Perhaps most remarkable among its virtues is the films integration of synch-sound recording. Expository dialogue is offered to still camera setups whereas lesser remarks, often viewed as whispers between characters, are left in silence. To cover these gaps in the spoken record, ambient music stitches together each set piece with occasional bursts of song. More fluid and visually dynamic than many early sound films, The Million is also more entertaining than many subsequent talkies. In large part this is a credit to Clairs screenplay and deft direction, but it is also due to a willing cast carrying through the demands of a gentle fantasy. GC-Q
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1930s
TABU (1931)
U.S. (Murnau-Flaherty, Paramount) 84m Silent BW
Director: F.W. Murnau
Producer:
F.W. Murnau
Screenplay: Robert J. Flaherty, F.W. Murnau
Photography: Floyd Crosby
Music: Hugo Riesenfeld, W. Franke Harling, Milan Roder, Chopin, Smetana
Cast: Reri, Matahi, Hitu, Jean, Jules, Ah Kong, Anne Chevalier
Oscar: Floyd Crosby (photography)
Tabu is the last film of F.W. Murnau, who was probably the greatest of all silent directors. He didnt live long enough to make sound films, dying in an auto accident a few days after work on the musical score for this masterpiece was completed and a week before the films New York premiere. Filmed entirely in the South Seas in 1929 with a nonprofessional cast and gorgeous cinematography by Floyd Crosby, Tabu began as a collaboration with the great documentarist Robert Flaherty, who still rightly shares credit for the story. Clearly, though, the German romanticism of Murnau predominates, above all in the heroic poses of the islanders and the fateful diagonals in the compositions. As we now know, Flaherty was ultimately squeezed out of the project because Murnau, who had all the financial control, was not temperamentally suited to sharing directorial credit. This unfortunately has not prevented many commentators from continuing to miscredit Flaherty as a codirector.
Part of Murnaus greatness was his capacity to encompass studio artificein such large productions as The Last Laugh (1924), Faust (1926), and Sunrise (1927)as well as documentary naturalism in Burning Soil (1922), Nosferatu (1922), and Tabu. This versatility bridges both his German and American work. Tabu, shot in natural locations and strictly speaking neither German nor American, exhibits facets of both of these talents. The simple plotthe two chapters of the film are titled Paradise and Paradise Lostis an erotic love story involving a young woman who becomes sexually taboo when she is selected by an elder, one of Murnaus most chilling harbingers of doom, to replace a sacred maiden who has just died. An additional theme is the corrupting power of civilizationmoney in particularon the innocent hedonism of the islanders. Murnau himself was in flight from the Hollywood studios when he made the picture, although Paramount wound up releasing it in 1931.
However dated some of Tabus ethnographic idealism may seem today, the films breathtaking beauty and artistry make it indispensable viewing, and the exquisite tragic endingconceived musically and rhythmically as a gradually decelerating diminuendois one of the pinnacles of silent cinema. JRos
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1930s
DRACULA (1931)
U.S. (Universal) 75m BW
Language: English / Hungarian
Director: Tod Browning
Producer: E.M. Asher, Tod Browning, Carl Laemmle Jr.
Screenplay: Garrett Fort, from play by John L. Balderston and Hamilton Deane
Photography: Karl Freund
Music: Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Wagner
Cast: Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye, Edward Van Sloan, Herbert Bunston, Frances Dade, Joan Standing, Charles K. Gerrard, Tod Browning, Michael Visaroff
Although Bram Stokers seminal 1897 vampire novel had been filmed by F.W. Murnau in 1922 as Nosferatu and director Tod Browning had cast Lon Chaney as a bogus vampire in the silent London After Midnight, this early talkieshot in late 1930 and released on Valentines Day 1931was the true beginning of the horror film as a distinct genre and the vampire movie as its most popular subgenre.
Cinematographer Karl Freund had a solid grounding in German Expressionist shadowmaking whereas Browning was the carnival barker king of American grotesquerie, so the film represents a synthesis of the two major strains of silent chills. Like such major American horror properties as The Cat and the Canary and The Bat, this Dracula comes to the screen not from the pages of classic gothic literature but direct from the stage: the primary sources of the screenplay are a pair of theatrical takes on Stokers novel, from Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. The
break-out star of the new genre is Bela Lugosi, who had played Dracula on Broadway and was finally cast in the film after the early death of Brownings favored star, Chaney. It may be that the loss of Chaney took some of the spark out of Brownings direction, which is actually less inspired than George Melfords work on the simultaneously-shot (on the same sets, no less) Spanish versionthough the latter suffers from the lack of an iconic Dracula and the fact that it represents exactly the shooting script, whereas the English-language Dracula was considerably tightened by an edit that took out twenty minutes of flab.