then produced a cut that ran for two and a half hours, which was the version most people saw for many years until film historians set about to reproduce the original. That restoration is the one I sat through for sevenish hours spread over four nights on the Criterion Channel. I have seen seven-hour movies (and some that seemed like it) before, most notably Bela Tarr's Sátántangó (1994). The urge I usually have afterward is to try to justify the expenditure of time, typically by categorizing it as an "immersive experience." That approach works with films like Tarr's, which has a grounded reality to it that provides a look into a human existence other than my own, which is the aim of all narrative art. It's less easily justified when the film is as preposterous as Gance's is in many ways. I said it was operatic in its plotting, and here it's useful to think of the melodramatic excesses of works like Verdi's Il Trovatore, based on a florid Spanish play that involves foundlings, mistaken identities, and people torn between passion and duty. La Roue has a foundling, survivor of a train wreck, rescued by a railroad engineer who raises her along with his own son, allowing both of them to believe they are siblings, which works until she blossoms into a young woman and first the father and then the son realize they're in love with her. The treatment of this story evokes, as others have noted, the novels of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, but it also reminds me of Thomas Hardy's works, in which fate (which Hardy calls "hap," or the blind workings of chance) forestalls any efforts by the protagonists to chart their own course. And since the story involves a kind of incestuous passion, the legend of Oedipus comes to mind, and sure enough Gance quotes Sophocles in one of the intertitles. But of course it's a movie, and that necessitates a good deal of spectacle, starting with the train wreck that sets the plot in motion. La Roue is never dull, and it's sometimes emotionally affecting, but it's not an opera (although Arthur Honegger's score suggests its potential in that regard) and it's not a novel or a tragedy. It's a movie, and one with a great deal to watch if you're willing to commit seven hours to it, but I think you have to be devoted to learning about the craft of movie-making to profit much from it.   

Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922)

Erich von Stroheim and Maude George in Foolish Wives

Cast: Erich von Stroheim, Miss DuPont, Maude George, Mae Busch, Rudolph Christians, Dale Fuller, Albert Edmondson, Cesare Gravina, Malvina Polo, C.J. Allen. Screenplay: Erich von Stroheim; titles: Marian Ainslee, Walter Anthony. Cinematography: William H. Daniels, Ben F. Reynolds. Art direction: Richard Day, Elmer Sheehy, Van Alstein. Film editing: Arthur Ripley. 

Erich von Stroheim's reach exceeded Hollywood's grasp, though not without some initial encouragement by the studio heads. Universal eagerly promoted Foolish Wives as "the first million-dollar movie," and most of that sum was apparent on screen: the huge sets re-creating Monte Carlo that were built on the Monterey Peninsula in California. Some of it, too, wasn't visible: Stroheim reportedly insisted on having underwear created for his actors bearing the monograms of their characters. But there were limits to what the studio would do for the director: When Rudolph Christians, a key actor in the film, died in mid-filming, Stroheim proposed that his scenes be reshot with his stand-in, Robert Edeson, but was forced to give in to the studio's work-around: Edeson played the role in the remaining scenes with his back to the camera. But mostly, the studio's resistance was to Stroheim's vision of a movie that would run somewhere between six and 10 hours and be shown on two consecutive nights. He was forced to settle for a three-and-a-half-hour version, which was subsequently cut again under the instructions of the New York censors. More cuts by the studio followed after the film was a box office disappointment, so that what we see today is a reconstruction cobbled together from existing versions. But after that, what we have is a juicy, kinky melodrama about decadent Europe trying to corrupt innocent America. Stroheim plays a con man pretending to be an exiled Russian aristocrat, Count Sergius Karamzin, living with two women he says are his cousins: the phony princesses Olga Petchnikoff (Maude George) and Vera Petchnikoff (Mae Busch). They're out to milk whatever cash they can from suckers at Monte Carlo, and Sergius sets his sights on Helen Hughes (Miss DuPont), the wife of an American diplomat (Christians). In his down time from that seduction, he also pursues, with purely carnal intent, a hotel maid (Dale Fuller) and the pretty but mentally challenged daughter (Malvina Polo) of the man who counterfeits the money Sergius uses to bilk gamblers at the casino. There's a spectacular storm and an even more spectacular fire, too, before Sergius gets perhaps more than what's coming to him. Even in its truncated version, Foolish Wives is almost too much.