20,000 Leagues Under Sea (1916)

Little Slumber 
In Nemo Land

20,000 Leagues Under Sea
Directed by Stuart Paton
USA 1916
Imprint Blu Ray A/B/C

Warning: Some slight spoilers here. 

I’ve been wanting to see this silent version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea for some time now, since I loved the original novel by one of my favourite authors, Jules Verne. I didn’t get the UK release of this because it was bundled in with a bunch of movies I wasn’t that interested in but, I’m glad I waited now because this Australian edition is part of their Tales Of Adventure Collection 8, with some other Verne movies and some slightly adjacent tales in its make-up.

Now, I was both impressed and disappointed in this in equal parts so, I’m not quite sure how to organise this review... 

Okay, the first thing I was impressed with was that, unlike 99.5% of the Captain Nemo films I’ve seen in film versions, they actually get the character’s ethnicity correct to the book.. so an Indian, turban wearing guy (I think they actually got it right in the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen too but, that movie was also an incredibly poor adaptation of its source material). That being said, the caveat here is that he’s portrayed by a white dude, Allen Holubar, in brown face. Swings and roundabouts I guess, people. 

Another impressive thing is the Williamson brothers and their invention. Highlighted in footage before the film gets properly underway, along with a photo of Jules Verne, the Williamsons went with the director on location (the same locations used for the Disney version a few decades later) because they'd invented cameras for underwater photography. So there are lots of shots of divers and fish and coral etc in the movie. I can’t imagine what this might have looked like to the inhabitants of the world at the time, many of whom would never had been able to see what this stuff properly looks like before this motion picture was released. So it’s a landmark film for inventing and demonstrating the world’s first underwater photography, if for nothing else.

However, there are some problems I had with the film. 

Asides from lots of almost superfluous women in the movie… Verne didn’t really do much in the way of meaningful female characters, certainly in his most famous books… the story is an absolute mess and Jules would have been scientifically rotating in his grave at such shenanigans (and don’t get me started on the 50s serial of Mysterious Island, with its alien queen hell bent on world conquest, either). What we have here is very little to do with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea after about the first 10 mins… it’s also taking portions from The Mysterious Island (probably my favourite Jules Verne novel) and then grafted onto it another story featuring a.. ‘child of nature’ as she is credited in the cast list (a euphemism for someone who’s ‘gone native’)… who, most viewers will twig, long before the end of the picture and the big reveal, turns out to be Captain Nemo’s long lost daughter. 

About her... one of the crew of the balloon that lands on the island finds her and, she’s played by a lady called Jane Gail, again in brown face make up. And all I will say about her is… she’s an absolute comic genius. The scene where the poor white guy is trying to show her how to put on a shirt and trousers... and she’s waggling her toes at him… had me in stitches. I need to see more things with this lady in because she tickled my funny bone somewhat. She was the truly bright spot of this film for me, for sure (she died on her 74th birthday, I’m informed). 

Things all come around and she is reunited with her father who dies, is buried at sea and then we also see the Nautilus submarine (which appears to be quite different in long shot as opposed to when it surfaces, it seems to me) sink beneath the waves one final time. Leaving us with a romantic entailment involving one of the crew of the original balloon and Jane Gail’s character. Which also leaves me with the question… was this the first time an interracial romance had been depicted on screen or were there earlier films?

And that’s me done with this iteration of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, I think. It was a pleasure to watch this version, despite the enormous liberties taken with the original source materials… I’d certainly recommend this one to lovers of silent movies and will probably watch this one again at some point (if only for the comical shenanigans of Jane Gail). I’m pleased I finally got to see this one. 

Battleship Potemkin

Introspective Peasants Revolting... Actually

Battleship Potemkin
aka Bronenosets Potyomkin
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
USSR 1925 
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

It’s been a few decades since I last revisited Sergei Eisenstein’s oft voted ‘number one film of all time’ classic Battleship Potemkin. So I thought, with the recent Blu Ray release by the BFI of the film coupled with the score that Red Ken, the then mayor of London, commissioned from the Pet Shop Boys for a free live performance accompanying the film in Leicester Square on 12th September 2004, this was a good opportunity to take another look. Although I bought the original CD album of this piece when it was released back then (which is also included in this recent BFI release, along with the Blu Ray), I’d never heard this particular score with the context of the images it was meant to accompany before. So I’m glad this version finally got a release.

Now, Eisenstein was all about the Russian propaganda of course and, this film made in 1925 was put together to commemorate the anniversary of the failed but inspiring Russian Revolution of 1905. And it was much widely acclaimed and, you can’t ask for much more than to have your movie banned in most countries on the fear that it would spark an uprising amongst the working classes in places like France and so on. Over here in the UK, the ban wasn’t lifted for a while and it was finally granted a release, with an X certificate, presumably to deter a certain section of the cinema going population, in 1954. 

The film is a ferocious beast of a movie in terms of the power of images and ideas, for sure. It’s also a case, for those detractors of the art of silent cinema, for a more naturalistic acting style in that medium... it possibly helps that many of the ‘so called actors’ were in fact common people from the streets and navy of good old mother Russia. There’s certainly not much in the way of overdramatic gesturing in this one. 

The film is split into five sections (translated as thus on this particular iteration of the film)... Men And Maggots, Drama On The Deck, The Dead Man Calls Out, The Odessa Staircase and Rendezvous With The Squadron. And it demonstrates a lot of Eisenstein’s signature directorial flourishes for sure. Obviously, Eisenstein was all about the editing and his cross cut montages... to show, for instance, the hard work of the men on the boat cross cut with the mouldering, maggot infested food they are expected to eat being prepared... are all present and correct.

As, of course, is his method of typeage... casting non-professionals to give them an authentic look as visual shorthand and then inserting them into little vignettes staged apart from the main action but made to look like they are part of it, in order to amplify the emotional context of the movie... like little static inserts whereas a film maker today would probably either zoom in or move the camera within the shot. But there’s a lot to be said for doing it this way too and it’s still an effective way of working, I think... if much abandoned in the method of execution these days. 

But there are other things which I feel are less said about the director’s work than is generally lingered on, due no doubt to the incredible impact of his other techniques. I mean, he was obviously as good as Fritz Lang when it came to directing huge crowds of people in unison but, the shot compositions are pretty good too. Like early in the movie when the diagonal ropes of the sailors hammocks as they sleep below decks are juxtaposed with similar shorts of different angles and then, later, reoccurring in the diagonal lines created by the struts, ropes and staircases on the walkways above.

Plus little details which are picked out such as the fallen crucifix of a wrathful priest embedded in the deck or the dislodged glasses hanging from a rope during the scene where the mutineering rebels take control back from their overseers. 

Then there’s the famous slaughter of the civilians by the police on the steps of the Odessa (not that this moment happened on these steps in real life)... one of the most influential sequences in the history of cinema, much used since and always cropping up in cinematic homage to this day, in a film already overflowing with influential and iconographic imagery (there’s a reason why directors like Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder and Michael Mann cite this as their favourite film). 

A brutal and gory sequence with such imagery as the head shot child dying, his mother carrying his body against the troops and also being shot down, the other mother shot and knocking her own baby carriage down the steps (in a fate the actress more or less met in real life 20 years later, when Stalin was having a go at everyone... how many times have we seen this moment reconstructed since?), the woman with the eye shot out and, of course, the montage of the stone lions rearing up from sleep to startlingly awake at last. You can see just why the film is still influential... it’s got some powerful, visual ideas used to push its agenda.

And it’s nice to see this version of the film retains... or perhaps rather recreates... the red coloured flag which Eisenstein himself had hand tinted for the film’s original premiere back in 1925. Which is a very nice touch for modern audiences to see, I think.

As for the score by the Pet Shop Boys... well it’s not bad ‘actually’ and doesn’t, for starters, detract from the movie (I may be hoisted up and taken to task for that but I think it’s fine, sorry). It’s pretty good and well spotted in terms of, for instance, where some sung lyrics might suddenly invade the mix at certain highlights to support and possibly elevate the spirit of revolution which infuses the tale. They could certainly even be accused of Mickey Mousing* it in a few sequences... for good or worse but, again, I think it actually works here.

And, yeah, that’s me done with this recent(ish) Blu Ray presentation of the 2004 UK screening of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. I’d like to think the director would have been okay with this freshly scored version and I think it doesn’t do the film any harm... as long as the kiddies who view it today in their new fangled film studies classes (wish we’d had those in my day) realise that the sonic environment of this version is unlike anything that could be heard contemporary to the film’s original release. I think it’s important that people know that before going in. And, if you are aware of that and haven’t seen this version... maybe pick up a copy. It’s still a pretty great movie.

*The once very popular but unfashionable for a while practice of a composer matching notes to catch on screen action in a film... yeah, they mostly all still do it and I don’t think it’s a particular bone of contention anymore, it’s nice to say. 

Häxan

Häx Med Room

Häxan
aka Häxan - Witchcraft
Through The Ages
Sweden/Denmark 1922
Directed by Benjamin Christensen
Radiance Films
Blu Ray Zone B

I was very happy to receive, this Christmas, the new Radiance Films ‘bells and whistles’ limited edition of Benjamin Christensens’ 1922 masterpiece Häxan aka Witchcraft Through The Ages (as the cut down William Burroughs narrated version is often known as). Alongside the many interesting extras and a beautiful 80 page booklet of essays on the film and its legacy, the package also includes five ways to watch the movie, with different cuts and many different scores and optional narrative choices. I chose to watch, for this review, the fully restored, tinted original version (uncut, so it’s technically a fair bit longer than the original release in Sweden and other countries, where censor cuts were originally imposed) with a score by Matti Bye (which is in itself quite an extraordinary work, it turns out, I’ve just ordered one of the last CD copies of the soundtrack I could find on the internet).

It’s been a long time since I watched a print of Häxan and, I have to say, I think I appreciated it a lot more even than the last time I saw it. The film, which has the director pictured in the opening... he also plays the devil throughout in quite a jolly manner (and even Christ, very briefly)... poses itself as a seven part essay on the history of witchcraft, with dramatisations of events (many obviously bordering on fictional) and it takes you from a quick history of how the world perceived itself from the times of Ancient Egypt and into, for the most part, the middle ages. Showing things like the witches sabbath, various potion preparations and a full on witch trial conducted by the Inquisition with accusations coerced, under torture, to name other innocents around a village until even the young lady who first brought the ‘witch’ to the attention of the church is herself accused and burned for her troubles.

Other sections look at, for example, instruments of torture and, although there are certainly horrors which are still very powerful within the film, there’s also a strong sense of tongue-in-cheek humour detectable throughout. When the narrator’s intertitles talk of one of the actresses wanting to try out the thumbscrews for herself, for instance, the director dangles the idea of the confessions he got out of her in ten minutes. Another sequence in the movie depicts the devil’s corruption of a nun and how it infects the whole monastery of nuns who are subsequently caught up in the hysteria (yeah, the director claims all of the film is derived from scholarly and historical accounts and, I’m pretty sure the incident with the nuns was based on a real life case). So, in a way, I guess that makes Häxan one of the early (if not the earliest?) nunsploitation movies.

As the film pushes its agenda with superimpositions and some genuinely wonderful (and often quite intentionally funny) special effects scenarios... some of which may make you think of the early cinema of pioneering film maker Georges Méliès... it also counterpoints the modern form of reacting to witchcraft, showing how women of today (aka 1922) may be diagnosed with hysteria. The thing is, though, when you start looking at all the things that the director/writer is showing and looking at the common agendas between, say, the monks of the Inquisition and doctors contemporary to the release of the film in their medical rooms, it becomes very clear that this film is very much about the way the female has been subjugated, controlled and disposed of in various different ways throughout history. So, the film can have its exploitation cake and eat it at the same time but it’s nonetheless, as far as I’m concerned, a feminist text first and foremost.

One of a few notable things found in the movie would be when two priests are trying to obtain a confession from a suspected witch (aka, already condemned woman) and the scenario of the woman between a kindly, coaxing monk and an angry one must honestly be one of the best depictions of the old ‘good cop/bad cop’ interrogation scene I have seen depicted on film. Another sequence of interest is the mechanical automaton, presumably clockwork, with its richly layered depiction of hell, obviously based on one of the woodcuts the director highlights a little earlier in the picture.

And that Matti Bye score is great, mixing traditional instruments with weird sonics and atonal, unsettling sounds and I really thought it was a first class accompaniment to the film. There’s even a scene, where a monk is scourging another monk, where Bye borrows a time honoured page from Bernard Herrmann’s playbook for Hitchcock’s Psycho, with slightly slower, high pitched notes mickey mousing the movements of the scourge.

All in all, then, the recent Radiance Films Blu Ray set of Häxan - Witchcraft Through The Ages is pretty spectacular and the most thorough coverage of the film I’ve seen to date. An easy recommendation from me and one which lovers of silent cinema should relish.

The General

Rail Of A Tale

The General
USA 1926
Directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B boxed edition

It’s been quite a while since I sat down and watched a silent movie and even longer since I last had a look at The General. For some reason I’ve always preferred, in terms of early silent movie US comics, people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd over people like Charlie Chaplin and Keaton especially appeals to me, perhaps, because of the stony faced visage which he constantly presents throughout the course of his pictures. I don’t remember if he ever smiled during one of his movies and this reminds me of myself, to a certain extent.

Now, I’ve never really been much into laughing at comedy movies. My absolute favourite writers and performers of the genre would be Woody Allen and The Marx Brothers but even when I am watching their films I tend to not really laugh so much as watch all the details intently and analyse the way in which the comedy works. Therefore, honestly, I’m not a fun person to take to a comedy because, at least when I’m looking at something like a horror movie in a similar fashion, it doesn’t matter too much to others that I don’t laugh (although, truth be told, I might be more likely to laugh during a really bad exploitation picture or modern horror tale).

The General is based, I’m guessing quite loosely, on events during the American Civil War when a similar incident involving a soldier stealing said train (The General) to further their own, nefarious ends took place (depending on whether you are rooting for the blues or the greys... I never know the difference). In this version of events, Keaton plays the driver, Johnnie Gray, who ends up going after the stolen locomotive, with all the expected and often unexpected comedy shenanigans and, more importantly for lovers of Keaton’s work, I suspect, all the ingenuity that his particularly clever brand of visual comedy brought to the story.

The set up is of Keaton courting girlfriend Annebelle Lee, played quite resiliently given some of the things that happen to her, by Marion Mack. However, war breaks out and when Lee’s father and brother go to enlist, she urges Keaton to do the same. Alas, when he gives his profession as railway engineer, he is deemed too important to be allowed to go and fight. Although he doesn’t quite know this yet because the reveal of that info is only for the audience and the stigma of him not being able to enlist is enough to keep his sweetheart from ever talking to him again until he is in uniform.

Time passes and the train is stolen by the Union army. However, due to unforseen circumstances, Keaton’s girlfriend Annabelle is also along for the ride as a prisoner of the soldiers. The movie then turns into a ‘chase, rescue, escape and tell the confederates of the upcoming attack before the union soldiers can stop us’ kind of affair... filled with all your favourite gags and cleverness that you expect from Keaton.

There’s also a lot of danger involved in some of these films and you have to wonder sometimes how these things ever got made at all. There’s no way a studio would let some of the things Keaton does in this be performed by any of the actors these days... you’d be liable to lose your leads. The amount of running and climbing along the speeding train Keaton does, for example. Or the wonderful moment where he is sitting on the crossbeam by the side of the wheels and the train chugs into motion, taking him with it. Or the time when he jumps out the train, clears a bit of wood out of the way, keeps it in his hands as he sits on the cow catcher and then throws it at another bit of wood, catapulting it off the track just in time. There’s some good stuff here and, of course, a lot of the actors get caught up in the ‘spirit’ of these films. For example, when the pipe to fill up with water comes off at the other end and Marion Mack is suddenly knocked over by the force of gallons of water, she was kept in the dark as to what was about to happen to ensure a more lifelike reaction to the proceedings.

The newish Blu Ray restoration from Eureka Masters of Cinema is the absolutely best presentation I’ve seen of this movie. The running time is a little longer than that listed on the IMDB but I suspect that’s because the film is actually running at something approaching the correct speed for this presentation. Which I’m guessing is a really hard thing to do because, if memory serves, a lot of these silent films were hand cranked and so the speed was kinda up and down depending on how good the camera operators were at keeping a certain rhythm going and also how tired they were at the time of the shot. The presentation of the movie on here uses the Carl Davis score for those of you who are interested in such things. So, yeah, this new one is pretty much the definitive version to own, from what I can see (although it’s taken me so long to get this particular review up that I believe the same company are already bringing out another reissue very soon... so that’s possibly the one to get).

A bit of a short review but The General is definitely a good place to start if you’re unfamiliar with the work of Buster Keaton and I really wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of modern stuntmen weren’t still getting inspired by this guy now. Whether they would have been allowed to do some of them, however... or even if they’d need to now, in the ago of CGI... is another question.