LÂge dOr has bequeathed some of the cinemas most unforgettable images: the mummified bishops; the painter Max Ernst as a frail, dying bandit; the cow on the bed of an elegant haute bourgeois villa; Lya Lys sucking the toe of a statue; the manic face of Gaston Modot; and the angelic Jesus and his gleefully exhausted fellow libertines on the castle drawbridge. It is a film that
exists out of time, retaining its power to stir and shock into the twenty-first century and beyond. DRob
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1930s
ZEMLYA (1930)
EARTH
U.S.S.R. (Wufku) 75m Silent BW
Director: Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Screenplay: Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Photography: Daniil Demutsky
Music: Lev Revutsky (restored version)
Cast: Stepan Shkurat, Semyon Svashenko, Yuliya Solntseva, Yelena Maksimova, Nikolai Nademsky, I. Franko, Arkhip, Pyotr Masokha, V. Mikhajlov, Pavel Petrik, P. Umanets, E. Bondina, L. Lyashenko, M. Matsyutsia, Nikolai Mikhajlov
Arguably, Aleksandr Dovzhenkos Earth is the single greatest achievement of the ever-more-impressive Soviet silent cinema. A modernist who drew deep inspiration from folk artnot unlike his contemporaries Marc Chagall and Sholem AleichemDovzhenkos ode to the beginning of collectivization in the Ukraine is a riot of delirious imagery of swaying wheat fields, ripening fruits, and stampeding horses. The arrival of a tractor is greeted with joy by the peasants, who begin to imagine new lives for themselves, but surviving kulaks (landowners) conspire to assassinate the inspiring young head of the Partys village committee. His death, though, only makes the villagers stronger in their resolve; in a mind-boggling finale Dovzhenko brings together themes of birth, death, harvest, progress, and solidarity as the dead man is reunited with the land he loved so well.
No summary, however, can really do justice to the extraordinary sensuality of the film, a quality not much appreciated by the Soviet censors. Among the choice bits removed from earlier released versions are a scene in which, in a symbol of communion, the village men urinate in the tractors radiator, and a shot in which men draw strength and comfort by putting their hands inside the blouses of the women at their sides. Anyone looking for the origins of Andrei Tarkovskys cinema must start with Earth. RP
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1930s
LITTLE CAESAR (1930)
U.S. (First National) 79m BW
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Producer: Hal B. Wallis, Darryl F. Zanuck
Screenplay: Francis Edward Faragoh, Robert N. Lee, from novel by W.R. Burnett
Photography: Tony Gaudio
Music: Erno Rapee
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Glenda Farrell, William Collier Jr., Sidney Blackmer, Ralph Ince, Thomas E. Jackson, Stanley Fields, Maurice Black, George E. Stone, Armand Kaliz, Nicholas Bela
Oscar nomination: Francis Edward Faragoh, Robert N. Lee (screenplay)
Genre can be used to read history and interpret moments in time. Accordingly, Mervyn LeRoys Little Caesar helped to define the gangster movie while serving as an allegory of production circumstances because it was produced during the Great Depression. Within the film is inscribed a wholesale paranoia about individual achievement in the face of economic devastation. Leavening this theme alongside the demands of social conformity during the early 1930s means that LeRoys screen classic is far more than the simple sum of its parts.
Caesar Rico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) is a small-stakes thief with a partner named Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Recognizing a dead-end future, they move to the heart of Chicago, where Joe becomes an entertainer and falls in love with a dancer named Olga (Glenda Farrell). In contrast, Rico gets a taste of the life and enjoys it. Possessing a psychotic ruthlessness, he gradually looms as the new power on-scene before finally succumbing to an ill-tempered ego and the syndicate-breaking police. Gut shot and dying beneath an ad for Joe and Olgas dinner act, Rico sputters some final words of self-determination, underlining how he wont ever be caught because he lived according to the terms of his
own ambition.
For audiences, Ricos killer was undoubtedly a clear call of recent tensions about the state of the world at the time. Limited by the feature films structure, but not dulled by censorial practice in the days before the Production Code Administration, Little Caesar offers a scornful look at free enterprise taken to an extreme. Seen through the long view of history and the focus on ill-gotten gains, its a perfect corollary for Wall Streets collapse, itself the result of poor regulation, mass speculation, and hysteria manipulated to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Acting out to get a bigger piece of the pie, Rico expresses the wish for acceptance and the drive toward success in an otherwise indifferent world. Simultaneously terrorizing innocents and devastating the society he desires to control, he ends up illuminating the demands of power with homicidal shadows in this, a seminal film of the early sound era. GC-Q