Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)

Directed by Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton
Starring Buster Keaton, Tom McGuire and Ernest Torrence
Produced by Buster Keaton Productions and Joseph M. Schenck Productions


William Canfield's business is in trouble.

He runs a paddleboat on the Mississippi River.  His boat lacks passengers and is starting to fall apart around him.To make matters worse, the local business mogul has launched his own luxury riverboat to compete with Steamboat Bill's Stonewall Jackson.

Bill does receive one happy bit of news:help in the form of a son he never met is on the way.  Junior is coming from college in Boston and, with such a gargantuan, muscular father, the son must be the second coming of Paul Bunyan.  Right?

Wrong.  Off the train steps a rail-thin young man in a beret who couldn't be less like his father. His father works to toughen his son up, exchanging his beret for a manlier hat and encouraging him to throw a punch at the rival riverboat captain.  Try as he might though, Junior's apple clearly fell a little farther from the tree.



Complicating matters is the presence of Junior's girlfriend in town.  She's also home from college and is (of course) the daughter of Steamboat Bill's chief rival John King.  Both father's forbid their children from seeing one another.

When the Stonewall Jackson is condemned by the local officials, Bill loses his temper and is thrown into jail.  Can Junior save the family business, spring his dad from prison win the girl and survive the devastating cyclone that whirls through town?

If there was any doubt that Buster Keaton was the king of silent comedy, if you had some notion the Charlie Chaplin might be the true master of slapstick and pathos in the 1920s, Steamboat Bill Jr. doesn't just slam the door on such thoughts.  It drops a house on them.  Literally.

The film features Keaton's most famous stunt: he's wandering through the streets of a town that is disintegrating before his eyes.  He stops in the middle of a street and... the entire front of a house collapses on him.  The only thing that saves him?  He is standing in the precise spot where the open attic window of the house lands.  An inch to the right or left and our hero and the actor are crushed.

It's a few seconds, but it is an amazing moment in its ambition and execution.  It's serves as such an astounding crescendo to the climactic cyclone sequence, it's easy to overlook the rest of the action.

Which is almost (stressing "almost") a shame because Steamboat Bill Jr. really is Keaton at his perfect best.  We see his stone-faced expressiveness as he searches for his father when he arrives in town.  His comic timing when he delivers tools to his father in jail or when he's attempting to sneak onto the rival ship.  His athleticism as vaults from deck-to-deck on the Stonewall Jackson.  And his fearlessness as he clings to an uprooted tree as it flies across town.

And that's what Keaton's characters are about time and time again.  He gets by on luck and pluck.  He sets his sights on the girl and hurls himself through every obstacle God and man place before him.  He's a hero, plain and simple.

The rest of the cast is good, but Ernest Torrence is great as Steamboat Bill Sr.  He brings the same menacing presence to this comedy that we saw in his villainous turn in Tol'able David.  Here, he's a hulk of a man, stubborn and set in his ways, the perfect foil to his weak son.

Steamboat Bill Jr. is about as flawless as comedy gets.  Laugh-out-loud moments and death-defying stunts all build to an ending sure to leave you happy.

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

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The Love of Jeanne Ney (1928)

Directed by G.W. Pabst
Starring Édith Jéhanne, Uno Henning and Fritz Rasp
Produced by Universum Film (UFA)

War is coming to Crimea and everyone is choosing their sides. Some, like Andreas, are covertly laying the groundwork for the Bolshevik invasion. Others, like Alfred Ney, are collecting the names of rebel agents for the government.

And some, like the villainous Khalibiev, play both sides to make a quick buck. So what if the list of agents he gives to Ney are random names from the phone book?

Andreas gets wind that Ney has a list of Bolshevik spies and heads off to retrieve the document. During their confrontation, Ney is killed. This puts a damper on the blossoming romance between Andreas and Ney's daughter Jeanne.

The Bolsheviks attack and Jeanne escapes to Paris to live with her private detective uncle, Raymond. Her uncle is not thrilled to see his niece, but allows her to stay when his blind daughter Gabriella insists.

Jeanne's escape proves to be short-lived. Khalibiev follows her to Paris, concocting a scheme to marry Gabriella and get Uncle Raymond's money. Andreas is also in Paris hoping to recruit new soldiers and rekindle his romance with Jeanne.

Throw in a "stolen" diamond and a train ride and all of the elements of a suspense thriller are present. Does Andreas win back the hand of Jeanne?  And can Khalibiev get away with his schemes?



When someone describes a film as "Hitchcockian," certain ideas come to mind: suspense, horror, intrigue. Sure there may be the occasional indelible image like birds on a kids' playset or a shower scene, but for the most part, when you think of Hitchcock, you think about mood.

So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the master I suspense has been aping G. W. Pabst this whole time.

Don't get me wrong: nothing in The Love of Jeanne Ney comes anywhere close to the cinematic perfection that is Rear Window, Vertigo or North by Northwest. But Pabst film shares more than a little in common with Hithcock's work.

We see ordinary people drawn into large political battles. Intrigue as characters act in their self-interest and inflict pain upon those they love. And that feeling that every character's next decision may be the one that dooms him.

Pabst knows how to build tension from scene to scene. Characters enter a room and the camera switches to their point of view, quickly darting across the room. There are no slow camera movements here, the camera is always nervously surveying everyone within the frame.

At other moments, Pabst lingers on a moment until we feel uncomfortable, waiting for something to happen.  The director gets a lot of mileage from Edith Jehanne's face in the title role and I found myself flashing back more than once to Kim Novak in Vertigo.

The rest of the cast is fantastic. Uno Henning manages to capture both the romantic leading man and the passionate revolutionary roles perfectly. Brigette Helm's blind Gabrielle fumbles through life at moments almost zombie-like, subjecting herself to the whims of the men that surround her. It's a stark contrast to her roles in Metropolis, but she is equal to the task.

The true standout here though was Fritz Rasp as Khalibiev. Every look and movement just oozes sliminess. When he is on screen, you can see the wheels turning in his head, examining every angle and detail to his own lecherous advantage.

As good as Rasp is, Adolf Licho is just too over-the-top cartoonish as Raymond. When Jeanne first arrives in Paris, he recoils as though a vampire just arrived. Later, as he is imagining a big payday, he starts hugging and dancing with his safe in ways that were... uncomfortable.

The other issue in the movie is Jeanne herself. She's beautiful, but she's not terribly active. Stuff simply happens to her. Her one moment of action toward the end allows her to identify the real criminal, but she really just blunders into that moment. There's not much to root for with our heroine.

The Love of Jeanne Ney has all the trappings of a Hitchcock tale, but without its scope. Pabst seems to be bridging the gap between the silent era and what is to come. Definitely recommend.

**** out of *****

Photo from ithankyou

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Happy Blogiversary to Me

Our regularly scheduled programming will return in a moment but...

Today marks two years since I sat down and watched 1910's Frankenstein and decided to post something about it here.  A lot has changed in that time.  Some good, some bad.  Even when I've taken some breaks from my blogging though, I knew 100 Years of Movies was there waiting for me.

So let me take a moment just to say "Thanks!"  To my wife and family for putting up with me when I turn on what my son refers to as "one of those movies."  To Netflix, without which I cannot even fathom how I would do this.  And to the readers, whether you are checking out each post or reading about that one movie. 

I have learned a ton about film over the last 731 days.  The thought that I'm 19 years into my film watching after two years is a little daunting, but exciting as well.

Thanks for reading the site.  Cheers!

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The Wind (1928)

Directed by Victor Sjöström

Starring Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson and Montagu Love 

Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM)

In a barren desert landscape, a train navigates the rocky terrain, buffeted on all sides by wind and sand.

Within a passenger car sits Letty, a single woman on her way from Virginia to stay with her cousin Beverly and his family on a hard-scrabble plot of land in Texas. A cattle rancher takes an interest in Letty and there are some sparks before the wind intrudes, blowing through an open window in the car.

Once at the station, Letty disembarks and is escorted to her cousin's house by the rancher Wirt Roddy and two cowboys, Lige and Sourdough (because really what else would you name cowboys?).  Her cousin is thrilled to see her and his kids take an immediate liking to her as well.  Beverly's wife?  She sees Letty as a threat and starts pushing her rival out.

After demurring at first, Letty accepts Roddy's proposal to take her away from this wind-beaten patch of wasteland and moves out of her cousin's house. Of course Roddy decides that is the moment to reveal he already has a wife. Without a home or any prospects, Letty must marry either Lige or Sourdough. She goes the younger route and she and Lige get hitched.

Lige quickly realizes Letty does not love him and promises to save money to send her away. Complicating this plan is the unrelenting wind and desert which are killing off the cattle. Can Lige take Letty away from this spirit-crushing existence?  Or will Letty finally learn to live with her lot in life?



 I have admired a number of melodramas during my marathon. If there is a thread that connects those I have enjoyed, I'd say it's that as overwrought as the emotions became, the characters were consistent and their actions came from a place I could understand (if not agree with).

I don't get any of the people that populate The Wind.

The film is a series of characters making bad decisions. I started out wondering why the hell Letty would want to move to this barren landscape. By the end, I couldn't figure out why anyone lived there.

Letty moves in with her cousin and his family. Beverly's wife clearly doesn't want the outsider there. And not in a passive-aggressive dropping the occasional hint way. More of the in-your-face, "get out of my house now!" way.  You'd think maybe that issue would have come up before Letty got on the train.

So Letty marries Lige and she seems shocked when her new husband expects her to love him. Shocked that the husband expected his wife not to be repulsed by a simple kiss.

Later, Lige heads out to the range to survey the dead cattle with some other ranchers. First off, the cattle are dead because the ranchers are trying to graze them in the middle of the $&%#*@$ desert. Second, Letty insists that she cannot stay alone at home with the wind so she rides off into the middle of this constant sandstorm with Lige. And she gets thrown from her horse. And then she rides with Lige on his horse and that horse throws her. So she has to go back home anyway.

None of this would be terrible if the characters' motivations didn't seem so arbitrary scene-to-scene.  The film careens from one moment to the next with each of the players suffering from an amnesia that makes them forget everything they previously said or did.

The completely asinine story gets better acting than it deserves from the two leads. Lillian Gish is reliably great here as the woman being driven mad by gusts of wind. And Lars Hanson manages the trick of taking Lige, a character that begins as simple comic relief, and turning him into a fully formed, sympathetic human being.

There are some fantastic choices made by director Victor Sjöström. He builds the tension after an argument between the newlywed couple by focusing the camera on the husband's and wife's feet as they pace back and forth across the cabin, until Lige decides to break the stalemate.  We then follow his shoes until they reach Letty. The film's conclusion ratchets up the suspense and features a haunting shot of a dead body being buried by the wind blown sands.

While there are some positives here, it's not enough to save The Wind. The fundamental setup is so flawed and the script has the characters make increasingly stupid decisions.

** out of *****

NOTE: The titular weather from The Wind was produced using eight airplane engines.

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Steamboat Willie (1928)

Mickey Mouse pilots a steamboat down a river, merrily whistling along to the music of the ship's steam engines. Mickey is not the captain, and when the real pilot shows up he angrily kicks Mickey out of the cabin.

The boat pulls into a dock and loads up on farm animals. Minnie Mouse arrives too late to board, forcing the quick-thinking Mickey to snag his squeeze with the boat's crane.

When a goat eats Minnie's sheet music and guitar, the mice are forced to improvise. Can Mickey still put on an impromptu show?  And what does the ship's captain think of this?

So here we have a piece of movie history. Walt Disney's first short to feature a synchronized soundtrack was actually Mickey's third foray onto the screen. Steamboat Willie was not the first film to use the new technology, but it was the most popular and launched a movie studio as well as a media and merchandising empire.

The technology is front and center here. Films like The Jazz Singer used "sound-on-disc" technology. The music and dialogue would play independent of the film. This worked wonderfully as long as neither the sound or the film skipped or changed speeds.   The technology required someone to constantly monitor the presentation.

"Sound-on-film" technology eliminated the synchronizing issue. The sound is on the same reel of film as the images so if the projector is at the wrong speed, the sound still plays with right frames of film.

As I said, Steamboat Willie was not the first to use "sound-on-film," but it was the film to popularize it.

So is the film any good?



It is, but it still has some of the issues we've seen in Disney's previous work.  Mickey as a character is a lot of fun here. He's mischievous and looking for a good time on his boat. His humor and playfulness are infectious in a way Disney failed to reach with his previous creations Julius and Oswald. It's easy to see how the mouse became an icon.

The other big boon to the story is the sound and it is a real achievement. After watching almost 20 years worth of silents, the contrast between those and Steamboat Willie is staggering. Every movement by each character produces a whistle or a grunt or a song.

In fact, there are moments where the novelty of the sound becomes an issue. In a couple of scenes, the film lingers only to show off the sounds being made. It's the equivalent of a 3D film constantly jamming foreground objects in your face. The filmmakers understand the novelty of what they are doing and show off a bit.

The other problem here is the way some of the animals get treated. Mickey plays a cat as an instrument by swinging it around by its tail, turns a duck into a bagpipe and pulls a half dozen piggies from their mom before playing the sow by pulling her... well, you get the picture.

The only thing that saves these sequences is their brevity and the fact that we've already built up some goodwill toward our hero. It's a minor quibble, but it's there and unfortunately distracting from this landmark film.

I've probably seen the opening 30 seconds of Steamboat Willie a hundred times, but this was the first time seeing all seven plus minutes. It remains a fun and impressive achievement. Flaws and all, this is definitely required viewing for film fans.

 **** out of *****

Photo from DisneyWiki

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The Circus (1928)

Directed by Charlie Chaplin
Starring Charlie Chaplin, Merna Kennedy and Al Ernest Garcia
Produced by Charles Chaplin Productions

The circus has come to town and our starving and poor, but ever loveable Tramp is checking out the festivities.  He gets mistaken for a pickpocket and ends up running from the police taking refuge in a mirrored fun house and posing as a mechanized mannequin before finally ending up in the center ring of the circus.

The Tramp's exploits make the audience howl with laughter when the circus' own clowns could not.  The ringmaster gives our hero a tryout, but soon realizes the Tramp is only funny when he's not trying to be.  He brings the poor guy on as a janitor, but always makes sure he finds himself in the center of the action.

The Tramp doesn't even notice.  He's too smitten with the ringmaster's step-daughter.  Our hero thinks he has a shot at happiness with this girl until the new tightrope walker Rex enters the picture.  The girl instantly falls for this new and hunky performer.

Can the Tramp win the girl?  And will he survive his own walk along the high wire long enough to find out?



That's more like it.

It's been three years since The Gold Rush, a classic that felt all wrong to me.  I've been looking for the Charlie Chaplin I loved in The Kid and his early shorts.

While not The Kid, The Circus does a much better job of balancing the humor and pathos that have come to define one of cinema's most iconic characters.

The opening few minutes are hilarious and inventive as Chaplin accidentally ends up with a wallet stolen from another man by a pickpocket.  Both Chaplin and the pickpocket end up on the run and keep running into one another throughout the carnival surrounding the circus.  The chase through the mirror maze is funny, Chaplin's posing as a mechanized animatronic is hysterical and the entire chase crescendos on a revolving platform in the center ring of the circus.  It's fun and it gets our plot going.

The one-sided romance between Chaplin and the girl is sweet, but never overbearing.  It's also carried out in a realistic way with the Tramp performing small acts of kindness for his potential love. It's genuinely heart-breaking when the Tramp (and the audience) learn she has fallen in love with Rex.

Of course, the circus setting provides Chaplin with no end of set-ups for comedy bits and a few deliver.  My favorites were his interaction with a slumbering lion, his cheering for Rex to fall from the tightrope and of course the brilliant climax where the Tramp cheats a bit to perform his own routine on the tightrope.

There are a lot of bits that fall flat as well.  The use of the magician's booth was a bit too obvious. His racing around inexplicably kicking people due to his happiness just felt wrong.  But these are moments and they pass.

The ending of the film was pitch perfect, reminding me of the character's portrayal in his early shorts.  I won't spoil it here, but it's definitely the Tramp we all know and love in the end.

The Circus isn't perfect, but it's much better, tighter and funnier affair than The Gold Rush.  If you are a fan of Chaplin's other works, you should check it out.

**** out of *****
Photo from the Museum of Modern Art

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Felix the Cat Shorts (1928)

Comicalamities, Astronomeus and Outdoor Indore

It's 1928.  Time for another round of Felix the Cat shorts!

In Comicalamities, Felix enlists the help of the artist who draws him to woo a female cat.   In Astronomeus, Felix harpoons a bicyclist on Saturn and gets booted to Mars which he repopulates with thousands of cats.  Outdoor Indore features our hero falling prey to a firehose accident which fires him halfway around the world.

All three of these are more inventive than anything Walt Disney has put out to this point in history.  My personal favorite was Comicalamities which is clearly influenced by Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell shorts.  The artist becomes a character himself, first drawing Felix then adding a tail to his impatient creation.  When Felix comes across a lady cat, he has the artist give her a makeover.

Beyond the connections to Fleischer's earlier work, the animation here is beautiful. Unlike most cartoons, Felix actually moves in three dimensions here, swimming toward and away from the camera during an underwater sequence.  I particularly love the ending of this one which is both surprising and totally consistent with the previous set-up.

While Comicalamities was the best of the three, the other two are fantastic.  Some of the ideas present here are out-of-this-world brilliant.  From the creature design on Mars to Felix' use of a tiger's stripes as a ladder to him charming two snakes to turn into a bike, there are animation ideas here I love.  It's fun and whimsical if not laugh-out loud funny.

I knew nothing of Felix the Cat cartoons before starting 100 Years of Movies, but they are becoming one of my favorite stops during each year of cinematic history.  Not as funny as the Warner Bros. cartoons I grew up, they are fun diversion and impressive in their animation style.

Comicalamities: ****1/2 out of *****
Astronomeus: **** out of *****
Outdoor Indore: ***1/2 out of *****

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