LAMB Devours the Oscars

I'm not planning on weighing in on the Oscars.  I've seen a grand total of four of the ten best picture nominees and am not terribly interested in a couple of the choices.

Fortunately, there is another option for readers like me.  The Large Association of Movie Blogs is holding a blogging marathon called LAMB Devours the Oscars.  Each day for 31 days, they will feature a new post related to this year's Oscar awards.

  Love seeing Roger Deakins get some love!  You should check it out.

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The Paleface (1922)

Buster tied to a pole... sort of...

Directed by Buster Keaton
Starring Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox and Joe Roberts
Produced by Buster Keaton Productions

In a rural part of America, a tribe of Indians lives in peace and harmony on their land.  Their tranquility is shattered when a group of oil barons steals the dead to their land.  The furious chief orders the death of the first white man to walk through their gate as retribution.

In walks Buster Keaton chasing a butterfly.

The tribe begins following Keaton around as he explores the insects on their land.  He eventually catches on that they mean him harm and he tries unsuccessfully to escape.  They tie Keaton to a pole, but he pulls the pole from the ground and changes positions as they attempt to build a fire around him.

He eventually does get away, finds and abandoned cabin and constructs some fire proof underwear from some asbestos fabrics.  Now when he is captured, he miraculously survives the burning and the tribe deifies him.

Can Buster help his adopted family get their land back?  And what will a competing tribe have to say about these developments?

As with other Keaton shorts, the plot of The Paleface is ancillary.  It's an excuse for Buster to pull off some great action-comedy set pieces.  The best of these is the bit with the pole described above.  Each time one of the Indians piles wood underneath Keaton's feet, Buster moves to a new spot when the Indian's back is turned.  The execution between the players is perfect for the gag.

Once Buster is accepted into the tribe, he leads the warriors to the office of the oil company and they threaten the businessman with a tribal dance.  Keaton interrupts the dance to critique one of the dancer's moves.  When one of the oil barons attempts to escape, Buster follows and returns with a toupee in hand.  The chief is impressed with the paleface's scalping abilities.

I watched this one with my eight-year-old and he loved it.  The sight gags and pratfalls hit him right in the funny bone every time.

The Paleface is another Keaton short and that is its greatest strength and primary weakness.  It's funny and contains some inventive gags, but it is cut from the same cloth as the comic's previous work.

*** out of *****

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Beyond the Rocks (1922)

Valentino and Swanson

Directed by Sam Wood
Starring Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Robert Bolder
Produced by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation

Poor Theodora.  What's a girl to do?

The youngest of three daughters born to a widower, she's the family's meal ticket if she can find a wealthy man to marry.  She's out in a boat one day and falls into the water, only to be rescued by the dashing Earl of Bracondale Hector.  He brings her onto the beach and she thanks him with a Narcissus flower (robbed of its scent by the water).

Theodora eventually receives her marriage proposal, but it's from Josiah Brown, an older, rotund grocer-turned millionaire who is seemingly looking for the trophy wife.  His money will help save her family so she says yes.

Theodora is now walking in the circles of the upper crust.  On their honeymoon in the Alps, a tired Josiah begs off hiking up a mountain, so Theodora goes out with a friend and a guide, but ends up falling off a cliff.  As she dangles precariously in the air, Hector fortuitously comes to her rescue.

Hector is now smitten.  Theodora is falling in love with the young aristocrat.  Will Theodora cast her family obligation aside and go off with Hector?  Or will she stay with a man she does not love out of a sense of duty?  And just what does Josiah think?

I am really surprised how much I liked this one.  Romance is not normally my thing, but the story here is almost constantly engaging and it moves along at a good clip (with one misstep; more on that to come).

The casting here is spot-on.  Gloria Swanson plays Theodora with beauty and elegance, but also a dangerous streak.  It's easy to see why when men fall for her, they fall hard.

And Rudolph Valentino: I now totally understand the mystique.  He underplays Hector in the movie.  He's a lazy, carefree playboy, but will totally change his ways for the right woman.  Theodora is that woman.  And she's taken.  You believe he is smitten with her, but he is also willing to step aside if she chooses to stay in her marriage.

Which bring me to the element that elevates this above most traditional romances: Josiah.  The romantic drama playbook is pretty absolute in its conventions.  If it's a choice between two guys, one must be a jerk.  It makes the woman's choice clear: stay with the guy undeserving of love or move to the one you belong with.  Beyond the Rocks does not make that easy choice.

Josiah is a nice guy.  He genuinely cares about Theodora and when he realizes she loves Hector, he's crushed.  He's so hurt, he undertakes a dangerous trip to north Africa, in the hopes that the dangerous terrain may end his life.  He starts out as this cardboard character that you expect to loathe.  By the end of the movie, he's a tragic hero who is the source of any emotion the audience feels.

The movie follows the travels of jet-setting aristocrats and the production design is spot on.  Every garden is impeccably manicured, every grand hall appropriately lavish.  The film gives its beautiful cast a series of gorgeous backdrops.

The only real problem for me in the movie is a sequence in which Hector tells Theodora the story of two lovers from the past and the film then shows us the story with Swanson and Valentino playing the parts.  The film grinds to a halt during the sequence.  It's unnecessary and overlong.

Beyond the Rocks is a movie I want to revisit with my wife.  It's a slight tale elevated by its actors and by some unconventional storytelling choices.  Definitely worth checking out.

****1/2 out of *****
Photo from GoneMovie.com

NOTE: Beyond the Rocks was thought to be a lost movie until a print was discovered in 2003.  That's right.  Barely seven years ago, people could not see this one.  It makes me sad to think of all the amazing cinema that has been lost to time.  It makes me hopeful to think there are still treasures waiting to be discovered in someone's attic.

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1922: Now Brought to You in 3-D!

After an extended stay in 1921, we are moving on to 1922 (naturally).  Former President Taft dedicated the Lincoln Memorial, the site of numerous movie scenes (notably for me, Clint Eastwood's quiet moments from In the Line of Fire).  The Irish Free State forms with the Big Fella at its head.  And archaeologists entered King Tut's tomb.

In the movie world, The Power of Love was the first 3-D film ever made (complete with red and green glasses).  Russian filmmakers begin experimenting with montages (my hometown hero Rocky is forever in your debt).  And a couple of significant franchises are born: Rin-Tin-Tin and Our Gang (though no Alfalfa or Spanky yet).

The biggest news happened off-screen as Hollywood, nervous about compulsory censorship, creates the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America to manage its content.  By 1930, the organization's Hays Code would become the driving force behind movie censorship for decades.  Ultimately, the organization became the Motion Picture Association of America which continues to make baffling ratings decisions today.

So, what are we watching?  Honestly, I am not planning on staying here long.  I am very excited to do my first revisiting of a movie I saw before: Nosferatu.  It's been about 15 years since I watched it on video.  Besides that, Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood, Beyond the Rocks with Rudolph Valentino, and Oliver Twist (Lon Chaney!) are on my list. 

Photo from Wired

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The Three Musketeers (1921)

Fairbanks takes the high ground

Directed by Fred Niblo
Starring Douglas Fairbanks, Léon Bary and George Siegmann
Produced by Douglas Fairbanks Pictures

Young, ambitious D'Artagnan sets off from his small town for Paris to fulfill his lifelong dream: to join the King's musketeers.  Along the way, he runs afoul of Rochefort, the right hand man of the evil Cardinal Richelieu.  D'Artagnan meets musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis, challenging them each to a duel, but the fight becomes a battle between the four men and the cardinal's guards.

Meanwhile, Richelieu is plotting against King Louis XIII.  His plan?  To retrieve a diamond buckle that the king gave to the queen, but that the queen gave to the English Duke she's in love with.  If Richelieu succeeds, he'll... um...errr....

Okay, the plot of this movie makes zero sense.  The king gives the queen a diamond jewel, making a point to say that it is one-of-a-kind.  Impossible to reproduce.  The queen immediately turns around and gives it to the duke.  The cardinal witnesses this and, rather than accuse her on the spot, convinces the king to ask the queen to wear the bling to a ball a few days later. So, we get a lots of scenes of the queen wringing her hands and the Cardinal looking very self-satisfied.  It also means our hero can race to England to try and retreive the bauble. 

It's easy to dismiss the story as a meaningless excuse for Fairbanks to be let loose his manic energy, but the film spends a lot of time on the plot.  There are a lot of scenes that exist to communicate the gravity and stakes of the situation.  We see lots of symbolic chess games.  We get lots of characters making bold pledges with massive flourishes of the arms. We get a lot of our villain and our damsel in distress pondering their plans and fates.  We try to build tension as the cardinal's men assemble for the climax while D'Artagnan races toward the city.  So, the story matters and it is nonsensical. 

As for Fairbanks, he is fine here.  Not great, but not bad.  He shines when there are action scenes, but there aren't enough chases and battles in this movie to distract from his poor acting in the other scenes.  He spends much of the movie with this completely earnest look on his face that is just painful to watch.  To say nothing of the fact that he is way too old to play this part.  He looks the same age as the other musketeers, if not older.  That would be fine if they adapted the story to service his age, but they make a point of him being a younger man several times.

The movie works during its inventive action scenes.  I like the swordfight early on between the musketeers and the cardinal's guards.  D'Artagnan's one-on-dozens battle and subsequent escape over Paris' rooftops is thrilling.  And the final fight between our hero and Rochefort feels like an epic precursor to Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood climax.

The standout performance here for me was Nigel De Brulier's Cardinal Richelieu.  He never really does anything overtly bad, but one look at the guy and you know he's evil.  You can always see the wheels turning in his head and his eyes relish the moments when he thinks he has won.  I also love the Bond villain like secret door and staircase in his office.

The other notable achievement of the film is in the production design.  The king's halls feel grand.  Paris feels like a lived in place populated by real people, not extras.  The scenes of Fairbanks following a young woman he has just saved through the nighttime streets makes the alleys look menacing and foreboding.

One last thing: the ending for this is silly and not in a good, Fairbanks-y way.  The Richelieu from the previous 98 percent of the movie would never do what he does at the end.  the change in character is ridiculously jarring and sets up a "hey, everything worked out" ending that is really unearned.

At the end of the day, The Three Musketeers is a movie that wants to have it both ways.  It wants to be a zany, comic action-adventure. It also wants to be a palace intrigue thriller.  It accomplishes neither.  It's overstuffed with story and characters and isn't as filled with the Fairbanks brand of boundless energy as his previous work.  And that's a disappointment as I loved Fairbanks' take on Zorro.

**1/2 out of *****

Photo from DVDTalk

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Shameless Self-Promotion: The Kid and Other Things

I want to give some love to the LAMB blog for featuring the 100 Years' review of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid!  I also want to make sure people check out Chris Edwards' look at Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, originally reviewed here.

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Leaves from Satan's Book (1921)

Jesus, the apostles and a lot of text

Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
Starring Helge Nissen (and a lot of other people)
Produced by Nordisk Film

The war in heaven is over and Satan has lost.  As his punishment, Satan is sentenced to tempt humans into evil actions.  If people give into temptation, Satan receives another 100 years of punishment.  However, if they can resist, God will remove 1000 years from Satan's sentence.

Leaves from Satan's Book follows the devil as he attempts to sow the seeds of evil at the time of the Crucifixion, the Inquisition, the French Revolution and the Finnish Civil War.  There is one good movie here, two okay ones and one that is terrible.

The best of the four is the tale during the French Revolution.  As the aristocrats are rounded up, Joseph. a servant of the Count de Chambord, sneaks his master's wife and daughter into Paris to avoid the guillotine.  Joseph is in love with the daughter, but she does not reciprocate his feelings.  Satan, in the form of Erneste, brings Joseph into the Jacobin circle.  Erneste points out to Joseph that he only needs to threaten to expose the lineage of the de Chambords.  Joseph resists, but Satan forges a letter to the Jacobins about the aristocrats and blames it on Joseph.  If the man admits he did not author the letter, he will be led to the guillotine.  If he lies and says he exposed the women, he will be hated forever by the woman he loves.  What will he do?

The two okay movies follow similar paths, albeit with different endings.  The Inquisition episode revolves around a priest that lusts after a woman.  He can use his position to pressure the woman.  In the Finnish story, a man in love with a Finnish patriot's wife threatens to inform on the couple to the Red army.  These two are pretty simple tales told well by the director.

The same cannot be said of the Bible story.  It's poorly acted, poorly edited and has no tension at all.  There are random cuts to close-ups of people's faces that are inexplicable.  The film never shows us during this episode, it tells us.  Almost nothing is conveyed by the camera; it's all done through title cards.  Satan's influence over the high priests makes no sense because they are already screaming for blood.  And there's nothing like building dramatic tension by telling a story that everyone knows and bringing nothing different to it.

There's a flotilla of actors here and none are extraordinary.  Helge Nissen's Satan connects the tales and you never feel the internal conflict he must have being cursed to entreat people into actions that lengthen his own punishment.

I can't really recommend anyone sit through this.  The opening tale is the Passion and it is horrendous.  The other three are okay, but nothing special.

** out of *****

Photo from Greencine Daily

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