Best movies of 1927
Friends of film:
Don’t fear the silents!
Moving pictures had been around since Edison’s first kinetescope forty years earlier. Most were short novelties without plot; you’ve seen them. A running horse. A jumping man. Yay.
By the twenties, movie studios started to run like Henry Ford’s factories, with a logical division of labor churning out films with constantly leapfrogging technologies.
What a perfect time culturally for this to happen. America, despite (or because of?) prohibition was brash and unafraid, and wealthy. Lindbergh flew to Paris. News was dominated by stories of flappers and gangsters, which made their way easily onscreen alongside reminiscenses of our great heroics in the recently concluded Great War.
Vaudeville comedians found a way to perform before national audiences without having to schlep to Anaheim, Azuza, and Cuuuc...amonga.
German filmmakers had developed a unique style in a very different zeitgeist, with an emphasis on visual drama. Many of these directors made their way to Hollywood and New York, merging their artistic sensibilities with the more flippant and dollar-driven attitude of the American studios.
And then came sound: gradually, and then suddenly. As theater chains wired up amplifiers, synchronized soundtracks appeared. A butcher in Peoria heard the same music and sound effects as a stockbroker in Chicago (rather than each relying on a house orchestra trying to match the action onscreen). Then came actual talking, and singing, and not in that order. Right here, in 1927.
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And now, How to Watch a Silent Movie:
Don’t try to read lips. The title cards will catch you up to the action in a few seconds. Most of the actors were just improvising “mood” dialogue. Be surprised by how natural most of the dialogue acting is, in contrast to the exaggerated physical acting.
Remember: these were considered “moving pictures”: Be patient with the slowness of the shots and the lack of movement. Concentrate on the overall look of the screen, including the background, the lighting, the placement of objects and people. Soak it up and recognize how beautiful films can look when there aren’t cuts every two seconds. It’s a moving picture.
Conversely, marvel at the ingenuity of camera use, movement, dissolves, cuts, sets etc. as clever people tried new techniques with their very limited resources.
Appreciate the evolution of acting, which had come from the stage where the actors relied on exaggerated body language and facial expressions to reach that guy in the back. The close-up becomes paramount, and skilled actors recognized its power. Give them respect.
FXD
Arlington VA
Click on the posters for movie clips…
Chicago
d. Frank Usron
****
Phyllis Haver, Victor Varconi, Virginia Bradford, Robert Edeson, Eugene Pallette
You probably knew that the 1992 musical film Chicago was based on a 1973 Broadway musical, but did you know the play was based on a 1927 movie, which itself was based on a play, which was based on “true” events?! All the characters you know are here— Roxie Hart, Billy Flynn— but the story is told in a different manner. For instance, Amos is kind of the hero, doing his utmost to save Roxie from herself: he’s the one who hires Billy Flynn. And obviously, being silent, it’s not a musical. One of the great movies of and about the Roaring 20s.
The General
d. Buster Keaton & Clyde Brucksman
****1/2
Buster Keaton, Marion Mack
Buster Keaton is one of the three great silent comedians, alongside Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd (whom you may never have heard of but you will if you stick with FranxFlix). Keaton was known as “old stone face” for his ability to almost never show any facial emotion during his amazing stunt-driven antics. His body does the talking, however, and here he is at his most eloquent. Though dismissed at the time as being too serious for a comedy, and too funny to be a drama (retelling a real Civil War incident), it has come to be recognized as his masterpiece. No less than Orson Welles called it “the greatest comedy of all-time, if not the greatest movie of all-time.” Watch it realizing that all of his death-defying stunts were done by him on film, with no stuntman, no special effects; he could have died at any moment. The train wreck scene was the most expensive scene ever filmed up to that point, and they only had one take to get it right.
The Jazz Singer
d. Alan Crosland
****
Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland, Eugenie Besserer, Otto Lederer
Al Jolson was already a 40-year-old star of the stage when he took on the part that would define him forever as the first person to talk and sing in a full-length motion picture. It is mostly a silent film with title cards, but every once in a while the speaking happens, and to this day it still seems like magic. The story may be a bit trite, but it is well-shot (the sound parts from within a sound-proofed refrigerator-sized box) and well-told, so that it is worth watching for more than just its role as a historical marker. If nothing else, watch this middle-aged fogie perform some dance steps that prefigure - believe it or not - James Brown and Michael Jackson.
Metropolis
d. Fritz Lang
****1/2
Gustav Frolich
If you like Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Matrix, or any version of Batman, you owe it to yourself to see where it all started, as it is the great-grandaddy of all dystopian sci-fi movies. This is the pinnacle of German Expressionism, with its highly stylized visuals, including the movements of human bodies and faces. The special effects use a juxtaposition of models and backdrops to give a sense of dizzying scale, combined with weird camera angles and quirky choreographed movements of thousands of extras to create a film as beautiful as it is frightening in its portrayal of a future where a small class of privileged humans control the machines that control the world of subterranean workers. Also if you’re a lover or hater of Nicolas Cage: this is why. He based his style of acting on the excesses of German Expressionsism. You will watch him in a whole new light.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
d. F W Murnau
****
George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston
German Expressionism comes to Hollywood, and it turns out to be a beautiful marriage as the excesses of each are tempered. We have become so accustomed to the female temptress as being the interesting person on film, that it is almost shocking to see the lead actress playing the betrayed wife, and finding ourselves rooting for her to win her man back as they navigate the depths of the alluring City that the succubus has drawn him to. It’s a pretty cool City; I’d be tempted too.
Underworld
d. Josef von Sternberg
****1/2
Clive Brook, Evelyn Brent, George Bancroft, Larry Simon
Another great “first” this year: the first great gangster film. Flappers, speakeasies, con men with colorful nicknames, corrupt cops, wild shootouts…it all started here. And it’s glorious. This is the product of another German filmmaker recently come to Hollywood; von Sternberg knew nothing of Chicago or gangsters beyond what he read in the papers. Yet he created the template that is still being followed today.
Wings
d. William A Wellman
****
Clara Bow, Buddy Rogers, Richard Arlen, Jobyna Ralston
The first movie to receive a Best Picture Oscar features great aerial combat cinematography not to be matched until Top Gun (1985), and the best depiction of World War One until Paths of Glory (1957). The film features Clara Bow, the top screen draw of the time known as the “It” girl, but honestly she is a distraction from the combat scenes. Look for young Gary Cooper in a small but memorable supporting role. His stoic ease in the face of combat not only created his own screen persona, but established the template for the new generation of actors.
A word about the Jazz Singer and Blackface
I hate that I have to do this, because I like to think my audience is sophisticated and not given to modern shibboleths, but we live in this world so here goes.
Al Jolson appears in blackface in The Jazz Singer, as he often did on stage for the previous twenty years. Why?
Blackface was a legacy from antebellum minstrel shows, and they were by design filled with hatred and bigotry. White men clownishly painted their faces in visually offensive cartoonish portrayal of black people, and this was very deliberately accompanied by the worst racial stereotypical attitudes & behavior. This cannot be denied.
The original demeaning concept evolved into an ever-milder standardized format over the next 80~ years through traveling medicine shows, the Vaudeville circuit, and then Broadway. American audiences expected stock characters in the same way that European audiences expected stock characters in a Punch and Judy show. Black artists even joined the troupes. Yes: some of the greatest blackface artists were actually black. Weird but true.
The way I see it, the racial elements were still around but the racist elements had dissipated. They did not disappear; not by a long shot. But the genre evolved into an honorific of the legacy of previous generations of singers, dancers and comedians, both black and white. African-American dancing (shuffle, tap) and singing (gospel, ragtime) and comedy (corny jokes, naïve exposés) provided an outlet from the European-derived equivalents (opera, classical, waltz, Shakespearean drama) that were the respectable staples of the era.
It’s a fascinating and not very pleasant history. But I’m here for the movies, and I expect you are too. So do your own research and let’s cut to the videotape.
Al Jolson, a Jew from the Bronx, performed for twenty years on Broadway before his screen debut in The Jazz Singer. Much of his stage time was in blackface, because it was an accepted trope that songs about “Mammy” on the Plantation were always done that way. The irony here is that the character is singing through tears and burnt cork makeup to his real life Mammy, not some stock trope. Layers of meaning unfold before us. With sound.
A few years later, Fred Astaire performed in blackface onscreen in Swing Time (1936), in homage to his hero Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the most popular black dancer of the early twentieth century. Read that again: Astaire did it as an homage, not mockery.
No matter Astaire’s intentions, it is a cringeworthy scene: a stain on an otherwise wonderful film. (And don’t get me started on the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland pastiche that mars Babes in Arms). I would like to think that if I had seen it upon it’s release I would have felt just as appalled as I do now- but who’s to say? I am a product of my current enlightened culture; born eighty years earlier I would have been a product of that culture, for better and for worse.
And that’s the key: for better and for worse.
There are various types of ignorance. One is to rob segments of humanity of their inherent dignity as the minstrel shows and their enthusiastic audiences did. Another is to judge past times by current morality, which is ever evolving, and not always for the better.
There is so much richness to a movie such as The Jazz Singer that it would be a crime against culture to dismiss it as merely outdated and offensive. For one thing, we get a peek we get into traditional Jewish culture unlike any other I’ve ever seen on film.
To ignore or erase the past in order to justify one’s own moral superiority is to risk missing some wonderful things that one couldn’t have otherwise conceived of. In fifty years, someone may be judging your youthful culture for crimes that you can’t yet conceive of. We are fish unaware that we are swimming in water.
We’ve all got to face the past, unafraid, even the worst parts, in order to be nourished, and to learn.
For better and for worse.
FXD
The Corrected Oscars
Love this. And your hints for the modern watcher of movies is brilliant. Thank you.