Ahead of this Sunday's Academy Awards broadcast, in which the hit silent-era pastiche The Artist is up for Best Picture, David Denby in the latest issue of The New Yorker has a terrific piece on, among other things, the "lost style of acting":
The silent cinema hit the world like a hurricane, destroying élite
notions of culture overnight. As a feature-length art form, it lasted
less than twenty years, from 1912 to 1929, yet more than ten thousand
features were made in that period in the United States alone. From the
beginning, the silent cinema was an art devoted to physical risk and to
primitive passions, to rage, lust, ambition, and obsession (silence made
emotions more extreme in many ways), and it produced obsession in its
huge audience. I’m hardly the first man to worship at the shrine of
Louise Brooks’s careless but overwhelming appeal. “The Artist,” a
likable spoof, doesn’t acknowledge that world of heroic ambition and
madness—it’s bland, sexless, and too simple. For all its genuine charm,
it left me restless and dissatisfied, dreaming of those wilder and
grander movies.
Accompanying Denby's piece is a slide show, The Lost Stars of Silent Film. The title is a bit askew as its nine images present three of the great women of silent cinema — Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, and Louise Brooks. One commenter there gripes that too many of the truly fine silent-film women go unrepresented altogether, and even I — who, like Denby, am reduced to bibbling tumescence at the existence of Louise Brooks — wouldn't allocate four of only nine slots to her. Still, I'm pleased to see it there.
On my iPad, the tablet version of Denby's article adds a video. It's Denby explicating Louise Brooks' backstage seduction scene in Pandora's Box. It's a scene that literally took my breath away the first time I watched it, and it still leaves me swooning many viewings later. Denby's video is not available for linking, alas. (My own say on Pandora's Box is at DVD Journal.)
In related matters...
The 16th annual Kansas Silent Film Festival starts tomorrow at Washburn University. Among the numerous delights there will be the newly restored version of Georges Méliès 1902 ur-classic, A Trip to the Moon, which featured so prominently in Hugo.
Next month, the 17th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival headlines a new restoration of Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon, "the Holy Grail of silent masterpieces," with a new score conducted live by composer Carl Davis,
at the Art Deco Paramount Theatre in Oakland. "Due to the expense, technical challenges, and complicated rights
issues involved, no screenings are planned for any other American city." Hoo boy!
Critic David Bordwell on Dante's cheerful purgatorio — Occasioned by a New York retrospective of director Joe Dante's films, including a marathon screening of his pop-culty mashup The Movie Orgy, Bordwell elegantly reflects on Dante's body of work. "Dante, impresario of the comic grotesque, finds his inspiration in popular culture, the more wacko and inept the better. The comedy may come from childhood silliness, the grotesque from childhood fears. They say we baby boomers will always be just big kids, and Dante accepts this with a grin and a darkly cheerful eye."
laurel-and-hardy.com: Film Preservation - Another fine mess — A thorough four-part look at a difficult but necessary curatorial artistry. "How could movies like these, so widely seen for so long, be at risk of disappearing forever in first-class quality copies? Because they were too popular. Too many prints and negatives wore out, is the simple answer."
As a somewhat more than armchair Shakespeare buff with teeth-gnashingly strong opinions about the moronic, counterfactual "authorship controversy" recently given the thud of a movie it deserves in Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, I have considered blogging about it at Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL. But I fear such a post would devolve into a spittle-flecked Hulk-smash rant (on the Internet?! No way!) on the "Oxfordians'" logical fallacies and their absurd Creation Science/Birther/Moon Hoax-style pseudo-intellectualism. So instead I heartily recommend more clear-headed authorities such as Holger Syme (start here), Paul Edmonson, Ron Rosenbaum, and Bardfilm's KJ.
Having seen and been equivocatingly enthralled by Von Trier's bleak yet beautiful newest, Melancholia, I've been curious to read a review of the film from someone with first-hand experience with depression. Dean Treadway at Filmicability rewards my quest here.
Ferdy on Films: Marilyn Ferdinand, one of the more thoughtful and interesting movie bloggers going, also helps me see Melancholia more clearly.
The Girl With the White Parasol: Citizen Kane Takes the Stand - "The reason I watch films is so that I can find those moments of beauty, whether they come from a Technicolor image or from the throb in an actor's voice or from a string chorus. That's why I named my blog, 'The Girl with the White Parasol.' That's why I love film. And that's why I love Citizen Kane."
Music: Oscar Peterson
Near at hand: Yellow Submarine figures
According to Davis S. Cohen in Variety, and Thomas Gladysz (founder of the Louise Brooks Society) at Examiner.com, the silent film star's private journals are being unveiled after a 25-year moratorium. Says Cohen:
Brooks kept private journals from 1956 until her death in 1985, and bequeathed them to the George Eastman House with instructions they remain sealed for 25 years.
That date passed in August, and Eastman staffers have been poring over the journals before making them available to the public.
I lived in Rochester, NY years ago, working as the planetarium Astronomer Intern at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, just a few blocks from the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. I visited the Eastman House occasionally, though not as often, or with the depth of research, that I now wish I had.
Brooks was a Rochester resident in her last years. She died years before I arrived, and I didn't even know she had lived there until well after I made my next career move to Portland, Oregon. It was there that my life-long love of early cinema broadened to embrace Brooks the first time I saw and wrote about Pandora's Box.
Her relationship with the Eastman House was more than just a casual accident of geography. As summarized in her Wikipedia biography, in 1956...
... James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982.
I have a copy of Lulu in Hollywood, of course, and can affirm her reputation as a damn fine writer, and as a candid, observant critic with a sharp eye and intellect to go along with her sharp tongue.
As evidenced by the Variety news, these newly unlocked private journals include further reviews and commentary about the Hollywood set, which she had abandoned with some disgust in 1938. For instance, after a 1957 screen of Anna Christie starring Greta Garbo (with whom the omnisexual Brooks once had a one-night affair), she wrote of Garbo's performance: "She strains terribly... Is made to read line on top of line without pauses for mental transitions."
It's an observation that shores up my own thoughts about Brooks' striking, before-its-time naturalism on screen.
I wonder what else we'll see in the journals, assuming that they're going to be published unabridged. Hers was a life packed with more private drama than you usually find outside an HBO series, and much of it wouldn't exactly make what you'd call "family reading." She was graced with beauty, smarts, and talent that seemed to flow naturally from every cell in her body, yet as I wrote in that other blog post:
As an actress, not to mention as an unapologetic sexual and professional maverick, she was ambitious but reckless. Cocksure but difficult to the point of self-destructive. Independent, emancipated, and willful but too damn temperamental and mercurial to commit to any situation — jobs, husbands, lovers, Hollywood studios — long enough to really get serious roots dug in. She described herself as "a born loner, who was temporarily deflected from the hermit's path by a career in the theatre and films."
I'm hoping we get more of that Brooksie in these journals too. After all, the instructions to leave them sealed for 25 years suggests that there's something there besides opinions of performers and performances, right?
Although I'll always wish she'd lived long enough in Rochester for me to seek her out and meet her once I got there, I'll be looking forward to reading these journals and pretending that that's how it happened.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the largest and most important festival of its kind in North America, will celebrate its 15th Anniversary Festival at the majestic silent-era movie palace the Castro Theatre this July.
This year's program is an extraordinary collection of favorites and a few that would be new to me. Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (my own write-up is here) must be a real trip when shared by a big audience of enthusiasts, and oh how I'd love to see that newly restored version of Metropolis.
Yet another reason to visit one of my favorite cities.
Like Bogart or Ingrid Bergman or Cary Grant, James Cagney is one of those vintage Hollywood actors who compels me to stop and watch while channel-flipping, who occupy an amount of shelf space among the DVDs I dip into when I'm, say, "in the mood for a Cagney movie" the same way I get in the mood for a good burger or a familiar favorite album in my iTunes library.
Among my favorite bits in movie-ized Shakespeare is Cagney's roisterous comic turn as Bottom in Warner Bros.' 1935 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a peculiar viewing experience if you know Cagney only from the tough-guy roles that helped make him an icon of his era. Those roles had already started by then, thanks to his head-turning breakout performance in 1931's The Public Enemy. This is the movie that made a star out of Warner contract player Cagney, who thereafter embodied no-bullshit gangster cool for generations.
Alongside '31's Little Caesar and the following year's Scarface, The Public Enemy made the pulpy tommy-gun melodramas into something, as Box Office said at the time, "absolutely serious from start to finish," something "meant to be taken seriously by the audience." The New York Times noted Warners' "laudable motive" of "apprising the audience that the hoodlums and terrorists of the underworld must be exposed and the glamour ripped from them," and the film's moral that "civilization is on her knees and inquiring loudly as to what is to be done."
Nonetheless, up until the final reel, in The Public Enemy the wages of sin are obvious: a kid street punk with an abusive dad and a talent for petty crime can grow up to be a big-shot racketeer with loads of dough, flashy cars, tailored suits, and beautiful, willing dames. (Too bad about that final reel, but it's a good one too.) The film did such an effective job of showing that, yes, Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta, its prologue and epilogue disclaimers extolling its wholesome social intentions failed to budge the delicate bluenose pressure groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the League of Decency. The Public Enemy's violent realism, scenes blatant in their sexual suggestiveness, and the snappy allure of Cagney's performance helped ring in Hollywood's self-censoring Production Code of 1934, which sanitized criminal and sexual subject matter for years.
Under the masterful guidance of director William A. "Wild Bill" Wellman, Cagney gives The Public Enemy its dynamism and rewatchability. No one else onscreen can hold a candle to him. Originally, Cagney and co-star Edward Woods (as Powers' life-long pal and partner in crime) were cast with their parts here reversed, Woods having the lead role as Powers. But after catching sight of Cagney in action in another film, studio bosses flipped the casting just before shooting began.
With Cagney in the lead, it was guaranteed that volatile mobster Tom Powers was the most attractive and captivating force on the screen. His success proved, if by then there was any doubt, that audiences will go for a charismatic lowlife over a dull hero any day of the week, a lesson Hollywood never forgot.
Cagney's body language and his ease with street-level speech — a holdover from his own youth on the streets of New York City's Hell's Kitchen — were a revelation. Tom was no cartoonish caricature of a thug, and the reviews of the day praised Cagney's naturalism as part of the film's realism. In the documentary featurette on the DVD, Martin Scorsese says that before he shot The Aviator he showed his cast The Public Enemy, and when Cagney's entrance arrived someone exclaimed "Modern screen acting begins."
Keep that "modern screen acting" thought in mind — I'm coming back to that in a moment.
The Public Enemy is, of course, the movie that gave us the most famous grapefruit in Hollywood history:
That's Mae Clarke getting the citrus in the kisser, a moment that took on a life of its own in the decades since (it has even been parodied on The Simpsons) and that has an uncertain origin story. (TCM's page on the film probably provides the best summary.) Clarke is one of several women in the life of Cagney's brutal yet magnetic gangster.
Taking second billing after Cagney is Jean Harlow as the classic bottle-blond Other Woman. Unfortunately, while the rest of the film's "girls" (among them Joan Blondell) are fine, the clanging exception is Harlow, whose line-readings sound so leaden and amateurish that not even Cagney can save her.
One of a harem's worth of Howard Hughes discoveries, Harlow was already a star thanks to Hughes' Hell's Angels the year before. Her lack of acting talent didn't go unmentioned by the critics, although Variety, in its review of Hell's Angels, wisely observed that, "It doesn't matter what degree of talent she possesses ... nobody ever starved possessing what she's got." Regarding The Public Enemy, Variety added, "Harlow better hurry and do something about her voice. She doesn't get the best of it alongside Clarke and Blondell."
I wish I could find an online video of the Harlow-Cagney scene in the image up there to the right. In it her nails-on-a-blackboard voice and unconvincing performance just drain the juice from the scene, illustrating my thesis perfectly. Still, here's the scene where Cagney and Harlow meet:
As much as I enjoy The Public Enemy, Harlow is the bug in the fruit salad for me.
However, when I listened to the DVD's thorough commentary track by author Robert Sklar, I discovered that William Wellman, who had directed actress Louise Brooks three years earlier in Beggars of Life, originally offered her the role that Harlow lead-balloons here. At first Brooks accepted the part, but then changed her mind and went to New York. That decision began the end of her too-short career, and kicked off the decades-long professional and personal downturns that followed.
One of filmdom's rare sui generis evocative beauties, Brooks is best known today for her starring presence as the loose-living showgirl Lulu in German director G.W. Pabst's 1929 classic, Pandora's Box. It's one of the great films of the silent era, which was by then all but subsumed by the talkies.
Pandora's Box gives us an easy dozen images that snapshot our popular impression of Louise Brooks — that exquisite face, which seems made for close-ups; that jet-black helmet-cut bob; an effortless eroticism; a delicacy that's too joyful for a femme fatale yet too knowing for a mere naif.
Pabst had been so struck by Brooks' brief role in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port that he insisted on casting her as the lead in Pandora's Box — after a two-year search for an actress to play the well-established German character Lulu (a search comparable to that for Scarlett O'Hara). Pabst created something of a national scandal when he rejected Marlene Dietrich, a bona fide German star, in favor of this minor Hollywood American player. Brooks ditched Paramount (no love lost on either side) and headed to Berlin.
Pabst treated her with a regard and respect that Hollywood had never given her, even though she irked him by relishing Berlin's "life is a cabaret" energy to a degree that would make Sally Bowles blush. (She later made it up to him by giving the director one night of what she described in her essays as her greatest sexual performance.) While in Europe she made Pandora's Box and Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl, then Prix de Beauté in France, a project begun with René Clair. Because of these films — although they were not well-received in their time and played in the U.S. and elsewhere muddled by heavily censored recuts — her eventual status as a beloved screen favorite was only waiting to be carved into our cultural marble.
Give all due credit to Pabst, but Brooksie pretty much single-handedly raises Pandora's Box above the doomed-bad-girl melodrama, the kind of one-tone moralistic parable so common in its time. Her deft, restrained performance of "tragic Lulu with no sense of sin" (as Brooks later described her) lifts the script with layers and shadings that wouldn't become common aims for years afterward. The Kansas-born actress didn't choose to play Lulu as a malevolent vamp knowingly attracting then destroying men beneath her heels (Marlene Dietrich would have fallen into that mode with one snarly look), or as some pre-War "Candy," an innocent unaware of the way men and women react to her sexually catalytic presence. Instead she walked that tightrope so tactfully that with repeat viewings we see more within her and may interpret her actions differently with every nuance. She made Lulu unfathomable, a well that always has more to give.
Brooks was not a trained actress. Despite that — or maybe because of it — she brought to the screen a performance style that's regarded as years ahead of its time in its naturalism and lack of pretense. As Brooks herself wrote,
"The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation."
In other words, film allows an actor to be not merely an animatronic puppet, but a communicator of a character's (and/or the actor's) innermost "thought and soul." In her later journals, she criticized a Garbo performance by noting that "She strains terribly... Is made to read line on top of line without pauses for mental transitions."
Watching Brooks today, we're bowled over by how modern she is, how subtle and unaffected. It's as if she intuitively understood that there's more "transmitted" power in a focused laser beam than in a wide-open spotlight.
Critics today laud Brooks' performance in Pandora's Box for the same modernity we see in Cagney's Tom Powers, and she did it two years before Cagney's entrance.
So it stabs me in the heart to learn that The Public Enemy might have teamed up Cagney and Brooks.
It's a pairing that would have changed the movie enormously, offering an altogether different heft and "reading" to the scenes between Powers and his mistress. Instead of Harlow diminishing those scenes (and the film), Brooks would have amplified and magnified them.
It's hard to imagine Brooks out-acting Cagney, but it's painfully easy to imagine the two of them together working so well that cinema might have witnessed as elemental a pairing as Bogey and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy, or hydrogen and oxygen. Movies generally, and perhaps the social order, might be different today somehow.
Regrettably for us, Brooks detested Hollywood and its "play along to get along" ethos. As an actress, not to mention as an unapologetic sexual and professional maverick, she was ambitious but reckless. Cocksure but difficult to the point of self-destructive. Independent, emancipated, and willful but too damn temperamental and mercurial to commit to any situation — jobs, husbands, lovers, Hollywood studios — long enough to really get serious roots dug in. She described herself as "a born loner, who was temporarily deflected from the hermit's path by a career in the theatre and films."
It's a "What if?" that colors my viewing of The Public Enemy as I gnash my teeth through Harlow's grating performance. As with my previous Alternate Universe Movies post — "The Maltese Falcon" with Gene Tierney instead of Mary Astor — it's one of those often frustrating ponderables that emerges from the movies' long history of accidental convergences and tauntingly unfulfilled possibilities.
There's an excellent documentary about Brooks, Looking for Lulu, narrated by Shirley MacLaine and produced by Hugh Hefner for Turner Classic Movies. It used to be available on YouTube in six parts, but it's gone now. Find it if you can.
In related matters...
