Allan Dwan | A Modern Musketeer / 1917

a kansas cyclone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Allan Dwan (screenwriter, based on a story “D’Artagnan of Kansas” by E. P. Lyle, Jr, and director) A Modern Musketeer / 1917

 

Allan Dwan’s 1917 silent 68-minute film A Modern Musketeer turned up on many of the lists I used to discover LGBTQ movies, but after watching it several months ago, I immediately dropped it from that compilation. And even after much thoughtful brooding ever since, I would argue that it’s not really an LGBTQ film in that none of its figures outwardly express any interest in same sex love nor in gender change or transition, unless you imagine the film’s imaginative shifts between the 17th century dress of  Charles de Batz-Castelmore d'Artagnan with his long hair, blousy shirts and cape, and the local Kansas boy Ned Thacker—both performed by Douglas Fairbanks—represents some sort of crossdressing fantasy. 

 

    Strangely enough the author of the 1918 Photoplay review felt it most certainly was, but in reverse, Fairbanks masculinizing the original D’Artagnan by virtue of his manic leaps, jumps, and absurd acrobatics:

 

“Draft the dictionary, order the thesaurus into intensive training, mobilize the superlatives and equip the book of similes for the first line trenches ­ "A Modern Musketeer" has arrived. Here is Douglas the Fairbanks at his most Douglasish and eke at his Fairbanksest. Here is the breaker of all speed records in the speediest of all forms of entertainment making all his past performances look like the funeral march of a colony of paralyzed snails. Here is Briareus threshing about with every one of his hundred arms at once. D'Artagnan, forsooth! Fairbanks makes the Dumas swashbuckler seem a popinjay, a milksop, a wearer of wrist watches in times of peace, a devotee of the sleeve handkerchief, a nursery playmate, and eater of prune whip, a drinker of pink lemonade, a person susceptible to hay fever, a wearer of corn plasters, an habitue of five o'clock teas, a reader of ‘Polyanna.’”

 

     And I will say both his D’Artagnan and the cyclone force of Ned are quite queer in their behavior in their excessive hyperactivity aimed primarily to help women out of straits they were perfectly happy to be in or in which they were never truly involved. Both represent the kind of courtier who might toss down a cape upon a muddy street where a woman was about to walk with such a force that the mud would be sent straight into her eyes. Or, perhaps, he might first jump into it just to test it out, slinging mud both upon himself and everyone about. God forbid that he get excited; this boy not only climbs quickly to the roof of the village church, but straight up its steeple to sit in its weathercock. As D’Artagnan he spends more time during a duel in the rafters than swashbuckling it out on the floor below.

  

    One might further observe that this film represents the queerest mish-mash of genres that ever made it to the screen, beginning as it does as sort of comic swashbuckler, occasioned by the fact that his mother, loving Dumas, read him The Three Musketeers before and after his birth so many times that he believes he is himself D’Artagnan. In “reality,” if such a word has any meaning in this series of vertiginous tales, he is just a small town Kansas boy born in a cyclone which throughout youth makes him feel it necessary to personally perpetuate as he speeds of on a road trip where he transfers his car, which perhaps was moving too slowly for him, onto a railroad track beating the train to El Trovar, the Grand Canyon resort hotel where he proceeds to court a young teenage old girl Elsie Dodge (Marjorie Daw), charm her money-grubbing mother (Kathleen Kirkham), and alienate the young girl’s would-be fiancée, the wealthy Yonkers businessman Forest Vandeteer (Eugene Ormonde), whom he soon discovers is already a three-time bigamist and business scammer.

 

   Given their location, the film quickly falls into the genre of a Western, which includes Indians (both a sympathetic portrait of the Hopi Tribe and a negative portrait of a renegade Indian Chin-de-dah [Frank Campeau] who uses the former cliff-dwelling Puebloans [Anasazi] tribe’s homes as their hideout) and bandits who plan to steal Elsie rather than rob a bank.

     Such evil-doings, both of Chin-de-dah, who, as a guide to Vandeteer and Elise, plans to lure them into his camp at the base of the Canyon, toss Vandeteer into the Colorado River, and scoop up Elise as a wife whether she likes it or not.

     Once our young cyclone gets a wind of these goings on, obviously, nothing can stop him, as he rappels down the canyon wall, greets the arriving trio to temporarily knock out Chin-de-dah and half of his gang before rushing off on horseback to lead them on a chase during which Elsie and Vandeteer are encouraged by the former gang member James Brown (Tully Marshall) who has teamed up with Ned, to put themselves in the noose of the rope so that they might be dragged back up the cliff by a horse tied to the rope at the top.

      Vandeteer, himself as evil as Chin-de-dah, almost falls to his death, but Ned saves him on the condition that he write out an admission of having involved James Brown in a former scam, that he give up any claims to Elsie, and pay him a large sum of money which he shares with Brown.

      So does Ned win the girl, although we are certain that he won’t be able to sit around long enough for the marriage and certainly could never sit still long enough in her arms for them to truly make love.

      Indeed, in this film, despite his constant attempts to save women from harm, most of the time he and D’Artagnan are awarded slaps and words of abuse from women who never wanted their help in the first place. And even for the grateful girls, his rewards are a brief kiss and wave goodbye as he leaps off into another adventure.

 

     Other than the end-of-the-movie kiss he receives from Elsie for saving her life, most of the rewards Ned receives come from males, Vandeteer’s French chauffeur who is so delighted by Ned’s ingenuity and his love of all things French, that he attempts to award with a big, long kiss (in French declaring that Ned is the most wonderful man he knows and cannot resist kissing); and what almost appears as a longed-for respite Ned gets as he is forced to hold down Chin-de-dah and two of his cohorts for several long frames while laying sprawled out on the flat rock floor of the Indian’s hide-out—a very queer scene in the midst of all his intense actions, with even an intertitle commenting on how “cozy” they are. And, of course, his father has awarded him a car for leaving town, akin to the knobby horse D’Artagnan is left his by his father, the source of his first violent adventure after strangers mock the animal.

 

     And then are the inevitable analogies to that touchstone of gay movies, The Wizard of Oz, which also has no real LGBTQ figure unless you count the sissy “dandy-lion.” Like that other  Kansas hero, Dorothy, Ned takes his own cyclonic self out of the land of alfalfa and wheat to a strange new world where he becomes the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion all in one, employing his quick thinking, his love for the girl and the adventure, and his courage to do battle with this film’s version of the witch, Chin-de- dah, whose ruby shoes in this case is the special necklace which the Indian wears, claiming it makes him imperious from harm, which Ned cuts from his neck as his reward to having saved the day. The only major difference is that, in this case, Kansas doesn’t really want to return home.

  

     Finally, there is Fairbanks himself, who through this early trial-run of his later swashbuckling adventures, plays the role fully in camp mode, preening to the camera and mocking his own efforts as he shows off D’Artagnan’s extraordinarily long curls and his absurdly-shaped moustache as well as Ned’s cyclonic efforts to climb, jump, leap, and ride atop every inanimate and sometime animate figure he encounters. Certainly, in his duels and battles this hero puts his whole body into the effort, making physical contact with more men than make up an American football or British cricket team. In short, Fairbanks employs all the standard gestures of what is defined as masculinity to reveal their real purpose, to butt up against a fellow male like two stags locked in a horny duel.

     So, in the end, if this film isn’t truly gay, it’s certainly queer, and ought to be recognized as such.

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

Vittorio De Sica | Umberto D / 1952

closed out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cesare Zavattini (story and screenplay), Vittorio De Sica (director) Umberto D / 1952, USA 1955

 

Many critics agree with Vittorio De Sica’s own assessment of his film, Umberto D, that is his finest achievement; De Sica simply described it as his favorite of his works.

      Indeed, who could not like this touching film about outsiders of post-World War II culture, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti), the maid of the house in which he rents a room, Maria (Maria Pia Casilio), and Umberto’s pet dog, Flike. De Sica begins his film by showing us that these characters are not the only ones suffering in Italian post-war culture. Almost all the old, in a culture that wants to forget their past, are not receiving enough through pensions in order to survive, and they are gathered for a march to protest the issue, which is quickly put down, at first by somewhat gentle police proddings that quickly turn more violent, as the old men are forced to go on the run and hide out on side-streets before returning home. For many of them it’s clear, home is on the streets.

     Umberto still has a room, but with a large amount of back payment due he knows that his time there is limited. His landlady is already renting his room out for sexual rendezvouses by the hour when he goes out, and she threatens that she will soon throw him out. Both he and the young maid working in the house look time again out of the bedroom windows, Umberto revealing an entire world of light and comfort not currently available to him, and Maria seeking to see the soldiers with whom she is in love.

 

     At first, given the almost cartoon-like nature of this woman (Ileana Simova) who clearly aspires to become a great singer—for which she has little talent—and a wealthy married woman—a role she will surely achieve—we can hardly take these threats seriously.

      If she is mean to the nearly starving Umberto and his dog, the maid, Maria, is a gentle and kind friend, although worn out by all her duties and, particularly, by the swarms of ants invading her kitchen domain. Stealing bits of leftover food, she tries to get the elderly tenant to eat, providing him also, upon his request, a purloined thermometer so that he might check if he is coming down with an illness.

       And why shouldn’t he be? Having tried to sell his watch, he gets only a few dollars, the daily take by a local beggar. His prized books fetch a few lire at best. But even the meager amount he has raised as a down-payment on his room is rejected by the landlady: for her it is all or nothing. Depression, if not a more illness, is a surety.

     After calling for the medics, Umberto is allowed entry to a local hospital, where for a day or two he is well-fed and looked after. But his illness, so he is told, is only tonsillitis, and he must vacate his bed. His neighbor in the hospital attempts to show him how to play upon the sympathies of the nurses, but Umberto is too much a gentleman and far too honest to accomplish the task, just, as later, he simply cannot bring himself to beg for much-needed money.

      When he returns to his room, he finds workmen pounding a huge hole in its wall; the landlady is planning to expand her living room for after her marriage. And, even worse in his absence, his beloved pet Flike has escaped through an open door. Umberto checks out the local pound, finally to find his dog just before he is about to be put to death.

      Maria, moreover, as she has previously confided, has her own problems. She is pregnant, and she has no idea whether the father was the tall soldier from Naples or the short one from Florence, or whether either of these men will accept their paternity if she tells them about her condition. Most certainly her employer, once she learns of Maria’s condition, will kick her out of this unlivable paradise, where long into every night the landlady sings to her invited guests. What began as a kind of satire about a striving bourgeois woman has suddenly turned into a kind of nightmare for those who live near her. And the next morning, of his own accord, Umberto, packing up the few pieces of clothing he still owns, slinks off into the streets.

    Umberto cannot even feed himself, let alone his dog, so he seeks someone to adopt the cute pet, but encounters few who seem appropriate. He does interest a  young schoolgirl, but her Nanny quickly intervenes and refuses to accept Umberto’s loving gift. He finally attempts to leave the dog in the park where several playing children might discover him, but Flike, soon after, reappears to be lovingly greeted by his sad friend. Having failed to arrange for even Flike’s survival, Umberto takes up his friend into his arms and waits upon a railroad track for an approaching train.

      As the train comes nearer, the dog becomes aware of what will soon happen, and struggles to escape Umberto’s embrace, running off with the old man in the chase. It takes some time for the chastised human to draw Flike to him again. But, at least, both have been spared—if just for a while.

      De Sica ends his sad tale with the two of them, doomed by the society in which they exist, walking down the lane of the park while children play around them. Even if they do not survive, the new world will go on.

      I see this film, despite most critical conclusions, less as a neo-realist drama, than as a somewhat sentimental sad-sack comedy in the manner of Chaplin and Clair—two of De Sica’s favorite directors.

     The actors are amateurs who the director has molded into convincing performers, and the camera follows mostly everyday events, many of them on the neo-realists’ favorite set: the Italian streets. But the entire situation of the film is a kind of prop to capture our emotions within its “inside/outside” structure. The three holy saints of this story, all of whom are destined to be destroyed in one way or another, are symbols more than real human beings, despite their players’ credible naturalistic acting.

     We can almost imagine that, like Chaplin’s tramp, Umberto might be the subject of a sequel, co-featuring the now even grander landlady, and the destitute Maria, with whom Umberto will again meet up for further comic and semi-tragic circumstances. De Sica, to my way of thinking, is not truly a “realist” or even a new realist (as I have argued, for other reasons, neither was Rossellini), but a director with more links to another generation who found some of the neo-realist values useful to his filmmaking.

     I say this not to devalue De Sica’s achievement, but simply to more firmly link his art to the more romantic and melodramatic theatrical conventions before him. And it helps to explain, I would argue, the increasing lack of interest of audiences for the films that followed the moving Umberto, and reiterates his final redemption in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a work very much about nostalgia for a lost world before the wars.

       

Los Angeles, June 4, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).

Luis Buñuel | La mort en ce jardin (Death in the Garden) / 1956, USA 1977

two moved on

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Buñuel and Gabriel Arout (screenplay, based on the novel by José-Andre Lacour), Luis Buñuel (director) La mort en ce jardin (Death in the Garden) / 1956, USA 1977

 

Watching Luis Buñuel’s 1956 Mexican-produced film, Death in the Garden the other day, I was reminded again of John Farrow’s 1939 melodrama, Five Came Back. There are, of course, obvious

differences. Farrow’s work might be described as a disaster film, the likes of which almost saves the jungle escapees of Buñuel’s drama, since when the figures of Death in the Garden come upon a crashed airplane, they carefully pick through their luggage, including foodstuffs, clothing, and other baubles in order to survive. Although Farrow’s airplane travelers all amazingly survive their crash, very few survive their jungle experiences. And in both films, the denizens of the insufferable Eden in which they find themselves, reveal their psychological makeup and the beliefs and failures of imagination which define their actions.

 

       But, whereas, the characters in Five Came Back are basically all types, whose destinies are partially determined even before they crash into the desperate situation in which they suddenly find themselves, Buñuel’s figures seem much more unpredictable. We never might have imagined, for example, that the loving cook, Castin (Charles Vanel), a current diamond seeker who hopes one day to open a restaurant in Marseilles, would, under the punishment of the jungle leafage, go mad and kill two of his fellow travelers—just as we never might have imagined that his beloved mute daughter, María (Michèle Girardon) might have been strong enough to be one of two survivors.

       We can almost forget the cinematic reasons for their escape from a growing dictatorial South American country into an environment that they would be unlikely to come out of alive. It’s all too clear that the corrupt city that they all temporarily inhabit is a metaphor for Buñuel’s homeland, Spain—even given the fact of true dictatorships of Argentina, Venezuela, Columbia, Peru during that very same period. For Buñuel this film was clearly both personal and representative of current events.

       The director, moreover, based his heroes on personal values as well. While one might have thought that the committed, caring, and handsome priest, Father Lizardi (Michel Piccoli) might be allowed into the survivor club, as a man who particularly espouses the status quo—and given Buñuel’s own anti-religious perspectives—he is not permitted to live, despite his attempts of saving his small band of disbelievers.

        You might also have thought the young whorish Djin (Simone Signoret), who, after all, loves and is loved by most of the men of this little party, might be among those “who came back.” And certainly, she is the liveliest complainer of the entire group—and with good reason, since a bedroom existence and complete non-involvement with revolutionary values makes her the most unlikely member of the conspirators. Yet, far beyond everyone else’s obvious failures, she is certainly the most absolute traitor, a woman who might sell out anyone for profit and sexual gain. Her amazing late picture presence, as she dresses up in gowns and jewels stolen from the plane they find crashed into the jungle, reveals her absolutely amoral sensibility better than anyone else in this movie—the priest having already tried to bury the jewels the young María has previously discovered. Djin, above all others, almost deserves to die, despite whatever true love she may or may not feel within. If she has convinced Castin that she loves him, and is attracted the macho-hero Shark (Georges Marchal), and has even sexually compromised the priest who is seen by the community as visiting her—she must die, even for Castin’s sake.

    

     The rakish hero of this director’s tale is the handsome, usually bare-chested, Shark, whose motives are never quite clear, nor is his morality, as he comes to be one of the vaguest of the all the figures gathered.  He comes out of nowhere and moves in a moral world where we can never quite be sure where he is standing. Yet, he seems more loyal to his small band of revolutionaries than any of the others, and, despite forays out into a world where he might easily have survived alone, he returns to them, even—when Castin goes mad—attempting to protect them. Clearly, he is a brutal adversary and has obviously survived through his ability to destroy others. But it is only through him that any of the others have the ability to survive, and it is he who takes away the beautiful young María to a new life in Brazil, wherever that may lead them. One suspects that their life together—even if it might not even be a shared one—will end, as it has for all the others, in tragedy. Certainly those who returned in Five Came Back might never have lead “normal” lives.

      As critics and even the director himself might argue, Death in the Garden is not one of his better films. But I might never forget these pilgrims’ greedy consumption of python flesh or, even more  notably, that python carcass coming to life again through its infestation of ants. And seldom has a jungle such as that Buñuel created ever before or again been so alive with the sense of often invisible life. Again and again, the characters regret that, despite all the noise and frightening possibilities of destruction, they can never actually see the world around them. The jungle knows them in a way that they can never know it.

     Buñuel’s world in this film becomes an almost surrealist landscape in which survival is simply a matter one’s own inner emotional realities, and as disturbing as these character’s souls are, most of them live only in their imaginations, and, thus, their deaths are certain even before the movie’s curtain rises.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).

 

Jean-Luc Godard | Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) / 1964

pleasure or love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Luc Godard (screenwriter and director) Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) / 1964

 

     Although some critics might wish to describe the Godard work as a kind of romantic comedy, in its abstraction of the feminine figure, Macha Méril as Charlotte, and the camera’s almost mechanical analysis of her body, there is actually very little romance or comedy, despite the fact that the film begins with her lover, Robert (Bernard Noël), with whom she finds “pleasure” despite the fact she actually does love her husband, Pierre (Philippe Leroy) more, and serves as a fairly good mother to his son, born to Pierre’s first wife.

      Both men want her exclusively, which she refuses, demanding the same rights the French men have often assumed, to be able to have both a wife and a lover. Robert pleads with her to divorce Pierre and to marry him, while Pierre has previously had her followed and discovered that she was seeing Robert. What he doesn’t appear to know is that she is still seeing him.

     The story of the Godard work is slight, amounting primarily to a final reckoning up Charlotte’s discovery that she is pregnant (without the knowledge of which of the two men is actually the father); the director makes it quite clear early on that of the two, Pierre is the better man, a devoted father, an intellect, and an adventurer, while Robert is simply an actor. And it is that fact the finally most influences Charlotte’s decision to give up pleasure for love.

       The important thing about the film is the intellectual underpinnings of the work, particularly in the way Godard presents the different viewpoints of his characters. In a radical storytelling device, the director studies the relationship between love, sexual pleasure, and conception. Pierre, who argues that we must never forget the past, has a firm moral ground, particularly in connection with his attention to the Holocaust. Charlotte, on the other hand, lives and acts primarily in the present, not always knowing why or what she is attempting to embrace. It is Pierre’s filmmaking friend (Roger Leenhardt) that argues for conception, that the two, past and present, need to be arbitrated, compromised so to speak. A third set of views is spoken by their young son, Nicholas, who seems to argue for the future: you desire something and then set out to achieve it.

      Of course, all these views are needed simultaneously to live a full life. And it is only as a family, working together that we perceive the complete being living with knowledge of the past, a lust of the present, and a vision for the future, and is for that reason alone that the “married woman” remains just that.

 

    The other remarkable aspect of this film is Godard’s presentation of the media’s notions of womanhood.  Everywhere Charlotte goes, billboards and magazine ads call out for an idealized and male fantasized vision of women, women with perfect breasts, with desired bodyweight, and who wear the proper clothing. Her maid even expects her husband to be a kind of beast, and two young girls whom Charlotte encounters in a café discuss what to expect from the boys when it comes to sex, the more knowledgeable of the two arguing that the girl simply must be compliant. Is in any wonder in such a sexist world that Charlotte seeks equality, that she may seek a way to meet her own desires for pleasure.

     At film’s end, we have no way of knowing whether or not she might gain that equality. Yet, it appears she has learned about herself in her affair that she might bring to her relationships with her husband and children, certainly if that second child is a girl.

     In the end, it is Godard’s visual analysis of the problems of his hero that make this movie such an excellent piece. As in so many of his films, Godard creates a structure that works perfectly in tandem with its themes, in this case, the problems “the second sex” face in a patriarchal society.

 

Los Angeles, Easter day, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018). 

Marshall Neilan | A Little Princess / 1917

turns of fortune

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frances Marion (screenplay, based on a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett), Marshall Neilan (director) A Little Princess / 1917

 

This first version of the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, an hour-long silent film from 1917 is a truly surprisingly well directed and coherent work, with director Marshall Neilan combining long perspective shots, alternating simultaneous scenes, and ambitious story-telling landscapes, within the more domestic drama of the London boarding school into which the slightly spoiled Sara Crewe (Mary Pickford) is placed by her India-based father, Captain Richard Crewe (Norman Kerry).

 

    For the first long part of this film, despite her despair for now having lost immediate contact with her beloved daddy, the mean boarding school mistresses, Miss Minchin (Katherine Griffith) and her sister Amelia (Ann Schaefer) go out of their way to treat the new girl, who her fellow residents dub “the little princess,” extremely well, expecting annual benefits from her wealthy father. Even the jealous girls grow to like her, particularly when late at night she secretly tells them stories she has learned in India. The film, indeed, devotes a quite entertaining episode of Ali-Baba (W. E. Lawrence) and the den of thieves.

     The scenes that accompany her story are quite lovely and complex in their imagery, far beyond most of the films of the day in their cinematic quality.

     But we get glimpses of the cruelty of the two administrators in their treatment of a girl without parents who is unable to pay, Becky (an early performance by Zasu Pitts), who they treat virtually as a slave and who speaks, apparently, with a cockney accent.

     Celebrating her 10th birthday with chocolates and other treats paid for by the Minchins, news suddenly comes that not only has Sara’s father died, but did so with believing that his best friend, Mr. Carrisford (Gustav von Seyffertitz) defrauded him regarding a diamond mine, leaving him and his daughter penniless.

     Now Sara is moved to the attic and like Becky, who has become her best friend, treated as a slave, fed only small portions of the food that they must help prepare to cook. Although she basically remains in good spirits, entertaining that not so very imaginative Becky, she too increasingly grows hungry and depressed.

     One day, while in her room, she is suddenly visited by a monkey, and soon after an Indian servant, Ram Dass (George McDaniel) crawls her window to claim him. Becky has long wondered whether her friend’s imagination does not take her beyond reality, but now poor Sara wonders as well if she has begun to imagine things.

      In fact, her father’s former friend, Mr. Carrisford has moved into the building next door with his Indian servant. And Ram Dass has long been observing the sufferings of the sweet, golden-haired child—a bit questionable if you think of it as being a kind of voyeurism of older man concerning a young underage child, but evidently perceived as innocuous in the day.

      In any event, by Christmas the men have planned a surprised dinner for the two girls, setting up a special table replete with a full turkey, cranberry sauce, and potatoes as Sara and Becky clean the school and help to prepare the sumptuous Christmas dinner to which they will not be invited.

      Returning to their rooms at the end of the day, first Sara and then Becky cannot believe their eyes—or their noses—as they sit down to enjoy the miracle before them.

     At that very moment, Miss Minchin shows up, shocked and quite flabbergasted by what she sees, apparently accusing the girls having somehow stolen the dinner from her own pantry. Watching the event from across the way, the two kind gentlemen immediately cross the roof and intervene, scolding the boarding house harpy for her treatment of the girls. In seeing Ram Dass again, she suddenly reverts to one of her Indian phrases, and Mr. Carrisford, amazed at hearing the phrase demands to know her background. She explains that her father, Captain Crewe died and left her penniless. Carrisford is suddenly overjoyed, explaining that he has been long looking for her, making every attempt to find her whereabouts since he returned from a sickness to find her father dead, having wrongly believed that he had defrauded him. In fact, the mines resulted in more money than even expected, and “the little princess” is now a very wealthy woman.

     Taking both girls into his own house, Carrisford celebrates the holiday by permitting Sara to invite street boys to share her Christmas treats and gifts under the tree.

     Although the story is rather implausible and the plot filled with too many meandering events and genres, the work overall is so brilliantly handled that one has to imagine that it must have seemed to be one of the most advanced films of the day, particularly when compared with the far cruder pictures of the year such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure or Roscoe Arbuckle’s The Butcher—although some of the most important movies of that year such as J. Gordon Edwards’ Cleopatra with Theda Bara have been lost.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).