Newsletter Winter 1984-85

TFS SEMINAR 1984

As each of my previous Seminar reports has included gloomy ruminations on the possibility that steadily rising costs might force the Society to end its twenty-year long association with the Briars Inn, it is a relief to be able to announce that, despite a sharp price increase on the previous year, a record number of participants attended this year’s session.  (For the record, I should not that TFS provided a generous $11 subsidy per participant to keep the costs to manageable levels, and that a Bill Everson seminar involves transportation and customs charges that have to be included in the overall budget.)  This would seem to indicate that members are willing to continue paying up as long as they feel that they are getting their money’s worth, and there seemed little doubt, from the overall response this year, that there was general satisfaction with the quality and variety of films shown.

This year was the return of Bill Everson on his regular two-yearly schedule, with, as usual, a selection of rarely seen films from the silent era and the 1930s.  Though a few of the titles at least (such as Stella Maris, Song of Songs, and Show People) were probably familiar to most participants, it was often the lesser known films which proved to be both the most interesting and the most entertaining–reinforcing the impression made time and again by means of these seminars that, in the heyday of the studio system, the overall quality of film production was remarkably high, and that it is perhaps accident and chance that have preserved the critical reputation of certain films at the expense of others. Let Us Live, for example, a film directed by John Brahm of which I had never even heard, may not be as stylishly directed as Fritz Lang’s exactly contemporary and thematically very similar Fury and You Only Live Once; but it could be argued that it is a more honest and outspoken film and does not let the judicial system which it is condemning off the hook in its closing moments as both of Lang’s films do.  And unpretentious programmers like Stolen Heaven, It Pays to Advertise and Pick Up at least have the merit of keeping one awake, unlike Rouben Mamoulian’s dreary Song of Songs, which induced such an intensely soporific effect that I entirely missed “those scenes in gay Berlin cafes and that naughty ‘Johnny’ number” which, according to Variety, proved the highpoint of the whole endeavour.  Admittedly the film began at around one o’clock in the morning, but I doubt if it could have kept me alert at any time of day or night.

Almost all the films screened fell into the two overall categories of melodramas dealing with crime and police work, and comedies centred round sexual relationships, sometimes including a touch of social comment.  The crime films ranged in quality from the thematically incoherent We’re Only Human, directed (if that is the right word) by one James Flood, to the already mentioned Let Us Live.  We’re Only Human has its hero a policeman who is constantly being criticised by his superiors and his girlfriend for his “shoot first, think later” policy in moments of crisis; yet he paradoxically re-establishes his reputation at the end of the f ilm by taking on a gang of criminals singlehanded, without observing even the elementary precaution of informing his colleagues as to what he is doing!  William K. Howard’s Scotland Yard, dealing with a criminal who impersonates an English aristocrat killed during the First World War and then attempts to take on the dead man’s identity to carry out his unlawful schemes, is at least directed with some pictorial flairs; but it suffers from the laboured dialogue and uncertain delivery of so many early sound films.  Pick Up, made a couple of years later in 1933, is rather more lively and has Sylvia Sidney as a gangster’s wife who has been imprisoned for her complicity in his crimes and who, on her release as the film opens, vows never to see him again.  Penniless and homelss, she drifts into a relationship with a friendly taxi driver (played, against type, by George Raft) and finally confesses her past to him.  They set up house together (in a manner that preserves enough ambiguity about their sexual status to satisfy the merging Production Code) until her husband escapes from jail and tries to frame her as an accomplice in his breakout.  Everything is sorted out satisfactorily for her in the end, however.

Four Hours to Kill (1935), directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Richard Barthelmess, was another title previously unknown to me that provided a welcome surprise.  Barthelmess plays a murderer who is being returned to his home state for execution, but who (for reasons which escape me at the time of writing) has to spend some hours in the foyer of a New York theatre with his police escort.  While there he recognises the man who had informed on him and caused his arrest and he manages to escape from custody in order to kill him.  The whole action is confined to the precincts of the theatre (whose stage performance is heard off-screen but never shown) and the main story is interwoven with a series of vignettes of members of the audience and theatre employees, revealing some of their personal problems and crises.  (This Grand Hotel format, as reviewers acknowledged, was very popular at the time and can be seen also in the British Friday the 13th, which will be discussed shortly.)  Barthelmess, who I have always found an awkward and uneasy actor in sound films, puts in a surprisingly effective performance and the film at its best creates a powerful and gripping atmosphere.  Let Us Live (1939) takes up a familiar miscarriage of justice theme of the period, and is actually based on a contemporary court case. Like Fury, it begins with a young couple planning their marriage when the man is wrongly identified as a participant in a robbery and, as in You Only Live Once, the bemused and victimised innocent is played by Henry Fonda.  A web of purely circumstantial and hearsay evidence is woven around the young man, driving him inexorably towards the death chamber; his fiancée (played by Maureen O’Sullivan) tries desperately to secure the evidence that will prove his innocence and gradually convinces a police lieutenant (Ralph Bellamy) that she is telling the truth.  At almost literally the last moment, with Fonda in the death cell and his execution only a few hours away, they track down the real criminals and force a confession from them.  All this is tautly and vividly presented, but what makes the film exceptional is its ending, when a representative of the judicial system, on hearing that Fonda has been reprieved, tells his fiancée blandly: “Well, there’s been no real harm done!”  Lang originally intended to end Fury with a very similar statement by Spencer Tracy once his own innocence had been proved, rather than with the saccharine embrace that signals–against all the evidence of the film itself–that, really, “no harm has been don,” but the studio overruled him; Brahm’s film thus stands with Mervyn Leroy’s They Won’t Forget as one of the few films of the period that refuses to dilute the force of its social criticism with a spuriously “happy” ending.

The much more light-weight Stolen Heaven (1931) provides a link between the theme of crime and the theme of romance that dominated most of the weekend’s films.  A young man steals $20,000 from his employer and convinces a young woman who he barely knows (and whose profession, it is clearly implied, is that of a streetwalker) to go off with him to Florida on a gigantic pleasure spree; once the money is spent, they will both commit suicide, for only money can make life worth living.  The first part of the arrangement goes off as planned, but, as their cash dwindles, the girl (who is played by the talented Nancy Carroll on a constant knife-edge of near hysteria that recalls her performance in Laughter, shown in last year’s seminar) begins to have second thoughts about the suicide pact.  She tries to find means of secretly replenishing their funds by exploiting the generosity of a rich admirer; meanwhile the police are on their trail and are closing in.  A rather improbable series of events at the close of the film not only enables them both to stay alive but suggests that their offer to repay Joe’s employers with money obtained from Mary’s admirer will keep them both out of prison.

It Pays to Advertise, made in the same year as Stolen Heaven and starring Carole Lombard, has nothing of the seediness in character and moral tone that appear to have distressed some reviewers of the time in the latter film.  Best descried perhaps as a light-hearted romp, it has the magnificent Eugene Pallette as a tyrannical industrialist who insists that his shiftless sone make his own way in the world instead of relying on the family wealth.  Prompted by his energetic girlfriend, the young man sets up in business as a rival to his father and starts a huge advertising campaign for a “new” type of soap for which they devise a catchy slogan.  Unfortunately, however, their limited resources have all been exhausted in paing for the publicity and they have no means of actually producing any of the soap for which the stores are now clamouring.  Undaunted, they appropriate a consignment of the father’s product, change the labels, and find they have a roaring success on their hands.  In alarm, the father offers to buy his son out (which was the girl’s plan all along), but, at the last moment, he discovers the deception that has been played on him.  Reconciliation is achieved nonetheless, and all ends happily.

Palm Springs (1936) strives, with rather less success, for a similar lightness of tone and remains an unmemorable, if innocuous, work.  Mamoulian’s Song of Songs, which takes itself a good deal more seriously, is certainly very striking visually and Marlene Dietrich (whose partnership with Josef von Sternberg was deliberately interrupted by paramount in order to make this film) is always ravishing to watch; the plodding pace and the ludicrous self-importance of the whole project, however, make it a very different experience from the same director’s still lively Applause, which was screened last year.  Another well-known title, Show People, directed by King Vidor, was one of the some half a dozen silent films on display.  It was the only film of the weekend that Ihad seen before and I found it disappointing on a second viewing.  First time round, however, it demonstrates that the much maligned Marion Davies possessed considerable skills as a comedienne, and the already well-worn “making-it-to-the-top-in-movies” theme is handled with a good deal of flair and offers several “behind-the-scene” glimpses that must have considerably intrigued audiences of the time.

Another silent, Dancing Mothers, directed by Herbert Brenon has an intriguingly “modern” theme in its story of a middle-aged woman who, having spent her married life in dutiful subservience to her selfish husband and daughter, decides to make a bid for independence.  She claims for herself the rights to go on her own to nightclubs in the evening, and even to deliberately attract the attentions of members of the opposite sex, that the husband and daughter take for granted for themselves but find “shocking” in her.  An element of protectiveness remains, however, and she finds herself trying to shield her daughter from the attentions of an older man by flirting with him herself; in a rather surprising twist, she appears at the end to have abandoned her ungrateful family audiences, the best-known name in the cast is that of Clara Bow, who plays the daughter, but it is in fact Alice Joyce’s performance as the mother that provides the highlight of the film.

A final entry in the category of comedies based on sexual problems and relationships was the obligatory (in a Bill Everson seminar) British comedy of the 1930s.  Lancashire Luck (1937) is in fact quite a jovial piece of work and deals with the fortunes of a solid northern working class family who win some money on the football pools and decide to leave the town and set up a tea-room in the countryside.  There they come into conflict with the haughty upper-class lady who owns a neighbouring estate, while the daughter of the family (Wendy Hiller in her first screen role) falls in love with the lady’s son, not knowing his true identity.  In the typical wish fulfilment manner of almost all British films dealing with class conflict until the late 1950s, true love conquers all and social barriers crumble in an orgy of goodwill and fellow feeling.

Two Westerns were scheduled for the weekend, The Stampede, directed by John Ford’s brother Francis, and W.S. Hart’s The Toll Gate.  Song of Songs left me in no fit state for The Stampede, which was shown afterwards, and pressure of time squeezed out The Toll Gate, which Silent Series members should be able to see instead this winter.  Two other silent offered a chance to see the two best-known female stars of the era at work.  Mary Pickford’s Stella Maris, directed by Marshall Neilan, is generally considered one of her best films, and it offers her in t wo different roles (with the help of sophisticated trick photography): as an orphan waif from the slums who sees only the harsh side of life, and as a “poor little rich girl”, a cripple who is carefully shielded by her family from any contact with sadness and cruelty.  Inevitably the two come into contact and finaly the waif’s self-sacrifice allows Unity (who has meanwhile been cured of her illness) to achieve happiness with the man she loves.  If British films like Lancashire Luck suggest that, given the chance, ich and por will find a common meeting-ground purely as human beings, Stella Maris is more typical of Hollywood’s treatment of the topic: the rich are conventionally unhappy until the end of the film, when they manage to combine wealth with love; the poor have the options of a) getting a lot of money and becoming rich, b) remaining in robust, sturdy and contented poverty, or c) dying (where they will probably be better off anyway).

Lillian Gish’s Sold For Marriage (one of the few films that she did not make with D.W. Griffith before the mid-1920s) has another very “American” theme: the assimilation of immigrants, and their customs and way of life, into American society.  Gish is first shown as a Russian peasant girl whose family try to make her marry a rich older man instead of her sweetheart; she resists them but, when Jan leaves for America, she is lusted after by a local dignitary.  As her refuses to desist until she hits him over the head with a log, she and her family are forced to flee the country and end up in Los Angeles (conveniently meeting up with Jan along the way).  Even in America, however, her relatives intend to impose their will on her and try literally to sell her into marriage against her wishes.  Jan appeals to the American authorities, who intervene and establish that all immigrants must conform to American standards of freedom and equality and abandon their own obsolete and benighted customs.  Gish gives her usual spirited and yet beguiling performance, and the film has some interest today now that the pendulum is swinging the other way and ethnic communities in both Canada and the United States are insisting on maintaining their own customs and, in some cases, their own ethical and judicial standards, even if these conflict with the established consensus.

As usual, Bill offered two “discoveries” of his own, neglected and forgotten films that he felt deserved to be far better known than they are.  One of these, the British Friday the 13th, directed by Victor Saville and with a cast tht is virtually a “Who’s Who” of the acting talent of the period, certainly merits re-discovery.  It begins with an accident on a London bus in which several people are killed or injured, then flashes back twenty-four hours to show the chance sequence of events that brought these people together at that time.  The film has the characteristic virtues of “traditional” British cinema at its best: vividly realised and idiosyncratic characters, lively dialogue, a strong sense of place and local identity, humour, and credible relationships and conflicts between the personalities on screen.  If the ending is a little too pat, with the crash in a sense solving everyone’s problems and those who are killed either deserving to die or better off dead (like the man hurrying home with a present for his wife, who has just left him for another man), that is a minor fault in what is otherwise a consistently entertaining film.

The German-made The Lost Son (1934) directed by Luis Trenker, is another matter.  Bill made large claims both for this film and for the work of its director as a whole, before the screening, and, interesting as the film undoubtedly is, it did not seem to me always to have the particular virtues he indicated.  It falls rather uneasily into three distinct segments: in the first, the hero Tonio (played by Trenker himself) is seen in his native Bavaria, working as a mountaineer and tourist guide.  These scenes are spectacularly and effectively filmed and create a fine sense of physical effort and danger.  After an accident in which a friend is killed, Tonio decides to try his luck in America, hoping that the family of an American tourist with whom he had conducted a mild flirtation will help him find a job.  They are out of town, however, and the central segment of the film, shot in New York in almost documentary fashion, shows his downward progress at the height of the Depression as he moves from one temporary job to another and finally ends up sleeping in doss houses and eating in soup kitchens.  Fortuitously, however, he is recognised by Lilian on her return to town, in the somewhat improbable setting of a boxing match, where Tonio is working as a second, and, as her father is a millionaire, his fortunes change dramatically.  In the last section Tonio returns to Bavaria to marry his childhood sweetheart and the wedding takes place during a local festival whose elaborate ceremonies are a strange mixture of pagan and Christian customs.

The New York scenes are particularly impressive and create a genuine sense of hopelessness and despair that is not confined simply to the main character’s misfortunes.  I have difficulty, however, in seeing the film as the anti-Nazi statement that Bill claimed it to be, even if Goebbels is reported to have disliked it and ordered it to be banned.  Without impugning Trenker’s genuinely anti-Nazi credentials, there seems little in the film that could cause offence to any respectable member of the Party: America is presented in a totally negative light, the hero returns gratefully to his native country, and the ceremonies at the end (based apparently on an amalgamation of surviving regional customs) have a heady Wagnerian quality that is not at all inconsistent with Nazi philosophies.  The reasons for the ban on the film seem to have derived more from the political opportunism, with Germany trying at the time to avoid offending American susceptibilities unnecessarily, rather than with any objection  to its ideology.

However this may be, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to judge the film for myself, and I will have no objection if Bill carries through his suggestion of bringing more films by Trenker to future seminars.  All in all, he provided material for a stimulating, thought-provoking and enjoyable weekend–one of the most successful to date, if comments that I overheard are to be trusted.  As usual, the organisation of the seminar was impeccable and Doug Wilson, whose last year as Seminar Chairman this was, deserves thanks for his contribution to the success of this and previous meetings.

by Graham Petrie