Friday, February 11, 2011
My Missing Picture Nominees: Disraeli (1929-30)
By Edward Copeland
Now that I've seen Disraeli, I lack viewing only one of the five best picture nominees from 1929-30, the third year the Academy handed out Oscars. I doubt that The Love Parade will change my mind since the third best picture recipient, All Quiet on the Western Front, marks the first time that the Oscar for best picture went to a movie that still holds up today as a great film. However, we are here to discuss Disraeli, which won George Arliss best actor for his portrayal of the famed British prime minister. The movie is stiff and stagy and while Arliss' performance overflows with theatricality, he is the whole show here and really the only aspect of Disraeli that makes it remotely watchable today.
Some reference sources will cite Arliss as having won for Disraeli and The Green Goddess, but according to the Academy's official site:
[NOTE: As allowed by the award rules for this year, a single nomination could honor work in one or more films. Though the final awards ballot listed both Disraeli and The Green Goddess in his nomination, the award was announced for only the Disraeli performance. It has never been established as to why this was, but it possibly could have been because the original report from the Acting Branch Board of Judges only listed the Disraeli performance in the results of the nominations voting, or it could have been because on some of the final ballots, the voters had indicated the Disraeli performance over the other.]
Take that for what it's worth. Of his competition, I've only seen Wallace Beery in The Big House and that was many, many years ago, so I wouldn't trust my memory to try to compare the two performances other than to note I've seen many Beery performances and he was a fine movie actor whereas Arliss' work definitely shows the signs of someone who made his mark on the stage and in silents. In fact, perusing IMDb, Arliss had played Disraeli before in a silent film with the same title back in 1921. Both films told the same story and were based on a play by Louis N. Parker. So — and I hate to make this assumption without doing the requisite homework — the Academy nominated its first remake in its third year of its existence.
Disraeli tells the story of the British prime minister's quest to secure rights to the Suez Canal in Egypt while fighting forces opposed to the idea at home and trying to beat Russia, who has its eyes on the same prize. Sounds like it could make an exciting story of political and international intrigue. Too bad it doesn't turn out that way.
Directed by Alfred E. Green, Disraeli begins with a series of what could be called blackout sketches, detailing quick scenes elsewhere such as the House of Commons where Disraeli's Suez Canal idea goes down to defeat. After these few short scenes, the rest of the action purely resembles a play, taking place in the drawing room of Disraeli's home.
With no government backing or, more importantly funding, to realize his plan to acquire the Suez, Disraeli hits upon a plan to finance the venture with private funds from the richest citizen he knows, Sir Hugh Myers (Ivan F. Simpson). He sends an envoy, the young Lord Charles Deeford (Anthony Bushell), who also is part of a burgeoning and unnecessary romantic subplot with Lady Clarissa (a very young Joan Bennett, still in her teens).
Unfortunately, opponents to the plan sabotage Myers' wealth, making him bankrupt, after the plan has gone through, as one of those adversaries, Mrs. Travers (Doris Lloyd) comes to gloat at Disraeli, who upon her arrival first acts (or perhaps overacts might be a more appropriate word) that he's ailing) before he springs on her. It seems that a lot of the opposition to Myers (and to Disraeli, though not shown in the film) is that he's Jewish). Mrs. Travers and others constantly refer to him as "the Jew."
However, Disraeli's skills manage to trick the Bank of England to give Myers a line of credit, saving the deal and delivering to Queen Victoria the additional title of Empress of India. Despite Arliss' tendency to play to the back row, he is the only reason to see the movie and, by reading reviews of the film from 1929, this was his first sound feature. Reading reviews from the time can be quite illuminating. Mourdaunt Hall writing for The New York Times gave the film a rave, though something in his lead disturbed me in his description of Disraeli (the historical figure, not the movie).
"It would have done old Louis Parker's heart good last night to hear and see George Arliss in the Vitaphone version of his play, Disraeli, which was offered to an appreciative audience at Warner's Theatre. For Mr. Arliss is on his mettle and he lends to the romantic conception of the great Jew an artistry and vigor that is a joy to behold."
Now, I did not know these historical facts off the top of my head, so I looked them up, but Benjamin Disraeli was the first (and so far only) person of Jewish descent to serve as prime minister of England. His parents were both Jewish but when he was 12, his father had him baptized into the Anglican Church and he was a practicing Christian until his death, though much of the bile and hatred thrown at Disraeli throughout his career was anti-Semitic in nature. Still, for The Times to be referring to him as "the great Jew" decades after his death strikes me as odd, when his ancestry had nothing to do with his accomplishments. Gee, that sort of reminds me of a certain Christian president of ours that people keep tossing slurs at accusing him of being a secret Muslim.
It's worth noting that Time magazine wasn't quite as bowled over by the film as The New York Times (mainly because in its capsule review, they seem to question why it was made) though they call it "exciting" and also emphasized that Disraeli was Jewish despite the fact that he practiced Christianity.
"The efforts of a Jewish prime minister of England in 1875 to buy a public utility for his kingdom have been made into a picture as exciting as a detective story. This is odd but it is odder still that, although Louis Parker's old play is no more than effective theatrical plum pudding, it should seem at times almost literary."
What difference did it make so many decades after his service that 20th century U.S. publications felt it necessary to emphasize that Disraeli was born a Jew. I doubt they referred to any other British prime minister as "the Christian prime minister of England." I know we live (in theory) in a time where such labels aren't viewed as significant by people who judge politicians on their actions, not their religions or ethnicity, but still, it's alarming even if the references are passing and not necessarily negative. It's just that they weren't necessary at all by 1929.
Of course, 1929 wasn't just a new time for talking motion pictures, it also was a new time for film criticism and a Mourdaunt Hall didn't have the decades' worth of filmmaking classics and acting tour de forces with which to compare Disraeli that critics that have come since do. Perhaps they didn't think it would be fair to say that Disraeli didn't live up to the best of the silents. I'm not in that position. Be it talkie, or be it silent, literally thousands of films have been made that exceed Disraeli in greatness.
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Labels: 20s, Criticism, Joan Bennett, Oscars, Remakes, Theater
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Monday, May 28, 2007
The Greek gods created a woman
By Edward Copeland
I reluctantly admit that my knowledge of some silent films contains some major gaps. For instance, I'd never seen a single work by German expressionist master G.W. Pabst (in silent or sound for that matter), so I was excited to finally get to see 1929's Pandora's Box in its excellent Criterion Collection edition, which also offered my first glimpse at fabled silent star Louise Brooks, who lived until 1985 but never made a film after 1938.
The most fascinating thing about Criterion's treatment of Pandora's Box is that it offers you not one, not two but FOUR different scores that you can play while you watch the film. There's an orchestral score by Gillian Anderson (not that Gillian Anderson), that attempts to evoke the German movie palaces of time; a score by Dimitar Pentchev composed in the cabaret style of the Weimar-era; a modern orchestral score by Peer Raben, a frequent collaborator of Rainer Werner Fassbinder; and a piano improvisation by Stéphan Oliva. Admittedly, I didn't take the time to watch the film four times with each score (I only watched it completely with the Anderson score), but I did decide to watch one pivotal sequence (the film is divided into eight acts) with each piece of music. It's quite interesting to see how the same images play with different underscoring. With the exception of the piano improvisation, I found each score worked exceedingly well and if I watched the film again in its entirety, I think I'd probably opt for Raben's work this time. (The Criterion set also offers a bonus disc, which I didn't sample, as well as a commentary track by film historians.)
As for the film itself, it is hauntingly beautiful as is much of the work that has survived from that era of German cinema. Pabst condensed the tale of good-time girl Lulu from wide-ranging promiscuity to more focused dalliances with sex and crime on the way to her inevitable comeuppance and Brooks' glow makes the entire enterprise shine. The film was controversial in its time for many reasons, the least of which is its fairly straight-forward lesbian implications. The tale's trajectory isn't likely to surprise, but Pabst's use of the camera keeps you spellbound. My own personal favorite touch is when someone is shot but you only know it for sure because of the little puffs of smoke you see rising over a shoulder. Aside from Brooks, Pandora's Box is populated with many great faces such as Fritz Kortner as the doctor who becomes embroiled with Lulu, Franz Lederer as his weak son and, most especially, Carl Goetz as Lulu's father. His face seemed to have been specifically made for silent cinema. One other interesting note about the DVD: This is the first silent film I've watched that also is subtitled. The title cards are in the original German with English subtitles below.
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Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Hollywood always loved its gangsters
By Edward Copeland
As HBO's The Sopranos nears its end and following the fresh Oscar win of Martin Scorsese's Boston cops-and-mobsters film The Departed, I happened to catch, thanks to TCM, a showing of 1928's The Racket, one of the two other nominees for best production in the Oscars' first year that lost to Wings. Produced by Howard Hughes, The Racket is a fascinating artifact with many of the mob story standards set nearly 80 years ago.
Directed by Lewis Milestone (who won an Oscar that very first year, not for this film but in the defunct comedy direction category for Two Arabian Knights), it's a fairly standard (now anyway) story of cops vs. crooks as stalwart Police Capt. James McQuigg (Thomas Meighan) works to bring down underworld boss Nick Scarsi (Louis Wolheim, whose face was made for gangster movies. I wonder what he sounded like.) McQuigg finds Scarsi's Achilles' heel in his attempt to protect his younger brother Joe (George Stone) from getting embroiled in either his shady dealings or with women he perceives as "golddiggers" such as Helen Hayes (Marie Provost) (Yes, that is not a misprint. Her character's name was the same as that of the actress, who was well known even then. There must be a story behind that somewhere.) When a joyride between Joe and Helen ends up with a pedestrian's death, McQuigg thinks he finally has the leverage to get Scarsi once and for all, something that needs to be done quickly before a city election that he plans to deliver for "The Organization." The Racket can hardly be called a great film, even among silents, but it is entertaining and it's fascinating to see all those standard mob elements on display so many years ago. It's also interesting when compared with the following year's Alibi that I reviewed earlier this year. Both films make it clear that the cops had to bend the rules to get the bad guys, though the police in The Racket are much more straight arrows than those in Alibi.
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As HBO's The Sopranos nears its end and following the fresh Oscar win of Martin Scorsese's Boston cops-and-mobsters film The Departed, I happened to catch, thanks to TCM, a showing of 1928's The Racket, one of the two other nominees for best production in the Oscars' first year that lost to Wings. Produced by Howard Hughes, The Racket is a fascinating artifact with many of the mob story standards set nearly 80 years ago.
Directed by Lewis Milestone (who won an Oscar that very first year, not for this film but in the defunct comedy direction category for Two Arabian Knights), it's a fairly standard (now anyway) story of cops vs. crooks as stalwart Police Capt. James McQuigg (Thomas Meighan) works to bring down underworld boss Nick Scarsi (Louis Wolheim, whose face was made for gangster movies. I wonder what he sounded like.) McQuigg finds Scarsi's Achilles' heel in his attempt to protect his younger brother Joe (George Stone) from getting embroiled in either his shady dealings or with women he perceives as "golddiggers" such as Helen Hayes (Marie Provost) (Yes, that is not a misprint. Her character's name was the same as that of the actress, who was well known even then. There must be a story behind that somewhere.) When a joyride between Joe and Helen ends up with a pedestrian's death, McQuigg thinks he finally has the leverage to get Scarsi once and for all, something that needs to be done quickly before a city election that he plans to deliver for "The Organization." The Racket can hardly be called a great film, even among silents, but it is entertaining and it's fascinating to see all those standard mob elements on display so many years ago. It's also interesting when compared with the following year's Alibi that I reviewed earlier this year. Both films make it clear that the cops had to bend the rules to get the bad guys, though the police in The Racket are much more straight arrows than those in Alibi.
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Labels: 20s, HBO, Howard Hughes, Milestone, Scorsese, Silents, The Sopranos
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Friday, March 23, 2007
If you lose the war, don't blame me
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the 1927 Blog-a-Thon being coordinated at Goatdog's Blog.
By Edward Copeland
1927 offered quite a few of silent cinema's undisputed classics but when I thought about what to write about, I had to go with Buster Keaton and his largely unheralded co-director Clyde Bruckman's The General.
I'm sure it will be one of the more popular subjects this weekend but hell, when else was I gonna come up with a good excuse for writing about it? Rewatching the movie ahead of this, I was struck once again by what a masterwork it is.
Keaton and Charlie Chaplin seem permanently linked together as silent film's two great clowns but, though The General provides plenty of laughs, it should really be classified more as an adventure than a comedy because it produces just as much suspense as silliness.
It's also striking for a degree of realism in its Civil War setting that you wouldn't expect your run-of-the-mill comedy to take the effort to realize. What's even more fascinating is that even though Keaton's character of Johnny Gray is from the South and longs to help the Confederacy against the Union, neither side is portrayed in a particularly villainous light.
Of course, much of the humor of the film stems from Johnny Gray's two loves: Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) and his train engine The General. When the Confederate Army refuses to enlist Johnny, saying he's more valuable as an engineer, Annabelle's father misinterprets it as Johnny being a coward and tells Annabelle so, prompting her to tell Johnny she can't love him until he's wearing a soldier's uniform and disbelieving him when he tells her the real reason.
Honestly, it makes you wonder why he'd even care about someone who demands such a silly thing. However, when the Yankees steal his beloved train, Johnny rises to the occasion to retrieve it, unaware at first that they've taken Annabelle as well. The rest of the film is one long, funny and riveting chase.
When I think about it, many of my favorite comedies of all time really contain as much tension as gags such as Dr. Strangelove, His Girl Friday or After Hours.
I've always hated the great Keaton vs. Chaplin debate, as if it's impossible to love them both, which I do. It's also like comparing apples and oranges. The General vs. City Lights? Sherlock Jr. vs. Modern Times? Why be forced to pick? In a way, it's like Fred Astaire vs. Gene Kelly, with Chaplin taking the more stylish Astaire role while Keaton displays Kelly-like athleticism. I don't want to pick between those two either.
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Labels: 20s, Astaire, Blog-a-thons, Chaplin, Gene Kelly, Keaton, Movie Tributes, Silents
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Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Perhaps I was too hard on Helen Hunt
By Edward Copeland
Earlier this year when we conducted our survey of the worst Oscar choices for best actress, I was surprised that Mary Pickford's win for Coquette managed to make the top 10 because I figured if an Oscar fanatic such as myself hadn't managed to see it, few others would have either. Thanks to TCM's annual 31 Days of Oscar, I managed to record Coquette and I finally got around to watching it. I have to think if more people such as myself had seen it, Pickford's atrocious performance in an even worse film would have landed even higher.
To say this 1929 film is creaky is to do a disservice to creaky films that are at least still watchable. This awful Southern melodrama concerns Norma Besant (Pickford), the daughter of well-to-do Southern doctor (John St. Polis) whose preoccupation with social image leads him to frown on the budding romance between Norma and Michael Jeffery (John Mack Brown).
Dr. Besant doesn't think Michael is worthy of his daughter or his family and demands an end to the forbidden romance. Of course, it's hard to keep lovers apart so I'm going to spoil the rest for you in the hopes you never have to endure this mess.
Dr. Besant goes out to confront Michael and ends up shooting him to death, making Norma torn between telling the truth of what happened or lying to say the shooting was justified in order to save her father.
Of course, in the courtroom, Dr. Besant can't stand to see his daughter torment herself by lying so he tells the judge to ignore her testimony and confesses everything before grabbing the pistol from the exhibit table (which for some reason is still loaded in the middle of the courtroom) and killing himself.
Pickford's silent beginnings are quite evident as every movement is overwrought and flamboyant and her wandering accent is laughable. However, she's hardly alone. Everyone in the cast is subpar, especially William Janney as her brother Jimmy who I swear looks in one scene as if he's reading from a Teleprompter.
Still, Pickford is the star and she's the one who picked up the second best actress Oscar ever, the first for a performance in a talkie. Of course, all the nominations were "unofficial" for 1928-29 and I've only seen Bessie Love in the awful best picture winner The Broadway Melody. I'll give the other unofficial nominees — Ruth Chatterton (Madame X), Betty Compson (Carrie), Jeanne Eagles (The Letter) and Corinne Griffith (The Divine Lady) — the benefit of the doubt and say that surely one of them had to be better than Pickford and Love.
I will give Coquette one minor bit of praise: director Sam Taylor's final shot of Norma leaving the courthouse as each passing street light illuminates when she passes was quite nice.
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Monday, February 19, 2007
An awkward time for movies
By Edward Copeland
In my seemingly neverending quest to see all the major Oscar nominees of all time, I took advantage of Turner Classic Movies' annual 31 Days of Oscar programming to catch Alibi, which was nominated for best production and best actor for Chester Morris in the award's second year, 1928-29. Actually, as we now know, all nominees for that year are unofficial ones, since no nominees were actually announced, which is good for the Academy in the case of Alibi and Morris since it gives them their own alibi of plausible deniability for nominating this creaky relic, especially Morris' performance.
Directed by Roland West, who never helmed another film after 1931, according to IMDb, Alibi definitely bears the signs of its time when silents transitioned to sound. As a result, Alibi does contain some striking visuals, but once the characters speak, everything goes downhill. As for the story, imagine an
early version of The Departed, only minus solid acting, writing or plotting. Alibi tells a cops versus crooks story where neither side is really that admirable. There aren't moles per se, as in The Departed, but the film does ask whose tactics are truly worse. Morris who got the Oscar nomination "unofficially" plays Chick Williams, newly released from prison who claims the police set him up. He even pursues romance with the daughter (Eleanore Griffith) of a police sergeant (Purnell Pratt) who is determined to send Chick back to prison by any means necessary.
The plot unfolds rather predictably and for every striking image, there are multiple cringe-worthy moments of acting, especially by Regis Toomey as a perpetually drunk Wall Street bigwig who gets embroiled in the plotting.
A plot twist, in a way, justifies his less-than-stellar portrait of a lush, but not enough to make the performance work. However, Toomey shows a lot more life than Morris does.
Alibi shows such a clash between the silent and talkie eras, that I'd be curious as to how it would have played if it had remained as a silent, but we'll never know.
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Monday, April 17, 2006
When both she and the pictures were big
By Edward Copeland
Until I sat down to watch the DVD of 1928's Sadie Thompson, which brought Gloria Swanson her first best actress Oscar nomination (one of the original trio of best actress nominees in Oscar's inaugural year), it never occurred to me how little of Swanson I have actually seen. Before watching this film, the only things I'd seen Swanson in were Sunset Blvd., Airport '75 and an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Sadie Thompson marked my first encounter with Swanson in her silent glory when she truly was a superstar much as the Norma Desmond she would portray in Sunset Blvd. In fact, in 1928, Swanson was so powerful that she was one of the few women to have their own production companies — Sadie is credited as a Gloria Swanson Production.
Written and directed by Raoul Walsh (who also plays a pivotal role), Sadie Thompson was an adaptation of Somerset Maugham's short story "Miss Thompson," which had been turned into a stage success and already had one film incarnation prior to this one. It would later be remade as a talkie called Rain in 1932 starring Joan Crawford and again in 1953 with Rita Hayworth in Miss Sadie Thompson. The only two versions I've seen are the Swanson and Crawford ones and the contrast is fascinating, not only because the story is the same but because of the differences when one film's actor can use their voice and one cannot. Sadie Thompson also is interesting because much of the film's final reel has been lost and for the DVD, it has been re-created using still photos and, in one sequence, lifting footage from Rain and removing the sounds. Watching Swanson in silence though really emphasizes the power she had in the silent era. You can see some of the flamboyant gestures she let Norma use 22 years later, but she has true power, spark and humor playing the good time girl who becomes the object of a preaching moralist out to save her soul and protect society from the likes of her. (Are we sure who the Beatles wrote "Sexy Sadie" about?)
It's really almost pointless to try to compare Sadie Thompson and Rain since the silent versus talkie depictions change the equations entirely. Crawford is probably just as good in the 1932 version, but she gets dialogue to almost make it an unfair fight. However, even with these differences, it is easy to compare the worth of the actors playing the moralists in the two version.
Lionel Barrymore in the silent version is all sinister, so much so that when the film's climax arrives, it really seems out of character. In contrast, Walter Huston's performance in the 1932 film is more fully realized. While he is still the villain of the piece, he's still unmistakably human so his ultimate fate seems like a natural progression.
Even with the cobbled-together final minutes, Sadie Thompson is worth a look, especially for Oscar completists. Rain is just as good and comparing the two films is a fascinating thing to behold. I saw Rain first — and a long time ago — but I'm not sure the order matters and the Sadie Thompson DVD includes the final minutes of Rain as a bonus feature. Sadie is probably more important, if only for a look at the power that Gloria Swanson once wielded in Hollywood, especially for those of us who know her only as Norma Desmond or as herself slumming on The Beverly Hillbillies or hilariously dictating her memoirs into a tape recorder on the doomed jetliner in Airport '75.
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Labels: 20s, Beatles, Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Oscars, Silents, Television, W. Huston, Walsh
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