that doesnt dazzle the eye with rich, shimmering interplay of detail, lighting, gesture, and movement. MR
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1920s
OUR HOSPITALITY (1923)
U.S. (Joseph M. Schenck) 74m Silent BW
Director: John G. Blystone, Buster Keaton
Producer: Joseph M. Schenck
Screenplay: Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez
Photography: Gordon Jennings, Elgin Lessley
Cast: Joe Roberts, Ralph Bushman, Craig Ward, Monte Collins, Joe Keaton, Kitty Bradbury, Natalie Talmadge, Buster Keaton Jr., Buster Keaton
Arguably as great a film as the better-known The General (1927), Our Hospitality Buster Keatons masterly satire of traditional Southern mannerskicks off with a beautifully staged dramatic prologue that establishes the absurdly murderous parameters of the age-old feud between two families. By the time the main story takes over, Busters Willie McKay is a twenty-something innocent, raised in New York but returning (thanks to a wondrously funny odyssey involving a primitive train) to his familial town, where his courtship of a girl met en routethe daughter, as it happens, of the clan still sworn to spilling his bloodplaces him in deadly peril, even though Southern hospitality dictates his enemies treat him properly as long as hes in their home.
Much of the humor thereafter derives from a darkly ironic situation whereby Willie determines to remain a guest of his would-be killers while they smilingly try to ensure his departure. Keatons wit relies not on individual gags but on a firm grasp of character, predicament, period, place, and camera framing (see how he keeps the camera moving after hes fallen off the ludicrous bicycle it has been tracking alongside); the result is not only very funny, but also dramatically substantial and suspensefulnowhere more so than the justly celebrated sequence when Willie saves his beloved from plunging over a waterfall. Never was Keatons sense of timing so miraculous, his ability to elicit laughter and excitement simultaneously so gloriously evident. GA
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1920s
LA ROUE (1923)
THE WHEEL
France (Abel Gance) 273m Silent BW
Director: Abel Gance
Producer: Abel Gance, Charles Pathé
Screenplay: Abel Gance
Photography: Gaston Brun, Marc Bujard, Léonce-Henri Burel, Maurice Duverger
Music: Arthur Honegger
Cast: Severin-Mars, Ivy Close, Gabriel de Gravone, Pierre Magnier, Gil Clary, Max Maxudian, Georges Térof
Visionary French filmmaker Abel Gances The Wheel opens with a spectacular fast-cut train crash, as revolutionary to spectators in 1922 as the Lumièress train arriving in a station in 1895. Railwayman Sisif (Severin-Mars) saves Norma (Ivy Close) from the crash and brings her up as his daughter. Both he and his son Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) fall in love with her, so Sisif marries her off to a rich man. She and Elie eventually fall in love; both her husband and Elie die after a struggle. Sisif goes blind and dies, after being tended by Norma.
Then, as now, opinions on what was originally a sprawling nine-hour film are divided. The Wheels melodramatic plot was combined with wide-ranging literary references, including Greek tragedy, as is suggested by Sisifs name (Sisyphus) and his blindness associated with incestuous desire (Oedipus). These pretensions were seen by intellectuals to conflict with the films extraordinary cinematographic techniques (such as the accelerating montage sequences based on musical rhythms), which related the film to avant-garde preoccupations with a pure cinema and Cubist concerns with machines as the emblem of modernity. The films contradictions are admirably brought together in the central metaphor of the title: the wheel of fate (Sisif/Sisyphus ends up driving the funicular railway up and down Mont Blanc), the wheel of desire,
the wheel of the film itself with its many cyclical patterns. PP
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1920s
THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1924)
U.S. (Douglas Fairbanks) 155m Silent BW (tinted)
Director: Raoul Walsh
Producer: Douglas Fairbanks
Screenplay: Douglas Fairbanks, Lotta Woods
Photography: Arthur Edeson
Music: Mortimer Wilson
Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Snitz Edwards, Charles Belcher, Julanne Johnston, Sojin, Anna May Wong, Brandon Hurst, Tote Du Crow, Noble Johnson
The Thief of Bagdad marked the culmination of Douglas Fairbankss career as the ultimate hero of swashbuckling costume spectacles. It is also one of the most visually breathtaking movies ever made, a unique and integral conception by a genius of film design, William Cameron Menzies. Building his mythical Bagdad on a six-and-a-half-acre site (the biggest in Hollywood history), Menzies created a shimmering, magical world, as insubstantial yet as real and haunting as a dream, with its reflective floors, soaring minarets, flying carpets, ferocious dragons, and winged horses.
As Ahmed the Thief in quest of his Princess, Fairbanksbare chested and with clinging silken garmentsexplored a new sensuous eroticism in his screen persona, and found an appropriate costar in Anna May Wong, as the Mongol slave girl. Although the nominal director was the gifted and able Raoul Walsh, the overall concept for The Thief of Bagdad was Fairbankss own, as producer, writer, star, stuntman, and showman of unbounded ambition. (Side note: the uncredited Persian Prince in the film is played by a woman, Mathilde Comont.) DR