July 24: Syncopation (1942 -- William Dieterle)

★★★

Syncopation works along two lines.  On the one hand, there’s the love story between Kit and Johnny, which is a mess as it surges from first one thing then another.  Starting with the childhood friendship between Kit and Reggie, we suddenly realize that Reggie is gone from the story and find Kit married to Paul.  Soon after that, she’s getting along famously with Johnny.  While the story is bumping along these changes, there's also a shift in focus.  Kit emerges early on as the musical center of the film, climaxing with the courtroom scene, but she is then relegated to a role as cheerleader for Johnny for the rest of the movie.  And among all these surges and shifts, odd moments interrupt the story.  Ella, for example, breaks into song in court, Kit and Johnny fall in love in seconds while reading Walt Whitman, and Ella dies melodramatically as her son Reggie arrives in Chicago on a parade float.  None of these events is central to the story.   And continuity elements plague the narrative line, too.   At the end of the film, Kit’s father suddenly turns up in the audience in New York to celebrate Johnny’s successful appearance at a club there, though we haven’t seen or heard from him for a long time in the film.  The Kit/Johnny story line is a turbulent muddle.

But the other main thrust of the film, the story of jazz, works much better.  From the earliest scenes in Africa, Dieterle shows us feet moving in a syncopated rhythm, the film’s idée fixe definition of jazz.  After Africa, we see the same shot of feet moving to this rhythm in a New Orleans church, then in the Chicago courtroom, and finally in the film’s concluding club scene.  The jazz through-line also interprets the meaning of the genre.  The suffering of the enslaved incubates the music, and when Reggie tries to blow the star down for the recently-widowed Kit, we see the significance of jazz has expanded to express individual suffering.  As the music morphs into the Swing 40s, it’s a music that simply expresses something real and primal.  Syncopation shows us that jazz always retains a connection to the essential heart.  The movie makes an additional point as we watch Reggie’s failure to master Bach and Johnny’s throwing off the confines of orchestral jazz -- jazz is an individual expression that occurs at an inspired moment, an analog to the restless American poetry of Walt Whitman, and not a performance of notes on paper.  The film also anchors the birth of jazz in the African-American community and dramatizes the music’s crossover into the white community when Reggie teaches Johnny how to swing his trumpet.  As messy as the love story is, the movie’s treatment of jazz makes many important observations.  And it has a fun conclusion of several important early-40s musicians edited together as a performance.

Syncopation is a worthwhile interpretation of jazz as a quintessential American expression with a focus on the individual.  Unfortunately, Dieterle is unable to merge this line of thought with a coherent narrative, and the film suffers for it.  It’s worth watching Syncopation for the musical thought, but it’s mostly a failure as cinema.

July 23: White God/Fehér isten (2014 -- Kornél Mundruczó)

★★★

There are a lot of interesting things going on in White God.  It’s the coming of age story of a young girl in Budapest who has to work out her changing relationships with her estranged father and her friends.  It’s the story of a dog that is separated from his owner and goes on an Oliver Twist odyssey.  It’s a parable of the immigrant/native strife that is becoming so apparent in Europe.  It’s a revenge tale, and it’s a horror story.  And it has some tremendous shots of packs of dogs running amok in the Hapsburg streets of the city. 

What director Kornél Mundruczó doesn’t bring here is a fleshed-out unity among all these elements.  Hagan, the dog, is the most well-rounded character of the film.  He goes from a happy pet to a vengeful terrorist leader via a terrible arc that includes betrayal, abuse and drugs.  What an outstanding work this film would have been if Mundruczó had been able to bend the arc of Lili so the two characters intersected and complemented each other.  However, the director is willing to let Zsófia Psotta give us a one-dimensional Lili who strikes a similar note whether she is looking for her dog, playing in the orchestra or going to nightclub.  Lili is a surface that lacks interior, and we can hardly accept the changes she walks through because her on-screen impenetrability tells us nothing of her internal processes.  Because of this weakness in the central character, it’s hard to see the ending of White God, when music tames the savage beast, as much beyond a strikingly beautiful cop out.

There are great moments of cinema here.  The dogs running through the boulevards and interiors of the city are exciting, evoking a feeling like that in parts of Hitchcock’s The Birds, when everyday, innocent animals suddenly become a menace.  The civilized but visceral opening of the film sets a tone that prepares us for much of the violence to follow. too.  And the concluding scene is an image of beauty and reconciliation.  However, the uneven work that precedes this conclusion undercuts the effect here, so although the concluding trumpet performance seems inevitable, it lacks significance.  It’s a pity that so much buildup and beauty comes to so little at the end.

May 22: Sherlock Holmes (1922 -- Albert Parker)

★★★

Six years after Sherlock Holmes’ screen debut, Albert Parker revisits the detective, even using the same William Gillette play as his source material.  At a minimum, it makes for an interesting comparison with the 1916 serial.

It’s hard to say that Parker improves on Arthur Berthelet’s earlier version.  As in the earlier film, there are cohesion problems here with, for example, big gaps that make the Sherlock Holmes/Alice Faulkner romance hard to accept.  And while Parker brings a little more fluidity to his 1922 editing than Berthelet managed, this later film lets the character of Holmes sprawl from college youth to middle-aged crime solver, introducing us to a surprisingly simple kid as our embryonic detective but not giving us enough insight to understand or believe his later transformation.  And if that range isn’t enough, Parker adds Sherlock-as-loving-husband to the mix.  The ’22 Sherlock Holmes lacks the tight character focus of the ’16.

But Parker’s film has its strong points.  He cuts back the role of the Larrabees and foregrounds Moriarty, shaping him into a singularly vicious villain.  The film is also effective with some filmic elements.  At one point, Holmes leaves a dark foreground and is suddenly lit in the mid-ground as he crosses a street, an effective use of light that certainly attracts the eye.  The opening aerial shot is likewise compelling.  And actors like John Barrymore and William Powell know how to hold scene.  Even Hedda Hopper is effective in her very small role.

It’s hard to know why Goldwyn Pictures would have wanted to return to the same character and the same source material that a film had used only six years previously.  While this Sherlock Holmes warrants some comfortable appreciation as early cinema, it’s not a great step forward for the character, the theatrical script or for film.

May 18: Sherlock Holmes (1916 -- Arthur Berthelet)

★★★★


This 1916 version of Sherlock Holmes sets up a cinematic character that we still recognize today.  Arthur Berthelet adapts the theatrical version of Holmes that was popular at the time to the new medium, and he even casts the playwright and star, William Gillette, in the lead.  A lot of the adaptation succeeds.

A big part of the success here is due to Gillette.  With an eye to the theatrical, he introduces Holmes’ signature cap, pipe and cape in this very first screen appearance of the character, and the Gillette also uses a less-exaggerated acting style than many of his more melodramatic peers.  But Berthelet adds elements of the cinematic, too.  Faced with scenes that would run longer than a film canister, Berthelet uses dissolves to keep action continuous and in the same setting when he has to change film rolls.  He also uses depth of field to advantage.  For example, there’s a point where we have Dr. Watson’s back in the foreground of a door opening while we look into the well-lit interior of the room and see Holmes moving in the background.  In another moment, we have an exterior with a carriage in the foreground and people moving in windows in the background.  Berthelet has none of the fluidity and editing that Griffith will burst onto the scene with the following year, but he’s clearly using cinematic elements in adapting Gillette’s play.

As interesting as the Sherlock Holmes is to watch, there is no small amount of discontinuity and turgidity to the narrative.  It’s hard to know how much of this has to do with the original material and how much is the fault of Berthelet and the man who adapted the work to the screen, H.S. Sheldon.  But it’s also important to remember that the film was released as a four-part weekly serial, each part with its own episodes.  What jars us as we watch the film at one sitting likely wouldn’t be as bothersome if we watched it with a week between each part.

This is quite a worthy film to watch, both as the screen debut of the iconic character and as a fun, silent serial.

May 17: In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914 -- Edward Curtis)

★★★

Years before Robert Flaherty followed Nanook for his year in Northeast Canada, Edward Curtis blended some Northwest Kwakwaka'wakw tales into a melodramatic story that let him showcase the vanishing culture of this people.  In the Land of the Head Hunters has a predictably clichéd story, but the visuals make the film worthwhile.  Curtis uses actual Kwakwaka'wakw actors, and he brings into the film an outstanding number of ethnographic elements.  We see decorated Kwakwaka'wakw lodges, totems, big canoes, and costumes like that of the wolf-dancer.  Even the story feels like it has authentic elements with the extraordinary brutality of Yaklus as he murders people he happens on.  There’s much to appreciate in this film.

Unfortunately, the restoration of this film had to proceed from terribly flawed sources, and the compromises imposed on the restorers limit its cinematic pleasure.  Big sections of the movie were apparently missing, so the action stops frequently as we linger on a frozen frame that replaces the missing footage.  This technique is a reasonable compromise, but there are so many instances of the action freezing that the film at times feels like a slideshow rather than a movie. 

It’s a pity that there aren’t better elements to restore this film from.  The parts that are intact show us that Head Hunters could be a far richer cinematic experience, though even in its present condition, it still has much to offer as a document of the unique, fading Kwakwaka'wakw culture.

May 16: The Epic of Everest (1924 -- Cpt. John Noel)

★★★★

This is an engaging documentary about the failed 1924 British expedition to climb Mt. Everest.  The leaders of the expedition, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine among them, apparently weren’t thrilled with Cpt. Noel’s tagging along to film, but that left Noel to bring his own subjectivity to bear on this movie.  And his is a refreshing take that is neither a hagiography of valiant leaders nor a hyped thrill like we see on cable TV.  Noel’s interest here is the beauty that surrounds the climbers and the almost mystic doom that follows the expedition.

Long before David Lean filled his camera frame with a desert and let a distant line of camels cross it, Noel’s steady lens gazed at tiny lines of men and yaks as they trudged across the Tibetan plateau or struggled up an ice-caked cliff.  And these are only a few images of the beauty Noel finds on the expedition.  We also see landscapes with square Tibetan village structures that cling to topography and close-ups of the rugged inhabitants dressed traditionally.  Glacial columns create fantasy landscapes, too, and all the while, Everest looms in the background with a plume of snow blowing off its peak.  And we watch darkness creep over this extraordinary landscape several times.  Epic of Everest tells us that the expedition is cold, hard, and menacing, but what resonates is the beauty of the endeavor that it shows us.

Noel also imparts a mystical doom to his telling, just as an Anglo-Saxon chronicler might in one of his epics.  Everest is a mighty, unconquered force of nature, and we see a Tibetan priest foretell the expedition’s failure.  We also learn that as Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess of the Earth, Everest is protected by mythic, howling dogs, and that one of its glaciers, for all its beauty, is the place that fairies and giants dance.  All these would threaten those who seek to conquer the mountain.  At one point, an intertitle makes doom even more explicit when it tells us that the next image of the 22-year-old Irving is that of a man who would soon be dead.  Hence the dread as we see Mallory and Irving set out on their last attempt at summiting and later watch Noel Odell he lays out blankets on a high ridge as a signal that the two have vanished.  The fatalism that Noel evokes here hearkens back to that of early storytellers like the Beowulf poet.

Even with this originality, Noel’s portrayal doesn’t manage to transcend the worldview of his time.  We learn the name of only one of the 500 porters, but the film mentions the names of every one the Europeans; we linger on the deaths of Mallory and Irving, but we never learn anything of the two porters who freeze to death in a base camp.  There is also a smugness in the film’s attitude towards the Tibetans and an attitude of conquest towards nature.  But the beauty and spirit that inform this film lift it past the limits of its worldview and make it a movie that we can readily respond to today.

April 6: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016 -- Zack Snyder)

★★★