Beggars of Life (1928)

Screen capture from Criterion DVD

WHO: Louise Brooks features as one of the three lead performers in this film, her first major dramatic role according to the Louise Brooks: Looking For Lulu documentary found on the Criterion edition of Pandora's Box, and which features short clips from Beggars of Life including the one I took a screen capture from for the above image (which doesn't do anywhere near justice to how this film looks on 35mm). I wrote a long-ish essay on Brooks the last time the San Francisco Silent Film Festival opened with one of her films, Prix de Beauté, and don't have much of an update of thoughts about her after less than three years. But read on:

WHAT: Brooks fans who fall in love with her European phase are sometimes disappointed that she plays a less traditionally glamorous role in this film, but in all honesty it's a terrific, if superficially atypical, performance for her. Reportedly she enjoyed making this film more than any other. But it's also a great showcase for Richard Arlen, made after Wings but before Thunderbolt, the Four Feathers and Tiger Shark (to name a few of my other favorite Arlen films), and was in fact sold as a Wallace Beery picture upon its initial release.


On some days, I think Beggars of Life is my very favorite film in which Louise Brooks appeared (noting that I have yet to see a few important ones, including her screen debut The Street of Forgotten Men). It's a constantly surprising train thriller with great performances all around-- only one character's arc (Blue Washington as Black Mose- a very interesting character undermined in his last reel) is a disappointment. And the filmmaking is frequently astonishing- some of director William Wellman's best work, deploying multi-exposed frames as a storytelling engine with a boldness unparalleled in narrative cinema until the the 1960s, unless I'm forgetting something.

If you want to read more about Beggars of Life you can't go wrong with Laura Horak's essay originally published in the 2007 SFSFF program guide. (Much more on that in a bit.) This was the last public screening of the film in a Frisco Bay cinema, according to Thomas Gladysz of the Louise Brooks Society, who has posted a comprehensive list of all local theatres that ever advertised screenings of the film, going back to 1928. He's also prepared a collection of international screening ephemera, and I might as well also link to his review of the 2007 Castro showing.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre, opening the 21st San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

WHY: Writing this post inspired me to pull out one of the program guides I saved from the 2007 SFSFF, in which Beggars of Life also screened. It put me in a wistful mood, so let me recount my full history with the festival, something I've never done on this blog before. 

I first learned about SFSFF in 1999, while attending a Truffaut double-feature at the Castro and seeing flyers out for the 4th annual program, which was to screen Wellman's Oscar-winning Wings among other films (I hadn't heard of the others before at that time: Love, By the Law and a set of short animations). I was intrigued but already had river rafting plans that weekend, so filed the event away for future investigation. I missed the 2000 festival because I was living abroad, but upon my return I made sampling the 2001 SFSFF a priority. Out of the four programs that July Sunday I selected the Italian Maciste all'inferno to attend, and was simply blown away, not by the film itself, which was rather mediocre, but with the enthusiasm of the costumed crowd around me, and the presentation itself, which included a surprise Koko the Clown short beforehand, an enlightening introduction, and of course a tremendous musical accompaniment, in this case by pianist Michael Mortilla. I regretted not having planned to attend the whole day of screenings, though in the meantime I've since caught up with the other three features shown that day. (Peter Pan and It in cinemas, and thus far Within Our Gates only on Turner Classic Movies; I'm excited to finally have another chance to see it at the Castro this Saturday!)

In 2002 & 2003 I caught half the programs, attending a full day of showings each year (the festival had just doubled in size) but having to work the other weekend day. These were my first experiences seeing Cecil B. DeMille, Harold Lloyd, and King Vidor films on the big screen, and I knew I was hooked. In 2003 I was able to volunteer for the festival as an usher, making the financial sting a little easier on my struggling wallet. In 2005 I volunteered in the festival office a couple days, got to meet the friendly folks who put on the event, and signaled my interest in joining the volunteer research committee, which prepared the information-packed festival essays and slideshows for each program. In early 2007 (after covering the festival as press on this blog in 2006) I was invited to join that group, which was and still is one of the biggest honors of my movie-loving life.

It was quite an experience for a humble blogger with lots of passion for silent film but only a short history watching it and no formal training or expertise, to sit down at a table with the other members of the group, which included SFSFF board member (now president and film restorer) Rob Byrne, TCM writer and editor extraordinaire Margarita Landazuri, the brilliant David Kiehn of the Niles Film Museum, and rising star scholar Laura Horak (who will present the Girls Will Be Boys program at the festival on Sunday, in conjunction with her newly-published book of that title about gender-fluidity in silent cinema). At that time there were still few enough programs, determined far enough in advance, for a group of nine of us (the amazing Shari Kizarian contributed to and edited the program book and slideshows from her home abroad) to discuss our research and writing ideas around a table of snacks in the festival office for months before the program needed to be printed. I learned so much, not only about silent film, but about writing and being edited, from being allowed in that group. No other single experience as a writer has marked my cinephilia in such a profound way.

I ultimately wrote seven 1200-word essays for the festival between 2007 and 2011, about films (sort-of) spanning five continents: Miss Lulu Bett (North America), Jujiro (Asia), Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans (set in an undetermined location, filmed in North America but based on a European story), The Gaucho (Hollywood-ized version of South America), West of Zanzibar (Hollywood-ized version of Africa), Man With a Movie Camera (Europe) and I Was Born, But... (again Asia). By the last couple years, however, the festival had expanded to four days and it became impossible to fit all the program book writers around a table in the festival office, or to lock in all the programs with enough advance notice for amateurs in the group (mostly I mean yours truly) to work at the pace we'd been accustomed to. The program book is more than an oversized pamphlet now, but a glossy publication, and the essays have stepped up a notch or three to match; now they're written by some of the leading silent film scholars, critics and journalists around (including some of the same folks who I was so honored to share a table with nine years ago-- I can't wait to read what David Kiehn has to say about the Wallace Beery submarine thriller Behind the Door when I pick up my program tonight!)

But thumbing through that old "oversized pamphlet" provides a stark reminder of some of the many changes to San Francisco over the past nine years, through the ads alone. In 2009 the booklet started placing them in the back, but in 2007 they were interspersed throughout the 48 pages. The inside front cover has an ad for KDFC, which still exists but has moved down the dial to the 90.3 frequency that my old favorite community radio station KUSF occupied until 2011. Film Arts Foundation, advertised on the same page as Kizirian's wonderful Hal Roach essay, completely dissolved into the San Francisco Film Society in 2008 and nothing really has emerged to fill some of its most important shoes (support for experimental work, providing access to equipment, etc.) An ad for the region's best source for rare movies on VHS and DVD, Le Video, sits between Landazuri's essay on Camille and Horak's on Beggars of Life; it shuttered late last year and although Alamo Drafthouse announced plans to integrate its collection into that of Lost Weekend Video, which as of this past April now occupies part of the New Mission lobby, I've yet to hear any indication that this will actually happen anytime soon. Turn the program guide page and there's an ad for Booksmith, which changed ownership in 2007 and jettisoned its once-incredible silent film book section; now SFSFF partners with Books, Inc. for its amazing line-up of Castro mezzanine book signings. Perhaps the hardest of them all is the loss of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which is advertised underneath Richard Hildreth's barnstorming essay on DeMille's The Godless Girl; this weekly paper had by far the best film, arts and politics coverage of any local print newspaper, and it pressed its last issue in 2014.

As sad as it is to contemplate all of these losses over the past near-decade (and as sad as losing a vital institution is, it cannot compare to the human toll change has taken on San Franciscans; it was such an irony that the SF Chronicle published an article praising Wellman's quasi-remake of Beggars of Life on the same day another of its cruel campaigns against homeless people succeeded) makes it all the more heartening that an institution like the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has thrived and grown in these years. Now in the business not only of presenting films in the best possible way, it also undertakes restorations of important classics and forgotten gems, like this year's record FIVE re-premieres: Mothers of Men, Behind the Door, The Italian Straw Hat, What's the World Coming To and Les Deux Timides. That all five of these are finished on 35mm ought to gladden celluloid purists who might take note that although there's a slightly higher proportion of digital presentations in this year's festival than ever before, SFSFF will still screen just as many all-35mm programs as it did back in 2007 when there were ten programs not counting "Amazing Tales From the Archives" (which still exists as a major part of the festival, and is still free, although donations are becoming more emphasized). 

 

And although the festival is noted for annually showcasing many of the world's most-anticipated silent film restorations, it's very nice to know that the 35mm print of Beggars of Life set to screen tonight is the same one, I'm told by festival director Anita Monga, that showed on Saturday night of the 2007 festival, the first and last time I and maybe a thousand or more people ever saw it on a big screen. The musical accompaniment, which I recall was wonderful last time, will be the same as well. In a world in which the new so frequently threatens to pave over the old, there's something very comforting about that kind of consistency.

HOW: 35mm print from George Eastman House, with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Just like in 2007, as noted above.

Prix de Beauté (1930)

WHO: Louise Brooks. Is there another name, another face, that more succinctly stands for the silent film era to modern audiences than hers does? Known to but not particularly appreciated by the masses when she was making films, Brooks became the focus of a growing cult starting in the 1950s, an era when looking for treasures in film history began to become an activity more widespread than just at cineclubs and film societies. Robert Farmer has compellingly argued that Brooks in particular began speaking to mid-century audiences because she epitomized a kind of Modernism that it took World War II to create a hunger for, and French critic André Bazin to describe. This doesn't quite explain, however, why interest in Brooks would snowball after decade upon decade.

I think it's because Brooks represents a stance with regard to the Hollywood studio system, and particularly its classic era, that has taken deeper and deeper hold on the cinema-literate as we've obtained greater and greater distance from it. Brooks is not Greta Garbo, who thrived in the silent film industries of Europe and California, and then thrived again in Hollywood once the talking picture came about- so much so that her 1930s films are far better remembered than her 1920s work. She's also not Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd, whose sound pictures (with perhaps a few exceptions in Chaplin's case) critically and commercially pale in comparison their silents, but still represent fairly substantial bodies of work and do not languish in complete obscurity. Brooks is not even Lon Chaney or F.W. Murnau, whose careers ended with the silent era because their lives did, freezing their filmographies at a moment of tragedy that happened to coincide with the technological revolution.

No, the mythology of Louise Brooks is that she was too smart to want real stardom and all that came with it. That she fled the vapid roles she was forced to take in Hollywood to make a few masterpieces (or near-masterpieces) in Germany and France, but refused to come back on the terms the studios and their oversexed bosses demanded, thus sparing herself the abominably compromised life of a top Hollywood actress of the 1930s, allowing the Crawfords, the Harlows, the Davises, to take that role instead.  This narrative could use some fine-tuning, as some of the silents Brooks made in Hollywood (Beggars of Life and A Girl in Every Port in particular, at least) display real artistry from their directors even if they don't center completely around Brooks as Pandora's Box, The Diary of a Lost Girl, and Prix de Beauté  do. And she did take some roles in US talkies in the 1930s. But since they are more frequently dismissed than seen, they disturb her reputation as a rejecter of The System very little.

As celebrated as classic Hollywood is on Turner Classic Movies, at remaining pockets of repertory cinema, and on countless blogs and websites, there lies within even the most ardent fan an ambivalence about the formulas, the censorship, the politics, and the fabrications that lie behind the studio filmmaking of the 1930s through 1950s (and beyond). Louise Brooks, by essentially avoiding association with this period, positioned herself as a figure to be adored in the manner of any other beautiful bygone movie star, but whose adoration doesn't bring forth the same contradictions of complicity in a damaging and inauthentic industrial system that other performers from her generation can evoke.

Brooks's image rests almost completely upon her photographs, her own late-in-life writings on her career and those others she profiled in articles for periodicals like Film Culture and Sight & Sound (some later republished in the book Lulu In Hollywood), and the three films she made not in Europe- particularly Pandora's Box, which has become, almost like The Passion of Joan of Arc for Falconetti, a passport to intense fandom that overshadows desires to become familiar with an actor's other work.

WHAT: Prix de Beauté is the last-made and by far the least-known of Brooks's European trilogy, for a number of reasons. Though it was originally to be directed by René Clair, its production was delayed long enough for Clair to become occupied with another project, and the task fell to Italian director Augusto Genina, whose reputation has never been comparable to that of Clair's or (Pandora's Box director) G. W. Pabst. The Brooks cult of the 1950s can arguably be traced to a German-born critic and archivist then living in Paris, Lotte H. Eisner, who had no reason to mention in her 1952 monograph on German expressionism The Haunted Screen a French production with an Italian director and an American star, even one whose roles for Pabst were discussed substantially.

Probably the largest obstacle to Prix de Beauté's full canonization even among Brooks fans is the problem of version control. Shot as a silent film but ultimately released more widely as an early talkie, with Brooks's dialogue and singing dubbed in by French and Italian women, the film in its most-seen version gives us neither the opportunity to hear its star's authentic voice, nor to imagine it for ourselves in our own minds. It's a compromise almost fatal to audiences not inherently interested in the processes of early sound-film production, and perhaps especially for Brooks obsessives. However, a silent version that was released to certain unwired-for-sound 1930 cinemas, has survived to be praised by Kevin Brownlow as superior, and digitally reconstructed from available film materials by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna. A perceptive viewer of the sound version may notice that what little dialogue there is is for the most part extraneous to the plot, and sense that Prix de Beauté is truly in essence a silent film no matter how it has been more frequently viewed over the years.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 7:00 PM, as the opening film in the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

WHY: The SFSFF runs through Sunday at the Castro, and has as ambitious a program as ever, impressive considering it was only a little over a month ago that the organization hosted a weekend of Alfred Hitchcock silents at the venue. If you missed that, the Pacific Film Archive reprises all titles in August, and Davies Symphony Hall will screen his The Lodger this October. Tickets for the latter go on sale Monday along with other film-concert tickets (including a sure-to-go-fast John Williams gig).

The stalwart David Hudson has collected many of the best preview pieces anticipating this weekend's silent extravaganza, but I'd like to make particular mention of Michael Guillén's post documenting the verbal portion of a 2006 PFA event at which animation director and scholar John Canemaker dazzled a captive audience (including me) with his demonstration of the films of Winsor McCay and discussion of how they were created, how they were presented to the public in their day, and how they fit in with McCay's also-groundbreaking and brilliant work as a newspaper comic strip artist. There's nothing like learning about this with Canemaker's presence and his collected images there to visually teach us, so it's wonderful that the SFSFF is bringing him back this Saturday morning to present (and perhaps update with further research?) his multimedia show. Unless a surprise announcement is in the works, this event seems to be (though it is not being promoted as such) the equivalent of the SFSFF's annual "directors pick", which has in past years brought modern-day luminaries like Guy Maddin, Terry Zwgoff, Pete Docter, Alexander Payne, and Philip Kaufman to introduce and contextualize screenings of 1920s films. Canemaker, though not as widely-known as the above names, makes a fine addition to this tradition.

Louise Brooks fans should not want to miss other programs in this year's festival. If Prix de Beauté is a fine example of Brooks after Pabst (though he contributed to the scenario, he was not an on-set molder of the film), then Saturday night's screening of The Joyless Street is Pabst before Brooks. Instead there is Garbo, as well as Asta Nielsen Werner Krauss. I have not seen this film which did so much to build the reputations of Pabst and Garbo in particular. Surely Pandora's Box could not have been made without it having come first.

Of the figures Brooks profiled in her own articles, Pabst and Garbo were among the first, but she went on to write about Chaplin, Keaton, Marion Davies (in an article focused on her niece Pepi Lederer, a friend of Brooks who met a tragic end), and a number of other silent and early sound movie fixtures. Chaplin and Keaton appear at the SFSFF this year too, joining Felix the Cat and Charley Chase in the Kings of (Silent) Comedy program. Davies appears too, in the comic The Patsy tomorrow night, perhaps the most likely film to satisfy confirmed silent movie fans and win converts among uninitiates among any in the entire program. Although this is admittedly a dangerous claim in a program so packed with enticing programs. I plan to be there for just about all of them.

HOW: Prix de Beauté screens as a DCP presentation with live accompaniment by pianist Stephen Horne, who was recently interviewed about his process for the Louise Brooks Society.