Kino

[Donald Trampoline]

But Metropolis should not be 24 fps. That is too fast.
German silent film projection speeds lagged behind their American counterparts. I don't know the exact correct frame rate, but 24 is too fast for a German film of that year.

[HerrSchreck]

I think he meant that this is the speed that FWMS released it to the world viz the latest restoration (i e the theatrical as well as the Kino Moc & Transit discs).

[Rufus T. Firefly]

But Metropolis should not be 24 fps. That is too fast.
German silent film projection speeds lagged behind their American counterparts. I don't know the exact correct frame rate, but 24 is too fast for a German film of that year.

According to the original score the running speed was supposed to be 28fps. At the premiere it is believed it was shown at 24 or 26fps. I for one would be happy with a 1080p 24fps presentation on a region-free disc.

[Donald Trampoline]

But Metropolis should not be 24 fps. That is too fast.
German silent film projection speeds lagged behind their American counterparts. I don't know the exact correct frame rate, but 24 is too fast for a German film of that year.

According to the original score the running speed was supposed to be 28fps. At the premiere it is believed it was shown at 24 or 26fps. I for one would be happy with a 1080p 24fps presentation on a region-free disc.

That sounds really surprising to me, given that other German film projection speeds were much slower (I am not sure if you are refuting that as well). Also, I have seen the Metropolis Moroder sound speed print projected and the movements were distractingly faster and jerkier than their natural speed. Not ridiculously so but enough to be clear it was the wrong speed.

DVD releases often have used the incorrect frame rates, so that's hardly a standard to consult. FWMS is a good source, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they didn't lose control over what speed the DVD company used. (although that was HerrShreck's point, sorry.)

I presume if you have knowledge of what frame rate was used at the original premiere that this must have been quite a significant deviation if such a detail was worthy of note by contemporary sources (unless people were in the habit of scribbling down projection frame rates out of interest!). Where did you find that information? Is it on some DVD bonus materials or a book?

Anyway, my real point is that I'm just always annoyed when silent films are presented at incorrect speeds. It greatly undermines the performances, I feel, and affects the pacing somewhat. I would prefer that silent films intended for 20 fps or 22 fps do not get compromised to 24 fps because of synergy with the HD frame rate. (If Metropolis indeed has its own special frame rate, then that's another story.)

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Have a read of page 8 of the Nosferatu thread, which summarises these things. I don't think there is a definitive answer.

[Donald Trampoline]

I haven't seen this upcoming Kino mentioned here yet:
(I swear I searched!)

Rhythm Thief (1995, Matthew Harrison)

They also have something called Variety (1983, Bette Gordon) which I don't know anything about. (No, not the E.A. Dupont one!)

[drdoros]

They also have something called Variety (1983, Bette Gordon) which I don't know anything about. (No, not the E.A. Dupont one!)

One of my favorite experiences at Kino was distributing Bette Gordon's VARIETY. It came to us sort of by accident (Kino acquired a company and it was owned by them) and it didn't fit the Kino mold at the time, but I really liked it. It is an extremely important landmark feminist film (was it based on a Kathy Acker script?) and Bette was/is definitely one of the coolest people I've met in film -- though I haven't seen her since the release. It also has some incredible scenes of New York in the 1980s including the old Variety Theater before it was restored.

Dennis
Milestone F&V

[HerrSchreck]

It's almost for that reason-- and the NYC indie feel in general-- that I'm interested in this film. Ah the old Deuce. Something vaguely Piano-Teachery about the synop of the lead character, though I know I'm being very general here.

[Donald Trampoline]

These are both NY films, so maybe that's why they're being released together.
Actually, so is the Morris Engel collection on the same main page, so it's a thematically timed release of NY on parade through indie filmmaker eyes. Pretty cool.

P.S. - Thanks for the info, Dennis!

[railroaded]

Just noted at Michael's Movie Mayhem the future release on Aug 12 of 3 Lech Majewski films:

Glass Lips
The Roe's Room
The Garden of Earthly Delights

[miless]

I wonder who owns the rights to "The Gospel According to Harry"?
Not that I care for the film, it just seems that Viggo Mortensen's debut starring role would be out on DVD by now.

[railroaded]

I wonder who owns the rights to "The Gospel According to Harry"?

You got me there, but that one was already announced by Kino on May 14

[bergelson]

Has someone bought the new release of They Made Me A Fugitive by Odeon Entertainment and can report if the quality is better than the abysmal Kino Release?

[rollotomassi]

The quality is OK, rather typical of this company's releases. Just don't expect anything Criterion/MoC/FilmMuseum class...

I'll go and do some caps and be back later.

Edit: OK, caps are done, if anyone wants to see caps of They Made me a Fugitive, send me a private message and I'll email them to you.

[Jeff]

Early Sjöström art, prices, specs.

[Saturnome]

Victor Sjöströzm's Ingeborg Holm? It was already hard enough to pronounce but now !

[HerrSchreck]

Fo shizzle my cashizzle is on the Sjostrozm Ingebizzorg.

[zedz]

Even the ghastly colorization on the Outlaw cover and any number of wild horses couldn't keep me away. I hope the film is as amazing as I remember. If it is, Schreck, it should hit you right in that Sir Arne's sweet spot.

Yet another 'DVD release of the year' contender to file behind the Yoshidas, Shimizus and ultimate Kluge, if it arrives (Criterion? Any rabbits you want to pull out of the hat?)

[Mike Gebert]

Don't know how much interest there is in silents here, but there seems to be a little, so I'll repost reviews of the two Harry Langdon comedies released by Kino, which were originally posted on NitrateVille, a discussion site for silent and early talkie films. I seem to be one of the few who found much of worth in these films; I'm not a big Langdon fan (and generally bristle at the claim that he's one of the four great silent comedians, both because I don't think he is and because I don't think there should only be four), but in this case, I seem to be among the few defenders.

Three's a Crowd

So the standard story (Frank Capra's) on this is: Langdon didn't understand his own character, made a film or two that was too sentimental and not funny enough, quickly torpedoed his own popularity and proved that he should have trusted the great Capra to guide him.

This much of the above is true: Three's a Crowd is not funny enough.

My friend Ben Urish wrote an article pretty well demolishing Capra's version as after the fact self-justification-- you get fired, you tell everyone your boss was an idiot. The case is summed up by a comparison of two quotes from Mack Sennett; by his 1950s autobiography Sennett was peddling the Langdon, clueless naif story, but in 1928 Sennett (who no longer had a financial interest in Langdon's success, though a bit of one in burnishing his own reputation as a discoverer of great talent) was calling him "greater than Chaplin" and saying "He had his own ideas, exactly, of how everything should be done." Which sure sounds like someone who's heard what one of Langdon's ex-employees is saying about him, and wants to set the record straight.

Three's a Crowd is a misguided film in some ways, but what you cannot say is that it's an inept one, the work of someone who took over reins he wasn't up to holding. It is, in fact, a very precise work in its effects, reflecting someone who has a very clear idea of what his character is and what he can do. The problem is, that idea tends to paint him into a bit of a corner where he can't be all that funny, or even function as a dramatic character. But nevertheless, it represents a very high level of understanding of and commitment to his comic persona.

Langdon works for a trash hauler and admires, a bit pathetically, the man's home life with wife and children. (This leads to some rather queasy gags about the man suspecting Langdon of trying to break up his home. These would be funnier if Langdon's character weren't actually writing secret admirer notes to the man's wife.) Out of nowhere a woman about to give birth appears in Langdon's life, and soon he has, miraculously, wife and child, or so it seems. But I am surely spoiling nothing by saying this can't last.

People have called this Langdon's take on The Kid, but that just shows how different Langdon and Chaplin are. Chaplin works all the stops on the organ to make us laugh and cry; his devotion to the kid is total and heroic, so when he gives him up, as we know he must, it's one of the great tearjerker scenes in silents. Langdon, on the other hand, is such a strange creature that all the reaction to this situation has to take place inside his own infantilized head. He doesn't really interact with mother or child, he's just enthralled by the idea of having them; they're props in his fantasy world, not other people. It's Langdon's take on The Kid, crossed with Langdon's take on The Collector.

One admires the rigor with which Langdon keeps his reactions to other people on a four-year-old level, but it does tend to make it hard to take his film as drama. What almost makes it work is that Langdon as a filmmaker constructs such a stark, fable-like visual environment for his tale that you can believe such a character inhabits such a world. Half the film or more takes place in Langdon's tiny shack at the top of an endless flight of stairs-- hell, half the film or more takes place from the same camera angle in that room. (He seems to have gotten his shack from the same Expressionist builder as Rotwang in Metropolis or Charles Farrell in Lucky Star.) Where Langdon's earlier features seemed to want to put him in a big environment for the comic contrast with his tiny reactions (a tactic which to my mind falls apart in The Strong Man's epic-sized and noisy climax, where he seems very out of place), this film constructs a perfect tiny world around him-- his own Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

And so it all might work as a kind of minimalist fable... if only it were funnier. There's the problem, Langdon seems to have forgotten to develop gag sequences, and the ones there are seem oddly half-hearted-- a long sequence about frozen diapers on a clothesline ends with pie filling being poured into a diaper-crust-pie, which is low-grade Sennett stuff, and a scene of him dangling out the floor of his shack doesn't have the existential hopelessness of a similar scene of peril in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, which makes his peril so funny. In the end, Three's a Crowd is oddly beguiling in some ways, and (like Langdon always is) creepy in others, but what it just isn't it is funny enough to win us over to its very odd, but undeniably fully realized, world.

Print quality is excellent, beautifully clear apart from a couple of moments of nitrate decomposition in non-critical scenes; the organ score by Lee Erwin might seem a little sepulchral for a better comedy, but seems to suit this one's otherworldliness fine.

The Chaser

You can instantly tell that The Chaser is the work of someone who got burned making too artificial and precious a movie last time out. This movie works overtime to establish Langdon in a sardonically realistic setting-- getting bawled out by both his wife and mother-in-law over the phone, while he sits at his office, zoning out but dutifully checking in from time to time to assure himself that they're still there, blathering at top speed.

I've always thought of Langdon as sort of a Laurel without a Hardy, and the early scenes of The Chaser come so close to L&H territory that you start to wonder if they didn't consciously pick up a thing or two from here-- not only is the scornful wife straight out of L&H, but lodge membership as an excuse to get away and have a good time out of the wife's control plays a major role in the establishment of the plot. His wife eventually catches him partying-- the title refers to the notion of him being a skirtchaser, not to being the last item on the bill to clear the house, though that's probably how the film has been thought of for many years-- and hauls him into divorce court. But the judge has a novel idea: make Harry be the wife for 30 days, down to wearing a skirt, while his wife wears a suit and goes to work.

This is a first-rate premise for Langdon's weird, asexual yet randy persona, and though The Chaser isn't the first-rate comedy the premise was hoping for, it's not a bad one. And Langdon gleefully takes it into gender-bending territory which seems very modern by silent comedy standards, as a procession of tradesmen, oblivious to everything but the skirt, start flirting with Harry-- who reacts violently to the first one but is practically in Joe E. Brown "Nobody's perfect!" territory by the end. This is the best section of the film, the most interesting and the funniest part (it also has the most striking camera work-- there's a tracking shot through multiple sets which Keaton would have been proud of), and all in all it makes The Chaser good enough to erase the arbitrary distinction between the good Capra-era Langdons (which are often overrated, especially The Strong Man whose big finale is, to me, an overblown misfire) and the bad post-Capra ones. There's just not that much qualitative difference between them; it's like the difference between Keaton's self-produced films and the final two MGM silents, maybe, but nothing like the far greater gulf in quality between Keaton's silents and his MGM talkies.

The last two reels are a bit of a fall-off, because they play like a two-reeler that's been tacked on-- he winds up playing golf, and then discovering a group of young women out on a chaperoned outing, and it all wraps up so quickly you might wonder if they were running low on film. Here, maybe, we can safely say that Capra brought a solid story sense to the films which Langdon didn't have; The Strong Man, for all I think it's overrated, unquestionably has a solid dramatic climax (specifically, it has the climax of Hell's Hinges) and this is more like a throwback to the what-the-hell-try-it Sennett days, when premises would spin on a dime two or three times over the course of a two-reeler.

Still, The Chaser has some good laughs and even more moments of sexually-tinged weirdness only Langdon would have dared. If Harry Langdon has probably gotten more attention than he deserves, laugh for laugh, thanks to James Agee, these two films, at least, have gotten less attention than they deserve, not only relative to Langdon's other work but to silent comedy generally. And they've continued to be viewed through the lens of Capra's rewriting of history, as evidence of Langdon's incompetence and naivete when, in fact, they offer considerable evidence of his keen insight into his character and directing ability.* For those reasons alone, anyone interested in Langdon ought to check them out and see for yourself that you can't trust everything you read about silent comedy.

Again, the print quality is very good (though this is a more pedestrian-looking film than Three's a Crowd), and Lee Erwin's sprightly organ score is well suited to the comedy.

* Walter Kerr cited as an example of Langdon's misunderstanding of basic comic principles a scene in which he's laying under a sheet, thinking he's drunk poison but actually having drunk a laxative; for maximum comic effect the shot needs to hold absolutely steady on the sheet until he bolts from it for the toilet off-screen, but it's interrupted by a cut which, in effect, resets the clock on the gag. Yet that's an editing failure, not a directorial one, and almost certainly the cut, which pointlessly gives us a closer view of the sheet for a couple of seconds, is there to allow the sequence to be shortened. My guess is, Langdon shot the scene with a full 30 or 40 seconds of nothing happening, exactly as Kerr wished, and it was probably cut after audiences became restless at previews.

[railroaded]

Announced for 09/02/2008 :

Isaac Julien' s Documentary "Derek"

and

"War Requiem" by Jarman himself.

[Tommaso]

BEST News this year! I wonder whether this is a port of some forthcoming BFI disc? Well, let's cross fingers Kino will get "War Requiem" right (after Zeitgeist seems to have messed up their Jarmans).

Nothing on Jarman on the Kino site yet, but they now have cover designs for the Sjöströms, and they also announce Osten's "A throw of dice". This is available from the BFI of course, but seems to have gotten very little attention here, so I'd like to point out (again): this is a ravishingly beautiful film completely indispensable for any silent film fan. Get it!

[railroaded]

I rely mostly on Michael's Movie Mayhem.

ClassicFlix is pretty quick with Art, they had the Sjöström double bill exactly a month ago.

[Tommaso]

I had a quick look at amazon, and they list "War Requiem" as well. So it's definitely coming.

[LesRoches]

Don't know how much interest there is in silents here ...

I'm a huge fan of silents, Mike, and very much welcome your reviews here. Please, keep 'em coming.

[Jonathan S]

I've always thought of Langdon as sort of a Laurel without a Hardy, and the early scenes of The Chaser come so close to L&H territory that you start to wonder if they didn't consciously pick up a thing or two from here

I agree absolutely, Mike. Although I don't claim to be the first to have noticed Langdon's influence on L&H - particularly Laurel of course - I did write about it fairly extensively in my 1995 book Another Fine Dress: Role-Play in the Films of Laurel and Hardy including several references to The Chaser.

To quote myself, "The ambiguity of [Langdon's] comic persona - the all-important face has been described as 'a strange mixture of discordant opposites' - provided Laurel and Hardy with a model of instant and infinite variability in terms of gender, sexuality and, especially, age."

Langdon's influence on Laurel can be traced in the persona the latter gradually adopted in his solo films after Harry became very popular, as well as in the L&H shorts. I'd go so far to say there would have been no Laurel & Hardy (at least not as we know them) without Harry Langdon.