Favorite Silent Films

Above: Lon Chaney in HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924), could there be a more appropriate film for 2020?

 In the unrelenting hellscape that was 2020, we all had to seek our comfort where we could find it. One place I've been very happy lately is in the world of silent film. I've always liked the silents, but over the last year or so I've been watching more and more artifacts from the strange and mysterious world of the pre-sound era. Sadly, most movies from the silent era are lost (anywhere from 80% to 85% most estimates say), yet what remains is a rich treasure trove and much of it is available online. YouTube in particular is a good source of silent film, oftentimes with new kinds of musical accompaniment.

Here are some of my favorites:

1. 7TH HEAVEN (1927)- Director Frank Borzage's masterpiece is, simply put, one of the most beautiful movies ever made, a sweet and touching romance with Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor. This one always makes me cry. 

2. THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE (1921)- They call Victor Sjostrom the father of Swedish cinema. Watch this moving epic of sin and redemption and see what that means. The films of Ingmar Bergman are unthinkable without something like THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE paving the way.

3. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928)- Movies don't get much more intense than this harrowing recreation of the trial and execution of Jeanne D'Arc. One of Dreyer's signature films and certainly one of the most fascinating films about religion ever made. (Is it a testament of faith? A condemnation of fanaticism? Both?) The central performance by Renee Falconetti is as unsettling as any ever put on film. 

4. HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924)- How odd that one of the darkest Hollywood movies of the silent era (maybe THE darkest, come to think of it) was made at MGM. But then again it was directed by Victor Sjostrom during his brief time working in the US. The story of a heartbroken man (Lon Chaney) who takes a job as a circus clown whose masochistic gimmick is that he gets repeatedly and viscously slapped and heckled by the audience, it is as strange and disturbing as it sounds.

5. GREED (1924)-Fun fact, Frank Norris's 1899 MCTEAGE is the novel that I've read the most times. Erich von Stroheim famously tried to put all of the book on screen, resulting in a 10 hour epic called GREED. Chopped down to a more manageable running time by MGM (MGM again!), it's the story of money and murder, and, of course, greed. The climax in Death Valley is an unforgettable vision of hell on earth, a damnation sought and earned by simpleminded dentist turned killer McTeague (Gibson Gowland).

6. INTOLERANCE (1916)- DW Griffith's epic ain't for everyone, but I genuinely love this film. It's 3 1/2 hours long with four intercut storylines told across different time periods, all on the theme of "love's struggle throughout the ages." It is entirely possible that this 104-year old film might be the most artistically ambitious movie you've ever seen.

7. SUNRISE (1927)- A film as beautiful as 7TH HEAVEN and, in its way, as daring as GREED or INTOLERANCE, this is FW Murnau's grand tale of love and temptation. George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor (who ran back and forth between this and 7TH HEAVEN) and Margaret Livingston comprise the greatest love triangle in silent film.

8. THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI (1920)- I mean, what can you say about Robert Wiene's horror classic? It didn't singlehandedly invent German Expressionism, but it is undeniably the consummate example of it. The sets--twisted, slanted, angular, unreal yet real--are as important as the story of insanity and murder itself.

9. STEAMBOAT BILL JR (1928)- There aren't a lot of comedies on this list, in part because I tend to think that comedy is over represented in considerations of silent film. (There are a lot of reasons for that, chief among them being the relative ease with which slapstick translates across cultures and time periods. A man falling on his ass is pretty much funny to everyone.) Here's my favorite silent comedy. There are other Buster Keaton films that get more attention, but this one makes me laugh the most and also contains his greatest death-defying gag, wherein he drops the front of house on himself.

10. IN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928)- To sort of borrow what I said above about CALIGARI, this film didn't invent Surrealism but remains its primary cinematic artifact. The work of filmmaker Luis Bunuel and artist Salvador Dali is a 21-minute drug trip of arresting imagery. Nearly a hundred years later, its impact has been somewhat dulled as Surrealism has been absorbed by more of the mainstream, but the film itself remains fascinating. As with CALIGARI, part of the appeal is the fact that it's both physically palpable and wholly unhinged from our waking world. 

There are a lot of big classics and important figures I've left off this list (no PHANTOM OF THE OPERA or NOSFERATU? no Charlie Chaplin or Fritz Lang?), but the list isn't intended to be either definitive or objective. This is just what rocks my boat the most.

One film I'd like to mention is one I'm still watching. LES VAMPIRES (1915-1916) is a ten-episode French crime serial about a gang of outlaws led by a sexy femme fatale named Irma Vep (played by the actress Musidora). I'm on episode seven, and I'm having a blast. It's funny to see how this serial influenced, oh just about every crime movie you've ever seen. It's got it all: severed heads stashed in boxes, rooftop escapes by costumed figures, poisoned rings, poisoned pens, faked deaths, real deaths, evil hypnotists, chloroform, gun fights, swapped identities, and a sequence where thieves pump gas into a ritzy meeting of swells that reminded me of similar scenes in both Tim Burton's BATMAN and Christopher Nolan's TENET. Filmmaker Louis Feuillade made LES VAMPIRES as the central film in a trilogy of crime epics, between FANTOMAS (1913-1914) and JUDEX (1916). I haven't seen those yet, so I guess I know what I'll be doing as I'm heading into 2021.

7TH HEAVEN (1927)

There's something so incredibly pure about the romanticism of Frank Borzage that his films become, at least for me, impossible to resist. When you watch a movie like 7TH HEAVEN, you're watching a filmmaker in complete command of his craft. That he is making a romance about the transcendent power of love is, in some ways, of secondary concern for me. Perhaps another way of saying this is that while I don't believe in the transcendent power of love in the way that Borzage did, I do believe in Borzage.

7TH HEAVEN is based on a play by Austin Strong, and the screenplay and titles were written by Benjamin Glazer, H.H. Caldwell, Katherine Hilliker, and Bernard Vorhaus. It tells the story of an impoverished young prostitute named Diane (Janet Gaynor) who lives with her abusive sister in the slums of Paris. She is rescued from this plight by a sewer worker named Chico (Charles Farrell), who takes her to his bird's nest apartment high above the city. Soon they fall in love and are married, but Chico is drafted into service in the killing fields of WWI. Will he return to her? Can even death itself keep them apart?

A film like 7TH HEAVEN is at once wholly artificial and deeply real--which might be a good description of the Borzage aesthetic. It is artificial in the sense that it is every inch a silent film, a film of big broad gestures and big broad emotions in both the acting and directing. The set design and cinematography are impressionistic. Even by the standards of the silents, though, the film unfolds in a world of fantasy. Despite the backdrop of WWI, there is no hint of the literary modernism that came out of that war and informed much of the literature that dealt with it.

Yet the glory of Borzage's film is that it makes the unreal real, makes the plainly artificial deeply believable. It is a movie about dreamers who are desperate to escape the unbearable realities of poverty and war. The key to understanding it is to understand that their dreams, their romance, is more important to Borzage than those grim realities. Near the end, Chico is killed in the war. Yet he returns to her, born again in shafts of bright white light. It is pure fantasy, and I mean both the "pure" and the "fantasy." What is real here is the yearning, the desire to be free of the dirt and pain and sorrow. 

Chico is a proud atheist, but he finds spiritual (and bodily) redemption in his love with Diane. I don't think Borzage is trying to make a theological statement here--there's no reason to think he actually believed that love could bring the dead back to life--but he is clearly making an artistic statement. He was the screen's great romantic. Modernism be damned. 

The central performances of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell are glorious. They were the perfect screen couple of their day. She was tiny, pixish, and fragile--yet somehow indestructible as well. (The scene where she finally fights back against her abusive sister is surprising in the furor of its violence.) He was tall and handsome, masculine yet entirely vulnerable. (He breaks down crying from fear when he discovers he has to go to war, an unthinkable thing for a screen hero to do in our macho age.) They are such products of their era, not simply in their acting but in their bearing and being. He's more beautiful than she is, and she has a scrappiness that makes her a particularly earthy angel.

Of course, like all silent films, 7TH HEAVEN is not for everyone. It is so far removed from what we think of as a movie today, it's essentially a different art form. It's part fairy tale, part light show. It is beautiful, though. Beautiful, deep and true.

Helen Holmes and the First Female Action Heroes

I have a couple of new pieces out right now about the heroines of the silent movie serials of the 1910s. I'm excited to have them out, because these performers were an amazing group of women who created characters that deserved to be remembered.

In the new issue of MENTAL FLOSS you can find my profile of the fearless Helen Holmes. She wasn't the first or the biggest of the serial queens, but for my money she was the most radical. In the years before women got the vote, Helen produced an image of a strong working-class woman who could rise to any challenge. The issue is available on newsstands and better bookstores now. The article is called "The Girl At The Switch" and is located on page 32. 

Over at Tor.com you can find my overview of the silent serial queens. I talk about Holmes along with Helen Gibson, Ruth Roland, Mary Fuller, and Pearl White. You can find that here.  

THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE (1921)

I don't know of a better film from the silent era than Victor Sjostrom's masterpiece THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE. Of course, that's just another way of saying that I don't know of one that I like better. I suppose plenty of people would nominate Lang's METROPOLIS or Griffith's INTOLERANCE or von Stroheim's GREED--and while those are great films, all three of them seem to groan under the weight of their own ambition. They were all conceived as epics of one kind or another, as proof of the greatness of their makers.

I'm not knocking ego, and I'm not suggesting that Sjostrom was immune to ego, but I am saying that THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE is a film that is as ambitious as any film of its time without drawing attention to how ambitious it is. There are no grand sets or outlandish shooting locales, just a sprawling story of life and death, of sin and redemption.

The movie stars Sjostrom himself as David Holm, a drunk who has abandoned his long suffering wife and two small children. He's drinking away New Year's Eve with a couple of friends, recalling how his deceased friend Georges once told him a legend that the last soul to die on New Year's Eve was forced to drive Death's carriage for the next year, collecting the souls of the recently departed, and bearing witness to unrelenting suffering.

I hesitate to disclose much more of the plot--and I recommend that would-be viewers stay clear of such details--because one of the pleasures of the film is the way it unfolds information through an intricate series of flashbacks that keep pulling us into the past while adding drama to the present. For people who think Welles (or, hell, Tarantino) invented the backtracking narrative, this film should come as a shock. Here's a story that is as densely packed as a great novel (it was based on the novel KORKARLEN by Selma Lagerlof), that respects our ability to keep up and follow along. This pays off toward the end, as the story builds to some of the most intense moments in silent cinema. (Without giving anything away: there's a moment toward the end of this movie that is as suspenseful as anything in NOSFERATU.)

At the time, the film was famous for its central special effect: the sophisticated use of double exposures that gives Death's carriage and the souls of the departed the apparitional quality of ghosts. While this effect, on a technological level, has today been rendered little more than a camera trick, its aesthetic impact in the film itself is undeniable. These images, over 90 years old as I write this, have a haunted quality that's only been compounded over time. David Holm's dark odyssey with death is as powerful now as it's ever been. Maybe more.

Having said all that, the film does have a decidedly disappointing ending. It's difficult to say whether or not the ending disappoints because it adheres to outdated notions of redemption--and I mean "outdated" only in the sense that the type of modern audience likely to see the film today has probably already rejected the idea of spiritual redemption. (The type of movie geeks who watch silent Swedish masterpieces are a pretty agnostic lot.) But perhaps the ending here disappoints because it adheres to melodramatic convention as a way to tie up a story that has otherwise been richly textured and brutally fatalistic. 

So is the ending a reflection of the glory of spiritual redemption, or is glorious spiritual redemption itself just a story some people like to tell themselves, a kind of tacked-on happy ending to life's preordained bummer of an ending? I guess it depends on your religion.

The most famous fan of the film was Ingmar Bergman, a disciple of Sjostrom who would later cast the great director as the old professor in WILD STRAWBERRIES. Watching Bergman's films, you can see the director wrestling with THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE-- most clearly in THE SEVENTH SEAL, in which the characters face the spectral figure of death without the benefit of either melodramatic or spiritual redemption; but also in something like WINTER LIGHT, in which a priest who loses his faith manages to find a redemption of sorts.

THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE is available in a beautiful edition from the Criterion Collection, which is available for streaming on HuluPlus.  

              

Silent Film Chronicle

Cullen Gallagher has kicked off his new Silent Film Chronicle with a piece on the great Janet Gaynor. It's exciting that Gallagher--the brains behind Pulp Serenade--has devoted his new blog to one of the most fascinating but least understood areas of filmmaking, the silent era. Go check out his essay on Gaynor, as beautiful and charismatic an actress as ever worked in movies, and tell him what you think.