100 Years of… Master of the House

Mads comforts Ida

More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, for plenty of that. Madly successful at the box office, Master of the House is, as near as you got from Dreyer, a Hollywood entertainment, telling a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, emotional arcs, good guys and bad guys, fairly realistic performances and a moral at the end that you can actually see coming from … Read more

100 Years of… He Who Gets Slapped

Lon Chaney as HE the clown

It’s 100 years old, at least, He Who Gets Slapped. Which helps explain a title that would be laughed out of the first production meeting these days. “He Who…? He Who?” Sounds like an old car changing gear. As for the rest of it, it wouldn’t pass muster either. Way, way too unsettling, grim and dour for our times. Though it might make a nicely dark horror movie. Here’s a film that was praised to the skies when it came out. The New York Times thought it was “perfect”… and a “faultless adaptation” of the original hit play (which had transferred from Russia to Broadway and become a hit all over again), and that … Read more

100 Years of… Die Nibelungen: Siegfried

Siegfried checks his sword before setting out

Long before techno or Kraftwerk there was Richard Wagner, and in 1924 director Fritz Lang and his writer wife Thea von Harbou decided to put a story the German headbanger had popularised onto the screen. Die Nibelungen: Siegfried is the first of a two-part phantasmagorical medieval epic “dedicated to the German People”, a Tolkien-before-Tolkien, Game-of-Thrones-before-Game-of-Thrones tale of hair, helmets and hunting horns. Plus invisibility, dragons, fair damsels, derring-do, treachery and death. George Lucas clearly watched this first film (at least) before making Star Wars and the debt owed visually by Game of Thrones is also obvious here and there. What’s remarkable is how technically accomplished it is given given the crudity of the … Read more

100 Years of… Sherlock Jr.

The projectionist reads a book on how to be a detective

Buster Keaton’s masterpiece Sherlock Jr. wasn’t that successful when it debuted in 1924. Audiences didn’t laugh that much. Critics also didn’t think it was that hilarious – “far and away about the most laughter lacking picture that “Dead Pan” Buster has turned out in a long, long while,” said Variety. Even Buster Keaton seemed rueful about it when later interviewed – “alright but not one of the big ones”. There is something in those verdicts. It isn’t a massively funny film but there is so much conceptual and theoretical brilliance on display here that it doesn’t matter. Variety’s review also reckoned Sherlock Jr. wasn’t a patch on Harold Lloyd. But Keaton here is … Read more

100 Years of… The Thief of Bagdad

The princess and the thief

Douglas Fairbanks was the Tom Cruise of a century ago and in 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad, Fairbanks’s favourite of his own films, you get to see him at his very best, in the peak of physical condition, in a film that’s one remarkable action set piece after another. As you’ve probably guessed, it’s silent, in black and white and set out in old Bagdad, where an Arabian Nights story unfolds concerning Ahmed (Fairbanks), a common street thief caught up in the machinations over who will wed the country’s fair princess (Julanne Johnston). Many would scale those walls, not least Ahmed, though he understands he has only a snowball’s chance in hell against … Read more

100 Years of… Coeur Fidèle

Gina Manès as Marie

The first thing to say about Coeur Fidèle (aka The Faithful Heart) is how brilliantly good the image is on this 100-year-old movie. I watched the Eureka Masters of Cinema version and it’s excellent. It’s important that it’s good because this is a highly visual movie. It certainly won’t win awards for storytelling. Wikipedia says it was written in a day, to which the response is surely “you don’t say”. Marie is an orphan girl who skivvies at the bar of her foster parents. She is in love with Jean, a local docker, but is being courted by Petit Paul, a brutish drunkard. After her adoptive parents give her to Paul, Jean and … Read more

100 Years of… The Phantom Carriage

The phantom carriage materialises

The Phantom Carriage is something of a phantom movie. Loved by Ingmar Bergman, who rewatched it every year and claimed it inspired him to get into film-making, it was also adored by Charlie Chaplin, who called it the best film ever made. Stanley Kubrick was also a fan, and lifted one of his most iconic sequences – Jack Nicholson axing through a door in The Shining – directly from it. But how many people have actually seen this classic? Bergman, Chaplin, Kubrick, this is clearly a film with “bottom” but it also has plenty going on up top. In short, it’s a Dickensian tale of a man who has lived a life as an … Read more

100 Years of… Warning Shadows

Ruth Weyher as the "Woman"

The remarkable Warning Shadows (Schatten: Eine nächtliche Halluzination) is often lumped together with other German movies of the 1920s as expressionist but it’s only tangentially an expressionist movie. It’s too strange to fit in that box, too individualistic. As silent movies go it’s strange too. Once it’s done its introductions – the characters’ names materialise as the actors appear on stage in front of a white screen which will take on significance later – there are no intertitles, not one. The American born but Germany-raised director/writer Arthur Robison does it all with images and his actors, no further explanation necessary. The story is weird as well – like a sexed-up fairy tale – … Read more

100 Years of… Our Hospitality

Wille and Virginia

1923 is the year when Buster Keaton’s run of classic feature-length comedies gets out of the blocks with Our Hospitality, which signals its intention to be different even in its opening credits, which linger on the screen far longer than those of most films of the era. Here, they say, is something to be savoured. The story is William Shakespeare via rural 19th-century America via the mind of Buster Keaton, a re-working of Romeo and Juliet crossed with the Hatfield and McCoys feud, with Buster playing Willie McKay, a guy who falls in love with a young woman he meets on the train journey back to his Appalachian homeland where he’s inherited a … Read more

100 Years of… Salomé

Salomé dances for Herod

Salomé, a notorious enterprise for the Russian-born, now-forgotten Hollywood great Alla Nazimova, its star, co-writer, co-director and producer, is the film that ruined her financially and brought an end to her time as a Hollywood player. It needs to be bad to justify the damage it caused to such a glittering career. It is. The original story is from the Bible, as retold by Oscar Wilde, then retold again by adapter Nazimova and co-writer Natacha Rambova (Rudolph Valentino’s wife and possibly Nazimova’s lover). But in spite of the reworkings it’s still the story we all know, of the young and beautiful Salomé demanding that Herod bring her the head of John the Baptist. … Read more