Reviews

You might expect Joseph Conrad to be an author whose darkly ironic tales of colonialism were turned to romantic mush by the silent movies, yet here's an outstanding, completely unknown 1929 silent by Herbert Brenon that conveys much of his worldview in the course of a tale of desperate sea adventure. Colman plays Tom Lingard, a sort of Bogartish, cynical both-sides-of-the-law trader in the South Seas; a yacht run by a rich jerk gets becalmed near a dangerous island, Colman wants to keep the navy (any navy) out of his territory and sets out to rescue them, falling in love with Lili Damita as the rich jerk's bored wife. (When Ralph Richardson played Lingard in Outcast of the Islands, he was more Old Testament Patriarch than To Have and Have Not.)

Given the date, I worried this would be the silent version of a sound film, and painfully dull; what it actually looks like is that they wrote a talkie script, then filmed it silently anyway. So there are scenes that are a bit static at first, and overreliant on titles, yet it soon grows more visual and, more importantly, retains Conrad's sensibility, depicting the blundering, destructive ways of western powers in the east without holding back for the sake of the romance. A mature, well-made film (said to be missing one reel, but there is only one jump in the narrative that looks like a scene or two is missing) that deserves rediscovery as a major late silent. Shown at Capitolfest in 2018, and mostly in very good condition, this would be a worthy title for any festival or archival series.

In 1928, this was one of the first Soviet films to reach the west and considered on a par with Potemkin; Variety felt it was so important that they reviewed it twice (once from the artistic perspective and once from the average exhibitor's jaundiced viewpoint). If not the stylistic groundbreaker that Potemkin was, it's an impressive work of both visual beauty and emotional impact (rare among Soviet silents), that warrants rediscovery for itself and for its director, whose first solo effort (after co-directing Miss Mend with Boris Barnet) this was.

Maria (Anna Sten) and Jacob (I.I. Koval Samborski) are a happy peasant couple soon to become unhappy; the local baron, who rented them the rockiest piece of land this side of Man of Aran, has a daughter, who forces Sten to abandon her own family and wetnurse hers. She in turn has a husband (Vladimir Fogel of Miss Mend) who lusts after the peasant girl whose bare shoulder he's exposed to on a regular basis, and all this leads to Maria having a fight with her husband, trying to flee the home, and winding up with the infamous Yellow Ticket certifying her as a member of the profession of prostitute. (Note: this film bears no resemblance to any other film of that title, most of which are based on a famous American play of the teens.)

Clearly Ozep, in devising this Zolaesque story, was looking for material that would fly with the regime, and there's a perfectly good expose of the decadence of the Tsarist regime here, chaining peasants to aristocratic whim just as the land is chained with barbed wire, and using their bodies for feeding or pleasure indiscriminately. If Ozep's visual lyricism about peasants and the land doesn't go to the florid extremes of, say, Dovzhenko, on the other hand it has a sharp point which it makes with precision and a mordant wit, which you can't really say of Earth.

In fact, though the scenes of Maria and Jacob's peasant life have a rough-edged believability (as in his next film, The Living Corpse, Ozep is a great caster of weatherbeaten, non-actor extras) and quite a lot of visual beauty, the strongest section of the film is when Maria sinks into the profession for which she mistakenly has the ticket. It's worth noting that Ozep made three films in a row with substantial brothel sequences (The Living Corpse and The Murderer Dmitri Karamasoff), and in each case he seems to evince a real, ahem, love for the milieu in all its forced joviality, wanton desire, and seedy decadence, music and lust and self-loathing combining for a vivid impression of manic-depressive hell on earth. Sten, too, reaches the high point of her performance here, trading Maria's customary cow-like blank stare for a despondent world-weariness.

Tolstoy's The Living Corpse, once a very popular play (John Barrymore did it on Broadway), starts with what could be the premise of a legal expose— the main character, Protassow (played by the director V.I. Pudovkin), wants to divorce his wife so she's free to marry her aristocratic lover, but both church and civil divorce law conspire to make this simple matter between adults illogically difficult.

But what it's really about is moral alienation; throughout the story, legal solutions to the dilemma present themselves, but Protassow finds them all so degrading, hypocritical, alien to his sense of decency that he just can't go along with the "sensible" thing to do in a corrupt society. In many ways it reminded me of the Coen Brothers' latest (and outstanding) film, A Serious Man, likewise driven by a wife's desire to divorce and marry her lover— Protassow is trying to be a serious man, an ethical and responsible man, but people keep turning up in front of him saying "Here's the sensible thing to do," which invariably really means, "Here's the sleazy thing it would be really, really convenient for me if you would corrupt yourself by doing."

Film history, on no particular evidence, has awarded Pudovkin credit for most of this film, when in fact writer-director Fyodor Otsep/Fedor Ozep was a more prestigious figure at this time and it has clear similarities to his previous and next films, The Yellow Ticket and The Murderer Dmitri Karamasoff. Although one can see Pudovkinesque touches in some montage sequences, the style of the film is more subjectively psychological than didactically Soviet- Hegelian, mirroring the mental state of its main character.

When he's dark and moody, the film is too— capturing a sick bourgeois society with a mordant eye for grotesqueries. When Protassow goes to a tavern, the first thing he sees is a sailor getting drunk while his child begs him to come home. And the three pimps who offer to help him by setting up a scene of adultery to facilitate the divorce are gargoyles straight out of George Grosz, particularly one with what looks like a double-wide set of teeth. The sinister politesse with which they try to transact their business is the equal of anything in Pabst or Lang for moral rot— and equally Weimar-Germanic in feel. (The film was actually shot in Germany by a Soviet production company.)

But when he gets a taste of freedom from his intolerable situation— as when he visits a gypsy dance club— the style goes manic in a manner that looks much less like his fellow Bolsheviks, and far more like that of Ozep's old White Russian colleagues like Alexander Volkoff and V.I. Tourjansky, who were by then working in France. The rapid cutting suggests Volkoff's Kean or Gance's Napoleon (on which both Volkoff and Tourjansky assisted), while the hand-held camera-work suggesting exhilaration or agitation in several sequences reminds one not only of Napoleon but of Dmitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant.

To have made a film of such psychological acuity, in which the drama comes from inner states rather than outward events of the plot, was rare enough in the silent days, though others (notably Stiller and Pabst) certainly did it. But it is hard to think of another film in which those inner states are melded so completely with the style of the film, and in such a varied and visually innovative fashion. It's one of those late silents that leave you marveling at the medium as it existed— at its end.

The one possibly distinctive thing about The Mist was shot down by the studio and can only be seen on the 2-DVD set: a black and white version. What looks like smog in the color version takes on a silvery menace of nothingness in black and white, and Darabont's intention here-- basically to make a Twilight Zone episode-- becomes clear and, at times, visually effective. Nevertheless, this is a misfire which owes most of its flaws to King's original story, but is not helped by Darabont's flat, unconvincing direction, which desperately needs a touch of Cloverfield-era rawness to transcend its TV movie feel.

The blue collar locals are caricatured as dimwits who are more or less instant prey for a religious nutcase; and possibilities for dramatic tension between characters with reasonable opposing views are tossed away (the most intelligent opponent of the hero is done away with quickly). Virtually all the speaking characters quickly wind up in the hero's camp (even though we've seen little reason in their characters why they're all so rationalist and others aren't)-- yet the logic or necessity of the hero's choices are not at all clear.

All that could be forgiven if the movie was... scary! Here we have to start with blame for King-- it's a real letdown that a mist that could have contained anything turns out mainly to have giant rubber bugs in it. The menace of the mist dissipates the moment we first see CGI tentacles. Add in the explanation eventually given for what's going on and this is Lovecraft Lite without a real sense of bottomless awfulness hiding in the Mist.

After watching the two Leonce Perret films in the Gaumont set released by Kino, the word that seemed to sum him up for me is "cerebral." I don't mean that there's psychological depth such as you might find in Scandinavian films of the teens here; the characters in both are more or less the standard two-dimensional types of Victorian melodrama, vigorously portrayed by French actors with obvious stage training, but types nonetheless.

But the films take a cool, methodical approach to melodramatic tales that others (not least of them Perret's coworker Louis Feuillade) would have made more lurid. That's both their weakness and their strength, for movies of 1912-3; they are carefully worked out, logical, and thus unusually credible for melodramas of their time. If the delight of Feuillade's serials is the sense that any social order could be overturned at any moment, part of the satisfaction of Perret's is this sense that his world is so solid.

Both films on the set are crime films, that genre which simultaneously presents a vision of the world's proper order and of its subversion. In The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador, which runs about 45 minutes, a guardian (played by Perret himself) conspires to steal his ward's fortune in a manner that turns violent; she winds up in a sort of catatonia, and to jog her memory, a film is made of the events and shown to her (and us). More could have been made of this theme of a film within a film, how true what we see is, etc., but it's pretty remarkable that it's being done at all in 1912.

The one major flaw in this film is Perret's own casting-- plump and genial-looking, he's a natural comedian (which he was, in fact), and he doesn't exude the cold Victorian heartlessness the part wants. Still, the open air photography and the clinically precise staging of events in medium shot make this an unusually fluid and lucid film for 1912, that could easily have come from five years later.

I first heard of this film in an interview thirty years ago with Edward Gory (imdb is trying to correct my spelling, that should be g-o-r-e-y), and it's hard to imagine a more perfect audience for this movie, with its tale of an innocent little girl who loses her parents (one in war, the other to the usual collapse Victorian wives succumb to) and winds up in the hands of scoundrels, only to acquire a purehearted protector in their ranks. (He is, in a nod to Hugo, a slight hunchback.)

The unspooling of this melodrama is hypnotic, in Perret's clear-eyed and skillful telling; even so well-crafted an American film as Traffic in Souls from the same year seems remote and unsteady compared to the clean, perfectly efficient visuals and editing here. That said, it is a modest disappointment that the little girl-- a charmingly capable miniature Bernhardt, able to pull off every Victorian stage gesture never seen in real children-- becomes little more than a prop over time; her plight is never milked for the emotional effect it could have. If there's an apparent flaw in Perret's work-- comparing it not to other 1913 films but to the later teens films it seems the peer of-- it's that he doesn't seem as interested in his actors as you'd like him to be. They're all obviously skilled, and play their types perfectly to type, and he shoots them in medium shot so we can actually see their faces; but there's no reason for a movie called The Child of Paris to be decorous in its playing-- it ought to pull out all the stops and jerk tears like Griffith a few years later. What starts as a serial seems to end as a neatly solved puzzle.

Still, Kino's release of this film in its Gaumont set is an enormously important release that does some serious rewriting of the standard film history.

A sort of modest High Noon imitation which shows how even a fairly routine western back then could have some interesting things on its mind. Fred MacMurray is the new marshal of a town, and the witness to the killing of the previous one during a bank robbery, which means he's front and center in terms of responsibility for the impending hanging of the kid who did it, a local boy gone bad (Robert Vaughan). His High Noon moment comes when the whole town starts to get a liberal conscience about the kid's lack of proper upbringing, and starts to want to let him go, while only MacMurray stands up for hardcore law and order values.

If the politics of the film are as anachronistic as the tidiness of the supposed western town (which feels like a soporific 50s sitcom suburb as much as it does anything on the prairie), the clash of 50s juvenile delinquent-movie progressive attitudes and a Dirty Harry/Reaganesque law and order type is strikingly ahead of its time. Or maybe, like High Noon, it's making a blacklist/McCarthyism parallel, except here it's justifying following the law (ie, naming names) to a T even when it makes you unpopular with those who would cut the bad guys some slack. Anyway, Nathan Juran is no poetic western stylist, and Fred MacMurray is stalwart but not as intensely compelling as, say, Randolph Scott, but it's an interesting little movie nonetheless.

I find Marie Dressler vehicles fascinating, not because I entirely enjoy watching her (she's kind of scary) but I find it so interesting that glossy MGM had a star who was aimed at that whole class of old-before-their-time, world-weary housewives and mothers who would put on their frumpy best, walk in ill-fitting shoes after a long day of doing things for everyone but themselves, and sit down for 75 minutes of intense identification with one of their own. Once labor-saving devices and family planning conquered America, women stopped being so tired and worn at such early ages, and so there's never been another star quite like her; the equivalent audience is seeing things like Mamma Mia! today, fantasies of late-middle-aged youth, not premature old age.

In this one she's a housekeeper who is really the only mother a bunch of rich kids ever had; the dad finally marries her in old age, she inherits the estate, and three of the kids come after her to get the money. The setup doesn't entirely bear scrutiny (the spoiled grown kids hardly act like they've even met her before, let alone were raised by her) but it doesn't matter, it's all about her frumpy-old-lady common sense telling the world what's what, a Mr. Deeds for the support hose set, and you can see why her audience ate it up and she got an Oscar nomination.

Report from Cinevent 2007: YOU ARE GUILTY! (**) James Kirkwood as one of two half-brothers, the other of whom has a mustache and, by the law of silent movie brothers, is therefore no good. Mustache brother embezzles, good brother takes the fall to spare (step-)Mother and hits the hobo trail, and soon he's haunted by The Whispering Chorus-- wait, that was another, not dissimilar movie. Not-bad 1923 silent in the kind of somber, philosophical-slash-depressed vein that pretty much vanished from Hollywood for good later in the decade; even when films like this aren't that great, they offer a fascinating window into the last moment when popular culture still reflected a general view that life was hard, sad and unlikely to end well.

Report from Cinevent 2007: RUNNING WILD (****) One of the few W.C. Fields silents NOT remade as a Paramount talkie-- though the setup is awfully close to The Man on the Flying Trapeze, with Fields as an office drudge with a messy desk and a wife and pampered stepson who have him beaten down. The turning point of the plot takes it in a more visual direction, though-- his inner lion is released by a hypnotist and he literally runs wild, delivering comeuppance to all his tormentors in a lengthy comedy-action sequence. It had the audience in stitches, and showed that while his silents lack one of the talkies' great assets-- his voice-- they also had sides of his persona lacking in the films made when he was older and less agile.

One thing that strikes you as you watch the early Lubitsch comedies recently released on DVD in the US by Kino is-- how did Lubitsch come to have such an extravagant visual style, only to give it up a few years later? The later Lubitsch movies are certainly handsome, coming as they mostly do from Paramount and MGM, the chicest of the Hollywood studios. But for all the exotic places depicted in his films, it never occurs to him in later years to depict them with wild curlicues of plaster, fortresses that look like birthday cakes, staircases that descend a quarter-mile amid running water, as he does the European fantasy-land in The Wildcat.

The Wildcat is a sort of burlesque on a genre of military romances buried so deeply in the mists of memory that they still seem familiar even when it's hard to think of an actual example of what's being parodied (The Desert Song?). There's a fortress on the edge of mountainous wilds, and there's a handsome young officer who's been exiled there because of his love life. And then there's a tribe of wild mountain people including a tempestuous daughter, played by Pola Negri, with whom the officer will fall in love.

As with the mistaken identity plot in The Oyster Princess, you can imagine the 30s comedy this would be the setup for, but it's nothing like this-- which mainly consists of running around and clowning broadly. Only a few bits here and there-- a hilariously exaggerated depiction of the results of the officer's Casanova-like behavior, a delightful bit of comedy on the quarter-mile staircase that plays out with the purity and visual grace of Buster Keaton's single-take descent down six flights of stairs in The Cameraman-- are actually especially funny. (There's also a quite racy "Lubitsch Touch" moment involving his photo, a pair of pants, and where she happens to kiss.)

You wish in vain for Negri and her inamorato to sit down and actually share a scene, heat up the chemistry set, show us some real one-on-one Lubitsch Touch worthy of Billy Wilder's line that "Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than most directors could do with an open fly." But at least in Negri you have a recognizable comic human being, full of life and randiness-- and the ending, though still half-cartoon, has an emotional effect well beyond anything in The Oyster Princess just three years earlier.

CTU-- the government agency with the hippest clothes and technology, the messiest private lives and the highest mortality rate in America. 24-- the TV show that you can't stop watching even when you don't believe a moment of it. And Jack Bauer-- the Id of post-9/11 America. Here's a rundown on five years of bad days for Jack Bauer:

SEASON 1-- Investigating an assassination plot against a black presidential candidate, Jack Bauer is forced to become the assassin himself by baddies holding his daughter Kim. This is really the only season to live up to the premise of realistic real time-- in later seasons CTU operatives can drive halfway across Los Angeles in a commercial break-- and that realism pays terrific dividends in certain scenes, as when Jack's wife spends time in the company of a guy who may be another concerned parent or not... and it takes a good two or three episodes to find out for sure. Casting is excellent-- why hasn't bad guy Michael Massie gotten more work?-- and the soap operatic aspects (Jack had an affair with one of his coworkers, which is going to blow up in a big way in both his personal and professional lives) enhance rather than detract from the suspense, all the way to a gut-punch ending which is one of the most shocking in TV history. A terrific season which earned the show a lot of viewer loyalty.

SEASON 2-- The black candidate in Season 1 is now President Palmer, middle easterners want to explode a nuke in LA, and President Palmer's weak handling of the crisis leads to an attempt by members of his cabinet to remove him from office. There are good villains in the terrorists, Xander Berkeley's bureaucratic boss, and especially Penny Johnson Jerald's scheming First Lady, but the CTU office romance of Tony and Michelle is tedious, and the efforts to find a way to put Kim in peril get steadily more ridiculous (two words-- mountain lion! Six more words-- Kevin Dillon as a survivalist kook!) The biggest problem is that the character of President Palmer is so poorly conceived; we're supposed to see him as noble and Lincolnesque compared to the schemers around him, but in fact he always makes the worst choices for the most pompous reasons, making it hard for others to support him, for CTU to do its job-- and for viewers to sympathize with him in the internecine struggle.

SEASON 3-- A couple of drug cartel-running brothers (who Jack has been undercover with) plot to release a biological weapon in LA. This season starts disastrously, with far too much soap-operatic attention paid to younger characters presumably shoved into the cast at the network's insistence. (Call it Dawson's 24.) Having written themselves into a hole, the writers throw a Hail Mary pass at the 8 hour mark which changes everything for the better (despite the fact that it contradicts much of what we've seen). The rest of the season continues reasonably suspensefully, though there are still absurdities (this season's mountain lion is a baby hidden under a desk at CTU!), and the amount of screen time devoted to slow death from infection and/or the threatened torture of captives makes this a deeply unpleasant season to watch. On the plus side, it does bring back both of the show's great villainesses to date, and both actresses take full advantage of the opportunity to show off their highly hissable characters in an encore. And it introduces the best supporting character at CTU ever-- Mary Lynn Rajskub's computer whiz Chloe, who's brilliant, but full of bad attitude.

SEASON 4-- Middle eastern terrorists get hold of a device which allows them to cause nuclear plant meltdowns. The best season since the first, this one does a terrific job of exploring all the fears, issues and character types which had been in the public consciousness since 9/11. Arnold Vosloo is the main villain, a kind of clean-shaven Bin Laden, but much of the plot revolves around a seemingly Americanized Arab-American family who are in fact moles preparing for a suicide attack; the dramatization of jihadist attitudes through the fanatical father, conflicted mother and thoroughly westernized son is quite powerful. Likewise, Jack's frequent resort to torture is explored as a moral issue with no easy answers.

The season isn't perfect-- THIS season's mountain lion is the schizophrenic daughter of the new CTU director who's being treated at CTU (!!!), a subplot that removes the fine actress Alberta Watson from CTU far too early in the season; and Jack's romance with the daughter of a Rumsfeld-like Secretary of Defense is drippy-- but all in all it's a powerful and thought- provoking season, and serves to introduce the third, and by far the most interesting, presidential character in the series, Gregory Itzin's weaselly President Logan.

SEASON 5-- Jack, living under an assumed name, gets pulled back in when Chechen terrorists try to disrupt the signing of a treaty with the Russian president by threatening a nerve gas attack. The real stars of this season are Gregory Itzin as the sleazy President Logan and Jean Smart as his mentally disturbed, but no dummy, First Lady, and the game that's played out between them as the conspiracy twists like a pretzel is great fun. At the same time we get Peter Weller as Jack's ex-boss, now possibly a conspirator, which is as close as we're likely to get to a Star Trek-like Good Jack Bauer fighting Bad Jack Bauer. Not as convincing as Season 4, and the writers prove far too willing to kill off promising characters for the (diminishing) shock value rather than develop them to their fullest, but the performances of Itzin and Smart make this deliciously watchable TV up to the very last twist.

Report from Cinesation 2006: AN Italian STRAW HAT (***) Rene Clair had a huge reputation in the early days of sound, and though it's not hard to see why, it is hard to see why the same critics who loved his films (often voting them onto the early Sight & Sound lists of the best films of all time) were dismissive of great Hollywood comedies with exactly the same virtues. (A Nous la Liberte and Le Million are delightful, for instance, but in no way that Duck Soup and Top Hat aren't equally or more delightful.)

This-- based on a perennial stage farce about the complications that follow when a horse eats a married woman's hat while she's off dallying with her lover-- is skillful enough, and it has a few very funny moments, but made mostly in medium or longshot with little subtlety in the playing, it seemed far more primitive for 1927 than, to pick one American comedy, Kiki (shown earlier the same day)-- and the audience at Cinesation didn't laugh nearly as often, either.

Report from Cinesation 2006: KIKI (****) As Jeanine Basinger says in her book on Silent Stars, perhaps the biggest hole in our understanding of silent stardom is the career of Norma Talmadge-- she likens it to knowing talkies without ever seeing Bette Davis. This sparkling new Library of Congress restoration of a 1926 Parisian showbiz farce is atypical for the grande dame roles Talmadge usually played, but as with Marion Davies and Show People, it wouldn't be the worst fate for a star to be known mainly to history for a first-class comedy.

Talmadge, at thirtysomething more game than gamine, is a plucky street gal who weasels her way into producer Ronald Colman's chorus line, his home, and his heart. Because a number of folks present had seen it just a month before at Cinecon, I was prepped for the idea that it was something of a screwball comedy with neither lead behaving in any way that real humans would. (The word "stalker" was used on alt.movies.silent, and aptly so.) But taken as kind of a silent Twentieth Century or Bringing Up Baby, it had lots of laughs, and Talmadge pulls off the comedy beautifully (as does George K. Arthur, as her archrival among Colman's servants).

Report from Cinesation 2006: THE GRUB-STAKE (****) This 1923 Nell Shipman production is a rip-snorting action movie with enough plot for two or three ordinary Shipmans, happily with print quality that did full justice to its Alaskan photography.

At first it's a bit dismaying to see feminist role model Shipman trying to protect her virginity from a rotter who lured her to Alaska to become a dance hall girl-- virginity is for other silent actresses to worry about, Nell Shipman should be worrying about grizzly bears and rockslides. But soon she's got her invalid father lashed to the dogsled and she's off looking for gold, taking time out along the way to curse God face to face and to frolic amid nature's larger mammals (at which point God is let off for good behavior) before a two-fisted finale with a literal cliffhanger. This picture had everything but the Johnstown Flood in it, and accompanist Ben Model's playing gave it everything he had too. The only pity is that some of the titles were noticeably jittery-- an easily remedied glitch that really shouldn't even have been let out of a major national archive for a show like this.

Report from Cinesation 2006: BELLA DONNA (**) Third and last film version of a Nazimova stage vehicle about a woman who falls fatally under the spell of a silky Egyptian charmer. Basically another variation on The Sheik, or like The Mummy without mummies, slow-moving and somewhat cheap but with a certain opium-fever-dream feel that works in its own way.

The fleshy Mary Ellis (a light opera star who originated Rose Marie) doesn't have the ethereality the spellbound sinner needs, and the rest of the British cast puts the stiff in stiff upper lip, so it's up to Conrad Veidt to raise the temperature above tepid, and to suggest perversities and cruelties his sturdy British colleagues never dreamt of.

Report from Cinesation 2006: REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? (****) The notes suggested that James Whale sold this idea to Universal by comparing it to The Thin Man-- but it's The Thin Man as written by Evelyn Waugh, a tale of bright young things drinking and partying fast enough to keep despair at bay, and a reminder that Whale belonged to the same generation of artists formed by World War I who produced things like The Sun Also Rises and Goodbye To All That.

A group of young friends party the night away on a series of amazing Art Deco sets, and when they wake up in the morning, one of them has been murdered. As the mystery-plot mechanics take over, it loses some of its brittle, dark charm, relying on Arthur Treacher in the Thesiger part as a mordant butler for laughs. But at its best this is one of the most striking comedies of the 30s, energetic and gay (in the old sense-- mostly) and often very funny, yet worldly and almost bleak at the same time. If only the solution of the mystery could have paid off the film's tone thematically. The collector's print shown, incidentally, was 16mm, but could have been 35mm for how beautifully it showed off the film's remarkable sets.

Report from Cinesation 2006: THE COSSACK WHIP (***) Viola Dana versus the Tsar's secret police, leading up to a climax that prompted inevitable comparisons among this silents-savvy crowd to the legendary Behind the Door. This 1916 melodrama was directed by her husband, John Collins, who died in the influenza epidemic in 1918, and was just far enough ahead of the actual Russian Revolution to treat revolutionaries sympathetically; it sags badly with a soapy middle, when she's torn between revenge and a career in the west as a dancer, but the vividness of the opening scenes (the Cossacks attack her village) and the climax, and Collins' generally lively and inventive staging, make it a strong and memorable film. (Eastman House archivist Ed Stratmann's intro was interesting, talking about how the film was reconstructed from different versions around the world, each containing different censor cuts within a film with, apparently, something to offend everyone.)

Report from Cinesation 2006: THEIR BIG MOMENT (***) A 1934 RKO comedy-mystery directed by James Cruze, which apparently is kept off TCM by rights problems with the original play. William Gaxton (a big stage star), Zasu Pitts and Slim Summerville are a magician and his assistants who get hired as fake mediums to try to get a rich widow out of the clutches of another fake (Ralph Morgan). The plot meanders and needed some ironing out, but some genuinely funny bits and a good cast made this a pleasant find. (I was especially taken with the actress playing the widow, Julie Haydon, and wondered if she'd ever done anything else; she sure did-- she originated the daughter in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway.)