I love the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for a lot of reasons. This is just one of many, but one that defines the spirit of the festival.

Fernando Martín Peña spent twenty years trying to track down the holy grail that was the complete, long though lost Metropolis. In collaboration with Paula Felix Didier, director of Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires, they found it, confirmed its authenticity and contacted the Murnau Foundation, which had undertaken the task to reconstructing the original version. It was only one of many elements that went into the definitive version now making the rounds in festivals and cinemateques around the world (lost footage was also recently discovered in a New Zealand archive, and better condition than the Argentinean print), but it was the essential missing link that provided not just footage unavailable in any form elsewhere, but an invaluable guide to the artists, historians and technicians doing the physical work of restoring and reconstructing the definitive version.

And yet he had not seen the finished restoration until its screening at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

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The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the biggest and most well-curated silent film festival in the United States, celebrates its 15^th edition by adding a day of screenings, opening Thursday, July 15 with a screening of John Ford’s The Iron Horse (from Dennis James’ personal 35mm print) and then launching into the weekend with the Friday evening screenings of Rotaie (1929), a late silent from Italy, and the newly restored Metropolis (1927), in a digital presentation with accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra, all at the historic Castro Theatre (in this case, historic also mean no air conditioning, so attendees are dressing in layers and watching the weather).

I won’t launch into a big preview—that’s been ably done by Michael Hawley at The Evening Class, Hell on Frisco Bay and Anne Hockens on SIFFBlog (with links to short previews of the individual films by David Jeffers), while Michael Guillen anticipates the restored Metropolis and reprints an essay on the restoration by Bret Wood on The Evening Class. I’ll be dedicating my coverage to reviews and ruminations, starting with The Iron Horse, which launched the festival on its new Thursday opening night.

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Chicago (1927) (Flicker Alley) is the first screen incarnation of the story of jazz baby murderess Roxie Hart, first created in a play by former crime reporter Maurine Watkins that hit Broadway in 1926. Ginger Rogers played her in the William Wellman-directed Roxie Hart, which took the sex and cynicism right out of it, and of course it was turned into the Broadway musical that was brought to the screen in the 2002 Oscar winner. This version, produced (and in part directed) by Cecil B. DeMille, had been all but forgotten in the meantime, at least until a print was found in Cecil B. DeMille’s private collection, but even after select festival showings it’s still largely unknown. Hopefully this Flicker Alley DVD release will help take care of that.

Former Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty Phyllis Haver is Roxie, the bleached blond jazz baby of an unfaithful wife who plugs her wealthy lover (Eugene Palette) and tells her blindly adoring hubby Amos (Victor Varconi, an all-American type in the Joel McCrea mode) that it was burglar. Unlike future incarnations, this Amos is no sap, merely deluded by love, but his illusions are quickly shattered when he recognizes the dead man and finds one of her garters in his pocket. And as the press turns it into a front page scandal turned salacious soap opera, with Roxie as the willing star, the femme fatale playing the victimized innocent with all the subtlety of a second rate stage diva playing Victorian melodrama, Amos is the hero of the piece if only for his loyalty and sacrifice. Everyone else—from Roxie to the press to the assistant D.A.—simply uses the murder for their own notoriety with mercenary focus.

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Battleship Potemkin is the second silent classic released on Blu-ray by Kino (and for that matter, any label) in the United States. I review the film and the disc for the Turner Classic Movies website.

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was commissioned by the Soviet government to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the failed 1905 uprising against the Czar. The government hoped for a traditional film extolling the heroism of the sailors who led the mutiny against the Czarist military commanders. Eisenstein delivered a film that carried his revolutionary message of collective action against corrupt authority in the very form of his film, most directly through the editing that put his theories of montage to practice. Battleship Potemkin is agitprop, but cinematically magnificent agitprop, an attempt to redefine the conventions of narrative storytelling away from emotional connections with the dramatic journeys of individual characters and into a “socialist ideal” of revolutionary art where the hero is the collective hero and the individuals are simply members of the movement: faces in a crowd dedicated to the ideals of social justice.

Read the complete feature here.

I review the American home video debut of Rene Clair’s silent comedy classic The Italian Straw Hat, beautifully restored to its original length by David Shepard and released on DVD by Flicker Alley, for the Turner Classic Movies website.

Rene Clair’s reputation is primarily built on a trio of comic masterpieces of the early thirties that added the expressive possibilities of sound to film comedy without sacrificing the fluid style and creative imagery from the height of the silent era. Apart from dimension of sound, however, his mastery of cinema comedy first burst onto the screen in mature form in his 1927 masterpiece The Italian Straw Hat (Un chapeau de paille d’Italie), a fleet, lightfingered gem with the befuddled energy and knockabout momentum of a Harold Lloyd movie, the criss-crossing characters of a screwball comedy and the continental attitude and sparkling wit of a Lubitsch film.

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The original stage farce, Un chapeau de paille d’Italie, debuted in 1851 and was regularly revived well into the twentieth century. Clair appreciated the play’s narrative complications, momentum and movement and when Albatross Films acquired the rights, Clair wrote a screen adaptation (in a mere eight days, he later claimed) and updated the setting to “la Belle Epoque” of 1895 Paris, which is also (as critics have noted) the birth of cinema. For a story precipitated by simple plot mechanisms, Clair manages to develop it into a lively character comedy, and for all the narrative complications and criss-crossing character trajectories, Clair gets by with under forty intertitles and conveys the rest visually. He opens the film up (the scene of the horse eating the hat is not seen in the stage version) but more importantly he gives the stage farce a distinctly cinematic treatment, from his perfectly-timed cross-cutting to his flights of imagination. While the wedding party toasts the nuptials, we get carried into Fadinard comic nightmare visions of the officer destroying his home, and when he later tells the complicated story to a would-be ally, Clair illustrates it as a Victorian stage melodrama played out in exaggerated poses against a painted backdrop: it’s become his own personal tragedy, with him as the tormented hero.

Read the complete piece here.

The DVD of the Week is, without a doubt, Criterion’s magnificent edition of the 2008 restoration of Max Ophul’s final film, Lola Montes, and I review it here. But along with something old, Criterion has something new, or rather a couple of somethings new, foremost among them Steve McQueen’s unforgettable Hunger (Criterion). Before he went out speaking the king’s as a crisply proper British officer in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Michael Fassbender played Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands who, at the age of 27, went on a hunger strike in 1981 to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize IRA inmates as political prisoners. British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen creates a film unlike any traditional biopic or historical drama: an overwhelming visceral experience composed of the sight and sounds and sensations of men in prison, played out as an almost abstract portrait in power and resistance until the film’s sole dialogue, a debate between Sands and a Catholic Priest.

McQueen isn’t taking sides or making political points; in the brutal world of Ireland during the troubles, there’s plenty of reprehensible behavior to go around. Hunger is a study in the deterioration of the human body (we literally watch him waste away on camera) and the will it takes to endure such self-mortification in the name of cause. Available on DVD and Blu-ray, both featuring the tightly focused 13-minute documentary “The Making of Hunger,” bonus video interviews with McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender and a 1981 British TV documentary on the Maze prison hunger strikes, plus a booklet. As a side note, the menus are particularly haunting and unsettling.

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My DVD treat of the week is the giddy Soviet adventure serial Miss Mend (Flicker Alley). The 1926 epic, directed by Boris Barnet (who also co-stars as the heroic journalist) and Fedor Ozep, runs almost 4 ½ hours over three separate, feature-length chapters following the adventures of Miss Vivian Mend (Natalya Glan), dedicated typist and heroic supporter of the working class labor movement, and her doting admirers turned action heroes. “The whole city seems to be in the grip of some gigantic criminal conspiracy,” observes one of them, a photojournalist tracking the strange doings around the funeral of a millionaire industrialist to The Organization, a capitalist cabal bent on world domination through chemical warfare and political suppression (part of their dastardly plan is, of course, the demonization of the Bolsheviks as international criminals).

Early Soviet cinema wasn’t known for playfulness or escapist adventure (with a few exceptions), but this sprawling serial has both in a rapid-fire thriller that sends our heroes from their unnamed American East Coast city to Leningrad, where The Organization plans to destroy the Soviet Union with a plague. There are chases galore (on foot, in cars, on horseback), a stunning train wreck that leaves a mangled car with a body twisted in the wreckage (the villains coldly swap briefcases with the corpse so the cops will their phony documents on the victim), fistfights, bombs, and plenty of shots of vodka. Though modeled after the Douglas Fairbanks films and cliffhanger serials of Hollywood, the ruthless Dr. Mabuse-like villain and his devious campaign of murder, kidnapping, body-snatching and bribery also recalls Louis Feuillaude’s Fantomas serials and Fritz Lang’s Spies, but with more cheeky humor and quirky characters (what exactly is with all the boxing gear in the shared apartment of our heroic trio?). For the first few chapters, our heroes are consistently constantly outplayed and outsmarted by the devious capitalist conspirators, but you can’t keep a just cause down.

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Frequent readers of my blog (yes, both of you) may have noticed that I’ve dropped the ball on my "DVD for the Week" series at Parallax View. Yes, since I was already doing a weekly DVD column for MSN and a separate highlights list here, I decided it was too much. So I’ve decided to create something new for PV: a recurring feature on silent cinema, on the screen and especially on DVD.

I inaugurate "Silents Please!" with my coverage of the 14th Silent San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the weekend-long celebration that unspools every July at the Castro. In Part One, I cover the opening and closing night films: the Douglas Fairbanks feature The Gaucho (1927) and D.W. Griffith’s final silent feature Lady of the Pavements (1929). In Part Two, I spend time with Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927), the Czech feature Erotikon (1929), Gregory La Cava’s So’s Your Old Man (1926) W.C. Fields and the newly rediscovered and restored Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), starring John Gilbert and directed by King Vidor.

He was called “The Great Profile,” elevated as the great lover of the silent screen and held up as the greatest actor of his generation. In retrospect he left behind his share of hammy performances and lazy mugging, but when he was at his best, John Barrymore was a shining star of the silent screen. Kino has collected four Barrymore silents in The John Barrymore Collection, three of them new to Kino (but not necessarily new to DVD). The highlights come via the Killiam Collection, complete with the original seventies-era piano scores by William P. Perry recorded for repertory showings. The Beloved Rogue features Barrymore in swashbuckling form as François Villon, “poet, pickpocket, patriot” (as his introductory title card identifies him), a hard-drinking gadabout who satirized the King (Conrad Veidt, making his Hollywood debut in a comically gnarled performance) in his poetry but loved “France earnestly, Frenchwomen excessively, French wine exclusively.” The famed Shakespearean stage dramatist has a tendency to twist face into a clownish curl to play 15th century poet as a fun-loving fool and drunkard, parading about with his drinking buddies and playing the king of the beggars of Paris. But he also throws himself into the swashbuckling scenes, leaping across roofs less like an action hero than a child of the streets who hasn’t quite grown up, and tones himself down for romance with Marceline Day, the king’s ward. Alan Crosland previously directed Barrymore in Don Juan, one of another of his best silent films, and William Cameron Davies creates the lavish sets.

I’m even more partial to Tempest (1928), not a version of the Shakespeare play but a tale of a peasant soldier (Barrymore) in love with a princess (Camilla Horn of Faust, whose eyes burn with a mixture of haughty arrogance and guilty desire) in World War I Russia. Barrymore gives one of his most restrained performances as the tormented soldier whose hatred of the aristocracy is systematically stoked when he’s put through a living hell for his temerity at falling in love with a high-born beauty. The aristocracy systematically keeps the lowly peasant class its place until the revolution turns the tables, at which point the film tries to cast the Red Menace as the villain. It’s a hard sell given the brutality and contempt of the ruling class, but in a manner that suggests director Sam Taylor studied the works of D.W. Grifffith, he portrays the aristocrats as beautiful people tormented by the ugly peasants who take their revenge with a vengeance. In this new paradigm, Barrymore rejects class politics to save his fair aristocratic love from the grimy hands of the dark, unwashed proletariat brutes. Director Sam Taylor directed some terrific Harold Lloyd comedies before making this historical romantic drama, but he guide this gorgeous costume drama like he was a master of the epic form, and William Cameron Menzies once again contributes great sets. The box set also features the 1922 Sherlock Holmes and the previously released 1920 Dr Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, and the discs are also available separately. The films are preserved rather than restored but look fine and The Beloved Rogue is tinted.

Hollywood adventures don’t come more rousing than the 1939 Beau Geste. Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston are the boisterous Geste brothers, orphans raised by a society lady as gentlemen with a sense of playful camaraderie and undaunted chivalry. Read more »

The full story has still not been told but, simply put, Dennis James has been ejected from his seat at the Mighty Wurlitzer, where he has accompanied the silent movie series at the Paramount Theatre for the past 11 years. James has spent his career as a professional organ player and composer largely accompanying silent films in the traditional style, both in solo performances and in collaboration with orchestras or guest musicians, and promoting the lost art of accompanying silent films as part of the silent film experience. He helped the Seattle Theatre Group launch the Silent Movie Mondays film series in 1998 and has been active in the continued restoration of the theatre’s Wurlitzer organ. (The Paramount is one of the few preserved movie houses in the country that still has its original silent film organ.) And he has used his contacts with the studios and film preservation houses to secure the best silent film prints around. He has been essential to nurturing the series and one of the primary reasons for the success of the series.

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Kate Winslet finally won her Oscar and her performance in The Reader is the best thing about the film. Adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s novel by playwright David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, the film has all the hallmarks for Oscar-bait: literary source, “serious” theme, a credentialed cast (Ralph Fiennes co-stars) and a director who values words over cinematic expression.

Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz, a German woman, Hanna, who takes teenage boy Michael (David Kross) as a lover in late-fifties West Berlin. After a brief affair, she’s gone, only to reappear in a war crimes trial that law student Michael is attending, where she’s held accountable for her actions as a concentration camp guard directly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Jewish prisoners. Winslet plays the part as a hard, closed-in woman careful to shield her emotions even during the affair, but is so guileless as to recount her inhuman actions as a concentration camp guard with a blank, almost childlike matter-of-factness, as if unable to fathom any moral responsibility to “just following orders.” But while the performance is brave in its nakedness (both literally and emotionally), the film is less ambiguous in its attempt to explore cultural and personal guilt and complicity in the Holocaust. Director Stephen Daldry’s compassion for Hannah isn’t so much misplaced as unbalanced, so concerned with her personal shame that it too easily overlooks her human responsibility.

I reviewed the film for Parallax View here and review the DVD for MSN here.

Frank Miller’s big screen incarnation of Will Eisner’s landmark comic superhero series The Spirit was not a hit in theaters and the visually dynamic but narratively sketchy comic book movie isn’t any better on DVD. The character is an icon among comic book aficionados but not well known to the general public, which may have hurt the film, but the problem lays more squarely with comic book artist/writer-turned-director Miller, whom makes his solo directing debut with this film.
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After reviewing the great Flicker Alley DVD set Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer from MSN and spotlighting the set as my “DVD of the Week” with a longer review, I was asked to take another, much more in-depth look for the Turner Classic Movies website.

The image of Douglas Fairbanks that springs to mind to even the most dedicated silent movie fan is that of the grinning swashbuckling hero. From The Mark of Zorro in 1920 to The Iron Mask in 1929, Fairbanks was the dashing leading man of dynamic costume epics defined by his verve and acrobatic energy. But before he leapt into the public’s imagination in those flamboyant action epics, Douglas Fairbanks was a charismatic and decidedly contemporary leading man of light romantic comedies, a rambunctious urbanite facing the adventures of modern life and modern love with comic grace and athletic flair. Flicker Alley’s magnificent box set Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer is not just a survey of Fairbanks’ career leading up to The Mark of Zorro. In the words of Fairbanks biographers Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta, who write the essay in the accompanying booklet, “this set charts his evolution from screen satirist to swashbuckler.”

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Fairbanks made twelve features in eighteen months at Triangle, including Flirting With Fate, a dark comedy directed by William Christy Cabanne, and The Matrimaniac, scripted by Anita Loos and directed by Paul Powell (with cinematography by future director Victor Fleming), both included in this set. These are more comedies than adventures and Fairbanks is a romantic comic lead whose athletic talents are an extension of his gags, much like Chaplin’s slapstick grace, Keaton’s daring play with massive mechanical props (like a moving steam engine) or Harold Lloyd’s thrill stunts. They defined the Fairbanks screen persona as the all-American urban man with a chivalrous streak and an enthusiasm that bursts out of him in feats of gymnastic joy. Whether he was the working stiff with big dreams or the foppish scion of a business magnate who transforms into the man of action, he was always “Doug,” onscreen and off.

Read the entire feature on TCM here.