Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)

Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett in Me and My Gal

Cast: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Marion Burns, George Walsh, J. Farrell MacDonald, Noel Madison, Henry B. Walthall, Bert Hanlon, Adrian Morris, George Chandler. Screenplay: Arthur Kober, Philip Klein, Barry Conners. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Gordon Wiles. Film editing: Jack Murray.

Why have I never seen Me and My Gal before? Is it because it's not an easy movie to pigeonhole, being not quite romantic comedy, not quite screwball, and not quite crime drama? Or because it's one of those pre-Code movies that teeter on the edge of seriousness and back off from it in sometimes uncomfortable ways? It starts with an old man about to drown his dog and ends with the police detective protagonist fudging the truth to protect the not entirely innocent. And in between it's wall-to-wall wisecracks, most of them delivered by a never-better Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, who does the gum-chewing dame as well as anyone, even Joan Blondell. Tracy plays Danny Dolan, a cop whose attitude toward those he's supposed to protect and serve is summed up in his response to someone telling him there's been another bank robbery: "Oh, who'd the bank rob now?" And when told that it was the bank that got robbed, retorts, "Ah, turned the tables on 'em, eh? Smart!" There's also a slapstick drunk, a well-staged bank break-in, and even a parody of the Clark Gable and Norma Shearer movie based on Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (Robert Z. Leonard, 1932), which Dolan remembers as Strange Inner Tube. Much of the credit for turning potential chaos into a thoroughly entertaining movie has to go to Raoul Walsh, one those Hollywood tough-guy directors who seem not to get the recognition they deserve today. 

Le Million (René Clair, 1931)

René Lefèvre and Annabella in Le Million

Cast: Annabella, René Lefèvre, Jean-Louis Allibert, Paul Ollivier, Constantin Siroesco, Vanda Gréville, Odette Talazac, Pedro Elviro, Jane Pierson, André Michaud, Eugène Stuber, Pierre Alcover, Armand Bernard. Screenplay: René Clair, based on a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Music: Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès, Georges Van Parys. 

The French do wonderful things with air. They invented the soufflé and Champagne, and the Montgolfier brothers mastered the art of ballooning. And no French director had a greater gift for buoyancy than René Clair, whose mastery of pacing keeps even the most cockamamie of stories from collapsing, going flat, or crashing to Earth. Le Million is the quintessential Clair film, a musical farce that inspired countless movies, some of which don't always stay aloft. You can see the lineaments of the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) in it as well as Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). The story is much ado about a lottery ticket left in an old jacket owned by a young artist (René Lefèvre) with a mountain of debts, and it carries us from his studio to the jail to backstage at the opera and back again, sometimes journeying over the rooftops of Paris, all of which are embodied not by the real things but by Lazare Meerson's evocative sets. The music is pretty but forgettable, which is really all you need it to be. 

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F.W. Murnau, 1931)

Cast: Matahi, Anne Chevalier, Bill Bambridge, Hitu. Screenplay: F.W. Murnau, Robert J. Flaherty. Cinematography: Floyd Crosby. Film editing: Arthur A. Brooks. 

Humankind is its own serpent in the garden. If you expect F.W. Murnau's Tabu: A Story of the South Seas to be yet another fable about innocence spoiled by civilization, you're wrong. For Murnau, the fault lies in humans themselves, in their insistence on proscribing natural and instinctive behavior. The taboo that precipitates the crisis in the filn is not imposed by the colonizing Europeans, although we see the consequences of the clash between their value system and that of the islanders well enough, but in the tribal imperative that prevents Matahi and Reri from consummating their love. Reri is chosen to become the tribe's sacred virgin, an honor she doesn't want, so she flees with Matahi and is pursued by the tribal elder, Hitu, who is tasked with putting the lovers to death. On the French-colonized island where they land, they encounter a culture they don't understand, particularly its attitude toward money, a foreign concept that will be their undoing. But the valorizing of virginity produces the central taboo of the film. Much has been made of the "gay gaze" in the film: the camera's lingering on beautiful male bodies, which is attributed to Murnau's own gayness. But if Tabu is in any way a product of Murnau's sexual orientation, it's in the emphasis on the central theme: the proscription of desire. In Murnau's case it was the desire for others of his own sex, so the virginity taboo is a metaphor for the rejection of queerness that Murnau encountered in his own life. 

Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)

Cast: Stepan Shkurat, Semen Svashenko, Yuliya Solintseva, Yelena Maksimova, Mykola Nademsky, Petro Masokha, Ivan Franko, Volodymyr Mikhajlov, Pavlo Petrik. Screenplay: Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Danill Demutsky. Art direction: Vasyl Vasylovych Krychevsky. Film editing: Alexsandr Dovzhenko. 

At once lyrical, tragic, and enigmatic, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth might be viewed today as an example of how Ukraine has always been a temptation and a thorn in the side of Russia -- or at least those in Russia who would try to rule it. As a film about the collectivization of agriculture in the young Soviet Union it bears comparison to Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929), which attempted that subject with a much heavier hand: Its celebration of the tractor, in comparison with Dovzhenko's somewhat problematic introduction of a tractor whose radiator has to be pissed in before it will function, concludes with a tractor ballet. And Eisenstein's treatment of the reactionary clergy involves an all too obvious montage in which the followers of the church are juxtaposed with a herd of sheep; Dovzhenko is content with just showing his priest's frenzied proclamations of anathema on the collectivists. But Eisenstein's film, like Dovzhenko's, met with official disapproval: Collectivization was just too important to Stalin not to undergo intense ideological scrutiny. Artistically, Dovzhenko's Earth has to be judged the greater film, one in which the relationship of beauty and terror informs almost every frame.

L'Âge d'Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)

Lya Lys in L'Âge d'Or

Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque, Max Ernst, Artigas, Lionel Salem, Germaine Noizet, Bonaventura Ibáñez. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, based on a novel by the Marquis de Sade. Cinematography: Albert Duverger. Production design: Alexandre Trauner. Film editing: Luis Buñuel. 

Salvador Dalí was a bit of a hack, more interested in making money off of the bourgeoises he affected to mock than in advancing his art. So it was inevitable that he and Luis Buñuel would part ways, especially after Dalï turned to the right, supporting Francisco Franco and embracing Catholicism. Although their collaboration produced two extraordinary films, the 1929 short Un Chien Andalou and the feature L'Âge d'Or, it was Buñuel's career that proved to be the more lasting in terms of critical respect. And if there's anything memorable about L'Âge d'Or, it's Buñuel's ability to bring the Surrealist aesthetic to life in semi-narrative fashion. The extent of Dalí's actual contribution to the film has always been somewhat in question, especially since one target of the film's satire is the Catholic Church, which Dalí never quite abandoned before returning to it enthusiastically. The movie is essentially a series of vignettes, starting with documentary-like section on scorpions, then tracing the efforts of a couple to consummate their love, always frustrated by conventional society and religion, and concluding with an episode derived from the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, in which a group of people emerge from a castle where they have been participating in an orgy, led by a man who looks like Jesus. Bizarre images -- a cow in a bed, a woman sucking the toe of a marble statue, a cross decorated with the scalps of women, and so on -- punctuate the entire film, which is often unsettling and often very funny. The film's assault on the complacency of the bourgeoisie would become a constant in Buñuel's films, and the party scene clearly anticipates the experiences of the trapped partygoers in The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). David Thomson has noted the similarity of the country house party in Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939), pointing out that the gamekeeper in Renoir's film is played by Gaston Modot, who is the male half of the central couple in L'Âge d'Or, but I think we can also see its influence in such French New Wave landmarks as Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) and La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961).   

A Throw of Dice (Franz Osten, 1929)

Charu Roy and Seeta Devi in A Throw of Dice

Cast: Seeta Devi, Charu Roy, Himansu Rai, Modhu Bose, Sarada Gupta, Tincory Charkrabarty. Lala Bijoykishen. Screenplay: Niranjan Pal, W.A. Burton, based on a story from the Mahabharata. Cinematography: Emil Schünemann. Art direction: Promode Nath. 

India would become one of the great filmmaking centers of the world, but the silent film A Throw of Dice, though one of the early classic films made in the subcontinent, was directed by a German, Franz Osten, who would be arrested in India in 1939 for being a member of the Nazi party. Osten was a prolific filmmaker who did much of his work in India, often in collaboration with actor-producer Himansu Rai, who plays the heavy in this story based on an episode in the Mahabharata. It's about two kings who fall in love with Sunita (Seeta Devi), the beautiful daughter of a hermit, Kanwa (Sarada Gupta), who has fled the corruptions of court life. When one of the kings, Ranjit (Charu Roy), wins the heart of Sunita, the other, Sohat (Rai), plots against him. He proposes a game of dice, with the stakes being each other's kingdom. Using loaded dice, Sohat not only wins Ranjit's kingdom and the hand of Sunita, but also tricks Ranjit into becoming his slave. But when Sohat's deception is uncovered, Ranjit's subject mobilize and attack Sohat's palace. In desperation, Sohat leaps from a high cliff. It's a slight tale in the telling, but the beauty of the north Indian setting and the opulence of the palaces give the story a sumptuous frame. There's also a cast of thousands on display and a whole menagerie of tigers and elephants and other animals. 

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.