Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 3

  Keaton is, to reference Woody Allen again, by far the “cooler” artist. And there is a quiet brilliance about his work as a filmmaker, a reluctance to sell it out for a quick gag (or a stroke of genius), that Chaplin does not quite match. He was, moreover, working with a handicap unknown to Chaplin: that perpetually frozen face, never allowed to lapse into alarm at the predicaments he stumbled into. It is simply astonishing how the laughter keeps building and building despite the minimalism engendered by this endlessly recurring affectlessness. (Of course, he manifested other, more physical responses to peril—running away from it, for example, though, even then, he maintained a certain dignity as he fled the jurisdiction of chaos.)

  There is one other factor that adds to the degree of difficulty in his work. This utterly brilliant athlete had always to appear awkward while doing his stunts—as if he were everyman, confronting unimaginable peril yet soldiering on through it. It is at the heart of the identification he forges with his audience. He must, as we surely would not, stumble through to his ultimate triumphs. He cannot, for a second, look like he knows what he is doing. Or is about to do. And yet, of course, the planning that went into his manically extended thrill sequences is mind-bending.

  Oddly enough, I find it difficult to choose a single Keaton film for inclusion in this book. There are wonderful things in almost all of his films—the rescue of his girlfriend from the raging torrent in Our Hospitality; the mad near-miss chase between him and his girlfriend on the deserted ship in The Navigator; the entire concept of Sherlock, Jr. Then there is the epic adventurousness of The General (1926), which seems to me less a comedy (though, of course, it has plenty of wonderful comic bits) than an attempt to broaden his canvas. (He spent hugely on the film, for example risking over $40,000 on a shot of a train engine plunging from a bridge into a gorge, which elicits no more than a blank response from a watching officer, truly a spectacular nonevent in the plot.) But the movie, said to be Keaton’s favorite of all his works, was a flop at the time, and it does seem to me, at times, a somewhat halting and patchy film.

  Pressed, I’m going to give the palm to The Navigator. It is an economical film—perhaps an hour long—and it is nonstop and unpretentiously funny, maybe the most inspired and beautifully integrated and sustained of all his comedic efforts. All movies with any aspirations to lingering regard aspire to perfection, and even the best of them usually fail to find it (there are a few exceptions). This movie, because of the modesty of its goals, achieves something like that state. It is just lovely fun. I wouldn’t change a frame of it.

  4

  Ironies

  Two of the three greatest stars of the American silent screen were Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks the elder. She was pert, tiny and appealing; he was bold, dashing and appealing in quite a different manner. Together with Chaplin (Fairbanks’s best friend) they were the beneficiaries and victims of the modern celebrity system, which they essentially invented with their rather slapdash ways. Yet today they are virtually forgotten—unfairly.

  Pickford is condemned (mostly by people who haven’t seen many, or any, of her films) as sentimental and too perky by half. Fairbanks, of course, became the muscular, always laughing exponent of costumed athletic spectacle, a genre he virtually owned, and one that did not fare well after sound pictures arrived. These descriptions do not tell the half of their stories. There was more steel in her screen character than she openly admits, and a picture like Sparrows (in which she rescues children from a baby farm deep in southern swamp country) is an exciting adventure, bravely enacted by a resourceful actress. His spectacles (notably The Thief of Bagdad and Robin Hood) were wonderfully overproduced and sensationally rich in “gags,” as their many glorious action sequences proved.

  But it was not just a shift in taste that reduced these performers to footnotes. In effect, age did them in. They both became too old to sustain their essential youthful character, and neither could reinvent themselves in a new movie era. That was especially true of Fairbanks. He was forty-six in 1929, muscle-bound and uninterested in pursuing his previous course. His later years were devoted, without conviction, to vanity productions. Pickford was the same age and could not transcend her established character, either. She soldiered on a little more successfully than he did, winning an Oscar in 1929. But her relationship with fame was much more ambiguous than his. Their divorce was messy, a comedy of errors, really, and in her later years there was a drinking problem and a taste for seclusion.

  They possibly do not demand inclusion here, but I include them anyway—for Sparrows and for Thief of Bagdad. Pickford and Fairbanks remain potent exemplars of the spirit of their time, and when it comes to movies, you don’t have to apologize for liking them. I suspect the American movie would not have developed as it did, with its ineluctable sense of melodrama and spectacle, if these two performers had not so delightfully—and so profitably—existed. Try them some night. You will be more than surprised at how their images transcend their current reputations.

  King Vidor, a director about whom we will shortly have more to say, was musing, in the 1970s, about the beginning of his career, some fifty years earlier. He said, in effect, that if he had known about the attention that would be focused on the films of his early days, “he would have made them better.” That’s perhaps false modesty, but he was also saying that from 1920 to 1925 the more aspirational filmmaking was taking place largely in Europe, not in the United States, which nevertheless began its permanent world box office domination in this era. He cited, for example, the influence of German Expressionism and the rise of the Russian historical spectacles on the relatively few American directors who wanted their films to play for more than a few weeks in general release and not disappear, seemingly forever, from the world’s screens. He was speaking at a time when a cinephile audience had arisen, determined to trace the not entirely undistinguished roots of American film history to its beginnings and to honor its pioneers.

  It was during the period to which Vidor was referring that Rudolph Valentino crammed most of his career—discovery, huge stardom, a switch to (mostly masculine) contempt and premature death. At the end of that time, Garbo was discovered and soon became the dominant star of her era (though, oddly, not the greatest box office attraction), and Ernst Lubitsch came to America and made what he always considered his best film, The Marriage Circle (1924). D. W. Griffith struggled financially and artistically, trying to support a studio of his own and his habit of making historical spectacles that were awkward and seemed old-fashioned to a public that wanted something jazzier.

  There was another side to Griffith, which he chose not to exploit, yoked as he was to spectacle and “importance.” He was rarely entirely comfortable with the broad canvases of works like Way Down East or Orphans of the Storm, though he occasionally had some success with them. He was best at films like True Heart Susie and A Romance of Happy Valley, smaller pictures that referenced his early Biograph days and his own boyhood days in rural Kentucky. They have an ease and charm (and Lillian Gish, not trying too hard) that is sweet and funny and ages better than his more expensive and portentous efforts.

  Griffith made, and released in 1924, what I think is one of his best pictures, Isn’t Life Wonderful, a story of a German family plagued by famine and inflation. It summoned not overblown history, but the austere pleasures of what was his best vein: simple people struggling with simple, yet deadly, issues of survival. As a Griffith biographer, knowing much too much about him, I stand in a more ambiguous relationship to his life and career than most. He was a bit of a humbug and something of a poseur, and—never forget—the author of the noisome The Birth of a Nation. He has a lot to answer for. But in his early days he had a taste for simple stories about ordinary people that were gently sentimental, faintly comical and very appealing. Isn’t Life Wonderful represents a reversion to that vein, and the truest indicator of his feelings.

  It is perhaps the least well-known of his feature films—not that any of them are well
known anymore—and it did nothing to halt his slide first into irrelevancy and then into silence. Yet it is a beautifully felt and realized work, and though he made many other films with much larger impacts on the public and on film history, I believe Isn’t Life Wonderful deserves a place in this book.

  If you study movie history at all, you learn this, if nothing else: It is all irony. Griffith, for instance, flopped back to bombast and empty spectacle immediately after Isn’t Life Wonderful and never recovered his former pace or significance. And that says nothing of the largest irony of all: the fact that silent movies reached their highest level of sophistication and achievement (certainly in America) just as they were rendered irrelevant by the coming of sound.

  Consider the legendary Greed (1925). Basically Erich von Stroheim wanted to make a shot-by-shot version of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague, with a running time of perhaps seven hours. This he proceeded to do at MGM, with the producer Irving Thalberg, both a friend and an enemy of the director, wisecracking that Stroheim had “a footage fetish.” It wouldn’t do, of course; the studio cut it to a little over two hours and released it to considerable dubiety, tinged with admiration for Stroheim’s undoubted visionary qualities. Greed is not, in any sense, a likable movie; and it’s not one that I ever want to see again. Yet it is also something that must be reckoned with, if only because this story of murder, theft and blighted romance testifies to the vaulting ambition of Hollywood at the time. Thalberg told Vidor that Hollywood must occasionally indulge itself in follies like Greed. It could afford them and it could sometimes make money on them. Implicit in this comment was the notion that film could not truly be a respected art form if it did not do so. Thus Greed was, and was not, a signpost on the halting way forward. It has to be seen by anyone who claims a serious interest in film. Even in the cut version, it has passages of great power. Decades later, Hollywood would have known what to do with it—release it at its full length, and enjoy deserved praise for its courage or madness or whatever. But the time was not ripe. Something more disciplined, more in control, less brutish, more self-consciously beautiful was in order.

  Something like Sunrise (1927). It was a product of F. W. Murnau, a master of German Expressionism who was only thirty-eight when the film was released, and died three years later in an automobile accident. Yet by that comparatively tender age he had made Nosferatu (1922), to this day the greatest of the Dracula movies, because of the way it married the grotesque with the poetic in a dreamlike (but not dreamy) way. He had also made The Last Laugh, about a hotel doorman demoted to washroom attendant, with Emil Jannings improbably achieving a studio-imposed happy ending that, despite our resistance, touches us.

  Now Murnau was in Hollywood, working at Fox, on Sunrise. It was the set everyone in Hollywood wanted to visit when the film was in production. (The Jazz Singer was shooting, unheralded, at Warner Bros. at the same time. History has a way of sneaking up on Hollywood.) The film tells a very simple, almost abstract story. George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor are a not entirely happy farm couple. He lusts for the bright lights of the big city, just a boat ride away across a lake, and for Margaret Livingston, a temptress from the big town. He thinks about murdering his wife on a visit to the city. Instead, they have innocent fun there—a lovely meal, dancing, having their picture taken—and rekindle their romance. On the boat ride home across the lake, a storm comes up, and she is lost overboard and thought to be dead. The next morning she is found, and all ends happily.

  It doesn’t sound like much, and maybe it isn’t. But the beauty of its making, which triumphs over the banality (and abstraction) of its narrative, forms a wonderful contrast to the frenzied scenes of city life, delirious in their expressionism. The director is perfectly in control of this contrast, and there is a remarkable paucity of intertitles—not always the case in “serious” silent films. Lack of dialogue rendered unto the director unquestioned control over his film. Intertitles were often an afterthought (and often ludicrously out of key with a film’s intent), and indeed, Murnau had made The Last Laugh without resort to any intertitles at all. Dialogue and a carefully detailed script were requisites for sound production and this, in effect, set up a second power center for films. Unless a director participated in the writing, his authorship of a movie was necessarily diminished.

  This was clearly not the case with Sunrise. It was so obviously Murnau’s vision, elegantly abetted by the moving cameras of Charles Rosher and Karl Struss. The film was not a commercial success. It was only in later years that it achieved its high and deserved reputation, which, even so, is diminished by its having been released at the very end of the silent era. Sunrise is unlike any other film ever made—in story, theme and quality of presentation. It has taken decades for people to recognize that it is largely without precedent or successors in film history, and its admirers are a relative few. Sunrise has never been entirely lost. But it has never been entirely found, either.

  5

  The System

  By 1925 the studio system was fully empowered. Pictures continued to be made independently, but they were not able, by and large, to make their way unaided by studio backing. In this year, King Vidor, who had been making films outside the major studios, moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and into the welcoming orbit of Irving Thalberg. Vidor was thirty-one at the time, Thalberg twenty-six, and they took a shine to one another that might have been partially generational but was clearly based on ambition as well—not just for their own interests, I think, but for the medium to which they were devoted. They were among the first men who came to the movies without any special loyalty to other fields, such as the theater. They thought, at least part of the time, that the movies could be, among other things, an art form. Thalberg, as I said, felt that a prospering studio like MGM could from time to time afford to trade profits for the prestige of making thoughtful, occasionally stodgy movies that appealed to the small but influential audience for what we may call the “finer things.” Sometimes you didn’t even have to sacrifice profits to attain that goal.

  A case in point was Vidor’s sixth film for the studio, The Big Parade (1925). It was time for Hollywood to come seriously to grips with World War I. (A year later, Raoul Walsh would make the equally good What Price Glory.) It is an antiheroic movie. An ordinary doughboy (John Gilbert) goes to war, endures some action in France, is wounded, comes home and then restlessly returns to Europe and, still limping from his wound, embraces Renée Adorée, the French girl whom he belatedly recognizes as his true love.

  The film achieves its power simply, and is the better for it. There is, for example, a fine sequence in which American troops advance, under fire, through dense woods. Implacability is suggested by having them move to the beat of a large bass drum, one step every time it sounds. (The audience could not hear its booming beat, because it was a silent film.) The important thing about the movie was not its style, but rather Vidor’s stress on the ordinariness of his hero (or antihero). For now, and for several years in the future, he wanted his principals to be anonymous, mere faces in the crowd, almost accidentally picked out by his camera. Lots of movies, perhaps the majority of them, aspire to this condition, but most of them eventually succumb to the temptation of exceptionalism—eventually the hero indulges himself in the atypical heroic act or romantic gesture. In this period, Vidor’s people did not. And the audience picked up on that. The Big Parade was a very successful film, and it encouraged Thalberg to ask for more.

  Vidor made other pictures, of course, notably La Bohème, during the filming of which he actually thought Lillian Gish had died, so still did she become in one of her swoons. But his masterpiece of this era and perhaps of all his films came in 1928, in response to a casual query from Thalberg about what he was thinking about doing next. He didn’t know, but, according to his autobiography, a thought popped into his head: a film about how an ordinary man and woman might wander through life, observing and experiencing the usual ups and downs of its passage, triumphs and tragedies on a fairly
modest yet compelling scale. They thought at first to call it “One of the Mob” but eventually settled on The Crowd. Vidor shot the film in a highly expressionistic style, using as the couple he follows his own wife, Eleanor Boardman, and an extra, James Murray, whom he had spotted in a crowd leaving the studio one afternoon. One of the film’s salient qualities was its ease with expressionism. There were lots of raked and otherwise odd angles in it, plenty of things no one else was doing in American films—in one wonderful shot, the camera tracks up a skyscraper’s exterior, enters a window and reveals hundreds of workers at their drone-like toil in a vast office space. (The back rows were filled with dwarfs.) But still he was almost casual (excepting a few shots like the one just alluded to) in his devices. Sometimes you don’t even notice what he’s doing at first glance. It is masterful moviemaking. Perhaps most important, these people never become abstractions; there is enough specificity in their lives to keep us fully involved in them before, finally, they melt back into “the crowd.”

  The movie was widely acknowledged as something unique and important at the time, but it did not have much influence on Hollywood. There was no rush to imitate its style. It was one of the great one-offs of film history. Not that Vidor was done with his great run of the late twenties. He followed this film with a genial and expert comedy, Show People, in which a young woman comes to Hollywood intent on stardom, which she achieves. It is a tribute, perhaps slightly premature, to the early (or Mack Sennett) days of the industry. Who knew Vidor had a sense of humor?