Matthew Kennedy hosted a brunch in honor of Photoplay Productions, this year's recipient of the Silent Film Festival Award, whereat he introduced me to Kevin Brownlow. Brownlow was quick to disavow credit for the discovery of the Metropolis print found in Buenos Aires, Argentina, though he remained flattered by Fernando Peña's sentiment at the previous evening's screening that—if it were not for Kevin Brownlow—many archivists, Peña included, would not have become enamored with and dedicated to the preservation and restoration of silent films.
Brownlow carries himself with Old World elegance, mannered and respectful, though a bit cautious when strangers rush up to fawn over him. This is, perhaps, the wisest policy. On stage, however, he is in full command of his persona: erudite, generous and compelling. He and his colleague Patrick Stanbury accepted the 2010 Silent Film Festival Award from SFSFF Executive Director Stacey Wisnia on behalf of Photoplay Productions, who provided SFSFF the 35mm print of Frank Capra's The Strong Man (1926), courtesy of Douris, Ltd. As Brownlow mentioned earlier to Wisnia, he has been studying silent film longer than the era of silent film lasted.
"When I first started involving myself in screening and presenting silent films 40+ years ago in the 1960s," Patrick Stanbury stated in his acceptance of the award, "I couldn't dream of the possibility of not only restoring films but bringing them back to a large audience in such a wonderful theater as this. I'm delighted to be here in San Francisco and very grateful for this award. Photoplay has always believed in putting back the best possible quality prints on the screen and the film you're going to see today—The Strong Man—is an exceptional print made off the original negative, better than which you should not be able to get. And here to tell you more about this...." Stanbury conceded the microphone to Kevin Brownlow.
Expressing that it was marvelous to be at SFSFF at long last, Brownlow admitted he was most impressed "in every direction" with the souvenir program and its well-researched essays. He wondered what he could possibly add to Roberto Landazuri's contribution? He was equally impressed with the enthusiasm of the audience and hoped to ship them all out to England when they do their silent film festival. Confirming as "very true" the SFSFF slogan—"True art transcends time"—, Brownlow added that it is equally true when they say that art is the concealment of effort. Nothing proves that more than The Strong Man, starring Harry Langdon.
"Once upon a time," Brownlow reminded, "Harry Langdon was the fourth great comedian. Now he's fallen into undeserved obscurity. Certainly, he was a quieter comic than the others—you had to concentrate harder—but, he was highly rewarding. His was a simple child-like and immensely vulnerable character who stared at the world like a startled white mouse.
"This masterpiece comedy somewhat disconcertingly starts in WWI, Harry being a Belgian soldier captured by a German who turns out to be Zandow the Great [Arthur Thalasso]. After the war this strong man is invited to America and takes Harry as his assistant. They search for Mary Brown, a girl who wrote to him in the trenches and a surprising number of women admit to being Mary Brown. Capra and co-writer Arthur Ripley and, incidentally, an uncredited Tay Garnett cleverly weave the social problems of the 1920s—prohibition, organized crime, prostitution—into the comedy.
"Harry manages to meet Mary Brown and finds she's blind. Her father, a pastor, objects to Harry marrying her because of his work in the music hall. One night when he has to stand in for the strong man, he causes a riot. It's interesting that Charlie Chaplin should choose a blind girl for his own love interest in his own great comedy City Lights. Chaplin had one of those magpie minds that would pick up an idea, forget where it came from and it would come out as his, which I think is a legitimate artistic method of production.
"Priscilla Bonner who played the blind girl remembered Frank Capra as 'very sure of himself'; but, you know, there are so many conflicting facts about this picture and no two historians ever seem to agree on them. ...But Langdon was so reassured—and this comes from Photoplay, after who we named our company—that he went on a golfing holiday, leaving Capra and Ripley to work on the story for the next film Long Pants and that proved to be a miserable experience.
"Capra told me that Langdon read the wonderful reviews from New York—people went crazy for this man—and [Langdon] just couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle the renown and success. So when he made Long Pants, he said, 'I want to do more pathos.' [Capra] said, 'No, no, pathos is already in your comedy.' [Langdon] said, 'Do you know more than those critics in New York?'
"Biographer Joseph McBride talked with Priscilla Bonner and she described the difficult situation that followed: Langdon and Ripley freezing Capra out in a situation that left a most unsatisfactory film for Langdon—that was Long Pants—and also for Capra. Langdon fired Capra with the next film. That was the end of what might have been an incredible run of comedies had Capra and Langdon stayed together. Getting rid of such a brilliant partner was the kind of dumb thing that Langdon might have done in one of his comedies.
"Last year in Bologna we saw a series of exceptional films—silent and early sound—which demonstrates that Capra was among the brightest talents in a business already crammed with talent. ...Joseph McBride's book is called Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992). Yes, he was full of self-confidence. Capra claims Langdon did not create his character, he did! He and Arthur Ripley. This has been contested by biographer Joyce Rheuban [Harry Langdon: The Comedian as Metteur-en-Scène, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1983] who says the character was well-established in vaudeville before Langdon went anywhere near pictures. What Ripley and Capra were able to do was to recognize what made Langdon unique and to let him be himself on film.
"Whether you agree with McBride's study of Capra's character or not, you have to acknowledge he was a superlative film director and—in this case—he was working with a superlative comedian and a superlative cameraman Elgin Lessley, Keaton's cinematographer, who was the main cameraman on The Strong Man.
"By coincidence, it was the first silent film that I saw on a nitrate print from the Museum of Modern Art who totally by accident had sent it to the National Film Theatre. I hope you get something of the same thrill that I got." [That coincidence is fondly remembered in Brownlow's recent Sight and Sound essay on "the luster of nitrate."]
Cross-published on Twitch.
The 15th edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) pulled into the station with John Ford's romanticized western The Iron Horse (1924), starring George O'Brien and Madge Bellamy. Festival favorite Dennis James—who provided musical accompaniment on the Castro Theater's Mighty Wurlitzer—also provided the only surviving 35mm print of the American version, courtesy of 20th Century Fox. Joseph McBride, author of Searching For John Ford (2001) offered historical context to help the audience further appreciate SFSFF's opening night film.
McBride was recently in Bologna, Italy for the Il Cinema Ritrovato, which is a festival dedicated to the rediscovery of rare and little-known films with a particular focus on cinema origins and the silent movie period. The festival's subject focus this year was on John Ford. McBride recalled that—when he began researching Ford in the 1960s—there were only five or six silent Ford films that anyone could find, including The Iron Horse. Since then, nearly 25 silent films from Ford's early career have been rediscovered, either in partial or complete condition, such that this period of his creative output has become much more visible and available.
McBride recounted that a circus wagon took a company of 200 people from Los Angeles to the Nevada location where The Iron Horse was to be filmed. They departed on New Year's Eve, 1923, and the company published a newspaper on location which included the following poem in its first issue:
There was a young fellow named Ford
Who put all his troopers aboard.
He took all these green faces
To God's open spaces
To make a big feature. "Oh Lord!"
The shoot was quite an adventure. Ford was only 29 years old at the time but The Iron Horse was already his 50th feature film. He had started directing at the age of 17 and would go on to direct a total of 54 westerns in his amazing career, which included 137 films to his credit. Certainly, Ford is acknowledged as the master of the western genre. The Iron Horse was a pivotal film in his career for many reasons but McBride likes to say that The Iron Horse was to John Ford what Jaws was to Steven Spielberg. It made him a famous director, even though The Iron Horse was an ambitious, out-of-control runaway production that went way over budget and over schedule. His studio Fox Film was having a hard time financially but The Iron Horse became a major hit when it opened and made Ford bankable for the remainder of his career.
The Iron Horse was, in effect, Ford's response to Paramount's "super western" The Covered Wagon (1923). Ford's film, however, was about building the First Transcontinental Railway: a great American saga. The company worked on the Pyramid Lake Paiute Indian Reservation near Wadsworth, Nevada [known, perhaps, to participants in the Burning Man festival as the exit from Interstate 80 that one takes to get to Black Rock City]. They drew people from Reno and surrounding areas to be extras in the film. The extras were told to bring their own props and costumes to reflect the period 1860-69. The production crew recreated the building of the railroad in great detail. They built an entire town and moved the town as the tracks were being built, much as it had been done in real life. The company lived in the circus train; in a sense, like real pioneers. This rough and tumble company shot in the snow under adverse winter conditions.
Ford hired old-time Western lawman and expert marksman Ed "Pardner" Jones for sharpshooting stunts. Once, Fox Film's production manager Sol Wurtzel sent a telegram to Ford urging him to speed up the shooting. Ford took the telegram, folded it, and held it up, telling Pardner Jones to shoot right through Sol's name, which Jones did; he was such a great shooter.
Another time, Ford had someone shoot a clay pipe out of the mouth of an actor who wasn't prepared for it and this infuriated Ford's brother Eddie, the film's assistant director, who took a pick-axe and went after his brother. They had a monumental brawl. That's the kind of production it was.
In the 1960s Ford considered writing a book about the making of The Iron Horse and McBride's wife quipped that it would be more pornographic than foreign literature. She was, perhaps, alluding to the brothel Ford set up to service members of the film company. You could get overnight accommodations, a bath, a haircut, and laundry service all for $5. So they weren't totally deprived on location.
They spent two months filming in Nevada, soliciting the cooperation of Paiute Indians from the reservation, along with Chinese who had actually worked on the railroad, and—allegedly—even used the locomotives that met at Promontory Point when the two ends of the line were joined on May 1869 [although other sources claim these were replicas]. McBride opined that Saul Wurtzel deserved credit for letting Ford keep shooting even though he was over budget and schedule. Wurtzel had seen the quality of the footage.
The Iron Horse, McBride characterized, has the authentic look of a reconstructed documentary, which can be said in general of Ford's best westerns: they look like documentaries, even as they're visions of an idealized world with Ford's great eye for composition. Within that, Ford encouraged spontaneous rough-housing acting, usually on the first take, to make the film seem real. He created a vision of the American past that audiences found believable. Today, the plot of The Iron Horse seems kind of hokey; but, it's the film's visual spectacle that remains impressive: the flowing movement of trains, horses, and buffalo, which Ford orchestrated with virtuosity, especially the last 40 minutes of the film as it reaches its crescendo. Added to this, Ford introduced small character touches to keep the film on a human scale. He was paying tribute both to the unification of the United States by the railroad through Abraham Lincoln who had the foresight to do this during the Civil War, and to the immigrants who actually built the railroad: the Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, and other immigrant groups. Ford had an uncle named Mike Connelly who was an Irish shooter who came over to serve in the Union army and to help build the railroad so Ford was honoring his Uncle Mike's story. For the people working on this film, this was real history.
Ford liked to call the film The Metallic Mustang. That was his other name for it. It played for months and moved audiences to tears with its recreation of the American past. After The Iron Horse, Ford made another silent western Three Bad Men (1926), which unfortunately flopped. Then Fox made The Big Trail directed by Raoul Walsh featuring John Wayne in his first starring role and that also flopped. Audiences had lost interest in these super westerns. Ford returned to the western genre in 1939 with Stagecoach, which has been recently released on Criterion DVD. From that point on, Ford was on a roll and he solidified his reputation as—not only the master of the western genre—but, in McBride's estimation, America's national poet and the closest we have to William Shakespeare.
Hopefully, David Kiehn's immaculately-researched essay for the SFSFF souvenir program will be replicated for SFSFF's archives in the near future to keep company with the already generous sampling of essays from past editions of the festival. Adding production details to McBride's introductory comments, Kiehn depicts a grueling and exhausting shoot in a difficult location under hazardous weather conditions. Unexpected snowfalls caused continuity issues, which Ford resolved by ordering hundreds of extras to remove the snow. The dining room steward succumbed to the cold and died of pneumonia. In a classic anecdote of ethnic masquerade, Paiute Indians from the Pyramid Reservation were brought in to double as Chinese railworkers. And a justice of the peace in Reno, Nevada looked so much like Abraham Lincoln that Ford hired him on the spot. Kiehn's essay is rich with such stories.
There are two recent contributions to the wealth of research written on The Iron Horse that I would like to point out. At Long Pauses, Darren Hughes takes advantage of the Ford At Fox DVD Collection to construct a screen capture analysis of the saloon showdown scene in The Iron Horse whereby Darren emphasizes Ford's mastery of standard continuity editing through a careful purview of establishing shots, re-establishing shots, and crosscuts leading to the final showdown. It's a visually striking sequence energized by these edits.
At Parallax View, Sean Axmaker takes on Ford's historical veracity in his first report from the festival, linking back to his earlier TCM essay.
Cross-published at Twitch.
Matthew Kennedy hosted a brunch in honor of Photoplay Productions, this year's recipient of the Silent Film Festival Award, whereat he introduced me to Kevin Brownlow. Brownlow was quick to disavow credit for the discovery of the Metropolis print found in Buenos Aires, Argentina, though he remained flattered by Fernando Peña's sentiment at the previous evening's screening that—if it were not for Kevin Brownlow—many archivists, Peña included, would not have become enamored with and dedicated to the preservation and restoration of silent films.
Brownlow carries himself with Old World elegance, mannered and respectful, though a bit cautious when strangers rush up to fawn over him. This is, perhaps, the wisest policy. On stage, however, he is in full command of his persona: erudite, generous and compelling. He and his colleague Patrick Stanbury accepted the 2010 Silent Film Festival Award from SFSFF Executive Director Stacey Wisnia on behalf of Photoplay Productions, who provided SFSFF the 35mm print of Frank Capra's The Strong Man (1926), courtesy of Douris, Ltd. As Brownlow mentioned earlier to Wisnia, he has been studying silent film longer than the era of silent film lasted.
Expressing that it was marvelous to be at SFSFF at long last, Brownlow admitted he was most impressed "in every direction" with the souvenir program and its well-researched essays. He wondered what he could possibly add to Roberto Landazuri's contribution? He was equally impressed with the enthusiasm of the audience and hoped to ship them all out to England when they do their silent film festival. Confirming as "very true" the SFSFF slogan—"True art transcends time"—, Brownlow added that it is equally true when they say that art is the concealment of effort. Nothing proves that more than The Strong Man, starring Harry Langdon.
"This masterpiece comedy somewhat disconcertingly starts in WWI, Harry being a Belgian soldier captured by a German who turns out to be Zandow the Great [Arthur Thalasso]. After the war this strong man is invited to America and takes Harry as his assistant. They search for Mary Brown, a girl who wrote to him in the trenches and a surprising number of women admit to being Mary Brown. Capra and co-writer Arthur Ripley and, incidentally, an uncredited Tay Garnett cleverly weave the social problems of the 1920s—prohibition, organized crime, prostitution—into the comedy.
"Harry manages to meet Mary Brown and finds she's blind. Her father, a pastor, objects to Harry marrying her because of his work in the music hall. One night when he has to stand in for the strong man, he causes a riot. It's interesting that Charlie Chaplin should choose a blind girl for his own love interest in his own great comedy City Lights. Chaplin had one of those magpie minds that would pick up an idea, forget where it came from and it would come out as his, which I think is a legitimate artistic method of production.
"Capra told me that Langdon read the wonderful reviews from New York—people went crazy for this man—and [Langdon] just couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle the renown and success. So when he made Long Pants, he said, 'I want to do more pathos.' [Capra] said, 'No, no, pathos is already in your comedy.' [Langdon] said, 'Do you know more than those critics in New York?'
"Last year in Bologna we saw a series of exceptional films—silent and early sound—which demonstrates that Capra was among the brightest talents in a business already crammed with talent. ...Joseph McBride's book is called Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992). Yes, he was full of self-confidence. Capra claims Langdon did not create his character, he did! He and Arthur Ripley. This has been contested by biographer Joyce Rheuban [Harry Langdon: The Comedian as Metteur-en-Scène, Rutherford, New Jersey, 1983] who says the character was well-established in vaudeville before Langdon went anywhere near pictures. What Ripley and Capra were able to do was to recognize what made Langdon unique and to let him be himself on film.
"Whether you agree with McBride's study of Capra's character or not, you have to acknowledge he was a superlative film director and—in this case—he was working with a superlative comedian and a superlative cameraman Elgin Lessley, Keaton's cinematographer, who was the main cameraman on The Strong Man.
