At 333 minutes in its longest extant version, Abel Gances 1927 biopic is an epic on a scale to satisfy its subject. Although it follows Bonaparte from his schooldays in 1780marshalling snowball fightsthrough to his triumphant Italian campaign of 1796, by contemporary standards the film lacks depth. For Gance, Napoléon (played by the appropriately named Albert Dieudonné) was a man of destiny, not pyschology. His paean to the French Emperor has something in common with Sergei Eisensteins Alexander Nevsky (1938), both thrilling pieces of cinema in the service of nationalist propaganda.
If Gance is more of an innovator than an artist, its a measure of his brilliance that Napoléon still brims with energy and invention today. None of his contemporariesnot even Murnauused the camera with such inspiration. Gance thought nothing of strapping cameramen to horses; he even mounted a camera on the guillotine. In one brilliant sequence, he captures the revolutionary spirit of a rousing (silent) rendition of La Marseilles by swinging the camera above the set as if it were on a trapeze. His most spectacular coup, though, is Polyvision, a split-screen effect which called for three projectors to create a triptychnearly three decades before the advent of Cinerama. TCh
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1920s
THE KID BROTHER (1927)
U.S. (Paramount, Harold Lloyd) 84m Silent BW
Director: J.A. Howe, Ted Wilde
Producer: Jesse L. Lasky, Harold Lloyd, Adolph Zukor
Screenplay: Thomas J. Crizer, Howard J. Green, John Grey, Lex Neal, Ted Wilde
Photography: Walter Lundin
Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Walter James, Leo Willis, Olin Francis, Constantine Romanoff, Eddie Boland, Frank Lanning, Ralph Yearsley
Harold Lloyd is often regarded as the third genius of silent American comedy, his 1920s work often considerably more successful with the public than that of Buster Keaton, and even Charlie Chaplin. Often directly associated with the Zeitgeist of the Jazz Age, Lloyds screen persona is routinely noted for its speedy, can-do optimism and his films singled out for the audacious, often dangerous stunts and acrobatic feats that they contain. In many of his films the wonders of modernity and their embodiment in the teeming city itself are chief preoccupations. The Kid Brother, Lloyds second feature for Paramount, is often considered to be the bespectacled comics best and most holistic film. In many ways it deliberately turns its back on the 1920s, returning somewhat to the rural idyll of the 1922 film Grandmas Boy.
The films two most startling sequences provide a kind of essay in contrast, illustrating the combination of both a delicate and somewhat more rugged athleticism that marks Lloyds best work. In the first sequence, Lloyd is shown climbing a tall tree to attain a slightly longer look at the woman he has just met (and fallen for). This sequence illustrates the often meticulous and technically adventurous aspects of Lloyds
cinemaan elevator was built to accommodate the ascending cameraand the ways these are intricately connected to elements of character and situation (also demonstrating Lloyds masterly use of props). The second extended sequence features a fight between Lloyd and his chief antagonist, and is remarkable for its sustained ferocity and precise staging. Both sequences show Lloyds character transcending his seeming limitations, moving beyond appearances, and traveling that common trajectory from mamas boy to triumphant average American. AD
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1920s
THE CROWD (1928)
U.S. (MGM) 104m Silent BW
Director: King Vidor
Producer: Irving Thalberg
Screenplay: King Vidor & John V.A. Weaver
Photography: Henry Sharp
Cast: Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach, Estelle Clark, Daniel G. Tomlinson, Dell Henderson, Lucy Beaumont, Freddie Burke Frederick, Alice Mildred Puter
Oscar nominations: Irving Thalberg (best pictureunique and artistic picture), King Vidor (director)
Youve got to be good in that town if you want to beat the crowd. So says young John on his first sight of New York City, the thrilling metropolis where hes sure his special qualities will raise him high above the common herd.
Things work out differently for the hero of The Crowd, who shouldnt really be called a hero, because director King Vidors intention was to portray a man so painfully ordinary that he could seem a randomly selected sample from the movies eponymous urban multitude. He begins the story as a newborn baby indistinguishable from any other, and ends it as a New York bourgeois man indistinguishable from any other. In between, he undergoes experiences so humdrum that only a studio as adventurous as MGM under Irving G. Thalbergs regime would have considered it the stuff of Hollywood drama at all.
Nor would it have been if Vidor hadnt given it such stunningly imaginative treatment. From the stylized scene where John learns of his fathers untimely deathfilmed in a stairwell with forced perspective, borrowing from German film expressionismto the closing shot of John and his wife Mary, the generically named protagonists of this generically titled film, engulfed in an unthinking throng of moviegoers who mirror their herdlike selves, as unerringly and relentlessly as they mirror our own.