12. Foolish Wives (1922)

Disclaimer: I've noticed that the films are in a slightly different order depending on which edition of the book you look at. So from now on I'm going to just try and go in roughly chronological order, but I probably won't get it 100% right.

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Remember this guy from Sunset Boulevard?

How could you not? Gloria Swanson makes the movie, but he provides a memorable assist. The character's name is Max von Mayerling and he is described as "one of the three greatest silent directors" who is now working for his ex-wife Norma Desmond as her butler. It's some of the most inspired casting in film history, because the actor (Erich von Stroheim) actually was a famous silent director who had been mostly forgotten in America by the time Sunset Boulevard came out in 1950.

Von Stroheim's story proves as well as anyone's how it's possible to totally reinvent yourself in Hollywood, but you have to work hard to stay relevant and be willing to make compromises. Your ego can only carry you so far.

These days he is viewed as an auteur, which I think is just a fancy word for pain in the ass/batshit crazy. For example, he thought many of his movies should run 6-10 hours because he was obsessed with exploring all the details of a story. All the tales behind his films are about him being difficult and inflexible to work with, and he brought down his career by refusing to compromise on his artistic ideals to make commercially successful films.

Foolish Wives is considered the first "big" movie that he directed. It was also the first movie that was advertised as costing over $1 million dollars. It was originally budgeted for $250,000, but Universal Studio estimated it ended up costing $1,225,000 (von Stroheim argued differently, that it cost "only" $750,000).

Foolish Wives takes place in Monte Carlo and tells the story of a con man (played by von Stroheim) who poses as a Russian count. He's known for being a ladies' man and he zeroes in an the young wife of the American ambassador as his next target. Working with him are two female accomplices who pose as his cousins.

In a strange twist of irony, the theme of a man posing as an aristocrat mirrors von Stroheim's own life:  he was born Erich Stroheim, son of a lower-middle class Viennese hat-maker, but when he arrived in America he registered himself as Count Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim und Nordenwall, Austrian noble. He didn't completely get away with the ruse, however; other German speakers in Hollywood outed him as having a lower-class Austrian accent. Others say he didn't speak German at all, and later in life von Stroheim claimed he had forgotten his native tongue completely.

So, you have an enigmatic guy who rewrites his own backstory in America and does the same thing for characters in his films. Despite never having served in the military, von Stroheim often wrote himself into movies as high-ranking military officers.

In addition to casting himself as a smooth playboy-type, this film has another really big hint at von Stroheim's ego in the scene where he first meets his prey as she is reading a book on a hotel veranda. The book's title? "Foolish Wives, by Erich von Stroheim." 

I will say that the art direction in this movie is fantastic. The recreation of Monte Carlo is exquisite.

There was one scene that stuck out at me as really creative in which the Count uses a bit of mirror to spy on the diplomat's wife as she is undressing. You see a little sliver of what he is seeing, but the focus is on his face and how much he's enjoying being a voyeur.

One of the trademarks that gave von Stroheim the "auteur" label is the cynicism that pervades his films. This film employs the motif of innocence lost that I've mentioned so much recently, but the difference here is that the bad guy gets a lot more screen time and isn't really presented as, well, a bad guy. The blame is placed pretty squarely on the victim--the film's title is Foolish Wives, not Evil Playboys. It reminds me of Goodfellas: the "bad" guys do bad things, sure, but the lifestyle is just so glamorous and fun, how could anyone resist! It's the other person's fault for being such a schmuck! If the message of D.W. Griffith movies is "watch out for bad guys," the message of this movie is, "bad guys are sexy."

I find von Stroheim to be pretty fascinating, so I'm looking forward to seeing his other movie on the list, Greed.

11. Orphans of the Storm (1921)

Orphans of the Storm is the last D.W. Griffith movie on the list, and my feelings about it are pretty similar to what I felt about the rest of them (with the exception of Broken Blossoms): the technical aspects of the film are praiseworthy (the set pieces are particularly impressive), but the characters and plot are formulaic and left me feeling pretty bored. I figured out how this movie was going to end with over an hour of running time left.

Lillian Gish and her sister Dorothy play the requisite innocent heroines in a French Revolution setting, bad guys threaten to tarnish their innocence, etc., a battle between good and evil ensues....you get the idea.

Factoids about this film:

It is based on a play called "The Orphans" that had already been filmed at least twice before 1920; one version starred Theda Bara and was released in 1915. (I've seen some other examples of multiple silent films being based on the same source material--I guess the precedent for the current remake frenzy sweeping Hollywood was set a long time ago!) Theda Bara was one of the film industry's first sex symbols/femme fatales. She made over 40 films in her career but, unfortunately, most of them were lost in a fire in 1937 and very little footage of her survives to this day.

This movie is the last Griffith film to star Lillian Gish, and it's also considered his last big commercial success.

I am so glad to have all the D. W. Griffith films on the list behind me now.

10. The Phantom Carriage (1921)

The frame story of The Phantom Carriage is that whoever dies last on New Years' Eve is doomed to serve as Death's servant for the following year and collect people's souls when they die. The doomed servant of Death must ride around in a ghostly carriage to accomplish the task.

The film opens on New Years' Eve as a young Salvation Army sister lies ill on her deathbed. Her final wish is to speak to a man named David Holm before she dies. The next scene reveals that David Holm is a local drunk, but it's not immediately clear what the connection is between him and the girl. The rest of the movie explains the connection between them, and also what happens next for David Holm.

I absolutely LOVED this movie. It is suspenseful and chilling from the start and never really lets up.
This film is known for its use of extensive flashbacks and special effects: the carriage and the dead characters appear transparent. The effects add a lot to the film and make it extremely eerie.

The effects were created with multiple double exposures. And cameras had to be hand-cranked at that time, so the cameras had to be cranked at exactly the same speed for the exposures to match up. Post-production of this film took a while because of these technical challenges, but it all turned out beautifully.

Telling the story with flashbacks is also very effective. And in an early stroke of marketing genius, the movie was first released on New Years' Day in 1921. It had a big impact on a 15-year-old Ingmar Bergman, who would later become Sweden's most celebrated film director.

This is probably my favorite from the list so far. Highly recommended.
The whole thing is available on YouTube, if you want to watch it.

9. Within Our Gates (1920)

Happy Black History Month! Within Our Gates is the earliest known film by an African-American director. Usually considered a response to Birth of a Nation, it was released during a period of violent racial tension in the United States that followed the Great Migration of southern blacks to the north.

The film follows a young woman (Sylvia) as she runs into various perils while she is trying to raise money for a black school in the south. The movie is pretty straightforward until it nears the end, when Sylvia's father is framed for a crime. The pace really picks up as her family is being chased down by white townspeople. After Sylvia's family is captured, a white mob lynches her parents; Sylvia and her brother narrowly escape. The lynching scene is the most famous in the film.

In contrast to D.W. Griffith's one-sided vision of post-Civil War race relations in the United States, Oscar Micheaux offers a more complex look at some of the issues blacks faced. Not all the white characters are unsympathetic in this film, and not all the black characters are sympathetic. Sylvia eventually gets $50,000 for her school from a white philanthropist, while two black characters are shown "selling out" -- one denounces the idea of suffrage just to please the whites around him, and another turns Sylvia's family in to an angry mob in hopes of personal gain. At the end of a film, a rich white man chases Sylvia down, but lets her go after realizing she is his biological daughter.

The censors objected to this film because they feared it would incite more race riots like the one in Chicago in 1919. The objections caused some cities to show the film only with major scenes cut out, leading to multiple versions of the film. All prints later disappeared and the film was lost for decades until a single copy was found in Spain under the title "La Negra" in the 1970s.

This film isn't exactly one you would settle in and watch with a bucket of popcorn, but it is a very important piece of social history that would make a good teaching tool for classes/modules about the early 20th century in America. it's classified as a "race film," but I don't really agree with that label, since the cast isn't all black and the movie doesn't seem targeted just toward a black audience. It's meant to educate all people about racism, women's rights, and the importance of education.

8. Way Down East (1920)

Do not watch this movie on Netflix! I settled in for what I thought was an 83-minute movie and as it neared the end I thought to myself, "hmm....they have a lot of loose ends to tie up in a very short amount of time." Turns out Netflix only has part 1. The full movie is actually 145 minutes long. Luckily the whole thing is posted on YouTube, so I finished it there.

This film is based on a play that premiered in the late 1800s. It was popular through the first decade of the 20th century, but by the time Griffith released his film version, the Victorian plot seemed tired and outdated. It is old-fashioned and trifling even for 1920.

Griffith's reliable heroine Lillian Gish stars again as an innocent young woman who is wronged at the hands of society's less savory characters. Gish plays a poor country girl (Anna) who goes to visit her rich relatives in the big city and gets swept off her feet by a big city playboy who lures her into a sham marriage. After he abandons her, she goes through the traumatic experience of giving birth to an out-of-wedlock baby and being kicked out of a boarding house because of it. After the baby dies, she wanders until finding work on a prosperous farm. Things seem to be looking up until her ex-quasi-husband appears and starts wooing another girl, and the town gossips expose Anna's past and get her kicked off the farm. Reeling from the humiliation, she wanders out into a violent winter storm and eventually collapses on an ice floe headed for a waterfall. Luckily the farmer's son who has fallen in love with her saves her just in time and the film ends with a triple wedding (did those ever really happen in real life, or just in movies?)

The scenes on the ice floes are by far the most interesting part of the movie. Like I said, the rest of it is kind of corny and melodramatic, but it's notable for being the first Griffith movie on the list that has a lot of comedy in it. There are a lot of moments of slapstick comedy involving the minor characters in the film.

This movie was way too long. I don't mind long movies as a general rule, but the length of this one did not feel justified or satisfying. I didn't enjoy this movie nearly as much as the previous Griffith film I watched, and I'm convinced that what made that one good was the fact that Griffith really reined himself in on the length, didn't waste time on a million supporting characters and subplots, and chose a story that didn't have a cliched happy ending.

The ice floe scenes are pretty impressive for 1920, but that's really the only interesting thing about this movie. And filming those scenes had a lasting impact on some of the people involved: Lillian Gish's right hand was in the icy water for so long during the shoot that she had problems with it for the rest of her life (she lived until 1993) and D.W. Griffith also suffered long-term problems from getting frostbite on one side of his face.

This is the 4th of the 5 D.W. Griffith movies on the 1001 list. I wonder if the last one will be a melodrama like this one, or a more satisfying tragedy like Broken Blossoms.

Diving into Hitchcock

Been working on this book for the past couple weeks.

I picked it up because I read somewhere that it was an extremely well researched and well written biography of Hitchcock, and if there's anything I like more than a good movie, it's a good biography. The "well researched" description is extremely true--at first I was freaked out by the level of detail in it. It seems like the author could tell you what Hitch did every day of his life from the age of 14. Reading it makes me feel like a voyeur peeking into someone else's life, almost like I'm a character in a Hitchcock movie. Whoa.

Originally I was worried that I was getting ahead of myself because I'm currently at 1920 in my project, and I had always connected Hitchcock with a later era in my mind. But my concern over continuity was for naught--Hitchcock's career spanned both the silent and sound eras and he directed films in 6 different decades. So, it's not a bad idea to read a Hitchcock biography while you're trying to learn about general film history. Hitch had quite a few movies under his belt before Britain switched to sound in 1929 (the first British sound production was a Hitchcock picture), so a lot of the things I'm noticing in my project have parallels in his life story. Plus, as an adolescent he was a prolific movie and theater fan, so chances are I am watching movies he saw as a young man when they were in theaters.

Later in life, Hitch would state that his greatest influence was "the Germans": The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch. Hitchcock even directed some films in Germany during the 1920s. This explains a lot of his stylistic choices and why many memorable scenes from his movies are set to silence or near silence. He idolized the masters of scenery and atmosphere.

The only Hitchcock movies I saw as a kid are from later in his career, after he became the most famous and picked apart director in the world. There's a lot I haven't seen, and I look forward to diving into it with all this new knowledge I'm gaining.

My favorite quote from the book so far-

After being told by a writer that a certain plot wasn't logical:

"I'm not interested in logic, I'm interested in effect. If the audience ever thinks about logic, it's on their way home after the show, and by that time, you see, they've paid for the tickets."

It's all about effect, you see.

If you're interested in other great books about directors, this one about David Lean is fantastic. Highly recommended. 

7. Broken Blossoms (1919)

This is the third film by D. W. Griffith on the 1001 list, and the first I have enjoyed. There are still some aspects of this movie that are cringe-worthy (its alternate title is "The Yellow Man and the Girl") but overall this film is more nuanced and sensitive than the others. Its themes are no less complex than Griffith's other two previous films on the list, but his staging is less ambitious here and that serves him well in getting his message across.

Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) leaves his native China because he "dreams to spread the gentle message of Buddha to the Anglo-Saxon lands." His idealism fades as he is faced with the brutal reality of London's gritty inner-city. However, his mission is finally realized in his devotion to the "broken blossom" Lucy Burrows (Lillian Gish), the beautiful but unwanted and abused daughter of boxer Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp).

After being beaten and discarded one evening by her raging father, Lucy finds sanctuary in Cheng's home, the beautiful and exotic room above his shop. As Cheng nurses Lucy back to health, the two form a bond as two unwanted outcasts of society. All goes astray for them when Lucy's father gets wind of his daughter's whereabouts and in a drunken rage drags her back to their home to punish her. Fearing for her life, Lucy locks herself inside a closet to escape her contemptuous father.

By the time Cheng arrives to rescue Lucy, whom he so innocently adores, it is too late. Lucy's lifeless body lies on her modest bed as Battling has a drink in the other room. As Cheng gazes at Lucy's youthful face which, in spite of the circumstances, beams with innocence and even the slightest hint of a smile, Battling enters the room to make his escape. The two stand for a long while, exchanging spiteful glances, until Battling lunges for Cheng with a hatchet, and Cheng retaliates by shooting Burrows repeatedly with his handgun. After returning to his home with Lucy's body, Cheng builds a shrine to Buddha and takes his own life with a knife to the stomach.

This film was made during a period of anti-Chinese fear called the Yellow Peril. But in contrast to Griffith's fear-mongering The Birth of a Nation and confused Intolerance, this film preaches a message of tolerance. Griffith adapted the plot from a popular book of the era, but changed the nature of the main character to make him much more sympathetic. I can almost forgive Griffith for calling Cheng Huan "yellow man" and "chinky" because of how sensitively he frames the character's personality.

This movie was successful and highly praised by both audiences and critics even though viewers were disturbed by the depictions of child abuse. The original backer was so furious over the sad ending--all the main characters die--that Griffith bought the film back from him. It ended up being the first film distributed by United Artists, a collective Griffith started with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin so they could release their own films and avoid dealing with the status quo studio system. 

I liked this movie a lot more than I expected and I'm very curious about the next film on the 1001 list, another Griffith classic.

Fun fact - the actor who played the abusive father in this film, Donald Crisp, was also a director during the silent era and learned much of his tradecraft from D.W. Griffith. Crisp would later star in one of my favorite movies of all time, How Green Was My Valley, and win an Oscar for best supporting actor.