Silent Magic

Viewing silent movies in the 1960s and 1970s could be agony. The visual glories described so eloquently by writers such as Kevin Brownlow in The Parade’s Gone By, or William K. Everson in American Silent Film, were seen as “in a glass darkly” in most of the available prints. Bruce Hodson and Rob Gowland—unsung heroes of Australian film scholarship—at the National Library and the National Film Theatre did their best and allowed us to see at least some of the great films from the silent era in prints close to their original condition, as did David Stratton when he invited American film scholar Albert Johnson to present Show People, The Wind and The Last Command at the Sydney Film Festival. But as with so many important films they were never regularly available. Gowland—again—and Eddie Allison at Quality Films were able for a time to hire out good prints of the Russian classics for courses in film history like mine; but it was a constant battle and too often discussion and analysis, or even just enjoyment, had to run second to finding the films and getting them screened.

With DVD much of this has changed. No longer do we have to wait for special occasions such as the 1982 screening with full orchestra of Abel Gance’s Napoleon to experience a rare film. Increasingly, new restorations of the classics are getting their “first releases” on DVD.

These reflections were prompted by my recent purchase on DVD of King Vidor’s Bardelys the Magnificent (1926). The film—very famous in its time—had been “lost” for nearly seventy years. With carelessness typical of the period, MGM had ordered the destruction of the negative in 1936. Then in 2006 a nitrate print was discovered when the collection of Gilles de la Mettrie was purchased by Lobster Films, making possible a digital restoration with the original intertitles recreated from the screenplay. (The titles on the print were in French.) Since then, 35mm prints of the restored version have been screened at silent film festivals in San Francisco and Italy. It has been very well received, which is not surprising, as Vidor was at his peak in 1926. His previous film had been the still famous Big Parade, and both films starred the legendary John Gilbert.

The restoration of Bardelys on the DVD is a model of film scholarship. The third reel was missing from the surviving print so the narrative is continued using titles from the screenplay, stills and some footage from the trailer (which incredibly did survive). Visually it is splendid although, of course, not as sumptuous as it would have been in its original screenings. Above all the DVD restorers have the speed right. Movement is neither lethargic, which occurs when the print is projected slower than the speed at which it was taken, nor accelerated when projection speed is faster—the notorious jerkiness of silent movies.

When I started film teaching in 1970 it was believed that silent film needed to be projected at sixteen and two-thirds frames per second. Most 16mm projectors had a lever that enabled you to run the film at twenty-four fps (sound speed) or sixteen and two-thirds fps (so-called silent speed). This, as Kevin Brownlow pointed out, was nonsense. Cameras of the period were hand-cranked, and who could crank at the same speed all the time?

Projectionists and technicians of the silent era knew this only too well and 35 mm projectors in the cinemas of the time were all equipped with variable speed controls. On first making up the reels the projectionist would ascertain the proper rate of each reel and list it so the speed could be adjusted during the screening. Usually there would be a rehearsal with the orchestra or accompanist so appropriate music could be selected. First-run cinemas had full orchestras while second-run houses usually only a pianist or organist. Sometimes the studios or the director would send out musical suggestions and later complete scores. For example, D.W. Griffith wanted Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries to accompany the Ku Klux Klan’s gallop to the rescue at the end of Birth of a Nation and as the film’s love theme the impossibly sentimental Perfect Song (out of respect for Griffith no one uses this now).

The Bardelys DVD set recreates the viewing experience of both the first- and second-run houses, with the viewer able to choose from an orchestral or piano score played in the style of the period. I ran both and found them equally effective.

The question now is whether recreating these viewing experiences of the past is no more than an exercise in film archaeology—fascinating for historians studying the evolution of the medium and nothing more; or are at least some of these restorations enabling us to experience lost masterpieces? In my opinion the kind of film scholarship found on the Bardelys DVDs does both. As well as the “masterpiece” the set includes the 1924 Monte Cristo, also featuring John Gilbert. This too is a new discovery. It comes from a worn print found recently in the Czech Republic. For the historian it is an excellent example of popular film-making of the period, neither a masterpiece nor a flop, just unpretentious mainstream entertainment of the period that shows how good Gilbert was at the beginning of his career. Bardelys the Magnificent, on the other hand, is an extraordinary work of art. But to fully appreciate its riches you have to understand something about silent film-making and acting.

The cliché has performers with staring eyes emoting like crazy, urged on by directors in riding breeches yelling through a megaphone. Sometimes this was true. Still the stereotype was in part created by the film-makers themselves. King Vidor sent up his contemporaries mercilessly in his still very funny Show People (even funnier if you have a working knowledge of silent movies).

A corrective to all this extravagance is D.W. Griffith’s advice to the great Lillian Gish, “Don’t let anyone catch you acting.” His point was that film acting requires the performer to embody the emotion for the camera, not project their emotions to an audience in a theatre. Griffith knew much of the overplaying in silent movies came from stage actors who had not adjusted their performances to the camera; and indeed actors who came from the theatre, like John Barrymore, were ruthlessly self-critical about anything “hammy” in their screen work.

Nevertheless silent acting was never naturalistic as we understand it. Emotions had to be mimed, hence the expressive eyes, the fluid gestures and movement, as well as the emotional intensity. This was rarely achieved by the leather-lunged, shouting directors of the period. Vidor may have continued to use a megaphone on location well into the sound era, but he was softly spoken and thoughtful on the set.

A fascinating insight into how the best directors of the era worked can be found in a little-known scene in George Sidney’s Jeanne Eagels (1957). It shows the great silent director, Frank Borzage, recreating his directorial style. Yes, he is wearing riding breeches, but he speaks quietly through a small megaphone with musicians playing in the background. Working this way, directors like Borzage, Vidor and Griffith evoked performances of great subtlety that can still be profoundly moving.

The best modern analogy I can think of for acting in the silent era is the way emotion is portrayed in ballet. (Indeed, when she went to Russia, Lillian Gish was told the Bolshoi Ballet had been closely studying her films.) Once modern viewers adjust to seeing silents as a kind of mime or ballet, appreciating a work like Bardelys the Magnificent becomes relatively easy.

So what kind of film is Bardelys the Magnificent? It is based on an early novel by that master of historical romance, Rafael Sabatini, and follows its plot fairly closely. Since Sabatini constructed his narratives like stage melodramas complete with dramatic entrances and last-minute rescues, all of which translate readily into film, this fidelity to the original was a shrewd move by King Vidor and writer Dorothy Farnum. Other influences were the immensely successful Douglas Fairbanks Snr swashbucklers such as Robin Hood and The Black Pirate with their spectacular stunts (all performed by the star) and playful treatment of their often preposterous plots. Then there were D.W. Griffith’s rides to the rescue that built up the suspense by cross-cutting between rescuers and the imperilled heroes and heroines facing imminent execution or a fate worse than death—sometimes both. This had been seen at its best four years earlier in the great man’s French Revolutionary epic Orphans of the Storm.

Vidor seems to have easily encompassed all these influences. A witty opening with overtones of French farce establishes Bardelys’s reputation as a womaniser and favourite of the king. But once he accepts a tasteless wager to woo and win an obdurately virtuous lady and encounters Roxalanne, Eleanor Boardman’s spirited heroine, Gilbert becomes an ardent lover. To portray the transformation Vidor improvised one of his most famous sequences. As the director described it later, cast and crew arrived at a location in Pasadena near a small lake. He had thought the lakeside might be a good place for a love scene but hadn’t gone any further. Then Vidor saw a property man pushing an old rowboat that he’d brought along in case the director asked for one:

He brushed past the lone branch of a weeping willow tree hanging in the water. I asked the head grip, “How long will it take you to make a tunnel of willow branches a hundred feet long? They should just caress the water” … We mounted a camera in the bow of the rowboat and were soon gliding along through a corridor of willow branches that passed tenderly over the reclining forms of Jack and Eleanor … the leaves threw a moving pattern of light and shadow which played moodily across the faces of the lovers.

The effect eighty-three years later is still “magical”. But the sequence owes more to its stars than perhaps even Vidor realised. At the end of his career the director tried to recreate the same effect in Solomon and Sheba with Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida. It didn’t work. Neither Brynner nor Lollobrigida had anything like the intensity and sincerity of Gilbert and Boardman. In addition, while the later film was shot in colour, the sequence in Bardelys has an infinite variety of delicate textures, all in black-and-white.

Vidor manages the film’s transition from melodrama to playful swashbuckler with great aplomb. No sooner does the hero seem to be going bravely to his death, the victim of a jealous rival’s refusal to reveal his real identity, than Bardelys swings from the scaffold, and vaults over lines of soldiers, with Gilbert seeming to out-Fairbanks Fairbanks. In fact Gilbert was doubled for the more hectic stunts, but Vidor’s staging with its spectacular top shots, executed by ace cinematographer William Daniels, comes close to excelling the action scenes Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh had devised for Fairbanks. A delicious touch has the king almost not arriving in time to rescue his friend because he has become interested in the conversation of a new favourite. All this works as well as it does because Gilbert and Boardman are marvellously truthful in the dramatic sequences and Gilbert especially has a delicate lightness of touch in the comedy.

Bardelys is an impressive achievement—silent film-making at its most sophisticated. The subtle shifts in mood, the interweaving of satire, melodrama and romanticism, and the superbly controlled narrative, make this one of the masterpieces of the era. It confirms King Vidor’s place in the pantheon of great American directors.

Lobster has listed the DVD release of Bardelys the Magnificent and Monte Cristo as the first of a series devoted to the lost films of John Gilbert. So far we don’t know what other films they have in store for us, but Turner Classic Movies has just released Love, the silent version of Anna Karenina in which Gilbert is partnered by Greta Garbo. Still there is nothing as yet about La Boheme, also directed by King Vidor, co-starring Lillian Gish. All this is long overdue. Gilbert was a spectacular casualty of the coming of sound when his passionate “I love you, I love you” in His Glorious Night was greeted by hoots of laughter; an incident recreated rather cruelly in Singin’ in the Rain. Forgotten is that the star was rushed into making the film, and that His Glorious Night was directed by Lionel Barrymore—a superb actor but an atrocious director.

As can be seen from Queen Christina (the most accessible of his later films) Gilbert had a fine speaking voice. As I discovered when I researched the MGM television collection in the early 1980s, he gave some excellent performances in the sound era. Gilbert’s difficulties came more from MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer, who assigned him to some appalling projects in a vindictive attempt to get the star to break his contract, than from any vocal deficiencies. Tragically, just as he seemed to have overcome his problems with alcohol and was on the verge of regenerating his career, John Gilbert died of a heart attack in 1936. He was only thirty-eight. His work as a whole needs to be re-evaluated and the sooner some of Gilbert’s best sound films such as The Captain Hates the Sea and Downstairs are released on DVD the better. For the moment, this Bardelys the Magnificent and Monte Cristo set is a splendid beginning.

Neil McDonald writes: The material on D.W. Griffith and film acting and Lillian Gish’s influence on Russian ballet comes from an interview I conducted in 1979 with Miss Gish.