May 20: Grand Budapest Hotel (2014 -- Wes Anderson)

★★★★★

Grand Budapest Hotel has the technique, wit and insight that Wes Anderson has brought to his last several films.  We see the stiff tracking shots, formal compositions, bright color palette, stylized dialog and sharp intelligence that have become signature elements of his style.  Grand Budapest snaps with these.  But what’s interesting here is the way Anderson continues to tell stories with these elements while breaking new ground in his cinema.

Of all Anderson’s films, Grand Budapest most successfully incorporates the director’s stylistic elements in a consistent way by highlighting storytelling as a theme of the movie.  We start with a woman reading a book at the grave of an author and soon see a recording of the deceased author talking about his creative process, an introduction that communicates storytelling as an important part of the movie; the kid who keeps interrupting with a toy pistol foreshadows what we’re to see later, too.  Anderson though, in typical fashion, complicates this frame when the elderly author talks about a story he heard when he was young and the film then takes us to that moment in storytelling, the moment that the younger author is hearing the story of Gustave H. as told by the elderly Zero.  But there’s more.  Zero himself is recounting his own early life as Gustave’s protégé.  So Grand Budapest is a story told by an older writer, heard as a youth, from an older man who was talking about part of his own youth.  Or it’s all in the head of the woman who is reading graveside.  The movie is a dizzying regression of frames of stories recalled years after the narrators’ experiences.  These frames not only help account for Anderson’s characteristic foregrounding of narrative devices, but they also explain some of the content of the images we see on screen.

Storytelling, we’re told by the old author, is artifice, and Grand Budapest highlights the elements of cinematic storytelling.  An overlong tracking shot like that of Gustave and Zero crossing the hotel lobby makes us wonder how hard it was to choreograph the presence of various staff at just the right time while Gustave corrects bad behavior and continues his discourse.  It’s such a tour-de-force moment that it calls attention to itself.  Likewise, the film often uses obviously color-coordinated, symmetrical shots like the one of the pink Mendl’s truck in front of the pink hotel with its balanced lines of dark on both sides.  Anderson also elicits an artificial, mannered delivery from his actors and makes abrupt cuts from one scene to another, even using an iris at times, to create a movie that consistently directs attention to its narrative devices.

Another element of storytelling, point of view, also accounts for a lot of what we see on screen.  Zero’s perspective and storytelling dominate the film, and there are many visual elements that clearly have their origin in him.  For example, after learning of Madam D’s death, Gustave sends Zero on an errand, telling him to give the change to the “crippled shoeshine boy.” Right after Gustave’s line, the onscreen image flits momentarily to the shoeshine boy.  As my cinema bud, Lou, pointed out, this is just the sort of image that would register on the mind of a young kid.  Other parts of the storytelling in Grand Budapest have a similar origin.  The stop-motion animation of the ski chase could have its roots in a boy’s memory of 30s motion picture storytelling techniques, and the elaborate model of the hotel with its stiff funicular could come from the same recollection.  It’s not hard to imagine the colors, décor and immaculate dress as being partly in the memory of the young Zero either.

Recollections of the past tend to be tinged with nostalgia and a sense of decline, and since Grand Budapest is contained within two narrative frames of memories of lost youth, it’s not surprising to find decline as a theme here.  The film shows us an elegant, civilized culture in transition to something more base.  The ever-immaculate Gustave knows his role in this cultured civilization and works to keep it in place.  The hotel rules are formal and must be obeyed; even his role as gigolo to the wealthy, elderly patrons of the hotel is part of this same set of values.  Kiss, but don’t tell.  Grand Budapest, however, doesn’t tell us the story of an aristocratic society but rather the story of an order being undermined by something darker and less.  Madame D is killed, the lawyer is hunted down in a museum and gruesomely murdered, and people are beaten and shot.  A ruthless, fascist political order replaces the courtly aristocracy, and the Grand Budapest itself becomes first a barracks and then a battlefield.  Even the lawyer’s cat meets an untimely end.  And the décor of the hotel tells this same story of decline as the earlier scenes teem with art and color while the later ones take place in a Soviet-style establishment of indifferent service and cheap, dull, functional furnishings.  Grand Budapest is a tale of decline and loss.

In many ways, this film is the most pessimistic and violent in Anderson’s canon to date, but at the same time, the movie is making a statement about the value of art.  And storytelling is an art.  Art, in one point of view, gives us order from the disorder we actually live in; it gives us a way of seeing and understanding the world as having form and direction instead of being without.  The stories of Grand Budapest participate in that ordering, explaining to us how we got to the point we are at the film’s opening.  And the film even offers Gustave as an artist who uses form to combat chaos.  Gustave’s insistence on rules and formality are his effort make sense out of the world, but in a universe without real order, art ultimately fails.  As the older Zero says of Gustave, “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he even entered it. But I must say, he maintained the illusion with grace.”  Grand Budapest gives us an artist who maintains form to counter chaos, and though the artist loses this fight, like all art does, he “maintains the illusion with grace” as long as he’s there.

Many people, including Anderson himself, have talked about the influences behind Grand Budapest, but Ernst Lubitsch is the clearest to me.  Lubitsch’s films faced fascism directly, and even before that, they dealt with social class, hypocrisy and oppression.  Lubitsch addressed these ills by using a uniquely light satire that skewered the darkness without being heavy handed or direct.  A similar satire underlies Grand Budapest, a satire that remains as light as a Mendl’s cake with some steel in middle to aid our escape.

May 19: Captain American: The Winter Soldier (2014 -- Anthony Russo & Joe Russo)

★★★

There's something I like about Captain America.  He doesn’t have Batman’s darkness, nor is there Spiderman’s angst. He's loyal to friends despite being surrounded by those that say not to trust others, and he tries to do the right thing.  He’s classically handsome and strong, but he isn't invulnerable.  He has a sense of humor.  And as his repartee with Black Widow shows, he's even emotionally vulnerable. Captain America is as close to a human being as a superhero can be today.

And Captain American: The Winter Soldier is a competent, enjoyable film.  Like Robocop, Winter Soldier is an action movie with a message.   In this day of drone spying and NSA eavesdropping, the film warns us not give up freedom for security.  “This isn't freedom,” says Captain America.  “This is fear.”  And he then sets off to fight the security apparatus that would pacify the world.  It’s an engaging fight, full of humanity and special effects.  More characters are multidimensional here than we typically see in Marvel universe films, and the special effects have a natural quality to them, like the way Falcon zips and the helicarriers lumber. 

And Winter Soldier moves at a steady pace, interweaving a political story line with an investigative while adding action to each.   The Russos’ approach to the fight scenes, too, keeps the film accessible.  Fights are short, choppy pieces of action of varying speeds which are knitted together to give a sense of the larger conflict.  They recall Paul Greengrass’ work in the last couple of Bourne trilogy films.

Captain American: The Winter Soldier is a fun debut to the summer’s popcorn movies.  The hero is refreshing; the action, compelling; and rather than the self-conscious, parodying tone that can inform other films of this genre, the feeling here is as sincere and committed as the hero.  It makes for a good, summer experience.

May 18: RoboCop (1987 -- Paul Verhoeven)

★★★

To have been the cultural event it was in 1984, RoboCop now plays like a sci-if action flic with some on-the-nose moralizing.  In today’s environment of wanting to privatize everything from infrastructure to the army, RoboCop’s caution on commercializing public services is of relevance.  It clearly goes overboard in making this point -- the flamboyant killing of board member is already excessive without the deliberately indifferent cold-heartedness of the chairman thrown in – but this is not a subtle message film.  On a TV news show in the film, we also learn the commercialized space program has had some unfortunate accidents, and the refrain on TV show after TV show is “I’d buy that for a dollar.”  The film hammers its point the way Robocop hammers bad guys.

There’s a similar lack of subtlety in the film’s director-acknowledged Christ symbolism.  As Alex is being gruesomely shot in the early part of the film, his body assumes an open, crucifixion posture, and the incredibly dead policeman is next resurrected as RoboCop to save Detroit.  There’s even a scene analogous to Jesus’ walking on water.  In a film that deliberately lacks subtlety, this symbolism is very obvious.

This same rule of excess applies to the infamous violence in the film.  But this excessive violence points to the aesthetic weakness of the film -- RoboCop can’t decide if it wants to be an action thriller drama or a self-conscious parody of sci-fi thrillers.  The film calls us to sympathize with Alex as he demonstrates his love for his family and tries to figure out who he is.  But the film just as quickly turns to heavy-handed parody and posture as it does in the boardroom scene or the dialog in the confrontation in the drug factory.  After Emil runs his car into a boldly labeled “TOXIC WASTE” tank, he staggers around until he suddenly bursts into a subsequent scene with his rubber makeup mask dripping.  It’s hard for a viewer to know whether to take this film as cop drama or a parody.  As both, it isn’t effective.

RoboCop has some fine visuals, and it’s been very important for its effect on future films.  While the movie isn’t totally successful for a contemporary viewer, it still has a few thrills and historical importance.  And its theme is worth thinking about.

May 17: Farewell to Arms (1932 -- Frank Borzage)

★★★★

Whatever philosophies or ideas may inform Frank Borzage’s oeuvre, Farewell to Arms has a problem: It’s hard to believe the love at the center of the film.  That problem starts at the very beginning of the romance.  For a director who can wrest engagement from his audience even for the most outrageous melodrama, Borzage misses the mark when the couple at the center of this film first kindle their love.  They are alone, desperate and in the bleakest moment of WW I, yet Borzage fails to evoke any chemistry between Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper.  They begin their love scene with both of them in a dark, existential funk, move on to somewhat cold intimate moment, and are in redeeming love at the end of the scene.  It’s very unclear how meeting each other has led Frederic and Catherine to rise above the desperate pessimism of the moment, but we have to accept their intense love in order to understand the rest of the film.  It’s a stretch.

This one (albeit crucial) flaw aside, the rest of Farewell to Arms is vintage Borzage.  Gestures between Frederic and Catherine have a familiar intimacy of love throughout, similar to the haircutting scene of 7th Heaven, and the wrenching finale here simultaneously reinforces the obvious antiwar message of the film while also recalling the end of 7th Heaven.  In this scene, Catherine dies just as the armistice is declared, leaving Frederic to hold her body in his arms facing a bright light saying “Peace.  Peace.”  It’s a florid, melodramatic end to the film….and absolutely effective.  I find this ending bitter and pessimistic, though Cooper’s delivery certainly allows for an interpretation that includes some sense of transcendence.

There is also a strong antiwar message in Farewell to Arms  that, to the film's credit, doesn’t rely on scenes of gratuitous mutilation and death.  The real casualty of this war is the human spirit.  There’s no hope for these characters; they exist, but they can’t think about the future or about loving another person because of the omnipotence of sphinxlike authority and death.   The film shows this empty pessimism in both Catherine and Frederic, but as their love inspires them to grow beyond the darkness of their world, Borzage keeps the film’s focus firmly on the spiritual malaise with secondary characters like Rinaldi, Frederic’s friend who wants him to live only for the day; the priest, who is briefly inspired to try to marry the couple despite what he sees as their bleak prospects; and Helen, whose affection for Catherine and pessimism about the future leads her to vehemently oppose Catherine’s relationship with Frederic.  So pervasive is the hopelessness in the film that Frederic’s and Catherine’s best friends become important parts of the problems that confront the couple rather than aids to help the couple rise above their circumstances.

The antiwar sentiment also inspires some of the best of Borzage’s cinematic work in the film.  The braura sequence is Frederic’s desertion, which is a montage of vignettes of grief and destruction intercut with Expressionist canted angle shots of graveyards and crosses.  It’s hard not to notice the contrast between the devastation outside the military and the comparative comfort inside, too.  As we might expect, Borzage brings to bear his characteristically painterly use of lighting in interiors, too.  One innovative cinematic flourish is the scene when the wounded Frederic is brought into the hospital, injecting a modicum of humor into the film as Borzage plays with the camera and POV.  In this extended segment, we see things from the tightly-controlled perspective of an immobile Frederic while elements of the set, nurses’ faces, parts of Frederic’s own body and, eventually, Catherine pop into and out of the frame as Frederic encounters them.  The immobility of this POV recalls the sequence in Dreyer’s Vampyre as the undead Allen Grey must peer from the window of his tight coffin.  Like Farewell, Vampyre is a 1932 film, suggesting that Dreyer and Borzage were at least watching some of the same things.  Or talking with each other.

With so much of Farewell to Arms so effective, it is unfortunate that the love at the center of the film gets started so unconvincingly.  But that flaw aside, this Borzage work offers us a lot of cinematic beauty to enjoy.

May 15: Lucky Star (1929 -- Frank Borzage)

★★★★★

Lucky Star is another Borzage film full of melodramatic clichés that should take us right out of the movie.  There’s a young girl who is abused by her mother.  There’s a bad guy who schemes to get the girl away from her family by appealing to the mother.  There’s a wheelchair-bound veteran who learns to walk in an afternoon so he can get through a snowstorm to rescue the girl.  In summary form, these elements wouldn’t seem to make for compelling cinema.

But when Borzage puts them into this film, they resonate.  Maybe one element in the success here is that Borzage and his actors seem so committed.  Lucky Star is devoid of any sense of irony or feeling that it’s just making requisite melodramatic gestures.  Charles Farrell, who has a larger role here than in his two previous Borzage outings, looks genuinely annoyed at Mary’s dishonesty, and his Tim is clearly conflicted when Mary heads off to a dance in town.  We can see this in Farrell’s face and body language.  Likewise, Janet Gaynor’s Mary often shows a guarded curiosity with Tim and an uneducated, childish openness in her face that isn’t exaggerated or affected.  She’s a person, not a shallow stereotype.  Borzage even directs the villain, Wrenn, as a man who is up to no good but not as a towering figure of evil.  Wrenn is an arrogant, selfish person, but he is a human-scale villain and not a caricature.  They are all understated and lacking in hyperbole, and that’s part of what makes them touching in Lucky Star.

Borzage’s tight plotting also builds action so plot events seem to make sense; at least the plot isn't as episodic as that of many melodramatic stories.  Later actions in the film are motivated by preceding ones or by what we’ve learned of a character.  The ending conflict between Tim and Wrenn is just a final development of the tense relationship between the men that we see in the opening.  Also, in the war, we learn Wrenn’s seduction technique is to promise to marry the girl, and we then see him use this technique later in film.  Even Joe’s turning on Wrenn has precedent as he states is disapproval of Wrenn’s conduct well before he acts on it.  Actions and characters in Lucky Star have plenty of precedent and motivation, which helps keep us from feeling overtly manipulated for melodramatic purposes.  The logical world of the script makes us willing to accept the actions in the story.

And the beauty in this Borzage film adds an element of pleasure.  As the film moves forward, we’re not only following plot development but moving from one great image to the next.  Lucky Star is a progression of interesting textures, whether snow, the lines on floors, or the objects on a wall or table.  The film's images are rich in things to look at.  Borzage also uses light to both focus our attention and comment on the action.  Lucky Star often gives us a plausible source for a light with either a window or an on-camera light source.  And this same lighting can also carry meaning.  For example, when Tim falls after trying to walk, he tumbles out of a patch of light and into backlit shadow reflecting his frustration.  Borzage’s images also use depth of field to such an extent that viewers have to be aware of what’s happening in all planes of the image to follow the action.  Objects, actions and attitudes in the background reflect or comment on the foreground action, as we see in Tim’s first conflict with Wrenn atop the telephone pole.  And another element of Borzage’s images is his clear preference for a classical composition using a strong diagonal and a triangular arrangement of the elements of his images.  All these characteristics give Borzage’s individual images a deeply pleasing beauty while we’re also moving along through the story.

But it’s still hard to explain why Borzage’s late 20s work like Lucky Star is so touching and gratifying.  There is a sincerity, honesty and beauty to these films that clearly endures today.

May 14: 7th Heaven (1927 -- Frank Borzage)

★★★★★

Frank Borzage’s  7th Heaven is proof once again that not all melodrama is the same.  I can’t explain why a movie like Ordinary People can seem hackneyed, manipulative and derivative, while  7th Heaven keeps us riveted and in tears of joy and sadness by the end.  I do know that Borzage held me rapt through every minute of this film.

The main characters and the way the actors play them is a big factor in this film’s success.  Chico is a chiseled, handsome young man who is overconfident, brash and a little prone to overpresent himself.  “I’m a very remarkable fellow” is his refrain, one reinforced by the upright posture, broad gestures and open, smiling face Charles Farrell gives Chico.  The boy is also shy, sincere and, it turns out, vulnerable.  He puts great effort into telling Diane that he doesn't care about her, but he shares his food with her, stops her attempted suicide (complaining that she’s using his knife), and prevents her from being arrested by lying to the police about them being married.  When they go back to his apartment, he prepares a bed for her, steals a nightgown from a nearby clothesline, walks seven flights of stairs to get her water, and then he sleeps on a blanket on the balcony.  It’s apparent that his bluster is a cover for his attraction to her, an attraction he fears to admit.  “You're not going to take advantage of me?” he asks as they plan for her to move in.  In this sweet moment of honesty, we recognize Chico's vulnerability and see his simplicity in Farrell’s open, honest face.  The actor then goes on to take Chico from distancing bluster to honest expression of feelings.  Farrell’s face is knitted in effort when Chico tries to say “I love you” but can only muster his sweet, indirect “Chico…Diane…Heaven;” however, when Chico finally declares his love, Farrell plays the moment as completely natural.  We also appreciate Farrell’s work at the end of the film.  As Chico returns from the war, the change in Farrell’s body language couldn’t be more eloquent as Chico, bent, tentative, but eager, rushes to Diane.   Throughout the film, Farrell’s facial expressions and body language keep us engaged with Chico and speak as loudly as the intertitles of the character's development.

Janet Gaynor's Diane runs through an even wider range of emotions in the film, and the actor’s face takes us along at every change.  Early, Gaynor is wide-eyed and fearful as Diane’s sister, Nana, bullies and beats the girl.  Soon afterwards, Diane registers a conflict between honesty and lying as and Gaynor's eyes dart and body tenses in communicating the conflict of the two.  Gaynor's body language is consistently as expressive as her face.  As Diane contemplates suicide in her deep despair, Gaynor’s movements are listless and her face is empty and unfocused.  Later in Chico’s apartment, Gaynor’s eyes are wide and inquisitive and her movements small and tentative as the unsure Diane reaches out to Chico to help him with clothes.  In repeated scenes, Gaynor takes us through Diane’s mental process and emotions, from the nuanced progression of Diane’s recognition of the meaning of the wedding dress to the emotional ending of the film when, in minutes, Diane veers from happiness to despair and back to a completely unexpected happiness.  Gaynor’s performance here is masterful and an important reason 7^th Heaven can convince us and take us with its melodrama.

And this is a highly charged and melodramatic film whose story pulls at our heartstrings throughout.  It opens with a Grimm fairy tale scene of Nana viciously beating her sister Diane with a whip, a beating which goes on and on.  Soon afterwards, the evil Nana chases Diane through the street, beating her as they go and then nearly strangling her to death, another graphic scene that pulls us in.  Diane is soon attempting suicide.  But in contrast to this extreme darkness, 7^th Heaven also engages us with a powerful romanticism.  When Chico leaves the apartment at one point, the abused Diane, finally feeling safe, sits in a chair with Chico’s jacket and is soon pulling the jacket’s arms around her, pretending Chico is holding her.  This scene is so touching that Michel Hazanavicius quoted it in The Artist, the Academy Award’s Best Film of 2011.  Minor characters participate in 7th Heaven's warm melodrama, too.  Gobin sweetly blows on his pregnant wife’s soup to cool it while he's feeding her, and tears run down the rough character’s face as he leaves his wife for the war.  The boisterous Boul kindly cranks up his old Eloise to take the “newlyweds” around Paris, and he later drives her in the taxi defense of Paris, hauling French troops to the outskirts to fight the Germans.  And 7^th Heaven also offers many melodramatic gestures of love between Diane and Chico.  Their decision to marry themselves by sharing the religious medals between them is one such action, as is their agreement to pause at 11 am every day.  Chico promises to come to her at that time, and both repeat their shared private expression of love: "Chico…Diane…Heaven."  Another of their melodramatic moments occurs when Chico, leaving for war, asks Diane to stand still; "- Let me fill my eyes with you!" says the intertitle.  With two actors of less skill, such melodrama would simply fall flat.  With their acting skill, Gaynor and Farrell sell the melodrama to us, and we accept it.

While the acting and melodrama engage us, the complex intensity of the ending takes the film to a peak of emotion, unexpectedly drawing on much of what we've heard and seen previously in the film and intensifying the film’s feelings to a wholly unforseen degree.  Diane’s transformations in this ending are quicksilver.  From her confident trust in her husband at the beginning of the scene, she learns of Chico's death and quickly returns to the despair she knew in the film’s opening scenes, losing her faith and everything she’d gained through loving him.  Her strength implicitly sapped, she’s soon resignedly in the arms her lascivious factory supervisor.  Meanwhile, Gobin arrives with his wife, handicapped at having lost an arm in the war.  Overall, it’s a sad scene.  Borzage then cuts to the blind Chico struggling to make it home through the armistice celebration, an ironic, bittersweet scene.  Farrell is bent, uncertain, awkward and even desperate and as Chico struggles up the seven flights of stairs to the apartment, our dread builds.  Not only are we unused to seeing Chico so vulnerable, but we fear how he will respond to finding the supervisor holding Diane there in the apartment.  The film stokes our apprehension as it crosscuts between Chico and the apartment, but when he bursts into the room, Chico can’t see the supervisor holding Diane, and we watch Gaynor go from despair to disbelief to comprehension to joy in mere seconds.  However, Borzage doesn’t stop the melodrama at this point.  Although he can no longer see, Chico refers to what he said as he departed for the war, and the intertitle says, "My eyes are still filled with you."  And as if this incredibly romantic line isn't touching enough, Borzage pushes the melodrama even further by referring to yet something else we've seen in the movie.  “But nothing can keep Chico blind for long!" says the intertitle, "I tell you, I'm a very remarkable fellow!"  This is a very powerful, bittersweet ending to the film, suggesting Chico has the same self-confidence we’ve seen though the movie, but that he may not understand his circumstances.  Gobin now has only one arm to manage and hold his fire hose, and Chico is blind.  Although love triumphs here, 7^th Heaven suggests more challenges may lie ahead.  It’s hard to resist complex, emotion-packed ending like this one, where script, performance and direction all combine to create an emotional blender.

In addition to the performances and script, Borzage’s cinematic flourishes also keep us involved in this film.  From the early part of the movie, shot composition is striking.  When we first meet Chico, he’s talking with Rat in the sewer in a balanced shot with a white arc of light on each side of him and light streaming down from an open manhole above.  It’s a beautiful shot.  Another beautiful, if slightly ironic, composition is when the taxis are streaming to the front lines, zigzagging across the landscape.  And as the blind Chico is struggling up the stairs to his home, the background is an dizzying Expressionist spiral created by the staircase that is as riveting as it is effective at describing the emotional content of the scene.  Borzage keeps the compostions of 7^th Heaven interesting to look at.

And since Borzage was sharing not only the Fox lot with Murnau but also his lead actress, it’s not surprising to find technical innovation in this film.  The attention to depth of field in 7^th Heaven reflects a Murnau interest.  For example, after Chico stops Diane’s attempted suicide, the camera rests on her while, in the background, we see Chico’s legs walk away, return and walk away several times before he comes back to her.  In this scene, we get not only the confused resignation on Gaynor’s foreground face but, in the background, we perceive Chico’s own uncertainty and confusion.  Because the information in the background is as important as that in the foreground, we have to read the screen attentively to follow all that’s happening in this film.  In another cinematic flourish, Borzage uses a tight tracking shot to follow Diane as Nana chases her with a whip.  The movement here recalls Murnau’s tracking work in Sunrise, though with Borzage, the shot has an interesting sense of both movement and inescapable claustrophobia.  In this section, too, the visuals keep us focused on the screen.  And given the cross-shaped window shadow over Diane’s bed that directly quotes a similar shot in Sunrise, it’s not a big stretch to suggest that Murnau may have influenced the bravura tilt/cut shot that Borzage uses to emphasize that Chico’s apartment is indeed on the titular seventh floor of his building.  Like all the visuals in 7^th Heaven, this vertical tracking shot keeps us focused on the screen and involved in the movie.

Borzage manages a significant feat in 7^th Heaven.  He has a tight, touching script that engages us with its melodramatic elements, and he directs outstanding actors who can sell this melodrama to the audience.  He then adds to this engagement cinematic elements that keep us paying attention to the screen.  All these combine to make this movie one of the most affective silent films.

May 13: The Jazz Singer (1927 -- Paul Crosland)

★★★★

The rap on The Jazz Singer is worse than it deserves.  It's hardly fair to complain about melodrama in a film that was released in 1927 for a mass audience.  Most if not all its contemporaries relied on melodrama to bring their audiences along, even in higher-brow work like Sunrise and Metropolis. 

But there is a fair objection to the way Crosland ambles with the melodrama.  Much of the film shows Jakie torn in two directions.  On one side are his Jewish race, music, traditions and family (visually represented by ethnic rituals, actors and décor) while on the other side is Caucasian show business (which we see as coat-and-tie producers, a platinum blonde love interest, sleek clothes, sequins,  and ragtime).  This conflict seems to come to a head and resolution with the melodramatic backstage visit of Yudelson, but right after a long, intense interchange between Yudelson and Jakie, Jazz Singer milks the same dramatic conflict a second time when Jakie’s mother comes to the theater.  This repetition works the same melodrama but doesn’t move the film forward at all as neither visit dissuades Jakie from his choice of a career.  Shortly afterwards, though, we see Jakie with his father, apparently having chosen the path of tradition. Crossland, however, decides to extract even more melodrama from the tradition/business conflict by having Mary and the show’s producer inexplicably show up in the apartment on the left side of the screen to pull the hapless Jakie towards Caucasian business and away from the Jewishness on the right side of the screen in the person of Jakie’s mother and Yudelson.  The melodrama in this conflict of values is effective the first time, but by this third trip to the bank, it’s just dead plotting.

Even worse, after all the buildup over Jakie’s choice, we eventually discover that the soul searching is unnecessary.  Jakie was either going to join his family and tradition and lose his future career, or he was going to have that career at the cost of his family and his very identity.  These are high stakes.  He chooses family, and we see him as the cantor of his synagogue with his deceased father, who fades in with his hand on his son’s shoulder.  A touching scene, but one that’s immediately followed by Jakie’s hit Broadway show.  As it turns out, Jakie didn't need to worry as he could have both his tradition and his show business career.  All the worry and conflict was completely unnecessary, a very unsatisfactory outcome.

Despite the terrible plotting, there are elements here that make The Jazz Singer worthwhile.  For one, it deals with the very American theme of assimilation at a point in time when it was a significant issue.  Watching Jakie torn between his Jewish identity and assimilation into the broader swath of America is an insight into a challenge immigrants to this country have always faced.  In fact, it’s a topic that's treated even today in cinema.  And the film gives additional insight into the role of religion in American pop culture.  It’s already well known that churches and gospel music were the foundation of R&B music and singing; in The Jazz Singer, we see the background role of the synagogue and its musical training to the many Jewish performers who were important in American popular culture.  The movie gives an insight into another aspect of the importance of religion in American culture.

The most fantastic moment of the film is also the most famous: the first moment of synchronized speech in a feature length movie.  And while I was prepared to see the moment, I wasn’t prepared for how seamlessly it fit into the Jazz Singer’s larger themes and into larger cinematic history.  The entire first section of the film is done using the traditional conventions of silent film: melodrama, intertitles, exaggerated acting, stiff editing.  With synchronized music already established by this point in 1927, we also see Al Jolson perform a few numbers as Jakie, the rebel who wants to jump into his new American identity and shake up his received culture.  The bit of dialog in The Jazz Singer that was to change how movies are made occurs when our anti-tradition hero sits down at a piano to do a song for his mother, who has always supported in progressive attitude.  In the middle of his song, he starts to tell her he’s going to get her a dress, we hear her wave it off with ‘Oh…..no……,” and the conversation continues for short time.  The moment, like the jazz Jakie loves, is clearly improvised, and it’s just as revolutionary as the hero breaking away from his traditions.  The film leading up to the exchange is all traditional silent movie language, but at this moment we can, even today, feel the seismic shift in Jolson’s improvisation, his discovery that silent film conventions aren’t necessary in cinema.  It’s only a small breach in film language at this point as Jakie’s father enters the room and, with him, silent film’s traditional conventions reassert themselves.  But the few minutes of synchronized conversation between Jakie and his mother not only reflect the conflicts in The Jazz Singer but also undermine the very language of contemporary cinema, making a improvised turn towards a different future for the art.  I know of no other moment in film so laden with portent.

This seminal American film also raises some of the same questions as another seminal American film, Birth of a Nation.  It’s clear in The Jazz Singer that Jakie’s putting on blackface is his way of breaking away and joining the world of performance and theater.  In fact, when his mother and Yudelson visit him backstage, they can’t even recognize him.  But it’s an unfortunate choice of symbol, rendolent of the condescending, racist portrayals of blacks in contemporary minstrel shows.  As painful as it is to watch Jolson’s concluding blackface performance here, we are fortunate that Alan Crosland didn’t choose to include a full Jolson minstrel performance.  Those shows are as abhorrent to today’s audience as watching the Ku Klux Klan ride to the rescue of maidens, and perhaps even more so.

There are many things in The Jazz Singer that could be better, but the film offers us a very rare opportunity to not only see but even participate in a historic moment.  It’s rare to find a scene in a film that can both sum up the issues in the movie and create a watershed change in the history of an art form at the same time.  The short dialog between Jakie and his mother in this film does all these, and it does so thanks to an important element of American art, improvisation.

May 12: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927 -- F.W. Murnau)

★★★★★

While the technical achievement of Sunrise is widely praised, it’s the acting that's at the heart of this film and that makes it so touching.  George O’Brien’s Man is a lumbering hulk in the early part of the film.  Handsome as any male ever was in a movie, Man’s big, working man’s frame is torn between passion for the City Girl and love for his Wife and child.  In character, O’Brien doesn’t show his inner conflict by beating on walls or throwing things, but he instead has a stoop in his back; walks with slow, heavy steps; covers his face with his big hands; or stares intently for long periods of time into the distance as we search his face for clues to what he’s thinking.  Actions like this, in the performance of another actor, could well seem artificial, but Murnau has O’Brien hold each motion and expression while the camera moves in for close-ups or pulls back to an angle that reinforces what O’Brien is creating in his character.  The Man in the first part of this film seems like one of the most miserable human beings to appear on film.

The Man’s transformation is equally convincing.  After nearly murdering his Wife, the Man becomes profoundly penitent and solicitous, and it’s again O’Brien’s body that carries us with him.  In trying to console the Wife on the streetcar, in the café and walking on the street, the Man continually reaches for her but stops himself, often holding his big, desperate hands mere inches from her.  He starts a movement toward her and then reverses it as he is pulled between his desire for consolation and forgiveness and his understanding of how the Wife feels at the moment.  O’Brien is so effective that we feel as relieved as he is when the Wife tentatively accepts a piece of cake, and we’re as disappointed as he when she changes her mind.  Murnau trusts his actors enough to let them carry out their slow emotional development in front of the camera.  When the couple eventually arrives at a reconciliation, we again see it in the Man’s body.  Forgiven by the Wife, O’Brien’s Man moves with faster gestures and his face takes on more light with wider eyes that engage what’s happening around him.  His posture becomes more erect, and he walks with a swagger, holding the little Janet Gaynor at his side.  He still has a temper and, in keeping with his character, strong violence lies not far below his surface, but we also see humor and love in the Man at this point.

The emotions of Gaynor’s Wife play in a smaller range, but like O’Brien, Gaynor holds a scene and elicits our empathy.  We can feel her thought process as we watch her.  In our introduction, we sense the tired disappointment in her shoulders and listless slouch as she realizes the Man has headed out for a moonlight rendezvous, but it’s in her scenes on the boat that Gaynor truly shows the depth of her talent.  After the man has taken the boat back to shore to return the dog, the camera rests on Gaynor waiting in the boat.  There, we watch as her willed optimism at the Man’s change of heart battles a prudent caution that she clearly feels.  During the tug between these two sides, we finally catch resolve in her eye, but the Man returns and she stays in the boat rather than flee.  Gaynor gives a master class in silent acting in this short scene, and Murnau trusts her talent enough to let the scene play out.  Shortly after, we see a similar play of emotion in Gaynor’s face when the Man makes eye contact with her in the boat, rises from his seat, and approaches her.  In her eyes and facial expression, we first see puzzlement, then disbelief at what she finally understands, and then terror.  And all these emotions flit over her face in an unaffected, unexaggerated way that elicits our sympathy and fear; here, too, Murnau leaves his camera on Gaynor to let her carry the scene.  The actor also does a tremendously convincing job portraying the Wife’s evolution from fear of and anger at the Man to the rekindling of their love, a huge leap for an actor to take in a few minutes of cinema.  Gaynor begins this segment emotionally fragile, withdrawn and unable to look at the Man, but her body languages changes little by little in the church as the Man evinces his profound penance.  By the end of the scene, the Wife is open, smiling and holding her husband again.  And Gaynor not only executes this change, but she takes us along with her.

These affective performances alone could have carried Sunrise, but Murnau brought his two decades of cinematic innovation to bear here, too, creating a film that both summed up the cinema technique of his time and pushed it forward.  Fourteen years before Citizen Kane, Murnau put important information in a clear foreground, mid-ground and background.  Early in Sunrise, we see a graphic lamp in the upper left of the frame with a farming couple in the midground and the City Girl in the back.  It’s a strong image, bringing as much beauty to the scene as narrative meaning.  A similar scene of the Man and Woman drinking at the amusement park brings a similar aesthetic pleasure with activity in all three grounds of the frame.  And Murnau uses lighting to bring beauty to the film as well as to engage.  In the marsh scene, for example, an overhead source brings out silhouettes of the two figures against the night sky backdrop.  Lighting figures heavily throughout Sunrise in defining forms, creating spaces, and underscoring emotion.

The effects in the film are justly praised both for inventiveness and for effectiveness in reinforcing the point of each scene.  The director creates moods with mattes several times, like when the City Girl is describing the city to the Man while the sky is full of jazz bands and traffic.  Later in the film, when the Man and his Wife are reconciled, they are framed in a matte of sunbeams.  And in-camera superimpositions play an important role in Sunrise, too.  The opening of the film is a tour-de-force series of partial dissolves talking about the banal topic of travel and vacation in dazzling cinema.  One of Murnau’s most effective in-camera superimpositions has the Man sitting on his bed deciding what to do about his wife while a superimposition of the City Girl sits behind him holding his chest.  She whispers in his ear while his head is turned away, an effective image of his internal process.

Murnau avails himself of other cinematic tools, too.  His editing, for example, moves the film along a good clip.  Editing builds the menace and then the confusion of the boat accident, and it emphasizes the fun at the amusement park when the couple dances and when the piglet scampers about.  Murnau also creates the excitement of the city with a montage, and he cuts to enactments that reflect dialog, like the happy scene of the farming couple in a field which is cross-cut with the dialog of a couple of village women.  There’s a similar moment when the fisherman tells the story of the Wife’s rescue.  Another very effective cinematic tool is Murnau’s relative freeing of the camera.  There are many tracking shots in Sunrise, among the most effective being the shot that follows the Man out to the marsh before it becomes a point of view moment as the camera brushes aside the reeds.   Murnau also puts the camera on the street car as the Man and Wife go into the city; the ongoing dislocation out the front window visually echoes the emotional stress between the characters.  There are also many pans and tilts in the film.  When the vacation boat arrives at the village, the camera angles up to see the town before turning back down to watch the docking, and when the couple exits the bar at the amusement park, a long pan follows them out until they pass behind a fountain and picks them up again as they pass it.  Sunrise has a very active, engaging camera.

Murnau had all the elements of a classic in Sunrise, and he put them together to create one.  Based on masterful acting, audacious direction and technical innovation, Sunrise still moves people today.  Although films like this one mark the end of silent cinema, they remain a testimony to the power of that art form and give an intimation of where it might've gone.

May 10: The Saphead (1925 -- Herbert Blaché)

★★★

The Saphead is Buster Keaton’s debut in feature length films, and though he didn't direct or write, there are already some familiar Keaton elements here.  Most strikingly, there’s the deadpan, impassive face that confronts situations with a blank gaze and, by a series of unlikely events, leads the character out of adversity.  He wins a fortune gambling in this film, yet he remains unmoved, in fact unaware.  His social disconnect is so great that he follows the rules in a book to woo Agnes, oblivious to the fact that she loves him for who he is rather than for the caddish behavior his book counsels; later, when he tries to engage the society of stock exchange traders, he completely misunderstand the rules.  This impassive, fumbling figure is the Keaton we’ll see lots more of in the coming decade.

Saphead also allows Keaton to display some of his physical comic chops.  There’s a pratfall down a stairwell early on that has its roots in vaudeville, but it’s when Blaché lets Keaton loose on the stock exchange floor that we see the acrobatics we now expect.  After a long roll off the floor, Keaton becomes a human tornado, jumping onto, sliding under, leaping on top of and running around the bidders in an uproarious short scene that reverses the financial downfall of his father and sets everything right in his family.  This moment is the most telling glimpse of what Keaton will be able to do when he has more artistic control.

Keaton becomes the emotional center of this movie even though Blaché doesn’t give him much latitude and doesn't support him adequately.  The director allows Keaton to perform, but Blaché's direction lets the air out of scene after scene.  For example, when Bertie is trying to get arrested, he’s continually repulsed by a cop he’s unwittingly bribed.  This is a flat scene that, if Blaché had put some energy into, has the potential to be as funny as the concluding one in the stock exchange. And while Saphead has plenty of melodramatic elements – the looming revelation of Mark’s infidelity, the sudden loss and recovery of a fortune –Blaché seems unable to crank the melodrama enough to engage the audience.  Instead, it’s the audience’s engagement with Bertie that keeps us involved in the film.  He’s a small, cute, agile and clueless character, all of which makes us root for him in every challenge he faces.

Nor does Blaché avail himself of the elements of cinematic storytelling that were already in use in 1920.  There is no camera movement in Saphead, and Blaché uses crosscutting sparingly, and then only in service to the story.  Griffith could build a sequence to powerful suspense by crosscutting, but Blaché, for example, inserts a scene of a dying Henrietta only to explain why her letters are appearing at Bertie’s wedding.  Likewise, Blaché crosscuts Agnes’ arrival at home with Bertie’s waiting for her at the station, but his purpose here is only storytelling rather than suspense or humor.  Blaché doesn’t inject energy into this film with his direction, so if Saphead seems overly even-keeled, the responsibility for this lies much more with Blaché rather than Keaton, who carries the film the distance it goes.

Slow or not, The Saphead rewards us with a hugely empathetic Buster Keaton whose impassivity, incomprehension, and misunderstanding of his environment make the audience want to take his side in every scene he’s in.  Here in 1920, we see the Keaton we’ll really love in the next few years.

May 9: The Phantom of the Opera (1925 -- Lon Chaney)

★★★★

It’s hard to argue with the reputation of this film.  In 1925, it was drawing on the conventions of the horror/thriller and codifying them to the point that we still recognize these same genre elements 90 years later.  Phantom is a bona fide touchstone American film. 

One of the strengths here is the movie’s extraordinary images.  We’re visually hooked starting at the opening scenes of streams of people flowing to the Paris Opera, up its stairs and into its lavish performance hall.  This is not a chamber movie but instead an epic which set in a single, grand building.  Whether the faux Egyptian statuary back stage or the chiaroscuro of the Phantom’s abode, the frame here is always filled with interesting things to look at, and most shots as much about the background and set as they are about the characters. 

The Phantom does his part, too, to keep the visuals interesting.  When the film shifts to a color sequence at the masked ball, the Phantom steals this bright scene with his glowing red costume, and when he spies on the couple from atop the statue they’re reclining under, his cape billows into the air like a wide streamer of blood.  Even his horrible face provokes interest with his lipless mouth showing his teeth, his patchy hair and his dark, sunken eyes that look like those of a skull.  Director Rupert Julian uses this face especially well when the Phantom is driving his team of horses to flee the angry crowd. 

There are also unmistakably Expressionist gestures with lighting in this film.  The claustrophobic opening is all vaulted arches slashed by single source lighting and a bent figure carrying another light.  Shadows leap on walls throughout the film, too.  In fact, the first time we see the Phantom, he’s nothing but a shadow on one of these walls, and we’re treated to other silhouettes throughout.  Soon after the vault scene, we see shadows of ballerinas prancing on a wall, and we watch a silhouette constructed as the Phantom puts Christine on a horse and they ride off, stretching and deforming their shadow in their wake.  Phantom freely avails itself of such Expressionist visual gestures.

And the confident, fluid editing here moves the film along while engaging us.  The early opera section is almost a montage as the movie tells us the story of people arriving at the Opera house and settling in for a performance with short clips of each phase of the action.  Later, the film tells the story of the fall of the chandelier by cutting from the fall itself to many quick glances at the consequences of its slamming onto the patrons.  We see the same technique around other thriller/action points like the kidnapping of Christine and the pursuit of the Phantom.  Phantom of the Opera succeeds at least in part thanks to its editing techniques.

But in contrast to his success in other aspects of the film, Julien’s decisions with respect to acting stifle our engagement.  Perhaps channeling Expressionist vocabulary that creates an eerie, disoriented feeling in those films, Julian guides his actors into performances that are closer to pantomime than portrayal and that suck the life out of characters.  With this directorial choice, Phantom becomes a series of tableaux with actors’ limbs flung wide and held for effect rather than a series of scenes with humans working out their desires and beliefs.  In one scene, for example, the Phantom’s elevated hand with fingers stretched apart and bent resembles a characteristic gesture of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu.  In the Murnau film, with its consistently macabre tone, this gesture contributes to our sense of how unnatural the vampire is.  However, this same gesture feels like stilted acting in Phantom because the world of this later film is realistic with its business owners, detectives, cousins and art patrons.  Expressionist gestures work well in consistent, Expressionist projects, but offered in a realistic aetting, they simply feel false.  This is one reason Chaney’s naturalistic Quasimodo is far more engaging than his artificial Phantom.  And it’s one reason we hardly care at all about Christine or her beau, Raoul, as the actors pantomime their characters instead of create them.

Phantom of the Opera is a brilliant film to watch on screen.  Its visuals thrill, and its editing engages.  However, the unfortunate choice of acting style here is so inappropriate for the rest of the movie that we can’t stay connected.  Through Phantom, we can see how German Expressionism became a key part of B-movie horror.

May 8: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923 -- Wallace Worsley)

★★★★★

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a much better film than The Penalty, and it’s not just because of the more recent film's huge budget.  The gigantic set built at Universal and the masses of extras surging around the screen certainly helped, but the bigger contribution is that both director Wallace Worsley and actor Lon Chaney made such great strides in their cinema.

Worsley is far more effective here than in The Penalty.  One carryover strength of the visuals is that Worsley again works with light and dark to make a scene’s point.  In a great use of light, we see Jehan stay in the shadows as he sends Quasimodo out to kidnap Esmerelda, but when the armed patrol arrives, we watch Jehan back away, disappearing into the darkness gradually until only his face is left…which then vanishes, too.  It’s a very cinematic use of shadow.  Worsley's camera is looser here, too, even doing a short tracking shot when Esmeralda and Phoebus enter the ballroom.  But it’s in Worsley's editing skills that we find the most effective change.  In Penalty, Worsley primarily uses editing to further the story, but here in Hunchback, the editing quickens the pace of the movie and adds tension.  In scenes like the beating of Quasimodo, Worsley uses close-ups as he cuts from face to face, showing contributions and reactions to the scene.  There’s similar editing during the confrontation between Phoebus and Clopin as we cut between the faces of the antagonists.  This technique intensifies our engagement with the scenes.  Worsley also uses cross-cutting between different locations and even story lines to create suspense.  During the penultimate storming of the cathedral, we continually jump between Quasimodo, the crowd and Esmerelda as Quasimodo attempts to defend the cathedral and the besiegers respond to his defense.  For good measure, Worsley intersperses Esmerelda’s reactions.  This scene has editing fluency largely absent from The Penalty.

In addition to the improvement in Worsley's direction, Chaney’s Quasimodo is also a great step forward for the actor from Blizzard in Penalty.  While Blizzard’s background and actions lead us to have some understanding of his motivations, Quasimodo evokes our outright sympathy and care.  The hunchback could hardly be uglier with his misshapen face, lumbering gait, missing teeth and matted patches of hair, but Chaney’s movements and even facial expressions so effectively communicate Quasimodo’s internal process that we can follow along as the slow Quasimodo figures out that he’s been used by Jehan and later realizes that Esmerelda is on his side.  His confusion and fear before he is flogged is palpable, and his anger, when his tongue flicks out of his mouth, is always visible.  Childlike, Quasimodo obeys those he trusts, like Dom Frollo, in a way that is touchingly simple.  One of the best elements in Chaney’s performance is Quasimodo’s relationship with the bells.  Loud, monotone and inarticulate, the bells sound like the voice Quasimodo would have if he could speak, and as he leaps onto the bell’s ropes and pulls and somersaults, the image on the screen is the visual version of Quasimodo’s communication.  Quasimodo is not a nuanced being, but instead, loud and pure.  And his death monologue on the bells’ ropes is especially poignant.  Chaney creates a real, complex character in Quasimodo who thoroughly engages us when he’s on screen.

Even with its big budget set aside, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an achievement of silent cinema.  In this outing, the team of director Wallace Worsley and actor Lon Chaney hit most  notes right in creating this now-classic film.

May 7: The Penalty (1920 -- Wallace Worsley)

★★★

The Penalty is all about Lon Chaney.  He gives a very effective performance as arch-villain Blizzard, striding around with his legs folded into leather cups so he looks like a double amputee.  Chaney is completely unbowed as Blizzard, walking on the top of a factory table where his female employees are making hats, bullying the workers, grabbing them by the hair and threatening them.  He even uses his missing legs to dominate one of the woman as he sits on a piano bench playing the keys and makes his assistant sit below him to manipulate the pedals.  Chaney brings in moments of athleticism, too, as when he climbs up a series of pegs to peer into a high window looking over the factory floor and when he lowers himself to his underground workspace by using suspended chains.  He also deftly hops into chairs and onto the posing platform for Barbara.

And Chaney uses his face with as much dexterity as he does his body.  Close-ups tell more of this story than inter-titles, and Chaney carries and entire scene with the way he changes his face.  His quicksilver expressions shows us how angry he is in planning to kill Rose and how quickly her musical skill moderates his anger into appreciation.  His face quickly flicks from conveying his love for Barbara to anger at her rejection to penance at offending her.  There’s little action in either of these sequences, but rather Chaney tells us what’s happening by his countenance.  And director Wallace Worsley directs the camera and lighting to focus on Chaney’s expressiveness.  Blizzard can look like an old man at one minute, but high key lighting turns this same weathered face into the Prince of Darkness when there’s mention of Satan.  The Penalty is a tour de force of silent acting by Chaney.

Worsley brings other directorial flourishes to the film, too.  On a couple of occasions, he plays from one small, lit box to the larger dark screen.  For example, as Rose is exploring the subterranean storeroom, we see her backlit, peering at us from a square of light into a dark room whose foreground fills most of the screen.  That image contrast sharply with the surprise we get when she flips the light switch and, in the well-lit room, we’re jarred by suddenly seeing stacks and stacks of armaments.  The play of light and dark in this, and in the pursuit of Nell’s killer, intensifies the feeling of the scenes.  Worsley also knows to use editing and cross-cutting to good effect.  The editing heightens tension when he cuts between Blizzard at Barbara’s studio and Rose exploring the arms cache in the basement, for example.  And a delightfully cross-cut section is Blizzard’s explanation of his plan for looting San Francisco, which is cut with visual enactments of the plan.

The period insight into San Francisco also makes The Penalty interesting to watch today.  Whether it’s a mock-up of the turn-of-the-cnetury dance halls in the Barbary Coast section of the city or a view down a street that shows houses set on canted foundations to compensate for the grade of a hill, the film gives us glimpses of old San Francisco.  The quick flash of a streetcar, an Asian chauffeur, and the Asian décor of Blizzard’s apartment with its statue of Confucius wafted in incense all show us a set of circumstances and values in this city in 1920.

The film is also interesting for the way melodrama plays out in this silent crime thriller as opposed to how it works in a romance or drama.  In this film, actually, melodrama doesn’t function very effectively.  The story is chock-a-block with melodramatic elements.  Blizzard decides not to kill Rose because he loves the music she produces; Rose falls in love with the man she’s supposed to bring down; Dr. Ferris cures Blizzard of evil by operating on his brain; finally happy, Blizzard is killed by his former henchmen.  All this is pure melodrama, and in the hands of a different set of artists, it might have been effective.  Way Down East, also released in 1920, uses such melodrama very effectively.  But The Penalty has no actor who can engage the camera and, through it, the audience.  No one in this film elicits our sympathetic identification the way a Lilian Gish can.  Worsley’s camera shows us the chameleon techniques of Lon Chaney, but none of the cast can touch us and make us really care about them or the outcome of the action.  That lack of sympathetic attraction is the one major flaw with this movie.

There’s a lot to appreciate in The Penalty.  Though it relies primarily on technique, it can be a fun watch on the screen.