randy_byers: (Default)
[personal profile] randy_byers


I've been a bit of a silent movie kick again lately, and on Friday I watched another of DW Griffith's Biograph shorts, "The Unchanging Sea" from 1910. For a one-reel film (around 13 minutes), it packs in a fair amount of story about a seaman who loses his memory and is thought dead, a wife who waits for him longingly, raising their child to adulthood and marrying her off, and a reunion and happy ending in old age. Can't say these Griffith shorts are doing much for me yet, but I'll keep plowing through them to see what I can see, since he is supposed to be one of the early innovators. This one had Mary Pickford in a bit role playing the grown-up daughter.

After that I finished watching Queen Kelly (1929). This appears to have been a vanity project of the star, Gloria Swanson, who also produced it with the help of her lover, Joseph Kennedy (father of JFK). They hired Erich von Stroheim to direct, and he wrote a scenario (based on a novel) that would have made for a five hour movie. He shot a third of it before he was fired, and the movie was never completed. What exists is a delirious first act in which a playboy prince who is betrothed to a dominatrix queen falls in love with an innocent young woman (Swanson) from a stern convent. Swanson is completely unbelievable as the innocent girl, although she's still quite good. The real attraction of this part is the queen, who is a wonderfully fierce, crazed bitch who literally whips Swanson out of the palace when she catches her dallying with the prince and is otherwise seen slinking around in the nude with a strategically placed white pussycat.

Make no mistake, this is a trashy story of the most shameless, soapy, wish-fulfillment, sadomasochistic stripe (or should I say tripe?), and it's just a shame that the middle act was never completed. Only about twenty minutes exist, in which Swanson returns to her dying mother in East Africa and is forced to marry a sleazy old predator who runs a brothel. Apparently the story would have continued with Swanson becoming a hard-bitten madame (much more believable) who takes over the brothel and becomes known as Queen Kelly. The two prostitutes we meet ("obviously of the horizontal profession," as the title card has it) in the existing fragment are deliciously seedy and diseased.

The movie is beautiful filmed, with elaborate sets and that shimmering, glowing look of the late silent era. You may well have seen a bit of it, because it is the movie that Norma Desmond shows to Joe Gigolo, er, Gillis, in Sunset Boulevard when she declares, "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" I had to watch that again after Queen Kelly, and I found that it was even richer this time around after all the silents I've been watching. Part of what's so spectacular about Swanson's performance is the way that she's able to integrate silent acting style (particularly with her hands and her eyebrows) into what is also a wonderful, finely-tuned vocal performance. It helps that her character is a former silent movie star, of course.

Yesterday I got off of the silent kick and watched Kinji Fukasaku's Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Gunki hatameku motoni, 1972). Not exactly the most light-hearted way to spend a Sunday afternoon! This is the story of a war widow in Japan who, 26 years after WWII has ended, is still trying to find out whether her husband was really executed for desertion or what actually happened. (Echos of the Griffith short, come to think of it, as she too raises a daughter on her own and marries her off.) She ends up talking to five different men who were in New Guinea with her husband, and we get a Rashomon-like exploration of different perspectives and perceptions of what happened. Along the way, we are told many harrowing stories of the evil that men did to survive the war. It is brutal. This is one story that the phrase "searing indictment" fits very well, as Fukasaku hones in on the idiocy and venality of the war and of the emotional and spiritual damage that imposed on the people who suffered through it. The war is still a raw wound, and in the background we see Japan begin to rearm itself in the face of protests from a younger generation that has grown up in the shadow of Hiroshima. Much to his credit, Fukasaku leaves the story full of contradictions, elisions, and distortions, although this is no arty meditation on ambiguity. It is a raw, explosive, jagged look at human limitations. It's a labor of love -- Fukasaku optioned the book with his own money -- but it isn't easy to watch.

Maybe a Harold Lloyd comedy would have gone down better on a lazy afternoon.

Profile

randy_byers: (Default)
randy_byers

September 2017

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10 111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 16th, 2025 06:21 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios