7/16/22
Newsletter43
The Ass Crack of Dawn
It’s 3:57 AM, so it’s not even close to dawn yet.
Sound came to movies at the very end of 1927 with “The Jazz Singer” starring Al Jolson (real name: Asa Yolson), and is mostly silent with a few sound scenes. The films of 1928 are fascinating in that it was a great year for the end of the silent films, which got as sophisticated as silent movies ever got. Joseph Von Sternberg’s last three silent films are all terrific: “Underworld,” “The Last Command” and “The Docks of New York” (one of my favorites). F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” is kind of astonishing (and won the first and only Oscar for “Artistic Achievement”). Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus” is one of his best, and I will digress here for a moment strictly for my own amusement.
Perhaps my very favorite scene that Chaplin ever made is in “The Circus.” Charlie works at the circus as a cleaning man (that’s funny right there). He’s in love from afar with the beautiful bareback rider. Trying to impress her, Charlie goes out on the high-wire, holding the long balancing pole. Meanwhile, all of the little monkeys have escaped their cage, climbed the pole, and begin harassing Charlie on the high-wire. Suddenly he has little monkeys all over him, at both ends of the pole, and one on his head that keeps biting his nose. It’s completely hysterical and I have no fucking clue how he did it.
But most of the films of 1928 are a disaster: silent with inappropriate musical scores, badly synchronized sound effects, or are part talkie/part silent. Basically, nobody knew what they were doing. And it was the death of the brilliant silent comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and the rest.
The films of 1929/30, however, have always fascinated me. Which directors figured out how to use sound properly, and which didn’t. D.W. Griffith, who was the greatest filmmaker in the world in 1915, brought his career to an ignominious end in 1929/30 with a couple of truly awful early talkies, the last being, “Abraham Lincoln.” In fact, most silent directors couldn’t make the transition to sound. But the few directors who did make the transition, seemed to just naturally understand how sound movies worked. Frank Capra got it right away. His movie, “Miracle Woman,” with the exceptionally young and amazing Barbara Stanwyck is really well-made, and not a bad film, either.
Alfred Hitchcock understood sound right away. He was most of the way through shooting “Blackmail” silent, then was ordered to switch to sound. Well, he had already shot too many terrifically visual scenes that not only didn’t need any talking, but would be ruined by dialogue, so he quickly figured out how to properly put the sound in afterward. He then shot a few sound sequences and cut them in. The first one is the classic, 1929, unnecessary, sound scene. When the boy first picks up the girl and takes her back to his place to see his sketchings, it logically leads directly to a terrific Hitchcock murder scene . . . except that before we can get to the murder, the boy sits down at a piano and says, “Would you like to hear a song?” then sings a whole song, then we get to the murder scene, which is great. But Hitchcock being Hitchcock shot another sound sequence that fits perfectly into the movie and is a brilliant use of sound. She killed the boy with a knife. The next morning at breakfast with several people the word knife keeps coming up. Hitchcock then mixes the sound so that all the poor girl can hear is the word knife. For Hitchcock, sound was just one more way to create suspense.
Lewis Milestone, whom I recently mentioned, won Best Picture in 1929/30 with “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and he got it. The movie is way too long, but that’s always been a problem for big, expensive movies.
But the winner of my Best Picture for 1929 is my main man, William Wyler’s, film, “Hell’s Heroes.” This was the second version of “The Three Godfathers” story. The first version and the third version were directed by John Ford. There was even a low-budget version in the mid-30s. Over the years when Wyler and Ford would run into each other in their little community of Beverly Hills, their running joke was, “Who’s doing Three Godfathers next? Me or you?”
It looks like it’s going to be the best day of my life. But who knows?
Whoops, you're right, I misread the sentence. And definitely Hell's Heroes is better. But I love that scene with Brennan!
There's another one in 1936, directed by Richard Boleslawski, a Polish director probably best known in the US for another 1936 film, "The Garden of Allah" with Charles Boyer and Marlene Dietrich. I like his version of "Three Godfathers," which has a very good performance by Walter Brennan. There's a scene I just love where the outlaws set up camp and Doc (Lewis Stone) is reading a book. Gus (Brennan) says, "What book you reading tonight, Doc?"
Doc: "Fella named Schopenhauer, I guess."
Gus: "What's the story?"
Doc: "Well, there isn't any story."
Gus: "Jokes, huh?"
Doc: "Yeah, just jokes. Man is everything, woman nothing."
Gus: "Well, I'm sure gonna get a lot of nothing once I high Gray's Gulch!"