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Rent or Buy

7:51am Thursday 19th November 2009

Photograph of the Author By Parky at the Pictures »

A couple of weeks ago, this column bemoaned the scarcity of genuine screen classics on DVD and questioned why British audiences are less well served by their distributors than their American and French counterparts. This week, however, due credit has to be paid to Eureka and the BFI, who, between them, have issued seven gems by two silent masters, FW Murnau and Frank Borzage. This may not merit the fanfare that greeted the sumptuous 12-disc Murnau, Borzage and Fox set or Kino's six-disc Murnau collection. But it's cause for gratitude, nonetheless.

Phantom (1922) was released the same year as Murnau's horror masterpiece, Nosferatu. Yet, despite its title, this long-lost, flashbacking saga is actually a morality tale that was adapted by Thea von Harbou (then Mrs Fritz Lang) from a novel by Gerhart Hauptmann. With its discussion of the social hierarchy, the temptations of the city and the corrupting power of lust - not to mention its brief use of subjective imagery - this anticipates the themes and techniques that would inform Murnau's finest silent melodramas, The Last Laugh (1924) and Sunrise (1927).

Studious clerk Alfred Abel lives a simple life with hard-working widowed mother Frida Richard, flapper sister Aud Egede Nissen and art student brother Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (who also had an uncredited hand in the screenplay). However, Abel dreams of becoming a poet and his ambitions intensify when he is struck by rich blonde Lya De Putti's horse-drawn carriage and becomes convinced that celebrity affords his only chance of romancing her.

He shows his verses to bookbinder neighbour Karl Etlinger (whose comely daughter, Lil Dagover, dotes on Abel) and he promises to pass them on to a professor whose opinion he trusts. Convinced that literary fame awaits him, Abel scrounges some money from pawnbroker aunt Grete Berger and is duped into borrowing an even bigger sum by Nissen's dissolute beau Anton Edthofer. But Abel squanders it on a prostitute who resembles De Putti and quickly hits the skids when his poetry is dismissed as doggerel and he is fired for absenteeism. With his mother on her deathbed, Abel is accused of theft by Berger and his sole hope while serving a 20-year sentence is that Dagover can somehow forgive him his folly.

Given the current vogue for instant éclat and reckless self-indulgence, this is a surprisingly pertinent picture. The acting style has obviously dated, but Hermann Warm's production design remains exceptional and Murnau makes ingeniously expressive use of the towering buildings to suggest the guilt bearing down on the increasingly burdened Abel, as he loses everything in the impulsive pursuit of his elusive object of desire. Murnau's experiment with first-person perspective - as the camera approximates Abel's drunken viewpoint in the bar - is also noteworthy, as, some nine decades later, film-makers have yet to improve on such dislocatory tactics to give the viewer a visceral share in a character's experiences.

Curiously, this visionary dexterity is largely absent from The Grand Duke's Finances (1924), as Murnau clutters the action with intertitles and other printed matter to ease the convoluted story past its more obvious contrivances. Collaborating again with Von Harbou (whose inspiration this time came from a Frank Heller tome), Murnau clearly strives for the effortlessly witty sophistication that had been perfected by the great Ernst Lubitsch (whose finest German outings are due for Eureka release early next year). But while this is consistently engaging, it's always defiantly a minor work.

Harry Liedtke is the impecunious ruler of the island duchy of Abacco. Desperate to prevent his subjects from falling into the clutches of developer Guido Herzfeld (who covets the country's valuable mineral reserves), Liedtke agrees to marry runaway Russian princess Mady Christians. However, a forged copy of the letter sealing their deal emerges and, with threats of blackmail and a stock market crash hanging over them, the couple assume disguises and throw themselves on the mercy of charming rogue, Alfred Abel.

Produced by Erich Pommer, this should have been a breezy comedy of errors and drawing-room manners. But while the performances are polished and amusing, Murnau struggles to maintain momentum and it's easy to see from his endless resort to newspapers, letters and captions to explain the various intrigues and alliances why sound would be so eagerly seized upon by film-makers worldwide just three years later. Yet, in the same year that Alan Crosland changed cinema forever with The Jazz Singer (1927), Murnau demonstrated the poetic potency, psychological subtlety and pictoric beauty of the silent screen with Sunrise.

Planned in Germany and filmed in Hollywood, this adaptation of Herman Sudermann's A Trip To Tilsit (subtitled A Song of Two Humans) is a remarkable combination of European art and American craft. Given carte blanche by the studio, Murnau built a romanticised rural retreat and a temptation-riddled metropolis on the Fox lot to control every patch of seductive moonlight and dizzying impression of urban unfamiliarity, as backwater hayseed George O'Brien is lured away from adoring wife Janet Gaynor by city vamp Margaret Livingston, whose lubricious pleasure-seeking almost seduces him into a dastardly deed before he's restored to his senses by a nocturnal storm.

Although the uncredited Frank Williams's process shots occasionally steal the show, cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss thoroughly merited their Academy Awards for the lustrous visuals (the first achieved with panchromatic stock) and symbolic shifts of mood. Moreover, the unjustly forgotten Gaynor's performance is a masterclass in silent mime, as she passes from bliss to betrayal, forgiveness to fear, in her bid to come to terms with O'Brien's infidelity. And it was no accident that her Oscar triumph was presented for her work here and in Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, as no American director was more influenced by Murnau than Frank Borzage.

A onetime actor, Borzage established a reputation for intelligent, but sentimental romances in the early 1920s. In order to bring some cosy glamour and a modicum of optimism to tales that invariably dwelt upon poverty and cruelty, he devised a trademark blend of backlighting, soft focus, gliding camera movements and naturalistic acting that became so admired that when Murnau was overlooked for the inaugural Academy Award for Best Director, Borzage was a shoo-in over Herbert Brenon (Sorrell and Son) and King Vidor (The Crowd).

Adapted by the Oscar-winning Benjamin Glazer from a long-running stage hit by Austin Strong, Seventh Heaven is an unashamed weepie that chronicles the romance that coyly develops between Gaynor's waif-like streetwalker and macho Montmartre sewage worker Charles Farrell, after he plucks her from the misery of sharing a backstreet slum with her absinthe-swilling sister, Gladys Brockwell. Despite installing her in his humble garret, Farrell struggles to find the words to convey his feelings. But Gaynor recognises the vulnerability beneath his bluff exterior and they are soulmates by the time he marches off to the trenches.

Although Harry Oliver and Freddie Stoos's Parisian sets anticipated the street realism that would become a staple of French cinema in the mid-1930s, this is never anything but an idealised treatise on the nobility of the poor and the redemptive power of true love. Yet Borzage (like Douglas Sirk would do after him) treats the mawkish material with a gravity that imbues it with a social and psychological significance that far exceeds its penny dreadfulness. Consequently, he's even able to wring something genuinely affecting out of the cornball conclusion's celestial nuptials.

He similarly made a silk purse out of the Neapolitan potboiler Street Angel, which made Oscar history, as cinematographer Ernest Palmer and art director Harry Oliver won their awards a full year after Janet Gaynor had triumphed for her performance. Based on Monckton Hoffe's novel Cristilinda, this is Borzage's most Germanic picture, with the action frequently being adumbrated by oppressive shadows. But it also harks back to the bathetic yarns patented by DW Griffith, which saw Lillian Gish cling on to her innocence while suffering demurely in silence.

The diminutive Gaynor is less winsome, as the gamine who resorts to prostitution and theft in order to feed her ailing mother. She is arrested for stealing spaghetti, but manages to give the police the slip and seeks refuge with a travelling circus. However, she quickly fulfils the fortune teller's prediction that she will fall hopelessly in love, only for artist Charles Farrell to discover the truth about her shameful past shortly after painting her as the Madonna. Bereft at losing her beau, Gaynor meekly accepts her punishment. But, on her release, she wanders into the very church where Farrell is pining over his portrait.

Despite its conspicuous craftsmanship, this hoary tearjerker was almost outmoded as soon as it was released, as Gaynor's perky victim felt somewhat twee beside Clara Bow's It girls, Gloria Swanson's fallen women and Greta Garbo's exotic enigmas. Yet audiences clamoured for her to be paired with the gangling Farrell again and Borzage obliged with Lucky Star (1929), a part-talkie that has only recently been restored (albeit without its soundtrack) after years of neglect.

This time, Gaynor plays a country girl who thieves with impunity to keep body and soul together. But Farrell heartily disapproves of her behaviour and gives her a spanking after she swindles a man out of some money. Yet before Gaynor can succumb to such bluff charm, Farrell is dispatched to the Great War and returns in a wheelchair. Still something of an urchin, Gaynor tries to nurse him, but finds herself being given a makeover that serves only to strengthen their ardour. But while Farrell is repeatedly frustrated in his efforts to walk again, Gaynor's mother (Hedwiga Reicher) attempts to matchmake her with Farrell's former sergeant, the abrasive Guinn `Big Boy' Williams.

It speaks volumes for Borzage's mastery of such potentially maudlin material that this clichéd paean to constancy and courage is so deeply moving. Farrell's excruciating trudge through the snow to save Gaynor from a ruinous marriage is as touching as it's heroic. By contrast, however, a palpable sensuality pervades the sequence in which Farrell washes Gaynor's hair with eggs in a bid to make her more presentable. Yet this would prove to be the last time that Borzage directed Gaynor and by the time he reunited with Farrell on Liliom (1930), their leading lady was Rose Hobart.

Borzage's reworking of Ferenc Molnár's renowned play has been rather overshadowed by Fritz Lang's 1934 screen version and Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1945 musical interpretation, Carousel. As with most films from this period, it's hamstrung by the limitations imposed by primitive sound recording techniques. But the simpering-voiced Farrell also feels miscast as the brusque Budapest carnival barker who is sacked by jilted boss Estelle Taylor for flirting with the decorous Hobart.

Undeterred by Farrell's bad boy reputation and determined not to wed a dullard like best friend Mildred Van Dorn, Hobart consents to marry him. But he refuses to find work and answers her entreaties with his fists. Yet when he discovers that his wife is pregnant, Farrell vows to get money by fair means or foul and is fatally wounded during a robbery. In the afterlife, however, he begs for a chance to ensure that Hobart and her daughter will survive without him.

There are moments of indubitable magic here, most notably when the celestial train comes into Farrell's room to collect him, while the underworld express creates sparks in the distance alongside the rollercoaster track. But, apart from Harry Oliver's art direction and Borzage's innate sense of romance, this is primarily significant for being the first Hollywood feature to use back-projected settings. Nevertheless, its appearance is more than welcome and it's to be hoped that the BFI will release the remaining titles from Fox's wondrous anthology in due course: Lazybones (1925); They Had to See Paris (1929); Song o' My Heart (1930); Bad Girl (1931); After Tomorrow; and Young America (both 1932).

Finally, this week, Rebecca Miller comes more up to date - while remaining firmly in melodrama territory - for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, an adaptation of her own novel that can't decide whether it's a dark social satire, a chunk of all-star pulp or a melancholic discourse on mid-life mores.

Settling into a Connecticut retirement community with octogenarian publisher husband Alan Arkin, fiftysomething New Yorker Robin Wright Penn passes the time between polite dinner parties and encounters with flaky poet pal Winona Ryder and mercurial neighbour's son Keanu Reeves by reflecting on her past. She's happy to relive her feuds with pill-popping depressive mother Maria Bello and her teenage sojourn with lesbian aunt Robin Weigert and her S&M porn-shooting lover, Julianne Moore. But Wright Penn's growing dissatisfaction with her entombment is exacerbated by her guilt over the fate of Arkin's second wife, Monica Bellucci. Moreover, she begins acting out her repressed urges during uncontrollable bouts of sleepwalking.

Miller can't be accused of stinting on storyline or lacking the courage to examine the ennui endured by so many middle-aged American women. She also makes adroit use of Declan Quinn's camera and Michael Shaw's production design to establish the various settings. But she never seems wholly in control of the tonal shifts, with the result that this messy, fitfully engaging hybrid veers unconvincingly between domestic histrionics, quirky kinkiness, droll wit and absurdist fantasy.

Blake Lively impresses as the younger Pippa alongside the typically eye-catching Moore, while Arkin steals scenes in his accustomed manner. But while it's easy to appreciate why Wright Penn made the decisions she has since come to regret, it's more difficult to forgive her inability to escape the stultifying docility that Miller conspires to reinforce by surrounding her with such sketchily established secondary characters.


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