The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

Directed by Wallace Worsley
Starring Lon Chaney, Patsy Ruth Miller and Norman Kerry
Produced by Universal Pictures

Paris during the late 1400s.  The city enjoys an uneasy peace between the elite and the lower classes.  The King of France sits over the upper crust while Clopin is the self-proclaimed "king of the beggars."  The poor throw their festivals in the plaza outside the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the king's guards ensure things don't get out of hand.

One of the king's guards, Phoebus, becomes smitten with Clopin's adopted daughter Esmeralda.  That's not unusual because most of the males in the story are taken with the girl as well.  Unfortunately, this includes the evil Jehan, brother of the archdeacon.  Jehan convinces Quasimodo, the deformed bellringer of the cathedral, to kidnap Esmeralda.  Unfortunately for the hunchback, he is captured by Phoebus during the attempt and publicly flogged.  Only Esmeralda takes pity on him, bringing him a drink of water.

Jehan and Clopin learn Phoebus and Esmeralda plan to marry and conspire to upset the union.  Under the threat of a real class war, Esmeralda reluctantly agrees to forsake Phoebus' love, but plans on last rendezvous at the cathedral.  During their secret meeting, Jehan stabs Phoebus and Esmeralda is blamed and arrested.  Under the pain of torture, she even confesses to the crime.

As Esmeralda is being led to the gallows, she is forced to stop and repent on the steps of Notre Dame.  Quasimodo sees the woman who showed him kindness and swings down to her rescue.  The archdeacon provides her sanctuary within the cathedral, but Clopin plans an assault on the church to take back his daughter.

Will Phoebus and Esmeralda's love win out?  And what will become of our title character?

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is not really about the hunchback of Notre Dame.  It's actually everyone else's story.  It's a love story between a young man and woman.  It's a political struggle between an evil underclass leader and an evil psuedo-representative of the church.  The title character is on the periphery, more a pawn of others than an active agent himself.

Then why is Quasimodo important?  He's the x-factor. He Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film.  He's Sloth in The Goonies (there's even a physical resemblance).  He the variable that none of the conspirators can plan for, but he finds himself at the center of everything.  And you cannot predict which side he'll come down on.

Lon Chaney plays Quasimodo as though the scenery was an all-you-can-eat buffet.  Of course, the make-up is great.  A tuft of hair, awful teeth, one misshapen eye, that hunched back... it looks fantastic.  He's jumping around like a monkey, yelling and screaming at his enemies and joyfully riding up and down on the rope that rings the bells.  From scene to scene, he is either the most animal-like or most human member of the cast.

Unfortunately, the movie itself is kind of blah.

Sometimes a movie is overly complex; this one is needlessly complex.  There are side characters and subplots that go nowhere.  Esmeralda's birth mom (from whom the beggars abducted the girl as a child) is now a crazy old woman who wishes death upon all the gypsies, especially Esmeralda (not realizing the girl is actually her daughter).  Then at the end, she realizes Esmeralda is her long lost child and... nothing.  Esmeralda doesn't find out.  They never meet after the woman makes the discovery.  It's a plot thread that just dangles.

The sets here are lavish, but there really isn't much of a world built.  None of the spaces feel at all connected and some scenes play like they are from a different movie entirely.  Nothing feels terribly lived in or real.  Some characters (the king, the poet) exist only to say a line or two because they needed someone to say that line.  They are not really a part of the goings on; they just appear to conveniently move a plot point along and then disappear into the ether.

The few action moments in the movie are really poorly realized.  You cannot make out the leads from the extras and it becomes hard to follow.  Who is winning or losing?  No idea.

I'm also going to assume that surviving versions of the film have suffered some unkind edits.  At one point, Clopin is injured and seemingly dying on the steps of the cathedral.  We never go back to it.  I'm assuming he died?

After Quasimodo is wounded at the end saving Esmeralda, she looks on very concerned.  That is, she looks concerned until Phoebus shows up.  Then she looks relieved and leaves with him, not giving a second thought to her mortally wounded hero.  Really?  No resolution between the hunchback and the damsel in distress he rescued?

There's a lot of great stuff in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, principally Chaney's lead performance and the spectacular sets.  However, the movie itself feels sloppy.  The lead performance deserved better.

**1/2 out of *****
Photo from Film School Rejects

The Ten Commandments (1923)

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
Starring Theodore Roberts, Charles de Rochefort, Estelle Taylor
Produced by Paramount Pictures

In the deserts of Egypt, taskmasters force slaves to carry a statue of the Sphinx to a new resting place.  Never mind that the Hebrews are tired and thirsty.  If one of them is run over in the process, so be it.  It is all to honor the Pharoah and his Egyptian deities.  Who will save the people?

Moses, of course.  With Aaron by his side, he has already unleashed nine plagues upon the people of Egypt, but now he is delivering his worst threat: the death of the first born sons of the country.  The Pharoah laughs the threat off and calls in the dancing girls.  That is a decision the leader soon regrets.

As Egypt wails from the slaughter of its children, the Pharoah discovers the death of his own boy.  Grief-stricken and scared, he releases the Hebrews from their bondage and Moses leads them into the desert.  The Egyptian leader quickly changes his mind and pursues the nomads in chariots.  They come to the Red Sea.  Things get biblical.  There is a parting, some stone tablets and a golden calf...

...All of which, we discover, are being read from the Bible by a woman in the 1920s to her two children Danny and John.  Both love their mother, but Danny is convinced that the ten commandments are outdated.  He meets and marries a fellow heathen girl and sets out to break the commandments.  After three years, Dan is a successful contractor, while John is still a lowly carpenter.  Dan decides to cut corners building a new church in town by skimping on the cement to sand ratio.  Will Dan's attempt to break the commandments be fruitful?  Do you really have to read the rest of this review to know the answer?

Let's start with the good.  In the Egyptian prologue story, the effects are spectacular.  The parting of the Red Sea looks superb, with some great visual trickery showing the Israelites crossing between the walls of water.  The sets, exteriors and costumes all evoke a great sense of time and place.

Still, the prologue has story problems.  We get one sequence of the "evil" Egyptians, are quickly told that there have been nine plagues and next thing you know the first born are getting whacked.  I already know the story and the movie is relying on that.  If it weren't, Moses isn't much better than Pharoah in terms of his arc.

After the Israelites have escaped and are camped on the bottom of Mt. Sinai, the effects work kicks in again.  The delivery of the word of god involves some impressive explosions and a bolt of lightning to actually carve the tablets from the stone.  The spectacle of it is better than the story though.

Once we go to the modern tale, the movie almost becomes a comedy.  Here we have Dan who decides to break all of the commandments.  And for the rest of the movie, he is obsessed with this.  He's constantly bringing it up.  It just never feels like an authentic reaction.  You also have to question the wisdom of a woman who marries a guy with adultery and murder on his to-do list.

After Dan's life goes to hell (oh, spoiler: the guy who decided to disobey God has things go to hell in his life), the true subtlety of screenplay kicks into full gear.  Dan attempts to escape the authorities in his motorboat named "Defiance."  When the engine stalls, Dan and the boat are dashed against a cliff.  But not before Dan looks up and sees the cliff transform into the two stone tablets with the ten commandments.  The message hits you with the subtlety of an anvil falling from ten stories up.

There is a lot more about the "modern" story that is ponderous and ludicrous, but it is not really worth going into.  As a screen test for DeMille's remake with Charles Heston, this is four stars.  As something for the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000, four-and-a-half.  On its own, it's sadly:

*1/2

1923: Welcome to Hollywood... land

We finally leave behind 1922 and move onto 1923.  So what's happening? Time magazine is published for the first time in March, Yankee Stadium opens its gates in April and President Warren G. Harding dies in office in August.  Most important for me though?  The premiere of Hockey Night in Canada as a radio show.  I'm a Flyers fan, but I have a great respect for the history of the sport and it is amazing that the flagship program has been around for so long.

In 1923, the famous Hollywoodland sign was erected to advertise a housing development.  In movies, the Fleischer brothers produce the first feature length animated film, a documentary about Albert Einstein.  In a strange bit of serendipity, Cecil B. DeMille releases his original version of The Ten Commandments the same year that Charles Heston is born.  Heston would star in DeMille's remake of the movie 34 years later.  A new technology for recording sound on the edge of film strips debuted in New York.  This method would become the industry standard.

What are we watching?  The Ten Commandments has already arrived from Netflix so that is a given.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney is a definite.  I also absolutely have to see Safety Last! which is considered by some to be the definitive Harold Lloyd film.

Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922)

Which one of these characters is the evil Dr. Mabuse?

Germany in the early 1920s.  Financial markets rise and fall minute by minute.  Women seek relationships with the hint of danger and adventure.  Men are scoping out the next card game in a secret room at the back of the club.  And the police are powerless to stop the chaos that has consumed the city streets.

Well, not quite chaos.  Guiding every peak in the stock market, every hole card at the poker table and every exchange of money is the mysterious Dr. Mabuse.  He is a master of disguise.  He is a hypnotist.  He is a counterfeiter.  He is a criminal mastermind with his finger in every pie and an insatiable appetite for more.  He is Lex Luthor with no Superman in sight.

After staging a train robbery in a complicated scheme to profit from financial markets, Mabuse sets his sights on a much easier mark: the young Edgar Hull.  With the help of his accomplice Cara Carozza, Hull is soon under Mabuse's thrall and giving his money away through a card game.  However, swindling Hull puts the relentless State Attorney von Wenk on the criminal's trail.

Von Wenk meets Countess Told, a rich married woman who frequents the gambling dens for the sense of danger, but never plays.  The two conspire to discover the mysterious forces pulling the levers of German society.  But who will survive this literal battle of minds?

Mabuse plays a mind game with his opponent

In Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, director Fritz Lang creates a world and characters that leap off the screen. This is a film that has a running time of almost four hours, yet moves better than many of the shorts I have watched.

The cinematography here is dark and beautiful.  The rooms that the upper crust inhabit are huge, lavish and decadent.  The streets are always foreboding, always feeling like the shadows will swallow characters whole.  I love the world of the movie.  Every doorway may lead to a backroom criminal enterprise or a well-appointed underground casino.

Casting in the silents does not get enough notice, but Dr. Mabuse is just perfectly filled out.  Every actor and actress has an entire history written across their face.  Even minor characters that fill out Mabuse's crew are distinct in appearance and characterization.  Characters who appear for less than five minutes of the movie get the full attention of the writer, giving the movie a terrific sense of heightened reality.

SPOILERS AHEAD!  The plot is dense and does slow at times, but only for moments.  I was shocked at Hull's death.  It felt like he was being established as a lead who would help take down Mabuse.  When he was gunned down in the street, I really began to wonder how Mabuse would be taken out.

A couple of specific moments are worth calling out.  The opening sequence is breathtaking.  Unlike almost every other silent, there is no setup.  No characters sitting around living their lives so title cards can tell us who they are. We are thrown right into the action.  There's no spoon-feeding.  Characters are unveiled through action, exactly as it should be.

The interaction between Carozza and Countess Told in the jail cell was perfect. Told acts like she's been arrested in an attempt to get Carozza to reveal Mabuse as the criminal mastermind.  Carozza seesthrough the ploy and mocks the police and the countess.  Told sees her own potential future and realizes the life of danger is not for her.

I also loved the moments with Mabuse counseling Count Told.  He fractures the man's already fragile psyche.  Told is soon tormented by visions of himself (with some impressive-for-their-time special effects). 

The end of this movie features a great piece of misdirection by Mabuse almost sending von Wenk to his death, a gun battle in the streets and a crazed Mabuse visited by the ghosts of his victims. All of the scenes have impressive effects and are beautifully shot.  The way the ghosts melt into view in front of Mabuse is atmospheric and tense.

As a viewer, I appreciate ambition in a filmmaker, but I really take note when skill equals ambition.  Here, Lang sets out to center a story around a villain over a four hour run time and hits almost every beat.  I could spend another four hours with these characters.  I'm rooting for Mabuse to escape in the end.  This may be my favorite silent movie yet.

***** out of *****

Photos from SBCC Film Reviews and Films de France

Blood and Sand (1922)

Gallardo falls for Dona Sol

Directed by Fred Niblo
Starring Rudolph Valentino, Lila Lee and Nita Naldi
Produced by Paramount Pictures

Juan Gallardo has big dreams.  His mother wants to get his head out of the clouds and learn his father's trade as a shoemaker.  Gallardo however dreams of fame and glory and cheering fans.  He dreams of becoming a bull fighter.

Instead of seeing to his chores and duties, Gallardo and his friends head for their town's makeshift bull-fighting arena.  The group thrill the small crowd with their antics and bravery until one of Gallardo's friends is tragically gored by the beast.  The boy's comrade dies in his arms, but the exhibition was enough for Gallardo to get his shot on a larger stage.

Soon, Gallardo is the toast of Seville.  He marries Carmen, a girl any parent would be happy to see on their son's arm.  But his newfound fame also attracts the attentions of Dona Sol, a man-eating vamp.  Will Gallardo choose the right woman?  And can he keep his mind on his work long enough to survive the dangers of the bull fighting arena?

Blood and Sand should have been a better movie.

All of the ingredients are there.  A charismatic leading man.  Two beautiful, perfectly cast women.  A plot filled with high stakes both in the arena and outside of it.  So why does it so rarely soar?

The movie has a lot of flaws, but there are two that hold it back more than any.  First, like many of the silents, it never fills in the gaps.  Gallardo pretty easily becomes the best bullfighter around.There's no real struggle.  Within minutes, he goes from boy in the village to famous matador.  When he spots Carmen in the crowd for the first time, there's no real courtship.  You don't see them fall in love.  It's hard to care about relationships your not invested in.

The second is the misuse of Valentino.  Don't get me wrong: I think he's fine here.  However, when you've got a leading man with energy and charisma playing a character living his dream, why write him into so many situations where he's somber.

There are good moments here.  I liked much of the first half though as I said bull-fighting seems to come easy to Gallardo.  I like how with fame comes an entourage reminiscent of... well, Entourage.  The scene where Dona Sol seduces Gallardo is perfect.  It's sensual and full of tension, a remarkable achievement.

Ultimately, the movie is a lazy exercise in connect-the-dot moviemaking.  Individual scenes sing, but the pieces don't add up to an effective whole.

** out of *****

NOTE: Once again, a distributor does a film no favors with a terrible score.  It's the most monotonous, grating dour score ever.  And it keeps going.  For twenty minutes at a time.  Turn the sound down and play Dark Side of the Moon.

Photo from Three Movie Buffs

Shameless Self-Promotion: Way Down East

Movie Fanfare ran another one of my reviews.  This time it's D.W. Griffith's Way Down East.  Check it out and stick around to read the awesome Hackman Fever article about Gene Hackman's career.

Revisiting: Nosferatu (1922)

Seriously, that is just awesome.

Directed by F.W. Murnau
Starring Max Schreck
Produced by Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal

The setting: a foreboding castle in eastern Europe.  An eager young real estate agent takes on an eccentric old man as a client, an old man that causes the surrounding villagers to speak in frightened, hushed tones.  The agent wakes up with strange marks on his neck and dismisses them as mosquito bites.  Soon, he realizes that his new client may be more than he seems.  However, it is already too late because the monster has designs on the young man's girl back home.  And that foul creature's name was...

Well, it would have been Dracula, the most famous vampire in literary and cinematic history.  But the filmmakers could not get the rights.  So Dracula became Orlok and vampire became Nosferatu.

What a great movie.

Nosferatu gets its structure from Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the film is all about mood. It's about light and dark and the grays in between. 

Orlok is a creature whose appearance changes throughout.  He never looks human exactly, but he becomes more monstrous when he's in full vampire mode.  The make-up effects on actor Max Schreck remain perfect.  He's an animal.

Nosferatu is a straight up horror movie.  There's no Gary Oldman-Winona Ryder love moments.  Orlok is a monster and he kills because he needs to.  He's not conflicted.  He's not misunderstood.  He's just evil.

The cinematography is a clinic on using black and white.  Even before Orlok is on screen, the shadows and camera set a mood of impending doom.  There are some good practical effects including Orlok rising from his coffin that are effective for their time, but won't leave much guessing as to how they pulled the effect off.

I originally saw this 15 years ago and honestly, it did not stick with me.  I watched it as preparation for seeing Shadow of the Vampire with Willem Dafoe.  I wish I had paid more attention as a younger man because the movie is fantastic.  There are individual moments from this film I could pause and frame to hang on my wall.

Smarter men then I have hailed this as a classic and I could not agree more.  A definite must watch for fans of horror, vampire or just movies.

***** out of *****

Image from Wikipedia (yes, I was lazy with this one, but that shot is incredible) and Lists o Plenty