The Unknown (1927)

 A scene from Tod Browning's THE UNKNOWN, which will screen with live musical accompaniment by Stephin Merritt at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Tod Browning directed, and Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford star in this film.

WHAT: Eventually every film lover who digs deep enough into the most remarkable and unusual treasures of film history comes across The Unknown, a circus-set tale of obsession, blackmail, and revenge. It's best if he or she knows as little as possible about the plot specifics before watching it for the first time however. But I don't think it's a spoiler, or a risk of overselling it, to say that it contains Lon Chaney's most remarkable physical and emotional performance, and that I consider it one of the great cinematic works of the late 1920s, too-often unfairly relegated to sideshow status to the kinds of films that were considered for Academy Awards and/or received frequent citations in film history books. The Unknown barely even rated a mention in the 1957 Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces, in part because that film was made at Universal, which saw Chaney's Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame as far overshadowing the films he made with Tod Browning and others at MGM, and in part I suspect because its subject matter was still considered too hot to handle even in the waning years of the Motion Picture Production Code. That's all fine, as it helps The Unknown feel less like an old "warhorse" and more like a gem waiting to be discovered, even today.

If you do want to read more about the film, Sean McCourt wrote an article for this very blog about the last time it screened in the Bay Area almost six years ago.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I'm not going to earn any "cool points" from certain purists by admitting this, but I've attended just about every live music/silent film event the San Francisco Film Society has put on in the past fourteen years, and I regret attending none of them. Last year I was quoted in an article discussing the history of these screenings, and I'm afraid I came off as a little more curmudgeonly than I really feel. It's true that some of these events (Mountain Goats and Sir Arne's Treasure; Black Francis's The Golem) are really just music concerts with a 35mm print running overhead a band playing the kinds of songs it usually does, with little attempt to connect musical and film content beyond providing inspiration for the setlist. But I can certainly enjoy that kind of experience even if I don't necessarily consider what's happening "accompaniment" or a "score". Increasingly I'm just thankful to get to see silent films in 35mm, no matter what the sound in the venue is like.

These are unique events in that you really don't know what you're going to get when you walk into them. I had no idea what to expect last Tuesday when I went to see Thao Nguyen and her band the Get Down Stay Down, one of the few instances in which the SFIFF has presented one of these events with a band I was not already something of a fan of. I sat next to my friend Dakin Hardwick, who was covering the event for the Spinning Platters website, and has written an excellent summary of the event from the perspective of a Thao fan who'd never seen a Charlie Chaplin film before. A few seats away on my other side was silent film aficionado Lincoln Specter, a film-blogging colleague whose account I agree with almost completely, although I'd note that the low-budget classic The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra is as much influenced by Soviet film trends as German ones. I found the evening tremendously entertaining, and it was great to see The Pawnshop and several short newsreels from the National Film Preservation Foundation's haul of treasures recently repatriated from New Zealand (as well as 9413), in 35mm prints. 

Neither Dakin nor Lincoln really commented on the thematic unity of all the mixed-and-matched films and videos from various moviemaking eras, which only truly became apparent in the final of three short videos directed by Lauren Tabak and starring Nguyen, which made joking reference  to one of the Hearst Movietone clips screened earlier in the program. Nguyen is clearly aware of the historical demands of show business, in which women have found themselves offered as a commodity for audience consumption; performing on a stage built for nubile dancers to provide pre-film spectacle back in 1922 was a way to reclaim female power out of such a situation.

What Nguyen and company did was, again, not what I'd call a "score" for any of the films shown, but it was totally of a piece, and worked well as an evening's entertainment. Arguably better than some prior attempts by SFIFF-selected bands to compose or adapt music for a true film accompaniment. I thought last year's Waxworks score by Mike Patton, Matthias Bossi, Scott Amerndola and William Winant was possibly the most successfully realized of these attempts, but I know there are those who disagree with me even placing it in this category. Others, like Jonathan Richman's The Phantom Carriage and Stephin Merritt's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were, for me, largely admirable attempts that suffered a few too serious problems to truly succeed. As the latter ended, I tweeted that I "overall enjoyed the audaciousness of it all. Applied to an inarguable non-masterpiece, it doesn't fell like a wasted opportunity." I hope that Merritt learned a few lessons from that night, since he's being brought back tonight to provide the music for The Unknown, and is expected to tackle a third silent sometime down the road.

Anyway, if it doesn't work out, the professional silent film accompanists will arrive in full force (minus any organists, sadly) for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival which comes sooner than usual this year. It runs May 29 through June 1, in a cost-cutting attempt to take advantage of cheaper air and hotel rates for festival guests than traditionally found in July. There's only three feature films in this year's program I've seen in full before, the lowest such tally in many a year. All three are well worth watching, even if they're not their director's respective masterpieces: Carl Dreyer's The Parson's Widow, Yasujiro Ozu's Dragnet Girl and Buster Keaton's The Navigator. Of the others, I've long been wanting to see 35mm prints of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Underground, and The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, and am crossing my fingers these titles screen that way. Most of the others I've never or barely heard of at all, and am excited just to experience however I can, but especially on the Castro screen with top-class accompaniment.

If you can't wait that long, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum hosts silent 16mm screenings with live musicians every Saturday and have just announced their line-ups for May and June, including their weekend-long Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival which includes showings of proven classic titles like The Big Parade, Gertie the Dinosaur and The Circus as well as many lesser-known films.

HOW: The Unknown will screen in a rare 35mm print, with live accompaniment by Stephin Merritt. It will be preceded by a Guy Maddin short film Sissy Boy Slap Party, the soundtrack for which Merritt and accordionist Daniel Handler hope to whip the audience into a frenzy of participation.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 13 hosts the last scheduled screening of Tangerines, a Georgian (as in former Soviet Republic of) film that I've heard nothing but praise about from festgoers who've had a chance to see it already. Among other options there's also Charlie McDowell's The One I Love, one of three programs happening over the next couple days that were added to the festival schedule after the program books went to press, as noted on Gary Meyer's new EatDrinkFilms website.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The New Parkway in Oakland holds a special screening of a 2008 documentary called Children of the Amazon at 7:00 with the director present tonight.

Disney Before Mickey (and more)

The San Francisco Film Society has just put on its 4th Annual S.F. International Animation Festival as part of its fall season of mini-festivals of various themes. There was French Cinema Now and Taiwan Film Days before it, and now it's in the midst of its long-standing New Italian Cinema series, which closes Sunday with Marco Bellocchio's Vincere. Coming up is the first winter presentation of KinoTek, in recent years a mainstay of the Film Society's biggest annual showcase, the San Francisco International Film Festival. 2009's KinoTek programs were cut back at the SFIFF this past Spring, so the upcoming December 12-13 event, a "multimedia dance, theater and projected video performance" by Catherine Galasso entitled Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice, is welcome.

This year's Animation Festival presented Frisco Bay premieres of a couple of anticipated theatrical releases, Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (opening later this month) and Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar's a Town Called Panic, coming to Landmark Theatres in January. It also screened numerous shorts and features with more uncertain futures in local theatrical venues. I caught a pair of programs: the opening night celebration, in which local avant-garde animation master Lawrence Jordan participated by showing his 1960s film Ein Traum Der Liebenden while improvising the frame rate to sync with the live musical accompaniment by Pale Hoarse, and a matinee program of silent-era Disney shorts at the Embarcadero.

Many Disney fans have only in recent years started to fully appreciate the importance of the studio's pre-Mickey Mouse creative output to the foundation of the most ubiquitous animation company of all-time. From 1923 through 1927, Disney's premier character was not a cartoon at all, but a little girl named Alice (not to be confused with the Lewis Carroll creation, though her first film played on the association in its title Alice's Wonderland.) A live-action girl placed in a cartoon world, she was played by four different young actresses over the years, starting with 4-year-old Virginia Davis. Seven of the Alice Comedies, as they are often called, have been collected on a DVD in the Walt Disney Treasures collections of shorts. Unfortunately, though there were indications that the line-up for the festival had not been locked down until shortly before the screening, as it turns out the program for this matinee was comprised entirely of the seven shorts on the DVD. I suspect the digital projection was in fact sourced from the DVD as well, as it the image quality was a far cry from the last hi-definition digital presentation I viewed at the Embarcadero several weeks ago, Passing Strange. It's more than the difference between a digitally-shot feature from 2009 and celluloid creations from over eighty years ago; there were tell-tale horizontal lines in the image that had nothing to do with film's tendency to degrade and everything to do with resolution of the digital image.

Despite the disappointing picture quality of the presentation, the event was still enjoyable. The selections from the DVD showcase each of the four Alice actresses, though the majority feature Davis, including Alice's Wonderland, Alice's Wild West Show, and Alice Gets In Dutch. One film, Alice in the Jungle, cobbled together footage shot of her for previous films to create an entry in the series completed well after her contract with Disney had ended. Showing the films in chronological order, with in-person commentary from Disney researchers Russell Merritt and J.B Kaufman (some of it during the film, quasi-benshi-like), gave a real sense of how the Alice films progressed stylistically over the years. The earlier cartoons feature extensive live-action prologues before whisking Davis into the animated universe, for example, while the later films dispense with this conceit, focusing more on pure animation. They even go so far as to relegate Alice to a supporting role in some instances, while the antics of a Felix-esque cat named Julius takes center stage. Also Felix-esque is the tendency toward increased elasticity and mutability of objects and body parts as the shorts progressed chronologically. The biggest laugh of the program was found in Alice Gets In Dutch, when Julius inhales some "Cheyenne Pepper" and sneezes his face right off, onto the floor.

The most thematically fascinating of the films was one I hadn't watched before: Alice's Egg Plant, which features Alice (played by Dawn O'Day) and Julius as management of a chicken farm under Bolshievik revolt. In the film, striking chickens are shown to be under the influence of a Russian agent, purely a caricature of Communism. When a pair of roosters begin fighting, Alice and Julius get the idea to bust the union by bringing the combatants into an indoor boxing ring and charging their hens an egg a piece for admission. Knowing Walt Disney's later opinions on unions (especially after his own workers went on strike in 1941), I couldn't watch this sequence without wondering if he ever saw mass entertainment, or the distribution of his cartoons in particular, as a kind of "tax" motion picture companies could "levy" on workers needing a release from a day on the factory (or picket) lines. Russell Merritt, when asked about this cartoon in the q-and-a following the screening, said that Walt was at this point in his life "spectacularly non-political," for what it's worth.

J.B. Kaufman expressed that a program of other Alice shorts will play an unspecified future date at the Walt Disney Family Museum, this time with live musical accompaniment. I don't believe I've mentioned here on this blog before that this museum, which opened in October, has a charmingly decorated screening room with daily digital screenings - the venue is not at all equipped for 35mm projection, and Merritt in fact believes such a distribution method to be inferior in picture quality to a Blu-Ray transfer taken directly from the negative. Currently, the Walt Disney Family Museum is showing Sleeping Beauty on Blu-Ray daily; I'll reserve judgement until I see it for myself, but I'm sure it at least will look much better than the non-HD copy of Fantasia I watched there last month.

My first encounter with the Alice films was at the 2003 San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF), where Virginia Davis was present on the Castro stage to talk about her participation in the series, and six 35mm prints of Alice films were shown alongside a few other early Disney shorts, all accompanied by live music by the accomplished pianist Michael Mortilla. The SFSFF has long considered animation an important piece of its presentation mission; in fact the first film I ever attended at that festival back in 2001- an Italian silent favored by Frederico Fellini called Maciste In Hell, was preceded by one of the Fleischer Brothers' Out Of The Inkwell shorts that influenced Disney's creation of Alice. As returning readers may know, since 2007 I've been on the SFSFF's research & writing committee, tasked with creating educational materials for the festival: program book essays and informative, fun slideshows for each program screened at the festival. I haven't written on an animated program for the festival. (yet?)

Silent-era Disney returned to the 2009 summer festival back in July, most prominently in the form of a kid-friendly matinee tributing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the character Walt Disney lost creative control of in 1928, inspiring the birth of Mickey Mouse and of Disney's long tradition of aggressively protecting its subsequent intellectual property, even to the point of successfully lobbying for corporate welfare through endless extensions to federal copyright laws. I also made mention of Mickey Mouse in my own slideshow and essay accompanying Douglas Fairbanks As The Gaucho, noting that Disney selected this adventure film to spoof for Mickey's second-ever cartoon, The Gallopin' Gaucho.

After the summer festival, I had time to write about The Gaucho presentation as part of my partial SFSFF wrap-up here at Hell On Frisco Bay, but couldn't get around to Oswald or the rest of day three at the festival before my life began busying again. My quick-and-dirty version: the Oswald program was interactive fun, as pianist Donald Sosin encouraged the audience to join his family in vocalizing sound effects for the Lucky Rabbit's loopy adventures, though I could tell that some of the children in the audience (SFSFF tickets are always free to attendees under 12 years of age) grew restless from the verbal introductions to the films. The rest of the day was terrificly diverse, with an excellent Czechoslovakian drama Erotikon rubbing elbows with W.C. Fields in So's Your Old Man, two experimental versions of Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, and my favorite new discovery of the festival, D.W. Griffith's Lady of the Pavements, a criminally underrated tearjerker again with Sosin providing accompaniment. (My favorite revisitation being Lillian Gish in the Wind, which I'd never quite appreciated before but was a thrilling masterpiece with Dennis James behind the Wurlitzer organ.)

The SFSFF's annual Winter Event approaches --this year it falls on December 12-- and it promises to be equally diverse and rewarding. The day opens with Sosin playing for Merian C. Cooper and Ernest P. Shoedsack's Chang (the Thai word for 'elephant' rhymes with Kong), a pseudo-documentary filmed in rural Nan Province, on the border of Northern Siam (now Thailand) and Laos. Its frames filled with stampeding elephants, prowling big cats, and a comic-relief gibbon dubbed "Bimbo", this film is more than just a warm-up for Cooper & Shoedsack's 1933 pictures starring an iconic stop-motion giant ape or two. It's a grand entertainment in its own right, and ought to look splendid on the Castro Theatre screen. I'm particularly excited to see Abel Gance's World War I epic J'Accuse as I've never watched a complete film by the legendary French director, whose films have not screened on Frisco Bay in many years. This one is the U.S. Premiere of a new restoration. The J'Accuse score will be a keyboard arrangement of the orchestral score composed by Robert Israel, who will make his first SFSFF appearance with his performance at the Wurlitzer. Dennis James musically handles the final two programs of the day-long event: Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. paired with the Goat, neither of which I've seen on the big screen before, and Tod Browning's West of Zanzibar, which I caught in a Guy Maddin-programmed series at the Pacific Film Archive a few years back.

It's West of Zanzibar, starring Lon Chaney in another of his delectable misfit roles, and featuring supporting turns by Mary Nolan, Warner Baxter and Lionel Barrymore (making his first SFSFF appearance) that I've spent several weeks researching and writing program notes for this time around. Chaney and Browning are already quite familiar to loyal SFSFF audiences, so I elected to focus less on their partnership than on the climate of film censorship in the late 1920's; West of Zanzibar was a rare adaptation (from Broadway, of all places) for the Browning/Chaney duo, so its production was affected by "The Formula", a set of censorship guidelines Hollywood had in place several years before the Hays Code was put into place in the early 1930s. One might consider West of Zanzibar as a silent-era "pre-Code" film, in fact, thanks to the themes of the play (addiction, miscegenation, etc.) that were dialed down only somewhat for the film version.

This post has grown to a monstrous size, but before I press 'publish' let me mention a few more events connected to classic film and the Castro Theatre: Citizen Kane and the Magnificent Ambersons play there today. This weekend features a new print of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. December 2-10 the theatre holds a tribute to the producer Samuel Goldwyn, including a healthy number of William Wyler films and a Howard Hawks double-bill. From December 16-23 the space is given over to a Alfred Hitchcock series that includes many of the usual favorites from the director, as well as a few that haven't been spied on a Frisco screen for quite a while. And though the Berlin & Beyond festival of German-language film has been postponed until Fall 2010, January at the Castro will feature another beloved festival, the eight edition of Noir City, which has also revealed its lustful, larcenous program on its website.

Sean McCourt: The Unknown

This year was the first that I attended essentially every program at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Prior years I'd come close, but had always skipped at least two presentations as a strength-saving strategy. This year, I was a late arrival to the free Archivist presentation where the audience learned about the good work of the J. Jeffrey Selznick School of Preservation but caught everything else in the marathon weekend. Between screenings I squeezed in some socializing with friends old and new, including a crew of bloggers from Frisco Bay and beyond (Ryland Walker Knight and Girish Shambu have more details on this social aspect of the festival). If only the SFSFF had programmed a clear dud or two, I might not have felt so overstimulated and wiped out by the end of the event! Ultimately I'm thankful for such a rich three-day weekend, though. And I'm eager to form my impressions of the screenings as soon as I can.

Unfortunately, that's probably not going to be very soon. I'm no longer exhausted, but I've taken on enough projects and activities that I'm too busy right now to sit down and pound out a piece that will do some small justice to the riches of the festival. So I'm ever so grateful to present a wrap-up of the festival's latest program innovation: a late-night screening of Tod Browning's mad masterpiece the Unknown. Lon Chaney admirer Sean McCourt follows up his previous silent film coverage here at Hell on Frisco Bay, with his take on the "Chaney By Midnight" screening:

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The 13th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival lit up the screen at the Castro Theatre last week, showcasing three days of entries from the earliest days of motion pictures, ranging from riotous comedies to twisted tales of the macabre. Saturday night's presentation of the 1927 film The Unknown, was definitely in the latter category, with the Tod Browning (The Unholy Three, Dracula, and Freaks among many others) picture reveling in its disturbing imagery and subject matter.

Before the show began, a series of slides were presented on the large screen, giving facts and trivia tidbits about the stars of the film, Lon Chaney, Sr. and Joan Crawford. As the audience filled in to near-capacity, one series of slides said that both Chaney and Crawford were known for transforming their looks -- his for horror, hers for fashion. The next slide showed two pictures, side by side -- one of Chaney with his makeup kit from the 1920s, the other showing Crawford with hers in the early 1930s. Operations Director of the Silent Film Festival and host for the evening Jesse Hawthorne Ficks started the evening off with some of the usual pleasantries that accompany such events, such as naming sponsors, but quickly electrified the packed audience with his passionate delivery and clear love of all things cinema, particularly when he spoke about why it is so important to preserve films, mentioning how the recent fire at Universal Studios had destroyed many of the circulating 35mm prints of classic films.

Ficks also mentioned that all of the short films presented at the festival were restored by students at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, which drew a wildly appreciative round of applause from the audience, leading into the screening of the first film of the night, a classic short Nick Carter two reel mystery, The Last Call, starring San Jose native Edmund Lowe and Diana Allen. Stephen Horne, who has been a performer for silent films for nearly 20 years, provided an outstanding live piano accompaniment for this, as well as for The Unknown. During the film, there were plenty of funny (though quite effective) special effects, such as when Carter’s wife is listening to the radio horn, and the musical score and lyrics are animated coming out of the horn, followed by the words of the opera star in trouble begging for help careening outwards.

After the warm-up picture, Ficks explained that all prints of The Unknown were lost for 50 years until one was found in France in the 1970s, then introducing Guy Maddin (director of My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World, and others) to a volley of cheers and enthusiastic screams, inaugurating the Festival’s "Director’s Pick" series. Maddin initially joked with the audience, saying that he was probably preaching to the converted, then stated how he felt that "really good melodrama is as fine an art form as there is," and likened the effect of silent films to when "at night, when we sleep, in our dreams we are liberated."

Closing his brief introduction, where he admitted that he was going to be reading the original English subtitles to the film, and not translating directly from the French on screen, he said that melodrama is "true life uninhibited", and that "there's nothing more truly, crazily, uninhibited than a Lon Chaney and Tod Browning collaboration." Departing the stage to a roar of applause, Maddin made his way to the back of the theater and his microphone, and the curtains parted for what many consider one of the finest films of its time.

In The Unknown, the legendary Lon Chaney, Sr. is repulsive, yet somehow empathetic, as circus attraction Alonzo the Armless, a member of a traveling gypsy circus who harbors a dark secret known only to his sidekick, the diminutive Cojo. Alonzo pines for the love of Nanon (Joan Crawford), the circus owner’s daughter. She reveals to him that she has a self-proclaimed incorrigible fear of men’s hands and arms, and that she is tired of men constantly pawing at her. The fact that Alonzo has no arms (or so she thinks) renders him harmless to her in her mind, and she spends a considerable amount of time in his company, speaking of a multitude of men’s advances, including Malabar, the circus’s resident strong man.

Throughout the film’s bizarre plot twists and unexpected surprises, Chaney’s incredible talents are constantly on display. Rightfully known as "The Man of a Thousand Faces," Chaney was one of the earliest and most influential pioneers in make-up for the cinema, creating many characters and looks that are still instantly recognizable today, 80 years after he committed them to celluloid. In the beginning of the film, first-time viewers can genuinely believe that Alonzo is indeed an armless man, thanks to the ingenious work of Chaney, though his method is revealed soon enough in the progress of the picture’s story.

There are several humorous shots (at least the audience thought they were funny, exploding in laughter when they appeared on the screen) such as when Chaney is seen smoking a cigarette with his feet, or playing a tiny guitar or ukulele with his lower extremities. There has been some discussion whether this was actually Chaney or a stunt double performing in the shadows, but nonetheless the effects are entirely believable. Though the plot of The Unknown -written by Browning- emerges as a twisted, nightmarish story even 80 years after its’ release. Based on the audience's reaction, which ranged from a few couples who might have actually seen some first-run silent films in their youth to current twenty-somethings who dressed the part of prohibition-era flappers and bootleggers, the film can still elicit an overwhelmingly positive response, proving that the innovators of film and the language of cinema can give today’s filmmakers an even run for their money when it comes to entertainment and the suspension of disbelief.