Best of Silent Movies PART 2 (1914-1932)

TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY | 1914 EDWIN S. PORTER  

It stars Mary Pickford, in a role she would reprise eight years later for the 1922 adaptation by John S. Robertson. The film first released in US theaters on March 30, 1914, and was rapidly successful, particularly in propelling the fame of its star, Mary Pickford, to new heights. Distribution was handled by producer Daniel Frohman, one of the original founders of the Famous Players Film Company. The film survives today due to the preservation efforts of the Mary Pickford Foundation and the film archives of UCLA.

The film was produced in 1914 by Adolf Zukor's Famous Players Film Company with a budget of $10,000. One of the first feature films to come out of early Hollywood, shooting was spread between the California cities of Del Mar and Santa Monica.[5]

When Zukor gave Mary Pickford the script to Tess of the Storm Country, she had to be persuaded to take the lead role. The script was based on a successful novel of the same name by Grace Miller White, but it eliminated much of the book's moral pieties, complexity, and regional dialect. What was left—and what gave Pickford pause—was melodramatic, clichéd, and direct.

Pickford eventually accepted the role due to the popularity of White's novel, but she chaffed under Edwin S. Porter's direction. She later told a film historian that Porter "knew nothing about directing. Nothing." The aging Porter was still employing an outdated approach to film-making that worked so successfully him in films like The Great Train Robbery (1903). For example, he resisted using camera movement to his advantage, decorated his sets with painted backdrops, refused to take advantage of film's illusion of depth, and relied heavily on intertitles to deliver narrative. Pickford, one of the most influential pioneers in filmmaking and acting, was used to working collaboratively with directors and cinematographers to get the best shot. She was also adept at modulating for the camera, commanding attention within a frame, and enchanting audiences. While Porter refused to consider Pickford's suggestions, she delivered a stunning performance and helped turn the film into a resounding success. She later pointed to the film as "the beginning of my career."

1915

LES VAMPIRES | 1915 LOUIS FEUILLADE

The genre of crime serial was common at the time, and Feuillade had had a big success with his previous work, the serial Fantômas. It is suspected that production of Les Vampires began when Gaumont learned that rival company Pathé had acquired the rights to release the serial The Mysteries of New York,[10] known in America as The Exploits of Elaine,[11] and felt they had to fend off competition. Another American serial, The Perils of Pauline, had become massively popular since the release of Fantômas.

The idea of the criminal gang was possibly inspired by the Bonnot Gang, a highly advanced anarchist group who went on a high-profile crime spree in Paris during 1911–1912. Feuillade wrote the script himself, but did it in a very simplistic way, usually writing the premise and relying on the actors to fill in the details. Later episodes were more scripted, however.The style has been compared to that of a pulp magazine (which it was later serialized as.) In an essay on the film, Fabrice Zagury stated "...Feuillade's narrative seldom originates from principles of cause and effect... Rather it unwinds following labyrinthine and spiral-shaped paths." None of the episodes employ the cliffhanger mechanic, popularized by The Perils of Pauline.

The film employs tinting to describe the lighting: amber for daylight interiors, green for daylight exteriors, blue for night and dark scenes and lavender for low-lit areas (such as nightclubs or dawn). It is noted for its length, just under 400 minutes, and is considered one of the longest films ever made. 

At the time of its release it was the second longest film ever made, behind the 1914 Christian film produced by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania The Photo-Drama of Creation by Charles Taze Russell (480 mins.)

Musidora saw a noticeable raise in her public profile after the film's release, becoming a star of French cinema. She was able to concentrate her career on directing and writing her own films. Édouard Mathé and Marcel Lévesque enjoyed lengthy film careers as a result of their performances. The three leads, as well as many other cast members, were re-cast by Feuillade to appear in his other serials such as Judex, Tih Minh, Barrabas and Parisette.

CIVILIZATION | 1915 REGINALD BARKER, THOMAS H. INCE, RAYMOND B. WEST

EAST IS EAST  | 1916 HENRY EDWARDS

 The film is an early example of the plot premise which would prove very popular in the British silent film canon: that of a character (almost always a pretty young girl) from the working-class East End of London being suddenly thrust by circumstance into the daunting milieu of West End high society.

The full print of East Is East survives, and is well regarded by historians of British silent film. Writing for the British Film Institute, Bryony Dixon notes: "Edwards seems to have had an innate or instinctive understanding of cinema space both as an actor and director, and despite being hampered as everyone else at that early date by rather fixed sets and camera positions, he uses himself and the other actors to convey the space beyond the fourth wall, creating the illusion of a satisfyingly convincing world." She also notes: "The locations are well chosen and evocative of a bygone era, particularly the lovely scenes in the Kentish hop fields", and that Edith Evans in a very early screen role "outrageously upstages everyone at every opportunity". Although largely a serious drama, the film also includes scenes of visual humor arising from the awkward collision of East End and West End manners and habits.

HOMUNCULUS | 1916  OTTO RIPPERT

Screenplay by Robert Reinert. With Olaf Fønss, Ernst Ludwig, Adolf Paul, Alfred Paul, Theodor Loos. Long believed lost except for a single chapter, this astounding science-fiction serial is the German Fantômas and then some—the story of a laboratory-created superman (played in brooding, romantic fashion by Olaf Fønss) who is at once a master criminal and a Christ figure. Painstakingly reconstructed from fragments discovered in seven film archives by Stefan Droessler of the Munich Filmmuseum, the six-part film is filled with the neuroses that would explode into Expressionism and charged with the political contradictions that would lead to National Socialism. Reconstruction by the Munich Filmmuseum.

Homunculus, produced by Deutsche Bioskop in 1916, is a six-part serial science fiction film involving mad scientists, superhuman androids and sinister technology. The script was written by Robert Reinert, and the film foreshadows various elements of Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis, as well as serving as a model for later adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein rather than the original 1910 version. The subject-matter of Homunculus is similar to an earlier film about a monstrous man-made being, Der Golem (Paul Wegener, 1915).

Fritz Lang wrote the script for Rippert's historical epic The Plague of Florence (1919), feature the black plague.  The cameraman was Emil Schünemann, who was behind the lens for In Nacht und Eis. After 1924, Rippert stopped directing films and worked as a film editor. 

THE HALF-BREED | 1916 ALLAN DWAN

When Douglas Fairbanks, Allan Dwan, and Anita Loos adapted Harte’s novella as The Half-Breed in 1916, the poetic idea of the Noble Savage was perhaps less in vogue than the 19th century notion that Native Americans were just plain savage.

The real story is not Lo’s parentage, but the triangle of Lo, Nellie, and Sheriff Dunn. “Although the film runs through the standard white woman-Indian man plot points, it rewrites them with sharp satire,” says scholar Scott Simmons in his 2003 history of the genre, The Invention of the Western Film. Anita Loos, who wrote Half-Breed’s scenario, might have been at least partially responsible for turning the stereotype of the virginal white woman and the rapacious redskin on its head. Nellie’s brazen pursuit of Lo seems to belong to the flapper frankness of the 1920s rather than to pre-World War I Victorian morality.

The film follows a common strategy of exposing racism and then evading a real confrontation with its consequences—in this case, by revealing Nellie to be a heartless coquette and providing Lo with a more worthy love interest, Teresa, who, as both a Mexican and an outlaw, is his social equal. Yet it’s unfair to condemn the film for its inability to transcend its time period’s prejudices. The Half-Breed is still, as Frederic Lombardi writes in his 2013 book Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, “the most original and risky of Fairbanks’ Triangle features.”

See also: Film restorer Robert Byrne discusses the project to restore Allan Dwan's THE HALF-BREED (1916).

SHOE PALACE PINKUS | 1916 ERNST LUBITSCH

Sally Pinkus (played by Lubitsch) is a sharp young Berliner of Jewish heritage who takes a job as a shoe store clerk after being expelled from school for goofing around. Soon fired for trying to court the owner’s daughter, Pinkus lands another job in a more ‘upmarket’ shoe salon, only to be fired again, before charming a rich benefactress to fund his ultimate dream: Pinkus’ Shoe Palace.

“Lubitsch’s films are therefore linked to the Jewish milieu not only through their use of ‘Jewish humor’, or their depiction of the social and commercial circles typical of Jewish life in Berlin at the time, but also – and more importantly – through their emphasis on the issue of assimilation and the conditions that enable it. His films introduce characters who endeavor to overcome their ‘inherent’ social status and integrate into other, more esteemed social groups. Employing clearly stereotypical features, Lubitsch depicted these characters’ efforts to conceal these features and take on new behavioral codes and a new appearance. The attempts to ‘buy’ aristocratic status – traditionally inaccessible to Jews – or to pretend to be part of German mountaineering culture, seem to support the argument that Lubitsch’s protagonists are foreign to ‘German nature’ and to the German cultural tradition, and that their efforts to integrate are in vain.” ( Kalbus, O. 1935.Vom Wesen deutscher Filmkunst, vol. 1. Altona: Bilderdienst.)

“German film provided a forum in which Jews negotiated different models of masculinity and nationhood, as well as a site where “internal” Jewish discourses surfaced within German popular culture.” ( Nicholas Baer Messianic Musclemen Homunculus (1916) and Der Golem (1920) as Zionist Allegories)

Hailed by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut and Orson Welles as a giant among filmmakers, Ernst Lubitsch was a preeminent figure in the history of cinema who directed some of Hollywood's most sophisticated and enduring comedies. More than a great director of actors and action, he added his own personal signature - known as the "Lubitsch touch" - to all his work, a sense of style and grace that was rarely duplicated on the screen. After making a name as a director in his native Germany, Lubitsch was brought over at the behest of star Mary Pickford to direct her in "Rosita" (1923). From there, he made comedies like "The Marriage Circle" (1924) and "Kiss Me Again" (1925), as well as dramas like "The Patriot" (1925).

1917

THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL | 1917 MAURICE TOURNEUR
THE KING OF PARIS | 1917 YEVGENI FRANZEVICH BAUER
HÁROM HÉT | 1917 MÁRTON GARAS
THOMAS GRAAL'S BEST FILM | 1917 MAURITZ STILLER
MAN THERE WAS | 1917 VICTOR SJÖSTRÖM
THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL | 1917 MAURICE TOURNEUR
THE DYING SWAN | 1917 YEVGENI FRANZEVICH BAUER
REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM | 1917 MARSHALL NEILAN