For some values of "glorious"

Hollywood legend has long had it that silent film star John Gilbert was brought down by the advent of talking pictures and his having a voice that wasn't particularly suited to the new medium. Recently, TCM ran a night of movies dealing with the transition to sound, including the one credited with starting Gilbert's end: His Glorious Night.

The setting is one of those European resorts that catered to the upper crust of European society, especially in the pre-war years the nobility, that would have seemed exotic for American audiences of 1929, with an added vibe of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. It's the sort of place where the visitors amuse themselves watching polo and steeplechase, and dressing to the nines to go to dinner. Staying at the resort is Princess Orsolini (Catherine Dale Owen), accompanied by her mother Eugenie (Nance O'Neil) and a much older military attaché, Col. Krehl (Gustav von Seyffertitz). The princess is betrothed to Prince Luigi (Tyrell Davis), although he's an absolute drip and this is clearly a marriage of political convenience.

John Gilbert plays Captain Kovacs, a military officer who, however, is not of high birth. He meets Orsolini, and it's love at first sight like Vronsky and Anna Karenina, except that in this case Orsolini is only engaged, not actually married. However, Orsolini discovers that Kovacs isn't of the nobility, and that makes going any further in their relationship a decided no. Mom and Krehl find out what's going on, and they're pissed about it. Kovacs, understanding that a lot of what's going on is being driven not by the princess but by her handlers, figures out a way to try to get back at them all, which is to make himself look even worse than he really is, so that if this information comes out it would be an even bigger scandal. To this end he drops hints of having spent time in prison and the implication that he's still a conman and the relationship is part of a con.

Mom wants to see Kovacs personally, and she and Krehl hope that they can come up with some way to get Kovacs to leave the resort, even if they have to pay him off to do it. Their plan is to get to his suite and look for any love notes the princess may have written to Kovacs, and then impress upon him that he could get in trouble if he doesn't leave. Kovacs is having none of it, and makes the demand that the princess spend an evening alone with him in his suite. However, while they're trying to talk things out, Orsolini faints. Since this happens on the balcony and Kovacs has to get Orsolini back to her room, this gets seen by at least one other person, and gossip gets around. Worse, at breakfast it's discovered that Kovacs is still there.

His Glorious Night was the first John Gilbert talkie to be released to theaters, although it was the second one filmed. While the movie may have helped to start the downward slide of Gilbert's career, I have to say that it's not because of Gilbert's voice. True, it's not as stereotypically deep as some other stars' voices would prove to be, but it's not as bad as legend would have you believe. Instead, there were a bunch of other factors at play. Chief among them is the dialog, which is terrible, and doesn't serve anybody well. Gilbert's protestations of love here were parodied in Singin' in the Rain, and it's easy to see why anybody who remembered the movie (and Arthur Freed was at MGM already in 1929) woud make the comparison. Catherine Dale Owen comes across as wooden here, and like a lot of early talkies the direction feels like it's done for the benefit of the microphone and not for artistic reasons.

I'd also suggest that with the depression about to come, there was also going to be a range of new faces coming to the movie screen to replace many of the stars of the 1920s. For the young romantic comedy type, Robert Montgomery was already at MGM and would make waves the following year in The Big House; Clark Gable would make even bigger waves in A Free Soul; and the elegant type could be done by someone like Leslie Howard who had the British accent for it. The sorts of movies that Gilbert featured in would be going on their way out.

TCM ran a restoration print of His Glorious Night, and the print itself looks and sounds quite good. It's just a shame that it couldn't have been in service of a better story.

One Cossack or another

John Gilbert was honored last year in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and once again that gave me the opportunity to record a couple of silent movies that I hadn't seen before, or hadn't blogged about before. One of those was The Cossacks, and recently I finally got around to watching it.

The Cossacks as a people were a semi-nomad group of Slavs who were allowed in Tsarist Russia to live in semi-autonomous regions, in exchange for providing military service to the Tsars so that the Tsars wouldn't have to draft so many more settled Russians into the military. One result of this is that they become renowned for their military prowess, while at the same time not having that great a respect for outside authority. This movie version has the Cossacks living in a time when Russia was busy fighting the Turks, which would place it in the 18th or 19th centuries; the movie is based on a book by Leo Tolstoy.

John Gilbert stars as Lukashka, a Cossack who, unlike the others in his village, isn't all that interested in fighting. This ticks off his fater Ivan (Ernest Torrence), but also his girlfriend Maryana (Renée Adorée). She wouldn't want to marry Lukashka if he's going to be the laughing stock of the community. Not only that, but she's more than willing to take part in the ridicule that everybody else is heaping toward him.

Lukashka is determined to prove that he can be just as brave as his fellow villagers, and gets the chance to prove it when some of the Turkish POWs stage a prison break. Lukashka could have Maryana now, but there's one problem: the Tsar needs them to go off to war again, and Lukahska goes with his fellow villagers. While he's away, the Tsar sends Prince Olenin (Nils Asther) to the Cossack village. In the name of ethnic harmony, the Tsar wans some of his princes to marry Cossack women, and Olenin has been given that task. Olenin falls for Maryana, and even proposes marriage to her, but she doesn't want it. Of course, there's the question of how much choice she has.

Things go from bad to worse when Lukashka comes home from the latest military campaign to find a prince putting the moves on what should be his girlfriend. Now, since John Gilbert is the star here, we can expect that he's going to wind up with the girl in the final reel, but how? That's going to involve some more battles with the Turks.

There were, to me, multiple problems with The Cossacks. One is that the story didn't seem to know where it wanted to go. Apparently, the screenplay was altered several times during shooting, which would explain why it's such a mess. Also, the movie starts off slowly, really boring me for the first half hour. This is a fairly obvious problem as well, although things pick up in the second half of the movie. And then it also doesn't help that both of the leads are miscast here. John Gilbert seems to be playing John Gilbert, Hollywood Star, while Renée Adorée doesn't come across as Cossack peasant at all.

So I have to say that there are better John Gilbert movies out there to watch than The Cossacks.

Rent, minus the crappy songs

In the latest installment of "Honorees in Summer Under the Stars for whom I have a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM", the actor in question is John Gilbert, whose career spanned the silent era and the early part of the sound era. Among his silent films is the 1926 adaptation of La Bohème, which comes on overnight tonight, or in the wee hours of the morning, at 2:15 AM (which makes it still August 19 in the Pacific time zone).

La Bohème tells the tragic story of Mimi, played here by Lillian Gish. But we don't meet her first; instead we meet the future man in her life and his friends. It's the early 1830s in Paris, and bohemianism is already a thing, having taken its name in French from the idea that the wandering gypsies (now referred to as the Romani) came from the Bohemia region in what is now the Czech Republic. But the bohemians here are fully French. Rodolphe (John Gilbert) is a writer who would like the write the Great French Play. But he needs to pay the bills, so he resorts to writing articles for some sort of magazine, at least as they existed in the 1830s.

Rodolphe lives with Marcel, a struggling artist who at least has a girlfriend in Musette (Renée Adorée) who is able to provide Marcel and his friends with some food. The two men have two other roommates, musician Schaunard and Colline (a very young Edward Everett Horton). As for Mimi, she lives in the same building as the men, in a garret apartment where she does piece-work as a seamstress. She, like the men, has a lot of difficulty coming up with the rent money.

It's the first of the month, and the men are somehow able to scrounge up the rent money, but Mimi isn't, which means she's about to be thrown out. She couldn't even get enough money from pawning the few things she owns. But when Musette invites Marcel down for dinner, and he invites his friends, Rodolphe, the last to get invited, sees poor Mimi about to get thrown out and takes pity on her. However, the rich Vicomte Paul, seeing Mimi's beauty, tries to proposition her under the guise of offering her some work.

Mimi rejects Paul's advances, but accepts Rodolphe's, and as you can guess, the two fall in love. This love gives Rodolphe the inspiration for his play. However, he spends so much time writing his play that he runs way behind on the articles he's supposed to be writing for the magazine, to the point that the editor basically fires him. However, the editor only does this when Mimi brings over Rodolphe's latest piece, he being too busy working on his play to go over to the editor's office himself.

At this point, Mimi does something profoundly stupid. She doesn't tell Rodolphe that he's been fired, and is going to have to find some other writing job to pay the bills and give him the time to write that play. Instead, she decides to work double time so that she can earn more money herself and give the extra to Rodolphe, who thinks those are his wages. Mimi promptly works herself to an early grave, and the rest, as they say, is history.

To be honest, I haven't seen either the opera La bohème, or the musical Rent which is based on the opera. This version of the story, however, is at least reasonably well-acted, even though the story is melodramatic and might be eyeroll-inducing for some. Just when you think it can't get tragic enough, it gets more tragic. But that's the fault of the source material, not the actors or director.

While I'd have to say I prefer other movies from the silent output of John Gilbert and Lillian Gish, this version of La Bohème is definitely worth watching.

Theoretical public domain

Back in April 2020, TCM ran Bardelys the Magnificent in conjunction with the first of the stay-at-home TCM Film Festivals. It's a silent from 1926, and since today it January 1, 2022, it's the day on which anything with a 1926 copyright should enter the public domain. With that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie.

John Gilbert plays Christian, the Marquis de Bardelys, a nobleman in the France of Louis XIII (Arthur Lubin) who has the reputation of being a sort of French Don Juan or Casanova, although Casanova came rather later if memory serves. Indeed, we see Bardelys getting into a swordfight with another man in the film's opening scene over the honor of the other guy's wife. But he's both good enough with a sword, and so charming, that he's able to get away with what he does.

Meanwhile, also in the royal court is the Comte de Chatellerault (Roy D'Arcy). He's been pursuing Roxalanne de Lavendan (Eleanor Boardman), daughter of a provincial viscount who isn't the biggest supporter of the King. Roxalanne spurns Chatellerault's advances, and when Bardelys gets in on the humiliation of Chatellerault, the latter issues a challenge. If Bardelys can't woo Roxalanne in three months, he'll give up his landed holdings to Chatellerault.

So Bardelys sets out to see Roxalanne and her parents, but along the way comes along a man who has just been killed, Lesperon. Lesperon was an enemy of the King who was wanted for treason, but Bardelys doesn't know that. In order to keep the wager a secret, Bardelys takes on Lesperon's identity, not knowing the truth about Lesperon. He goes to see the Lavendans and fairly quicky falls in love with Roxalanne for real. But Chatellerault comes along to arrest Lesperon, and isn't about to let on that the man arrested is in fact Bardelys. Bardelys will have to make a swashbuckling escape.

Now, Bardelys the Magnificent having been released in 1926, it should be in the public domain. And I suppose a silent version of all the moving images would be. But the opening title has both the 1926 copyright and a notice that the restoration print has a 2008 copyright. (I assume the score was commissioned for the restoration and also has a 2008 copyright.) Therein lies a story. Apparently, Bardelys the Magnificent was considered a lost movie for many years until a print was discovered in France in about 2006. However, that print was missing one reel, which was reconstructed using the surviving intertitles as a guide and both production stills and scenes from the trailer.

As for the movie itself, it's a well-enough made movie with a story that probably engaged the public back in 1926 but doesn't seem particularly special nowadays. Gilbert shows why he was a silent star, and Boardman is pleasing enough to look at. I'm glad that I got the chance to watch Bardelys the Magnificent, but have to admit that there are other silent drams I'd recommend first, even movies in the swashbuckling genre like the Warner Bros. Don Juan.