Introducing the opening night film of the 14th edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Jeffrey Vance—author of Douglas Fairbanks (University of California Press, 2008)—offered: "Judging by this enormous turnout tonight, I'm inclined to think that talking films are just a passing fad."
One of the great pleasures of Douglas Fairbanks' career, Vance specified, were the action-adventure films of the 1920s; one of his finest being The Gaucho. "It's also one of the most unusual of his features," Vance qualified. "It's dark in tone and it leaps frequently from comedy to tragedy to self-parody. Like the other great Fairbanks films, it has spectacular opportunities for him to showcase his wonderful athletic prowess and it also contains superb production values." Characterizing The Gaucho as "a near masterwork", Vance claimed it's a pity that the film is rarely revived because—of all of Fairbanks' films—it may resonate best with 21st Century audiences because the character Fairbanks plays is dark and ironic and his mesmerizing leading lady—Lupe Vélez—is no damsel in distress but "in every respect the equal of Fairbanks' gaucho." Indeed, one contemporary review dubbed her "the female Fairbanks."
Fairbanks realized from the start that a deft touch was essential to leaven the film and to prevent it from becoming too dark. He, therefore, made an unexpected but true decision: he hired a top comedy director F. Richard Jones to direct the film. The production is beautifully designed by Carl Oscar Borg and photographed by Tony Gaudio, in whose cinematography the influence of German cinema is evident.
The Gaucho was also something of a family affair. Douglas Fairbanks's wife Mary Pickford, unbilled, plays the Virgin Mary and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. wrote some of the intertitles.
The film is likewise filled with brilliant stunts—Fairbanks' work with the bolas is particularly impressive—and it contains wonderful cinematic illusion through the usage of hanging miniatures and models. Further: "The carnal combativeness between Fairbanks and Vélez was a fresh approach to Hollywood lovemaking." Yet despite all these attributes, critical reaction to The Gaucho was decidedly mixed. The consensus among film historians is that—in the later period, when audiences were no longer confused by the sudden switches of mood and the leaps from comedy to tragedy—The Gaucho would have been a bigger hit.
The Museum of Modern Art not only kindly made the new print of The Gaucho but helped publish Vance's volume on Fairbanks, which had been commissioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Vance—along with Tony Maietta who helped author the volume—have had the pleasure of introducing the new MOMA print to audiences in both New York and Los Angeles, and now in San Francisco at their favorite venue for silent films, The Castro Theatre.
Maietta spoke next. He noted that The Gaucho was originally tinted and contained sequences in two-color Technicolor of Mary Pickford as the Madonna. Though the new MOMA print has not yet had the tinting or two-color Technicolor restored, Maietta offered six minutes of Technicolor outtakes of Mary Pickford as the Madonna, preserved by George Eastman House, which he felt would help provide a better idea of how color truly impacted The Gaucho when it was first shown. Maietta remarked that 2009 marks the 100 year anniversary of Mary Pickford's career, which began in 1909 with Her First Biscuits.
Fairbanks' previous film The Black Pirate had likewise been filmed in two-color Technicolor, a technology which suggested that you were seeing the entire spectrum of color when—in reality—you were only seeing red and green. Technicolor was in its infancy in 1926 and—though Fairbanks was hesitant to undertake the enormous expense of testing the evolving technology throughout his entire feature—he did recognize that Technicolor would lend the gravitas he desired for the religious mysticism of the scenes with the Virgin Mary. Fairbanks also knew that his wife Mary Pickford photographed beautifully in Technicolor (there are surviving tests of Pickford filmed during production of The Black Pirate).
To create the special effect of the celestial glow around the Virgin Mary, Pickford stood on a pedestal backed against a plank trailing her silhouette. Two bands of leather bristling with a multitude of thin sticks of pliable metal were then rotated behind her and hit with intense floodlights such that—when the metal sticks passed at a rapid pace around her silhouette—they produced a celestial glow.
Casting his wife as the Virgin Mary appears to have been somewhat of a whim on Douglas Fairbanks' part. Obviously, he knew his audiences would enjoy it, and Pickford was quite pleased as well; but, there were a few other speculative reasons about why he might have cast his wife as the Madonna. It was widely rumored that Fairbanks was having a brief affair with his leading lady Lupe Vélez during production. It's also speculated that this was a retaliatory gesture on his part as Fairbanks had witnessed the on-stage chemistry between Pickford and Buddy Rogers on the set of the romantic comedy My Best Girl. Apparently, Fairbanks casting Pickford as the Virgin Mary was not only to re-establish his dominance, but seemed an obvious casting choice to counter his having an affair with the "Mexican Spitfire." "You draw your own conclusions," Maietta encouraged.
All the work involved in this sequence, Maietta stressed, the casting of Pickford, the technical effort to simulate the celestial glow, the Technicolor, hasn't been seen by audiences in color since its original release. The SFSFF audience is only the second audience in the whole world to see these outtakes.
Film historian and critic Alexander Walker dismissed the cameo of Mary Pickford as the Virgin Mary in The Gaucho as being achieved with a penny sparkler burning behind her to create this celestial glow. Unfortunately, many film historians have picked up on this penny sparkler theory as fact in multiple biographies; but—as just seen—the facts are quite different. As recently as a 1996 review in The Village Voice, when The Gaucho was revived in a Douglas Fairbanks retrospective at Film Forum, Elliot Stein writes: "Roman candles are going off in her halo." Stein's review (available at Highbeam Research Library) categorized The Gaucho "pure gold" and a "revelation."
"It's his best, least hygienic film," Stein continues. "Fairbanks appears as an outlaw who frees a Lourdes-like shrine town in the Andes from the rule of a vile tyrant. The darkest of all his films, it's the only one to contain a whiff of eroticism. This gaucho is not just another adult boy scout—he's an alienated, chain-smoking, Byronic antihero. The leading lady is Lupe Vélez—the only zesty heroine of a Fairbanks film. This is the one Fairbanks picture in which you can imagine the leading couple getting it on. The art direction, glass shots, miniature work, and effects are drop-dead breathtaking. The dungeons in this film look like feature displays in Architectural Digest. The Gaucho climaxes with the best cattle stampede in movie history."
The first chapter of the Vance/Maietta volume on Fairbanks can be sampled in PDF format. Eventually, Brian Darr's informative essay for the SFSFF program will hopefully be added in its entirety to the festival's archive. Until then, I note Darr's research that Fairbanks "was moved to make the film about a healing shrine after visiting Lourdes, France, where, in 1858, St. Bernadette had reported visions of the Virgin Mary. He transposed his story to Argentina, subverting his screen persona by making his title character a bandit and an overt atheist."
Despite Vance's assertion that critical response to the film was "decidedly mixed", Darr—whose passion for animation rivals my own—writes of the film's audience reception: "The Gaucho premiered at Mann's Chinese Theatre in November 1927. It became a hit and earned twice its $700,000 production cost. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks chose the popular film to parody for the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon. As The Gallopin' Gaucho (1928), Mickey smokes a cigarette in the Fairbanks manner, rides a rhea bird up and down the Andes, tangos with Minnie, and throws his tail around like bolas. Disney repaid its debt to the star when the animated mouse appeared in the travelogue Around the World [in 80 minutes] with Douglas Fairbanks (1932)."
Along with what's gathered in External Reviews at IMDb, there's a page on The Gaucho at Dr. Macro's, from which I've gleaned most of the images for this entry. Thanks Dr. Macro!
Cross-published on Twitch.
July is here—which means it's time to jump aboard the time machine and set the dial for 1920s San Francisco. The SF Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) returns for its 14th glorious edition this weekend, and lucky Bay Area filmgoers (and scores of devoted out-of-towners) will get to relive the magnificent era of silent movies once more.
SFSFF is a first-rate act, which explains why it's become the most prestigious annual event of its kind in the Americas. How so? First, you begin with a venue like the built-in-'22 Castro Theater, perhaps the nation's most beloved extant movie palace. Next you program an eclectic, challenging and fun group of films and exhibit them with the best possible 35mm prints. Then you hire the cream of internationally renowned silent movie musicians to accompany the films. Throw in a printed program of scholarly essays, informative slideshows before each screening, lots of special guests and a Grand Prize Raffle courtesy of San Francisco's McRoskey Mattress Company—and there you have it. Thanks to the festival, I've gone from being marginally interested in silent cinema, to having the SFSFF be the most anticipated three days of my film-going year.
When the line-up was announced last month, I'd hoped to find a program or two worth skipping out on. But of course, it all sounds too good, which means being sequestered in the Castro (with time off to go home and sleep) from 7:00PM Friday until 10:00PM Sunday. This year's roster is a typical SFSFF mix of familiar actors (Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, W.C. Fields, John Gilbert) and directors (King Vidor, Josef von Sternberg, D.W. Griffith), with the distinctly less familiar (Soviet-era sci-fi and a French surrealist take on Edgar Allen Poe). Here's a cursory jaunt through the entire weekend's schedule.
Friday, July 10
7:00PM, The Gaucho—At the height of his career in 1927, Douglas Fairbanks wrote and starred in this adventure extravaganza, playing a rakish but honorable Argentine bandit called upon to defend a pilgrimage site from plunder. The film co-stars Lupe Velez in her first major role, an actress I only know from a dubious appearance in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon (a sordid story involving suicide and a toilet bowl). The film was directed by F. Richard Jones, Mary Pickford has a cameo as the Virgin Mary, and Mexican locations stand in for the Argentine pampas. I'm sure I'll know lots more after reading the film's program notes, written by none other than Hell On Frisco Bay's Brian Darr. Featuring the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. After the screening, the SFSFF opening night party takes place in the Castro mezzanine with drinks and live music.
Saturday, July 11
10:00AM, Amazing Tales From the Archives—For the fourth year in a row, SFSFF offers this FREE-admission spotlight on film preservation. (And speaking of FREE, kids under 12 get into ALL SFSFF shows gratis!) The program's highlights include a restored 1911 Edison short, How the Hungry Man Was Fed, and Screen Snapshots: 7th Series, with behind the scenes footage of Ramon Navarro and Clara Bow. Presenters are Joe Lindner and Heather Olson of the Academy Film Archive, along with 2008's SFSFF preservation fellowship recipient Anne Smatia. Featuring Stephen Horne on piano.
12:00PM, Bardleys the Magnificent—This 1926 King Vidor-directed romantic swashbuckler was considered lost, until a near-complete, but unprojectable print was discovered in a French cellar in 2008. It's been digitally restored and will therefore be projected digitally at the festival, marking a SFSFF first. John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman star in a tale of mistaken identity and political intrigue set in the court of Louis XIII. Featuring the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
2:30PM, Wild Rose—A romance between a poor country girl and a rich Shanghai artist is played out in this 1932 film from acclaimed Chinese director Sun Yu. Set against the backdrop of Japan's invasion of Manchuria, the film is said to explore issues of class-ism and the country's rural/urban divide. It stars Wang Renmei as the titular Wild Rose, and Jin Yan, the "Valentino of China." Jin Yan's widow, Qin Yi will be on hand to introduce the screening. Featuring Donald Sosin on piano.
5:00PM, Underworld—George Bancroft and Evelyn Brent star as gangster Bull Weed and his moll Feathers, in this slice of 1927 silent proto-noir from director Josef von Sternberg. Ben Hecht wrote the story (in tandem with an uncredited scenario by Howard Hawks) and then demanded his name be removed once he saw what Von Sternberg had done with it. He won an Oscar anyway. This film will be introduced by San Francisco's own Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller. Featuring Stephen Horne on piano.
7:30PM, The Wind—Lillian Gish plays a Virginia transplant driven nuts by West Texas wind, sand, cyclones and despicable suitors in SFSFF's 2009 Centerpiece Film. The movie was made under grueling conditions in the Mojave Desert, and Gish is once again directed by Victor Sjöström (The Scarlet Letter). The performance includes a special wind effect used in silent movie scores of the 1920s. Leonard Maltin will do the intro. Featuring Dennis James on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer.
9:45PM, Aelita, Queen of Mars—I missed this at the PFA two years ago when it screened as part of their Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema series, so I'm really glad to see it turn up here. Aided by eye-popping futuristic sets and costumes, the story concerns an earthman who takes a rocket ship to Mars and helps lead a revolution there. Directed by Yakov Protazanov and released in 1924. Featuring Dennis James on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer and theremin, and Mark Goldstein on the Buchla Lightning.
Sunday, July 12
10:30AM, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit—Before there was Mickey Mouse, there was Oswald, a cartoon character created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at Universal Studios in 1927. Disney lost control of the character in a 1928 legal dispute, and future episodes were produced by Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker). This program highlights eight Disney/Iwerks Oswald cartoons with guidance from Leonard Maltin and Iwerks' granddaughter Leslie Iwerks. Featuring Donald Sosin on piano.
1:30PM, Erotikon—Once the kiddies have been cleared from the Castro, the SFSFF heats up with this 1929 Czech silent from Gustav Machatý. This is the director who would scandalize the world four years later with Heddy Lamar's nude swimming scene in Ecstasy. In this melodramatic precursor, a young girl has sex with a stranger, gets pregnant, marries another man and then returns to her former lover. The film is noted for its expressionistic imagery and non-judgmental approach to female sexual desire. It's also the first Czech film to appear in the SFSFF. Featuring the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
4:00PM, So's Your Old Man—I guess I was vaguely aware that W.C. Fields made silent films, but it's hard to imagine him without that lilting sneer of a voice. This year we get to experience a "muted" Fields, thanks to the SFSFF Director's Pick program and Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World, Bad Santa). Fields plays a New Jersey "put-upon paterfamilias" who invents a shatterproof windshield. After a disastrous demonstration at an auto convention, he meets a Spanish princess who leads the way to redemption. Directed by Gregory La Cava in 1926, the film was remade by Fields eight years later as You're Telling Me. This screening will be hosted by Zwigoff, writer Daniel Clowes (Art School Confidential) and esteemed actor/writer/director/SFSFF Board Member Frank Buxton. Featuring Philip Carli on piano.
6:15PM, The Fall of the House of Usher—Of all the films in the festival, this is the one I'm perhaps most intrigued by. French director/film theorist Jean Epstein adapted this Edgar Allen Poe story in 1928, with the assistance of an ultimately disgruntled Luis Buñuel (fresh from making Un chien andalou with Salvador Dali). It's said to be light on plot, but very heavy on atmospherics denoting dread, decay and discomfort. Marguerite Gance (wife of director Abel Gance) stars as Madeleine Usher, the model/muse whose death drives her husband to madness. Featuring Stephen Horne on Piano.
8:15PM, Lady of the Pavements—The 2009 SFSFF comes full circle for its Closing Night Film, with yet another vehicle showcasing the talents of Lupe Velez. This time she's a Spanish cabaret singer being pursued by a Prussian aristocrat in 19th century Paris. This 1929 picture would turn out to be maestro D.W. Griffith's final silent film, and it's generally considered the artistic high point of his later career. Two musical numbers and a dialogue sequence were re-shot to qualify the film as a part-talkie, but the original soundtrack discs are considered lost. In the SFSFF presentation, the two musical numbers will be sung live by vocalist Johanna Seaton. Featuring Donald Sosin on piano.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
Introducing the opening night film of the 14th edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Jeffrey Vance—author of Douglas Fairbanks (University of California Press, 2008)—offered: "Judging by this enormous turnout tonight, I'm inclined to think that talking films are just a passing fad."
Fairbanks realized from the start that a deft touch was essential to leaven the film and to prevent it from becoming too dark. He, therefore, made an unexpected but true decision: he hired a top comedy director F. Richard Jones to direct the film. The production is beautifully designed by Carl Oscar Borg and photographed by Tony Gaudio, in whose cinematography the influence of German cinema is evident.
The film is likewise filled with brilliant stunts—Fairbanks' work with the bolas is particularly impressive—and it contains wonderful cinematic illusion through the usage of hanging miniatures and models. Further: "The carnal combativeness between Fairbanks and Vélez was a fresh approach to Hollywood lovemaking." Yet despite all these attributes, critical reaction to The Gaucho was decidedly mixed. The consensus among film historians is that—in the later period, when audiences were no longer confused by the sudden switches of mood and the leaps from comedy to tragedy—The Gaucho would have been a bigger hit.
The Museum of Modern Art not only kindly made the new print of The Gaucho but helped publish Vance's volume on Fairbanks, which had been commissioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Vance—along with Tony Maietta who helped author the volume—have had the pleasure of introducing the new MOMA print to audiences in both New York and Los Angeles, and now in San Francisco at their favorite venue for silent films, The Castro Theatre.
Fairbanks' previous film The Black Pirate had likewise been filmed in two-color Technicolor, a technology which suggested that you were seeing the entire spectrum of color when—in reality—you were only seeing red and green. Technicolor was in its infancy in 1926 and—though Fairbanks was hesitant to undertake the enormous expense of testing the evolving technology throughout his entire feature—he did recognize that Technicolor would lend the gravitas he desired for the religious mysticism of the scenes with the Virgin Mary. Fairbanks also knew that his wife Mary Pickford photographed beautifully in Technicolor (there are surviving tests of Pickford filmed during production of The Black Pirate).
Casting his wife as the Virgin Mary appears to have been somewhat of a whim on Douglas Fairbanks' part. Obviously, he knew his audiences would enjoy it, and Pickford was quite pleased as well; but, there were a few other speculative reasons about why he might have cast his wife as the Madonna. It was widely rumored that Fairbanks was having a brief affair with his leading lady Lupe Vélez during production. It's also speculated that this was a retaliatory gesture on his part as Fairbanks had witnessed the on-stage chemistry between Pickford and Buddy Rogers on the set of the romantic comedy My Best Girl. Apparently, Fairbanks casting Pickford as the Virgin Mary was not only to re-establish his dominance, but seemed an obvious casting choice to counter his having an affair with the "Mexican Spitfire." "You draw your own conclusions," Maietta encouraged.
All the work involved in this sequence, Maietta stressed, the casting of Pickford, the technical effort to simulate the celestial glow, the Technicolor, hasn't been seen by audiences in color since its original release. The SFSFF audience is only the second audience in the whole world to see these outtakes.
"It's his best, least hygienic film," Stein continues. "Fairbanks appears as an outlaw who frees a Lourdes-like shrine town in the Andes from the rule of a vile tyrant. The darkest of all his films, it's the only one to contain a whiff of eroticism. This gaucho is not just another adult boy scout—he's an alienated, chain-smoking, Byronic antihero. The leading lady is Lupe Vélez—the only zesty heroine of a Fairbanks film. This is the one Fairbanks picture in which you can imagine the leading couple getting it on. The art direction, glass shots, miniature work, and effects are drop-dead breathtaking. The dungeons in this film look like feature displays in Architectural Digest. The Gaucho climaxes with the best cattle stampede in movie history."
Despite Vance's assertion that critical response to the film was "decidedly mixed", Darr—whose passion for animation rivals my own—writes of the film's audience reception: "The Gaucho premiered at Mann's Chinese Theatre in November 1927. It became a hit and earned twice its $700,000 production cost. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks chose the popular film to parody for the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon. As The Gallopin' Gaucho (1928), Mickey smokes a cigarette in the Fairbanks manner, rides a rhea bird up and down the Andes, tangos with Minnie, and throws his tail around like bolas. Disney repaid its debt to the star when the animated mouse appeared in the travelogue Around the World [in 80 minutes] with Douglas Fairbanks (1932)."
