Silent Sunday: The Cat and the Canary (1927)

German director Paul Leni made only four films in Hollywood before he died of blood poisoning in 1929 at the age of 45: the lost Charlie Chan film The Chinese Parrot; The Man Who Laughs and The Last Warning, both of which I really want to see; and this, one of the first "old dark house" mystery-thriller-comedies, which was based on a popular 1922 play and brought to the screen as an amazingly un-stagy, expressionistic, fast-moving whodunit that inspired, among other things, Scooby Doo.

It's not much of a horror film, being that it's not scary, but it is a beautiful work of art that demonstrates much of what made the late silents so great. Leni's camera is fluid and poetic, his shot setups are usually excellent, and the film makes great use of tinting, and even the usually momentum-killing intertitles are put to good use. It's all in the service of a pretty silly story, but the visual style is enough to make the film well worth watching.

Read the full review.

Keywords: Laura La Plante, Paul Leni, silent films, Silent Sunday

It Happened One Paranoid Delusion

In this, the seventh episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In, Nathaniel, Nick, and I finally have some serious disagreements: is It Happened One Night absolutely perfect, or only nearly so? Can one really get enough of Claudette Colbert in this movie, or is her screen time sufficient? Are there enough pitch-perfect scenes, or should there have been one more? Readers, it's a surprise we didn't resort to physical violence to resolve these issues.

And then there's the whole issue of A Beautiful Mind, which also nearly resulted in tears: is it really bad, or just relentlessly average and anonymous? Do we care not a whit about the main characters' relationships, or is there a glimmer of something worth paying attention to? Is Ron Howard a boring, characterless director, or is he in fact devoid of a heart?

Head on over to Nathaniel's Film Experience Blog to discover just how close we were to tearing each other's hair out in this contentious discussion.

One of the problems with this series is that in the interest of not driving readers away with our blathering, we try to keep the entries somewhat short. This is a problem because I could go on all night about how wonderful It Happened One Night is, and how it gets better every time I see it. It's obviously the best screwball comedy ever made, and according to my own stupid, outdated Top 100 list, it's also the 13th best film ever made. That list needs lots of fixing, but this film's place is secure.

But calling it a screwball comedy seems to sell it short, because there's so much more to it than the madcap antics of its followers. It leaves those films (mostly) in the dust on the comedy side of things, but it also has more of a heart and more of a brain than most of them, a fact that's still surprising even after seeing it the third or fourth time. The scenes between Colbert and Walter Connolly (as her father) have become my favorites because they depict one of the most fully developed and complicated parent/adult child relationships I can remember seeing in a comedy. It's a shame the Best Supporting Actor category was still a couple years away, because Connolly would have been a lock.

Keywords: Best Pictures, BPFOI, Claudette Colbert

Silent Sunday: Sunnyside (1919)

Charlie Chaplin's 1919 short Sunnyside is a highly weird little film, full of typical Little Tramp-tics and sight gags, but with a couple of digressions into fantasy and a completely inscrutable ending. One doesn't expect to leave a Chaplin film wondering if the Tramp kicked the bucket in the end (unless it involves a real bucket, of course), but here we are nonetheless.

The bulk of the film is what we expect from two- or three-reel Chaplin. He plays a farmhand who spends most of his time getting kicked in the butt by his employer; he also runs the desk at his boss's hotel, cooks all the food, and cares for the livestock. The best gags involve his attempts to save time by having the chicken lay her eggs in the frying pan and milking the cow directly into a coffee cup. He's in love with the neighbor's daughter (Edna Purviance)—a plot development so inevitable that it's announced by a title that reads "And now, the 'romance'." Two things complicate his wooing. First, after a run-in with a renegade bull, he's knocked unconscious, an interlude in which his spirit cavorts in a field with a troupe of faerie ballerinas. Soon after he wakes, a rich guy from the city arrives, gets into a car accident, then starts macking on Edna, who seems taken with the guy's spats. Charlie attempts, in his inimitable way, to imitate the wealthy heel, but when it fails, he tosses himself into the path of an oncoming car, and kablam! He's dead.

Or is he? There's a quick fade to the hotel, where his boss is kicking him awake; he's fallen asleep in a chair, and Charlie's suicide over Mr. Rich and Edna's romance was just a dream. Before leaving, Mr. Rich smiles at Edna, who spurns him, and she and Charlie waddle off happily. The end.

Except I don't buy it. The whole suicidal despair segment doesn't fit with the film's already-demonstrated dream world, which is much lighter in tone—remember the faeries. It seems like too much for a 30-minute film to make a bunch of "dream rules" and then break them. And Charlie's behavior and the gags he's involved in during the "second dream" are completely consistent with reality—there are no visitations, but he does attempt to make spats out of a pair of wool socks, resulting in hilarity.

Of course, if the suicide is real then what comes after is one of those Jacob's Ladder-style "at the moment of death" dreams, which isn't entirely satisfactory, but is at least novel. The suicide angle might seem a bit dark for a Chaplin film, but the other option is that the film is kind of sloppy and thrown together. I realize this was surely the case in many, many instances, and probably is the correct answer here, but I like my ending better.

Keywords: Charles Chaplin, silent films, Silent Sunday

Slim Is the Boss

This is Slim, the oldest and smartest cat. If at some point in the future she starts speaking English, we won't be all that surprised. She's in charge around here. Sometimes the other cats get out of line—often, their mere existence is enough to set her off—and she has to beat them up to remind them of their place, which is away from her. Once in a while she has to put us humans in our place as well, like if we are asleep and she is hungry. Do not be misled, however: she's a sweetie who loves nothing more than to be on you and on your stuff while you're working, your pillow while you're sleeping, and your bathmat while you're showering. (She waits on the bathmat so that when you get out, she can lick your wet ankles, which is only sort of as weird as it sounds.)

Silent Sunday: Broken Blossoms (1919)

Is this a good place to admit that this is my first feature-length Griffith film? Probably not, but it's too late now. I've seen chunks of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, but I'd never really tackled the guy who basically invented the modern cinema. I'm a bad cinephile, but I'm working on that.

My first foray is into his depressing tale of a forbidden, interracial love between a Chinese man and a white woman. Of course, it's so understated that it's possible to read it as a completely unreciprocated love. Richard Barthelmess, a great, unjustly forgotten actor, is very good as "The Yellow Man," but the film belongs to Lillian Gish, who works her closeups with dazzling skill.

Read the full review.

Keywords: D.W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, silent films, Silent Sunday

Birdie Has a Cold

This is Birdie, the middle cat. She might look apprehensive because right after I snapped this, I picked her up and stuffed her into her cat carrier for a trip to the vet. She has a cold, you see, and it won't go away; one of its most charming symptoms is that she sneezes right in your face. This particular trip was more horrifying to her than most, because our car is at the shop and I had to walk the seven blocks to the vet, her carrier bumping against my leg. To add to the fun, she was late on her vaccines, so the doctor gave her two shots; I also learned that she has to go in for some serious teeth cleaning as soon as her upper respiratory infection is cleared up. That will be great fun for all of us.

Silent Sunday: Early Jesus

The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1902-1905) is one of the earliest feature-length films, although it's not much of a "film" by modern standards. It's a series of scenes, or tableaux, of the life of Jesus, from the Annunciation to the Ascension. Still and stodgy, the film provides some relief outside the obvious historical value: there's some really great tinting, along with some really impressive dissolves, masking, fading, and other early-cinema tricks that seem to belong more in a Georges Méliès film than in a dead-serious film about the Christ. (The best effect has to be when the baby Jesus appears—abracadabra!—in the manger, saving Mary the pain of labor.)

Read the full review.

It's available from Image Entertainment in a fabulous, meticulously restored, gorgeous DVD that retains much of Pathé's impeccable tinting and adds, for a bonus, another early Passion play, the 1912 film From the Manger to the Cross, which was shot on location in Palestine. The package is a model of attractive presentation and obvious love for the medium.

Keywords: silent films, Silent Sunday

The Lord of the Hotel: The Return of the Concierge

MIKE: Only five Best Picture winners have won all the Oscars for which they were nominated, and we have two of them in this installment. In 1932, Grand Hotel became the only film to win Best Picture without winning, or even being nominated for, any other awards. It presents the intertwining tales of people living in various states of desperation at the finest hotel in Berlin: broke baron John Barrymore, dying bookkeeper Lionel Barrymore, stenographer (etc.) Joan Crawford, Prussian industrialist Wallace Beery, and depressive diva Greta Garbo. On the other end of the calendar is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, whose eleven-for-eleven tied it for the most Oscars ever. Shortly before its thirty-seven endings, epic battles occur, Gandalf (Ian McKellan) is wise, Gimli and Legolas (John Rhys-Davies and Orlando Bloom) bond homosocially, Frodo and Sam (Elijah Wood and Sean Astin) destroy the ring, and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) becomes king.

The two films present a perfect storm of nerdy Best Picture statistics trivia: only ten films have won the big prize without a single acting nomination, and these two are on that list as well. What's up with that? Grand Hotel presents a banquet of movie stars working at the top of their game; is it simply the lack of supporting categories and the limited space (three slots each) in the lead categories that caused its shutout? What do you think about these performances? And whereas great acting isn't the focus of the Lord of the Rings saga, does its lone nomination (Ian McKellan's for the first installment) give the series enough credit for its stars' acting chops? (Yeah, I know we're dealing with just this one film, but you'd have to be drunk on Louisiana Flips to think all those Oscars weren't for the entire series.)

NICK: See, that brings up a big point for me right away. Even if The Return of the King pitched that perfect Oscar game in part because AMPAS wanted to reward the whole trilogy, and even though principal photography was (famously) continuous on all three installments, I can't help thinking that The Return of the King is a stylistically different and frankly inferior picture to The Fellowship of the Ring. Not that it's a huge difference; I still like ROTK a lot, and it has plenty of the expressive color, the detailed designs and locations, the energy, the scale, and the emotional breadth that subtends the whole wonderful series. But I feel like ROTK gets stuck too often in these magnified close-ups of actors in frankly unimaginative frames, and the editing patterns don't keep all the fields of action and conflict as pristinely differentiated or as exciting as Fellowship did. (All three installments indeed boast different lead editors.) The serial and very protracted endings are a big problem for me in ROTK, and since you bring up acting, Mike, the emphasis on close-ups in ROTK, which should be even more actor-friendly, instead keeps emphasizing that some of the cast don't have the full control and technique that their roles require (Elijah Wood, John Noble) and others keep trying to screw their faces up and force out a convincing tear or two or twenty (Sean Astin especially, but also Billy Boyd). It's a tenser, fuller, more majestic movie than Two Towers, but I don't think it's the series apex that I coveted, or that Oscar commemorated, and I don't think it's as deserving a winner as Fellowship would have been.

Big pluses: That Gollum-centric opening is still a corker, and the lighting of the beacons is a reliable thrill. And Shelob. Big minus: "Shadowfax, show us the meaning of haste!" This won for screenplay?

NATHANIEL: But it didn't win for screenplay... the trilogy won. I'd go so far as to say that all of the LotR wins and nominations are based on the whole, projected (in the first two years) or existing (once Return was playing). It's hard to hold the Academy's attention—this isn't (usually) the EMMYs where you can phone it in once you're well liked—but generally once you've got awards momentum, you've won half the battle. Return of the King had three years of mass emotional investment propping it up even if it hadn't proved as satisfying as it did.

I'll beat a dead horse and agree that it stumbles with those multiple endings. Not because they're there (there are dozens of characters to bid farewell to you know) but because Jackson underlines their ending quality so much. Why the multiple fadeouts? What a weirdly misjudged repeat "gotcha!" that decision proved. It reminds me of that great line from The Age of Innocence: "Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it." Why toy with our natural desire to exit the theater after three plus hours of satiating thrills? I suspect that if you simply erased the fadeouts—maybe a cross dissolve instead?—there would've been less griping.

But let's stay positive. There's so much to love. In both movies I might add. Is it just me or is Joan Crawford, often disparagingly viewed as something of a Shelob herself, a total kick in the pants in Grand Hotel? She's my favorite part of the movie and I like most of its parts.

NICK: I agree, it's not just the quantity of endings in ROTK, but beyond their constant elegiac quality, it's the insistence on soothing beauty that puts me off at the end. After the highest-stakes global struggle imaginable, the world has no scars or stretch-marks, the light gleams, and the actors get pushed in all those closing scenes between ineffable sorrow and beatific grins, often on a dime. I really feel like the emotional AND the narrative threads get sacrificed to bland, reassuring spectacle in those conclusions.

But, as requested, I'll stop griping: and yes, Joan Crawford is amazing in Grand Hotel. Even as the other actors spin reliable or even engaging versions of the archetypes assigned to them, Joan is by far the craftiest at making Flaemmchen neither "good" nor "bad" and keeping us guessing about the character...despite keeping her playing style so simple and direct.

Grand Hotel has at least as many close-ups per minute as Return of the King, but to such a different purpose: you are practically watching the advent of 30s-era movie stardom as you watch Grand Hotel, as the camera extracts as much behavioral implication and palpable personality as it can just by doting on these scrupulously lit faces. The stars become an indispensable part of Art Deco style, sleek and cool and reflective. But they also capture enough of the longing and desperation built into the script that the movie doesn't feel completely weightless... and stardom itself is more interesting for its connotations of loneliness and unreality.

MIKE: I like what you said about the dawn of 30s-era stardom, Nick, and it fits with what went on offscreen—Garbo and Crawford fought over screen time, Garbo and Beery refused to sign until they got extravagant salaries, and Garbo seems to be willing to poke a little fun at her own superstardom—"I just vant to be alone" and all that. I'm so glad we all agree about how great Crawford is here. For me, she nails the film's surprisingly dark ambience best. I love her most in the scenes where she's negotiating her relationships with the men around her, first with John Barrymore as the two of them, through some of the film's best dialogue, recognize a mirror image in the other, and later with Wallace Beery as they hash out the terms of her "employment." Like everyone in the film, she's grasping desperately for control over something in her life, and like everyone, her control is mostly an illusion. I think the only actor who doesn't nail practically every scene is Lionel Barrymore, who overplays his drunk scenes and is saddled with some painful "you like me, you really like me" lines, but his confrontation with Beery in the bar is one of the film's best moments.

I don't want to slight its technical achievements, either—Nick alluded to the great lighting and Art Deco sets, but I was especially impressed with the camera work, which seems to have recovered from the great-step-backward of Cimarron and recaptured All Quiet on the Western Front's fluidity. Those twin show-offy tracking shots through the lobby are fun, but I especially appreciated that it eschewed the boring pattern of 20-foot-high establishing shots and medium shots of its predecessor, instead valuing those luscious closeups. And I don't want to rewatch even a second of Cimmaron to double-check this, but is this the first of our Best Pictures with an incidental score—not just over the titles, but during dialogue scenes as well?

NATHANIEL: Ah but what hath Grand Hotel wrought in doing so? I love the star mojo in the movie but the closeups are so well lit and performed and it's not always this way. Movies are rarely this careful in lighting now. And the acting... well, there's not always a reason to be cropping out entire bodies and even the tops and bottom of star faces as is the current style. I don't really want to measure the size of an actors pores. I just want to be wowed by screen beauty. Nowadays actors will get full frame treatment even if they're just doing something incidental like ordering food. It dilutes the actual potency of the important closeups. I love long shots and medium shots.

MIKE: The shots in GH really do show us how much has changed. By 1932, the "classic Hollywood look" seems to have been pretty much in place, as demonstrated here, and films made from there until the end of the studio system seemed to have a basic grasp of shot and editing patterns that gave proper weight to various shot sizes (of course I'm totally overgeneralizing). Each type of shot has its place, even the eyebrow-to-chin closeup favored today (and even the handheld shakycam that seems to be the default now), but I wish modern filmmakers thought variation was more important.

NATHANIEL: I hadn't really thought about this in terms of Lord of the Rings but as Nick suggested, the closeups in the third installment don't always pay off. It's one of the reasons I've never sat down to watch the trilogy back to back to back. I fear that after seeing Elijah Wood (bless) worry beatifically in tight closeup 20 times, you've seen all there is to see. And I'm guessing it's a lot more than 20 times if you do the marathon. Would the trilogy have lost some of its magic if we didn't have those year long breaks?

NICK: Oh, we wouldn't want to berate Grand Hotel for its paler (that is, even glossier) imitators any more than we'd want to arraign The Lord of the Rings for all of the Narnias and Golden Compasses and Spiderwicks we've been sloshing through since. If anything, when I see something like Pan's Labyrinth being robustly over-praised and over-Oscared, which never would have happened pre-LOTR, I'm glad to see an under-served genre like fantasy enjoying some benefit of the doubt, even from the AARP—I mean, AMPAS.

I've never done a 12-hour Rings-o-rama, either, Nathaniel, and I agree that the films wouldn't necessarily benefit. I'm guessing a lot of the battle scenes would start to look the same and the big speeches would run together—even within ROTK, this becomes a problem—and I've already made clear that the first installment is, for me, the grandest and the smartest.

MIKE: I think the pacing of the releases was perfect. Closer together, and I'd have overdosed on them; farther apart, and my faulty memory would have required revisits of the previous films (and perhaps forced me to give in to the temptation to watch the overindulgent "extended editions"). Speaking of losing some magic, I found that I was a lot less involved in ROTK watching it on my TV at home. It felt like theatrical viewing is required for something that's shooting for this level of majesty. I found the effects to be less convincing and the sheer blow-you-away scale I remember from seeing it in the theater to be pretty much gone. I still think it's a pretty great film, but its flaws are a lot more visible on the smaller screen (which seems counterintuitive).

NICK: Since I've been a bit stingy with my praise and I know we're all fans, I love the sheer, striving spectacle and the lack of cynicism that Return of the King brought to multiplexes, and I do love almost any BP winner that is such an anomalous pick for Oscar. For that matter, I'm hard-pressed to think of another Best Picture winner that much resembles Grand Hotel, either, in its unique blend of escapism and melancholy, and its successful admixture of dissimilar actors. Who knew that Crawford and Beery could shine in the same movie, and that any scenery could survive with two Barrymores on the premises? Future crazy-quilts of star cameos like some of the 1950s winners don't come anywhere close to what this picture achieves. Grand Hotel and Lord of the Rings aren't perfect, but their strongest elements and their dodgiest imitators confirm how special they are... and though neither would have won my vote, I love that Oscar's frequently lockstep voters appreciated and stood behind them.

Readers, what do you think about serial endings, use and abuse of closeups, Joan Crawford, our neglect of poor Gollum, etc. etc.?

More stuff: Nathaniel's post, Nick's post.

Previously: #4: Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby, #3: All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash, #2: The Broadway Melody and The Departed, #1: Wings and No Country for Old Men

Keywords: Best Pictures, BPFTOI

Silent Sunday: Don't Change Your Husband (1919)

In the first film Gloria Swanson made with Cecil B. DeMille, a pairing that would produce six films and make Swanson one of the biggest stars of the silent screen, she goes around dressed like a peacock, swathed in Oriental scarves and headdresses. She's a longsuffering wife whose husband is a slob, and when a suave ladykiller starts sniffing around, she falls for it. But the grass is always greener, better the devil you know, etc.—these words of wisdom exist for a reason!

The DVD presentation brings up a common issue, especially when dealing with films that aren't under copyright protection anymore. It's part of Passport Video's Gloria Swanson Collection, and I'll admit that I'm happy to be able to see it at all, but I wish these companies would put a little effort into their presentation. There's no restoration to speak of, I'm convinced the "ending" we see is in fact evidence of missing footage, and, most gallingly, Passport chose to brand the picture with a "Gloria Swanson Collection" logo that never goes away; it sits there like someone spit on the screen.

Read the full review.

Keywords: Cecil B. DeMille, Gloria Swanson, silent films, Silent Sunday

Million Dollar Land Grab

It's time for the fourth installment of Best Pictures from the Outside In, wherein Nathaniel, Nick, and I discuss Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby.

That's all I have left, aside from jet lag. Read the conversation.

Keywords: Best Pictures, BPFTOI