Tarzan of the Apes (1918)

A mere four years after the novel saw publication, here comes 'Tarzan of the Apes'.  It opens with a zoologically dazzling opening montage to match that of 'Life of Pi' (2012) - A snake!  A warthog!  A lion!  An elephant!  Some kind of bear!  Double rhinoceros!  I suppose audiences back then might have been more easily impressed by such stock footage displays as the one that starts this picture.  (That is, if it is stock footage - it could have been shot for the purpose for all I know, but lions really don't live in jungles, and the scenes with actors were apparently shot far from these animals' real haunts, in Louisiana).  Still, it must have been exciting to go to the cinema and see, not just bleary human forms and shuffling slides of text, but vast, shaky animals.  It's the same reason we see a venus fly-trap in action in 'Nosferatu' (1922), or animals in full colour in 'The African Queen' (1951)

As we all know, Tarzan is a hairy but clean-shaven fellow who lives in the jungle, swings on vines (he does so only briefly here, at the half-way point of the film - I suspect the famous image comes from a later picture) and was raised by animals, making his eventual meeting with civilised society (as opposed to sinister-looking Arab slave-traders, local savages and other horrid stereotypes) exciting and slightly-but-not-very romantic.  The concept is a little similar to that of The Jungle Book, except that, while Mowgli was (I think) an Indian child raised by a wolf, a panther and a hilarious bear, young Tarzan is an English child of the upper class raised by apes and heir to a fortune and heritage of which he knows nothing, meaning a (financially) happy ending is practically guaranteed from the start (though as we'll see, this film never quite reaches that inevitable 'you were rich all along' conclusion).

It's an interesting view of humanity's innate yearnings.

So, for the first half, young Tarzan is raised by a lovely chimp called Kala, larks about a while, and has no reason to talk to anybody - convenient in a silent film.  The intertitles mainly tell us what is happening or what characters are thinking, which seems a rather poor use of silent film as a visual storytelling medium.  This feels less like a film, more like a written story with moving illustrations - illustrations which are as spectacular as they are expensively staged: slightly.  As in 'America 3000' (1986) and 'Battlefield Earth' (2000) , our hero learns English and ingenuity after discovering a book, and immediately comprehending its uses and the meaning of its symbols.

After this we skip a number of years, and meet the adult Tarzan, played by Elmo Lincoln, an actor with an amazing name.  He engages in a variety of adventures of exactly the kind one might expect of Tarzan, and left me wishing I was watching the less innovative but much more fun 'George of the Jungle' (1997).  This, though, was almost certainly the first time there had been a film quite like this, so I suspect I ought to have admired its novelty - but I've seen it all done more enjoyably and slickly later on, so these fresh adventures seem, with the weight of time, full of cliché.

It's not even as sexy as it sounds.

The film only covers the first half of the novel's story.  I'd be tempted (though to be honest not very tempted) to watch the sequel which was released the same year (and was a Western, curiously enough) but it no longer exists anywhere in the world, and can be watched by nobody.

The film suffers, as many 1910s films do, from lack of close-ups of actors' faces, meaning that even if they're doing their best acting we don't really see the emotion, so it's very hard to engage with it as a drama.  By this point these things were getting better, and film-making was growing steadily more competent, so I suspect the rather rough and bleary print I saw on Youtube has also counted against my appreciation of this film.  That is, the early 20s films I've seen restored for home release have looked and sounded so crisp and beautiful, and my dismay at the 1910s may in part stem from the fact that I've watched the whole decade for free in gloriously compressed 240p YouTube video.

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You can find the film on YouTube, but here's the novel too.

Broken Blossoms (1919)

'The Yellow Man', as the intertitles would have it.

...or to give it its full title, 'Broken Blossoms, or The Yellow Man and the Girl'.  Naturally I was a bit wary, and when the director's slide came up bearing the name 'D.W. Griffith' I was inclined to turn the film off, so gruelling did I find 'Birth of a Nation' (1915), that plodding racist pageant.  This being the age of extreme xenophobia in the US against the so-called 'yellow peril' the film had the potential to be ugly indeed.  I was intrigued, though, by the first few minutes, which promised a tragedy, but gave us, not a Chinese villain, but a Chinese hero, a tender Buddhist missionary who travels to the wild land of London with a message of peace and hope.  This is not what I expected from this writer/director.

It seems that Griffith, having created a massive monstrosity of racist cinema in 1915, then made a career out of partial apologies.  He never conceded that 'Birth of a Nation' was a racist diatribe, but followed it, and its uproarious reception, with a succession of films about tolerance and, like this one, about non-white heroes oppressed by Western whites.  For balance, you see.  There are problems, of course.  Huan Chang, the film's hero, is played by the white Richard Barthelmess, who plays the role in an angular style almost identical to Roddy McDowall's Dr Cornelius from 'Planet of the Apes' (1968).    He wears so much make-up as to seem between ethnicities and between genders, and almost every intertitle refers to him not by name, but as 'the yellow man'.  Even in monochrome, this is surely a step too far.  Now, I could spend a lot of time here exclaiming 'outrageous thing is outrageous' and surprising nobody, but perhaps this isn't just a particularly patronising and racist attempt to tell an anti-racism story.  Perhaps this is all deliberate, and D.W. Griffith has learnt irony and self-awareness.  I do hope so.

...but soon: 'The Yellow Man's dreams come to wreck against the sordid realities of life'.

Weird racist anti-bigotry aside (not that we should really ignore these things), this turned out to be a surprisingly well-made film.  As it transpires, D.W. Griffith is extremely good at telling a story with pictures - something not immediately apparent from the hugely long 'Birth of a Nation'.  He excels with this more intimate noir, this tale of crime and domestic abuse in foggy Limehouse.  The characters are few, and (aside from 'the yellow man') interesting and well-drawn, the shots and staging are far above anything else I've found in this difficult decade, mixing the usual long-shots with convincing two-shots and some of the closest and most aggressive close-ups I've seen from the silent era, or any era.

The story itself is simple and horrible, with Battling Burrows the boxer beating the child Lucy with a belt whenever his temper's up, and her brief escape under the care of the sensitive young Huan Chang only acting to enrage Battling past breaking-point.  When Battling Burrows orders the waif-like child to smile, she doesn't know how to; she has to push the sides of her mouth up with her fingers, and in this way smiles for him with eyes full of terror.  I realise this is a highly sentimental melodrama, but an astounding performance from Lilian Gish propels this from didactic slush to something truly horrific and frightening.

Lilian Gish as the terrified Lucy

I say again, Lilian Gish gives a great performance, which renders the film more upsetting than it ought to be.  There's plenty to remember about the film, and it's the clearest, and most agreeable in duration, that I've yet seen from the 1910s.  It also treats us to two rather extraordinary death scenes.  We see them both coming, of course, but the performances are certainly remarkable, and I shall endeavour to attempt one or both of them on the day I die.

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The film's so old you could doubtless find it on Youtube (the best quality copy seemingly being the one with its title in Russian), but here's a disc anyway:

Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917)

Magee (George M. Cohan) ponders his endeavour with a cigarette

'Seven Keys to Baldpate' was my choice of film for 1917 because I liked the title.  Nothing else really leapt out about the year, perhaps because the major film-making nations were busy warring at the time, and I stumbled on this enjoyable little thriller.  It stars George M. Cohan, an actor famed for his penning of morale-boosting songs including 'You're a Grand Old Flag' and the tune from the Go Compare adverts.  His legacy is with us yet!

The film has a rather wonderful premise.  Cohan's character is a novelist famed for his schlocky melodramas, and a newspaper derides him for writing such popular tosh.  He claims he could write a high-brow novel in under 24 hours, and is held to his claim in the form of a $5000 dollar bet, which in those days was lots of money.  He has until the following midnight to come up with an idea for a novel and write it in its entirety.  Needing seclusion for this task, he hurries to the Baldpate Inn for some utter peace and quiet, believing he holds the only key.  As the title may suggest, the film then heads in a direction utterly different to that of 'The Shining' (1980)

Naturally complications ensue, and a disappointingly small amount of the film is given over to Magee actually trying to write a book.  The duplication of keys means he finds himself repeatedly interrupted, both by people who know he's there and wish to see him, and by a gang of crooks who mean to use the generally empty inn as a stash in a plot to bribe the mayor.   After the first few intrusions Magee is prompted to exclaim that 'there are more keys to this blooming flat than in a Steinway piano'.  It's a line that would play just as well today, were the quaint 'blooming' replaced with something earthier.  It's a witty script, with much of the dialogue left to the imagination, but with the most important and most quotable bits presented as italic intertitles.  A favourite was a warning to Magee as he approached the inn: 'The hermit's hut!  His wife ran away with a travelling man and it made him a woman hater.  He often plays GHOST to frighten us natives hereabouts.'  Have you ever read such a promise of later-in-the-film antics?

The rude review that prompts the film's action

Except for all the white makeup and the lack of sound, the film looks a lot like the low-budget, studio-bound TV shows of the forties and fifties.  The film-grammar is all there at last, and the establishing shots and close-ups come where and when you might expect and want them.  It's far more intimate than last week's 1910s movie 'Cabiria' (1914) - indeed I think 'Seven Keys to Baldpate' is much helped by the fact it isn't an epic, if that isn't an absurd thing to say.  Grand films on great scales may sell more tickets, but this tiny tale lets us see faces, not crowds, so it's far easier to care about the central character.  We can see him think, and his dialogue can reveal quirky character, rather than relentlessly driving plot and history.  Cohan has an excellent way of looking simultaneously aghast at some new development, and slightly miffed to be interrupted from his work.

I love the concept of the film, and I'm not at all surprised to read that it was also made into a film in 1916, 1925, 1929, 1935, 1947 and 1983.  There's always a pleasure to watching a characterful fellow throw himself into a near-impossible task for a bet, especially when the unexpected and unlikely promise to loom against him.  The film is a celebration of the bizarre melodrama Magee is supposed to be avoiding, and it soon becomes apparent that if he can survive the night he won't care whether the bet is won or lost, since his adventures make such a good story.


P.S. The 1983 version was filmed as 'House of Long Shadows', and starred Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and John Carradine, which is such a ridiculously fine cast of horror actors that I may need to give the film my attention.

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The whole film is on Youtube here, but it's utterly silent, so you might want to decide on something to hum over it, ideally something lasting an hour and five minutes.

Cabiria (1914)

The giant statue of Moloch consumes another victim!

'Cabiria' was the first truly epic film - and I do like an epic.  It's a story of melodrama, adventure and rescue set during the second Punic War - which is to say Phoenicans, Carthaginians and Romans in the minus-second Century, with Hannibal and his elephants.  The film plays out on huge sets with a real sense of depth, and tells a story tremendous scope, with crowds engulfed in convincingly hot smoke as they flee the flaming mount Etna.   For the 1910s, it's quite a thing.  It's strange to think that people almost a hundred years ago were making movies at all, let alone movies as grand and impressive as this.

To begin with, the pictures, sets and framing reminded me of the yet earlier 'La Vie et La Passion de Jesus Christ' (1903), but this is an even more ambitious picture, less reliant on an audience's knowledge of the story being told.  Unfortunately it gets around this unfamiliarity by asking the audience to read what's happening rather than watching it, with paragraph-long intertitles of an occasionally poetic character.  Still, in terms of telling its tale clearly and presenting attractive pictures, this eclipses the other 1910s films I've seen and wouldn't seem too shabby in the mid-'20s.  It leaves 1915's 'Birth of a Nation' looking crude and ugly, a reminder that America was still a decade or two away from being coolest country.

Thanks intertitles.  Thintertitles.

Being a decade ahead of your time is quite impressive in early cinema. The only things I'd really complain about are the length (though it is an epic), the amount of off-screen politics we're expected to follow, and the dearth of mid-shots and close-ups, though of course those hadn't really been invented yet.  Watching this left me appreciating the facial closeup far more than I have before.  Without it, the main characters all seem a little too distant, like members of the crowd. Without an audible voice an actor really needs their facial expressions visible if they're to present any emotion beyond flailing-armed distress.  Still, considering how much I found to bemoan and condemn in 'Birth of a Nation' or the 1917 '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', this really is the great triumph of the decade.

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You can see the whole thing on Youtube if you fancy.  It's like looking back in time: everyone involved is surely dead.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)

Captain Nemo, telescoping

I recently read Jules Verne's '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', and enjoyed it very much.  Now, I'd probably recommend you read 'Around the World in 80 Days' instead, as its educational content is more colourful and readable, less scientific and statistical.  Nonetheless, Verne's submarinal thriller is a fine tale of high adventure, and well-written, to boot.  As I did with Dickens, I assumed I knew Verne without reading him, and was surprised to learn that his prose style is very entertaining, and his characters well-drawn and very human.

Perhaps it was a mistake, then, to go straight from the book to the film, especially to this very early adaptation, made shortly after Verne's death.  After all, films are often (though not always) less satisfying than the original books.  And, indeed, the best films tend not to have been books at all.  This 1916 work is a technical marvel.  Proudly it proclaims itself 'the first submarine teleplay ever filmed', as it has the first ever underwater shots.  These were achieved, not through invention and use of an underwater camera, but by filming through a periscope of sorts, meaning that any shot with a fish in it is rather blearier and somehow less deliberate-looking than the above-water shots.

I could have shown you a shot of sharks, but they were blurry and awful,
and reading this caption is more likely to thrill you to terror.

This movie was less a story told in pictures and supported by words (which, to my mind, is the aim of film storytelling), more an illustrated synopsis.  The whole plot can be found in the intertitles, and almost nothing is revealed visually.  This is a relief in some ways, as the shots and editing are relatively crude.  Partly, this is down to the age of the film, but partly, too, a lack of flair and innovation.

I can't condemn the film for lack of ambition, as it not only adapts that great submarine work '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', but throws in its sequel 'The Mysterious Island', which, somebody has clearly decided, happened exactly simultaneously.  One affect of this is that the real story of the original book, and its emotional core - Ned Land and Monsieur Arronax trying to escape - is cut entirely.  Another unfortunate impact is that there are too many characters.  The lack of any close-ups at all, and the fact that everybody dresses the same (except Nemo, who dresses like Father Christmas) means the myriad characters are indistinguishable.

All in all, it's a bit of a mess.  In its time, a fabulously expensive mess, and one which did at least give audiences their first view of real live fish under the sea, a spectacle entirely lost on more fish-savvy modern viewers.

Seriously?  He probably left it out on purpose.

P.S. In about fifty films, I've somehow managed to watch three set in submarines.  The others, if you're curious, were 'Das Boot' (1981) and 'Yellow Submarine' (1968), and they're about as diverse a trio as you could find in the blog, or in the century.

P.P.S. The next update is from eleven years later, and will put this film to shame.  Since I've got a '20s film following a '10s one, I might see if I can post one from the 30s after that, and give you ten consecutive posts from consecutive decades, if that makes any sense.

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I bet, after my descriptions, you don't want to watch the film.  But in case you do, here it is.

Dr Nicholson and the Blue Diamond (1913)

I've found the silent films I've been watching for this project wonderfully diverse and refreshing, but it's quite pleasing to find one that matches the silent movie pastiches and parodies I've either seen or have been involved with.  In short, 'Dr. Nicholson og den blaa Diamant' is a melodrama, though it may not entirely realise it, and has a slimy and obviously evil villain facing off against handsome wealthy people, and somebody wears a top hat.

The premise is something along these lines.  Through one of those quirks of law that I hope only occur in fiction, Alice Kensington, an heiress, is obliged to marry before she can claim her inheritance, which is to be substantial.  She's an intelligent and independent sort, and decides to enter into a mock marriage (which is presumably a real marriage sans consummation) for one month, so as to gain her inheritance without being lumbered with a husband she doesn't want or love.  She places an advert in the paper requesting a temporary husband, as you do.

People still dressed so in 1913

Dr. Nicholson, an unashamedly villainous cad who dwells in a den, spending all day smoking a hookah and operating his electronic door (pretty swish in 1913) has a cunning plan.  He hires a down-on-his-luck duke to be the faux-husband, and intends to use him to steal the priceless Blue Diamond which I like to think might be the Blue Water Diamond from 'The Last Remake of Beau Geste' (1977), or perhaps blue is just the most exciting colour for these things, even in monochrome.

Toward the climax, Dr Nicholson climbs on top of a fast-moving train, and for an exciting moment I believed I was about to see my favourite cliche, the train-top fist-fight, born.  Alas, having gotten on top of the carriage, he postures for a while, then jumps off into a river when the train goes over a bridge.  Wonderfully, this was filmed with no more trickery than telling the lead actor to actually get on the train and then jump off.  They did these things properly back then.

Dr. Nicholson in his evil lair.  He's the one with the gun.

This being 1913 - which when you think about it is a long time ago - the plot comes to us fairly slowly, taking an hour to tell a story that might have been told in half the time had the film been made a decade later.  Nonetheless, it's fairly sensational, full of incident and high drama, though I couldn't quite call it unpredictable.

The biggest surprise, watching this film, is the absence of dialogue intertitles.  I'd always assumed that these were invented about the same time as the silent film, and that the absence of recorded sound made slides of who-said-what, the movie equivalent of speech-bubbles, inevitable.  They're wholly absent here, and the only real intertitles are used to introduce new scenes, as they were in 1903's 'Le Vie et La Passion de Jesus Christ'.  This film uses a rather ingenious replacement for dialogue: every time a character needs to say something to another character, they write to them and we see the letter.  So, rather than talk one to another, characters make a point of leaving, and then a letter arrives from them once they're no longer in the location of their recipient, and the audience gets to read long paragraphs of cursive handwriting about who's doing what, and why.  At least in the English-language print that I watched, all the characters seem to write with identical handwriting.  Handwriting so classy as to be a bit too fancy to read with any comfort.

Thankfully the letters are on screen for ages.

After all this, I'm inclined to venture the dialogue intertitle as my favourite innovation in the development of cinema.  More useful to the telling of the story than audio or colour, and more charming too.  The typefaces have been a delight, wherever I've seen them: a typically soviet-looking font for 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925), tidy serifs for Swedish films, and gothic script for the dark German folk-tales.  I wonder how much of the association of certain typefaces with different nations and their cultures hails from the silent film era.  Until I see more early Danish films with proper intertitles, I shall assume that Dansk is properly spoken in elegant and highly italicised penmanship, and carries over long distances.

Anyway, you can quite lawfully watch the film here, and it's quite interesting to do so to get an idea what people were capable of filming a complete century ago.  It seems bizarre, somehow, that the movies can have been going on for as long as that, but, as I've learnt, cinema was already very advanced by this point, and was already pretty complex and ambitious a full decade earlier.  If I ever get to the end of my hundred years project I'm sure I'll go mining into the 1900s and 1890s to try to grasp how films really got started - but I'm keen not to make an unwieldy project any bigger than it is at present.

P.S. My thanks to JillBob for poining me towards this film, and also for recommending 'Brick' (2005), and 'Goodbye Lenin!' (2003), all of which I've been glad to see.

P.P.S. Thursday will bring a post about 'Häxan' (1922), a rather exciting Swedish/Danish documentary about witchcraft through the ages.  I'll try not to spend too long examining its intertitles.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

This entry may sum up with the greatest purity one aspect of this project: I've watched this film so you don't have to.  I've dreaded 'The Birth of a Nation' fro some while, having tried it in 2004 and given up bored after half an hour.  Here's a film that's way racist, way long at 190 minutes, and not especially engaging or rewarding to a modern eye.  I considered other options for this year, 'Der Golem', for instance, but 1915 simply is 'The Birth of a Nation' and to skip it out would be simply absurd.

The first half of this sentimental and differently-exciting melodrama shows two American families, one Northern, one Southern, divided by the Civil War.  We see the war, in all its glory and tragedy (the South were the heroes, by the way), and the ensuing reconstruction under the Neanderthal-faced Abe Lincoln, whose assassination is lavishly reconstructed at the film's mid-point.

John Wilkes Booth, after assassinating the president

The more notorious second half tells the tale of the liberated 'negroes' (as the film insists on calling them) and ruthless carpetbaggers (who are a cross between carpet slippers and teabaggers) oppressing the 'helpless White minority'.  The Ku Klux Klan is formed, apparently to seek something like good and equality through 'fair trials' and diabolical fancy-dress, and to quash these (obviously blacked-up) rascals who are, we are told, degrading America.

'The organization that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule'.  It's a very ugly piece of propaganda, but it seems to have worked.  The release and popularity of this film was almost wholly responsible for the re-emergence of the KKK in 20th Century America, a vigilante mob still exercising its brute force well into the 1950s.  The heroic young colonel of the film's first half is the instigator of this gang of terrorists, and the film would very much like us to admire him for it.  At the end, the spectral form of Jesus Christ puts in a cameo to lend it a little credibility.

The household servants are presented as benign (in short, they're submissive),

presumably as the one example with which to say 'this film can't be racist'.

All this is set to a rich orchestral score, which may be a more modern addition.  It's rather odd to see such American scenes of alarm overplayed with Grieg's characteristically Norwegian Peer Gynt music, or 'O Christmas Tree' (though it may have been the equally irrelevant 'The Red Flag').  Colonel Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant was apparently made to the strains of the British national anthem, a tune which may have a different meaning in the U.S., but I felt compelled to stand up in salute to her majesty in any case.

One of the most striking discoveries in the 100 films experiment is how competent, stylish, ambitious and advanced films were a century ago, a time we think of as their infancy - and how the advances from then until now have been slow, gradual and constant.  The adventure from 1913 cinema until 2013 isn't marked by milestones and watersheds (except perhaps the arrival of talkies, which so far seem to have emerged over-night fully formed), but by seemingly seamless development.  The more films I view, the more I can see how cinema got from the 1910s to the 1920s, from there to the 1930s, and so on.  Technically there's little between this and 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) bar a honing of special effects.  Decades famed for their distinct flavours - the 60s and 70s, for instance, flow smoothly from one to the other.

The North marvel at the South's bravery in war

To bring this back to 'The Birth of a Nation', here are superimposed images placing models ablaze in the same short as fleeing crowds; a camera clearly fixed to a moving vehicle to keep pace with actors on horseback; shots are juxtaposed with the understanding that viewers will know how to read the links between images; intertitles introduce scenes (as they did a decade earlier) but also provide excerpts of dialogue or context within the scenes.  In 1915, the movie and the movie audience are both highly advanced.  This is a flm wholly confident of its ability to use all cinema's techniques to tell any scale or complexity of story.  Of course, it looks crude and ancient now, but who was to know back then how far cinema might develop.  If director D.W. Griffith didn't anticipate the coming of sound and colour, then the epic scale of this achievement, with its cast of hundreds, its historical re-enactments and battlefields filled with smoke, horses and explosions, must have looked like the greatest film it was possible for humanity to produce, the eventual pinacle of the medium.  I wonder what film holds that title now.