A Romance of Happy Valley

I've got enough silent films on my DVR that I really should be going through them more quickly. I've got at least one more John Gilbert movie to do, and all the movies I recorded during Silent Movie Day last September. In addition, I recently sat down to watch one that was totally new to me: A Romance of Happy Valley.

This one opened up with what looked like surprisingly modern intertitles, and it turns out that the movie was considered lost for many years until a copy was found in a Soviet archive, naturally without English intertitles. The movie is set in rural Kentucky, where almost everybody seems to be surprisingly OK with their lot in life, despite it not being a very prosperous life. The one person who isn't is Joshua Logan, Jr. (Robert Harron, who died tragically a year after the movie was released). He's apparently read about New York, and the possibility of making big money there. This would allow him to return home and buy his parents' farm and, I'm guessing, offer the family some financial security.

But Dad especially, and to a lesser extent Mom, think the big city is sinful and the rural life is virtuous. Dad, and pretty much everyone else, tries to get Joshua Jr. not to leave, and to become a good Christian and vow that he'll stay in rural Kentucky. The one person who at least has a halfway decent reason for wanting Joshua Jr. to stay is Jenny Timberlake (Lillian Gish). She's the stock character of the girl who grew up with the boy and fell in love with him, with the thought that they'd always get married when they grew up. She's also helping take care of her widower father.

Eventually, Joshua Jr. has had enough of it and runs away in the middle of the night, tellng Jennie that he's going to New York for one year which should be enough time for him to earn the money he needs to return home a success. He gets a job with a toy manufacturer, being given the assignment of making a novelty toy frog that will float in water. (I don't think the sort of clear plastic that would float had been invented yet.) So Joshua Jr. doesn't become a success in year one; instead, it takes him seven years or so to get the money to come home.

Additionally, he's stopped writing, so he doesn't know what's going on back in Kentucky. Dad is in danger of losing the farm, which has a mortgage on it. So the elder Logans have to take in boarders. Joshua does come back, but nobody recognizes him. At about the same time, somebody robs one of the local banks and stops at the Logan place for a room. So all of the plot strands come together for the climax....

A Romance of Happy Valley was made by D.W. Griffith, and I can see why it remained unknown to me until know. I've seen several of the other titles that Griffith made and are the ones that people might think of when they think of Griffith. To be honest, all of those are better. It's not that Romance of Happy Valley is a bad movie; it's more that it feels like there's nothing terribly original or distinctive about it the way there was with the better-known Griffith movies. But it's still worth one watch at least.

The Miser's Heart

I didn't have anything planned to blog about today, so I went in the closet where I've got a bunch of my DVDs packed up and pulled out both the cheap Mill Creek box set of John Wayne films, and the two-disc set of D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts. Since the shorts are, well, shorter, I watched one of the movies on that disc that I hadn't seen before, The Miser's Heart.

There are multiple stories going on here, although they all come together. Kathy is a little girl living with her mother, who falls ill, leaving Kathy to play on her own for the day. Kathy lives downstairs from the titular miser, who seems to be a bit less of a miser and more of a man who just doesn't trust banks and keeps his money in a safe in his apartment. But that's a target for thieves, and two men are going to come looking for that money.

Meanwhile, Jules (a young Lionel Barrymore) is a thief who steals a bag of food from a working class man, and runs off with the bag, winding up in the courtyard behind the building where Kathy and the miser live, so he meets Kathy and their stories intertwine first that way. But then, something more dramatic happens when the big-time thieves come, looking for the miser's money. Kathy happens to be in the miser's room at the time, so the thieves more or less kidnap her and hold her hostage outside, hanging from a second-story window!

Jules sees Kathy and is able to save the day, in what is an interesting little two-reeler that already shows Griffith's growing command of techniques like inter-cutting and how to build up suspense. The acting (which according to the cast list on IMDb and Wikipedia, as the movie has no credits, also includes a young Donald Crisp), is not much to write home about, since movies were still early enough and being churned out fast enough that learning the techniques for effect movie acting were still taking a back seat. But the movie is still entertaining enough.

One other thing to note is the presence of the American Biograph logo on the stairwell, which I presume was included as an extra attempt to maintain copyright, since the copyright laws still hadn't been updated to facilitate copyrighting entire movies.

The Miser's Heart is in the public domain now anyway and you should be able to find a copy on your favorite video site.

The Adventures of Dollie

As I mentioned yesterday evening, I didn't have anything cued up already to post about today, so I took the DVD set of D.W. Griffith shorts that I've got and picked one of the movies to do a post about. The one I picked also happens to be Griffith's directorial debut, The Adventures of Dollie.

As you can see from a card added before the movie begins, this is a movie that survives becaus Griffith sent the positives to the Library of Congress to get the copyright, as films as a whole apparently couldn't be copyrighted back in 1908 when the movie was made. There's a documentary called Fragments that's aired on TCM a couple of times which discusses this. Some filmmakers would just send in one key sequence; others, like Biograph apparently, sent the whole one-reeler in. These scenes can be reconstructed, much in the way flipcards would give the illusion of motion. In the case of The Adventures of Dollie, while the action survives, there are no intertitles beyond the opening titles; I don't know if the original film had intertitles. In any case, the action is easy enough to follow without them.

Dollie is the young daughter of a family who decide to go for an outing at some sort of riverside park. Mom and the daughter end up on a wall by the river, when a pedlar comes along, trying to get Mom to buy something. He's way too pushy and she refuses. Eventually, the pedlar decides to get revenge by kidnapping poor Dollie!, taking her back to his wagon.

The pedlar puts a gagged Dollie in one of his barrels, and he and his wife set off in their wagon. But when they cross the river, it gets bumpy, and one of the barrels falls out. You can probably guess what happens the rest of the way.

The Adventures of Dollie is clearly primitive stuff by the standards of today, but for 1908 it shows Griffith having a pretty good idea of how he wants to use the images to tell a story an in easily understandable way. There's the clearly defined good versus evil, and suspense from a sense of danger, along with a happy ending. Already at this early stage he had potential, and it wouldn't be long before he put it to better effect.

Unsurprisingly, since it's in the public domain, quite a few people have put prints of The Adventures of Dollie on Youtube.

His Trust, Part 1

I wanted to review a movie today and not just do another entry in the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon, so I decided I'd do a short. I popped by D.W. Griffith box set into the DVD player, and the next one on the set that I hadn't done a post on was His Trust.

This being a 14-minute movie, there's not much plot. It's the Civil War, and southern Col. Frazier goes off to fight, leaving his wife and young daughter to be taken care of by their loyal house slave George (Wilfred Lucas in blackface). Sure enough, Col. Frazier is killed in action, followed by nasty Union forces burning down the Frazier place. George, however, stands by the lady of the house.

His Trust has any number of problems, although the one that everybody is going to jump on is that of having white actors put on blackface to play the black characters. Needless to say, this ranges from people looking like the sort of college student who covers his face in body paint at its least bad, to some characters looking quite ghoulish, notably the female servant, who I don't think has a name. George having the wrong color hair doesn't help:

The other big problem is that Griffith conceived His Trust as a longer movie (about 25 minutes), while Biograph insisted on releasing another one-reeler. So the movie got split in two, as a title card informs us at the beginning, with the other half being His Trust Fulfilled. The result is a short that ends abruptly, leaving us with all sorts of unresolved plot points, because, frankly, this isn't the end of the movie. My box set doesn't have His Trust Fulfilled, although there seems to be several edits available on Youtube, since the movie is in the public domain.

On the other hand, His Trust already shows Griffith's adeptness at composition. The battle scene that kills Col. Frazier is well-handled with the exception of the actor playing Frazier keeping his eyes open in death, while there was a really nice shot in the house-burning scene:

I'm glad I picked up the Griffith box set, as movies that old don't show up very often.

The Unchanging Sea

I've mentioned a couple of times that I picked up a two-disc set of D.W. Griffith shorts and have been going through the shorts on them rather slowly, any time I don't really want to blog about a feature or want a second post on a day. With that in mind, I recently watched another short from the movie, The Unchanging Sea.

Based on a poem by 19th century British writer Charles Kingsley, the movie tells of three fishermen who go out to sea to earn their living. The main character is married, and spends a little time on the beach with his wife before going out to sea:

Not quite Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr

After the fishermen set out to sea, we get the ominous question:

With a question like that, expect the answer to be "No!"

Eventually, our hero washes ashore somewhere other than where he set out, although it's hard to tell since D.W. Griffith had a paucity of filming locations (IMDb says San Pedro and Santa Monica, California):

Definitely not Burt Lancaster, and probably not even Robert Mitchum as Mr. Allison

A lot of time passes, enough for the fisherman's daughter to grow up (played as an adult by Mary Pickford) and fall in love with a fisherman of her own, which understandably frightens Mom.

Upstaged by a cat, more obviously when the film is running

There's a lot to pack in to a little under 14 minutes, and Griffith does fairly well, considering this is still 1910 and pretty early in his career. I found the story to be a bit tough to follow, although that's because you need to pay attention to the story where I was paying more attention to images to pick out for the blog. You can argue that says something about how advanced narrative could be already in 1910.

There are various prints of The Unchanging Sea on Youtube. The print should be in the public domain, but as always with silent movies, if there's backing music that probably wouldn't be in the public domain and that might cause the video to be pulled from Youtube (something that already happened when I posted a link to Griffith's A Corner in Wheat many years ago).

The Sealed Room (1909)

Not really having anything to blog about today, I decided to open up my box set of early D.W. Griffith shorts again and watch one of the shorts on it; this time, the selection was The Sealed Room. This being a one-reeler, clocking in at a little over 11 minutes, there's not a whole lot going on, although the disc menu claims it's based on short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Honoré de Balzac. Arthur Johnson plays a King who has decided to build a private alcove (called here a dovecote) for him and the Queen (Marion Leonard) to have some alone time together, blocking off all the windows and having only one entrance. What the King doesn't know is that the Queen has been getting it on with the Minstrel (a young Henry B. Walthall with a goofy mustache). When he finds the two of them in the dovecote, well, he has his masons seal it off -- with them inside -- out of jealousy. The end

Still, despite The Sealed Room having little plot and a short running time, there's still a fairly good amount of interesting things going on. One is in the picture above; if you notice, the wall of the dovecote has a Biograph logo on it, which I presume is there to deal with would-be copyright thieves, since the logo isn't in its normal corner spot. Johnson as the King looks like he's got some sort of ridiculous eye make-up, and Walthall looks like he's playing something closer to a ukulele than whatever sort of instrument it was supposed to be. I wouldn't have thought that guitars made it to wherever the story was supposed to be set when it was set. But neither the place nor the time is mentioned, and guitars were definitely in Spain from the late 15th century on while they reached France by the end of the 16th century. And Walthall's leering as the minstrel is a hoot.

The Sealed Room, having been made in 1909, is in the public domain, so several prints of it are on Youtube:

Those Awful Hats

Another of my recent DVD purchases was this two-disc set of D.W. Griffith shorts and, wanting to do a movie review but not wanting to sit through a full movie, I decided to watch the three-minute short Those Awful Hats.

Apparently, this one was done when the studio wanted something to play to patrons to remind them to remove their hats as a courtesy to other paying customers. A bunch of people are watching a movie, when top-hatted Mack Sennett and his female companion in a ladies' hat of the day come in, causing a disruption. More women with increasingly elaborate hats come in, until the problem is solved in a rather unique and hilarious way. The short made me think of a couple of later shorts, Robert Benchley's A Night at the Movies and the Pete Smith short Movie Pests.

That's it, which understandably isn't much since the movie is a touch under three minutes. But the joke works, and the special effects (the movie on the screen that the audience is watching and one other) are surprisingly good for a movie from 1909. My understanding is that Griffith donated copies of a lot of his stuff to the Museum of Modern Art, which is why his silents survive when so many others don't. The DVD case art doesn't say if that's the origin of these prints, but the one on the DVD was surprisingly good considering the age, and one of the reviews at Amazon says that's the case for all but one of the shorts. (Bizarrely, many of the "reviews" seem to be for a DVD of some children's movie, but I couldn't figure out what movie since they're all one-liners.)

The box set has two DVDs, each on its own spindle; since these movies are all one- and two-reelers you can't expect each film to have its own DVD and that would be a massive waste. Still, the packaging is adequate. Of the shorts, I think I'd already seen and blogged about A Corner in Wheat, but most of them are new to me.

Those Awful Hats, having been made in 1909, is in the public domain, so there are a bunch of copies on Youtube. The one I linked to has almost the same running time as the one on the Kino DVD set which is why I linked to it; I didn't actually watch to see if the print is as good.

Way Down East (1920)

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for some time is D.W. Griffith's 1920 silent Way Down East. The movie should be in the public domain but is also available in multiple DVD editions.

Lillian Gish plays Anna Moore, a poor country girl who is sent to the big city by her mother (Mrs. David Landau) in the hopes that her wealthy cousins will take her in. Those cousins don't really care for the naïve country girl, but there is one crazy rich aunt who does, so Anna gets trotted out to the parties. It's at one of these parties that she's noticed by Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman).

Anna thinks he's nice, but that's because she doesn't know better r know anything about big-city ways. Lenox is, in fact, a ladies' man who goes through one woman after another reminiscent of Walter Matthau's character in Cactus Flower. To get the chaste Anna into bed, Lowell comes up with a scheme of making a phony wedding so that Anna will think they're married, and then he can have sex with her. But of course, Lowell dumps her, so she leaves for another small town.

The only problem is that that one night of sex left Anna knocked up, as always happens in Hollywood movies. SO here you have a woman who isn't really married, and doesn't really have any way to support the child she's about to give birth to. The one saving grace, if you can call it that, is that the baby is sickly and isn't going to live very long. Can the movie get more melodramatic? Why yes, it can! Poor Anna gets evicted, and has to find a job.

She's lucky that she's able to get a job with the Squire Bartlett (Burr McIntosh). He's got a sun in David (Richard Barthelmess), and a niece (David's cousin), whom it is hoped David will marry. But David takes a fancy to nice Anna. Of course she has her past that she fears makes her unmarriageable. Worse, she has to deal with the Squire, who has fairly strict Christian values and would probably throw Anna out if he found out about her past. On top of that, Lowell shows up living across from the Bartletts, and clearly he knows a fair bit about Anna's past.

He's not the only one, as there are a bunch of gossips in town, and one of the old biddies who knew Anna back when she had the baby shows up, so you just know Squire Bartlett is going to find out. The end result is that Anna runs out of the Bartlett house at the height of a blizzard and tries to cross a river full of ice floes, an iconic scene from silent cinema.

There's a lot interesting about Way Down East, although it's not without its problems. The climax on the ice floes is certain exciting, and dangerous -- that was really Lillian Gish on the ice. But the movie is very slow developing with the result that at times it feels a bit of a slog. It's also pretty darn melodramatic, as I found myself wondering just how much more Griffith was going to dump on poor Anna. Even with those problems, I'd still highly recommend Way Down East.

Fox remade Way Down East (actually, it was based on an old stage play so technically even the Griffith version could be considered a remake) in 1935, but I haven't seen that one yet.

Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages

I finally watched Intolerance off my DVR. It's available on DVD in several version, so I don't have a problem doing a full-length post on it.

Director D.W. Griffith made this one following Birth of a Nation, a film controversial for its depictions of black people and its perceived parise of the Ku Klux Klan, which was comparatively moribund until Birth of a Nation helped enable the renewed Klan of the 1920s. Griffith decided he was going to make a movie to answer his critics, and Intolerance is the result.

The structure of Intolerance involves parallel stories in four time periods, all showing how hate and a haughty spirit among those with power can lead to disastrous consequences. In chronological order, those four stories are set in the Babylonia of Prince Belshazzar; the Israel of Jesus; 16th century France, and the then present of 1916. The two middle stories should be well known to anybody who's studied history or grown up in a majority-Christian country.

As for the modern story, that's the most interesting part. It involves a bunch of women who decide to go on a moral crusade, calling themselves "uplifters". The leader of the "uplifters" is a spinster who guilts her brother into giving them the money for their actions. The brother owns a factory, and the money he spends causes the factory to become unprofitable, so he takes actions that lead to a strike and all the workers getting fired. The Girl (Mae Marsh) is the daughter of one of the workers who dies in the strike; she meets The Boy (Robert Harron) who after losing his job is forced into a life of crime. He gets sent to jail, she gets their child taken away from her, and so on and so on, leading up to a chase sequence to stop an execution.

I have to admit I was decidedly underwhelmed by Intolerance. The movie made it on the last AFI list of 100 greatest American movies released about a decade ago. I can't help but think, however, but that was largely a response to the previous AFI list back in 1999. Birth of a Nation was on that list, and frankly Birth of a Nation is a much better movie regardless of the political message it carries. But just as Griffith wanted to respond to his critics, I've always gotten the impression that Intolerance replaced Birth of a Nation on the AFI list because critics wanted to make a point about the terribleness of Birth of a Nation

What's the problem with Intolerance? There are a couple. Short shrift is given to two of the stories, the Jesus one and the Huguenot one. In general this would be a problem, but when you have a movie running over three hours you'd think they could come up with a narrative that gives enough time for all four stories. The bigger problem, however, is that the movie is didactic, and Griffith has no qualms about beating us over the head with his point about how horrible intolerance is. We get the point already. The melodramatic nature of the modern story is also a bit of a problem. Even with that, however, the movie probably would have worked better with just the modern story and the Babylonian story; I'm reminded of Noah's Ark which only had two stories as well. Or even more dramatically just make a standard and normal length movie about the present day story.

And yet there are good things about Intolerance, mostly in the Babylon sets. Those are spectacularly outsized, as befits a movie that was conceived as having an epic budget. You can imagine Cecil B. DeMille remembering this movie when he made the silent version of The Ten Commandments, and then thinking of it again when he made the sound version of The Ten Commandments that we all remember. The movie also has effective use of intercutting, especially in the climax. Griffith had learned this technique well from Birth of a Nation.

Would I recommend this movie? I think Intolerance is one of those movies that should be seen once, but that probably shouldn't stand as an all-time great.

Ramona (1910)

TCM is running Coquette this morning at 11:00 AM. It's the movie that won Mary Pickford her Best Actress Oscar, although I can't help but think it's a career achievement award since the acting is overwrought and because Pickford made most of her movies before the Academy Awards. But if you haven't seen Coquette before, it's worth at least one watch.

Pickford's career goes back a long way, to when she was an 18-year-old which would mean around 1910. One of her earliest is a version of the oft-filmed novel Ramona. This one was made out in California before the movie community decamped there for the better climate; most of the time D.W. Griffith and the other filmmakers were still back in the New York area.

A lot of Griffith's silent work survives, or at least more than a lot of other directors; as I understand it Griffith donated some of his work to the Museum of Modern Art for preservation. Ramona survives and, being from 1910, is in the public domain, which means that it's unsurprisingly ended up on Youtube:

The Avenging Conscience

Over on the TCM boards, somebody mentioned having watched The Avenging Conscience or: "Thou Shalt Not Kill". It's a 1914 film from D.W. Griffith that's based in part on Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Telltale Heart", and on some of Poe's other stuff.

I hadn't even heard of the movie before, but since it's from 1914, I realized it's in the public domain, which means that it's likely available on Youtube. Sure enough, a Youtube search revealed multiple copies. The movie has received a DVD release, although Amazon implies it's out of print. The TCM SHop does seem to have it available, although they list it as 68 minutes, while IMDb claims it was originally 78 minutes. And some of the Youtube copies are around 83 minutes. (Some of that, I'd presume, is down to the playback speed.)

I haven't watched it yet, but here it is on Youtube:

A Corner in Wheat

I was going to post today about the birthday of actor Jean Gabin, but it turns out that I already did that in 2014. I suppose I could talk about tonight being a night of Bob's Picks on TCM -- or is that tomorrow; I'll have to look it up again -- except of course that Robert Osborne isn't going to be there to present the picks. So I decided to think about some old silents that are in the public domain.

With that in mind, I'm posting an early D.W. Griffith effort, A Corner in Wheat. This 1909 short is about a man who tries to corner the market in wheat, which would of course make him a wealthy man. That attempt, of course, has consequences. The one actor you might be likely to recognize is Henry B. Walthall, who plays the assistant to the "Wheat King".