Man's Castle (1933)

WHO: Frank Borzage is still underrated. Given his importance to Hollywood during the 1920s and 30s (he was the first person to win two Academy Awards for Best Direction), and his distinctive mastery of the medium, his name should be as recognizable as Frank Capra's or Ernst Lubitsch's, but for some reason none of his films have entered our cultural memory like some of those directors' have.

WHAT: My friend Ryland Walker Knight wrote a fine appreciation a few years back, that included these lovely sentences:

Man's Castle takes on characteristics of its male lead, a young Spencer Tracy, unspooling with patient bemusement and gruff shades of guile. Tracy plays Bill, a man who lives clean and free, taking whatever job will feed him, living most nights under the stars.

Bill and Trina (played by Loretta Young) represent two very different outlooks (gendered, perhaps) on poverty during the worst year of the Great Depression; their struggle to reconcile their philosophies as they form a family unit is at the heart of this film (the heart is always at the heart of a Borzage film), and as Ryland notes, makes this story a universal one applicable to any era or area.

WHERE/WHEN: 8:00 tonight only at the Roxie.

WHY: This week's Pre-Code series is not only an opportunity to see American society reflected in a mirror unclouded by the paternal haze of the censor, but a chance to see how some of the best Hollywood filmmakers responded to the rapid changes in available technology during the first several years of sync sound-on-film. Already we've seen how experimenters with cinematic language like Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Florey, Josef Von Sternberg, and William Wellman responded to the challenge of making images that could keep up with the provocative dialogue their actors were speaking, and tonight we get to see another confident hand at work on this problem.

Borzage is generally less ostentatious than these others in this period, but there's no doubt his stylistic flourishes play a major part in the feelings he evokes from his scenario. The last time I saw Man's Castle, in the midst of a Borzage retrospective, I was inspired to write an article on his contributions to Hollywood style, later republished here; it's one of my most-frequently-referred posts, which I think says a lot about the paucity of writing on the formal qualities of this director's work. I've read and watched a lot more since, and am not sure if I'd take the same line of argument. Who knows what I might be inspired to say after another viewing tonight.

HOW: Tonight's double-bill of Man's Castle and Virtue (starring Carole Lombard) is all-35mm.

Safe In Hell (1931)

WHO: Starring Dorothy Mackaill, a leading lady for First National throughout the mid-to-late 1920s, but who became destined for near-obscurity when her contract failed to be renewed in the process of that studio's envelopment into Warner Brothers. This is the final film she made for First National; the majority of the rest appear to be lost. Oh, and it would be her 110th birthday today.

WHAT: "Fallen woman" Gilda (played by Mackaill) flees New Orleans to escape a manslaughter charge after setting fire to the hotel room of the man who set her on her "fall" in the first place. She ends up on a godforsaken Caribbean isle infested with centipedes and, worse, other criminals trying to avoid extradition. As "the only white woman on the island" she has to fend off their lecherous overtures using methods that just might backfire. Mackaill makes quite an impression in this, the only film of hers I've managed to see, but so do many of the terrific character actors stocking the rest of the cast. Of particular note is Nina Mae McKinney, who you might recognize from King Vidor's 1929 black-cast parable Hallelujah; here she's the proprietress of the hotel where the island lamsters congregate. Making a musical number out of a dinner-serving scene, McKinney turns what could have easily have been just a glorified maid role with a tropical twist into one of the film's most memorable and forceful characters, just with a few extraordinary gestures and line readings.

William Wellman directed five films in 1931 including Night Nurse and The Public Enemy, but for my money this is an even better film than those far more famous ones. (I haven't seen Other Men's Women or The Star Witness yet). For more on Safe In Hell check out Alt Screen's fine round-up.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Roxie. Showtimes are listed as 6:20 and 9:00 but that can't be quite right as the 71-minute co-feature Torch Singer is supposed to start at 8:00. I'm guessing that, rather than running Torch Singer early to get it finished in time for Safe in Hell at 9:00, the latter will in fact have a delayed start time around 9:15 or so.

WHY: It's a highly underrated movie that I don't believe has screened in the Bay Area in many years. And it's one of the most characteristically "pre-code" titles in the Roxie's series devoted to such films, ending this Thursday.

HOW: The bad news: although Torch Singer will screen in a 35mm print from Universal, Safe in Hell is now a Warner title and thus is being shown via DVD. In an extensive conversation with Michael Guillén published at Keyframe, series mastermind Elliot Lavine explains how Warner-controlled films are no longer available for his Roxie programming because that company is trying to force a move to all-digital distribution. 

One could hold out for another venue to try to book Safe In Hell in 35mm; it appears the Pacific Film Archive still has some access to such prints as they're playing (for example) Warner's I Confess this Friday as part of their Alfred Hitchcock series. But is the PFA likely to bring this title any time soon? And how long will even its ability to get 35mm prints from digitally-minded companies last, anyway? (Note that their print of Lifeboat for next Sunday comes not from Fox but imported from England.)  I'd love to see the PFA or someone else reprise the extensive Wellman retrospective that played (almost entirely in 35mm) at New York City's Film Forum a little over a year ago, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

The good news is that a DVD of a pre-code movie can look pretty good on the Roxie screen. This weekend I attended three series screenings, each using different formats. In terms of image and sound quality, the 16mm print of Blood Money left the most to be desired; I've seen much better 16mm projections in that space (though I've seen much worse as well.) Given the rarity of the film, I wasn't about to complain. Of course the 35mm print of Murders in the Rue Morgue was by far the best-looking of the weekend. But the Saturday night DVD projection of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (though made by Paramount, this is now a Warner-owned title, long story short) surprised me in its image quality. It didn't look like film, but it also didn't look like the inferior digital image I'm used to seeing at that venue. I heard there were snafus at the afternoon screening of the same title, however. Here's hoping tonight's presentations of Safe in Hell are as trouble-free as the one I saw the other night; Mackaill's heroine has enough problems to deal with on her own without having to worry about temperamental modern technology.

Peter Pan (1924)

WHO: Anna May Wong has a very small but very memorable role as Tiger Lily in this.

WHAT: The silent version of J.M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up is for my money still the best screen adaptation of this famous tale. Yes, we all know the Disney version but the Paramount version directed by Herbert Brenon is far more faithful to Barrie's stage original. (Barrie scholars have written that the playwright in fact was dissatisfied with the film for being too faithful to his stagings; he was hoping Hollywood technologies would be used to further expand the scope of his play, but his suggestions went unused.)

One convention of Peter Pan performances was the casting of a young woman in the title role, for "purely practical" reasons as Heidi de Vries puts it: "girls were lighter in the harnesses that were required to lift them up into the air for the flying effects." Brenon's fidelity to staged versions extended to this convention, and 17-year-old Betty Bronson was given the Peter Pan role in his film. An in-the-know audience can't help but recognize the lesbian implications of this casting choice, given that both Wendy (played by Mary Brian) and Tiger Lily are more explicitly (if unrequitedly) romantically interested in Peter in this version than in Disney's. Although Anna May Wong has few scenes as Tiger Lily, in one of them she memorably rubs noses with Bronson affectionately, an action which is clearly meant to be a stand-in for a kiss. So while this isn't the first on-screen interracial, same-sex kiss, it may be the closest a 1920s film came to such a portrayal. At any rate it's probably the only silent film example of face-to-face contact between a white woman in male drag, and a Chinese-American woman in costume as an Indian from a fictitious tribe.

(Speaking of which, although the portrayals of the tribe is based on the stereotypes held by a playwright who knew of America only through what he read, such as the works of James Fenimore Cooper, there's nothing nearly as cringe-inducing as what the 1953 cartoon did with these characters. Still, if you bring children to the screening, it would be a good opportunity to talk to them about racial stereotypes and the use of actors of one ethnicity to portray another.)

WHERE/WHEN: Two screenings today only at the Balboa Theatre, the first a 4:00 PM "Family Matinee" and the second as part of the Balboa's annual Birthday Bash, celebrating 87 years of this stalwart movie house festivities starting at 7PM but Peter Pan starting well after that, if previous years are an indication.

WHY: The Balboa's Birthday Bash is one of the most underrated silent film events of the calendar year, especially when it comes to value for money. For a regular ticket price every attendee gets to see a feature film and shorts with live musical accompaniment, as well as other live entertainment as well as a chance to win terrific prizes for knowing silent film trivia. Not to mention the complimentary cake and door prizes, which when I attended two years ago were worth more than the ticket price to begin with!

If you liked seeing Anna May Wong shine in a small role in The Thief of Bagdad at the most recent San Francisco silent film event, the Silent Winter held two weeks ago, you'll definitely want to see a glimpse of her again here. Of course she's also in Shanghai Express at the Roxie today, but it's quite possible for a dedicated cinephile with a free Sunday to make it to screenings of both that and Peter Pan. The next chance to see Wong on screen I'm aware of will be April 13th at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's theatre, where she appears in an Earthquake-themed drama called Old San Francisco from 1927. The Niles calendar for March is also up.

Other silent film events on the horizon include this Friday's showing of Safety Last and Cops in the currently-running Cinequest festival in San Jose, and, just announced, the San Francisco Film Society's first announcement for its upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival: a May 7th Castro Theatre screening of the German expressionist showcase Waxworks with live music by Mike Patton, Scott Amendola, Matthias Bossi and William Winant. I'll admittedly be attending this less as a silent film fan but as a longtime fan of other musical projects these men have been involved in, including Faith No More, Mr. Bungle and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

HOW: 35mm print, with music performed by accomplished silent film piano accompanist Frederick Hodges.

...And God Created Woman (1956)

WHO: This is an early role for Jean-Louis Trintignant, in this case playing opposite Brigitte Bardot.

WHAT: I think it would be difficult to find a serious critic willing to go to bat for this as a truly great film; Kevin B. Lee concisely outlined most of the film's limitations as well as strengths in one of his early Shooting Down Pictures videos; if you'd rather read than hear his illustrated essay, the transcript is here. I wouldn't know how to make a case for it as a successful film in any meaningful way, although it was successful financially in its day and successful in helping get the gears turning on the beginning of the French New Wave. Unlike Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette & Chabrol, director Roger Vadim never wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, but because he was able to make such a splash with his first feature before age thirty he became an inspiration to these cineastes (Godard and Truffaut both singled out ...And God Created Woman for praise), and to French financiers looking to tap into market desires for films by youthful directors.

There is something interesting about the film's mise en scène nonetheless. Richard Neupert in his A History of the French New Wave quotes Vadim as saying, "Our generation does not want to retell stories with the same vocabulary that has been used for so long and that not even the neorealists could escape: long shot, medium shot, close up, shot/reverse shot. It has become a nightmare. All films look the same." In ...And God Created Woman the director almost completely eschews close-ups and the shot/reverse shot schematic, building his visual style almost completely out of medium shots and especially long shots, reminiscent perhaps of a Jacques Tati film of the 1950s. Of course this style of filmmaking is no longer very unusual at all especially on the international festival circuit, and directors like Tsai Ming-Liang and Lisandro Alonso have pushed it even further, and to more apparent aesthetic purpose than Vadim's (which seems largely engineered to show off his Saint-Tropez locations, and perhaps to emphasize his stars' bodies over their faces. At any rate it makes what seems to most viewers today to be a rather routine family drama with some uncomfortable social and political undercurrents more than just that for those carefully attuned to how the camera is being used to capture the cast.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. 6:30 PM.

WHY: ...And God Created Woman marks the beginning of the PFA's eleven-film retrospective for the actor currently on minds and screens thanks to his turn in Amour, that lasts this month and next. The series has its share of great films, such as Rohmer's My Night At Maud's, Bertolucci's The Conformist and Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ Express. But any good retrospective should include work that shows a range of quality so as not to give the impression that its subject was only involved in masterpieces. So although I appreciate the the opportunities to rewatch favorite films with Trintignant's performances particularly held in mind, I'm just as curious to see how react to films I haven't cared for before (perhaps because I've seen them only on video) like ...And God Created Woman and Z, and to see relatively lesser-known works like The Outside Man, which also plays the Castro March 8th, on a double-bill with The Terminator for some reason.

HOW: 35mm print imported from Institut Français.

Five Star Final (1931)

WHO: Edward G. Robinson stars in this. He's something to behold.

WHAT: I wrote about this film for Senses of Cinema nearly ten years ago. Allow me to quote myself (although I might like to make a few modifications in word choice, I won't):

Five Star Final is perhaps the darkest in the cycle of journalist-themed films produced in Hollywood during the early 1930s. The central character, a self-destructive tabloid newspaper editor named Randall (Edward G. Robinson), manufactures so much enthusiasm for an assignment to dredge up the Nancy Voorhees case for a sure-fire hit serial that he destroys her in the process.  

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at the Roxie.

WHY: Five Star Final and its double-bill-mate Blood Money from 1933 kick off a week-long series of early-1930s features that the Roxie is entitling Hollywood Before The Code: Deeper, Darker, Nastier!! Dennis Harvey has crafted a typically helpful overview of the "Pre-Code" concept and the series, highlighting some of its best titles like Josef Von Sternberg's Shanghai Express and William Wellman's Safe In Hell, but he doesn't mention Five Star Final. If ink-stained wretchedness appeals to you as a cinematic topic (and why wouldn't it?), don't miss it!

HOW: Five Star Final is a digital screening, and Blood Money screens on 16mm. The rest of the series uses about half 35mm sources, half digital; all formats are listed on the series website.