The Lily of color

Twenty years ago, when TCM was more flush with money, one of the things they did was to have a young film composers' competition in which the winner won the chance to score a silent picture that had an extant print, but no accompanying score. One of the silents that was reintroduced to the world in this way was The Red Lily. The last time it showed up on Silent Sunday Nights, I recorded it, and recently, I finally watched it.

Ramon Novarro is the star here, playing Jean Leonnec, who is the son of the mayor of a small town in western France. He's in love with Marise (Enid Bennett), daughter of the local cobbler. They're even thinking of getting married, at least until Marise's father summarily dies. She's sent to live with her nearest relatives, who treat her like dirt to the point that she wants to escape, even in the middle of a driving rain storm. She meets up with Jean again, but his dad doesn't approve of their relationshp.

So the two young lovers leave for Paris, and just as they're leaving, Jean's dad discovers that there's money missing from the municipal safe, which to him obviously means that his own son must have stolen the money. The lovers reach Paris; at the train station, Jean looks for an information booth to find out where they can go to get married. Instead, he's approached by a couple of gendarmes who inform him he's accused of larceny back in his home town and he's going to have to go with them. He doesn't even get a chance to inform Marise of this, so she sits for hours at the train station waiting for Jean to come back.

Eventually, we learn that the real thief admitted his crime back in the small town, but Jean escaped from the train before he discovered this, so for the rest of the movie he thinks he's a fugitive. Marise, meanwhile, needs a job. She's able to get one in a factory at first, but circumstances turn against her and she eventually turns to prostitution, because the movie insists on piling on more and more for the two lovers to overcome.

Jean makes it back to Paris, always living in the shadows, when he mets Bo-Bo (Wallace Beery), part of the gang of thieves that populated Paris of this era, at least in the imaginations of writers. Jean keeps looking for Marise while trying to stay one step ahead of the police. But what's going to happen if he finally meets her and discovers that she's been forced to turn to prostitution?

The Red Lily is relentlessly melodromatic, at least until the final reel, in that it makes the situation worse and worse for the seemingly doomed young lovers. In that regard, the plot is ridiculous, although I suppose it may have been the sort of material that audiences of the day absolutely loved. While this sort of story line isn't quite my cup of tea, I do have to say that in terms of the acting and the technical aspects of filmmaking, The Red Lily is definitely very well made. It's definitely worth a watch.

The Flying Fleet

August 12 on TCM is the day in Summer Under the Stars for Anita Page, who was fairly big at MGM during the dawn of the sound era until she was eclipsed by other stars. Indeed, all of the films TCM is showing date from a four-year period between 1928 and 1932. The day kicks off with a movie that was on my DVR from the Memorial Day weekend military movie marathon: The Flying Fleet at 6:00 AM.

Anita Page is of course not one of the flyers since women were not admitted to the the Naval air corps when the movie was released in early 1929 as a silent film with a synchronized soundtrack and sound effects. That honor goes to the men, and there are six of them, headed by Tommy Winslow (Ramon Novarro) and Steve Randall (Ralph Graves). The six men are about to graduate from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, at which point they'll get commissions, although they all hope to become pilots instead. (Recall that the US did not have a standalone Air Force until after World War II.) But before any of them even get to pilot training, five of them go out for a night on the town while Tommy has to stay behind to relieve the duty officer. This is a blessing in disguise, as the men get drunk. One of them, Dizzy (Edward J. Nugent), gets expelled for his trouble and being the only one to get caught.

After graduation, they all do naval training before starting flight school. The first thing to do is a physical, and since one of the characters is "Specs" for his glasses, he's right out, although he's told that Admirals can have glasses, just not pilots. After a bunch of training in the naval air station in Pensacola, FL, the remaining men get sent to San Diego for training.

It's there that Anita Page shows up. She plays Anita Hastings, who apparently lives in San Diego, and immediately both Tommy and Steve are smitten with her. It's clear that since they're the only two so smitten, that the other two friends from Annapolis are going to wash out of pilot training. The other thing that's clear is that there's going to be a romantic rivalry between Steve and Tommy for Anita. Since Ramon Novarro is top-billed and was a bigger star at the time, you might guess that Anita is going to go for him. In some ways you'd be right, but....

Steve decides to try some underhanded things to win Anita's affection. Or, underhanded things to be able to spend more time alone with Anita. It climaxes with Steve stealing Tommy's trousers when Tommy and Anita go to the beach together. Steve proposes to Anita, and Tommy responds by strafing Steve. The superior officers notice Tommy's act, which is a violation of the rules. They punish Tommy by taking him off a test flight from San Diego to Honolulu.

In some ways, however, that turns out to be a good thing. The plane takes off, with a prototype aircraft carrier following behind. The plane, piloted by Steve and with two of the friend who washed out on the crew as navigator and radioman, hits a storm. Nowdays, flying over the top of a storm might not be such a big deal, and modern planes are tougher anyway. But the crew's attempt to avoid the storm fails, and they crash into the ocean, with Specs being badly injured. Will the search and rescue crews from the aircraft carrier find them in time?

The Flying Fleet is one part military movie and one part melodromatic romance, and it's the military part that works much better. Fans of old planes and old naval vessels will enjoy all the documentary footage, as The Flying Fleet was made with the sanction of the US Navy. The love triangle half of the movie, well, that doesn't work quite so well given how formulaic it is. Not that this is Anita Page's fault. Or even Novarro or Graves' faults, although it should be added that Graves doesn't have the screen presence that the other two do.

IMDb claims that The Flying Fleet is 100 minutes, while Wikipedia says 87, and the shorter running time fits the print that TCM ran over Memorial Day. I don't know if there was footage cut. The screenplay was courtesy of Spig Wead, who had been in the Navy himself before a serious injury. His story was told in The Wings of Eagles, where he was played by John Wayne.

Will you do the fandango?

I think I mentioned it back in September that there's such a thing as a National Day of Silent Pictures, obviously promoted by the sort of groups that want to preserve the extant pictures and restore any that should be found. TCM ran a full day of silents to promote the occasion, and it gave me the opportunity to record several movies that I hadn't seen before. One of them was the 1923 film version of Rafael Sabbatini's Scaramouche.

The movie helpfully informs us that it is set in France during the reign of Louis XVI, with all of the class baggage that this implies. We are then sent to a village somewhere in provinical France. Having grown up here and left for Paris to study law is André-Louis Moreau (Ramon Novarro), who is about to return to his home village together with his friend Philippe, who is studying for the priesthood. They return just in time to see an injustice where a peasant dies.

Philippe, being a bit of a Catholic radical, decries this just as the local bigwig, the Marquie de la Tour (Lewis Stone) shows up. Philippe keeps up his radical views, and when the Marquis acts like a dictator, Philippe slaps him, resulting in the Marquis challenging him to a duel. Of course, the seminarian knows nothing about fencing, so the Marquis bests him, killing him in the process. This is, after all, a duel.

And the Marquis can get away with it too, since he's a nobleman. André, not knowing what to do, goes to his godfather, Quintin de Kercadiou. He's got a daughter Aline (Alice Terry) who is about the same age as André, so naturally he falls in love with her. However, it's a love that's not to be satisfied just yet, since the two have class differences and Dad hoping to marry his daughter off to somebody of good social standing like the Marquis. Never mind that Aline loves André and wouldn't want to marry a drip like the Marquis.

André keeps trying to get justice for the death of his friend, but since he's accusing a marquis he's making some very powerful enemies. This results in an order for his arrest, not that of the Marquis. André rather sensibly flees, ultimately joining up with an acting troupe. He becomes a successful playwright, eventually winding up in Paris and getting engaged to the daughter of the man who leads the troupe. The Marquis and Aline show up at one of the plays, and of course she spots André. Meanwhile, the Marquis, being an utter jerk, starts hitting on André's fiancée.

But since this is all set during the reign of Louis XVI, you know that the Revolution is about to start, and that's going to cause problems for everybody, since the mob is going to be braying for the heads of as many aristocrats as they can get.

Scaramouche is the sort of movie where it's easy to see why it was such a big box office hit when it was released a century ago. It's got an easy-to-follow storyline and the sort of melodrama that leads up to a visually exciting climax. Navarro is unsurprisingly good, and this movie was a big boost to his career. The print that TCM ran also looked to be in surprisingly good shape for a movie from 1923. One thing that is slightly surprising, however, is that some of the intertitles look to be a more recent restoration, since there are two totally different typefaces used. Definitely give Scaramouche a chance if should come across it.

A Night in Cairo

Ramon Novarro was honored in Summer Under the Stars last August. One of this movies that TCM ran that I hadn't done a post on before was The Barbarian, so I recorded it and only recently finally got around to watching it.

Myrna Loy plays Diana Standing, one of those idle rich types who's able to travel around the world even when there's a depression on, as she and her companion Powers (Louise Closser Hale) travel to Egypt, where she apparently has some ancestry. But the real reason she's there is because she's got a fiancé in Gerald Hume (Reginald Denny), some sort of engineer who is currently working in Egypt. The wedding isn't quite scheduled yet, as they could get married in England, or perhaps even here in Egypt.

Meeting Diana at the train station in Cairo is her uncle Cecil (C. Aubrey Smith), as well as Jamil (Ramon Novarro), a dragoman, which basically means somebody who is able to assist travelers who don't speak the language in various parts of the Middle East. He, unsurprisingly, is taken by Diana's beauty, and we know the two are going to meet again beacuse they're the stars of the movie. Also falling for Diana the first time he sees her, sometime later in the movie, is the Pasha (Edward Arnold), who has a much higher status than a mere factotum like Jamil.

Jamil also turns out to be a bit of a jerk, as he comes up with a ruse to see Diana again. Diana is traveling with her lapdog as well, and said dog is lost by the time they get to the hotel. Ah, but Jamil was able to find it -- or did he snatch it before Diana could get it as an excuse to go to Diana's hotel room? Diana gives him a monetary reward, and that ought to be the last time the two meet.

Except that Jamil keeps coming up with excuses to see Diana again and try to make things "convenient" for her, which includes making all sorts of trouble for Diana by showing up in the bedroom of her hotel suite unannounced, while Diana is still in bed! It should be clear to every viewer that Jamil is simply trying to put the moves on Diana, and won't take "no" for an answer, and gets increasinly forward about it. Yet another character who deserves to be smacked. Thankfully she does finally dismiss him.

But things get even worse when Diana decides to go for an excursion by camel to see Gerald, who has been called away by his work on an aqueduct. Jamil finds out about it, and gets the guide to leave so that he can take the other guide's place! Jamil then basically kidnaps Diana and takes her across the desert, still trying to woo her. She gets away, but it's only to Pasha's desert place, and Jamil, manipulative bastard that he is, gets Pasha to believe that Diana is lying about having been kidnapped.

The big problem with The Barbarian is that all of this is supposed to taken as a love story! Maybe in the days of silent movies, when the first film version of the story was made, people might have been less offended by exotic passions. And from a friend of mine who has some romance novels published to her pseudonym, I know that there are women who have some sexual desires involving some fairly taboo subjects. (Men do too, of course, but we have different taboo desires.) So I suppose some people would be turned on by the thought of Jamil ravishing Diana. But I know that there are a lot of people who wouldn't, and I'm in that group.

But if this sort of stuff is up your alley, have at it.

Mata Hari (1931)

Ramon Novarro was one of the stars in Summer Under the Stars last month, which gave me the chance to watch -- or maybe re-watch, since I might be confusing it with some of the other pre-Code spy movies -- Mata Hari.

Novarro is obviously not in the title role, since that's the famous female spy from World War I. So Mata Hari is played by Greta Garbo. In this movie, she's in Paris, wowing everybody in 1961, including the Russian army officers stationed there. (From reading the Wikipedia page on Mata Hari, there was a force sent to the western front by Tsarist Russia before the February 1917 revolution took the country out of the war.) That force is headed by Gen. Shubin (Lionel Barrymore). Flying in to France is dashing young Lt. Rosanoff (Ramon Novarro), with some coded dispatches from Russia for Shubin.

Needless to say, the other side would like those dispatches. Andriani (Lewis Stone) is the head of those enemy agents, with a bunch of people working under him, including Mata Hari as well as woman named Carlotta (Karen Morley). Working for the allies is Dubois (C. Henry Gordon), convinced Mata Hari is a spy but unable to prove it.

Mata, for her part, works as an exotic dancer at one of those nightclubs in Paris that, at the time the movie was made, so about 15 years after the setting of the movie, would be employing people like Josephine Baker as the entertainment. Mata Hari's exoticism and beauty charm all the men, and the newcomer Rosanoff is no exception. He would like to see her after the show, not realizing that she'd only be usin him to get those dispatches once she learns he has a copy of them.

Rosanoff also doesn't know that his superior, Gen. Shubin, has been carrying on an affair with Mata Hari. But Mata Hari falls in love with Rosanoff, too, which is unsurprising because Ramon Novarro is a much more obvious romantic lead than Judge Hardy. It all leads to Mata Hari getting caught since that's what happened in real life, and sentenced to death, although Rosanoff, having been injured in a plane crash, doesn't actually know what's going to happen to the woman he loves.

I'm not certain exactly how much bearing in reality this version of Mata Hari has. It's got the sort of competence that MGM was able to bring to its programmers, although since we're still in 1931, it doesn't have quite the technical expertise that later movies would have. Still, the story is interesting enough.

If I were going to recommend any of the movie's stars to people, I'd recommend other of their movies first, although that doesn't mean that Mata Hari is bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that there's other stuff easier for people to get into.