Lost worlds found

Talking up the Northeast Silent Film Festival

By Mike Miliard

THE LOST WORLD (1925): Harry O. Hoyt’s original dinosaur movie.

The greatest attraction your eyes have ever beheld! Seven years to bring it to you! Seven years of hard work, but now this strange and sensational story lives before you! . . . The eyes of the civilized world have never seen adventure and romance like this! You forfeit your right to see the greatest entertainment the brains of man have ever achieved if you miss . . . The Lost World!”

Forget Jurassic Park III. The preceding is from the trailer for the original dinosaur movie, showing Friday as part of the 2nd Annual Northeast Silent Film Festival, taking place at the Alamo Theatre in Bucksport. And if the breathless hype seems a bit much, remember that its jerkily circling pterodactyls and lumbering brontosauruses were the apex of special effects in their day (seven years in the making!). Happily, the film still has an appeal — even in this jaded new millennium where films spring fully formed from desktop computers and digital sound rumbles plush seats.

Shown in a 1916 movie house with live accompaniment by acclaimed pianist Philip Carli, the other films in this charming series, which aims to explore “rural places and lost worlds,” hold up just as well. Why? Is it their quaintness? A nostalgia for a simpler time? Perhaps. But the crude ethnic stereotypes that inform a couple of them are evidence enough that the “good old days” never were. I’m more inclined to think that well-crafted and heartfelt work is enduring, no matter how hokey the passage of decades might render it.

“Silent movies are a lost art form,” says festival organizer Andrea McCarty. Part of the reason, she says, is that most theaters today aren’t equipped to project them at the proper speed. The Alamo is. “You see them on TV, and the people are moving really fast and are all jerky. They look funny. That’s a real hindrance to taking them seriously,” she says. It also causes many to reject them out of hand as the dusty relics of a bygone age. McCarty contends that that’s a big mistake. “These films had a really high level of expression. The acting was a little different, people had to express themselves more. Also, you look at these films and they were dealing with a lot of the same serious subjects we’re grappling with today.” She adds, simply, “I think they’re timeless.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stupendous story of adventure and romance,” trumpets the ornate title card of The Lost World (1925), Harry O. Hoyt’s laborious screen adaptation. The place is London, late 19th century. Wild-eyed Professor Challenger’s (Wallace Beery) ceaseless talk of a hidden jungle, cut off from the planet’s evolutionary process and home to live dinosaurs, has made him the laughing stock of the city. Edward Malone (Lloyd Hughes), an earnest, square-jawed reporter, convinces his paper to fund an expedition to the Amazon, to find the elusive as-yet-undocumented thunder lizards and to rescue an explorer who remains stranded there. His motives have as much to do with the explorer’s daughter (Bessie Love) as plumbing the South American jungle.

A steamy place, replete with real pythons, bear cubs, and sloths (and an amusingly phony gorilla), the jungle is evoked with green-tinted lens. When a brontosaurus is first glimpsed through the brush, or when the expedition is menaced by an allosaurus, the effects do appear clunky to modern viewers. But what once must have been awe-inspiring is still captivating in its way. And it is a seminal film. Special effects pioneer Willis O’Brien, who’d been toying with stop-motion techniques as far back as 1915, would bring later his skills to a talkie called King Kong. And Spielberg’s Jurassic Park sequel of the same name lifted many of its conceits.

In Tom Forman’s Shadows (1922), Lon Chaney plays Yen Sin, a Chinese man who washes ashore in a tiny Maine fishing village after a shipwreck. Urkey is the kind of place “whose sturdy folk had always followed the same simple faith as their fathers.” Problem is, Yen Sin doesn’t share that faith. So he keeps to himself in a small skiff, eking out a living doing — what else? — laundry. He’s only grudgingly accepted; the upright citizens can’t quite stomach a “heathen” in their midst. The crux of the story comes when Yen Sin makes a deathbed conversion to save the local minister (who’d evinced a near-obsession with seeing him convert) from being victimized by blackmail.

Chaney’s performance is nuanced and heartfelt. He conveys the inherent goodness of the character without saying a word. But, even allowing for the different era, lines like “Yen Sin very humble dog but he washee collar fine” distract from his talents. The film was significant in its representation of an Asian who wasn’t an opium fiend or a villain. In fact, many stormed out of its premiere when it became apparent that Yen Sin was actually meant to be the hero. Still, seeing an ethnic stereotype (referred to alternately as “Chink” and “the Chinaman”) ostensibly sacrifice his life for the happiness of a white couple is galling.

Another film featuring a Chinese character is Chester M. Franklin’s moving adaptation of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. But The Toll of the Sea (1922) features an actual Asian, not a squinting, makeup-caked Caucasian. Lotus Flower (Anna May Wong) is smitten when a wealthy and rakish American businessman arrives in her rural Chinese village and later proposes to her. When he’s suddenly called back stateside she waits fervently, their new son in her arms, for his return. He finally does — with his American wife.

The film benefits from artful dialogue that at times vaguely connotes eastern poetry (“Tis the spring day with lovely far away light. Why must the flowers fall with hearts unquiet?”). Also, it’s the first movie to employ a primitive version of Technicolor (just red and green tints). This is put to great effect in scenes of sun-dappled Chinese gardens, sumptuously decorated interiors, and, ultimately, a roiling sea. (We’re told prior to the film that its final sequence was forever lost; footage of the Pacific was shot with an authentic 2-color camera in 1985 and appended — the effect is virtually seamless.)

The title of Harry Edwards’s Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) does not refer to a licentious lady. Instead, it alludes to the hilarious, calamity-beset stroll from Massachusetts to California undertaken by Harry Langdon’s hapless man-child. He does it to win $25,000 to save his father’s faltering shoe company from bankruptcy. He’s also lured by the promise of a smooch from Joan Crawford’s comely flapper on the other side of the continent.

Langdon is superb. But sadly, history hasn’t remembered him as kindly as contemporaries like Chaplin and Keaton. His dopey demeanor and dazed expression (emphasized by the thick black eyeliner and wan complexion de rigueur in ’20s silent films) are eminently watchable, and his physical comedy is a hoot — whether he’s dangling precariously over the edge of a ravine or attempting (spectacularly unsuccessfully) to hang a pinup girl on the wall.

The film succeeds thanks to long stretches, uncluttered by intrusive intertitles, where Langdon’s comedic talents are given free reign. When words do pop in, they take the form of great one liners like “I’m so crazy about that girl, I’m crazy.” and “I’ll get the money in three months if it takes a year!”

More than eight decades after its release, Frank Hurley’s South (1919) is still awe-inspiring. It’s a plainspoken but stirring documentary of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s problem-plagued 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole.

The story is well-known by now, thanks to runs at The Movies on Exchange Street and at Bowdoin College’s Peary-MacMillan Museum: after plowing through some 1500 miles of ice, the Endurance, bearing 28 men and 70 dogs, became irrevocably lodged in an ice floe, where it sat for 9 months before being crushed to pieces. In the meantime, the crew passed the time: conducting experiments, exercising the dogs, and in Hurley’s case, documenting it all with an artful eye.

Many images are arresting: a ground-up view of Shackleton climbing high aloft the crow’s nest; nocturnal shots of the boat that make it resemble an ethereal, frost-encrusted Flying Dutchman; and footage of the crew’s triumphant return to civilization — they’d been cut off from outside communication for nearly two years.

Of course, all’s well that ends well, and after Shackleton undertook an 800-mile trek through icy waters and scaled a glacier to bring help to his stranded crew, this journey did. I can think of many worse ways to cool off after a balmy mid-coast day than to sink into the musty cool of the Alamo theatre and retrace it with him. n

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard@phx.com.