All the Movies Podcast: Recent Episodes
Greg Gioia
Max Linder made 233 films. I’ve clearly missed the boat on him, as Max Wants a Divorce was among his final films. He only made 10 more after this one.
I watched this on a DVD that includes 3 other Linder films. Click the image below if you’d like to buy a copy of your own. (I get nothing if you do, so this isn’t a ploy to make money.)
The film is in the public domain, and can be viewed here.
Here is the other film I watched, from 1911, which predates Chaplin’s earliest works by 3 years. Linder is already light years ahead of Chaplin here, and it’s criminal that he’s not better known.
Next I’m watching A Revolutionary [1917], directed by Yevgeny Bauer.
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Another Mary Pickford movie, this one is listed on imdb.com as The Poor Little Rich Girl, though you can see from the poster below that it was originally titled with an “a” rather than a “the.”
The film has all sorts of clever camerawork and plot points. Here’s my favorite: when Pickford shouts through the keyhole that she hates her new playmate, we see the words come bursting through to the other side!
I watched this on a Blu-ray, which is, sadly, now out of print. As of this writing, there is a copy for sale on Amazon for $213. It’s a great disc, with 4 great films, but probably not worth that much. Or is it? There is one for sale on eBay for a mere $475! Click the image below if you’d like to buy the less expensive copy.
The film is in the public domain, and can be viewed here. The quality isn’t great, but it’s definitely watchable.
Next I’m watching Max Wants a Divorce [1917], directed by Max Linder.
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This is the second Tom Mix film I’ve seen. It was re-released, and likely heavily edited, as Single Shot Parker.
The film is in the public domain, and can be viewed here.
Next I’m watching The Poor Little Rich Girl [1917], directed by Maurice Tourneur.
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In April, I shared a list of 52 films that I considered to be iconic classics that someone should watch if they want to become well-versed in film history. I wrote it after a discussion in the comments section of a post written by Kyle Worley, who had created his own list of 52 films which was itself a response to my brother Ted’s post outlining a 52-week crash course in the humanities.
I’d didn’t know Kyle when I saw his film list, but after we’d both shared our lists, we kept in touch, and the other day we had a conversation about how we compiled our lists, and the our approaches to film in general. I’m sharing that conversation now.
We both feel that conversations like ours are not as common as they once were. In the social media era, people tend to offer a quick like or comment on an article, often to spark an argument or simply to insult the author, but in-depth discussions have fallen by the wayside. We’d both like to see more of those, and hope Substack will facilitate this sort of interaction.
On that topic, I am always open to talking with any of my readers about nearly any topic. I'm even happy to be told I’m wrong, or that I am misguided. I like discussions. I feel I learn from them, and I nearly always walk away from any conversation with my own opinions slightly shifted, or at least fine-tuned, for hearing what another person has to say.
Please enjoy this video, and feel free to engage me in a conversation!
(Normally, I only share video posts with paid subscribers, but as Kyle and I are both sharing this today, I’m opening this up to everyone.)
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com/subscribe
Today I’m talking about another of the short films Chaplin made for Mutual Film Corporation.
The film is in the public domain, and can be viewed here.
I watched it on the same Blu-ray set I’ve shared previously, which includes the 12 short films Chaplin made for Mutual in 1916 and 1917. You can click the image below if you want to buy a copy of your very own.
Next I’m watching The Heart of Texas Ryan [1917], directed by E.A. Martin.
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This is the 100th film I’ve watched since I began this project. You can scroll back through my Substack to see the other films, or you can see the Letterboxd Lists I’ve created for each “season” of this podcast.
It’s based on an 1862 poem by Henrik Ibsen. You can read the poem, translated into English, here.
The film is in the public domain, and can be viewed here.
Next I’m watching Easy Street [1917], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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I watched this film on YouTube. You can view it below.
Next I’m watching A There Was [1917], directed by Victor Sjöström.
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I watched on YouTube. I’ve linked the video below in case you’d like to watch, too.
Next I’m watching The Dying Swan [1917], directed by Yevgeny Bauer.
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1917 was a turning point for American cinema. In the coming weeks I will talk about 44 films from that year. I’ll also intersperse some written articles about other topics. If you’d like to know why 1917 was a turning point, listen to the podcast! :)
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If you know me in real life, you know that for most of my life I’ve been enchanted by anything and everything Tiki, and one of my idols is the legendary creator of the Tiki phenomenon, Donn Beach. His isn’t a household name, but his life story is a fascinating one, and any time I’ve regaled friends or clients with tales about Donn, the response has been enthusiastic, to say the least.
Last year, directors Alex Lamb and Max Well released a wonderful documentary about Donn Beach, titled The Donn of Tiki. I watched it once online, and then had the good fortune to see it again on a big screen, with an audience full of Tiki aficionados no less, courtesy of Alex and Max.
The film is a delight. Most of it is made up with interviews with people who knew, or were affiliated with, Donn, but as Donn is no longer around, the creators made the clever, and fitting, in my mind, choice to have a puppet, reminiscent of the Rankin/Bass puppets of my childhood, to act out the part of Donn, while actual recordings of interviews with Donn Beach are played.
I’m taking today, during the break between the films of 1916 and 1917, to share a conversation I had with Alex and Max. We sat down at Velvet Taco, in Austin, Texas, and spoke for over an hour on topics ranging from our favorite films, our “handshake five” films, our early cinematic experiences, and, of course, Donn Beach.
I hope you enjoy listening to the interview. If you are curious about the film, here’s the trailer.
You can learn more about the film, and possibly see it if it comes to your town, on this web page.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com/subscribe
I watched 34 movies from the year 1916. You can see them in a Letterboxd list here.
Next I’m sharing an interview with the directors of a modern film, and after that I’m digging into the films of 1917!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com/subscribe
Today I’m talking about the final film from 1916 in my list!
Next I’m recapping the films of 1916.
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Next I’m watching The Matrimaniac [1916], directed by Paul Powell.
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I watched it on the same Blu-ray set I’ve shared previously, which includes the 12 short films he made for Mutual in 1916 and 1917. You can click the image below if you want to buy a copy of your very own.
Or, you can watch it on YouTube, linked below, as the film is now in the public domain.
Next I’m watching Twisted Trails [1916], directed by Tom Mix.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com/subscribe
An advertisement for the series:
You can watch this on YouTube, linked at the bottom of this post, as it is in the public domain. I watched it on the Blu-ray release of The Cossack Whip, where it’s included as an extra feature. You can click the image below if you want to buy a copy for yourself. The main feature is excellent.
Next I’m watching The Rink [1916], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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Here are a couple extras I found while doing research about this film. The first is the original “Music Plot" for the film, which are the songs suggested as musical accompaniment for the film. Not every picture came with one of these, and most that were created have been lost, so it’s nice to know what the filmmakers thought would best accompany each scene in the film.
While I could not find a movie poster for this film, I found a couple versions of the booking sheet that would have been sent to theaters encouraging them to play the film. Here’s the other one I found.
As far as I can tell, this film isn’t online. You can buy it at the link below by clicking on the regrettably low-res image of the Blu-ray. I highly recommend it, and all of Collins’ films.
Next I’m watching Mary and Gretel [1916], directed by Howard S. Moss.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com/subscribe
I watched it on the same Blu-ray set I’ve shared previously, which includes the 12 short films he made for Mutual in 1916 and 1917. You can click the image below if you want to buy a copy of your very own.
Or, you can watch it on YouTube, linked below, as the film is now in the public domain.
Next I’m watching The Cossack Whip [1916], directed by John H. Collins.
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I own this on Blu-ray, a copy of which you can buy by clicking on the image below.
If you don’t want to buy a copy, the film is in the public domain, and you can watch it on YouTube.
Next I’m watching Behind the Screen [1916], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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Here’s a link to watch the movie on YouTube.
Next I’m watching East is East [1916], directed by Henry Edwards.
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I have a Blu-ray of My Darling Clementine, which contains this film as an extra. If you’d like to buy that, I’ve linked it below. I’ve also found the film on YouTube, also linked below, if you’d like to watch it there.
Next I’m watching American Aristocracy [1916], directed by Lloyd Ingraham.
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This has been added to my Letterboxd list of The Best Movies Ever.
I have a DVD of this, but the quality isn’t great. I watched it a second time on YouTube, linked below, and honestly, it looks at least as good on YouTube as it does on the janky DVD I have. I wish this, and all of Hart’s films, were restored. Maybe someday.
Next I’m watching The Bandit’s Wager [1916], directed by Francis Ford.
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You can watch a 4k restoration from a 35mm nitrate print, which is about as good as it gets, at the link below. The soundtrack by Orlando Perez Rosso is great, too. I wish all the old silents looked this good!
Next I’m watching The Return of Draw Egan [1916], directed by William S. Hart.
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I watched it on the same Blu-ray set I’ve shared previously, which includes the 12 short films he made for Mutual in 1916 and 1917. You can click the image below if you want to buy a copy of your very own.
Next I’m watching 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [1916], directed by Stuart Paton.
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Today I’m joined by film historian Dante Ficeti for a discussion of D.W. Griffith’s epic masterpiece Intolerance. This will also be the first podcast I record without a written accompaniment. Wish me luck!
This is the Blu-ray I own. It features a beautiful restoration of the film, along with the excised films The Mother and the Law and The Fall of Babylon. This is well worth the purchase price, and will be a welcome addition to any collection.
Next I’m watching The Pawn Shop [1916], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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This is the 9th short film featuring Chaplin that I’ve watched thus far in the chronology. I liked him a bit more this time around than I did in some of the previous films, though he’s still a little bit mean-spirited and cavalier for my tastes. Nonetheless, I can see why he was as big a star as he was in his era, and his films always have some fun gags.
This time around Chaplin plays a tailor’s assistant. As you may expect, he’s not a very good assistant, and bumbles about the job. He gets into big trouble when he accidentally burns the trousers of a Count while ironing them. That’s a fireable offense, and he finds himself out of work.
His former boss learns that the Count is supposed to attend a fancy party being thrown by Miss Moneybags, but won’t be able to attend. Hoping to score some of those bags of money, the tailor disguises himself as a count and shows up at the party. Coincidentally, Chaplin also ends up at the party, and begins competing with his ex-boss for the affection of Miss Moneybags. Hilarity ensues, in the form of non-stop sight gags and action sequences featuring a dance floor, a staircase, pastries to the face, and all the expected Chaplin stunts.
The ante is upped when the real Count shows up after all. He summons the police to deal with the imposters. After a spectacular chase scene, Chaplin makes his escape, leaving behind the tailor, who is arrested.
I’m definitely growing accustomed to Chaplin’s style, and finding his films more and more enjoyable each time one pops up in the chronology. My young sons (ages 6 and 8) adore him.
I watched it on the same Blu-ray set I’ve shared previously, which includes the 12 short films he made for Mutual in 1916 and 1917. You can click the image below if you want to buy a copy of your very own.
Next I’m watching Intolerance [1916], directed by D.W. Griffith.
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Socially conscious movies were all the rage in the 1910s. I’ve already seen films that have dealt with abortion, child labor, prostitution, blackmail, forced marriage, rape, and more, so it’s high time heroin addiction joined the fray. It does so courtesy of Norma Talmadge, making her 5th appearance in the chronology, and her first since Going Straight.
This time around, Talmadge plays Renee, an assistant to John Minturn, a painter played by Tully Marshall. She’s somewhat lazy, prone to sleeping in and slacking off at work, and we learn that she’s taken to shooting up morphine in order to give herself the occasional pick-me-up.
We’re told in a title card that Renee developed her morphine addiction during her service as a wartime nurse. Interestingly, the U.S. didn’t declare war on Germany until April 6, 1917, nearly a full year after this film was released. I have to wonder if that card was added after the fact, during a re-release of this film, as it would make no sense to audiences in 1916. If anything, it seems like she’s taking it to combat her ADHD, as she’s awfully unfocused on her work, and life in general, and only perks up and gets down to business after she’s shot up, much like Coke Ennyday in The Mystery of the Leaping Fish.
The story begins with Minturn seeking models for a painting he’s working on, and settling on Patricia, the daughter of one his wealthy patrons, played by Marguerite Marsh. I’ve seen her sister Mae in a few films, but this is my first chance to see her, although she doesn’t have a major role in the film. She’s mostly there to propel the action. Sir Gordon Galloway, her fiancé, shows up, angry that she’s stooped to modeling for a painter. Unfortunately for the boyfriend, and Patricia’s father, who is eager to marry her to the wealthy, if foppish, Galloway, Patricia has fallen in love with Minturn, and they begin an affair.
As this is happening, Minturn learns of Renee’s addiction. Rather than deny using it, or promising to quit, she instead extols the drug’s positives, and promises him that he’ll be even more clever and creative if only he’d give it a try. He’s unconvinced, but in a moment of curiosity, he injects himself, and immediately discovers she was right. His painter’s block is gone! He’s Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael all rolled up into one!
He’s also much more open about his love for Patricia, and when she shows up, the two of them elope. Everyone is devastated. Patricia’s father disowns her, Galloway is inconsolable, and even Renee is glum, for she too was in love with Minturn. Worse, when she goes to shoot up to take the edge off of life, she learns that Minturn has exhausted her stash!
From there we see Minturn’s downfall, replete with hallucinations and attempts to get his new wife hooked on heroin, juxtaposed with Renee’s salvation, as she kicks the habit. When Minturn comes to her for a fix, she realizes she’s responsible for his situation, and decides to help him get clean.
A lot more happens, but that’s the gist of it to this point, after which Minturn eventually makes his way to a farm, where he cleans up just in time to return to the city and rescue Patricia from the clutches of a drug dealer.
If I’ve made it sound comical or over the top, I’ve misled you, as this is a very serious, and very well-executed film. It isn’t a medically accurate depiction of how a person injects heroin, and it is guilty of portraying addiction as a case of one hit immediately turning a person into a hardened junkie, but what it lacks in realism there it makes up for in how well it demonstrates what addiction can do to a person. It’s a grim and serious movie, and while it lacks the intensity and realism of something like Requiem for a Dream, it’s as close to that as a film made in 1916 could possibly have been.
I bought the DVD to watch John H. Collins’ Children of Eve, but was of course intrigued by the ostensible main feature of the disc. While it doesn’t live up to the Collins’ film, The Devil’s Needle is still quite powerful. It’s also available on Blu-ray, which I’ve linked below in case you’d like a copy of your own. I highly recommend purchasing a copy, as Children of Eve is an outstanding film, and one I know I’ll find myself revisiting many times, but The Devil’s Needle is quite good, too.
Next I’m watching The Count [1916], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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Sorry in advance for anyone I have catfished with my recent Best Movies of the 21st Century list. I saw a huge increase in subscribers after posting that, and I fear most of my new subscribers aren’t aware of what they are getting themselves into.
If you’ve been here since the early days, or if you've read my “sticky” Coming Soon post, then you know that I’m watching chronologically through a list of 4,000 or so movies, and I started this podcast as a private diary of the films I watch. I’d heard that a great way to remember what you read is to write about it after you read it, read it aloud a few times, record yourself reading it out loud, and then listen to the recording. Since I often forget all the details of movies I watch, I decided to try this method for movies rather than books.
After three years of using this method of remembering, I can say with some level of certainty that it doesn’t really work. I mean, maybe it sort of does, but honestly, I can’t remember the details of the films I’ve watched for this project any better than the details of those I’ve watched outside of it. Some things stick with me, and others vanish like the snows of yesteryear.
Meanwhile, I’ve felt that my progress through the list of movies I want to watch has been slowed significantly by having to take the time to write and edit an article about each one, rehearse it, and then read it into a microphone. I also feel that reading it turns what could be a more conversational podcast into something a bit stilted. I do better talking off the cuff than I do with a prewritten speech.
So what’s the point? Well, from now on, when I watch a movie I’m going to record and share a podcast without an accompanying article, which in all honesty is how most podcasts are shared anyway. I realized after starting this, as I checked out other podcasts, that I was the only one writing an article and then narrating it.
tl;dr version: from now on All the Movies will be a podcast without a written article.
I’ll still write the occasional article, like the ones I’ve shared during the break between seasons here, but for all of my “here’s what I watched” podcasts, you’re only getting a podcast. I have a couple already written, so if you’re a fan of the written word you still have a couple left, but after that, it’s all talk, all the time!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com/subscribe
I hope you didn’t mind my two recent posts that weren’t a part of the film chronology. I did something similar once before, in October, when I rattled off a list of my favorite monster movies, and I may do it again. Who knows? Fear not, however, if you are only here for the films, as nearly every time I post, it will be a podcast about the next film on my list.
Meanwhile, I feel I need to reiterate the reason this podcast exists, as my article about saving cinema attracted a large number of new subscribers. I fear the new listeners may be disappointed when they find out I don’t normally write articles about the world of film, and am instead watching my way chronologically through a list of films, and then sharing my thoughts about each film. Soooo… welcome, new subscribers! I hope you are interested in my thoughts regarding very, very old movies, as at this point, I’m only up to the films of 1916 in my list.
Speaking of that list, it has now grown to 3,845 films. Today I’m covering film number 76 in that list. Even if I were to pick up the pace considerably and cover 200 films per year, and not add any new films to the list, this project will still take me at least another 20 years. I hope I live long enough to finish! And I hope everyone reading this lives long enough to celebrate with me when I finally reach the films of 2025!
If it seems like I’m rambling rather than discussing today’s film, well, perhaps I am. It’s another Charlie Chaplin short. It’s a fine and funny comedy, and as before I’m growing more fond of Chaplin’s work, but there isn’t much to it.
What’s the film about? A top-hatted and tuxedoed Chaplin returns home after a night of drinking, and offers up 25 minutes of sight gags involving him climbing up and falling down stairs, dealing with a revolving table, tripping over rugs, lighting a cigarette, pulling out a Murphy bed, and various other impediments standing between him and a good night’s sleep.
See? Now you know why I was stalling for time at the beginning. I’ve got nothing more to say about today’s movie. I promise the next episode will be much more interesting, as the film deals with a very salacious and juicy topic— heroin addiction!
You can watch One A.M., and 11 other Chaplin shorts, on the same Blu-ray that I own. You can click the picture below to purchase a copy. I do not make any money if you buy one, just so you know.
Next I’m watching The Devil’s Needle [1916], directed by Chester Withey.
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I know that in my last podcast I promised another Chaplin movie was coming next, but that was before I discovered the film The Half-Breed, which, as luck would have it, comes exactly next in the chronology. Starring Douglas Fairbanks, The Half-Breed was released 20 days after The Vagabond, and 8 days before One A.M. It was almost as if fate decreed that I find the movie just in time to include it in my podcast. Serendipity, am I right?
Not so fortuitous were my discoveries of two other Douglas Fairbanks films, The Good Bad-Man and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish. However, as both were released in 1916, in April and June respectively, I decided to watch all three and talk about them together today, in much the same way that I watched some of Norma Talmadge’s older short films before talking about Going Straight. This is, after all, my first encounter with Fairbanks, who is a bona fide screen legend, so it’s only reasonable that I go back and watch a couple of his prior films to help me better understand who he was.
I’m also turning to a friend who knows far more about silent films than I do. That’s Dante. Today, Dante is joining me on the podcast to talk about Douglas Fairbanks in general, and these three films in particular. If you want to hear Dante’s thoughts, be sure to listen to the audio version of this article!
First off, I’ll share my thoughts on the three films. Douglas Fairbanks is a Hollywood legend. He was considered to be one of the four biggest stars of his age, and of any age, really, along with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and William S. Hart. As such, I’ve been looking forward to seeing what he was all about. Will he be like Pickford and Hart— movie stars that instantly stunned me with their screen presence and talent? Or more like Chaplin, who has taken awhile to grow on me? Let’s find out!
First up, I watched The Good Bad-Man. Fairbanks plays an outlaw who is actually a good man. Honestly, I wasn’t terribly impressed by the film, and if I didn’t know that Fairbanks was destined to become I would not have identified him as a future star. It played like a William S. Hart knockoff, and Fairbanks seems out of place. He’s meant to be a tough gunslinger in the Wild West, but he came across to me as more of a middle-aged dad cosplaying as a cowboy. The film isn’t terrible, and neither is he, by any stretch, but nothing about it is great. Unlike early Chaplin films, where I don’t like Chaplin’s persona, I very much like Fairbanks’ demeanor and screen presence. The only issue is that he seems out of place in a Western, and very much as if her were trying to mimic Hart, who by this point had mastered the role of a good bad-man. I want to rewatch The Bargain again after seeing this, if only to see perhaps the finest cinematic good bad-man of all time.
Next I watched The Mystery of the Leaping Fish and saw Fairbanks play an very different sort of character. No longer a cowboy, Fairbanks is now a drug-addled super-detective named Coke Ennyday. True to his name, he snorts coke, and shoots up heroin, any and every day, while solving crimes for the Secret Service. This short film has him on the tail of some Chinese smugglers, whom he pursues and eventually apprehends using heroin and opium the way Popeye uses spinach. His hopping around while “hopped up” dance is entertaining, as is everything in this short, silly film that feels like the seed from which things like Cheech & Chong no doubt sprung.
Finally, I watched The Half-Breed. This is the winner of the bunch. It’s a fully formed, well-shot movie. The camera lingers on some beautiful long shots, and moves when necessary, something that still hasn’t become common in the films I’ve seen from this period. Many still set up and shoot as if they are filming a stage play, but not Dwan. He’s clearly taken a page from Griffith’s handbook, and knows how to use camera motion to enhance the action on the screen.
I watched all three of these films on YouTube, and have shared the videos below.
This where I’d normally end my podcast, and it’s where the written portion of this entry ends, but if you listen to the recorded version , you’ll hear what Dante has to say. He has some great insights about all three films, as well as the life and career of the great Douglas Fairbanks. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Next I’m watching One A.M. [1916], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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I have to admit, every time a Chaplin film pops up in the chronology, I’m a little nervous. I know I’m supposed to love his work, and praise him as an early genius of film, but so far I’ve been unimpressed by him. It’s as if his distinct look is all that sets him apart from his peers, at least so far. Will this be the film that changes my mind? Spoiler alert— sort of!
This short opens with a sequence in a bar that is the best thing I’ve seen from Chaplin yet. He’s still playing the role of a somewhat mean-spirited instigator, but at least no one gets kicked in the seat of the pants this time around. Instead, we get a 4 1/2 minute scene of Chaplin’s Tramp playing his fiddle at a bar, while a five-piece band plays in front of the same bar. He tries to collect tips for himself, perpetrating that he’s collecting for the band, and chaos, and a chase, ensues.
After the bar incident, the scene shifts to a mansion, where a wealthy woman, played by Charlotte Mineau, a Chaplin regular, bemoans the fact that their daughter has been missing since she was a little girl. Cut to a Gypsy camp, where we learn that daughter, played by Edna Purviance, another Chaplin regular who I just saw as “the Girl” in The Fireman, was abducted by a band of Gypsies and has been living as a servant for one of them, played by Eric Campbell (yet another regular, he played the Fire Chief in The Fireman) ever since. She’s now full-grown, and laments her sad life.
Along comes Chaplin, who enthralls the Girl with his fiddling, before the Gypsy Chief comes along and shoos Chaplin away. He proceeds to whip the Girl, as punishment for talking to the Tramp, but Chaplin returns and clobbers him with a tree branch. While the other Gypsies tend to their fallen Chief, Chaplin and the Girl escape in the Gypsy’s wagon.
The next morning, Chaplin washes and grooms the Girl, who is unkempt after a lifetime in squalor, then prepares breakfast. While he’s cooking, she wanders off and meets a handsome young artist, played by yet another Chaplin regular, and future star director, Lloyd Bacon, who offers to paint her. She falls for him and brings him back to the camp to have breakfast with them, much to the Tramp’s dismay. She’s smitten, and spends the entire meal enthralled by the artist. When he leaves, both she and the Tramp are left broken-hearted.
Next, we’re in an art gallery, where the painting of the Girl has won first prize in a contest. The mother from earlier in the film sees the painting, recognizes her lost daughter’s unique, shamrock-shaped birthmark, and asks the Artist to help her locate the Girl. Fortunately, the Tramp and the Girl are still camped in the same place, and mother and daughter are reunited, as are Girl and Artist. They drive off happily, leaving the Tramp sad and alone.
It seems we’re destined for a bittersweet ending, until moments later, when it dawns on the Girl that it’s the Tramp she loves, and not the Artist, so she demands they turn the car around. They return to the camp, where she tells the Tramp she loves him, and he grabs his fiddle and hat, hops into the car, and off they go, presumably to a happily ever after ending.
The is easily the best thing I’ve seen from Chaplin. I hope this marks a turning point, and I’ll find my way onto the Chaplin bandwagon, but regardless of what comes next, this is definitely a fun, well-made, short film.
I watched this on the same Blu-ray set that I’ve linked previously, and have linked again at the bottom of this post. You can watch a good, clear copy on YouTube, which I’ve linked for you below.
This is the Blu-ray. Click and purchase a copy of your own!
Next I’m watching The Half-Breed [1916], directed by Allan Dwan.
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It’s becoming clear that early filmmakers were not shying away from difficult topics. I’ve already watched movies that deal with abortion, sweatshops, organized crime, class warfare, and race. Poverty has been a common topic as well, and that’s the focus of Lois Weber’s Shoes. Movie studios were clearly onboard with the notion of cinema as an agent of societal change.
Lois Weber was one of the big name directors of the 1910s, and this is the third of her films that I’ve watched, and the first where she didn’t share directing duties with her husband. And while this has something of a reputation as a favorite among feminist viewers, I don’t think it’s as well-made as the last one I watched, Where Are My Children. Where that film was full of subtlety and subtext, here everything is hammered home with no attempt at nuance.
For example, at night, the grim hand of poverty reaches down to disturb her sleep. No really. Look!
That’s more than a little no the nose, but not much more than anything else in this movie, which is dripping with Message with a capital M.
The plot concerns Eva, a shop girl who works to support her family. Her father is lazy, and her mother preoccupied with running the house, so the entire burden falls upon her. Each day she walks to work in old shoes, with paper in the soles, that hurt her feet. She sees a new pair in a shop window, but hasn’t the $3.00 to purchase them. Each payday, she brings the money home to her mother, who always promises next week she can buy shoes, but is never able to spare the money.
Enter Cabaret Charlie. He’s a singer at a local night club, and he’s been buying Eva’s co-worker gifts in exchange for sex. He spots Eva and immediately assesses her situaion. He offers to buy her a pair of shoes, but she has to sleep with him to get them. When her old shoes finally break apart in the rain, Eva is left with no choice but to go to the night club and earn herself a pair of shoes, which she does. The film ends with her coming home with her new shoes to find out her father has landed a job, though one that likely won’t last beyond a week, at which time the cycle will begin anew.
The real villain here isn’t Cabaret Charlie, it’s that dad. His lackadaisical approach to job-hunting is the reason his family is in such dire financial straits, and even the job he finds at the end promises to be temporary. That whole side to the story is the best thing about the film, as it’s far more real than the episodes at the cabaret, or Eva’s footwear woes. The family isn’t destitute, and there’s no evil landlord lurking at the door. Instead, they are just another poor family with barely enough to scrape by, but without means to handle any needs beyond the most basic. Eva needs a pair of shoes, not a new house or a cure for a disease. That grounds everything in realism, even as other elements of the film work against that grounding.
This film has been restored, and is available on Blu-ray, and while I wish I owned a copy, I don’t, and instead watched on YouTube. You can, too!
If you want the Blu-ray, you can find it by clicking on the picture of it below. I get nothing if you do, so don’t think I’m trying to make a buck off of you. At best I can live vicariously through your purchase if you buy a copy and tell me in the comments below that you did so.
Next I’m watching The Vagabond [1916], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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We’ll likely never get to see Theda Bara at the apex of her powers. This is one of only three surviving films in which she had a major role, and none are from her days as a major star. This film, and A Fool There Was, are early works, and the third, The Unchastened Woman, was her final full-length film, and a failed comeback attempt after many years of inactivity. Meanwhile, in between she became one of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, and portrayed characters such as Cleopatra, Salome, and Juliet, as well as starring in provocatively titled films such as The Vixen and The Tiger Woman. Sadly, those films are lost, and what we have likely doesn’t do her justice. It would be as if audiences in 2124 were trying to understand Paul Newman’s appeal, but only had The Hudsucker Proxy, The Left Handed Gun, and Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! to gauge his ability. They’d likely not get it.
There is always hope that a lost film will resurface. A few seconds of footage from Cleopatra were recently found by someone who bought an old projector on eBay. A piece of film that came with the purchase turned out to be a snippet from that film. What a find! The clip can be seen here. However, until any more turns up, we’ll have to accept that we have nothing of her at the height of her popularity.
As for East Lynne, well, it doesn’t make much of a case for her as the star we know her to have been. She’s one of many characters in a film with a plot so Byzantine that you’ll have no idea what’s going on unless you’ve read the source material, Ellen Wood’s novel of the same name. The book is a 784 page Victorian era soap opera with plots and subplots featuring countless characters navigating never-ending intrigue. When the movie was made, it was more or less assumed that everyone had read the book, because in 1916, most everyone had, so no effort whatsoever was made to explain anything that was happening onscreen.
I have no intention of slogging through the novel, so I read a summary of the story. Much was omitted from the film, but they kept the story of Lady Isabel (Bara) marrying Archibald Carlyle, and being duped by Captain Levison into believing her husband is unfaithful to her. She leaves him. The train she takes derails, and she’s believed to have died in the wreck. She survived, and sneaks back to her home wearing sunglasses and a wig so as not be recognized. She takes a job as nanny to her children— yes another Mrs. Doubtfire moment akin to that I recently saw in Where Is My Treasure?
Even if you watch knowing the plot ahead of time the film is still hard to follow because of how it’s paced. The film is only 75 minutes longs, the first 65 of which introduce characters and situations at a snail’s pace. Then the film shifts into overdrive and crams 2/3 of the novel into 10 minutes. According to the summary I read, about 75% of the novel (almost 600 pages) involves Lady Isabel in the guise of Madame Vine, her governess alter ego. We get about 4 minutes of her in the film. It’s a whirlwind!
Because of the crazy pacing, it’s impossible to understand what sort of chemistry exists between any of the characters. After Isabel disappears, Carlyle marries Barbara, a character about whom we know virtually nothing other than she loves Carlyle but hates his kids. Other characters show up only to vanish, never to be heard from again. At one point Levison and Richard are fighting over a girl, and… that’s it. Who does she end up with? We don’t know. She never shows up in the film again. So many characters do the same. They come, they go. Why were they ever there? Who’s to say? Not me. I’m just watching this thing.
When we do get character development, it’s hammered home with no subtlety whatsoever. Stuart Holmes, who plays the villainous Captain Levison, is poorly handled. When he’s introduced, he kicks a dog to let us know he’s not a good guy. Later, he kills a man, accidentally, but still, and then frames someone else for his crime. Just in case we still think he might be a good guy, we’re later shown a snake slithering through the grass while he seduces Isabel. They may as well have given him a foam finger that reads “Villain” to truly hammer home the notion that he’s a cad.
The real question I imagine most will have is how is Bara? My answer is, she’s quite good. She shows restraint during the emotional scenes where many of that era would have gone full ham. At the end, when one of her children is dying, she easily could have overdone it, but she kept the emoting in check, and that moderation in this early role suggests to me that her subsequent stardom was well-deserved. If only more would surface!
I have a DVD of this film, but to be honest the transfer there is so bad I found that it was easier to watch this on YouTube. The DVD is from the Silent Gems Collection which more often than not are pretty terrible. They look to me like they were downloaded off of YouTube, and then burned to DVD. The only time I’d recommend them is for the rare silent film that isn’t available anywhere else.
Here’s the best-looking version I could find. It has no soundtrack at all, so you can either watch in total silence, or run another version simultaneously and listen to the soundtrack of the second while watching the better-looking transfer below. You decide!
I’m more than a little surprised that this film hasn’t been restored, given that it’s one of precious few performances we have left of Theda Bara, but that's the state of silent cinema for you.
Next I’m watching Shoes [1916], directed by Lois Weber.
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If you want a drinking game that will get everyone drunk in 20 minutes, agree to take a shot every time someone gets kicked in the butt in a Charlie Chaplin comedy short. Be sure to have a lot of liquor on hand, because there’s a whole lot of ass-kicking going on.
And that’s about it. I know every time a Chaplin movie shows up I seem not to have much good to say about it, but really, his early shorts are very simple, repetitive, formulaic affairs. Sure, he’s good at falling down, but so were other actors of his day. I’m waiting, waiting, waiting to become enthralled by him the way seemingly every other person on the planet was during his heyday.
Plot-wise, this is about what I expected based on the title alone. Chaplin’s an inept fireman who spends most of his day falling down, kicking people in the butt, getting kicked in the butt, and generally disrupting life at the fire station. Naturally, at the end he heroically rescues a woman from a fire that had been deliberately set as an insurance scam. Chaplin climbs down the side of a building in that scene in what is the highlight of the film, and the film ends with Chaplin and the girl he rescued walking off together. He was a good fireman after all!
I watched this on the same Blu-ray set that included The Floorwalker, one of a dozen of the comedy shorts Chaplin made for Mutual in 1916 and 1917. You can purchase a copy by clicking on the photo below.
Next I’m watching East Lynne [1916], directed by Bertram Bracken.
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Between 1910 and 1915 Norma Talmadge was featured in over 100 short films for the Vitagraph Company, none of which I’ve had the chance to see. Yet, I recognize her name. Like so many stars of the silent film era, Talmadge endures as little more than a shadowy phantom of a bygone day, her name ringing a distant bell in the minds of film fans. We may have seen her name listed among other stars— Marguerite Clark, Theda Bara, Pearl White— all of whom were massively famous in their day, but relegated to footnotes, if that, today, or perhaps on a classic movie poster we’ve seen somewhere, but there the recognition ends. Despite being mostly forgotten today, between 1917 and 1926 Talmadge was probably the biggest female box office draw outside of Mary Pickford, and possibly Gloria Swanson. She was hugely famous in her day, bigger at her peak than even Garbo at hers, and Going Straight is my first chance to learn why.
In addition to watching Going Straight, I watched three of Talmadge’s Vitagraph shorts, Sawdust and Salome and A Helpful Sisterhood, both from 1914, and A Tale of Two Cities, from 1911. Had I known about them earlier, I’d have watched them when they came up in the chronology, but better late than never, right? In any event, they gave me a little bit more of a sense of who Talmadge was, though not much. Nothing about her jumped out at me and made me think “wow!” I wondered if Going Straight would give me better insight into why she was so famous.
The best moment in the three films came in Sawdust and Salome, when the wealthy son returned home with Talmadge, playing a horse-riding circus performer, as his bride. Upon seeing a picture of her in her circus outfit the parents declared
and immediately dismissed the idea of having her as a daughter-in-law. Imagine what they’d say about today’s standards of dress!
As for the film officially being discussed today, Going Straight is one of Talmadge’s earliest full-length films, made not long after she moved from Vitagraph to Triangle Pictures. Though directed by Chester M. Franklin and Sidney Franklin, the intercuts and parallel scenes smack of D.W. Griffith, who oversaw much what was being produced at Triangle. Some of the closeup shots remind me more than a little bit of Griffith’s work in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, and on a whole, the action sequences flow here in a manner suggesting the expertise of Griffith, so it’s clear he had more than a passing role in the making of this movie.
Were a modern viewer to watch this film without the context of having seen 60+ films made before it, he probably wouldn’t make much of Talmadge’s performance. That’s a testimony to her ability, as that same modern viewer probably would notice many (most?) of the other actresses I’ve seen overreacting and emoting. Talmadge, much like Mary Pickford, Lilian Gish, and some of the other greats of her era, maintains a level of realism on camera that gives her performance an understated and modern appeal.
Talmadge plays Grace, the wife of John Remington, a successful businessman played by Ralph Lewis. They live what seems to be a normal life, but early on we see Grace come across a news clipping that prompts a flashback, during which we learn about the couple’s sordid past. They were once criminals, and belonged to the Higgins Gang.
An exciting action sequence ensues, incredibly well-directed, whether by the Franklin Brothers or D.W. Griffith who’s to say, which includes some intercut closeups that propel the action as builds to a massive fight between cops and robbers. In the end, John and his partner in crime Jimmy Briggs, played Eugene Pallette looking impossibly young and slender, are captured. Grace escapes.
Back in the present, we learn that John served his time, and has gone straight since leaving jail. Jimmy hasn’t, and when a chance encounter brings him in contact with John, he takes it as an opportunity to extort money from him, lest he turn in Grace. Of course, the money isn’t enough, and soon Jimmy is back to recruit John to pull of “just one last job.” Grace heads to a friend’s house to play cards for the evening, after which she and her children spend the night. Naturally, the house Jimmy has decided to rob is the house where Grace’s friend lives, and calamity ensues. During the robbery, Jimmy heads upstairs to look for jewelry, and finds Grace asleep with one of her children. He attempts to assault her, seriously injuring the child in the process. John shows up in time to protect Grace, and Jimmy flees.
The next day, Jimmy shows up ready to kill John, but John is able to outsmart him, and throws him out a window to his death. Meanwhile, we see that their child, who had been at death’s door, is out of danger and will make a full recovery. John and Grace are once again a happy family.
I feel a lot better versed in the phenomenon that was Norma Talmadge after having watched this film, and the short films from her days at Vitagraph. She has a screen presence that comes through even in the damaged digital print I watched, and avoids the overacting and flailing that so many actresses of her day relied upon to express emotion. Griffith is no doubt in part to thank for that, as he (or the Franklins, if I’m mistaken) gave her closeups for most of her emotional moments, which allowed her to express herself through facial expressions rather than hand gestures and body language.
She shows up several times again on my list of films, as her popularity continued to rise. In 1923, a poll of picture exhibitors named Norma Talmadge the number-one box office star.
I watched this on YouTube, where the print isn’t very good, but the accompanying soundtrack is better than what you usually get with a silent film online.
Next I’m watching The Fireman [1916], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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It’s another Charles Chaplin short. So far I’ve enjoyed his shorts, but not to the extent that I quite get yet how he became the legend he is today.
When the movie started, Chaplin came onscreen and I was immediately shocked by how much better he looked. His hair was better, his acting less herky-jerky, he even seemed taller. He looked like he’d grown up in the six months span between this and the last film I’d seen him in. At last, I thought, I’m going to see what everyone else sees in Chaplin. And then Chaplin came onscreen. Surprise! I’d not been looking at Chaplin at all, but rather Lloyd Bacon, who would go on to have an outstanding career as a director, made up to resemble Chaplin. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Bacon and Chaplin together— Bacon played a couple roles in The Tramp— but this is the first time I’ve seen him as Chaplin, and he ain’t half bad. He comes off as Chaplin’s older, better-looking brother.
Once the film gets underway, it’s more of the same. Chaplin wanders about in inexplicable fashion, constantly thwarted by mannequins, escalators, drinking fountains, and other mundane objects. He remains detached, and comes off as annoying rather than likable. The best I can say is that to audiences at the time his antics were no doubt fresh, but they play out as dated and uninspired to me. I’m still not writing him off, but his early comedies don’t hold up to a modern viewing the way other films of the era do. I think I mentioned in a previous podcast that comedies don’t seem to have matured as quickly as dramas, and that still seems to be the case here. However, this comedic short is head and shoulders above most of the others of its time.
The plot is quite simple. A department store’s manager and his assistant, a position that was known as a floorwalker in that era, have been embezzling money, and have so far stolen $70,000, which is about $2 million in today’s dollars. They learn that the store’s owners are sending detectives to investigate so they pull the money from the safe and plan to abscond with it. The floorwalker hits the manager over the head and tries to leave with all the money. He learns that the detectives are just outside his door, which is when Chaplin walks in. The two notice immediately how similarly they look, and perform a rudimentary version, and quite possibly the first on film, of the guy looking at an actor he believes is his reflection in a mirror gag. Once that’s done, the Floorwalker pretends to give Chaplin a job so they switch outfits. He sends Chaplin out dressed as him, and sneaks off in tramp garb with the bag of money.
Except, from that point on, nothing goes well for either of them. They fall down escalators, get kicked repeatedly in the butt (a gag that seemingly happens at least a dozen times in every Chaplin short), and keep losing the bag. Eventually, the detectives corral Chaplin in an elevator, just as it descends atop the floorwalker, who bursts through the floor of the elevator and is presumably arrested.
I watched this on a Blu-ray set that includes a dozen of the comedy shorts Chaplin made for Mutual in 1916 and 1917. You can purchase a copy by clicking on the photo below.
Next I’m watching Going Straight [1916], directed by Chester M. Franklin and Sidney Franklin.
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This film began its life in 1899 as a play, also called Sherlock Holmes, written by William Gillette with the blessing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes’ creator. Gillette played Holmes in his play, and by the time Essanay Studios produced a film version, he’d played the role on stage over 1,300 times in the intervening 17 years.
Long considered a lost film, a serialized version of the film from 1920 surfaced in France in 2014. Film curator Céline Ruivo discovered a print at the Cinémathèque française. The film was restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. From their site:
What survives is the duplicate negative sent over to France after the First World War. The original film was a nine-reel feature and, when it came to Europe, it was reissued as a four-part serial, each chapter given its own slightly lurid title. The episode having Holmes lured into the Stepney Gas Chamber is now called, ominously and with appropriate misdirection, “Une Nuit tragique”; and in the best serial tradition every chapter is introduced with a recap of last week’s action. Happily, the only other alterations are in the intertitles. Some have been moved around or deleted, all of them hastily translated. But the picture itself is intact. As best as we can tell, not a frame of the original is missing.
Gillette does appear a bit old for the part, which makes sense as he’d been playing it for 17 years and was 63 when the film was made, but at the same time he’s the quintessential Holmes. Perhaps I think this because this film set the rules for all the Holmes films to follow, but I don’t think so. Gillette really does embody what Holmes should be. He’s tall, lean yet powerful, handsome but not too handsome, and he carries himself with a confidence that borders on imperious yet is never arrogant. Basil Rathbone, arguably the most famous cinematic Holmes of all time, may well have been chosen for his resemblance to Gillette.
As any fan of the great detective knows, Holmes is only half of the equation, for where goes Sherlock Holmes so goes Dr. Watson. Here, Edward Fielding plays the good doctor, and darned if he doesn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to Nigel Bruce— Rathbone’s sidekick in 14 Holmes films.
The plot here is rather circuitous, and at times nonsensical, and the majority of the enjoyment I got from this film came from Gillette’s presence onscreen, and the atmosphere of the film. Based loosely on the Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Sherlock Holmes is a somewhat plodding film.
The story centers around love letters written by a prince to a woman, now deceased, to whom he isn’t married, that are now the property of her sister Alice. The prince wants the letters back, for fear that the letters may end up in the wrong hands and be either used for blackmail or to soil his reputation, but the sister wants to keep them. Thus begins a circuitous tale of crooks trying to dupe her out of the letters by inviting her to live with them, then locking her up. She’s hidden the letters somewhere in their house, but they can’t find them. Keyholes are peeped through, walls are listened through, doors are open and shut, hands are wrung, brows wiped, it never ends.
Meanwhile, we see Holmes, at home on Baker Street. Who comes to visit? Watson! Apparently, they’ve only just met and aren’t yet roommates. Shortly after Watson’s arrival, Holmes must leave, to visit the home of the Larrabee’s, who are the kidnappers. He suggests Watson read a book, then takes off.
Now at the Larrabees, we see them still trying to locate the hidden letters. Meanwhile, the Larrabee’s maid has let Alice out of her room. Suddenly the doorbell rings. It’s Holmes. He’s left standing on the porch for what seems ages while the criminals deliberate and debate what to do. Finally, they let him in. In what is maybe the best scene of the early portion of the film, the camera moves about the room with Holmes’ gaze as he gets the lay of the land. The Larrabees try to trick Holmes into believing one of them is Alice, but he sees right through their subterfuge. The real Alice is produced. It’s unclear why she doesn’t seem to want to be rescued, but she seems indifferent to both her predicament and to Holmes’ presence.
Holmes tricks her into revealing where the letters are, but even still she opts to stick around the house. Why? Who’s to say? In any event, once he leaves, she finds a new hiding spot and returns to her room. 40 minutes of the film have gone by and we’re basically still where we started.
What about Watson? We rejoin him in Holmes’ study and find that he’s still reading that book. What was the point? Who’s to say? In any event, he finally gives up, and informs Holmes’ butler that he can’t wait any longer, and heads home.
We return to Larrabee manor, and learn that the criminals have decided to enlist the help of Professor Moriarty to thwart Holmes.
Holmes goes home and goes to bed, and dreams about Alice. Back at the house, Alice is daydreaming of Holmes. Romance seems imminent. And… more stuff happens. I normally go through the major plot points, but honestly, this film is a never-ending string of people coming in and out of rooms, wiping their brows, wringing their hands, and listening at keyholes, and it seems to never end.
Eventually, the film does end, and maybe that’s the best thing I can say about it.
I watched this film on YouTube.
Next I’m watching The Floorwalker [1916], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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I wouldn’t say I’m disappointed in this film, for though it is lacking punch overall, it does contain a couple subtle nuggets of enjoyment that offer a glimmer of insight into what the director would eventually be capable of creating. That said, it was a step down from his previous effort, Where Is My Treasure?, and not a film I imagine I will rewatch any time soon.
The most disconcerting thing about the film is that Lubitsch, who again is both director and star of his film, is playing Pinkus, a schoolboy. While he was 24 at the time, he looks a lot older to me. Before checking his age I assumed he was close to 40. He certainly looks out of place in the classroom scene, where he’s sitting amongst actual children. It’s kind of creepy, to be honest. The same goes for the scenes of him flirting with the schoolgirls. It was hard to suspend my disbelief and accept he was meant to be another teen, and I kept viewing it as if an old lech was infiltrating a school.
In any event, the film begins with Lubitsch as a schoolboy who is expelled for cheating. He starts looking for a job, and eventually lands one in a shoe store. He’s fired for acting inappropriately towards a female customer— he tickles her feet while helping her try on shoes— but saves his job at the last second by helping a demanding customer while the boss watches. One of the major themes of the film is his behavior towards women. Throughout the film he’s flirting with woman, and generally acting inappropriately, though never getting anywhere with them. He finally has a moment of realization after he flirts with a fellow employee, and walks with her while carrying her bag only to end up bringing her to her husband or boyfriend, with whom she walks off. He feels chagrined that he carried her parcel, and realizes what a sap he’s been.
His life changes when he tricks his boss into delivering used, dirty shoes to the demanding customer he’d helped earlier. It turns out she’s some sort of wealthy heiress. Pinkus had hoped to deliver them as the two of them had flirted a bit with one another, but his boss, something of a flirtatious type himself, decided to do it himself. When he’s humiliated by presenting the dirty shoes, our boy Pinkus shows up with the correct shoes. After chastening his boss by reminding him that he should be thinking about his wife, Pinkus brings the shoes to the customer. She is delighted, and takes a liking to him. She suggests he open his own shoe store. He explains that has no money to do that, and she promptly gives him 30,000 marks, the equivalent of about $150,000 in today’s money. He’s in business, and Pinkus’ Shoe Palace is born.
He hosts a fashion show, and seems to behave himself amongst all the female models, suggesting he really did learn from his earlier mistakes. The local papers write up the shop with glowing reviews, and the money starts rolling in. In the final scene, Pinkus returns to his benefactor to repay the loan, and suggests that rather than repaying her, they could marry, and “keep it in the family.” She agrees, and they presumably live happily ever after.
I watched this on a Blu-ray. It’s an extra feature on the Criterion Blu-Ray of Lubitch’s 1942 Film to Be or Not to Be.
Next I’m watching Sherlock Holmes [1916], directed by Arthur Berthelet.
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There isn’t much to this film, but it’s important to keep in mind that I’ve been on a run of some really solid films of late, and all things considered this one isn’t half bad. Compared to the average films of its era it’s probably a little bit better than average, but when stacked up against some of my recent entries, it’s a bit lacking The best thing it has going for it is Lilian Gish, but this is not her at her best.
The story is straight-forward. It begins in Russia, where Marfa (Gish) is living with her aunt and uncle. Their only interest in her is financial, as they intend to sell her as a bride to the highest bidder. She wants no part in their business venture, and wishes she could marry Jan, the handsome young man she met a few months back. He’s recently returned from America. Unfortunately, he’s broke, so instead she’s sold to a rather repugnant fellow. The film’s best scene comes when he approaches Marfa as she sits with her friend. She grabs his bottle of vodka and beats him with it before chasing him off. Her facial expressions during this sequence are as good as any I’ve seen in a silent film to date. You can view the scene below.
When the marriage day arrives, Marfa refuses. Next she ends up betrothed to a military official, but she clobbers him and flees the scene. He survives, but before they can find Marfa, she and her family have fled to a nearby port city and boarded a ship bound for America. Who else is onboard? Jan, of course! Her family still wants to profit by selling her off, so when they arrive in the States, they dupe him, leaving him in San Francisco while they head to Los Angeles. He eventually finds out that’s where they went, and heads to L.A. and starts hunting for her in the Russian part of town.
Meanwhile, Jan has again been sold to a bachelor bidder, but escapes. She finds a policeman, but he doesn’t speak Russian and ends up bringing her back to the family. All seems lost once the ceremony is taking place, but Jan shows up just in time. He’s brought the police, who have been cracking down on Russian brides for sale, and the entire corrupt family ends up in jail, leaving Marfa and Jan free to be together.
Again, though this isn’t a bad film, it’s nothing special. I don’t know that I’ll watch it again anytime soon, though I do have it on a DVD, so perhaps one day I’ll revisit it. It’s the first film from William Christy Cabanne that I’ve watched, and while he directed 167 films during a career that spanned 1912 to 1948, this is the only film of his I have on my list to watch. He does have some co-director credits here and there, so I will encounter his work again here and there, most notably on the 1925 blockbuster epic Ben-Hur. Fred Niblo is credited as the director of that film, but Cabanne is one of four others who co-directed, but weren’t credited at the time.
Perhaps someone reading this can recommend a Cabanne film that I should add to my list? I’m always open to suggestions, and I am certain that I’ve missed many important films while compiling my list of films to watch. The list is available to all paid subscribers, by the way. Or, to anyone who asks nicely.
Next I’m watching Shoe Palace Pinkus [1916], directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
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Giovanni Pastrone’s ground-breaking epic Cabiria has been one of the best films I’ve watched so far as a part of this podcast, so I was looking forward to seeing another film that he directed. I had no idea what to expect from this film, as even its title, The Fire, is vague. A film with that title could be about nearly anything. As it turns out, this one is about an incendiary relationship between a poet and a painter.
The original Italian title of the film is Il Fuoco (la Favilla - la Vampa - la Cenere), which translates to The Fire (the Spark, the Blaze, the Ash). That’s a solid title, as the film depicts a relationshp that grows from a spark of mutual interest into a blazing inferno of passion, and ultimately ends up in ashen ruins. In other words, the fire is a metaphor, which makes sense for a film about a poet.
I neither loved nor hated this film. I may have felt somewhat letdown due to my own expectations, as I thought this would be another epic-scale action drama along the lines of Cabiria, but that’s my own fault for pigeonholing Pastrone as a director who only made epics. No director makes only epics. Even D.W. Griffith made small-scale dramas.
The story is fairly simple. The main character, a painter of humble background, heads out to a lake to paint, where he encounters a woman writing poetry. They hit it off, and start spending time together. She’s wealthy and married, but living a wild life, and he abandons his mother to move into her mansion. They have a passionate affair, until one morning he wakes up after a bender to find the mansion abandoned. She’s moved out. He’s inconsolable, and eventually tracks her down at a high society party, only to find her with her husband. She pretends not to know him, and he has a nervous breakdown. The film ends with him in a nuthouse folding paper animals, while she continues to enjoy her wealthy lifestyle.
The Fire would pair well on a double feature with a A Fool There Was, as both deal with the then-popular topic of the female vampire, who seduces and discards men, leaving them broken-down shells of who they once were. I enjoyed A Fool There Was more, partly because Theda Bara made for a far more intriguing lead than Pina Menichelli, who plays the vampire in this one. I did enjoy the fire metaphor and imagery in this film, which made for clever, and at times almost surreal, visual effects.
This film was a little bit tricky to track down. I couldn’t find it on any sort of physical media, and it doesn’t seem to be on YouTube. The only place I was able to find it online is at the Internet Archive, where you can watch it, too.
Next I’m watching: Sold for Marriage [1916], directed by Christy Cabanne.
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I mentioned in the last episode that I would be going back and editing past posts to include the director in each episode’s subtitle. While doing so, I realized that a few episodes were inadvertently marked as viewable only by paid subscribers to my Substack. As I have no paid subscribers, that means they were invisible to one and all.
Before I start putting up new episodes, I’m going to go back and fix those old ones and share them, so you will see some “new” posts that are actually old posts pop up before I resume sharing new episodes.
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Hello strangers! (And a few folks I know.) Season 2 of All the Movies is here, which means I am about to start putting up some more podcasts of the movies I’ve been watching. We left off in early 1916, and we’ll pick up there with an Italian film in the next installment, which will be the 59th film I’ve watched thus far.
Before I put up that new episode, I’m going to edit the past posts to include the name of the director of each film. I usually mentioned the director, but it seems like something that I should highlight, so I’m replacing the somewhat pointless, though occasionally pithy, subtitles on past posts with the name the film’s director, and will continue to include that information in all future titles.
As a quick refresher, this podcast exists as a way for me to better remember the details about the films I watch. I also have an account on Letterboxd where I share lists of the films I watch, and some other neat stuff. You can also read this older post if you’d like to know more about why I launched this podcast.
And even though I initially created this Substack for my own personal use, now that people have subscribed, I hope y’all can converse with one another in the comments. Please use it as a place to get to know other fans of cinema. Especially at this early stage in the podcast, when all the films discussed are silent and over 100 years old, the odds of finding another person who shares your interest in esoteric film are probably better here than anywhere else online. In today’s world, where everything is online, opportunities to find likeminded individuals are few and far between, especially for stuff like old movies. Take advantage. Converse among yourselves!
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William S. Hart continues to be the best discovery I’ve made so far during this project. I knew virtually nothing about him before I watched The Bargain, and by virtually nothing I mean his name was vaguely familiar to me as belonging to someone who acted in Westerns. I did not expect to enjoy his films, and in fact, didn’t have any on the original list I made the day I came up with the idea for this podcast. It was only after I’d started watching my way through the list that I came upon The Bargain in a book about silent films, and learned that Hart was one of the legends of the silent era that I knew I needed to give him a chance. I’m glad I did!
Hell’s Hinges is the third Hart film I’ve watched to this point, and while The Bargain remains my favorite, Hell’s Hinges is a solid effort. This time around, Hart plays Blaze Tracy, the toughest guy in a lawless town.
When the film opens, we meet Bob Henley, played by Jack Standing, who I last saw as Landry in the delightful Fanchon the Cricket. At his mother’s insistence, he’s become a priest. He’s ill suited for the lifestyle, but his mother is immensely proud of his decision. The higher-ups in the church realize he’s likely to succumb to the temptations of big city life, so they assign him to a church in a tiny western town. He heads west, accompanied by his sister Faith, played by Clara Williams. She was Nell, Hart’s love interest, in The Bargain, and again there are sparks between the two of them. Frank Burke, the sheriff in The Bargain, and who also had a small role in Civilization shows up as Zeb.
Upon arriving in the town of Hell’s Hinges, the Henley siblings are “greeted” by a rowdy mob, led by Blaze. He has been asked by Silk Miller, the owner of the saloon, to run them out of town, and has promised to scare the reverend to death. Circumstances immediately change, as it’s love at first sight when Blaze sets his eyes on Faith. While that situation is a cinematic cliché, it’s believable here. We’ve all experienced what Blaze does at least once or twice in our lives, and the initial meeting between Blaze and Faith exudes chemistry and realism in a way that one seldom sees onscreen.
Needless to say, Silk and the rest of the town rowdies don’t see it that way, and are appalled that the meanest, toughest scoundrel in town has suddenly given up drinking and shooting, and is instead attending church. Undeterred, Silk quickly realizes that Bob Henley is not the most virutous of priests, so he invites him to give a private sermon to the dancehall girls. One in particular, Dolly, has been instructed to seduce Henley, and she handles her task with aplomb. The scene of the two of them drinking and canoodling is hilarious. Sure enough, he gets drunk and spends the night with her, and oversleeps. His congregation sets out to find him, and are dismayed when they do.
The disgraced reverend has quickly taken to the bottle, to the point where Blaze must ride to the next town to find him a doctor. Meanwhile, Henley proves far more devoted to the drinking life than he ever was to the cloth, and immediately takes up with the saloon crowd. He and his new friends get drunk and decide to burn down the church, leading to a brilliant battle between the mob and the church-goers, during which Henley is killed.
Blaze returns too late to stop the destruction. In the film’s best scene, he creeps up to the saloon, wherein lays an ambush, but he realizes this and kicks in the door with guns blazing and in a scene similar to one that would play out 76 years later in Unforgiven, wins a saloon shootout against overwhelming odds. After killing Silk, Blaze does what Eastwood only threatens to do, and burns the entire town of Hell’s Hinges to embers, after which he and Faith light out to start a life together.
I watched this on a DVD, though the quality wasn’t great. I found a version on Youtube that actually looks a lot better than the DVD copy.
Next I’m watching The Fire [1916], directed by Giovanni Pastrone.
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This is a Fatty Arbuckle I’d not seen before. Granted, I’m very unfamiliar with his work, having seen but a few of his shorts in the past, but nonetheless, this isn’t the sort of role I’m familiar with for him. This is one of his earlier films, so perhaps he hadn’t yet gone the fully comedic route, though this short film is a comedy.
The story is simple, at least at first. A married couple is getting dressed for dinner. They’re a wealthy couple, Arbuckle plays a doctor, so I suppose it makes sense that he is putting on his tuxedo for a dinner at home with his wife, played by Mabel Normand, who is also dressed to the nines. The plan is altered by the arrival of a telegram: the wife’s childhood bestie is coming for dinner. She’s elated, Arbuckle less so, especially once he learns they were sweet on each other as children. Despite it being an innocent thing— they were small children at the time— Arbuckle is jealous, and spends the evening keeping them away from one another.
The trio enjoy a decadent dinner, replete with rich, filling foods, the highlight of which are some massive lobsters. Normand remarks that no one will sleep easily after such a sumptuous feast, and no doubt all three would have spent the evening suffering from indigestion had an adventure not broken out in the meantime, for as dinner winds down, and post-prandial digestifs are being consumed, we learn that a couple crooks are casing the house.
One of the would-be robbers pretends to be injured to get inside, but Arbuckle sees through the ruse before the thief can break into his safe, and tosses him out. Undeterred, the robbers call the doctor and tell him he’s needed for an emergency, causing him to speed off to a nonexistent accident. When he gets there and realize he’s been duped, he immediately believes his wife and her friend sent him off so they can be alone together. Instead, they are beset by the robber, who has broken into the house.
From here the film shifts gears, and devolves into a series of chases and pratfalls along the lines of what one expects from a Keystone Cops short, then promptly shifts gears again, this time into much darker territory. Arbuckle returns home just after the robber has been chased away, so he sees his wife and her friend together and assumes the worst. He throws the friend out of a window, but once he lands two stories below the scene shifts to his bed. It seems the friend has dreamt the entire thing. Or has he? We cut back to Arbuckle and Normand. Still blinded by rage, he strangles her then staggers out of the room. Except she’s not dead! She picks up his discarded pistol, follows him out of the room, and shoots him as he is descending the stairs. Arbuckle falls to his death. Except he doesn’t. He, too, wakes up, having fallen asleep in his office chair. He races upstairs to check on his wife, and encounters the friend, who is doing likewise after the apparently shared nightmare.
Together the reminisce about the lobster dinner— those pesky crustaceans!— and share a laugh and a handshake. Friends at last! A fine end to a fine film!
Arbuckle is masterful with his gestures and facial expressions, and comes off as very versatile. He is quite menacing at times, while at others he exudes a boyish charm. He can take a pratfall as easily as he can strangle his wife. Best of all, he never overdoes it, all the while gliding across the screen in a svelte manner that belies his girth.
I watched this on YouTube, and have linked it below so you can enjoy it, too.
Next I’m watching Hell’s Hinges [1916], directed by Charles Swickard, William S. Hart and Clifford Smith.
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I’m more than a little bit awed right now by just how good this movie is. I was expecting a heavy-handed morality lesson couched as melodrama, and instead got an artful, thought-provoking, emotional rollercoaster ride, filled with delightful visual effects.
I must suggest that you leave your politics at the door when you watch this film, which touches on a number of subjects that are as controversial in 2023 as they were in 1916. If you can’t do that, then odds are you will be angered by some aspect of this film, which deals with abortion, eugenics, and birth control in a very unflinching manner.
Abortion is an issue on which the two sides simply cannot agree, and any discussion or depiction of the topic often leads directly to rage. It’s also a subject that, at least in art and media, tends to be only shown from one point of view, so it was incredibly interesting, and refreshing, to me to see the subject analyzed from multiple sides in this film. Again, if you can’t divorce yourself from your own politics, your mileage may vary, but I have no issue doing that. I don’t care at all if a film offers an opinion completely opposite to my own, as long as it does it in an interesting, entertaining, or artful way, so please don’t take my admiration of this film as an endorsement of any of its points of view.
The film concludes with the most haunting final scene to any movie I’ve watched so far for this podcast, and honestly, among the most devastating closing scenes of any film I’ve ever seen. I’ll give a spoiler warning for those listening who want to watch this without knowing what’s coming, but as usual I’m going to narrate a blow-by-blow description of the film. Remember— this podcast exists so I can remember what I watch. I’m glad my readership is along for the ride, but I’m not going to stray from my mission and omit spoilers. Listen at your own risk. Better yet, watch the film on YouTube, which is where I watched it, before you continue reading or listening. The video is linked below, with spoilers to follow.
What did you think? Didn’t that ending tear your heart out? It did mine!
The film starts with a trial, where Richard Walton, a district attorney, played by Tyrone Power Sr., is prosecuting Dr. Homer, who had been spreading literature concerning birth control. Dr. Homer makes his case for legalizing contraception by recounting three events he has witnessed, each shown in a brief flashback: an alcoholic parent abusing his children; a family too poor to provide medical care for their sick children; and a single mother who committed suicide, taking her infant with her.
When we see Richard at home later, we learn that he has no children, a situation that deeply saddens him. His wife, played by Tyrone Powers real life wife, on the other hand, seems content with her pet dogs, and spends her days socializing with other married, but childless, women. They are childless by choice, we find out, as Mrs. Walton knows of a doctor, with the fitting name of Dr. Malfit, who performs clandestine abortions, and sends her friends to them as needed.
Throughout the film, when a woman realizes she is pregnant, we see her sitting as a little cherub appears by her shoulder, interacting with her. It’s a very adorable, effective way to share such information. We also see, a few times throughout the film, these cherubs flying in and out of the gate of heaven, their path and destination varying depending upon their fate. It’s all quite clever and alternately amusing and gripping.
Mrs. Walton’s brother comes to visit, and immediately reveals himself to be a cad. He tries to seduce the maid, but she rebukes him. Not long after, he meets a girl who lives next door. She’s not as worldly as the maid, and falls prey to his seduction. When she becomes pregnant, he casts her aside, leaving her sad and desperate. Mrs. Walton finds out and sends her off to see Dr. Malfit. Complications arise, and she dies after the abortion.
This thrusts Dr. Malfit into the spotlight, and he ends up on trial, prosecuted by Walton. He’s sent to jail, but before he is taken away he gives Walton his appointment book, and tells him he should focus more on his own household and less on other people’s affairs. Sure enough, as he goes through the book he sees not only the names of many of his wife’s friends, but learns that his own wife had three abortions. Devastated, he returns home to confront her.
As these events were transpiring, we’d learned that Mrs. Walton had experienced a change of heart. Seeing her husband playing with her sister’s children, as well as various kids in the neighborhood, she realized how important being a father was to him, and had decided to have children after all. She lets him know this, but it’s too late. The repeated abortions have left her unable to have children. The film closes with the haunting scene I alluded to earlier. The Waltons are sitting morosely by the fireplace as the ghostly figures of what would have been their three children play on the floor. Future movie star Tyrone Power Jr. makes his uncredited film debut as the baby in this scene. The scene shifts as the couple are now quite old, still seated by the fire, as what would have been their now-adult children come into view. My own views on abortion aside, those images are intense, and give an already well-made, and emotional, film an incredibly powerful ending.
Next I’m watching He Did and He Didn’t [1916], directed by Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle.
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This is my least favorite of any of the films I’ve watched thus far. It’s 52nd out of 52. Which is not to say that I hated it, not by any stretch. There were some moments I enjoyed, but as a whole it is a heavy-handed, predictable platitude of a film.
The film opens in the difficult-to-pronounce, and wholly fictional, kingdom of Wredpryd, which despite its phony name is clearly meant to represent Germany. Wredpryd’s king, a very Kaiser-like fellow, has been talked into declaring war by some of his aides. He’s delighted to learn that Count Ferdinand, a Wredprydian, if that’s the proper term, has invented a fantastic new war machine: the submarine. Off into battle goes the Count, as pilot of his new invention. Meanwhile, back home, the women of Wredpryd band together to form an anti-war coalition, saddened as they are by the loss of their husbands, sons, and fathers to the brutality of the battlefield.
So far, it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? And at this point, I was onboard. However, the film takes something of a preachy turn. Count Ferdinand is ordered to launch a torpedo at a passenger boat which he’s told is secretly carrying war supplies. He’s about to give the order to fire when he has a vision of the aftermath of his actions. He sees the ship sinking, and the deaths of the innocent passengers. This scene is effective, and well-shot. It’s an exciting, grim depiction of war. Unwilling to kill innocent people, he refuses the order to fire. His crew turns on him, and he attempts to fight them off, which leads to the destruction of the submarine, and the deaths of many, possibly all, of its crew.
It seems Ferdinand has died to, for we catch up with him in Purgatory, where he meets Jesus. Jesus is pretty sad about the war, and that he did the right thing by not sinking the boat. He let’s him know that together they’re going to solve this whole war thing, and tells him he’s going to return to Earth in the Count’s body. So back to the land of the living goes Ferdinand, with Jesus along for the ride.
Despite having a halo when he is brought before the king, Ferdinand is sentenced to death for his treason. In jail, he’s bathed in the light from a glowing star as are the nuns in a nearby convent, which while a little goofy story-wise is brilliantly executed and makes for a stunning visual onscreen. Soon the whole nation has seen the same light, and as a whole the population marches on the capital with a message of peace.
Eventually the king visits the prisoner, and this time around he is awed by the presence of a higher power. While the king watches in shock, Jesus steps out of the sleeping Count’s body and guides him through a vision of the horrors of war, culminating in a glimpse into Jesus’ big book of sinners, which includes the king’s name. Horrorstruck, the king bows before Jesus and pleads with him for mercy. Jesus backs away and vanishes, and the king finds himself back in the cell with the Count.
Naturally, the king has been humbled, and immediately announces the end of the war. While he does this, Jesus wanders the battlefield blessing those who have fallen. In the streets, the mob of nuns rejoicse, as do the citizens of the nation. Everyone young and old comes rushing out from every nook and dell to crowd the city streets in celebration of peace. We’re given a full 7 minutes of rejoicing before the film closes, and as the blare of the war bugle is replaced by the shepherd’s horn, the screen fades to black.
The finale was the strongest sequence in the entire film. The celebrating citizens of Wredpryd was a lot of fun to watch, especially after the dreary, preachy middle section of the movie.
Like The Birth of a Nation, Civilization is a clear call to avoid the growing war in Europe. However, where The Birth of a Nation did so with a compelling vision of the atrocities of war, and told an entertaining story at the same time, Civilization fails in both regards. It beats its audience over the head with pacifist imagery for an hour and change, while never offering any plot beyond “war is bad.” Director Thomas H. Ince spent a year making the film, and allegedly spent $1 million in doing so, though other reports say that was a Hollywood exaggeration, and it in fact cost only $100,000 to make. Whatever he spent, in my estimation it was wasted, because this film just isn’t very good.
I watched this on YouTube, and you can watch it below if you like. The linked version includes the film’s original score. Despite being labeled as a 1916 film, Civilization premiered on December 31st, 1915. I can think of many better ways to have ushered in 1916 than to have watched this film.
Next I’m watching Where Are My Children? [1916], directed by Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber.
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This is the second film directed by Cecil B. DeMille that I’ve watched, and I’m even more impressed this time around. More so than even D.W. Griffith, DeMille demonstrated an almost immediate intuitive grasp of the potential of film. When I first began compiling the list of films I’m working through I saw that DeMille’s second directorial effort was the first film version of Brewster’s Millions, and I was keen to see it. Unfortunately, that film has been lost, so I will only ever be able to wonder how Edward Abeles fared in the role of Montgomery Brewster. I’m going to assume his portrayal isn’t on par with that of either Dennis O'Keefe or Richard Pryor’s, and leave it at that, though if The Golden Chance, DeMille’s follow-up to The Cheat, which I discussed recently, is any indication, I may well be wrong.
The Golden Chance was one of 14 films DeMille directed in 1915. As it hit theaters on December 30th, you might think it was the last one he made that year, but nope— once The Golden Chance was in the can he went to work on Temptation, which was also released on the 30th. I know I bring this up a lot, but I don’t know how some of these directors did it. These are not simple, short films, yet DeMille managed to get a masterpiece like The Cheat into theaters on December 13th, and still have it in him to knock out two more before the year was done. I can’t speak to the quality of Temptation— it’s a lost film— but one assumes it was excellent based on the other two films DeMille made leading up to it.
Cecil’s brother William was also a director, and he wrote about his brother’s ability to direct two pictures simultaneously in his book Hollywood Saga. “C. B. with his usual audacity determined to direct both pictures at once, with two entirely separate production units. This he did by shooting The Cheat by day and The Golden Chance by night, a feat unique in motion-picture history. He finished both pictures on time and both were outstanding hits of that year.”
One wonders when he found time to direct Temptation.
The Golden Chance stars Cleo Ridgely as Mary Denby, the daughter of a judge who married below her station to disastrous results. She’s trapped in a tenement with a husband who splits his time between committing crimes and drinking away all the money he makes from them. Desperate for money to feed the two of them, Mary responds to a help wanted ad and is hired as a seamstress for the wealthy Hillary family. Mrs. Hillary immediately recognizes Mary as a woman of good upbringing, and is shocked when Mary tells her where she lives. Nonetheless, she puts her to work mending her clothes. It’s all for naught, as when she returns home that night, Steve, her no-good husband, takes the money she earns and goes out drinking.
Meanwhile, the Hillary family has a problem. Mr. Hillary is trying to convince the dashing Roger Manning, a young millionaire played by budding star Wallace Reid, who I last saw in a small part in The Birth of a Nation, to go 50/50 on a million-dollar investment. Manning is interested, but can’t invest because he is leaving town the next morning. When Mr. Hillary complains about the situation to his wife, she comes up with an idea, and asks Roger, eligible bachelor that he is, if he’d like to stay for dinner and meet “the most beautiful girl in the world.” Of course he would, but the plan seems foiled when the beautiful girl has to cancel. What to do? A scheme is hatched, and she dresses Mary up in her own clothing and jewels, and passes her off as an unmarried woman. Roger is very interested, and the two spend the evening chatting.
The plan seems to have failed when Roger says he’s still planning to leave come the morning. In a last-ditch Hail Mary, the cunning Mrs. Hillary tells him “too bad, Mary is spending the weekend here and we thought you might, too…” And our millionaire is hooked. But Mary has to explain to Steve, whom she tells she has to go do a three-day long laundry project in Newark. He buys it, and off she goes.
Back at the mansion, the plan works. Manning decides to stick around so he can spend more time with Mary, and invest with Mr. Hillary while he’s at it. Manning even proposes to Mary, who of course says no, though without explanation. While he broods by the fire, in a gorgeous shot— the light of the flame casting flickering shadows on Reid’s face as the smoke from his cigarette swirls about him— Mary goes upstairs and despairs. She’s in love with him, but knows she can’t pursue a relationship because of her marriage.
Meanwhile, in a coincidence one only finds in the silent era, Steve’s partner-in-crime Jimmy the Rat says word around town is there’s a girl wearing expensive jewelry at the Hillary mansion, and they plan to rob the house that night. He climbs in the window and starts pilfering jewels, only to find his wife sleeping in the room! Mortified by the entire situation, she doesn’t stop him, and he heads downstairs with his loot, only to encounter Manning, who calmly confronts him, and easily disarms him when Steve pulls a gun. The struggle awakens the household, and a tense scene ensues where Steve reveals to Manning that Mary is his wife, which she initially denies, though she later tells him the truth. Before this, the family lets Steve stage an escape, worrying that if the police come, Manning will learn of the truth and change his mind about investing with them.
Once Steve is gone, Mary comes clean to Roger. He’s appalled, and a crestfallen Mary changed back into her rags and wanders out into the night. She ends up sleeping on a park bench next to a bum. While this is happening, good old Jimmy the Rat has a new plan for Steve. They’re going to lure Roger Manning to pay a visit to Mary at home, then blackmail him for having visited a married woman. Ah, the old days, when moral turpitude was still a thing! Of course, the plan fails. They have Mary send a note to Manning, but she sneaks “don’t come” onto the back of it, so he shows up prepared. He tells his friend to send for the police if he isn’t out in five minutes. Once inside, after a tense scene made up almost entirely of a a series of rapid-fire close-ups, a very well-choreographed, and filmed, fight breaks out. It’s almost like watching a professional wrestling bout at times, and very effective, and a huge change of pace from the film up to this point. At the end, Manning is more or less winning, though he’s conked on the head just as the police show up, so who’s to say how the fight would have turned out. Steve tries to escape through the window, but is shot by the police and falls to his death. The film ends with a bloodied, but victorious, Manning comforting Mary, in whom he still seems to be interested, but she turns her gaze away, as if unsure what to do. I’d like to think the end up together, but we never know for sure.
Some thoughts on the actors:
Wallace Reid is spectacular. He would soon become one of the biggest stars of the late teens / early twenties, and his appeal is evident here. When he encounters Horace B. Carpenter coming downstairs after the robbery, he is coolness personified. Steve McQueen couldn’t have played that scene any better. Reid died in 1923 from a morphine addiction, a tragic loss of his life, and a devastating blow to cinema.
Cleo Ridgely is good for the role. She isn’t a stunning beauty, but has a cuteness to her that makes her believable as a girl who grew up in wealthy, but has been beaten down by a life of poverty after marrying Steve. Her acting is a bit one-note. She spends a lot of time giving a blank stare into the camera, but somehow, it works.
On one hand, Horace B. Carpenter’s Steve is a little bit too evil. We never get to see a side of him that could have wooed a judge’s daughter away from her life of luxury and into the slums. This may have been intentional, as DeMille needed to give audiences a firm reason to tolerate Mary’s quasi-infidelity, and eventual pairing off with Manning.
Ernest Joy and Edythe Chapman as Mr. and Mrs. Hillary are quite good. They give a good balance of kindness and opportunism to their performances. They aren’t exactly evil, but neither are they nice.
I found this review, from W. Stephen Bush in The Moving Picture World, January 8, 1916: “Never before have the lighting effects been used to such marvelous advantage. The highly critical spectators who saw the first display of the film were betrayed into loud approval by the many and novel effects. If paintings in a Rembrandt gallery or a set of Titians and Tintorettos were mysteriously transferred to the moving picture screen, the effect could not have been more startling.”
A review from January 29, 1916, published in The New York Dramatic Mirror, sings similar praises: “The master hand of Cecil B. DeMille is evident throughout the whole picture. His is the bigness of vision that can see and appreciate the value and importance of little things, and it is the attention to seemingly inconsequential details that makes The Golden Chance a big, gripping, human picture.”
The Golden Chance is available on a DVD, paired with another DeMille film, Don't Change Your Husband, which I’ll watch later in the project. It’s also available on YouTube, and I’ve linked it below.
Next I’m watching Civilization [1915], directed by Reginald Barker, Thomas H. Ince and Raymond B. West.
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This is one of the most unusual films I’ve watched to this point in the chronology. It’s a strange mix of dream sequences and fantasies, directed by Yevgeny Bauer. It’s a Russian film, and gave me a glimpse into what was happening cinematically outside the U.S. in 1915. It is definitely different than most of the American films I’ve watched. The only one so far that’s been similar is The Avenging Conscience, D.W. Griffith’s 1914 foray into the nascent horror genre.
I’ve seen dream sequences in previous films, and some fantasy elements, but After Death pushes the boundary on what I’ve seen so far. The entire film is a back and forth between events happening to the characters and dream sequences. The plot is incredibly simple. A studious young man is taken to party where he sees a woman that he finds pretty. Soon thereafter he sees her sing onstage, after which he receives a latter from her asking him to meet her in a park. They meet, and have a very awkward and puzzling exchange. She tells him she has a lot to say to him. He responds that he’s ready to listen, but is surprised by the situation because he lives a scholar’s secluded life. She say she made a mistake and runs away.
Three months later, he finds out she committed suicide. He visits her family, and reads her suicide note, saying she killed herself out of unrequited love. He’s now wracked with guilt, because he also loved her but was too shy to let her know. He spends the rest of the film having numerous spooky dreams and visions of her ghost visiting him. He grows ill and is bedridden, still dreaming. The film ends with him dying in his mother’s arms after one last visit from the girl’s ghost.
As a realistic depiction of human behavior the film falls flat, but for the visuals it presents it is a stunning success. The dreams and ghostly visits are quite innovative and unsettling, and it’s there that the film earns its admission price.
As this is the 50th film I’ve watched as a part of this podcast so far, and I haven’t much more to say about it, I thought it might be fun to look at what I’ve watched so far. You know, metrics. The internet loves metrics!
First, let’s break it down by year.
1899 - 1 film1900 - 1 film1901 - 1 film1902 - 2 films1903 - 3 films1904 - 1 film1905 - 1 film1906 - 3 films1907 - no films from this year1908- 2 films1909- 4 films1910- 1 film1911- 1 film1912- 6 films1913- 2 films1914- 8 films1915- 15 films (13 covered so far)
What happened in 1907? How did I not find anything to watch from that year?
I should mention that what I’m doing, or at least the way I’m doing it, is not an exact science. I’m learning a lot as go along, so I may well have missed some must-sees from past years. I’d love to hear from those of you with more knowledge on this topic than me about what I may have missed, or what I should be sure to watch in the future.
Next, let’s examine how am I watching these movies. The answer in general is projected onto a big screen in a room in my house dedicated to watching films, but as for the source, it breaks down like this:
20 on YouTube16 on Blu-ray13 on DVD1 on Prime
Finally, let’s look by director. Here’s whose films I’ve so far seen:
14 films by Georges Méliès9 films by D.W. Griffith3 films by James Kirkwood2 films by Edwin S. Porter2 films by Henry Lehrman
and 1 film each from the following directors or teams of directors:
Gilbert M. AndersonReginald BarkerReginald Barker and Thomas H. InceYevgeny BauerFrancesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de LiguoroAugust BlomRomeo BosettiCharles ChaplinWilliam H. Clifford and William S. HartJohn H. CollinsCecil B. DeMilleEdwin MiddletonMabel NormandGiovanni PastroneFrank PowellMack SennettPhillips Smalley and Lois WeberWladyslaw StarewiczRaoul WalshW.W. Young
So there you go. 50 movies down, about 2500 to go.
Next I’m watching The Golden Chance [1915], directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
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The Cheat is the 23rd film Cecil B. DeMille directed. That seems like a long career, but those films were released over a span of 22 months, meaning he had less than two years as a director under his belt when he made this movie. Despite being so new to the art, his talent is apparent. This is a beautifully shot film, and includes the most effective usage of lighting and shadow that I’ve seen thus far.
The story opens with Richard, played by Jack Dean, sinking his entire fortune into an investment. He informs his wife, Edith, played by Dean’s real-life wife Fannie Ward, that she must temporarily curb her spending. She’s been spending a small fortune on clothing, and for a fund raiser for Belgian war orphans she’s helping organize. She’s the treasurer of the Red Cross chapter that’s putting on the fundraiser, and is entrusted with the $10,000 they’ve raised. She promptly gives it to a friend who promises he can double it overnight with an investment he insists is better than the risky one her husband has made. Naturally, he shows up the next day to tell her that the investment didn’t pan out, and the money is gone. Now she’s in a pickle! She has less than a day to come up with $10,000 to give the Red Cross.
She turns to her best friend, Haka, a Burmese ivory merchant with whom she spends most of her free time. He offers her the money, in exchange for a night together in bed. She reluctantly agrees, knowing the alternative is jail for embezzling the funds. When she returns home, her husband tells her his investment has panned out and they are rich beyond their wildest dreams. She asks him for $10,000 to cover a loss in a game of bridge, so he writes her a check. When she delivers it to Haka that evening, he refuses, telling her she needs to stick to their original deal. She tries to flee, he locks her in the room. There’s a struggle, and at one point Haka grabs her, and brands her shoulder with the red-hot brand he uses on his ivory. Desperate, she finds Haka’s gun and shoots him.
As this is happening, Richard shows up. He was suspicious about the alleged bridge debt, and has come to find his wife. Assessing the situation, he sends his wife away and when the police come, he tells them he shot Haka. Haka doesn’t dispute this, likely seeing a way to get his romantic rival, and Edith’s protector and source of income, out of the picture. In the subsequent trial, he maintains his guilt, but won’t offer a reason for shooting Haka. When he’s convicted, Edith finally bursts forth and tells the truth. When she shows the brand on her shoulder as proof, the judge dismisses the case, and Richard and Edith leave together.
When it was first released, the villain was a Japanese ivory merchant, which lead to protests by Japanese-Americans, so upon its rerelease in 1918, DeMille changed him from Japanese to Burmese. Nationality aside, the character was played with extraordinary aplomb by the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, for whom the role became his breakthrough to stardom. He became Hollywood’s first Asian matinee idol, and the first non-white international movie star. Stephen Gong, the executive director of San Francisco's Center for Asian-American Media, writes “It [the film] caused a sensation. The idea of the rape fantasy, forbidden fruit, all those taboos of race and sex – it made him a movie star. And his most rabid fan base was White women.”
Up for debate is whether the film is racist or not. Some will of course say it is, as the villain is played by an Asian actor, but I’d counter that his race is never a focal point of the film. It’s more that he happens to be a Burmese merchant. He could have been Turkish or Belgian, or even American. Moreover, he is clearly an accepted member of the upper class in the film. No one objects to his presence, or treats him any differently due to his nationality. So at least to me, it seems as nothing more than a villain being played by a Japanese actor.
More noticeable to me than anyone’s race is deMille’s pioneering use of what’s known as Rembrandt lighting. In numerous scenes, an actor’s face would be partly lit, partly in shadow. Hayakawa is the prime beneficiary of this technique, but there are many such scenes in the film. It works extremely well, and many lengthy shots from an immobile camera are augmented by this kind of lighting.
I watched this on a DVD, which includes a second Cecil B. DeMille film, Manslaughter, which I’ll watch later in the chronology. You can purchase your own copy by clicking on the picture below. On the advice of several people, I have created an Amazon Associates account, so if you do buy something from Amazon using my link, I may receive a few pennies.
The Cheat is also available on Amazon Prime, where it is available free to Prime members. I took a peek, and the quality of the film is solid, if not great, and the brilliance of DeMille, and cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff, is clearly visible. I still recommend you buy the DVD.
Next I’m watching After Death [1915], directed by Yevgeny Bauer.
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Try though I may, I’m still not seeing what others seem to see in Charles Chaplin. Granted, this, like the previous films I’ve seen from him, is an early effort, and I have hope that his later work will be better, but this feels like another forgettable film that is only worth watching because Chaplin starred in and directed it.
The plot, so far as there is one, is that an obnoxious man goes to the theater for a night of Vaudeville acts, and acts disruptive. Why he isn’t thrown out we’ll never know, but despite stealing seats from other patrons, punching the conductor, members of the orchestra, ushers, and other theater-goers, going on stage and assaulting performers and the stage manager, and doing various other things, he’s left to roam the theater at will, and sit where he wants. He throws pies, gets in fights, and is generally disruptive. A subplot— I guess you can call it that— features Chaplin as a tramp, sitting in the nosebleeds with the other poors, pouring beer on the patrons below, and eventually turning a firehose onto the performers and audience. The film ends with the obnoxious Chaplin being sprayed with water from the hose.
Chaplin acts very aloof, almost to the point of seeming dazed. Nothing he does quite makes sense, and it all feels very random. The film is full of pratfalls, pies to the face, and other shenanigans and sight gags that no doubt delighted audiences in 1915, but I was left feeling like I wanted more. On the other hand, I haven’t yet seen any comedies that felt fully formed, and I feel like comedy was lagging well behind drama and action at this point in cinematic history. Directors and screenwriters had yet to find their footing when it came to bringing laughs to the big screen; or, modern tastes are so different that the directors of the era were knocking it out of the park in terms of what their audiences wanted, and it’s only my modern sensibility that is making me think they were missing the mark.
I watched this on YouTube.
My indifference towards this film reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to mention almost since the my first podcast, and something I assume would show up in a comment were anyone to comment on my podcast. As an aside, do feel free to comment. I realize podcasts don’t generate much in the way of audience interaction due to how they are consumed, but I’d love to see some discussions below the written transcripts of the podcasts.
Back to my point— if there were comments, at some point someone would ask me why I don’t have a rating system in place for films. My answer: I don’t know how to rate films. I can tell you I liked a film, or even loved it, but I find it very difficult to compare films, which is what ratings inherently do. If I rate films on a scale of 1 to 5, the implication is that two movies rated 5 are about equal, which is seldom the case. I’d give all sorts of films a 5, meaning Citizen Kane and The Jerk would appear to be equal. I love both those films, but one is a much better Film with a capital F than the other; you can decide which. Wherever you stand on the Charles Foster Kane vs. Navin R. Johnson debate, the fact doesn’t change that 5 stars means something different depending on the movie, and it’s impossible to communicate what it means within a traditional film rating system. I’d love to hear what you think is the perfect system for rating movies. Maybe I’ll agree, and implement it.
Another problem is how to rate films that aren’t great films, but are great for what they are. A film can be great, but made on a small budget, or belong to a niche genre, and can’t compete with an Important Film from a Big Studio, which means it was doomed to never earn a 5 from the get-go. Or, do I rate films based on how great they are within their realm. Something like a Godzilla film comes to mind. Shouldn’t the very best kaiju film be rated 5? It’s the best it can be. Or, should it be capped at around a 3, since even the best Godzilla film can’t hold a candle to Fellini’s best work? Something seems wrong with a system where a movie can’t receive a top mark simply because of the type of movie it is.
So there you have it, the reason why I’m not rating these films.
Next I’m watching The Cheat [1915], directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
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It’s easy to dismiss most of the directors not named D.W. Griffith who were making films in 1915, and for the most part it can be understandable if one does so, but there were a handful of directors doing more than churning out what today would be called “content” at that point in the history of film. Cecil B. DeMille is another big name who was finding his footing in 1915, along with Maurice Tourneur, Raoul Walsh, and Raymond West. Those are the Big Names whose films I came into this project excited to watch, and from whom I expect to see great work. A name I was wholly unfamiliar with is John H. Collins, but after watching Children of Eve I’m ready to add him to that short list of early greats. I’ll see a few more of his films as I make my way through my list, and I’m very curious to see if they are as enjoyable as this one.
Collins directed 15 short films in 1914 and 1915 before switching to feature-length films. Children of Eve was the sixth, and final, feature-length film he directed in 1915, and from what I can tell, it was positively received by critics of the time. His work generally seems to have been praised, and had he gone on to have a longer career, I don’t doubt he’d be better known today. Sadly, he died in the influenza outbreak of 1919, leaving only a small body of surviving work behind. I am entirely convinced that had he survived, his name would be held in the same regard as the aforementioned stars of the silent era.
Collins worked for the Edison Company, which probably hasn’t helped his legacy. Everything I’ve read suggests that Edison was known for churning out average films at a quick pace to feed a growing market for film, and was a company wholly focused on the bottom line. From what I’ve seen of the Edison films, this is true. Based on what I’ve watched, Edison’s 1915 one-reelers are practically indifferentiable from what they were releasing in 1910, which makes Collins’ work all the more noteworthy to me.
Children of Eve is an exception to the Edison formula. It stars Viola Dana, to whom director Collins had been married in 1915, as Fifty-Fifty Mamie, so-named because she always splits the money she makes in dance contests 50/50 with her partner. Before we meet her, we meet her mother, Flossy, a prostitute from New York's East Side. She befriends Henry, a young clerk who lives in a neighboring apartment, who encourages her to reform her life. She does, and they fall in love, but she leaves him because she feels she’ll only be a negative influence on his life. She doesn’t tell him she’s pregnant, and ends up having the baby and dying shortly thereafter, leaving young Mamie with nothing besides a picture by which she can remember her mother.
The basic plot is very similar to what I saw in Rags, but with an extra layer provided by the film’s message about labor reform. Like Rags, and many other films I’ve seen, Children of Eve relies on some very unlikely coincidences to push the plot forward. Apparently audiences at the time were more forgiving of such plot contrivances, although even as I typed that I realized that a great number of modern films also rely on coincidence as a primary plot device, albeit better disguised than it was in the early days of film.
We pick up the story 17 years after Flossy’s death. Mamie is now a party girl, going out dancing with her main squeeze, Bennie the Typ, who besides being a great dancer is a low level criminal. We catch up with Henry, who never recovered from Flossy’s departure, and has turned from being a kind-hearted man to a greedy industrialist. In one of the coincidences I mentioned as being typical for the era, Mamie encounters Henry’s nephew Bert, who prevents her being arrested for shoplifting. He takes a liking to her, and convinces her to give up her wanton lifestyle and find religion.
Mamie starts hanging out at the settlement house where Bert volunteers, and he gradually introduces her to a new, more fulfilling lifestyle. At one point, he grows ill, and Mamie tries to visit him at home. Henry intercepts her, and sends her away, telling her to forget about Bert, explaining that her low societal position will make her nothing but a burden on him— very much the same thing Flossy had told him years ago, only by now he’s become hardened by the world and considers it good advice this time around.
Some of Bert’s activist friends recruit Mamie her to help in their crusade for social justice, and ask her to go undercover as a factory worker to help expose the terrible working conditions therein. Mamie goes to work in Henry’s canning factory, where he is employing children in a workplace that has no fire escape and only one staircase. Naturally, during her day there, the cannery catches fire, many children die and Mamie is fatally injured. The fire was based on a real-life event of the era, the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911, and Collins pulls no punches in depicting it. We see many dead children lined up in the aftermath. In addition to its stark realism, it is it a well-filmed, and brilliantly edited, sequence, that showcases Collins as a true directing talent.
Mamie is home, dying and Henry visits her, still unaware of who she really is. As far as he knows, she’s just another guttersnipe who was unfortunate enough to die in one of his factories. He’s initially reluctant to have his doctor help Mamie, but when he sees the picture of Flossy on her desk, everything becomes clear to him, and he understands Mamie is his daughter. He implores the doctor to help her, but is rebuffed, being told that money can’t change her situation. Mamie asks for Bert, who arrives in time to see her die. Crushed by all that has happened, Henry’s eyes at last open to what he has become, and he resolves to change his ways, and fight for the welfare of workers and work to put an end to child slavery.
If it sounds grim and a bit heavy-handed, at times it is, but it’s still a powerful piece of filmmaking by a director long forgotten by most. I have three more films directed by John H. Collins on my list, and am looking forward to seeing more from this director whose career ended far too soon.
I’ve seen a few DVDs of this for sale online, and am considering adding it to my collection, though it’s sometimes hit or miss with such DVDs. Some are homemade DVDs made from what look like videos copied from YouTube, and others are legit, restored versions made by professional companies. It’s hard to know what I’ll get, but if I do buy one, I’ll report about it. In the meantime, I watched this on YouTube, linked below. It’s an unusual version, with a restored and unrestored version playing side by side. I doubled the image size, and scrolled right to get the full-screen view of the restored version.
Next I’m watching: A Night in the Show [1915], directed by Charles Chaplin.
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The film opens with the outbreak of the Civil War, with young men rushing to enlist while their girlfriends watch with pride. Only our protagonist, Frank Winslow, played by Charles Ray, seems uncertain, but with some encouragement from his sweetheart he heads into an enlistment center. He doesn’t sign up, however, as he gets cold feet and flees home instead. His girlfriend is heartbroken and humiliated, and has to watch other couples celebrate the dubious honor of their men rushing off to war.
At home, Frank is confronted by his father, the esteemed Col. Jefferson Beverly Winslow. He’s aghast at his son’s cowardice, and does what any proud father would do— he loads his gun and points it at his son and tells him to either enlist or be shot. There’s some tough love for you. It works, as Frank enlists, under his father’s watchful, and well-armed, eye, and heads off to war. He doesn’t last long, as he deserts on his first night there, and races home, where the family servants hide him. The colonel discovers him however, and after chewing out his son, does the only thing he can think to do. He dusts off his uniform, likely from the Mexican War, and heads into battle, saying “the name of Private Winslow is on the rolls: someone must answer when that name is called.”
Meanwhile, as cowardly Frank is hiding in the attic of his home, his town is overrun by enemy forces, who commandeer his home. While his mother reluctantly feeds and cares to the soldiers, Frank eavesdrops. He overhears them discussing a map that shows their army’s weak point, one that could be easily exploited were the other side to learn of it. Summoning his heretofore absent courage, Frank sneaks down, holds the group of soldiers at gunpoint, and, dressed in the enemy’s uniform, steals the plans and rides away. He makes it to safely to where his troop is camped, where he is promptly shot by none other than his own father— he finally got his chance!— due to him wearing the uniform of the opposite army.
Frank survives the gunshot and delivers the map to the commanding officers, who successfully defeat the other army. Meanwhile, his father doesn’t realize it was his son he shot until he is summoned to visit the mysterious hospitalized hero. Imagine his surprise when he learns his cowardly son is a coward no more!
My favorite part of this film is Charles Ray. His acting is far more natural than that of many silent era stars. At times, he almost seems to be a modern day actor who has somehow been cast back into time to appear in a silent film, but never in a jarring way. I appreciate the way he conveys his fear, both of going to war and of being a coward, in a believable yet subtle manner.
I watched this on YouTube, and you can, too.
Next I’m watching: Children of Eve [1915], directed by John H. Collins.
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This is most noteworthy as W.C. Fields’ first film. Though only 35 at the time, Fields had already enjoyed a long and successful career in Vaudeville before turning to film. He eventually went on to become one of Hollywood’s hugest stars, and one of only a handful of silent film stars who is still widely remembered today, and this is where that film career began.
The story is simple, and really nothing more than an excuse for some gags. Fields and Bud Ross are at a picnic, competing for the attention of a girl. After a number of gags involving the picnic setting, they are convinced to settle their differences at a pool table. Once at a pool hall, the two take turns hitting impossible pool shots, accomplished via primitive but fun stop-motion photography. After besting his rival, Fields ends up in a brawl, which he escapes through a basement door. He leaves his rival dunked in a barrel of water, and heads off to unknown new adventures.
It’s short and to the point, and a fun distraction. Nothing is groundbreaking here, but the short is worth watching as Fields’ entry point into cinema. I am a big fan of W.C. Fields, and can remember many happy nights a young man watching his films alongside my mom, who was also a fan of his. We often quoted scenes from his films to one another, so I’m always down to watch anything he’s in.
It’s interesting that this film directly follows The Regeneration in the chronology, as I ended that podcast talking about how ground-breaking it was, and about the advances in filmmaking that were evident by 1915, and then along comes this movie that would not have been at all out of place in 1910. Pool Sharks is definitely a holdover from an older era of cinema. That is not a knock on this film by any stretch, as audiences in 1915 were certainly not all expecting, or ready for, more cutting edge fare. Keep in mind that plenty of films, especially comedic shorts like this one, that had been made in 1910, or prior, were likely still playing at smaller theaters all over the world, and that theater-going was a far different experience in 1915 than it is today. At this point in history, studios were still making films and selling, rather than loaning, prints to theaters, where they were sometimes run for years. Many were shown until the print wore out, so a short film like Pool Sharks, rather than seeming dated, may well have felt fresh when shown at smaller or more remote theaters, to audiences who had been seeing the same older shorts on repeat for years.
Next I’m watching: The Coward [1915], directed by Reginald Barker and Thomas H. Ince.
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I only know Raoul Walsh from a few gangster pictures he made in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, so I was curious to see some of his earlier work. Quite a few films he’s directed are on my list— 17 I believe— and The Regeneration is the first one to show up in the chronology. Despite being made in 1915, it stands up to his later work, and honestly, is as good as any modern film. Sure, it’s dated in some ways, but that’s the nature of all art, right? Any work of art is a product of its time, but it is the timeless qualities of the piece that allow it to stand out, and The Regeneration is timeless in the ways that matter.
Having extolled its timelessness, I’m going to start by praising this film for one of the ways it is most dated. The Regeneration was filmed almost entirely on location in New York’s Bowery. It’s really only through films like this that we can get a real glimpse into how that neighborhood looked back then. Sure, we can read all about it in myriad books, but nothing beats seeing the real tenements, streets, cars, and people on film. Just seeing the spider’s web of clotheslines strung between the buildings is a powerful reminder of what our cities once were, so even without a for its time spectacular stunt of a man climbing between buildings on one of those lines, the scene was fantastic to behold.
Part gangster movie, part morality play, The Regeneration traces the life of Owen, played as an adult by Rockliffe Fellows. We meet him first as a child, an orphan, taken in by abusive parents who use him as a servant. We see through his eyes as his parents drink and fight. We also see what apparently was a normal thing in 1915: Owen is sent by his stepfather to a nearby saloon with a coin and a bucket. He slips both under the swinging doors to the bartender, who moments later slides the bucket, now full of beer, back out, which Owen brings to his father, but only after sneaking a sip for himself. Later in the film we witness a den of gangsters passing around a similar (the same prop?) bucket of beer around. I take it to mean that going to a bar to fill a pail with beer wasn’t unusual back then.
Anyway, we rejoin Owen in his teens. He’s now living in the streets, running with a gang. He isn’t all bad, however. When he witnesses some bullies pushing around a crippled teen, he intervenes, and beats up the bullies. He’s still a good guy at heart, this Owen. Another time jump brings us to the present day, and we learn that Owen, now 25, is the boss of the toughest gang in the Bowery. Meanwhile, across town, we see the wealthy district attorney, played by Carl Harbaugh, dining with some of his rich friends. The conversation turns to gangsters, and one guest, Marie, Anna Q. Nilsson, exclaims that she’d love to see a gangster in the flesh. Ames tells her he knows just the place, and he leads a few of them to a saloon in the Bowery.
Apparently, the poors don’t take kindly to being gawked at by rich folk, and a scuffle breaks out. Owen is observing this when Marie catches his eye, and in a great bit of silent acting, implores him to intervene, which he does. He saves Ames, and escorts the party out to their car. As they part ways, we can see that Owen and Marie have taken an interest in one another.
Marie’s interest runs deeper than just her curiosity about Owen, as she was struck by a speech from a reform advocate she overheard as she was leaving the slums. She decides to devote her heretofore empty life to helping the unfortunate denizens of the Bowery, and takes up volunteering at a Settlement House therein. Owen notices her, and, though hesitant at first, keeps an eye on her from afar before finally being won over when he’s recruited to help rescue a baby from an abusive father. Flashing back to his own unhappy childhood, Owen realizes that Marie’s cause is worthwhile, and, to the shock of his gang, leaves his role as head gangster and starts learning to read and write at the Settlement.
The story takes a darker turn when Skinny, a much more brutal gangster, and Owen’s replacement as leader, stabs a policeman. He begs Owen to hide him at the Settlement, and though Owen at first refuses, he acquiesces when reminded of a time when Skinny had lied to the police to save Owen. The subterfuge works when the police come, but Marie, and a visiting Ames, find out that Skinny is hiding, and admonish Owen. Ames taunts him, telling him that Marie, who has fled to her room in disappointment, will never love him after his error. Surprisingly, she comes out with a redoubled devotion to Owen, determined to help him stay straight. Owen, ashamed, flees, and the audience can’t help but wonder if he’s out to get Skinny.
He’s not. He sends a note to Skinny saying that they’re even now, and to never bother him again, and heads to a church. There, he consults a priest, who also tells him that he’s a good guy, and he can’t stray from his righteous path simply because of one lapse in judgment.
Marie, meanwhile, does think Owen is after Skinny, or perhaps has rejoined his gang, for she heads to the gang’s clubhouse to find him. There, she’s duped by Skinny into following him into an empty bedroom, where he attempts to assault her. She barricades herself in a closet. While this is happening, Marie’s assistant, the crippled youth Owen had helped years ago, runs to let Owen know about Marie’s predicament. Owen arrives in time to chase Skinny away, who shoots at Owen as he escapes. The shot misses Owen, but mortally wounds Marie. On her deathbed, she implores Owen not to avenge her, shown in a striking and clever manner. Rather than a title card, she points towards a scroll that is superimposed onto the screen, and contains the verse from the Book of Romans, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” That would be out of place, and perhaps even comical, in a modern film, but in the context of the scene, and in an era where all films were silent, it’s clever and meaningful.
Skinny does received his comeuppances, though at the hands of the crippled youth, played by an unnamed actor who I wish I knew more about. He is a standout as the hunchbacked character in this film, and, to Walsh’s credit, is never singled out as a freak or anything special. He sees Skinny trying to avoid the police by climbing from one building to another on a clothesline (the stunt I alluded to earlier), and shoots at him. It isn’t clear if he hits him, or if it’s simply the surprise of the shot, but Skinny falls to his death.
Besides keeping Owen on the right path, his choice not to avenge Marie’s death adds an extra level of emotional weight to her murder. Had he been on the fence, and only decided to remain moral due to her death, it would feel like more of a plot contrivance, but it’s clear that he was already determined to do right before she was killed. Her death is simply a tragedy, and not a necessity of plot.
I really enjoyed this film. Intellectually, it’s certainly on par with what Griffith was doing at the time, though of course it is visually less innovative. This could well be in large part due to the budget Griffith had, as well as the scope of the stories he was telling. On the topic of Griffith, here’s an interesting side note: while this is the first film I’ve watched for this project that was directed by Raoul Walsh, it isn’t the first time I’ve seen him. He had a small role in The Birth of a Nation, in which he played John Wilkes Booth. He was also an assistant director, and part of the editing team on that film, and he clearly learned a lot from Griffith.
I’ve reached a point in cinematic history where there is a lot more structure to the filmmaking process. In many ways, 1915 seems to be the beginning of the modern era of film. It isn’t as if The Birth of a Nation instantly revolutionized film, and everything that came after was different, but it’s clear that moviemaking was moving away from the independent, and often haphazard, methods of its early days, and become far more organized, and supervised. The studio system wasn’t fully in place, but I’m beginning to see its roots, and films, at least the better ones, are now being made by coherent teams of people as opposed to one guy with a camera. From here on out, I think it’s going to be important for me to pay attention to more than just the director and actors in a film. Writers, cinematographers, assistant directors, producers, and other people are starting to play key roles in film by 1915, and it’s becoming interesting to track their progress.
I watched this on a blu-ray from the Flicker Alley collection, and I highly recommend you buy and watch it. And I should add— I don’t make anything if you buy these blu-rays and DVDs. I link these to help you find he films. You can click the picture below if you want to buy this great film.
Next I’m watching: Pool Sharks [1915], directed by Edwin Middleton.
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It’s Mary Pickford again, this time as Rags, so-named because she’s so poor she wears ragged clothing. Pickford never disappoints, and she’s as fabulous in this as she has been in any film I’ve seen her in to this point.
The film opens with Paul Ferguson, a bank cashier proposing to Alice McCloud, who is played by Mary Pickford. Alice is the ward of Paul’s employer, John Hardesty. The day after the engagement, Hardesty discovers that Paul has made an error at the bank, and his accounts are short. Rather than having Paul arrested and leaving Alice heartbroken, Hardesty allows the couple time to skip town before calling the police.
We pick the story up two years later. Ferguson is now the town drunk in a Western mining camp, and Alice is pregnant. Alice dies after giving birth to a girl, whom she names Glory. Paul jokes that they should name her Rags, because that’s all she’ll ever be able to wear. His prediction comes true, as we flash forward another 16 years, and see that Glory is now a spirited tomboy known to everyone as Rags, who is also played by Mary Pickford.
Back East, we catch up with John Hardesty, who is sending his nephew Keith, a mining engineer, out West to check out an investment. Naturally, he’s being sent to the same town where Rags lives. Keith arrives, meets Rags, and the two promptly fall in love. Keith later encounters his business associate, who saw him canoodling with Rags, and teases him. In a moment of foolish defensiveness, Keith exclaims that he sees Glory as nothing more than a bundle of rags. He’s unaware that Rags is eavesdropping on their conversation, and she runs away, crestfallen, and later ends the relationship, believing that her low social station will prevent them from having a happy marriage.
Meanwhile, Paul and two lowlife friends attempt to rob Keith at gunpoint, but the Sheriff shows up in time to prevent the crime. In the ensuing shootout, Paul is killed, and Keith is badly wounded. With his dying breath, Paul tells the sheriff to send Rags back to Hardesty, who will look after her.
Now back East, Rags adjusts to her new life of luxury, and stops wearing rags. When she again encounters Keith, home recuperating from his gunshot wound, she is his social equal, and at last the two can marry.
To my knowledge, Rags isn’t available on DVD, but it is in the public domain, and can be watched on YouTube, which is how I watched it.
Next I’m watching: The Regeneration [1915], directed by Raoul Walsh.
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William S. Hart stars in another ahead-of-its-time films, and one that I can easily see being remade today. In fact, I feel like it maybe has been remade, or at least homaged, a number of times. In this one, Hart is Bat Peters, a former master gunslinger who has retired from shooting, and taken up mining. He has found some ore, and heads to Chicago to meet with some mining investors to see if his mine is worth anything. It turns out it is quite valuable, and the investor he’s consulted agrees to buy it from him, and offers him a very fair price. So far, so good, right? Well, it wouldn’t be a Hart film without a dramatic twist, which is what comes next.
Once the price has been negotiated, Bat is paid in cash, and entrusted to the investor’s assistant, who is to take care of him for the remainder of his stay in Chicago. It’s all part of a nefarious plan, as Bat is invited to a friendly game of poker, unaware that everyone in the game is in on a scam to cheat him out of his money. If their plan succeeds, he’ll lose all the money he was paid for the mine, and the investor will get his mine for free. Unluckily for our villains, Bat notices them cheating, and transforms from Bat Peters, miner to Bat Peters, gunslinger.
Bat manages to recover his money, round up all the crooks, and even rescue the investor’s secretary, played by Clara Williams, who was kidnapped lest she warn Bat about the plot she’d overheard. It all ends on a happy note, as Bat heads back West, taking his new bride with him.
I watched this on a DVD, which you can buy as part of a box set at the link connected to the picture below.
Next I’m watching: Rags [1915], directed by James Kirkwood.
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Mary Pickford was everything they said she was. I knew very little about her before embarking upon this project, but she has not disappointed me one bit so far. From her bit part in The Country Doctor, to starring roles in My Baby, Tess of the Storm Country and Cinderella, and now as Fanchon, the Cricket, she brings a personality and brightness to the screen every time she shows up. I’m not even a tiny bit surprised she became the famous star she did. I’ve read that she is to this day the most popular female movie star of all time, and I don’t doubt it. No one will ever dethrone America’s Sweetheart as the undisputed queen of the silver screen.
Fanchon is a poor girl, who wears tattered clothes and lives in a shack in the woods with her eccentric grandmother. Townsfolk refer to the grandmother as a witch, and Fanchon is like a little cricket, chirping about the forest, living the life of a woodland sprite. She loves her life of freedom, but begins to feel lonely when she encounters a group of friends out playing and picnicking, and generally making merry. She plays some practical jokes on them as a sort of ice-breaker, but they backfire, and only serve to alienate Fanchon more. Worse, she’s developed a crush on Landry, one of the men in the group, played by Jack Standing, but he’s engaged to Madelon, played by Lottie Pickford, Mary’s real-life sister. Of course, after all is said and done, Fanchon and Landry end up together. Or do they? The film has a somewhat vague ending. Landry is near death, and Fanchon is at his bedside comforting him, hoping he gets better. We then cut to a scene of Fanchon happily frolicking in some weeds. Clearly some time has passed, but what has happened? Is she happy because Landry recovered, or did he die, and we see that her indomitable spirit allows her to be happy despite that tragedy. Who’s to say?
Besides Mary and Lottie Pickford, this film also features their younger brother Jack Pickford in a minor role, and is the only film in which all three siblings acted together. For years, this film was considered lost, a fact that saddened Mary Pickford deeply, as she often wanted to watch the one film she made with both siblings. It was only rediscovered after her death, in two pieces. Though each of the surviving copies that were discovered were incomplete, together the contained the entire film, and a restoration was undertaken. The film looks quite great, and is available both on blu-ray and on Amazon Prime. You can click the picture of the blu-ray below if you’d like to buy a copy of your own.
For what it’s worth, not only do I consider this to be a downright excellent film, but my 6-year-old son has also become enamored with both this film, and Mary Pickford in general. He enjoys watching silent films with me, and suggests all the time that we either rewatch Fanchon, the Cricket, or watch something else starring Mary Pickford.
Next I’m watching: The Ruse [1915], directed by William H. Clifford and William S. Hart.
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It’s time for another quick break from watching movies to handle some podcast business.
As regular listeners know, I started this podcast as a tool to help me remember the plots and details of films I watch. I often find myself forgetting what happened in a movie I watched, or if I’ve even watched a particular film, so when I heard on another podcast that a way to fix this is to write about the film, and then record yourself speaking about it, I created this Substack. I didn’t think anyone else would read or listen to it.
Now that I have subscribers, whom I assume are reading and listening, I sometimes find myself thinking about what I should be doing to best serve my audience, rather than what’s best for me. Though sometimes I assume that no one is actually reading or listening. I suspect many people subscribe to podcasts and blogs only to ignore or delete them when they show up in their inbox. Based on the complete lack of interaction or comments, I do sometimes feel it’s safe to say that no one is really listening to any of this, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, per se.
Nonetheless, when I started, I was posting articles quite often, but now that I have subscribers I have slowed the pace, so as not to overwhelm anyone, and I now have a backlog of complete, but unposted, podcasts. So, at the risk of overcrowding your inbox, I’m going to go back to watching and posting at my own pace. If that means a post every day for a week, or three weeks without one, so be it. I hope that doesn’t lead to people bailing on this podcast, because I genuinely enjoy knowing that others have taken an interest in my weird little project, but if you do unsubscribe, I won’t be offended. Plus, I have a list of over 2,100 movies to watch, and I’m not getting any younger.
Speaking of the list of movies, more than a few people now have asked if they can see that list. So far I’ve declined, so as not to spoil the surprise of what movie will come next, but I’ve come up with a way to share it without really sharing it. I’ve been getting a steady stream of emails from Substack reminding me to monetize my podcast. Clearly they think there is a big market for podcasts about really old films that no one knows or cares about, but I’m skeptical. Nonetheless, I’ve acquiesced to their polite demands, and have created a paid option of this Substack. The perk? If you pay you can see the list of films I’ve concocted. Keep in mind, I’m still adding to it all the time as I realize “oh yeah, that movie exists,” so it’s a work in progress, and one that you can now be privy to for the small fee of whatever it is Substack charges people for paid posts.
If anyone is dumb kind enough to subscribe, I’ll come up with some other fun perks. I was thinking that maybe a video tour of the library of film books I sometimes consult while researching articles could be fun, and I have some other ideas. In any event, feel free to send your hard earned money my way if you see fit.
Another feature Substack has been pushing on me is chat. They now have a way for readers to chat with one another. I’m not too clear on how it works, but maybe all my subscribers who aren’t commenting can also not chat. That sounds fun, so I’ll look into it.
The last thing I want to bring up while I’m writing about something other than a movie is a website I like called Letterboxd. It’s a site where you can keep track of what films you watch, write reviews of films, create lists, and so forth. I’ve been using it since 2015 to keep track of what I watch, though in a very half-assed way. I’ve tried to be better about that lately, and I’m pretty good about entering films I see in a theater, but I tend to be pretty haphazard when it comes to stuff I watch at home. However, fans of this podcast may enjoy the lists I’ve created to track what I write about here. Anyway, if you like movies, check out Letterboxd. And no, they did not pay me to say that, I just like that site.
If you’d like to see them, here are the lists I’ve created so far for the All the Movies podcast. You can click each one to be taken to the list. The 1915 list is still private when I write this, but I’ll make it public once I’ve posted the last of the podcasts for films from 1915, so I may as well drop it here for future readers.
1899 to 19091910 to 19141915
And that’s it for this little intermission.
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This is the 38th film I’ve watched as a part of this podcast, and one of just a few that I was truly aware of before beginning. I’ve enjoyed silent films since I was in my 20s, but before starting this project I’d never actively sought them out for home viewing. If I had the chance to see one in a theater, I’d do so, but theaters seem only to show the most well-known silent films, most of which were made towards the end of the silent era. Since I am watching the films chronologically, I’ve so far seen mostly lesser-known movies, so it was interesting to finally watch a film that is still well-known today, and a film I’d long meant to watch.
The film may be most known today simply for being controversial. The picture of the movie’s poster, shown above, starkly illustrates that controversy. And honestly, I knew little about this film other than it is allegedly a well-made, but racist, film, and so I went into it with those preconceived expectations. I have a very different point of view after watching it. I don’t want to delve deeply into the topic of race and racism, and would rather discuss the merits of the film as a film, but it seems impossible to talk about The Birth of a Nation without the topic of race coming up. With that in mind, while the film certainly contains imagery that will startle or disturb most members of a modern audience, the film itself doesn’t put forth a racist message. It’s a fictional drama/romance intermingled with a historical depiction of the South in the years just before, during, and after the Civil War. However, it’s the history told from the Southern point of view, which I think is a large part of the reason it gets branded a racist film.
If I had to sum up the film in a single, short sentence, which is difficult to do for a film that is over 3 hours long— the longest film ever made at the time of its release— I’d say that it is a staunchly anti-war film. The message it hammers home time and time again is that war, no matter how just the cause, is best avoided, and nothing can justify innocent young men being dispatched to battlefields to kill one another on behalf of wealthy and/or powerful individuals who remain safely at home. The film takes its time setting the stage for the war to come, allowing its audience to become invested in the friendships and romances of two families, one from the North and one from the South, before they are torn asunder by the war.
It’s worth noting that World War I was being fought in Europe when this film was being made, and though The Birth of a Nation is ostensibly about the Civil War, there is some very clear subtext that can be read as an admonition for the U.S. to stay out of the war happening in Europe. That warning of course wasn’t heeded, as the U.S. did enter he war a little more than two years after this film was released.
The film captures war in a very stark and realistic manner, and the war scenes are the most harrowing and emotional I’ve ever witnessed in a film. Before this I would have named Saving Private Ryan or Hacksaw Ridge as films whose depictions of war affected me on a visceral, emotional level, but neither come close to the feelings The Birth of a Nation elicited from me during the war sequences.
It’s also worth noting that this film was made 50 years after the end of the Civil War, which would have been as recent and relevant to audiences then as a film about the Vietnam War is now. Many people who had lived through the war would have seen this film, and certainly were involved in its creation, which I believe went a long way towards making its depictions of history so realistic. When The Birth of a Nation came out, Lincoln’s assassination was about as recent a historical moment as Nixon’s resignation is today, so despite feeling like ancient history to us now, the Civil War was an event that many who watched this film had lived through.
Visually the film is far ahead of anything I’ve watched yet. It flows like a modern film, and despite a running time of 3 hours and 13 minutes, it never drags. It starts by introducing two families, the Stoneman family from the North, and the Cameron family from the South. The two Stoneman sons are friends with the three Cameron sons, so the families get together in South Carolina. The Stoneman daughter, Elsie, played by Lillian Gish, doesn’t make the trip. While there, Phil, the oldest of the Stoneman brothers, falls in love with his friend’s sister Margaret. Meanwhile, Ben Cameron sees Elsie’s picture, and falls for her. Not long after this visit, the Civil War breaks out. Suddenly the five young men are fighting in a war, on separate sides. The youngest Stoneman brother is killed in the war, as are two of the Cameron boys. Only Ben and Phil survive. In one of the most powerful moments in the film two of the brothers encounter one another on the battlefield. Both have been mortally wounded, and despite being on opposite sides of the conflict, die as friends in one another’s arms.
The film continues with an account of the post-war chaos in the South, and moves between the historical story, including the assassination of Lincoln, and the fictional story of the two families. Ben and Elsie finally meet, and by the end of the film they are together, and the reconstruction of the South is underway.
The history portion of the film includes the creation of the Ku Klux Klan. This is no doubt the source of most complaints of racism against the film, and also the unfortunate and enduring legacy of the film. The original Klan only existed for about 5 years after the war, and was formed as a resistance movement against opportunistic Northerners who had come to the South seeking power and wealth amidst the ruins of the war. After the film was released, a new Ku Klux Klan was formed— the racist and evil one we all know today. So while criticism of the film itself as racist is certainly misguided, it’s fair to say that its anti-war/anti-violence message backfired, and it instead inspired an unfortunate amount of hatred in its wake.
Despite the controversy and backlash it sparked, the film is remarkable in purely cinematic terms. It’s so far beyond anything that came before it that it almost feels like the style and language of the modern film was birthed with The Birth of a Nation. It is hands down a masterpiece. It is both technically astounding and entertaining.
It was also a stunning box office success. Accurate records weren’t kept at that time, so we don’t know exactly how much it made, but in today’s dollars it made a minimum of $1.5 billion, and most estimate it brought in closer to $2 billion in 2023 dollars. Audiences sold out every show, day after day, for special showings in New York for which tickets cost $64 apiece in today’s dollars. However much it made, it was one the most financially successful films of all time, despite the controversy that surrounded it from its release.
I watched this on a blu-ray, linked to the picture below. It contains a number of special features, including two versions of the film and a number of D.W. Griffith’s early short films.
Next I’m watching: Fanchon, the Cricket [1915], directed by James Kirkwood.
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As the name suggests, this is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was released on January 19th, 1915, and directed by W.W. Young.
In many ways it feels like a lower stakes Dante’s Inferno. Alice wanders from situation to situation, each the same as the previous one in that she has encountered. It’s rather rote, but the costumes are so freaky that I remained invested to the very end.
Viola Savoy makes a good Alice, though she seems a bit old for the part. In Lewis Carroll’s story, she’s seven years old, but Savoy is 16, though this change in age is hardly a deal-breaker. The film, as with many of these early adaptations of classic literature I’ve been watching, only loosely follows its source. In this film, Alice takes a walk in the woods, and we’re reminded by a title card that “things we do and things we see shortly before we fall asleep are apt to influence our dreams.” Alice sees things and does things, before deciding to take a nap, during which, you guessed it, she dreams of the things she’s seen and done.
From here, the film is very much a dream come to life, as Alice encounters one actor after another in costumes reminiscent of what one sees at Chuck E. Cheese’s, or Disneyland— large, cartoonish animal heads atop furry body suits. It’s a little unnerving after awhile, though I imagine for its time it was somewhat unusual. Either way, it remains effective today, if only for its freakiness.
Plot-wise, not much happens. Alice wanders from scenario to scenario, scoping out the anthropomorphized animals. A rabbit, a bear, an owl, a dodo bird, a monkey and other animals interact with our heroine, as she makes her way to the Animal Convention, where they all dance together. After that she follows the white rabbit, talks to a caterpillar, meets the queen, talks with the Cheshire Cat, plays croquet, and does all the things one expects Alice to do during her time in Wonderland. Eventually she heads to the beach, meets the mock turtle and some parasol-carrying lobsters before heading to the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Just as she’s called to the stand to testify, she awakens from her dream and the film ends.
I don’t own a copy of this film, but it is available on Amazon Prime, which is where I watched it.
Next I’m watching: The Birth of a Nation [1915], directed by D.W. Griffith.
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No, she’s not that kind of vampire. In 1915, the word had a different meaning than it does today. Theda Bara was the original vamp!
Before she became Theda Bara, she was Born Theodosia Goodman, and moved from Cincinnati to New York in 1905, hoping to become a stage actress. She spent several years chasing success on Broadway and in Yiddish theater, to no avail. Though initially opposed to working in films, she eventually decided to give the medium a try, and she became, against long odds, one of the most popular movie stars of her day. Though nearly 30, and heavy-set in an age of waif-like stars, Bara invented what came to be known as the Vamp, and launched a career as a sort of anti-Mary Pickford, who was then known as America’s Sweetheart.
Her big break was A Fool There Was, in which she plays the vampire. Again, not that kind of vampire, though Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire,” upon which the film is loosely based, did draw some of its imagery from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Bara’s vampire is more of an emotional parasite than a blood-sucker. She lures men to their doom by making them fall in love with her, after which they stagger to an untimely end, down a path of alcoholism and loneliness once she abandons them for a new conquest.
That’s more or less the plot of this film. Bara’s vampire has just left her current lover, and is now intent upon seducing her latest mark, wealthy lawyer and diplomat and devoted husband and father, John Schuyler, played by Edward Jose. Her spurned lover commits suicide practically in front of Schuyler, but even that isn’t enough to convince him of the danger he’s in, and he eventually abandons his wife and child to take up with the Vampire. He slowly spirals downward into a drunken despair, and ends the film dropping dead, having been drained of his life force by the Vampire, who ends the film standing over his corpse, mocking him and tossing flower petals atop him. By this point, she’d already moved on to a new victim, and only returned to taunt him. Fade to black; feel depressed.
The most depressing thing to me is that nearly every film Theda Bara made has been lost. Only this one and one other survive. I know in the greater scheme of things that pales in comparison to true tragedies, but in a cinematic sense, it is deeply tragic. I went on about this last time, and I won’t dwell on it much more this time, but my soul aches when I realize that most of the films of the silent era are gone forever, and nearly all that have survived are in bad shape. Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that more than 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost, and the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost forever.
Let’s talk more about Theda Bara. Here she is as Cleopatra, in a film of the same name from 1917, now lost.
Look at the clarity of that image. Even if the film had survived, it would look nothing like that. Here’s another still of her, in full vamp mode, no doubt posed with her latest victim. Look at that eye makeup. She wouldn’t have to change a thing to fit into 2022 Hollywood.
I’m not exaggerating when I say she was a phenomenon in her day, in part due to the backstory her studio cooked up for her. They touted her as the daughter of a French artist and his Arabian mistress, and that she was “born in the shadow of the Sphinx.” Her stage name, Theda Bara, is an anagram of Death Arab. Her press conferences were legendary, held in rooms thick with incense smoke, atmospheric lighting, and crystal balls. The public bought into it. Bara was even subpoenaed once as an expert on vampires. The following clippings tell the story better than I can.
There will never be another like her. And sadly, we will only know about her from accounts of the day like those above, and two surviving films. I watched this film on a DVD. Click the picture below if you’d like to buy a copy of your own.
Next I’m watching: Alice in Wonderland [1915], directed by W.W. Young.
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This may be my favorite version of the classic fairy tale, though truth be told I think I’ve only ever seen the Disney version from 1950. In this version, Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart, shines as Cinderella, and the sequences of the story are perfectly paced. However, while watching I was struck with a melancholy sensation wholly unrelated to the film itself, or at least the film as it was originally made.
The films I’ve watched so far have been between 108 and 123 years old, so on one hand, I’m lucky to even be able to watch them at all. Movies were not considered particularly special in the early days of filmmaking. They were disposable commodities to most, and art only to a few. Film studios made little to no effort to preserve their past works, focusing instead on the business of producing new ones to supplant them. I’ve read that something like 90% or more of all films made before 1920 have been permanently lost. Every once in awhile a copy of a film turns up somewhere but for the most part, all those films will never again be seen. The few films that do remain are seldom in good shape, and are often incomplete. In many cases, no original negatives survive, and we’re left with whatever copies have remained intact over the past century and change.
Keep in mind that until the early 1950s, films were printed onto nitrate, which is not only easily damaged, but incredibly flammable. A single spark, moderate friction, or even a hot day can cause nitrate film stock to burst into flame, and once it catches fire, it cannot be put out. That is not an exaggeration, either. Nitrate gives off oxygen as it burns, meaning that you can completely submerge a burning film in water, or place it in a vacuum, and it will continue to burn. There is no known method for extinguishing a nitrate fire; it must simply burn itself out. As such, nitrate film is classified as a dangerous material, which requires licenses for storage and transportation. Film preservationists, meanwhile, treat nitrate like it’s an atom bomb, carefully storing it at -5° Fahrenheit, moving it only if absolutely necessary, and adhering to very strict protocols when doing so. Clearly it’s not that dangerous, as films were moved about, and screened, constantly in the past and hardly any theaters burned down. Nonetheless, that’s the state of things in 2022, which means, as usual, audiences are the losers here.
I will stop my rant about the dearth of opportunities to see nitrate film prints screened, but only after making one last point: films look indescribably better when seen in their original nitrate glory. I know this because everyone tells me so. I’ve not had the chance to experience this. I heard a firsthand report of someone who saw an original nitrate print of Casablanca screened in some years ago, projected by a true carbon arc projector, and he said the audience audibly gasped at how clear the picture looked. He could not find words to describe how real it looked, or the depth the blacks and grays had on the screen. I once heard a critic say that after watching nitrate prints, he now refers to especially beautiful sunsets as being almost nitrate-like in their perfection.
Okay then. Cinderella. It’s a fun film, and Mary Pickford makes for a lovely Cinderella. The story is about the same as the version we all know, with one notable difference being that in this telling, Cinderella and Prince Charming have a chance meeting in the woods before they meet at the ball, and he starts crushing on her right away. There’s something nice about having him fall for her as both cinder girl and princess that makes their romance all that more wonderful. It’s also interesting to note that Prince Charming here is played by Owen Moore, who was at the time Pickford’s real-life husband.
There’s a fun scene when the fairy godmother shows up, in which she has Cinderella round up the mice and rats that that she will magically transform. Pickford milks the scene for all it’s worth, and it’s a treat to watch.
The film, directed by James Kirkwood, was originally released on December 28, 1914. I own a DVD that includes Cinderella as a second feature, and one I’ll return to when the time comes to watch the main feature, Through the Back Door. You can find a copy of your own if you click the picture of the DVD below.
Next I’m watching: A Fool There Was [1915], directed by Frank Powell.
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I had no real expectations when I started watching this film. I’d never heard of it, or its star, William S. Hart, before I embarked on my “watch all the movies” project, but I saw it mentioned in a book about silent films I’d read some years back, and added it to the list almost as an afterthought. It’s not exaggeration to say I was stunned by how great this movie is.
I expected a primitive Western, given that this film was made barely a decade after the very first Western, The Great Train Robbery, a film that wasn’t the least bit compelling or sophisticated. Add to that the fact that so many of the older Westerns I’ve seen, all of which were made long after this one, have been fairly one-dimensional and formulaic, and you understand why I anticipated a hokey, predictable film. Boy was I wrong.
This is a very short movie, running just under an hour in length. From the get-go, it captured my attention, as it opens with each actor dressed in formal attire stepping on stage to bow to the audience. In mid-bow, the actor is transformed into his character, and rises in full Western regalia. Maybe I’m a gullible film-goer, but I was shocked by how drastic the transformations were. Clean-shaven men rise up with scraggly beards. Young men suddenly appear old. It’s a remarkable moment, as one sees just how much makeup and props can alter an actor’s looks.
Once the film is under way it initially appears to be just another Western, this time set in Arizona. Jim Stokes, the “Two-Gun Man,” holds up a stagecoach carrying $1,000 in gold. His method is somewhat clever, as he places three hats atop some shrubs a short distance from the trail, each with a pipe sticking out in front. From the viewpoint of the people in the stagecoach it looks like three bandits pointing guns at them, so when he holds them up, the coach’s guards surrender. Stokes tells his victims to stand still for five minutes, yells to his “accomplices” to shoot anyone who moves, then flees with the gold. Eventually his ruse is discovered and he’s pursued, and though wounded by a gunshot, he escapes. He doesn’t make it far before he passes out beside a riverbank, where’s he discovered by Phil Brent, a prospector who lives nearby, and who brings Stokes home and patches him up.
Brent’s daughter Nell tends to Stokes, and of course they fall in love. When a traveling parson happens by, Brent enlists him to marry Jim and Nell. Of course, neither Nell nor her father know who Stokes really is, and Stokes vows to go straight. He wraps up the stolen gold and addresses it to the bank it was destined for before his robbery, then heads into town to mail it. Once there, and before he can mail the gold, he’s identified as the wanted man he is, and has to flee. He heads for the Mexican border. At one point he scribbles a quick not for Nell, telling her to wait for him, and sends it with his horse back to the Brent home. He continues on foot, and makes it to a border town, all the while pursued by the sheriff. And this is when the film takes an unexpected turn. I almost don’t want to spoil it, as I now have actual listeners, so let me pause a moment and implore you to watch the movie before listening to the end of the podcast. It is available on Amazon Prime, where it can be rented for $2.00. I promise you, it will be the best $2.00 you spend this week.
That said, I don’t want to oversell this. Don’t expect something to rival John Ford or Sergio Leone. Also, be forewarned, the quality of the Amazon print is terrible. It skips and jumps, has blurred and faded with age, and is covered in scratches. On the plus side, and a first for any film I’ve watched thus far, it seems to have a soundtrack attached, likely appended in the ‘30s or ‘40s, when such a thing became possible. The soundtrack is very effective at giving the film a more modern feel, as it is a proper movie soundtrack that fits the film, as opposed to the tinkly piano music most of the silent films I’ve watched so far have had. The negative is that it has also decayed with age, and it sounds as worn as the picture looks. If you watch this, go in with an open mind, realizing you are seeing a film made 108 years ago that was poorly preserved, and is unrestored. Be glad it even exists in any form rather than criticize its imperfect quality. So now, go watch! Come back when you are immune to spoilers!
You’re back? Wasn’t that something? I may be wrong, and as I see more Westerns as I progress through the films on my list I may well encounter others like this one, but I did not expect such a morally ambiguous story. While watching, I honestly had no idea who was going to win or lose, live or die, end up in jail or go free, at the end of the film. When the sheriff lost the stolen money at the roulette wheel, I thought he might end up in a cell along with Stokes. I did not expect him to partner with Stokes. That moment, by the way, is remarkable. When The sheriff returns to the hotel room and tells Stokes what he’s done, Stokes’ laugh is genuine and perfect. And when all is said and done, and Stokes recovers the money, and the sheriff gives him a head start to the border, I was shocked. That feels like the sort of story that didn’t become possible until the 1960s and the spaghetti Westerns and counter-culture heroes, yet here we have it in 1914— December 3rd, 1914 for those keeping track. William S. Hart is hugely talented, and deservedly the star of the film, but J. Frank Burke is just as good as Sheriff Bud Walsh. Without his presence in that role, the film would not hold up, and the two play off one another perfectly to make this the masterpiece that it really is.
When Stokes and Nell give the sheriff a goodbye wave, I was all smiles, and for days after watching this I’ve been thinking back to it with admiration. So much admiration, in fact, that I bought a set of DVDs that includes this film and 4 other William S. Hart Westerns, which I’ve added to my list and will watch when the time comes. I fear they can’t be as good as The Bargain, which is now officially one of my favorite films of all time, but I’m curious to see what else Hart did.
As I mentioned above, you can watch the film on Amazon Prime, or buy the DVD as part of the set which I’ve linked to the picture below.
I looked up some reviews of the film, written when it was released, to try to get a sense of how critics, and audiences, of the time received this picture. Variety (November 13, 1914) described it as “one of the best feature-length Westerns ever shown,” and compared Hart’s performance to the artistry of a Frederic Remington painting. Meanwhile, W. Stephen Bush in The Moving Picture World (December 5, 1914) felt differently about the film, writing “The Bargain is nothing more than an old-fashioned ‘Western.’ I cannot truthfully say that it is one inch above the average of such pictures.” However, in his review he makes it clear that he is bothered by the morality of the film, especially the scene where the sheriff gambles, and I think that colored his review. He wrote, “There can be no doubt whatever that a picture of this kind has a bad influence on youthful minds.”
The film ends with a final title card that, at least in my mind, addresses the concerns of critics like Bush, and puts forth an optimistic point of view.
No star is lost we once have seen; we always may be what we might have been.
Next I’m watching: Cinderella [1914], directed by James Kirkwood.
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This is the first horror film I’ve watched, and one of the first feature-length horror films ever made. It’s loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but with some other Poe references tossed in for good measure. Though slow to start, once the horror story elements kicked in, this became a very enjoyable movie. Before that, however, it was feeling like a big of a slog, and about 30 minutes into its 81-minute runtime I was starting to count the minutes.
The story concerns a character only known as The Nephew, played by Henry B. Walthall, who works for his Uncle, who has raised him since he was orphaned as a baby. The Nephew is in love with a girl whose name we don’t know, but to whom The Nephew refers to as Anabel, because he compares her to the character in the Poe poem. Anabel is played by Blanche Sweet, who we last saw in The Lonedale Operator. They are forced to break up because The Uncle forbids The Nephew to do anything that will distract him from his work. While The Nephew goes to a garden party to give Anabel the bad news, The Uncle takes a walk, during which time he sees some young couples, and a baby, and realizes love isn’t so bad after all. He goes home to let his nephew know it’s okay for him to marry Anabel, but it’s too late. When he gets home, his nephew, insane with sorrow, strangles him before he can give his blessing, and hides the body behind a freshly-laid brick wall.
This is when the film kicks into gear, and redeems itself. From this point on, The Nephew has visions of The Uncle’s ghost emerging from the brick fireplace, haunting him throughout the house. There’s also The Italian, a big, dumb, drunkard who witnessed the crime and blackmails The Nephew, and a detective who suspects what he’s done. Griffith utilizes interesting, and sometimes grotesque, imagery to pepper the finale with meaning, so we see Jesus on the cross, and angel holding a banner that reads ‘thou shalt not kill,’ some gruesome, demonic ghouls, and even a scary witch on a broom. It’s effective, and scary. For a film that came out on August 2, 1914, it no doubt gave audiences far more of a scare than it would one today, but I still found it effective, and the effects were very well done.
In the end, The Nephew confesses, then engages in a shoot-out with the police before trying to hang himself. Anabel sees this and in her sorrow leaps to her death from a cliff. We then see The Nephew asleep in the comfy chair by the fireplace. He wakes up, and The Uncle comes into the room. He pokes him a few times to make sure he’s real, then realizes— it was all a dream! The Uncle says he should marry Anabel, who then shows up to say she loves him too much to break up, and all is well. The Nephew becomes a famous writer, and we see Pan playing his panpipes as some wood fairy children emerge from a tree as the film comes to a close. Such meaningfulness!
I watched this on a great-looking DVD from Kino Lorber. It looks like they are no longer selling it, and Amazon currently has only one for sale for a small fortune. You may be able to find it on eBay. Who’s to say?
Next I’m watching: The Bargain [1914], directed by Reginald Barker.
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The Italians were clearly at the forefront of the motion picture industry in its early days. Until I watched this film, nothing I’d seen so far had come close to Dante’s Inferno, also an Italian film, but Cabiria blows that film out of the water. Released on April 18th, 1914, Cabiria is the first true epic film, and it paved the way for directors like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, both of whom almost immediately began creating epic films of their own. Griffith was working on a film when he saw Cabiria, which he scrapped and restarted, the result being his own epic classic Intolerance.
I can’t emphasize enough how different this film is from anything I’ve viewed to this point. After watching, I searched to see if I’d missed some predecessor to Cabiria that somehow set the stage for what I’d just seen, but found nothing. Director Giovanni Pastrone invented the wheel here, so to speak. For starters, the sets are astounding. The Temple of Moloch has to be seen to be believed, as do a number of other spectacles created for this film. There are also fantastic battles, and impressive stunts. At one point, a legion of soldiers form a sort of human pyramid, using their shields as platforms, to create a makeshift staircase for someone to scale a castle wall. It’s a sight to behold!
Perhaps the highlight of the film is when Archimedes shows up. You may recall from your history or math classes, or in my case, Latin class, that he was the greatest mathematician of his age. He lived in Syracuse, Sicily, and his inventions were crucial to the city’s defense against the invading Romans. He invented what can only be described as a death ray— quite a feat for 214 B.C.!— with which he burned Roman ships during the siege of Syracuse. Cabiria includes that weapon, along with the Claw of Archimedes, in stupendous fashion.
The camera work in this film is far more sophisticated than that of any film that came before it, and while Pastrone didn’t invent the tracking shot, he employed it to a degree far beyond what anyone before him had done. He pioneered the concept of the moving camera, and Cabiria contains 52 moving camera shots in an era where only a handful of films ever utilized any camera movement at all. Previously, filmmakers had only used a panorama effect, moving the camera up and down, or from side to side, to show more of a static scene. Pastrone used a dolly to actually move the camera, which allowed him to zoom in and out of a scene. This method of moving the camera to create a sense of depth via movement, something previously only accomplished through set design, came to be known as the “Cabiria shot,” and was subsequently replicated and improved upon by many directors.
The film takes place during the Second Punic War (218-202 B.C.), and combines the historical accounts of the Roman historian Livy, primarily from Ab Urbe Condita, his history of the founding of Rome, with Gustave Flaubert's 1862 novel Salammbo and Emilio Salgari's 1908 novel Carthage in Flames. The history itself is fascinating, and if you’ve forgotten it, or never learned it, it’s well worth reading or revisiting. I won’t go into great detail, but the short version is that Rome, which at the time consisted only of what’s now known as Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, was at war with Carthage, which controlled most of Northern Africa, as well as the lower half of what’s now Spain. Probably the best known aspect of the war is the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, which he accomplished by crossing the Alps with North African war elephants. He was initially successful, but in the end, Rome won the war, primarily due to the Roman general Scipio, who defeated the Carthaginians, and their Numidian allies, forcing Carthage to recall Hannibal. In the war’s final, decisive battle, Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, in what is now Tunisia.
The above history is the background to Cabiria, which overlays the story of a young Sicilian girl, Cabiria, daugher of Batto, who is stolen by Phoenician pirates during the confusion following an eruption of Mt. Etna. She’s taken to Carthage, and is about to be sacrificed to the god Moloch in what is without a doubt the most awe-inspiring spectacle that had yet been filmed, when she is rescued by Fulvius Axilla, a Roman patrician, and Maciste, his slave, who are in Carthage acting as spies. Though unable to free her, they do manage to deliver her to Sophonisba, who happens to Hannibal’s niece, though they don’t know that. They chance upon her and beg her to take care of the child, and she agrees.
Years pass, and as the tide of the battles turn in Rome’s favor, Massinissa, king of Numidia, and Sophonisba’s husband-to-be, switches sides. This leads to Sophonisba outing Cabiria as having been marked in childhood for sacrifice, and the now-adult Cabiria is taken by the high priest to rectify that mistake. Massinissa intervenes, sending Fulvius and Maciste to warn Sophonisba that she is going to be paraded through Rome as a spoil of the war. She kills herself to avoid that fate, and summons Cabiria from the prison where she awaited her fate, allowing Fulvius and Maciste to spirit her away, and bring her back to her family in Sicily. Along the way Fulvius declares his love for Cabiria, and the film comes to a close with the happy couple sailing amidst sea sprites, celebrating their newfound love.
It’s a lot to take in, but it flies by on the screen and never bored me. Like all films of this era, it is episodic, and moments are drawn out so that the actors can convey visually what they can’t through speech, but still the pacing works. I was hooked through the final scene, and can definitely see myself watching this film again in the near future. I’m not alone, as Cabiria was an audience pleaser, and very successful in its day, bringing in $1 million at the box office. It is also the first film ever to be shown at the White House, so all in all a resounding success for Italian cinema, and a huge step forward for cinema in general.
Next I’m watching: The Avenging Conscience [1914], directed by D.W. Griffith.
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Fresh from watching Mary Pickford as Tessibel Skinner, heroine of Tess of the Storm Country, I’m left with mixed feelings. The film isn’t bad, although the story is more than a little heavy-handed and melodramatic, and Edwin S. Porter, as was his nature, simply refuses to move his camera. His tableau-like shots, and almost fundamental misunderstanding of the power of editing, reduce potentially dramatic shots to mundane ones, and limit the overall power of the film. Yet still, somehow, he manages to turn out an enjoyable 5 reels of film. (That translates into 80 minutes, as each reel held between 15 and 20 minutes worth of film.)
Mary Pickford, whom I saw in a tiny role in The Country Doctor a few films back, is the star here, and she is hands down the best thing about this movie. You can see her charm and personality shine through even the grainy and blurred version of the film I was forced to watch on YouTube, and when she is spiritedly booting people, literally, out the door of her hut, I couldn’t help but smile. I envy audiences who saw a pristine print of this when it came out, which, by the way, was on March 30th, 1914.
The story is basically rich vs. poor. Tess lives in a shanty town with her father, situated on a beach just below the estate of the wealthy Elias Graves, played by William Walters in one of his final roles. He’s obsessed with rousting the squatters from the beach, and after being thwarted in his eviction attempt decides to force them out by getting a law passed banning net fishing, which is how the squatters get their food. Some of the squatters disobey the new law, which leads to a murder. Ben Letts, a scoundrel who is trying to woo Tess, shoots an official who catches him fishing. Unfortunately, the police figure Tess’ father for the murder, and he’s sentenced to death.
Suddenly the story takes a big turn, as dad in jail is put on a back burner to a burgeoning romance between Elias Graves’ son Frederick, and our beloved guttersnipe Tess. He’s visiting from school, along with his fraternity brother Dan, who falls for Frederick’s sister Teola. Eventually they head back to school, but not before Teola becomes pregnant. She is writing to tell Dan the news when she gets a letter informing her that Dan died heroically in a fire at the frat house. Grief-stricken, she head to the beach and casts herself into the sea, only to be saved by Tess, who agrees to pretend the baby is hers when it comes. They come up with a clever plan— they write a note for Teola’s parents saying Teola sprained her ankle and will be at Tess’ hut for four days. Four days later, there’s a baby, and Teola heads home no worse for the wear. It feels like they glossed over some things there, but hey, it was 1914. Hollywood had standards.
The movie then goes into melodrama overdrive. Frederick comes home and is aghast to find Tess with a baby. Despite loving her, he shuns her for her evil ways. Plus, Tess can’t afford to keep the baby in good health. She is caught stealing some milk, and even after being whipped for her crime, isn’t allowed to bring the milk to her baby. Meanwhile, on the beach, Ben Letts is revealed as the true killer when he attempts to kill someone else.
Things come to a head when the baby gets sick and is near death. Tess goes to a church to have it baptized before it dies, but Elias Graves intercedes, telling the priest he will not allow such a desecration in his church. This is the last straw for poor Teola, who reveals to everyone that it’s her baby. Tess slinks home, leaving the sick baby with his true family.
At home, her father awaits, freed from jail and happy to see his daughter. As they embrace, Frederick shows up, chagrined and hoping for a second chance. He presents Tess with a letter form his father, informing her that both Teola and the baby are dead— we never find out why Teola died— and that he can only apologize for how he treated her and her father. Frederick and Tess reunite, and presumably live happily ever after.
Next I’m watching: Cabiria [1914], directed by Giovanni Pastrone.
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This is the third film of Charlie Chaplin’s career, and it hit screens on February 9th, 1914. If you’ve been following along, you know that is exactly seven day after his film debut, on February 2nd. That’s right, he had three movies come out within the span of a week! That’s unimaginable today, but it was the norm in that era of filmmaking.
Mabel’s Strange Predicament is the third of three Charlie Chaplin films I’ve watched in a row. It’s also the third Charlie Chaplin movie I’ve ever seen. That’s right. Somehow, despite being a lifelong film fanatic, I’d never seen any of Chaplin’s films. Before you start lobbing rotten tomatoes at me, let me offer an explanation. The first silent films I watched were those of Buster Keaton. I cinema down the street from my college played four Buster Keaton films a week— two shorts and two features— for a month. I’d never had the opportunity to watch a silent film before that time, but after seeing 16 of Keaton’s films, I was enthralled. I went to the local video store and rented a few tapes. One I mentioned in an earlier podcast contained a number of early films, including A Trip to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery, among others. Another was the early vampire classic Nosferatu. The third was Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr., which I’d just seen, and wanted to show to a friend so he would also see how incredible silent films were.
When we watched Steamboat Bill Jr., it fell flat. It was nothing like what I’d experienced in the theater. Of course, in the theater there was a guy playing a giant Wurlitzer organ, with which the soundtrack on the tape could not compete, but the main problem was the size of the image. What had been colossal on the cinema screen was tiny at home. All of Keaton’s facial expressions were lost, and his movements seemed mundane. Nothing about the film worked on a television, and we ended up turning it off less than halfway through the film. When I later watched Nosferatu, alone as my friend had already dismissed silents as hokey and boring, I found it interesting, but not particularly gripping, and ended up wondering how much grander it would have been if seen in a theater.
All of this leads up to the reason I’ve never seen a Chaplin film. After that day, I gave up on the idea of watching silent films at home, and instead waited to catch them on a big screen when I could, which, sadly, was not often. I have had the chance to watch quite a few in that setting, and in recent years I have acquired a fair amount of silent films on Blu-ray and DVD, but never happened across any of Chaplin’s films. Now, of course, because of the project on which I’ve embarked I’m watching most of these films on a television at home, but at least it’s far larger than the one I had in my college apartment way back when.
So now that I’ve finally seen him in three short films, what do I make of Chaplin? The best I can say at this point is that I’d like to see his films in a theater. I’m non-plussed to this point, and wonder how much is due to Chaplin himself, and how is due to the way I’m watching him. Granted, these have been his first three appearances on film, and he will almost certainly be better in later films, once he’s more experienced, so for now the jury, i.e. me, is out on him.
Mabel, on the other hand, steals the show here. She is both star and director of the film. Her predicament is that she’s been locked out of her hotel room, and is stuck in the hallway wearing only pajamas. The scandal! She is downright adorable throughout this film, whether early on when she’s playing catch with her dog, who is later responsible for her titular predicament, or when she’s hiding under a bed, trying to maintain her dignity. Chaplin, in his second outing as The Tramp, though billed here as The Drunk, is okay, but no different from any of the other drunks, tramps, or villains I’ve seen so far. He harasses Mabel, and is suitably lecherous, but if I didn’t know he was going to go on to greatness later, I’d not have noticed him as anything special, as opposed to, say, D.W. Griffith, who displayed obvious mastery as a director, even in his early, formulaic short films. Nonetheless, I’m very eager to see more of Chaplin, if only at this point because of his reputation.
As I don’t own a copy of this film, I watched on YouTube. I’ve shared the link below, in case you’d like to watch, too.
Next I’m watching: Tess of the Storm Country [1914], directed by Edwin S. Porter.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com
The Keystone Film Company put out Charlie Chaplin’s earliest films, and his first three were released within 7 days of each other in February of 1914. Last time I watched Making a Living, which hit theaters on February 2nd. Five days later, on the 7th, his second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice, came out. Just two days after that, he had a third film playing, called Mabel’s Strange Predicament, which I’ll watch next.
The real news here is that Kid Auto Races at Venice is the onscreen debut of Chaplin’s famous Tramp character. Where he was almost unrecognizable to me in the previous film, he’s unmistakably Chaplin this time around, wearing the baggy pants, and with his iconic bowler hat and toothbrush mustache in place.
The film is barely a film. It was shot in Venice, California on January 10th, 1914, while something called the Kid Auto Races were taking place. Those were ten-mile races for 14-year-old boys driving one- and two-cylinder homemade cars. Yes, you heard that right. 14-year-old boys racing homemade cars.
Do I even need to say that the Kid Auto Races are a thing of the past? In today’s litigation-minded world of hyper-protective, helicopter parents, it goes without saying that untrained 14-year-olds, without licenses, helmets, or seatbelts, are no longer being actively encouraged to race homemade cars through city streets, but that was the way the world worked in 1914, as kids raced at high speeds through the streets of Venice and Santa Monica, while ten thousand people lined up to watch.
Chaplin spends the film wandering into the street, being shoved back by the film’s director, Henry Lehrman, again in a co-starring role. This time he’s gone meta, as he is directing himself in a film in which he plays the director of a film. Lehrman is there to film the kid races, and Chaplin keeps walking into his shots.
Besides seeing Chaplin in his first outing as The Tramp, the highlight of this film is the race and its audience. These clearly weren’t actors. The film was shot while the Junior Vanderbilt Cup was taking place, and Chaplin and Lehrman set up cameras and improvised some comedy on the spot. You can see some of the spectators, especially the youngest children, paying more attention to Chaplin than to the race itself. Some of the best moments of the film are when the camera pans across the crowd, and you can see so many faces, young and old, and can soak in the mood of the day, the fashion of Edwardian era Los Angeles. Even the haircuts offer a snapshot of that moment in time. Beyond that, it’s wonderful to see what Venice looked like over 100 years ago, and marvel at a Los Angeles with such open spaces and simple streets.
I realized that a film like this was only possible at this early stage in Chaplin’s career. Within a year or two he and his Tramp would become Hollywood’s biggest star, and had he showed up at an event like this he would have been mobbed by fans and unable to shoot a film of this sort. Only the anonymity of his then-new career allowed for this film to be made, which makes it that much more of a treasure. On that day in January, 1914, the most famous person in Venice was almost certainly Albert Van Vranken Jr., winner of the 1914 Kid Auto Races.
As is the case with many of these early short films, I don’t own a copy, and had to watch on YouTube. Fortunately these early films are all in the public domain. You can watch below.
Next I’m watching: Mabel's Strange Predicament [1914], directed by Mabel Normand.
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I decided to watch this film for one specific reason: it’s the first film in which Charlie Chaplin appears. For that, it’s noteworthy, but strictly on its own merit it is a forgettable film. It runs for just under 13 minutes, during which time it gallops along through a number of only loosely connected moments. Chaplin, who I would not have recognized had I not known he was the star of the film, looks young and gawky. For some vague reason, he kept reminding me of the ‘80s pop star Prince, likely due to his head seeming too large for his short and slender body and the fact that he sported a a long, curved mustache rather than the toothbrush style he’d famously wear later in his career.
He spends the duration of the film sparring with Henry Lehrman, who not only directed the film, but co-starred as Chaplin’s nemesis. The film opens with their chance encounter on a sidewalk, at which point Chaplin asks to borrow money from Lehrman, who refuses him. They part ways, only to run into each other again later that day. This time, Chaplin has proposed marriage to a girl, who has accepted. Lehrman shows up, and we learn he’s been courting the same girl. They two men scuffle, before parting ways. Later, Chaplin responds to a help wanted sign and applies for a job as a newspaper reporter only to find that Lehrman is a reporter for the same paper, and he quickly convinces his boss not to hire Chaplin. Next, Lehrman witnesses a car crash. He takes some pictures, and some notes, but Chaplin happens along and steals his notes and camera, which he takes to the newspaper and is granted an exclusive. Lehrman shows up and the two have yet another fight, this time involving the Keystone Cops, a staple of the Keystone Films Company, and some random civilians. The film ends with them stuck on the cowcatcher of a street car. All in all, it is very haphazard, and relies far too heavily on coincidence to set up its scenes. Chaplin isn’t bad, but he isn’t great. I’ll cut him some slack, what with it being his first motion picture and all.
Making a Living first played in theaters on February 2nd, 1914. As I don’t own a copy, I had to watch it on YouTube. You can watch it below.
Next I’m watching: Kid Auto Races at Venice [1914], directed by Henry Lehrman.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com
A couple names that kept coming up as I was reading about the earliest years of filmmaking were those of Mabel Normand and Ford Sterling. What a great name— Ford Sterling! I had to find out if that was his actual name, and of course it was not. He was born George Ford Stich Jr., so I can’t blame him for changing his name. I want to change my name to Ford Sterling, too!
Sterling got his start in 1911 at Biograph, but when director Mack Sennet left Biograph to form Keystone Studios in 1912, Sterling followed him. By 1913, Sterling was one of Hollywood’s top comic film stars, though The Gusher, released on December 15th, 1913, represents the beginning of the end of that run, as he was about to be eclipsed by Charlie Chaplin come February of the next year. At the moment, however, Sterling was the king of comedy.
The queen of comedy was his co-star in this film, Mabel Normand. Both worked for the Keystone Film Company, and Normand was their biggest star of all. Previously I’ve spoken about Florence Lawrence, the Biograph Girl, today we’ll meet the Keystone Girl, Mabel Normand.
Normand had starred in a large number of films for Keystone, playing the character of Mabel, a cute, somewhat scatter-brained young girl who always found herself at the center of some comedic adventure. As with Sterling, The Gusher was something of a bookend to that part of her career, and one of the final Keystones that presented Mabel as a crazy, half-witted ingenue. Normand began directing her own films shortly thereafter, convinced that audiences wanted more than a cute, naive girl getting into trouble. She continued to make “The Mabels,” as they were called, but soon began to add complexity to the storylines, and, against Mack Sennett’s advice, pathos and intelligence to Mabel’s character. It worked to great effect, and her post-Keystone Girl career blossomed. Ford Sterling also changed his style of acting as Chaplin took over, going on to play serious roles, often to great acclaim.
I watched The Gusher on a DVD, shown below, where it is included as a second feature to The Extra Girl, another Mabel Normand film, which I’ll watch down the road. Based on what I saw in The Gusher, and read about her, I’m looking forward to seeing more of Mabel. You can buy your own copy of the DVD by clicking the picture.
The story is straight-forward, as have been most of the comedic shorts I’ve seen so far. Sterling and Normand are engaged, and he promises to get rich before they marry. Enter Charles Inslee, another regular in the Mabels, and whom I saw in the lead role of George Redfeather in The Call of the Wild. He cons Sterling into buying worthless land by pouring some oil onto the ground. Sterling thinks he’s an oil king, until Inslee’s accomplice informs him otherwise. Crestfallen, he returns to his new property and angrily slams his cane into the ground. He strikes oil! He’s rich! For real this time! Until Inslee, upset that he missed his chance at becoming an oil kingpin, sets fire to the oil.
At this point, I understood why this film was made, because the scenes of the burning oil well were not shot using special effects. That is clearly a real fire at a real oil field. Keystone must have had the footage, no doubt impressive in its day, and built the film around it, because in truth, the fire doesn’t improve the plot. It lends something of an unhappy ending to what is otherwise a simple comedy, for when the Keystone Cops make their obligatory, bumbling, appearance and arrest Inslee, no one is in good shape. Sterling and Normand are still broke and Inslee is in jail. Everyone loses, except the audience, who definitely got their money’s worth.
Next I’m watching: Making a Living [1914], directed by Henry Lehrman.
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I thought it might be a good idea to do a short, impromptu podcast to welcome the sudden influx of listeners who subscribed to my podcast yesterday. Before yesterday, I’d been keeping a low profile, and wasn’t doing any sort of promotion for this site. Initially, I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it, but I mentioned it to my nephew, Mike, who is a filmmaker, and to my friend Wei Ti, with whom I used to sit up late at night, drinking wine and talking movies, before we both moved far away from one another. I thought I should tell my brothers, too, so I did. At that point, I had acquired four subscribers. I did not expect anyone else to subscribe, and as I created this podcast as a method for remembering the films I watch, I was happy luring in four more subscribers than I ever anticipated having.
Then, yesterday, my brother Ted told his 70,706 Twitter followers that this podcast existed, and my phone erupted with emails telling me over and over again that I had a new subscriber. So… welcome new subscribers! If you’d like to know more about what I’m doing here, and why, please listen to my initial podcast from August, where I go in depth on that topic.
The short version is that I heard someone say that he used to forget the plots and details of books he read, but once he started recording a podcast about each book he read, he found he had much greater recall of what he’d read. I thought I’d try the same, but with movies. That decision came shortly after I’d decided to do something else: to go back to the dawn of cinema, and watch the “important” movies in chronological order. And that’s what the All the Movies podcast is, my thoughts about each film I watch as I work through my list.
Important is a subjective term, obviously, and I made the list based on my own sense of what films I should watch. Now that others are along for the ride, I welcome any and all of you to chime in and suggest films that you think I should see. I’m only 25 films in at this point, so any film released after July 6th, 1913 is fair game. All that matters is that is “important!” You be the judge of what that loaded word means.
Now then, carry on about your day. Tomorrow I’ll share my thoughts on movie #26 in on the list, which currently includes 1,748 films. Maybe you know a film that ought to be number 1,749? If you do, let me know!
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Suspense is another multi-director film, with the husband and wife team of Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber helming the production. Weber also wrote and starred in the film, which has elements that remind me of The Lonedale Operator, namely the way both films present actions that are happening at the same time. Smalley and Weber use a split screen to show simultaneous action, the first time I’ve seen that technique employed in a film. In this case, the screen is divided into three sections, so we can see a wife at home, on the phone with her husband, who we see at work. In the third section, we see a tramp lurking about outside the house.
Story-wise, I nearly summed it up above. The film opens with a maid quitting her job spontaneously. Bored of living isolated in the country, she writes a note, and leaves, without informing anyone of her decision. She leaves her door key under the mat, and takes off, leaving the mother of the house alone with her newborn baby. A tramp, seemingly the go-to villain in the nineteen-tens, sees the maid leave, and begins to case the house. The mother sees him, he sees her, and he tries to break in. She calls her husband at work, and he steals a car and speeds home to save her. The car’s owner flags down a policeman, and they give chase. Meanwhile, the tramp has found the house key, and is now inside the home!
The tramp is in no hurry. He has a sandwich in the kitchen, before heading upstairs, where mother and baby are hiding. Meanwhile, speeding home, the husband accidentally runs into a hobo who is walking in the street, but he seems okay. I guess cars didn’t go as fast, or weigh as much back then. He speeds on, and eventually gets home, with the police in hot pursuit. The scene of the car chase is really good, for its era or even today, to be honest. Early on we get a great extended shot of the police car as seen in a rearview mirror, and later see them side by side, racing down the road.
In the end, the husband arrives just in time to save his wife and child, the policeman and car owner arrive a step behind, and when they realize the situation, forgive the husband for stealing the car. The tramp is arrested, and all is well.
Despite the somewhat stunning for their day special effects, the most noteworthy aspect of this film is that it might be one of Lon Chaney’s earliest roles. It is unconfirmed, but it is believed that he plays the hobo who is hit by the car. Here’s a frame from the film— you can decide for yourself.
Personally, I’m unconvinced. It does look somewhat like him, but if there is controversy, then who’s to say? Not me. Everyone associated with the making of this film is long dead, so there’s no one to ask who might have a definitive answer. The best I can do is turn to film historian, and Lon Chaney expert, Jon C. Mirsalis, who used to think it was Chaney, but now does not. I’ll side with him, though I’d like to believe otherwise for purely sentimental reasons. Either way, it is fun to know that the Man of 1,000 Faces may have mystified us with one of his very first cinematic faces.
I don’t own a copy of this film, so I watched it on YouTube. You can, too!
Next I’m watching: The Gusher [1913], directed by Mack Sennett.
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Wladyslaw Starewicz is one of Russia’s earliest filmmakers, and someone I’d never heard of before sitting down to watch this film. I had no real expectations, and knew nothing about the film before pressing play, so I was shocked to find I was watching a puppet animation starring bugs! Had I known anything about Starewicz, I should have expected just that.
The early part of his directorial career was spent creating puppet animation films, using dead animals and insects as puppets. He got the idea to do this after trying to film two stag beetles fighting, but couldn’t because the lighting necessary to film them was hot enough to kill his stars. He recreated the fight using the dead beetles, whose legs he replaced with wire to allow for him to pose them for stop-motion animation. As far as we know, that short film, Lucanus Cervus, made in 1910, is the first puppet animation film to have ever been made. His enduring masterpiece however, is The Cameraman’s Revenge.
It tells the story of a beetle who embarks on a trip to the big city, presumably for something work-related. Once there, he visits a night club, but one that looks more like what we’d now call a strip club. On stage dances a dragonfly. Once her routine is done, she sits with her grasshopper boyfriend, but Mr. Beetle is smitten, and he pushes the grasshopper out of the way and strikes up a conversation with Miss Dragonfly. She understands him! She really, really gets him! Off they go to a nearby hotel for a night of passion, not knowing that Mr. Grasshopper, who happens to be a movie cameraman, has followed them, and is filming their love-making through the keyhole.
Meanwhile, back home, Mrs. Beetle is having some fun of her own. She’s invited another beetle over, an artist no less, and pretty soon they’re getting romantic. Naturally, Mr. Beetle returns home and catches his wife in flagrante delicto. He chases away the artist, and after a fight, he forgives his wife. Having patched things up, they head out to see a movie. What’s playing? You guessed it— Mr. Beetle and Miss Dragonfly, as seen through a keyhole at Hotel Amour. Now it’s Mrs. Beetle’s turn to be mad!
I don’t own a copy of this film, and had to watch it on YouTube. As silent dead bug puppet animation films go, I’d have to say this is my favorite.
Next I’m watching: Suspense [1913], directed by Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber.
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I’ve seen two American adaptations of Shakespeare so far, and now I’ve seen one from Denmark. August Blom directed this film, which, like the two I watched previously, is not a faithful adaptation of the original play. Unlike the other two, which took only the most basic premise and ran with it in new directions, Desdemona approaches its source, in this case Othello, as the framework in which to tell a parallel story. Valdemar Psilander, who was the top Danish screen actor of his day, plays Einar, an actor starring on stage as Othello, and whose wife, Maria, played by Thyra Reimann, is cast as Desdemona. As they prepare for the play, their real life begins to mirror that of their characters. Maria is seeing another man, and the actor who plays Iago, who Maria rejects early in the film, informs Einar of his wife’s indiscretion. The film builds towards a tragic climax that anyone who know the story of Othello will see coming, but it is still a powerful moment.
Of the three Shakespeare-inspired films I’ve watched, this one is by far the best made, though Florence Lawrence acting like a shrew is still the standout acting performance of the trio.
The film, under its original Danish title of For Aabent Tæppe, premiered in Finland on April 8th, 1912— important information you can surely use to impress your friends— before making its way into Danish theaters on May 12th of the same year. It hasn’t survived terribly well, and the print I saw, as an extra on the same Othello DVD I’ve mentioned twice before, is of very poor quality. That’s been an issue with a number of the films I’ve watched to this point, which is understandable due to their age, and it underscores something I said in my very first, introductory, podcast. Watching films at home is not ideal. Films were made to be seen on a giant screen, and this is more true for silent films than for more recent releases.
When these films were being made, they were made with the assumption that they would only ever be seen in theaters. Television didn’t exist yet. The first practical TV sets weren’t available to the public until 1939, and didn’t become common in American households until the late 1940s. Films were created to be seen on a massive screen, and directors took full advantage of that fact. Objects and actions were placed all over the screen, and what is large and obvious to an audience in a cinema becomes tiny and almost unnoticeable when viewed on even the largest of television sets. In silent films specifically, the lack of spoken words meant nearly all of the plot and story had to be conveyed to the audience via facial expressions and body language. Only as a last resort were title cards used. Those looks and gestures are minimized or lost when you don’t see these films on a 60-foot-wide screen in a cinema.
I’m sure I’ll expound upon this later, but I have to say, now that I’m 23 films into this project, that I really wish I could watch all of these in their original splendor, untarnished by age, and on a theater’s colossal screen. As they say in Denmark, “c'est la vie.”
Next I’m watching: The Cameraman’s Revenge [1912], directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz.
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The Lonedale Operator, released on March 23, 1911, is another of the short films that D.W. Griffith created for the Biograph Company, and the first of his films I’ve watched that doesn’t feature Florence Lawrence. This time the lead actress is Blanche Sweet, and she is the star of the picture. Lawrence was always in some sort of co-starring or secondary role.
Sweet plays “The Telegrapher,” daughter of “The Lonedale Operator,” so called because he runs the train station in the town of Lonedale, who takes over for her father one day when he falls ill. She becomes the Lonedale operator for the day, which also happens to be the day the payroll for the local mine is delivered. Two tramps set their sights on it. Our heroine realizes they are trying to break into the station and steal the payroll, so she locks the doors and telegraphs ahead to the next station for help. At first, no response. Griffith cuts to the other station where we see the operator fast asleep. Oh no! Fortunately, he wakes up and receives her cry for help. Back in Lonedale, Sweet passes out, no doubt from the exertion of tapping the telegraph key. Luckily, her boyfriend, a train engineer played by Francis J. Grandon, is given the message and he speeds in her direction to save the day. But he isn’t in time! The tramps have broken down the front door and are about to bust through the office door.
Thinking quickly, Sweet turns the light out before the tramps access the room, and she holds them at bay with what appears to be a gun. Except, we saw her turn down her father’s offer of a gun earlier in the film? What is going on? We find out when her boyfriend arrives. The lights go on, and she shows them all that it was a steel wrench all along! The tramps, acknowledging that they were outwitted, doff their hats and bow to her as they are led off to jail. The damsel in distress has saved herself!
Like the other Griffith films I watched, this one is noticeably better than much of what I’ve seen so far. One early scene in particular stands out, where the camera focuses on a tree’s branch, and its leaves, only to have Sweet and Grandon walk into the scene, under the branch, and into the foreground. They stop in frame and have a conversation. This is mundane by today’s standards, but I hadn’t seen anything quite that clever camera-wise to this point. This is also the first film I recall with a close-up shot, which was employed to show the audience that Sweet had been holding a wrench rather than a gun.
And in general, the film is more complex than previous ones, cutting back and forth between a number of simultaneous actions and locations. Tints were also used to keep the viewers informed as to where scenes were taking place, likely because audiences at that time weren’t used to seeing two things happening at once. Once Sweet is in the office, outdoor shots are tinted blue, and when her would-be rescuers are en route, scenes inside the train are tinted red.
I don’t own a copy of this film, but as with most all early silent films, it is in the public domain. I watched it on YouTube.
Next I’m watching: Desdemona [1912], directed by August Blom.
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At last, a feature-length film! Released in Italy as L'Inferno on March 2nd, 1911, this adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem is the work of three directors, Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro. This makes sense, given its length. It was three years in the making, in an time where short films were often being cranked out at a pace of one every three days, and though its 68 minute run time is brief by today’s standards, in an era of 5-minute films, it was a downright behemoth, and is the first full-length Italian film.
For those who haven’t read Dante, Inferno is the first of three epic poems he wrote chronicling a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And if you have not read Dante, do so immediately! T.S. Eliot wrote, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them: there is no third.” I am in complete agreement with Eliot. Read Dante!
Back to the film: Dante is guided through Hell by the Roman poet Vergil, where he encounters countless damned souls being tormented by demons in all manners of inventive ways. That this trio of directors, with no real predecessor to draw upon, were able to translate so much of the frantic and bizarre energy of Dante’s words into such stunning visuals, while having to more or less invent special effects methods as they went along, is astonishing. That they accomplished this in silence is all the more noteworthy. They convey so much merely through visuals. The film is the first to use flashback as a story-telling device, as Dante sometimes encounters souls who present a backstory.
Though it has been mostly forgotten, and looks primitive in comparison to modern films, I find it hard to believe that anyone can argue against this being the absolute apex of filmmaking upon its release. Nothing before it that I’m aware of comes close to L’Inferno in either ambition or execution, and in trying to come up with a modern-day comparison, the best I can do is to say it’s the 1911 equivalent of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in the way it blends an arthouse mentality into a blockbuster film.
The special effects are an impressive step up from anything I’ve seen before, and even if it’s often obvious how these effects have been achieved, they are no less stunning for the revelation. This was first apparent when Beatrice, Dante’s deceased love and muse, appears. While but a minor effect, her halo is fantastic, and when she flies away it is a far smoother flight than anything I’d yet seen. Another standout moment is a headless sinner who holds his own head as he walks up to Dante.
Perhaps the most effective moment of camera wizardly takes place during Dante’s visit to the second circle of Hell, where the lustful are subjected to the eternal torment of being buffeted about by a violent storm, unable ever to rest, just as I suppose lust blows one fruitlessly around in life. The film visualizes this with a sort of human mobile swirling sad souls in a never-ending circle above the heads of Dante and Vergil.
The most chilling moment of the film is saved for the ninth and lowest circle of Hell. It was certainly taken straight from the paintings of Gustave Doré, a 19th century artist who illustrated numerous classic works, Inferno among them. Compare what you see onscreen with the image below, and I think you’ll agree with me.
I don’t own a copy of this movie, though it is available on a couple different DVDs. I watched two versions of the film on YouTube, both of which were the same save for the score. One had a more subdued soundtrack added, which was appropriately dark and foreboding, but the second was the far more interesting of the two. In 2002 the German band Tangerine Dream composed a score for the film that I think works beautifully. I’ve seen mixed reactions to the score, with many complaining that it isn’t an instrumental album, and that vocals have no place in a silent film. Maybe those folks need to read what I wrote about the Fairy Tales of Georges Méliès and realize that the earliest silent films were often presented with a live narrator to describe the onscreen action. Nonetheless, I think both scores are suitable, and I present both to you below. First is the Tangerine Dream version, followed by one with only instrumentation.
Next I’m watching: The Lonedale Operator [1912], directed by D.W. Griffith.
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We saw that when D.W. Griffith brought Shakespeare to the big screen, he took great liberties with the plot, and by great liberties I mean he more or less threw it out the window, but his take on The Taming of the Shrew is downright canon compared to what Romeo Bosetti has done with Romeo and Juliet in the 1909 short film Romeo Turns Bandit. Griffith at least kept the basic concept of the story intact, and presented the action as taking place in 1500s Padua. Bosetti not only ignores the entire plot of the source material, he sets it in the modern day America. The action here is definitely not happening in fourteenth century Verona. About the only thing kept from the Bard’s play are the names.
Romeo wants to marry Juliet, but Mr. Montagu, her father, says no. Romeo rounds up some friends, they grab guns and don masks, and they throw a bag over Mr. Montagu and tie him up. Romeo next meets up with Juliet, who is clearly in on his scheme, and steals her away from her home. Mr. Montagu is then untied, and finds a ransom note at his feet that informs him Juliet has been kidnapped, and will be held until $1,000 is paid. Who does Mr. Montagu meet on his way home? Romeo, to whom he shows the ransom note. Romeo races off to “rescue” Juliet, and after he brings her home, is given Mr. Montagu’s blessing to marry his daughter. Romeo and Juliet get the happy ending they’ve always deserved!
Like the last film I watched, The Country Doctor, Romeo Turns Bandit uses title cards to keep the audience in tune with the plot. Nothing else struck me as noteworthy about the film on a technical level. The film stars Max Linder, one of film’s earliest comedy stars. His name isn’t well-known today, but he paved the way for some of the big names we do remember. He is considered responsible for the creation of the classic style of silent slapstick comedy employed by actors like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd.
Linder created the character of Max, a top-hatted dandy who appeared in well over 100 films. This character became incredibly popular, and Linder became the highest-paid actor in the world, commanding a then staggering salary of one million francs in 1912. He continued to make movies up until his death, with some of his final films being considered his best. In 1925, at age 41, he killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife.
Rather than ending on that down note, let me share with you where you can find this film, which was originally released on November 19th, 1909. I have it on a DVD for Othello, another silent film adaptation of Shakespeare, where it is an extra along with The Taming of the Shrew. You can click the picture of the DVD below if you’d like to buy a copy of your own.
Next I’m watching: Dante’s Inferno [1911], directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro.
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So I exaggerated a bit with this post’s subtitle, but the most interesting thing about this film, and the reason I put it on my list of films to watch, is the presence of Mary Pickford in a small role. She later became the original “America’s Sweetheart,” and, according to Wikipedia at least, is “considered to be one of the most recognizable women in history.” I wanted to see an early example of her work, and The Country Doctor, which premiered on July 8th 1909, is just that.
The star here is, of course, our favorite Biograph Girl, Florence Lawrence. She plays the wife of Dr. Harcourt, the country doctor of the film’s title. The film runs for 14 minutes, and the plot is straight-forward and somewhat predictable. The doctor’s daughter falls ill, and he tends to her. Suddenly, a neighbor bursts in— her daughter is sick, too! The doctor goes to treat the neighboring daughter, leaving his own daughter in the hands of mom. As the doctor’s child’s condition worsens, mom twice sends her friend to fetch her husband, but he’s too preoccupied saving the neighboring child. Suddenly, the neighbor girl is better, so the doctor heads home. While he’s on the way, his own daughter dies. Florence Lawrence has her moment when she reacts to the tragedy, and she’s believable. By the time the good doctor returns home, his wife is catatonic, and it’s too late to save his daughter’s life. Perhaps a lesson has been learned, but if so, I don’t know what it is.
Despite the somewhat melodramatic nature of the film, Griffith again demonstrates his talent, keeping things interesting and exciting, despite the audience knowing how things are likely to turn out. Lawrence doesn’t have much to do, and Pickford is barely in the film, yet it’s still an interesting bit of film, and I didn’t feel my 14 minutes was wasted.
I don’t think it exists on DVD. I couldn’t find it listed anywhere, and it’s not on anything I own, but it’s in the public domain, and I watched it on YouTube. I’ve posted the video below if you’d like to watch as well.
It’s worth noting that this is the first film I’ve seen that utilizes title cards during the film to explain the action. The descriptions are minimal, but serve to prepare the audience for what is about to happen, and go a long way towards assuring that there is no confusion on the part of the viewer.
Next I’m watching: Romeo Turns Bandit [1909], directed by Romeo Bosetti.
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There isn’t much to this short film. It runs for less than 4 minutes, and is nothing special, save for its final scene. That final scene is why it’s on my list, and why I watched, for it is allegedly the first example of someone taking a pie to the face in a film. There are, of course, rumors that two films preceded this monumental achievement, but I can find neither Family Troubles (1900) nor The Coal Strike (1905) to verify this claim. I’m not even sure if those films are considered lost, or if they are merely difficult to find. Nonetheless, Mr. Flip is the first absolutely confirmed use of the ol’ pie-in-the-face gag, and for that it has earned its place in cinema immortality.
This film, directed by Broncho Billy himself, Gilbert M. Anderson, was released on May 12, 1909, and stars Ben Turpin as the titular character. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Groucho Marx, enough for one to wonder if Marx borrowed some of his look from Turpin. The film chronicles Mr. Flip’s day as he goes about town, unsuccessfully flirting with women. His method involves reaching out to pat a woman’s cheek, and every woman he meets rebuffs him. More than that, they attack him. He’s stabbed with scissors by one, and electrocuted by another, but he doesn’t learn his lesson. He even brazenly reaches out to pat the cheek of a female barber who is in the process of shaving his face with a straight razor. Mr. Flip takes risks!
The film ends with Mr. Flip at the counter of a soda fountain, where he tries to pat the cheek of the waitress. She smushes a pie in his face, and the film ends.
This was an early role for Ben Turpin, who went on to act in 239 films, seemingly all of which were comedies. He had crossed eyes, which he used to comic advantage, first in Vaudeville, then later in motion pictures. It’s in the public domain, and I watched it on YouTube. You can, too. One caveat, there is a brief snippet of sound at the beginning, and then utter silence save for one moment later in the film, so don’t be thrown off by the sound cutting out.
Next I’m watching: The Country Doctor [1909], directed by D.W. Griffith.
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I wrote last time about how directors were churning out movies at a fantastic pace in the early days of cinema. To put that idea into perspective, the first film D.W. Griffith directed was released on July 14th, 1908. Less than 4 months later, on November 10th, his 35th film hit theaters. And sure, these were all short films, but each was made with its own cast and crew, and shot from its own script, and then edited down to its final form. That’s a crazy pace by any standards, but there you have it. Equally insane by today’s standards: according to IMDB, Griffith directed Florence Lawrence in 108 different movies.
Anyway, for his 35th film, Griffith opted to do Shakespeare, and adapted The Taming of the Shrew into a 18-minute-long short. That took some heavy editing of the original play, which lasts for about 2 hours in its original form.
The film stars Florence Lawrence as Katharina, the titular Shrew, Arthur V. Johnson as Petruchio, her suitor, and Linda Arvidson, Griffith’s wife at the time, as Bianca, Katharina’s little sister. Shakespeare’s play has all sorts of characters and scenes, and is full of laughs and drama. Griffith gets rid of just about all of it. We see Lawrence acting like a shrew, which is the best thing I’ve seen in any film I’ve watched for this project yet. You’d think she’s overacting, what with all her hand gestures and facial expressions, but somehow, it works. I totally get why audiences fell in love with her all those years ago. She’s beating people down and smacking them around, and her triumphant stance at the end is glorious. Enter Petruchio. He tames the shrew, primarily by denying her a roast chicken. Somehow, it works, and the two of the team up after he beats down all the servants. Suddenly, they’re in love. The end. I know it sounds nutty, but believe me, it works. You can look at all the pictures of Florence Lawrence you want, and read all about her online, but if you watch this, I promise you will fully understand why she was the star she was.
This film doesn’t seem to have its own DVD or blu-ray release, likely because it’s so short, and somewhat obscure, nor could I find it on any collection of D.W Griffith’s works. Luckily, it does show up as an extra feature on a DVD of Dimitri Buchowetzki’s 1922 version of Othello, which is how I watched it. You can click the picture of the DVD below if you’d like to buy a copy of your own.
While looking for the film on DVD or blu-ray, I came across another Kino Video that I’m contemplating buying. It collects 23 short films Griffith directed during his stint at Biograph Pictures. I may pick it up someday, but for now I’m going to continue plowing through the list of films I already have lined up to watch.
Next I’m watching: Mr. Flip [1909], directed by Gilbert M. Anderson.
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I chose this film for a few reasons. I’d been reading about the early days of film, and learned about Florence Lawrence. Hers was not a name I recognized, but she’s known as the first American movie star. Before her, people went to see films primarily for the novelty of seeing a film, or for the story the film promised to tell. If they wanted a western, they went to a western, and so forth. Florence Lawrence was the first person who could draw an audience simply by being in a film. She worked for the Biograph Company movie studio, and by about 1909 was being referred to by filmgoers as “the Biograph Girl.” Here is a picture of her, taken in 1908, the same year this film came out.
Many of her films are lost, and as I was sifting through the ones that remain I noticed that D.W. Griffith was listed as the director of quite a few. At the time he was one of many anonymous directors churning out literally dozens of films every year, but as he’d later go on to great fame as one of the earliest superstar directors, I thought it would be interesting to see some of his early work. The Call of the Wild seemed an obvious choice, because who doesn’t love that story of an indomitable dog in the wilds of the Yukon?
Surprise! This movie is not about Buck the dog. Instead, it’s about a Native American named George, and his unrequited love for Gladys, played by Florence Lawrence. While it’s a short movie, running just over 14 minutes long, it’s a definite step up in terms of story and production from anything I’ve yet watched as part of this project. This feels like a real, complete movie, albeit a very short one, with three acts, tension, and resolution. It even has an unhappy ending. It was originally released in theaters on October 27, 1908.
Some may view this as a politically incorrect film, by today’s standards, but I tried to watch through the eyes of a member of a 1908 audience as best I could. George has returned home to the American West after finishing school in Pennsylvania, where he was both a top student and a football star. At a party being held in his honor, he expresses his love for the host’s daughter, who rejects him. He goes home, gets drunk, and puts on his old Native American attire and rejoins his tribe. They all drink, after which they ride off together and accost Gladys. George attempts to kiss her, but is rebuffed, and he is prepared to abduct her until she pleads with him. She points to the sky, seemingly invoking God, and George lets go. He realizes the error of his ways. His friends don’t agree with him, but he threatens them, and they acquiesce to his desire to let Gladys go free. She rides away. The film ends with George riding alone, rebuffed by both societies to which he belonged.
This is by no means great cinema, but Griffith tells a clear story, and has an eye for action. You can definitely see in retrospect that he had an eye for what worked on a big screen, and I’m eager to see more of what he did in his early years.
I watched this on YouTube, as I don’t have a copy of the film. Here’s the version I saw.
Next I’m watching: The Taming of the Shrew [1908], directed by D.W. Griffith.
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I don’t know how much more I have to say about Georges Méliès. I watched the remaining seven films on the blu-ray I shared last time, and while they are uniformly wonderful, they are in the same vein as the first batch I wrote about. This isn’t to say that Méliès is a one-trick pony or anything. Far from it! Each film has its own character, and its own neat special effects. But, when it comes down to it, each is a static camera filming an impressively dressed stage, as actors and acrobats prance and tumble about, often appearing and disappearing before your eyes.
These are the films I watched:
1904 The Impossible Voyage [released July 31, 1904]1905 Rip’s Dream [released November 25 1905]1906 The 400 Tricks of the Devil [release date unknown]1906 The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship [release date unknown]1906 The Witch [released December 20, 1906]1909 A Diabolic Tenant [released January 1, 1909]1910 Whimsical Illusions [release date unknown]
As before they are available on this blu-ray. You can click the image and buy it, if you so desire.
The highlight of these is probably The Impossible Voyage, where a group of travelers fly to the sun and back, but all 7 were entertaining, and I’ll certainly revisit them at some point in the future.
And that wraps up my experience with the short fairy tales of Georges Méliès.
Next I’m watching: The Call of the Wild [1908], directed by D.W. Griffith.
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This feels a lot closer to what a modern viewer would call a movie than did any of the Georges Méliès films I wrote about last time. It’s very short, lasting only 10:24, but it tells a complete story, with scenes taking place in varying locations. Where everything in Méliès’ films appeared to be shot on a theater stage, The Great Train Robbery is shot in a telegraph office, inside a saloon, and even outdoors in a sort of forest. There is one scene in particular that jumped out at me as a true cinematic moment, when a train pulls into a station, and we see it arrive through the window of the station agent’s office. The train pulls in and stops at exactly the point where the camera can best catch it. It’s all very simple stuff by today’s standards, but it represents one of the earliest moments of a director placing a camera just so, to capture something that will happen at just the right spot. In other words, it’s filmmaking! This isn’t to disparage Méliès one bit. His work is incredible in its own way. It’s more that The Great Train Robbery is one step closer to modern movie-making.
Let’s get the technical stuff out of the way. The Great Train Robbery was released on December 1, 1903. It is directed by Edwin S. Porter, who had already directed 81 previous short films. This is the one he is best known for. It’s considered the first western.
Gilbert Anderson, who plays three roles in this film, went on to become the first western movie star. How fitting that he starred in the first western! He became known as “Broncho Billy,” and went on to star in more than 300 films, many of which were westerns. He was also involved on the production side. In 1907, he and George Spoor co-founded the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, which was one of the very first movie studios. Besides making Broncho Billy westerns, Essanay put out films starring Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, and many others.
I watched this years ago, on the same rented video tape I mentioned last time, a collection of early short films, and it was fun to see it again after such a long time. I don’t own a copy of The Great Train Robbery, but fortunately it is in the public domain, and I watched it online. Here’s a link to the video I watched, which I found on the Internet Archive.
Next I’m watching: 7 more short films from Georges Méliès
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I’m back, and ready to talk movies. The first film on my list is actually 7 short films, all from French director Georges Méliès. He was one of the earliest filmmakers, though not the very first, but he seemed like the best place to start. Méliès is considered the originator of special effects in movies, and pioneered techniques like substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and dissolves.
Before discovering movies, Méliès was a stage magician. He purchased Robert-Houdin’s old theater, which had fallen into disrepair, and thoroughly renovated it. He became hugely successful, in large part by concluding each night’s entertainments with a lavishly staged, original illusion that not only mystified his audience with magic, but told a story in the process. It’s no surprise that when he switched to making movies he achieved fame by recreating many of his stage effects on film, and used the new possibilities of the medium to augment them. He did things that were at the time incredibly difficult to create very realistic illusions onscreen.
Méliès first film was made in 1896. He made 78 short films that year, but the earliest of his films that I watched is actually the 199th he’d made, at least according to IMDB. I imagine it’s possible he made others that aren’t listed, and many of his works are lost. Who knows?
Most of what I watched was on the blu-ray linked below, which contains 13 of his short fairy tales. I hunted down a 14th on Youtube, also linked, because I wanted to watch his version of Bluebeard. I’m going to split the 14 short films into two segments, or episodes, I supposed you’d call them, and today I’ll cover the following:
1899 The Pillar of Fire [release date unknown]1900 Joan of Arc [released November 11, 1900]1901 Bluebeard [released July 10, 1901]1902 Robinson Crusoe [release date unknown]1902 A Trip to the Moon [released September 1, 1902]1903 The Kingdom of Fairies [released September 5, 1903]1903 The Infernal Cauldron [released October 17, 1903]
These are hardly movies by the modern definition. The plots are very simple, and what makes them interesting are the effects. The shorts on the blu-ray have all been restored, which included hand-painting the films with the original colors Méliès used over 100 years ago. That’s right, these are in color, or what passed for color at the turn of the last century. The black and white films were painted by hand, cel by cel, with several colors, and it results in a very unique and interesting product. The colors aren’t realistic, but they are vibrant and eye-catching. Also included in the restorations were Méliès’ original narrations. He wrote lines that were spoken by a narrator as his films played, and even translated them into English himself, so we can hear exactly what he intended us to hear. It’s quite different from what I think of when I think of silent films, but that’s what being a pioneer is all about. There were no preconceived notions of what a film should or should not be in the 1890s, so Méliès did his own thing, more or less making it up as he went along.
A Trip to the Moon is the only one of the bunch that I know for certain I’ve seen before. I watched it in black and white on a video tape I rented a long time ago, back when I was still in college, I believe, and then saw a restored version, with the images hand-painted, but without narration, in a cinema at some point after that. The rest of these were new to me. They’re all quite interesting. The situations are sometimes ludicrous— to leave the moon, the scientists push their ship off the edge of the moon and it falls to earth, for example— but you’re not watching for believability. You’re watching for fantastic ideas and images, and Méliès delivers. I can only imagine how astonishing these must have been to theater patrons when they, and the medium of film, were new.
You can click the above image if you’d like go buy a copy of the same blu-ray I watched. If you’d like to watch Bluebeard, here it is.
Next I’m watching: The Great Train Robbery [1903], directed by Edwin S. Porter.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com
I was going to jump right in and start talking about movies, but thought I’d better create an introductory “welcome” post, just in case someone other than me decides to visit my site. Unlike most podcasts, I’m creating mine for an audience of one: me. I’m sharing this in case they are of interest to others, but my primary reason for creating them is so I will better remember the movies I watch.
Awhile back I was listening to the Hardcore Literature podcast, and the host, Benjamin McEvoy, said something that jumped out at me. He mentioned that he used to forget the details of the books he’d read, shortly after having read them. I am plagued by the same phenomena, not only with books, but with films as well. I once was reading a book for the third time and realized I had no idea how it was going to end, and I’m the same with films. Within even a few months of watching a movie I can seldom remember more than the most basic aspects of what I’ve seen. I’ll watch a mystery and realize I have no idea who the killer is, despite having seen the film less than a year ago. I’ll see a clip of an iconic scene from a movie I’ve watched, sometimes more than once, and have no recollection of it whatsoever.
McEvoy said that he’d discovered a way to remember what he’d read, and at that I was all ears. His solution? Record a podcast! There’s a little more to it, as it’s the thought and preparation that go into creating one that help to cement the details in your mind, but as soon as he said it, it made sense. I’ve realized all my life that when I physically write something down I’m far more likely to remember it than if I only hear or read it, and when I speak something out loud, it definitely remains in my memory more than if I only think it. So I’ve decided to trust him and record a short video about each film I watch.
This decision dovetailed nicely with something else I’ve wanted to do for awhile, which is to go back to the beginning of film, and watch the history of cinema unfold chronologically onscreen. A couple weeks ago I sat down and spent the better part of a morning listing every “important” film I could think of, with important, of course, being a somewhat relative term. I’ve tried to identify the films that matter most, but any such list is going to be highly subjective. There are many obvious choices— you can’t discuss great films without bringing up Citizen Kane, or plenty of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, but by and large there were a lot of judgement calls on my part. And the list is by no means complete. I’m still adding to it as films come to mind. Throughout the day I’ll think “oh yeah, that movie exists!” and I’ll go in and add it to the list, but I have a solid sense of the bulk of it, and I definitely know which silent films I’m going to watch, which are the earliest films, obviously, and I even have a good idea about which early talkies I’ll see, because that is an area of film that I’ve long been most interested in.
After that, there is a period from about 1950 to 1990, give or take, where I’m far less knowledgeable. I’m sure I’ll change my mind as I watch, but right now I have a sort of notion that films weren’t as good between the late ‘40s and early ‘90s. The collapse of the Hollywood studio system gave rise to some bad cinema, with many notable exceptions, of course, but I may think differently as I watch a large selection of films, and who knows? I may come out of this project with the conclusion that the ‘70s were the greatest cinematic era of all time. Who’s to say?
I’ll find out over the next, what? 15 years? How long will this take me? My list is exactly 1,600 films long right now (I had no idea it was such a nice, round number until I checked just now— crazy!), and I’m sure I’ll add more as I think of them, so even if I can watch, and then talk about, 3 movies a week on average, it will be 2033 by the time I’m caught up to 2022, at which point I’ll have another 10+ years of films that don’t even exist right now to work through. Basically, I’ve set myself up either to do this for the rest of my life, or bail on the project. But that’s okay; I’m up for the challenge!
See, I love film more than any other form of art or human expression, even books— my degree is in English, and I love reading— which are a close second. Since I was very young I’ve loved going to the movies. I can still remember my first trip to the movies. When I had just turned 7, my mom took me to see The Sting, which she had seen when it was new and considered to be her favorite film of all time. This was in the days before cable TV and VCRs, or at least before they were commonplace, and we definitely didn’t have either. Back then, films were still re-released for limited theatrical runs from time to time. So something that was a big movie, as The Sting, a huge, successful, Oscar-winning movie, was, would sometimes be given a nationwide rerelease.
I can’t say I was able to follow all the twists of The Sting’s complex plot, but I got the gist of it, and was in absolute awe of everything about it, the giant screen, the actors on the screen in their 1930s garb, even the big tub of popcorn— in short, the cinema experience in total. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before I was back in a theater. It was the end of May, 1977 when I saw The Sting, and at about the same time, on May 25th, (my 7th birthday, actually), Star Wars came out. Like all 7-year-olds, and all little kids, and everyone really, went to see Star Wars during the summer. Star Wars became a huge deal, obviously, and I ended up seeing it three times that summer, and my lifetime love for the cinema was cemented.
Which brings me to an important point I want to make. There is a huge difference, a world of difference, really, between watching a movie at home and seeing one in a theater, and the latter is immeasurably better. You can watch a film at home on the biggest, best TV with the best sound system, and your experience won’t even be 10% of actually seeing a film in a theater with an audience. I know some will argue this point with me, “it’s better at home,” or whatever. 99% of the time my opinion is that no one is ever right or wrong, and everything is relative, and opinions are just opinions, on this point I’m adamant that I’m right and you’re wrong. Watching a movie at home is nothing when compared to seeing it in a theater.
That said, I’m going to have to watch nearly all of these films at home. It’s nearly impossible to find a local theater playing an older film to begin with, let alone a silent film, and let alone the exact film that is next on my list at any given time. So this is going to be an at-home project.
I’m still going to go to the movies, obviously. I go all the time, I went last night, I’ll still see all the brand new films, and I’ll see re-releases when I have the chance— I live in Austin, Texas, there’s a few theaters here that show older films— but to pull off watching over 1,600 films in the order they were released, I’m pretty much relegated to watching at home.
So there you have it, the introduction to my podcast. If anyone does see this, feel free to join me in watching all these movies. I’d love to watch along with you, and know what others think about the films, and will happily engage in discussions about them. If I had a catchphrase I’d insert it here, but instead I’ll just say, see you next time!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allthemovies.substack.com