Mavi Boncuk: Best of World Cinema Part 1 (1926-1929)

Mavi Boncuk |

BEST OF WORLD CINEMA | ACCORDING TO MAVI BONCUK

SILENT (1891-1936)

Part 1 (1891-1913)| Part 2 (1914-1919)

Part 3 (1920-1936)

SILENT TO SOUND (1926-1929)

Part 1

SOUND (1926-2022)

Part 1 (1926-2022)| Part 2 (1930-1959)

Part 3 (1960-1979) Part 4 (1980-1999)

Part 5 (2000-2009) Part 6 (2010-2022)

TURKISH CINEMA

SILENT ERA | [IN PROGRESS ]

SOUND (1933-1999) | SOUND (2000 - 2022)

Post Silent Films Era

20TH CENTURY | Early Sound (1926-1929)

1926

WHILE LONDON SLEEPS| 1926 HOWARD BRETHERTON

Warner Bros. film about a police-dog, Rinty, who helps Scotland Yard defeat a dangerous criminal organization known as the Mediterranean Brotherhood that operates out of the Limehouse district of London. No prints of this film are known to survive suggesting it is lost. It is on the Lost Film Files list for missing Warner Bros., but the soundtrack survives intact on Vitaphone disks in the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Rin Tin Tin or Rin-Tin-Tin (September 1918 – August 10, 1932) was a male German Shepherd born in Flirey, France, who became an international star in motion pictures. He was rescued from a World War I battlefield by an American soldier, Lee Duncan, who nicknamed him "Rinty". Duncan trained Rin Tin Tin and obtained silent film work for the dog. Rin Tin Tin was an immediate box-office success and went on to appear in 27 Hollywood films, gaining worldwide fame.

1927

WHAT PRICE GLORY | 1926 RAOUL WALSH

American silent comedy-drama war film produced and distributed by Fox Film Corporation The film is based on the 1924 play What Price Glory by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings. A short film of singer Raquel Meller was shown before this feature at the Sam H. Harris Theater in New York City. The short film, not quite synchronized, was the first public presentation of a film in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system. In January 1927, Fox re-released What Price Glory? with synchronized sound effects and music in the Movietone system.

Part of its fame revolves around the fact that the characters can be seen speaking profanities which are not reflected in the intertitles, but which can be deciphered by lipreaders. The studio was reportedly inundated by calls and letters from enraged Americans, including deaf and hearing-impaired people, to whom the vivid profanity between Sergeant Quirt and Captain Flagg was extremely offensive. Remade in 1952 as What Price Glory starring James Cagney.

WHEN A MAN LOVES | 1927 ALAN CROSLAND

American silent historical drama film of the frequently filmed story of Abbe Prevost's 1731 novel Manon Lescaut.

When a Man Loves re-teamed Barrymore and Costello after 1925's The Sea Beast. The film is the third and last film in Barrymore's first Warners contract, having been preceded by The Sea Beast and Don Juan. He and director Alan Crosland re-teamed at United Artists to make The Beloved Rogue, another French costume story that was selected because of the popularity of When a Man Loves. This film version of When a Man Loves repeats the ending of The Sea Beast, providing a happy ending rather than the tragic ending of the source material.

Many of the people who worked on the previous year's Don Juan worked on When a Man Loves, such as director Crosland, writer Bess Meredyth, editor Harold McCord, and director of photography Byron Haskin.

When the film played in the theater, the audience was so amazed that the sound was coming from the speakers, not from an actual live orchestra. A New York Times reviewer wrote that he, and probably the rest of the audience, forgot the fact that there was actually no orchestra in the theater. At the end of the film, The Vitaphone Symphony Orchestra was shown to the audience for about 15 seconds.

OLD SAN FRANCISCO | 1927 ALAN CROSLAND

American silent historical drama film which was produced and distributed by Warner Bros. starring Dolores Costello and featuring Warner Oland.

The film was released in a silent version and in a Vitaphone version, with sound-on-disc recording of music and sound effects only. It was the fifth Warner Brothers feature film to have Vitaphone musical accompaniment. Just one month later, on October 6, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer with music, sound effects, and spoken dialogue.

A print of the film still exists at the Library of Congress, George Eastman House and Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, as well as its Vitaphone soundtrack and has been restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive in association with other organizations such as the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art.

THE JAZZ SINGER | 1927 ALAN CROSLAND

Alan Crosland (August 10, 1894 – July 16, 1936) was an American stage actor and film director. He is noted for having directed the first feature film using spoken dialogue, The Jazz Singer (1927).Crosland died in 1936 at the age of 41 as a result of an automobile accident on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

American " talkie" musical drama film, the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated sequences). Its release heralded the commercial ascendance of sound films and effectively marked the end of the silent film era. It was produced by Warner Bros. with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system and features six songs performed by Al Jolson. Based on the 1925 play of the same title by Samson Raphaelson, the plot was adapted from his short story "The Day of Atonement". The film depicts the fictional story of Jakie Rabinowitz, a young man who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. After singing popular tunes in a beer garden, he is punished by his father, a hazzan (cantor), prompting Jakie to run away from home. Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer, performing in blackface. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer, but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage.

WINGS | 1927 WILLIAM A. WELLMAN
American silent war film set during World War I, produced by Lucien Hubbard, directed by William A. Wellman, released by Paramount Pictures, and starring Clara Bow, Charles Rogers and Richard Arlen. It won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. Gary Cooper appears in a small role which helped launch his career in Hollywood.

The film, a romantic action-war picture, was rewritten by scriptwriters Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton from a story by John Monk Saunders to accommodate Bow, Paramount's biggest star at the time. Wellman was hired, as he was the only director in Hollywood at the time who had World War I combat pilot experience, although Richard Arlen and John Monk Saunders had also served in the war as military aviators. Hundreds of extras and some 300 pilots were involved in the filming, including pilots and planes of the United States Army Air Corps. Whereas most Hollywood productions of the day took little more than a month to shoot, Wings took approximately nine months to complete in total.

Acclaimed for its technical prowess and realism upon release, the film became the yardstick against which future aviation films were measured, mainly because of its realistic air-combat sequences. It went on to win the first Academy Award for Best Picture at the first Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award ceremony in 1929, the only fully silent film to do so. The statuette, not yet known as the "Oscar", was presented by Douglas Fairbanks to Clara Bow on behalf of the producers, Adolph Zukor and B.P. Schulberg. It also won the Academy Award for Best Engineering Effects (Roy Pomeroy). Wings was one of the first widely released films to show nudity.

Wings was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", The Academy Film Archive preserved Wings in 2002. As the original negatives are lost, the closest to an original copy is a spare negative rediscovered in Paramount's vaults subsequent to the Cinémathèque Française print. Suffering from decay and defects, the negative was fully restored with modern technology. For the restored version of Wings, the original music score was re-orchestrated. The sound effects were recreated at Skywalker Sound using archived audio tracks. The scenes using the Handschiegl color process were also recreated for the restored version.

Director William A. Wellman was an experienced pilot himself

HAM AND EGGS AT THE FRONT | 1927 ROY DEL RUTH
American silent comedy film directed by and starring Tom Wilson, Heinie Conklin and Myrna Loy - all in blackface.[1] The film was released with a Vitaphone synchronized soundtrack with a music score and sound effects. Long thought to be a lost film, a print was screened at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2021 courtesy of the Cineteca Italiana.

SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS | 1927 F. W. MURNAU
American silent romantic drama directed by German director F. W. Murnau (in his American film debut) and starring George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, and Margaret Livingston. The story was adapted by Carl Mayer from the short story "The Excursion to Tilsit", from the 1917 collection with the same title by Hermann Sudermann. Sunrise premiered on September 23, 1927. It was accompanied by the first ever talking newsreels, which attracted much of the initial interest in the film. "Sunrise" was not a box-office success, but the industry knew it was looking at a masterpiece. When the first Academy Awards were held, the top prize was shared: "Wings" won for "best production," and "Sunrise" won for "best unique and artistic picture."

Murnau was one of the greatest of the German expressionists; his "Nosferatu" (1922) invented the vampire movie, and his "The Last Laugh" (1924) became famous for doing away altogether with intertitles and telling the story entirely with images.

Murnau chose to use the then new Fox Movietone sound-on-film system, making Sunrise one of the first feature films with a synchronized musical score and sound effects soundtrack. The film incorporated Charles Gounod's 1872 composition Funeral March of a Marionette, which was later used as the theme for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–1965).

Full of cinematic innovations, the groundbreaking cinematography (by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss) features particularly praised tracking shots.[*] Titles appear sparingly, with long sequences of pure action and the bulk of the story told in Murnau's signature style. The extensive use of forced perspective is striking, particularly in a shot of the City with normal-sized people and sets in the foreground and smaller figures in the background by much smaller sets.

"In the face of the enormous expenditures that the Fox Film Corporation had made, Sunrise was a box-office disappointment. Although some reviewers criticized the idea of a big-budget spectacle touting artistic pretensions, others immediately recognized the film as a singular achievement. Life magazine’s Robert Sherwood called it “the most important picture in the history of the movies.” Many independent theater owners remained unconvinced.

Sunrise may not have recouped its own staggering cost, but it became an artistic template for many of its studio’s biggest hits. Fox directors Frank Borzage, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, and John Ford all entered a Murnau-esque phase after Sunrise, producing films that stretched their aesthetic repertoire and still turned a profit. After seeing a rough cut of the film, Ford declared it “the greatest picture that has been produced.” His 1928 film Four Sons was tremendously influenced by Sunrise and was even filmed on some of Gliese’s sets, as were parts of Borzage’s Seventh Heaven. Both films were great commercial successes." SOURCE

The characters go unnamed, lending them a universality conducive to symbolism.[11] Veit Harlan compared his German remake Die Reise nach Tilsit (1939), pointing to the symbolism and soft focus of Sunrise he claimed that it was a poem, whereas his realistic Die Reise nach Tilsit was a film

Although the original 35mm negative of the original American version of Sunrise was destroyed in the 1937 Fox vault fire, a new negative was created from a surviving print. The film's copyright was renewed, and will fall into the public domain on January 1, 2023.

[*] The cameras employed in the first silent films were lightweight enough to be picked up and carried, but moving them was problematic because they were attached to the cameraman, who was cranking them by hand. Camera movement was rare; the camera would pan from a fixed position. Then came tracking shots -- the camera literally mounted on rails, so that it could be moved along parallel to the action. But a camera that was apparently weightless, that could fly, that could move through physical barriers -- that kind of dreamlike freedom had to wait until almost the last days of silent films. And then, when the talkies came and noisy sound cameras had to be sealed in soundproof booths, it was lost again for several years.

F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" and "The Last Laugh" are also in the Great Movies collection.

1929

1929 became an important year in the history of both Tobis and German sound film. After the Tri-Ergon film "Ein Tag Film" (One Day of Film), the film "Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame" (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame) marked the premiere of the Tobis system on January 16, 1929 with a series of songs sung by Richard Tauber. Barely two months later came the premiere of Walther Ruttmann's Tobis film "Melodie der Welt" (Melody of the World), which, at some 40 minutes, was the longest German sound film at the time. On September 30, the premiere of Carmine Gallone's Tobis production, "Das Land ohne Frauen" (The Land Without Women) - almost two hours long - was greeted by the press as "the first feature-length German sound film".Thus it came about that, on the one hand, Tobis functioned as a film production company. On the other hand, together with Klangfilm, it profited doubly from the rise of sound film by offering its technology to other production companies such as Ufa. The recording process was marketed under the name "System Tobis-Klangfilm"; the play-back equipment was offered under the name "System Klangfilm-Tobis". In this manner, the Tobis-Klangfilm cartel assured itself the best chances of survival during the turbulent inception of sound film - which the critic Rudolf Arnheim described in 1929 as "sound-film confusion".

DISRAELI |1929 ALFRED E. GREEN
THE GENERAL LINE |1929 GRIGORI ALEKSANDROV, SERGEI EISENSTEIN
ATLANTIC |1929 EWALD ANDRÉ DUPONT
THE KISS |1929 JACQUES FEYDER
THE LAST PERFORMANCE |1929 PÁL FEJÖS
WILD ORCHIDS | 1929 SIDNEY FRANKLIN
THE NEW GENTLEMEN |1929 JACQUES FEYDER
DOUBLE WHOOPEE |1929 LEWIS R. FOSTER
DAYS OF YOUTH |1929 YASUJIRÔ OZU
OUR MODERN MAIDENS |1929 JACK CONWAY
A STRAIGHTFORWARD BOY |1929 YASUJIRÔ OZU
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW | 1929 SAM TAYLOR
THE FLYING FLEET | 1929 GEORGE W. HILL
THE PEARL | 1929 HENRI D' URSEL
BRUMES D'AUTOMNE | 1929 DIMITRI KIRSANOFF
THE GREAT GABBO | 1929 JAMES CRUZE
PIPE OF COMMUNARD | 1929 KOTE MARDJANISHVILI
UNTAMED | 1929 JACK CONWAY
MONTE CRISTO | 1929 HENRI FESCOURT
BROADWAY | 1929 PÁL FEJÖS
SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE | 1929 REGINALD BARKER
SEDUCTION | 1929 GUSTAV MACHATÝ
THE LOVE TRAP | 1929 WILLIAM WYLER
WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU | 1929 ARNOLD FANCK, GEORG WILHELM PABST
FINIS TERRAE 1929 JEAN EPSTEIN
NAVY BLUES | 1929 CLARENCE BROWN
CHEMI BEBIA | 1929 KOTE MIQABERIDZE
THE WONDERFUL LIES OF NINA PETROVNA | 1929 HANNS SCHWARZ
DRIFTERS | 1929 JOHN GRIERSON (SILENT)
FRAGMENT OF AN EMPIRE | 1929 FRIDRIKH ERMLER
THE NEW BABYLON | 1929 GRIGORI KOZINTSEV, LEONID TRAUBERG
MOCNY CZŁOWIEK 1929 HENRYK SZARO
THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS 1929 JEAN GRÉMILLON
PANDORA'S BOX | 1929 GEORG WILHELM PABST  (SILENT)
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA | 1929 DZIGA VERTOV  (SILENT)
UN CHIEN ANDALOU | 1929 LUIS BUÑUEL  (SILENT)
THE COCOANUTS | 1929 ROBERT FLOREY, JOSEPH SANTLEY
DIARY OF A LOST GIRL | 1929 GEORG WILHELM PABST (SILENT)

MUSTALAISHURMAAJA | 1929 VALENTIN VAALA (SILENT)
Mustalaishurmaaja is a Finnish silent film. The first film with( Fennica-Filmillä) Fennica-Film. In the film, Manjardo (Theodor Tugai), who is the leader of the Roma camp, has two admirers, Akris (Hanna Taini) and Glafira (Alli Riks). However, Manjardo has already agreed on a marriage with Esmeralda (Meri Hackzell), even though Esmeralda is not interested in Manjardo. After getting married, Esmeralda soon runs away from Manjardo with her lover Fer (Bruno Lauré). The film was shot in the vicinity of Helsinki and featured many Roma who lived in the Helsinki region.

Valentin Vaala (Valentin Jakovitsh Ivanoff[ (b. October 11, 1909 Helsinki – November 21, 1976 Helsinki) was a Finnish-Russian film director. He started his career together with Theodor Tugai at the end of the 1920s and brightened the circles of the film industry with his modern and international touch.

Valentin Vaala was interested in directing films early on. A common vision was found with Theodor Tugai, who was three years younger - with his later stage name Teuvo Tulio - whom Valentin met on a winter skating rink as a teenager. Because filmmaking was expensive, they only got to try making a film in the summer of 1927 along the Vantaanjoki River. Vaala directed and Tugai played the main part. Filming was stopped due to lack of money, and Vaala continued his day job in the picture plate department. The following summer, they got businessman Armas Willamo as a financier and his agency company Oy Fennica Ab as a producer. The first work was called " Mustat silmät" Black Eyes, and it was completed in the early spring of 1929. The film was neither a success with the public nor to Vaala's liking. A few years after the premiere, he threw the film's original negatives into the sea in front of Kaivopuisto.

Vaala was Suomi-Film's long-term director and directed a total of 44 feature films between 1929 and 1963. Among these are works recognized as classics, such as Mustalaishurmaaja, Hulda of Juurakon, Green Chamber of Linnainen, Loviisa, People in summer sleep and Gabriel, come back. Vaala used the classics of Finnish literature as sources for his films. His many film adaptations were based on texts by Hella Wuolijoki, Mika Waltari, F. E. Sillanpää, Aleksis Kive and Maiju Lassila.

BLACKMAIL | 1929 ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Initially conceived as a silent film, Hitchcock would have been aware that studio head John Maxwell was in the process of auditioning sound reproduction equipment for the studio and the go-ahead was eventually given for Hitchcock to reshoot parts of the film as a "talkie" sound version. Ultimately, two versions of the film would be released to British cinemas — one with sound and one without
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WOMAN IN THE MOON | 1929 FRITZ LANG (SILENT)

Fritz Lang’s last silent film, “Die Frau im Mond” (1929), known in English as “Woman in the Moon,” was also a first — the earliest movie to depict space travel as a realistic possibility. Lang’s movie was at once pedantically scientific and outlandishly speculative — a spectacle low on human interest and high on cutting-edge special effects, some developed by the avant-garde animator Oskar Fischinger. “Woman in the Moon” begins as an energetic, if routine, reprise of Lang’s previous film, “Spies” (1928). The first half is largely devoted to criminal conspiracy. A gang of plutocrats, fronted by a master of disguise and suave thuggery named Turner (played by German cinema’s favorite villain, Fritz Rasp), plot to steal a rocket designed by an aging mad scientist from his earnest young protégé, the entrepreneurial astrophysicist Helius (the popular leading man Willy Fritsch). “Woman in the Moon” proved a box-office success despite hostile reviews, particularly from left-wing critics who perceived the movie as a showpiece for the right-wing media mogul Alfred Hugenberg, who had bought a controlling interest in the film studio Ufa.

LIBERTY | 1929 LEO MCCAREY

American silent two-reeler film, directed by Leo McCarey starring comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. While changing clothes in a getaway car, escaped convicts Stan and Ollie mistakenly put on each other’s pants. They spend the rest of the film trying to exchange pants in various unlikely settings.

THE VIRGINIAN | 1929 VICTOR FLEMING
Gary Cooper’s first talking picture was "The Virginian," directed by Victor Fleming[*]. It was the third film version of Owen Wister’s 1902 popular novel. The first adaptation was in 1921 with Dustin Farnum, and the second in 1923 with Kenneth Harlan. Cooper plays a foreman of the Box H ranch near Wyoming's Medicine Bow, who gives his old buddy Steve (Richard Arlen) a job. Soon after, they meet and fall in love with Molly Wood (Mary Brian), the newly arrived schoolteacher from Vermont.

“The Virginian" poses the kind of moral conflict that Gary Cooper would confront in future films, such as his 1952 Oscar-winning Western "High Noon." Torn between his conscience, which tells him he what to do, and his new wife, who tells him he must not do it, he opts for the former, because he knows that won't be able to live with himself if he doesn’t."The Virginian" was a commercial success, and Paramount reissued the film nationally in 1935 by popular demand.” Emanuel Levy

For many years, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, Victor Fleming's 1929 adpatation of Owen Wister's novel The Virginian was a very problematic film, at least as a viewing experience -- it was highly significant in Gary Cooper's career, and his presence in the title role made the movie intrinsically important. But until the 1990s when a serious restoration effort took place, the only prints available were of such poor quality (especially the sound), that it was impossible to appreciate The Virginian except as a historical curio. In the 1990s, the film was restored and became more widely available.

Rather than synchronize every sound on screen with a shown action, The Virginian treated sound as at times being independent of the action; this allowed for greater symbolism. The film also heavily used natural sounds, such as cattle.[13] This was facilitated by the outdoor shooting locations.

[*] Victor Fleming, (b. February 23, 1889, near Pasadena, California, U.S.—d. January 6, 1949, near Cottonwood, Arizona), American filmmaker who was one of Hollywood’s most popular directors during the 1930s. He was best known for his work on the 1939 classics Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.

Fleming’s first feature film, When the Clouds Roll By (1919), starred Douglas Fairbanks, and he directed several more movies before signing a contract with Paramount in 1922. Among the many prestigious silents he helmed were The Way of All Flesh (1927) with Emil Jannings, Hula (1927) with Clara Bow, and Abie’s Irish Rose (1928), an adaptation of the long-running Broadway show. In 1929 Fleming directed Gary Cooper in two westerns, The Wolf Song and The Virginian, an adaptation of Owen Wister’s popular novel. Although the latter was filmed several times, Fleming’s early talkie remains definitive, thanks to Cooper’s star-making turn as a charismatic ranch foreman and Walter Huston’s portrayal of a cattle rustler.

After The Wolf Song and The Virginian, Fleming left Paramount and subsequently directed (with Fairbanks) the travelogue Around the World in 80 Minutes with Douglas Fairbanks (1931). Fleming signed at MGM in 1932 and quickly became one of the studio’s top directors. The Wet Parade (1932), a well-received adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s book about Prohibition, featured Huston and Myrna Loy. More popular was Red Dust (1932), arguably the best of several teamings of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. A major box-office hit, the steamy jungle romance was filmed before censorship rules were tightened, and it featured teasing sexual banter that soon vanished from the screen. Fleming reteamed with Harlow on another success, Bombshell (1933), a satire of Hollywood, in which Lee Tracy was especially funny as an unscrupulous press agent.

ASPHALT | 1929 JOE MAY

Asphalt is a 1929 German silent film directed by Joe May[*]. The film stars Gustav Fröhlich and Betty Amann and is about a young woman in Berlin who is driven into poverty and steals a valuable piece of jewelry. She is caught by a police officer which leads to the woman to attempt to seduce him into letting her go. The film was shot between October and December 1928 at UFA.

Brilliant Else is convicted of theft by police sergeant Holk, but knows how to help herself by seducing him in her apartment. Holk refrains from reporting him, but his second visit to Else ends in tragedy: Else's friend, an internationally wanted gangster, attacks Holk and dies in the scuffle. Suspected of murder, he is arrested by his father, a sergeant. Else turns himself in to the police and testifies to the self-defense situation. Because, contrary to expectations, she has fallen in love with Holk.

With his last two silent films, May turned to more realistic dramas and also processed expressionist influences in his style: "Heimkehr" (1928) and "Asphalt" (1929), both shot for Ufa on behalf of Erich Pommer, mark the high points of his work, the socially critical "Asphalt" is considered one of the most important works of Weimar cinema.

In 1993, the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin discovered a print of Asphalt at the Gosfilmofond archive in Moscow which seemed to have been sourced from the original film negative.The chronology of scenes in print found differed from earlier versions and included extra scenes with German intertitles.

[*] Joe May Actor, Director, Screenplay, Building, Editing, Producer, Production Management
(b. November 7, 1880 Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)- d. April 29, 1954 Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA ).Other namesFred Majo (pseudonym) Julius Otto Mandl (birth name)

Under the name Fred Majo and together with Hans Székely, May also wrote the screenplay for the first talkie of the Pommer-Ufa production, "Ungarische Rhapsodie" (1928). With "Her Majesty Love" (1931), May's first talkie as a director, he created a spirited comedy.

In 1932, May-Film AG was dissolved by resolution of the general assembly. May emigrated to Hollywood via London in April 1933 after the premiere of his last German directorial work, "Ein Lied für Dich". After a few failures - including the musical "Music in the Air", in which several other emigrants from Nazi Germany took part - May directed mainly B movies for Universal. Of these, "The Invisible Man Returns" is now one of the classics of fantastic films, not least because of its innovative special effects. In 1943, based on May's submission, the anti-Nazi film "The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler" (1943) was made, directed by Fritz Kortner; Joe May's last directing work is the war comedy "Johnny Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (1944). After that there were no orders.

In 1949, Joe and Mia May opened the restaurant "The Blue Danube" in Los Angeles, specializing in Viennese cuisine. Due to a lack of success, however, it had to close again after a few weeks. From then on, the May couple depended on the financial support of friends and colleagues, and they were also supported by the aid organization for emigrants, the "European Film Fund".

ARSENAL | 1929 ALEKSANDR DOVZHENKO (SILENT)

Stenberg brothers' film poster

A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.

The film concerns an episode in the Russian Civil War in 1918 in which the Kiev Arsenal January Uprising of workers aided the besieging Bolshevik army against the Ukrainian national Parliament Central Rada who held legal power in Ukraine at the time.

While Arsenal does not possess the same historical breadth as Zvenyhora, it does follow Zvenyhora in having the same seven part episodic division. The expressionist imagery, perfect camera work and original drama took the film far beyond the usual propaganda and made it one of the most important pieces of Ukrainian avant-garde cinema. The film was made in 1928 and released early in 1929. It is the second film in his "Ukraine Trilogy", the first being Zvenigora (1928) and the third being Earth (1930). The film was shot at Odessa Film Factory of VUFKU by legendary cameraman Danyl Demutskyi and using the original sets made by Volodymyr Muller. The expressionist imagery, perfect camera work and original drama took the film far beyond the usual propaganda and made it one of the most important pieces of Ukrainian avant-garde cinema. Arsenal was badly received by the communist authorities in Ukraine, who began harassing Dovzhenko - but, fortunately for him, Stalin watched it and liked it.

Regarded by film scholar Vance Kepley, Jr. as "one of the few Soviet political films which seems even to cast doubt on the morality of violent retribution", Dovzhenko's eye for wartime absurdities (for example, an attack on an empty trench) anticipates later pacifist sentiments in films by Jean Renoir and Stanley Kubrick.

"Several apparently unconnected series of shots are edited as if there was no difference at all in their respective nature, status, or degree of stylisation. Arsenal is, on the one hand, quite primitive-looking and features some striking departures from the principles of socialist-realism supposedly already being enforced by Soviet film/political authorities at the time of its release (such as the horse who speaks, in intertitles of course, as Soviet cinema was to remain silent for several more years). On the other hand, Arsenal is reminiscent and pre-emptive of the associative freedom characteristic of Godard, Straub/Huillet or early Makavejev. The overall effect of Arsenal is quite at odds with other familiar Soviet films made at the same time, such as Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (formerly The General Line, 1929) – even if these may have been to some extent influenced by Dovzhenko’s movie. Part of the fascination of Dovzhenko’s work lies in such contradictions, even though it threatened the continuity of the author’s work as a filmmaker." MORE

HALLELUJAH! | 1929 KING VIDOR

Years before creating Hallelujah, King Vidor had longed to make a film employing an all-African American cast. He had floated the idea around for years but "the studio kept turning the idea down".Vidor’s was in Europe during 1928 promoting his film The Crowd, when heard of talking motion pictures emerging in the United States. He wanted an all-African American cast to sing "negro spirituals" after he had seen the success of it on Broadway. Vidor stated, "If stage plays with all negro casts, and stories like those by Octavus Roy Cohen and others, could have such great success, why shouldn’t the screen make a successful negro play?" Vidor was able to convince Nicholas Schenck, who was the president of MGM at the time, to get the movie made by framing it more as a film that depicted African American’s sexual deviance. Schenck put it simply to Vidor, "Well, if you think like that, I’ll let you make a picture about whores". Vidor received the inspiration to create this film based on real incidents he witnessed as a child during his time at home in the south. He observed: "I used to watch the negroes in the South, which was my home. I studied their music, and I used to wonder at the pent-up romance in them". Vidor began shooting in Arkansas, Memphis, and Southern California at the MGM studios.

The people inhabit a world of racial paternalism where, partly due to religion; the plantation workers are happy with the status quo. Zeke the plantation boy represents the morally upstanding country boy (the good) against the morally corrupt (due to Hotshot's influence) city girl Chick (the bad) who tempts him from the straight and narrow.

Hallelujah was one of the early projects that gave African Americans significant roles in a movie, and though some contemporary film historians and archivists have said that it had "a freshness and truth that was not attained again for thirty years", several contemporary film historians and archivists agree that Hallelujah exhibits Vidor’s paternalistic view of rural blacks that included racial stereotyping.

Museum of Modern Arts film archivist Charles Silver made this appraisal: "On one level, Hallelujah clearly reinforces the stereotypes of Blacks as childishly simple, lecherously promiscuous, fanatically superstitious, and shiftless [yet] Vidor could never be accused of the overt racial venom exhibited by Griffith in The Birth of a Nation...Is there, then, a defense for Hallelujah beyond its aesthetic importance? I think there is, and I think it lies in Vidor’s personality as we know it from his films...Hallelujah can and should be accepted as the remarkable achievement it is."

PICCADILLY | 1929 EWALD ANDRÉ DUPONT (SILENT/PART SOUND)

Piccadilly is a 1929 British silent drama film written by Arnold Bennett and starring Gilda Gray, Anna May Wong, and Jameson Thomas. The film was filmed on location in London, produced by British International Pictures. Ewald André Dupont[*] film is a late silent, noted for the central performance of the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong.

Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas) owns a nightclub featuring dancers Mabel (Gilda Gray) and Vic (Cyril Ritchard). After a confrontation with Wilmot, Vic quits performing at the club. When the joint starts losing business, a desperate Wilmot hires former dishwasher Shosho (Anna May Wong) as a dancer. She is an instant hit and forms a rapport with Wilmot, which makes both Mabel and Shosho's friend (King Ho Chang) jealous, leading to a mysterious murder.

This film initially was released as a silent in February 1929; however, with the advent of sound sweeping through the film industry at the time, the studio re-released the film later the same year in June for cinemas wired for sound. This version included a music score and sound effects by Harry Gordon, along with a five-minute sound prologue with Jameson Thomas who plays Valentine Wilmot in the film and John Longden as the man from China, which was filmed after the main filming was completed. The part-sound version initially was shown in the U.S.

Writing for the British Film Institute, BFI Senior Curator Mark Duguid says: "A film noir before the term was in use, Piccadilly is one of the true greats of British silent films, on a par with the best work of Anthony Asquith or Alfred Hitchcock in the period … notable for qualities not typically associated with British silent films: opulence, passion and a surprisingly direct approach to issues of race … For all its style and grace, the film's strongest suit is Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong … arguably never better used than here. To Wong's frustration, Shosho and Valentine's kiss was cut to appease the US censor ... Naturally, Piccadilly's publicity made much of Wong's exotic beauty: one contemporary poster—for the film's Austrian release—carries an illustration of the star dancing topless. It would have been unthinkable to portray a white actress in this way and, needless to say, no such image appears in the film."

In 2004, the film was re-released by Milestone Films after an extensive restoration, with music scored by Neil Brand, replacing the original music-and-sound effects soundtrack. It appeared in 2004 at film festivals nationwide, and in 2005, it was released on DVD.

[*] Ewald André Dupont (25 December 1891 – 12 December 1956) was a German film director, one of the pioneers of the German film industry. He was often credited as E. A. Dupont.

A newspaper columnist in 1916, Dupont became a screenwriter and began directing his own crime-story scripts in 1918. After several successes in his native Germany in silent films, he worked in London and in Hollywood, California. One of his greatest successes was the silent film Varieté (1925). This film, about an ex-trapeze artist, was noted for its innovative camerawork with highly expressive movement through space, accomplished by the expressionist cinematographer Karl Freund. Varieté even did well in the United States, screening for 12 weeks at New York's Rialto Theatre. Dupont's success was noticed by Carl Laemmle at Universal, who offered Dupont a lucrative contract. His first project was Love Me and the World Is Mine in the early summer of 1926, which ran well over budget ($350,000) and was not a success.

Dupont then headed to Britain and made the film Piccadilly (1929), a late silent, which is remembered for the central performance of the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong. Atlantic (also 1929) is a retelling of the Titanic disaster and is seen as one of the most innovative uses of sound film technology available at the time. Dupont made several more films in Britain and a few in Germany and France. After a brief return to Germany, the Jewish director emigrated to the United States in 1933, where he was assigned to several B movies and low budget "programmer" films. Unhappy with the lack of opportunities afforded him in Hollywood, Dupont became a talent agent in 1940.

HELL'S HEROES | 1929 WILLIAM WYLER (SILENT/SOUND)

This film is notable for being the first sound production directed by William Wyler[*].

American Western sound film, one of many screen adaptations of Peter B. Kyne's 1913 novel The Three Godfathers (already been filmed twice before by Universal, once in 1916 and again in 1920 as Marked Men, by John Ford) . Three outlaws, played by Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton, and Fred Kohler, promise a dying woman they will save her newborn child.

Made during the chaotic transition to sound, Hell’s Heroes was released in both an all-talkie and a silent version to accommodate theaters with expensive new sound equipment and theaters that had yet to purchase it. While filming on location, microphones had to be hidden in sagebrush and cactus, and the camera was enclosed in a mobile, soundproof booth to muffle the noise of the camera motor.

[*] William Wyler (b.Willi Wyler in Mülhausen, Alsace-Lorraine on July 1, 1902, d. July 27, 1981)

The son of a dry goods merchant, William Wyler studied business in Switzerland and the violin at the National Music Conservatory in Paris. In 1922, he was hired by his uncle Carl Laemmle to work at Universal Pictures, where he apprenticed as prop man, grip, script clerk, cutter, and assistant director for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and production assistant on Ben-Hur (1925). He made his directorial debut in 1925 at the age of 23, and, in the next two years, he turned out more than 40 action-packed two-reel westerns before moving into features. Many of the stories he was assigned to direct were second-rate, but Hell’s Heroes gained Wyler a critical recognition that continued to grow over the next 40 years.

Wyler went on to make an incredible roster of great classics, from Wuthering Heights (1939) to The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) to Funny Girl (1968). He was a recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Award and the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and his films received a total of 38 Academy Awards and 127 nominations, a record that most likely will never be equaled. SOURCE

SHOW BOAT | 1929 HARRY A. POLLARD (PART SILENT PART TALKIE)

Those were the years in which film studios were making a transition from silent films to sound films and this version of Show Boat was made as a silent film. The studio panicked when they realized that audiences might be expecting a sound version of Show Boat because sound films had become so popular, and the film was temporarily withheld from release.

Subsequently, several scenes were then reshot to include about 30 minutes of dialogue and singing. At first, the songs recorded for the film had nothing to do with the Broadway score. However, Universal began to fear that audiences might instead be expecting, rather than just the Ferber novel, a film version of the stage musical, which had become a smash hit and was still playing on Broadway while the 1929 film premiered. So, a two-reel sound prologue, featuring original Broadway cast members Helen Morgan (Julie), Jules Bledsoe (Joe), Tess Gardella (Queenie) and the Jubilee Singers singing five songs from the show, was added, and the movie was released both as a part-talkie and as a silent film without the prologue.

The singing voice of Stepin Fetchit, who played Joe in the film, was provided by Jules Bledsoe, the original Joe of the 1927 stage production of the musical. Fetchit mouthed the lyrics to a popular song of the time entitled "The Lonesome Road", which, as sung on the soundtrack by Bledsoe, served as the film's finale instead of a final reprise of Ol' Man River, as in the show. While the immortal "Ol' Man River" was retained, the rest of the Broadway version's songs were jettisoned in favor of several forgettable tunes written by entrepreneur Billy Rose, who convinced the movie's producers that the public had grown tired of hearing the Kern-Hammerstein score! Show Boat would be remade twice, with most of the original songs intact and without Rose's "improvements," in 1936 and 1951.

The eighteen-year-old Magnolia meets, falls in love with, and elopes with riverboat gambler Gaylord Ravenal. He turns out to be a poor husband and provider, eventually deserting Magnolia and her daughter. But Magnolia, harking upon her performing experiences while on her father's show boat, becomes a successful stage star and raises her daughter all by herself.

This film sticks very closely to the Edna Ferber novel, rather than the musical based on the novel. There are only two major changes from Ferber’s book : *Julie in this version is a white woman, not a racially mixed one; therefore she and her husband are not unlawfully married. * Ravenal returns at the end, instead of dying as in the novel.

THE THIRTEENTH CHAIR | 1929 TOD BROWNING

American mystery film based on a 1916 play of the same name by Bayard Veiller. It stars Conrad Nagel, Leila Hyams and Margaret Wycherly. The film was one of many released in both sound and silent versions. An earlier version of the film, starring Creighton Hale, was made in 1919 by ACME/ Pathe Exchange, directed by Leonce Perret. In 1937, the film was again remade by MGM under the same title starring Elissa Landi and Dame May Whitty.

Inspector Delzante (Bela Lugosi), investigates a pair of murders near a British mansion in Calcutta. Helen O'Neill (Leila Hyams) becomes a chief suspect based on circumstantial evidence. A fake Irish medium, Madame LaGrange (Margaret Wycherly) is called in to try to help solve the first murder.

The Thirteenth Chair was director Tod Browning's first sound film. It was based on one of the most famous of the "old dark house" stage plays: Bayard Veiller's The Thirteenth Chair which debuted on Broadway on November 20, 1916. The play had previously been adpated as a silent film by Léonce Peret as The Thirteenth Chair

SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN 1929 BENJAMIN CHRISTENSEN
American mystery film directed by Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen. Based on the 1928 story of the same name by Abraham Merritt, it stars Thelma Todd, Creighton Hale, William V. Mong and Sheldon Lewis. It was first released as a silent film and later as a part-talkie.

October 14, 2022

Best of World Cinema Part 1 (1926-1929) | Early Sound

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