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

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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

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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.

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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

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Mary Pickford and the Deevolution of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

In his 2005 review of Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin coined a new term for an increasingly popular movie trope: the manic pixie dream girl.  The term is defined as "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."


Rabin first applied the moniker to Kirsten Dunst in that movie, but since then it has been applied to everyone from Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby to Tom Hanks as a male variant in Big.  In fact, one website has over 60 examples of this type of character.

But who was the first MPDG?


Mary Pickford flirted with elements of the trope in some of her previous work like Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but in Tess of Storm Country she's in full on MPDG mode.  Lloyd Hughes plays Frederick Graves, a disillusioned son whose idea of a good life is starkly different than his wealthy father.  He's rudderless however and will likely become exactly what his father wants.

Enter Mary Pickford's Tess.  She's everything he's not.  She's poor.  She's fiery.  She stands up to authority.  She randomly breaks into dancing. There's no reason for Frederick to fall for her.

Yet fall he does.  Hard.

By the end of the movie, he's stood up to his father and been able to become his own man.  He literally tells Tess that she is the source of his belief system.  She transforms him into the man he could become.

So, Mary Pickford's Tess is full of quirk and enters a relationship with a man that fundamentally changes his life for the better.  She also is the type of creature that only exists in the minds of Hollywood writers.  She is perfect in her imperfection.  She has delicate features yet doesn't bathe and throws a mean right hook.

The only part of the MPDG standard she does not quite satisfy is shallowness.  She is deeply committed to caring for her father and her village.  And she drops everything to care for a baby in danger of being abandoned.  Unlike the traditional MPDG, she is very self-aware and is truly in love with Frederick while never compromising her values.  She's more like Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Like Clem, you can easily see Tess admonishing Frederick at the start of the film that she's not a concept and isn't there to save him; she's her own person, complete with flaws.

Still, in the world of the MPDG, Pickford is definitely one of the chains in the path's evolutionary path.  Or rather de-evolutionary path.  Pickford's oeuvre is clearly the forerunner of characters right up to Ramona Flowers.  Let's give credit where credit is due.

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Tess of Storm Country (1922)

Directed by John S. Robertson
Starring Mary Pickford, Lloyd Hughes and Gloria Hope
Produced by Mary Pickford Company

Imagine you've bought your dream home.  It's a literal mansion, a palatial estate sitting atop a hill with a water view. The perfect place to live out your years with your daughter and son...

...except for those pesky squatters living at the base of your property, ruining your view and acting in a wholly uncivilized manner.

You've tried legal means to get rid of the lower class, but the squatters have rights.  Fortunately, you have an ambitious would-be son-in-law who realizes the vagabonds are fishing illegally.  A call to the local police who collects all the shantytown's fishing nets and the people starve.  Problem solved, right?

Wrong.  See, numbered amongst the poor people is Tess Skinner. Not only is she clever enough to hide her daddy's net, but she also wins the heart of your own son.  The nerve of the girl!  When her father and some of the village's other denizens are caught with the net while fishing, your future son-in-law is shot and killed.  Will Daddy Skinner hang for the crime?  Will Tess bring everyone together in the end (hint: she's played by Mary Pickford)?  Will Tess end up with the rich man's son (hint: again, Pickford)?  And what's this about a baby?

Melodrama is one of the hardest forms of entertainment to pull off.  Stuff always needs to be happening, obstacles need to constantly appear and be overcome, but the audience has to care about the characters.

For me, Tess of Storm Country was a little too much mellow, and not enough drama.

Oh, don't get me wrong. There are certainly huge stakes here, but at times the story lingers a bit too long in one place. Personally, for the first half of the film, I just didn't get a real sense of drama.  The plot about the nets being taken felt contrived with our lead actress acting in a bizarre way. After she has successfully hidden her family's net (or so she thinks), she aggressively tries to protect another family's net.  Everyone knows the way that conflict will play out, but the movie seems to spend a lot of time with Tess defending that net.

The drama in the second half is better, but it hangs on a decision by Tess that makes no sense.  SPOILERS AHEAD.  The daughter of the wealthy landlord finds herself pregnant by her now deceased fiance.  Rather than deal with the shame of having a child out of wedlock, she convinces Tess to take the child.  When her brother (who is smitten with Tess) returns from college, he is outraged that Tess now has a child.

This entirely plot is built upon the premise that Tess would have any reason to help a woman she previously hated.  There is no explanation given.  When it threatens her potential shot at love, she still acquiesces to a woman she has no reason to cross the street for.  It makes no sense.

From here the movie downshifts without a clutch.  By the way, the baby (who ten seconds was fine and cute and making the audience go awwww!) is now dying.  And when I say dying, I mean "get him to the church to be baptized right now before he dies" dying.  You need connecting pieces to all of these scenes so the audience believes what is happening on screen.  As shot, it all simply feels like an exercise in moving from plot point to plot point.

The other major point against this for me was the colloquial dialogue on the title cards.  A lot of "kin" instead of "can", "aire" instead of "are" and "dum" instead of... well, this is a family blog.  We get it.  They don't speak proper English.  Stop beating me over the head with it.

The acting is good, but I don't think anyone is great. Pickford is very... well, Pickford.  It's the type of role she always plays.  In fact, she played this exact same role eight year earlier.

Some of the camera work and editing is brilliant. The scenes in the snow are particularly vivid and beautiful.

All in all, Tess comes across as having both too much story and not enough.  There are a lot of twists and turns, but little to connect each together.  It slows to a crawl when it should be humming along, and skips over moments that required a little time and attention.

** out of *****

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Robin Hood (1922)

Robin Hood enjoying a brew

Directed by Allan Dwan
Starring Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Beery and Sam De Grasse
Produced by Douglas Fairbanks Pictures

The crowd waits anxiously as the joust is set to begin.  King Richard offers his brother Prince John a friendly wager on the outcome.  Richard is backing the heroic Robin Hood... er, Earl of Huntingdon.  John's man is the lecherous Sir Guy of Gisbourne.  It does not matter that Sir Guy straps himself to his saddle; our hero quickly dismounts him and wins the prize...

...which he must accept from Lady Marian.  Now, that is a problem because Robin... sorry, the Earl of Huntingdon is afraid of women.  So, as various maidens approach him following the contest, he races from them terrified, seeking refuge by jumping into the castle's moat.


Later that night, the king is hosting a fare thee well party as he and his troops prepare to head off to the Crusades.  The king admonishes Rob... grrr, the Earl of Huntingdon for not having a woman to come back to.  Conveniently, our hero sees Prince John and Sir Guy start aggressively hitting on Marian and Huntingdon makes the save.  The guy who was afraid of women is now smitten.

Soon Richard is off to war with Huntingdon and Sir Guy in tow, leaving Prince John to run the kingdom.  Little does the king know that his brother has plotted with Sir Guy to kill the king and make John the ruler permanently.  Prince John is not waiting for that however.  He's taxing everything he sees and grinding his foes beneath his boot heels.

Marian gets a message to Robin...DAMMIT, the Earl of Huntingdon about the situation in England. Huntingdon comes up with an excuse to return to his homeland to mount an opposition against the prince.  Soon, word spreads of a robber knight named Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest and common men flock to his side to take on the army of Prince John.  Will Richard be able to satisfy his brother's assassination attempt?  And if he does, can Robin Hood hold out long enough to give the king a country to rule?

Okay, first, an acknowledgment.  The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is one of my favorite movies.  Ever.  It's movie perfection for me.  The performances, action... it's just perfect.

So, I come into any retelling with a bias.  That said, half of Robin Hood is a fantastic telling of the tale, complete with lavish sets and large action set pieces.  The other half?  Dull and nonsensical.  And unfortunately, those two halves collide to give you a bit of a mess.

The opening scene with the joust should be thrilling, but it's just boring.  It serves to introduce the main players. but it is just monotonous to watch.  We also are shown that our hero Huntingdon is terrified of women.  He is literally running from them after winning the joust.  I get the comedy they are trying to go for here, but it really undercuts my view of the hero when he's behaving like a child.

The movie then crawls into the party and the political intrigue of what is happening in England and with Richard's war party.  Unless you get really excited about people writing letters, this is slow.  This is the first hour of the movie.

The movie picks up when Huntingdon leaves Richard to wage a campaign against Prince John.  Huntingdon becomes Robin Hood and the movie starts humming.  There are some good battles with the army leading up to the climactic battle between Huntingdon and Sir Guy.  The end of the fight is actually pretty brutal considering the time period but I thought it fit well.

There are a lot of inconsistencies that bugged me.  Huntingdon goes from battle-hardened warrior to prancing around in tights as Robin Hood.  It's hard to reconcile his transformation into Peter Pan (complete with that legs apart-hands on hips pose).  The Merry Men get no exposition.  We are introduced to familiar names like Will Scarlett and Friar Tuck with no sense of who they are or how they got there.  Little John fares slightly better only because in this version, he spends the first hour as Huntingdon's squire.

Robin Hood also wants to pretend it's a mystery who Robin Hood is, and then who the mysterious new Merry Man in armor is.  The former is very obviously Huntingdon and the latter is obvious, but I will not spoil it.

Amazing sets

The sets here are lavish and really bring the world of Robin Hood to life.  The castle set was so large I assumed it was a painting until the cast started walking up the stairs.  Robin Hood's lair in the forest is great, with a tree filled with arrows fired by each of the Merry Men.

Fairbanks is... Fairbanks.  He's a physically agile hero with a bit of a comedic streak who (of course) gets the girl.  He's fine in this role, though I still prefer his Zorro.  The rest of the cast is good.  However, Wallace Beery as Richard is... different.  You expect the king character to be serious.  Beery is as much the prankster as Fairbanks in his role.  It works for the most part, but his jovial take on the character also undercuts the gravity of the movie's endgame.

The film ultimately takes too long to get to Robin Hood's story and that would be okay if it had something interesting to say.  Sadly, it doesn't.  What's left is half a good film and half a meh film.

*** out of *****

Photo from The Bioscope and Gone Movie

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