1920s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists project Vol. 3)

[swo17]

No love for Lubitsch's sublimely cynical Marriage Circle

I remember quite liking The Marriage Circle, but it's been a while and I'll need to rewatch it for the project.

As a sidenote, I would just like to recommend to everyone when commenting in this thread to please put film titles in bold. The primary purpose of this thread is to put forth films that others should consider in their lists. When it eventually reaches 20-30 pages, it will be a bit of a chore to plow through all of it, and it will be very helpful to be able to just skim through the posts for a refresher on what films were being discussed at any given time. Remember kids: words in bold embolden us all.

[tojoed]

Remember kids: words in bold embiggen us all.

Fixed.

[swo17]

I thought my post was perfectly cromulent as it stood.

[tojoed]

Indeed. Back to the topic, does anyone know Ivor Montagu's Daydreams (1928)? Is it available anywhere?

[antnield]

I had thought it was the BFI's 'History of the Avant-Garde: Britain in the Twenties' VHS release from 2001 or so. But it turns out that was another Montagu H.G. Wells adaptation with Laughton and Lanchester, Bluebottles.

[lubitsch]

Yesterday I briefly and without too much consideration jotted down a list of films that I believed had to be on my final list, and I saw that I already had 45 out of 50.

You're lucky because I'm at 59 at the moment. Thankfully I've seen almost everything available and only Gunnar Hedes saga und Fievre sound as if they could sneak in from the unseen films. It has some advantages because one doesn't get even tempted to vote for historically significant films or established classics that one responds rather lukewarm to. No vote for The General, Metropolis or Sunrise from me that's certain.

As for the Lubitsch US silents and The Love Parade, well they are slightly hollow exercises in style but then again not quite stylish enough. The Love Parade should lose 20 minutes and the other films are often slightly silly, Lady Windermere's fan is beyond some sophisticated shots an ordinary melodrama (as is Wilde's play). Only The Student Prince goes for an all out romance, but Die Bergkatze is definitively the funniest and most inventive of these films. The early 30s Lubitsch films are more intelligent and the later warmer even if less brillant.

Oh and I love Why worry?, it's in a close fight with the duo Kid Brother/Girl Shy who convincingly represent Lloyd's tender side. But Why worry? is fast, funny, has an irresistible buddy pair and a clearly structured story.

[Tommaso]

Well, after some re-consideration, I'm now at 52.... And I agree that probably there will be only few hidden gems that might make me throw out some of those films already on the list. But who knows? "Homunculus" came practically out of nowhere for me in the last round. So I will spend most of the time available trying to watch those films that are less known and hard to get in order to fill out the picture, even if there are probably no great masterpieces among them, only some very good films. No need to re-watch "Sunrise" for the list-making for me, as it will be among my top three anyway Together with Dreyer's "Jeanne d'Arc" and Vertov's "Man with a camera"; I would like to place all three on #1, ideally.

As to the Lubitsch films: I agree on "Lady Windermere", and it seems to be a play that isn't particularly suited to silent film, anyway. Though I still find the Lubitsch version better than the somewhat dreary sound version with Lil Dagover by Heinz Hilpert. On the other hand, I never understood why I never really fell for "Die Bergkatze", because I should, given that I normally like such mannerist stuff. But the thousands of different framings become a device that I soon tire of, and otherwise I often feel that the film is slightly overdone in its parodistic nature and ultimately seems like a somewhat too contrived exercise in style. Much better than "Sumurun", of course, but I'm not convinced of it.

[lubitsch]

No need to re-watch "Sunrise" for the list-making for me, as it will be among my top three anyway Together with Dreyer's "Jeanne d'Arc" and Vertov's "Man with a camera"; I would like to place all three on #1, ideally.

Tommaso you look like a nice guy, but you have a film taste that makes me shudder, I think I'll keep Der Feuerteufel for myself if you don't reconsider your choices .
I trashed Sunrise enough on this forum, but Dreyer's ordinary melodrama tract on a religious fanatic, oy! And the nadir of the whole silent film history, Vertov's snoozer. The 110th city symphony plagiarizing Cavalcanti and Ruttmann. That's another film I'll only see if forced at gunpoint. Just what exactly people think is so great about this film (especially after the Ruttmann) completely escapes me. A few split screens? Thrilling.
I think we should introduce also a hate list for every decade where the members can give negative points which are to be deducted from the list ...

[reno dakota]

Tommaso you look like a nice guy, but you have a film taste that makes me shudder

. . . says the guy who put three Chaplin films in his pre-1920s top 20. Each person's taste in film is bound to make someone shudder.

[swo17]

Knowing that someone loves three random films that just about everyone but lubitsch agrees are all-out masterpieces says next to nothing about that person's "film taste."

[Tommaso]

Correct, especially as my #4 will probably be Schwarz' "Nina Petrowna", a film that even Lubitsch seems to like.
I'll rush to the defense of Vertov later.... must continue watching France against Mexico now.

[zedz]

I think we should introduce also a hate list for every decade where the members can give negative points which are to be deducted from the list ...

I've got a vague memory of a 'Classics You Hate' thread somewhere, which is probably a better venue for venting. Otherwise, unless negative comments on specific films are considered, constructive and integrated into a fuller discussion of the film's pros and cons, they just come off as trolling.

And I've long given up trying to plumb the mysteries of taste and tastelessness (which sounds like John Waters' long-lost Austen adaptation). I'm with lubitsch all the way on the awfulness of Metropolis, and I'm even sort of resenting the imminent obligation to sit through it yet again in order to see if the recovered material relieves any of its problems, but The General will surely top my list, and it's such a joyously cinematic film I can't imagine somebody not enjoying it. But I imagine a majority of participants could say exactly the same thing about Lang's glacial bombast.

A few more viewed:
Der Konig der Mittelsturmer - The other Filmmuseum soccer film, not as good as the first, with rather drabber match footage at its climax, though there is a rather kinetic waterskiing sequence in the middle.

Vom Reiche der sechs Punkte - Interesting docudrama about rehabilitation for the blind. All told, it's unexceptional filmmaking - very similar in tone and structure to several of the veneral disease films in the BFI's Joy of Sex Education set, where the narrative is a very slender alibi for instructional documentary footage - but fascinating as a window on the times. There are some shots of doctors shoving the diseased eyes of children into the lens that vie with Un Chien Andalou in the screaming abdabs stakes.

Camille - Nazimova's 1921 modern-dress (and how!) version is notable for some spectacular late-Nouveau art direction. There's also a modicum of interest in the treatment of space, with unusual care taken to link together the contiguous spaces of Marguerite's foyer, bedroom, dining room and living room (party central). Otherwise, the film and performances are stiff and functional, with a callow Valentino barely registering.

Here's a representative still. Yep, all those folk are queuing up outside her bedroom.

[knives]

The General will surely top my list, and it's such a joyously cinematic film I can't imagine somebody not enjoying it. But I imagine a majority of participants could say exactly the same thing about Lang's glacial bombast.

What makes The General special for you? I find it a tiny bit bogged down in plot, luckily Keaton knows how to turn even this into goofy fun, so it's very low on my Keaton potentials (which is a bit like saying it's the worst tasting cheeto in a bag). Sherlock Jr. and The Playhouse are my two guarantees. Both have such a visual veracity and inventiveness I can't help but stand. Even the intertitles on SJ are hilarious. I'm giving weight to Neighbors and Seven Chances too, though those will be the first I dump if things get too tight.

[myrnaloyisdope]

What makes The General special for you? I find it a tiny bit bogged down in plot, luckily Keaton knows how to turn even this into goofy fun, so it's very low on my Keaton potentials (which is a bit like saying it's the worst tasting cheeto in a bag). Sherlock Jr. and The Playhouse are my two guarantees. Both have such a visual veracity and inventiveness I can't help but stand. Even the intertitles on SJ are hilarious. I'm giving weight to Neighbors and Seven Chances too, though those will be the first I dump if things get too tight.

The ironic thing for me is that I don't find The General very funny at all, but I still admire the heck out of it. The set design is top notch, and it's so well-crafted with great attention to detail. I'm kind of in awe of it, but it manifests itself in a sort of deep-seated respect.

As for Keaton films that will make the list, well Sherlock Jr. is pretty astonishing as a comedy and as a deconstruction of cinema. Steamboat Bill Jr. is dreadfully slow, but the final storm sequence is brilliantly conceived and executed, and makes the film a treat anyway. Seven Chances is great too, with the final sequence being incredibly well-done. The visual of hundreds of brides chasing him is one of cinema's great images.

I'm actully not much of a Keaton fan, his stuntwork and set pieces are always top notch, but as a gag man I don't find him nearly as enjoyable as Harold Lloyd. Lloyd manages to do small gags that are tremendous as well as the big stuff.

[zedz]

What makes The General special for you? I find it a tiny bit bogged down in plot, luckily Keaton knows how to turn even this into goofy fun, so it's very low on my Keaton potentials (which is a bit like saying it's the worst tasting cheeto in a bag).

Sort of like what myrnaloyisdope said, I find The General the greatest Keaton because it's so much more than a comedy. It's also one of the great historical epics of the era, superbly structured, and so it's a rare film that is completely satisfying on two normally contradictory levels. I really think it's a better film in period drama terms than Ford's fine Iron Horse. It might even be, at this early stage, more Fordian. Keaton certainly had Ford's gift of knowing exactly where to place the camera.

And of course, it's also a hugely successful comedy. It might not be Keaton's funniest film, on a joke for joke basis, but in this film the elegance and ingenuity of the gags attains a sublimity rarely seen. Just look at how utterly perfect the staging, framing and timing of the cannonball gag punchline is, with every one of those elements, plus the performance and the design (e.g. just the right cannon for the gag), contributing to the final effect. Or the timing and wit of the wood on the tracks gag. These are moments that still provoke spontaneous applause from live audiences, and with good reason. They're some of the most perfect moments even captured on film - the kind of felicitous moments most filmmakers would be lucky to stumble across once in a career, yet in The General they come along every few minutes.

[nsps]

Knowing that someone loves three random films that just about everyone but lubitsch agrees are all-out masterpieces says next to nothing about that person's "film taste."

Also funny is that Lubitsch said that those who liked "The President" in the pre-20s list only liked it because Dreyer's name is on it. And they only like Dreyer's later films because they're…by Dreyer, I guess.

[nsps]

Sort of like what myrnaloyisdope said, I find The General the greatest Keaton because it's so much more than a comedy.

That's the same reason why I find Sherlock, Jr. to be not only the best Keaton film or the best film of the decade, but the best film period. He undermines any conventional structure by resolving the conflict of the real world story halfway through the film, and instead embarks on a daring structure that builds off parallel gag mechanics with opposing but equally funny punchlines. It becomes a study of how we view films, why we view films and how the viewing experience relates back to our actual lives.

Also, if you need to make a half-hour montage of the greatest moments in film comedy on short notice, you could simply pull sequences from Sherlock, Jr[/b.

Seriously, without Keaton the '20s is my favorite decade, and it's nearly impossible to narrow my list down to 50 films. With Keaton, it's an insurmountable task.

[nsps]

Steamboat Bill Jr. is dreadfully slow, but the final storm sequence is brilliantly conceived and executed, and makes the film a treat anyway.

I guess it boils down to taste, but I really can't see how anyone could consider Steamboat Bill slow, especially a Lloyd fan. For example, the big climax of "The Kid Brother" just comes to a screeching halt—the character running around doing nothing for so long I wondered if the movie was shorter than its required runtime.

The storm sequence in Steamboat Bill is indeed some of the most virtuoso filmmaking ever, but I'm in love with the whole film. In fact, my favorite scene is probably

Spoiler

the attempt to break Steamboat Bill, Sr. out of prison—the singing of "The Prisoner's Song," the moment when he tries runs away, realizes he can't, then tries to pretend that he didn't, the reaction to the loaf of bread, etc.

I also love the hat-changing scene, and the way Keaton toys with the conventional expectations throughout the film, starting with his delayed character introduction that eventually reveals him in a wardrobe that certainly would have surprised the audience at the time. I really can't think of a single scene in which the film lags.

[Sloper]

Our Hospitality is easily my favourite Keaton, and currently resides at about number 3 on my list. I love the portentous, deadly serious drama of the opening scene, and the way Keaton follows this up by riding in on his silly bicycle. And I love the way the film is structured: I think of it as having three acts, with the first providing a gentle, elegiac historical recreation, the second providing most of the gags, and the third providing the action and stuntwork. Not totally unlike The Three Ages, then, except that here the structure actually coheres into a truly great feature film. It's a perfect mix of funny, authentic, moving and suspenseful.

The whole sequence where Keaton is staying with the Canfields, knowing that they'll try to kill him the moment he sets foot outside, makes me laugh more than anything else he did - especially the moment where he's trying to get some time alone with the girl (while she's playing the piano), and so runs outside to lure her brothers away, before dashing back to resume his nonchalant pose beside the piano. And so many comedians could take a lesson from the final gag of the film, which proves that you can be a little sentimental in a comedy without sacrificing the laughs.

Plus I'm a latent train enthusiast, and the one at the start of this film is quite simply the be-all-and-end-all of comedy trains.

[lubitsch]

Comedy is supposed to be funny and Keaton rarely is. I mean funny in the most simple way that I laugh at the gags when I watch the film. Mostly you can see him laboring hard at his jokes, preparing them and setting them up ... when the gag comes he has drained it of every spontaneous vitality. The scene in Sherlock jr where the film switches every few seconds and leaves him in another position is a perfect example of Keaton's ingenuity while being completely unfunny in itself. Why should the film we've seen before suddenly become an experimental film with static landscapes? And what exactly is supposed to be so funny about this situation? If humor has something to do with loosening up, then Keaton's films don't rank very high, small wonder that the public in the 20s preferred Chaplin and Lloyd and later Laurel &Hardy. It's nice for academics who want to write essays, but the viewing pleasure is rather low for me.
The General probably earned its status because it was clearly a labor of love and because it was the perfectly structured story for a slapstick comedian, the sketchy plot structures of most comedies being a painful deficit for most critics. But to me it simply stinks. Keaton's women are mostly props anyway but here we have such a stupid example that it's hard to care for Keaton's chase at all or to understand why they did bother to write the female role. As a history film it is a complete failure with his uncritical stance for the South and as a comedy on war I found it positively disturbing when he tries to milk some gags like the loose sword blade which flies off and kills the enemy.
The by far best Keaton film for me is The Cameraman where MGM forced the first compromises on him which were quite fortunately because he was forced to deal with a real leading lady and to develop some character instead of beind a programmed robot in his films. The film has an emotional depth especially when he believes he's lost Marceline Day for good and the camera tracks back before we get the comic twist which we won't spoil here for those who haven't seen the film.

[Gregory]

If humor has something to do with loosening up, then Keaton's films don't rank very high, small wonder that the public in the 20s preferred Chaplin and Lloyd and later Laurel &Hardy. It's nice for academics who want to write essays, but the viewing pleasure is rather low for me.

It's also nice for all those who appreciate the films in all kinds of non-academic ways. And what relevance does public popularity have? Whether or not Keaton's films were funny is only in the eye of the beholder, and I think the reasons you personally don't find him funny now are probably quite removed from the reasons he was not a big box-office success eighty or ninety years ago.

[Steven H]

The scene in Sherlock jr where the film switches every few seconds and leaves him in another position is a perfect example of Keaton's ingenuity while being completely unfunny in itself. Why should the film we've seen before suddenly become an experimental film with static landscapes? And what exactly is supposed to be so funny about this situation?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I got the impression that the film within the film in Sherlock Jr. had the male lead describing the world to the women he was trying to impress, like "there's a great big world out there, etc!" Again, I could be misremembering, but it's not too hard to think of reasons for showing a few landscapes. As for the humor, explaining jokes is a waste of time, but I would imagine the same person who would get a laugh from the Sherlock Jr. scene in question would enjoy Duck Amuck (like me). Lubitsch you look like a nice guy, but you have a sense of humor that makes me shudder.

I think The General is up there (my introduction to Keaton, saw it with a lively jazz accompaniment, a great experience), but The Cameraman and Sherlock Jr. will take higher spots because I just prefer his urban shtick.

[Sloper]

I have neither written nor ever wanted to write an academic paper on Keaton, and love him purely for how beautiful and funny his films are. Maybe I'm slow, but I very rarely see him setting up his gags, or if I do the set-up itself is funnier than most comedians' actual jokes. I first saw Sherlock Jr. (a rented VHS, without the awful Club Foot Noise) while in a seriously depressed state of mind, and it pulled me out of the doldrums like nothing else ever has done. As Steven H says, explaining jokes is a waste of time, but I think that 'changing backgrounds' sequence is hilarious: to put it in 'academic' terms, it signals the projectionist's transition into the 'cinema world' where reality can alter from one second to the next; but it's a famous scene because, like so much else in the film (the snooker game springs to mind), it exploits that part of our sense of humour which enjoys well-orchestrated absurdity and chaos. From that point on, the film is a wonderfully freewheeling parody of film clichés, and the ridiculous splicing of location footage here kicks that off.

But humour's a very subjective thing, as the arguments over Chaplin show; for instance, The Cameraman, for all its ingenuity, is one of my least favourite Keatons, because it just doesn't make me laugh that much.

As for the tastelessness of The General, I believe that was one of the things that earned it some negative reviews at the time, but it's never really bothered me. Keaton's humour is often quite macabre - I like the version of Cops which ends with a picture of the hero's gravestone, with the signature hat dangling off one corner.

(Incidentally, in the documentary A Hard Act to Follow, the Variety review is quoted as saying 'The General is far from funny'; but in my 1995 edition of the Variety Film Guide, this had been changed to 'The General is far from fussy'. Bit of hindsight-editing there, though I can't recall if the rest of the review had been re-oriented...)

[Michael Kerpan]

It is precisely the "historical" aspect of General that makes it often distasteful to me. It has too much stench of neo-Confederate propaganda. Give me Steamboat Bill Jr. any day.

[Vampyr]

Knowing that someone loves three random films that just about everyone but lubitsch agrees are all-out masterpieces says next to nothing about that person's "film taste."

Also funny is that Lubitsch said that those who liked "The President" in the pre-20s list only liked it because Dreyer's name is on it. And they only like Dreyer's later films because they're…by Dreyer, I guess.

Does this mean I must automatically love all Dreyer films? I've only seen one, so far, and as you can see by my nome de plume, I really liked it.

I'll also call out props for METROPOLIS, THE GENERAL and SUNRISE. But, like zedz said, taste is a subjective trait.