randy_byers | Entries tagged with douglas fairbanks

Continuing my exploration of Douglas Fairbanks movies, I just watched The Black Pirate. It seems to me that Fairbanks is just playing Fairbanks at this point, and I'm not really in love with this jaunty, smiling, cocky, but chivalrous character. However, this movie is chock full of pulpy pirate goodness (hint: someone walks the plank), and it's Hollywood at the top of its technical game. Wonderful sets, a huge cast of extras, great stunts (flying around in the rigging), great miniatures and explosions. Hollywood is all about the explosions.

The other interesting thing about this movie is that it's in two-strip Technicolor, which was what preceded the three-strip Technicolor that is celebrated in song and story. Two-strip Technicolor resulted in a much paler, pastel palette, but it is, by gum, color, and it's fascinating to see a silent movie in color. I'm guessing that the negative or print used for this Kino DVD had lost some of its pigment, because at times Fairbanks looks like he's in black and white while the characters around him look tan and flesh-colored. I doubt the star would have intentionally allowed himself to look corpse-colored in contrast. It was no doubt due to his primacy as a film star that he was given the budget to shoot this in color. I'm not aware of any other silent feature films shot completely in color, although I certainly could be ignorant on that front.

There was one bit of almost shocking implied violence that said volumes about how such things can be handled in an essentially PG way. A hostage swallows a valuable ring so that the pirates can't take it. The pirate captain calls over a villainous fellow and makes a gutting motion. The villainous fellow draws his knife and goes off screen in the direction of the hostage and returns momentarily. He hands the ring to the captain, who shakes it as if to shake off blood. Cut to next scene, which climaxes in an explosion. Arrrrrrrh!

This is a big budget Hollywood movie, and the ending is utterly dopey. It's also pretty much a boy's adventure throughout, with one woman to serve as the maguffin and prize and another to be her servant (because she's a princess, of course). I'm guessing this was still considered the gold standard of pirate movies when Michael Curtiz and Errol Flynn made Captain Blood in 1935, and even then it was shot in black and white. Becky Sharp, released that same year, is considered the first feature length film shot in three-strip Technicolor. Flynn would have to wait until 1938 to make his own debut in color, in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

So I decided to follow up the Douglas Fairbanks set by revisiting Robin Hood, which I first watched a few years ago. I can no longer remember why I picked it up back then, since it wasn't the type of silent movie I was interested in at the time. However, it certainly was interesting watching it again now after everything I've seen in the meantime, including these other Fairbanks films.

This is a much different version of the story than Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood, made sixteen years later. There is a long opening section, in fact perhaps half the movie, about King Richard's court. We begin with a tournament joust between the Earl of Huntingdon (Fairbanks) and Sir Guy of Gisbourne, in which King Richard and Prince John place a wager on their respective champions. We then move to a feast in Richard's castle, where we see John and Guy plot malfeasance while Richard pushes the girl-shy Huntingdon to chase the ladies. Huntingdon falls for Lady Marian, but it's time for all the knights to head off for a crusade in Palestine. Huntingdon accompanies Richard as his righthand man, and Sir Guy is part of the company as well. Soon John is torturing innocent villagers and threatening the meddling Marian, who sends a plea for help to Huntingdon. Huntingdon pleads with Richard to let him go back, then tries to leave against his orders. He is imprisoned. It is only after all of this that suddenly rumors of a mysterious brigand in Sherwood Forest emerge, and we move on to the territory where Flynn's version begins. There are still a lot of differences in the story even then, including the fact that Richard is not captured and held for ransom, which I believe actually happened to the historical Richard.

I'm still not sure what I think of this version story-wise. The Robin Hood section is rousing, but the Earl of Huntingdon section is less so. However, it probably doesn't matter because this is a visually gorgeous movie. The sets are utterly humongous, and that may well be what attracted me originally, because I love elaborate sets in movies. (Come to think of it, I think I was hoping for an elaborate forest set, because I love artificial forests in movies, such as the one in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen (1924). Alas, the forest in this movie isn't all that impressive, although there is at least one huge tree set.) The set for Richard's castle supposedly dwarfed even the Babylon set from Griffith's Intolerance (1916). It really is incredible. The inside is a cavernous and towering space that dwarfs the people in it, with huge fireplaces and a winding stone staircase that would have fit right into one of the Frankenstein movies. Then, on top of all that, it's photographed by Arthur Edeson, whose praises I sang when I wrote about The Maltese Falcon (1941). Robin Hood is a visually much darker film than the other Fairbanks films I've seen. The lighting is subtle, and the indoor shots in particular are full of chiaroscuro effects. In the scenes with fires, you get a sense of flickering firelight. I'm not sure if he actually used ambient lighting, but it sure feels like it. There are lots of long shots to emphasize the size and grandeur of the sets, and when we finally get a close-up of Fairbanks at some point along the way, it feels like it's the first time we've really seen his face. It's very strange, almost as though the sets are the main character. Well, it's probably where most of the money went, most of it apparently from Fairbanks' own pocket.

Fairbanks plays a dual character again: the virtuous, girl-shy noble and the gay, elusive bandit. Neither character seems as interesting as those he plays in The Mark of Zorro (1920), but maybe that's because they get lost in the gargantuan surrounds. My memory is that he's more at home in the gigantic sets of The Thief of Bagdad (1924), but I seem to recall that the cinematography there (also by Edeson) is more nimble and intimate as well.

I've now finished the Douglas Fairbanks - A Modern Musketeer set from Flicker Alley. There are eleven films in the set, ten of them feature length, and it was an eye-opening experience for me to watch them all. I got into silent movies via the expressionist films of Weimar Germany (Lang, Murnau, Pabst), and I wasn't initially all that interested in Hollywood films of the era. Within Hollywood, I've been interested in some of the more exotic directors like Maurice Tourneur and Josef von Sternberg. Of least interest in many ways were the four titans who started United Artists: DW Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. Of those four, Pickford and Fairbanks were of the very least interest. I haven't seen any of Pickford's films, and I'd only seen two of Fairbanks' epic swashbucklers: Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), which were mostly interesting to me because of William Cameron Menzies' production design. Having seen these eleven early films, I now find him a lot more interesting than before, even if he still represents a kind of mainstream film-making that will never been my main interest. In fact, these films are a good way to watch Hollywood, which really only got on its feet around 1915, evolve and become more sophisticated.

The last two films in the set chronologically (and I watched them all in chronological order) are The Mask of Zorro (1920) and The Nut (1921). The Mask of Zorro was his first full-on costumed swashbuckler, and he made The Nut afterward in case his fans weren't willing to make the transition to a different Doug. So The Mask of Zorro marks a new direction, while The Nut is very much in line with the modern day romantic comedies of the other films in the set.

What's interesting about coming to Zorro after watching a bunch of the earlier comedies is that you can see how it is still playing off those earlier characters, except now instead of the brash dolt character, you have him pretending to be a languid dolt in the form of Don Diego while revealing his true athletic heroism in the form of Zorro. The dual identity allows him to refine on his earlier character, which I realize now is also true to a certain extent of Robin Hood, where he plays the double character of a nobleman and brigand. Fairbanks' acting chops in The Mask of Zorro are quite good, particularly his playing of Don Diego, who is not so much foppish as enervated and eternally weary. He barely moves a muscle, in sharp contrast to Zorro, who practically explodes across the screen. As one wag commented on this set, it's pretty clear that Fairbanks (or his stunt double) was the inventor of parkour. He is forever climbing walls, diving through windows, and leaping from roof to roof.

The Nut is an extremely silly movie indeed, and a lot of fun. Fairbanks plays an eccentric inventor (what a nut!) who tries to win the hand of his beloved by helping her with a plan to place slum kids in wealthy households for their betterment. Everything he does goes wrong, and chaos ensues. The movie opens with the nut being awakened, bathed, dried, and clothed by a sequence of his inventions along a conveyor belt. This could have almost come out of a Gernsback story, and it's very funny. (Interestingly, Gernsback in his Munchausen on Mars stories compares Martian telepathy to the way information is conveyed wordlessly in silent films.) There's also a hilarious and furious chase sequence in which Fairbanks keeps making leaping tackles on somebody whose pants are on fire. Fairbanks ends up on fire too. The gags don't really add up to much, but the sheer frenetic physical energy is fascinating in itself. A lot of clever thought went into the construction of these sequences, and the editing is brilliant. On a technical level all these films are superb and represent the cutting edge of the new industry.

I've seen several people argue that when Fairbanks moved on to swashbucklers, the slapstick go-getter niche he had created was filled by Harold Lloyd. Makes sense to me, from what little I've seen by Lloyd. Comedy may have been Hollywood's true genius in this period. Even Cecil B. DeMille's marriage problem films of this era, while not slapstick, are very funny and wry. Well, there's still a lot I haven't seen, so I should refrain from general statements. I guess one of these days I'll have to buckle down and take a serious look at the other United Artists titans. The prospect seems like less of an ordeal than it did before I watched this set.

I missed a chance to see this at the Paramount Theater last summer, so I was glad to spot it in the Flicker Alley set of early Douglas Fairbanks films, because I had been intrigued by the descriptions. It turns out to be a a real gem, too. It's directed by Victor Fleming, who is most famous for getting credit -- as the last director standing -- on two of the most famous Hollywood movies of 1939, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, both of which went through multiple directors. Fleming had been the cinematographer on several of Fairbanks' films before this, but this was his first ever directorial credit according to the liner notes.

The basic story of When the Clouds Roll By is fairly typical of these pre-swashbuckling Fairbanks movies. He plays Daniel Boone Brown, a regular guy who's a bit of a dork. In this case, he is extremely superstitious, and the early parts of the film are full of strange superstitions that compel him to act idiotically. I suspect half of these superstitions were made up, although some were familiar, such as black cats, ladders, and rabbits feet. However, the unusually dark aspect of the story involves an evil psychologist who is using Fairbanks in an experiment to see if he can drive a human being so crazy that he will kill himself. The intent was apparently to make fun of the Freudian psychoanalysis that was becoming all the rage in post-War America. This grappling with Freud is reminiscent of the Expressionist horror film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which was released in Germany in early 1920.

What is perhaps most striking about Fairbanks' film are the sophisticated special effects and film techniques. Early on we get a representation of the food -- including Welsh rarebit -- dropping into his stomach and dancing around crazily, causing indigestion. This leads to a dream sequence -- a nightmare in which Fairbanks is first menaced by a funhouse-mirror distortion of Bull Montana and then chased by the food through swimming pools and ghostly walls and over an exaggerated slow motion obstacle hurdle. Central to this sequence is a passage where Fairbanks walks up a wall, across a ceiling, and down the other wall -- a special effect that was used again thirty years later by Fred Astaire, who of course added dancing to the mix. Later in this movie, we also get a representation of a fight in Fairbanks' psyche between Reason and Humor on one side and Fear and Despair on the other. This scene is absolutely hilarious, as Despair physically lifts Reason from her throne and tosses her to the floor.

Aside from the fact that I once again found Fairbanks' All-American character to be something of a prick (much like Tom Cruise in contemporary Hollywood), I found this movie a lot of fun. His physical exuberance and effortless stunts are reminiscent of Jackie Chan (another mugging prick, come to think of it), and the pace of the story and the editing is very rapid. Several of the gags are flat out brilliant and are clear predecessors to the physical comedy of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. It may drag a little in the middle, when we get down to a competitive love triangle, but at just over an hour, it doesn't outlast its welcome and moves quickly to the knock-out finale. I've really liked a couple of the movies in this set, but it may be true, as the liner notes claim, that this one is the best of the contemporary comedies he made before the period swashbuckler stage of his career. Perhaps the one thing it lacks is the witty intertitles that Anita Loos provided in earlier films.

I watched three movies last night, spanning thirty years and a nice variety of genres.

First up was A Modern Musketeer (1917). I'm still working my way through the collection of early Douglas Fairbanks films put out by Flicker Alley, and this is the film that gave the set its title. It's based on the story, "D'Artagnan of Kansas," and features Fairbanks as a typical (for this part of his career) rambunctious day-dreamer who was born in a cyclone (a hilarious sequence) to a mother who read Dumas during her pregnancy. He's too restless for the small Kansas town he grew up in and heads west. Wild West adventures around the Grand Canyon ensue. The movie opens with a dream sequence in which Fairbanks plays D'Artagnan, testing out the possibilities of his playing in costume adventures, which would eventually become his forte. This movie still has a lot of comedy in it, and Fairbanks is able to move between slapstick and amazing physical stunts with apparent ease. The director was Allan Dwan, who would direct a couple of his big budget smash hits in the '20s and who said they worked hard to make Fairbanks' stunts look effortless. One of the interesting things about this Flicker Alley set is that you can feel the Hollywood production machine growing in sophistication from movie to movie. It's also interesting that the Fairbanks character is often, as here, kind of an asshole. There's a bit of the ugly American beneath that cheerful, energetic, heroic surface.

Next up was Sign of the Cross (1932). 1932 was the greatest year in movies, and I continue my exploration of the riches. This one's by Cecil B. DeMille, and boy, hm, what can I say? This is a story set in Nero's Rome. Nero's top commander, Marcus Superbus (not to be confused with Atrios' Supertrain) falls in love with a Christian woman while resisting the overtures of the Empress Poppaea. DeMille is famous for making lurid morality tales, and this falls squarely in that contradictory category. 1932 was in the middle of the pre-Code era, so the lurid parts are pretty racy, perhaps most famously Claudette Colbert just barely up to her nipples in donkey milk, although honestly, all of the Roman women might as well be wandering around naked for as little as their clothes cover them. The film's stirring climax is a day at the coliseum in which depraved Romans (cf. the movie audience) avidly watch all manner of horrific killing, including the feeding of Christians to lions. The martyrdom of the Christians is played at the highest melodramatic pitch possible. Their heroism is their willingness to die for their beliefs, only adding to the overall morbidity of the movie. What's interesting is that the Romans get no comeuppance for their depravity, unlike in, say, The Last Days of Pompeii. One wrong note for me was Frederic March as Marcus. He seemed too wimpy for the role, in contrast to his great performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the year before. Charles Laughton chews the scenery as the effete Nero, with a very funny Roman nose glued on. This movie is a hoot, and I kept imagining that the cast of depraved actors and actresses were probably on the side of the Romans throughout.

Finally I watched They Live by Night (1948). This is categorized as a film noir, although except for the fatalism it didn't feel all that noirish to me. It's a story of lovers on the lam, directed by Nicholas Ray. It's visually striking, and there was something about the story that kept triggering unexpected feelings in me. I'm not actually sure what that's about. I guess I have a strong gut feeling that all romance is doomed. Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell play young hicks with no experience of the world (he's been in prison since he was sixteen) who fall in love and try to find a niche where he can go straight. Their naivety is heart-breaking, perhaps a little bit too much so, I dunno. There's definitely a melodramatic feel to it, but also, like the other Nicholas Ray movies from this era, a very personal feel that's strange in a genre movie. It feels both incredibly realistic and incredibly stagy and artificial. It's interesting to compare it to Gun Crazy (1950), which is a very similar story and yet miles different because the woman in the couple is an aggressive femme fatale who takes part in the crimes. I've got to say that on a first viewing, I prefer Gun Crazy to this one, although I also got the feeling that Gun Crazy was riffing off this movie, particularly in some of the shots from the backseat of the car. Anyway, this is another movie that I've wanted to see for years, and I'm glad to have caught up with it. Now could somebody release Ray's The Lusty Men (1952) on DVD? That's one I've wanted to see (without knowing its title at first) since I saw a clip of it in Wim Wenders bizarre memorial to Ray, Lightning Over Water, at the Neptune over twenty years ago.

When I was in college, this short silent comedy was a favorite at the local repertory theater. All the college kids loved it because of the drug humor. Douglas Fairbanks plays a scientific detective called Coke Ennyday -- a clear parody of Sherlock Holmes and his seven percent solution. Now the film is available on a new collection from Flicker Alley called Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer, which gathers eleven movies (mostly comedies) that Fairbanks made before he became a swashbuckling hero in the '20s -- although it does include his first swashbuckling hit, The Mark of Zorro (1920).

This was my first chance to see "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" since college days. It holds up pretty well as a cult item with a very goofy take on drugs. We first see Coke Ennyday shooting up every 30 seconds with a syringe poke to the wrist, which causes him to perk up, grin, and twirl his mustache happily. He is called upon to solve a mystery: a gangster is smuggling heroin into the city, but the cops can't figure out how. Ennyday heads down the beach, where silly huggermuggery involving ridiculous disguises and blow-up fish ensues in the surf and on the wharf. As the liner notes point out, the film seems unaware of the irony of a cokehead trying to shut down a drug smuggling ring. The story doesn't really matter, however, and what it's really about is Fairbanks' manic physical antics. This reaches a peak when he ingests several finger scoops of opium, which causes him to start juddering and prancing around the sets like, well, a hopped up slapstick comedian. The drugs are smuggled via a Chinese laundry called, in an awful pun, Sum Hop. Ennyday actually uses drugs to subdue the bad guys too, blowing clouds of coke into the faces of the menacing gang, which knocks them out. The drugs are his superpower.

It's all very silly and slapstick. Fairbanks apparently disavowed it once he became an established, family-friendly star. One can only imagine that it was a huge hit amongst the debauched members of the new Hollywood Babylon -- released the same year as Intolerance and its epic Babylon sets. One of the other interesting tidbits about this movie is that the scenario was by Tod Browning, who would later establish himself as a director of macabre hits like The Unknown (1927), Dracula (1931), and Freaks (1932). Anybody else see this in their college days?