The Broadway Melody (1929)

The Broadway Melody has some historical importance. It was MGM’s first musical and it was the first musical to win a Best Picture Oscar.

With the advent of sound it was obvious that musicals would be a big thing, but the right formula needed to be found. It was no good just filming a Broadway show. A way would need to be found to make musicals cinematic. Paramount were already getting into the musical business and while Ernst Lubitsh’s The Love Parade is a delight it’s more or less an operetta. The Broadway Melody on the other hand invents a new genre - the backstage musical. Big musical numbers but also lots of human drama and romance and intrigue behind the scenes.

This formula would reach perfection with 42nd Street in 1932 but The Broadway Melody is a bold very early attempt.

It signals its intentions from the start, with some stunning aerial shots of Manhattan. This is going to be the magic of Broadway meeting the magic of movies. Or that's what we hope.

Songwriter Eddie Kearns (Charles King) has just got his big break. Big-time Broadway producer Francis Zanfield (Eddie Kane) has not only bought one of his songs, he’s going to use it as the centrepiece of his new revue. Eddie now thinks he’s in the big-time, which he is up to a point. His girlfriend Hank Mahoney (Bessie Love) and her kid sister Queenie (Anita Page) have a successful sister act out in the boondocks but now they want to try their luck in the Big Apple. Eddie is sure he can get them a spot in the revue. Unfortunately when Zanfield sees their act he thinks Queenie is terrific but he thinks Hank is no good. There’s going to be some tension between the two sisters.

And there’s a complicated romantic quadrangle involving the Mahoney girls, Eddie and a smooth operator named Jacques Warriner (Kenneth Thomson).

This provides the behind-the-scenes human drama. And the entire focus of the film is this four-way romantic tangle.

The Broadway Melody’s biggest problem is that everybody is going to compare it to 42nd Street and it’s just not in the same league.

It just doesn’t have that Busby Berkeley genius. In the Busby Berkeley musicals the musical production numbers supposedly take place on stage. But they could never be accommodated on any stage and could never be watched by a theatre audience since they can only be appreciated when viewed through the camera’s roving eye, from above and beneath and from various angles. We have left the world of the theatre and entered a world of pure cinema. In The Broadway Melody the production numbers are filmed entirely from in front, as if we’re looking through the proscenium arch. These are filmed stage performances. They’re quite good, but they’re totally non-cinematic.

The Broadway Melody lacks the cynical hardboiled edge of the Warner Brothers musicals, and that sense that the show must succeed otherwise they all lose their jobs and starve. That’s because the 1930s Warner Brothers musicals were very much Depression-era musicals. But this is not true of The Broadway Melody. It was made and released in the boom times before the Stock Market Crash. The Broadway Melody is very much a Jazz Age musical, and it has an underlying buoyant optimism. We’re all going to be successful and we’re all going to be rich.

This is of course a pre-code movie. Jacques Warriner makes it clear that he wants to set Queenie up as a kept woman and that marriage will not be part of the deal. Queenie makes it clear that she’s happy with this idea.

There’s one slightly disturbing moment. A showgirl perched on the prow of a prop ship falls 25 feet to the stage floor. She hits the floor and she doesn’t movie. She is taken out on a stretcher - and she is never mentioned again! The poor girl might be dead for all we know. But the show must go on.

This movie really is way too long. The ingredients are here, but the balance is wrong. There’s too much focus on the romance melodrama and not enough on the backstage struggles involved in putting on a show. The staging of the musical numbers is unimaginative and stodgy. It is worth seeing for its historical importance but it just doesn’t catch fire.

The Warner Archive Blu-Ray looks terrific.

The Indian Tomb (1921)

Joe May’s 1921 silent epic The Indian Tomb was based on Thea von Harbou's very successful 1918 novel The Indian Tomb. Thea von Harbou was of course married to Fritz Lang. Lang and von Harbou wrote the screenplay for the film.

The novel, although extremely good, contains one very serious flaw. Interestingly enough that flaw is corrected in the movie. I don’t know whether it was von Harbou or Lang or May who made the change but it was very much a change for the better.

The movie is in two parts, Part I: The Mission of the Yogi (Die Sendung des Yoghi) and Part II: The Tiger of Bengal (Der Tiger von Eschnapur). It is in fact a single story with no obvious break between the two parts and the only reason it was originally released that way was the 3 hours and 40 minutes running time.

The story begins with a prologue. A yogi buried alive is resuscitated by the fabulously rich Ayan III, the Prince of Bengal (Conrad Veidt). According to legend when this happens the yogi must grant the person who revives him one wish. The prologue is important because it establishes that the yogi, Ramigani (Bernhard Goetzke), has supernatural or at least paranormal powers. And it establishes that Ramigani is compelled to carry out out the Prince’s commands even when he disagrees with them.

The Prince instructs Ramigami to persuade famed architect Herbert Rowland (Olaf Fønss) to travel to India to build a tomb for him. Herbert understands that the tomb will house the body of a princess, the beloved of the Prince. Herbert is persuaded that he must leave for India immediately without informing his fiancée Irene Amundsen (Mia May). Herbert departs on the Prince’s steam yacht. Irene is however a resourceful woman and she sets off for India as well.

On arrival in India Herbert discovers that there are very important things he hadn’t been told. The tomb is not to house the body of the Princess. It is to house the memory of a Great Love. A love betrayed. The Princess is alive. She has betrayed the Prince with a dashing but unscrupulous British officer and hunter, MacAllan.

The Prince has plans for revenge but his plans are not straightforward.

Herbert suffers several misfortunes, the most serious being that he is infected with leprosy. Nothing can save him. Or perhaps something can. But the price will be terrible.

MacAllan is a hunted man.

Irene is more or less a prisoner. The Prince’s feelings towards her are ambiguous. It’s possible that he desires her but his feelings about women are more than a little distorted.

Herbert and Irene become involved in attempts to rescue the Princess.

There is plenty of action and adventure. Narrow brushes with hungry tigers! Crocodile-infested rivers. A desperate escape across a rickety rope bridge over a chasm. A shootout at MacAllan’s bungalow. All filmed with style and energy.

This is however mostly a story about love. It’s a story of love betrayed, of misguided misplaced love, obsessive love, unhealthy love. But also noble love and faithful love.

Conrad Veidt is perfectly cast. He could play heroes or villains or victims or mysterious ambiguous characters and the Prince is all those things. He is probably mad, but he was probably once a very good man. Veidt also had tremendous magnetism. He’s in top form here.

The whole cast is good.

There’s plenty of interesting ambiguity. The Prince is not a mere villain. He is a man so shattered by emotional betrayal that he is no longer quite sane. The Princess is no innocent victim. She did betray the Prince’s love. And MacAllan is no hero. He not only seduced the Princess but boasted about it afterwards. Hebert Rowland is perhaps a little ambiguous as well, a man who allowed his artistic ambition to override his judgment. The yogi seems sinister at first but then we start to wonder.

This is a breathtakingly lavish production. The sets are jaw-dropping.

The movie might be better remembered had Lang directed it himself but I can’t fault May’s direction. This is a stunning emotionally complex movie and it’s very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed Thea von Harbou's novel The Indian Tomb and also Lang’s own 1959 version, Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959).

I’ve also reviewed another worthwhile Joe May movie, Asphalt (1929).

Aelita: Queen Of Mars (1924)

Aelita: Queen Of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov and released in 1924, was not quite the first science fiction feature film and was not quite the first feature film to deal with space travel - the 1918 Danish film Himmelskibet (A Trip To Mars) has that honour. Aelita: Queen Of Mars is however a very early and very remarkable example of the breed. It was also the first Soviet science fiction movie.

The music to accompany the film was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich.

It was based on Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita. It should be added that Alexei Tolstoy was a very distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace.

Strange signals are being picked up at a Moscow radio station. They seem to be coming from Mars. They cannot be deciphered but they do suggest that there is an advanced civilisation on Mars.

Engineer Los (Igor Ilyinsky) is is convinced his wife is having an affair, which leads to unfortunate results.

Los is obsessed by those signals from Mars and he is determined to build a spaceship and travel to the Red Planet.

The Martians are meanwhile very much aware of the existence of an advanced civilisation on Earth. They have built an advanced viewing device (much much more than a simple telescope). Aelita, the Queen of Mars, is obsessed by what she sees of Earth society.

It’s a clever idea and Tolstoy’s novel is excellent. Unfortunately the movie does not focus sufficiently on the science fiction story. An enormous amount of the early part of the movie is devoted to tedious social drama. There’s also an attempt at satire, with corrupt bureaucrats being pilloried, which is interesting. This would hardly have been allowed once Stalin had consolidated his position.

It’s interesting that Alexei Tolstoy initially opposed the Russian Revolution but later became an ardent supporter of the Soviet regime. The novel has its political moments but they’re handled in an interesting way with some touches of cynicism.

The movie dabbles a great deal in politics and towards the end becomes crude propaganda.

The movie also adds an irrelevant subplot regarding a bumbling amateur detective.

A lot of attention is devoted to Engineer Los’s marriage. This is an important aspect of the novel, explaining much about Los’s motivations, but it is dealt with in way too much detail in the movie.

This is a movie that needed to be severely pruned. The first half of the movie could easily have been cut by 30 minutes. We get brief snippets of the science fiction plot intercut will long meandering stretches dealing in intricate details with a whole lot of stuff we don’t need to know and don’t care about.

While this movie does have some very real flaws it offers a lot of compensations. The art direction by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky is stunning. The sets are amazing. The influence of the Constructivist movement in the visual arts is very obvious - this is like a Constructivist painting come to life which is wild since Constructivism was an abstract art movement. Alexandra Exter’s costume designs are insane, but in a good way.

This is a visually magnificent movie which invents its own distinctive science fiction aesthetic, radically different from the aesthetic of Fritz Lang’s German silent science fiction films. There is no other movie that looks quite like Aelita: Queen Of Mars. In fact there is no other movie that looks even remotely like this one.

Yuliya Solntseva’s strange and exaggerated performance as Aelita works for me. It makes her seem genuinely alien. Aelita looks like an Earth woman but of course she comes from a radically different culture.

So there is much to admire here. The problem is that the narrative is a total mess and the ending is catastrophically bad. It has some of the most superb visuals you will ever see. But as a movie it’s simply awful. It’s difficult to know what to say in terms of a recommendation. The visuals are so good that anyone with an interest in cinema will want to see them. But it’s such a bad movie. It’s a terrible movie that looks fantastic.

The old Kino DVD offers a reasonable transfer. This is a movie that needs a new full restoration. Judging by the DVD the source materials are still in fairly good shape so a restoration should be possible.

I’ve reviewed Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Aelita elsewhere (and the novel is vastly superior to the movie).

Love (1927)

Love (later retitled Anna Karenina) is an important movie in Greta Garbo’s filmography. She got to make this movie despite Louis B. Mayer’s attempt to destroy her career. She foiled that attempt by going over Mayer’s head to the owners of MGM. Love established Garbo as a star with the clout to pick her own projects, at least to some extent.

This movie also saw her moving away from her early vamp roles. This is the Garbo who became a legend - playing heroines who sacrifice everything for love.

Up to a point it follows Tolstoy’s novel, in a very superficial way. It’s a very long novel turned into a rather short film. The movie turns a complex story into a straightforward story of star-crossed lovers.

The setting is St Petersburg. Anna Karenina (Garbo) is married to the rich powerful Senator Karenin. She meets a handsome young Guards officer, Vronsky (John Gilbert). They are both stranded in a storm. They have to stay overnight in an inn. Nothing happens between them, but everything happens between them. The romantic/sexual fuse has been lit. There’s nothing either of them can do about it.

The first scene between Garbo and Gilbert is very long and it’s crucial. It’s a complex scene with all sorts of romantic and sexual approaches and hesitations and rebuffs. It’s the beginning of the obsessive love that the movie is all about. It’s done without any title cards. Garbo and Gilbert don’t need any help from title cards. We get the message.

The affair becomes more tempestuous. The scandal grows.

Anna’s problem is that she has a son. She will have to choose between Vronsky and her son. It is an impossible choice. As she tells Vronsky, she loves them both infinitely. But she will have to choose.

And eventually Anna’s husband will force her hand.

The film was shot with two radically different endings. Tragically the Warner Archive DVD includes only one of the endings and it’s a contrived and totally unsatisfactory ending which makes nonsense of the whole movie. This was an alternative ending for the benefit of exhibitors too afraid to risk screening a movie with anything other than a conventional happy ending. It’s very very difficult to judge this movie without being able to see the original ending.

There are some nuances which a lot of viewers today might miss. Anna’s husband is not a mere monster. He is not entirely unreasonable. He lays his cards on the table for Anna. He will turn a blind eye to her affair with Vronsky as long as she is very discreet. He will not tolerate a public scandal, or being publicly humiliated. Which is reasonable enough. But he also warns her that there will be consequences if she is not discreet. The problem is that Anna and Vronsky are not discreet.

This is Garbo in magnificent form as a woman tortured by love. John Gilbert is excellent. It’s the extraordinary chemistry between Garbo and John Gilbert that makes the 1927 silent version worth seeing.

The tragedy is that the moment they meet Anna and Vronsky are no longer in control. They both know that their love will end in disaster. It’s not they they know this and go ahead anyway. They have no choice. This is a love that cannot be denied. They have poured the wine and they will have to drink it.

Garbo also starred in a later sound version (in 1935) and that version is superior to the silent version.

Without seeing that original ending I honestly cannot say how good this movie really is, but Love is worth seeing for Garbo and Gilbert.

A Lady of Chance (1928)

A Lady of Chance is a 1928 MGM silent film starring Norma Shearer. It’s a lighthearted comic crime melodrama/romantic melodrama.

A Lady of Chance was shot as a silent film. By this time audiences were losing interest in silent films so MGM added some dialogue scenes. That soundtrack is apparently lost so the movie now survives only as a silent movie. What we get on the DVD is a modern score - I turned the volume down to zero as quickly as possible. I’ll watch a silent movie with no sound at all rather than endure a modern score.

Dolly Morgan, nicknamed Angel Face (Norma Shearer), is a con artist. She’s working the old badger game. It’s a racket she knows well.

She has a prime sucker lined up. His name is Hammond. Hammond knows that Dolly isn’t exactly a respectable girl. That’s OK, he doesn’t want a respectable girl. He wants a bit of fun. He knows that girls like Dolly don’t give away their favours without getting a few presents in return. Of course he doesn’t know just how much his fun is going to cost him this time. It’s going to cost him ten grand (an immense amount of money in 1928). He’ll have to pay up because if his wife finds out he’s in big trouble. She is not a very understanding woman.

Dolly is working this racket on her own, but unluckily for her she runs into two former partners-in-crime, Brad (Lowell Sherman) and Gwen (Gwen Lee). They want a piece of the action. Of course they intend to double-cross Dolly and she intends to double-cross them. When it comes to double crosses Dolly is an expert. She ends up holding the ten grand but she will have to make a hasty departure.

Dolly has a new sucker lined up, Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown). This could be it, the big score that every girl in Dolly’s line of work hopes will come along. Steve is a cement tycoon which sounds promising enough but when he tells her about the plantation back home, in the South, she knows she’s hit the jackpot. Ten grand is chicken feed compared to a score like this.

And the best thing is that Steve is as dumb as a rock. He even offers to marry her. She can’t wait to see that plantation. When she arrives in Steve’s home town there will of course be some surprises in store for her.

Dolly has been thrown for a loop and now the last thing she needs is for Brad and Gwen to turn up. Which of course they do.

While it’s not a conventional formulaic romantic comedy this is a movie that combines comedy with romance. It is amusing, and it is very romantic.

The acting is pretty good. Johnny Mack Brown makes Steve suitably innocent and naïve but he’s so well-meaning we can’t despise him.

Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee are fun as likeable rogues. Gwen Lee in fact is a delight. Lowell Sherman’s reputation hasn’t stood the test of time which is perhaps a little unfair.

Norma Shearer is fine and she manages to sell us on Dolly’s sudden change of heart. It’s a brittle amusing performance. These four main players really work extremely well together. Norma Shearer looks fabulous, which is easy for an actress to do when she has the great Adrian designing her gowns.

Robert Z. Leonard is not a director you’ll find on most people’s great directors lists and he’s not one of the darlings of auteurist critics but he made some extraordinarily good and interesting movies, include the superb 1949 noir The Bribe and the very underrated pre-code Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise).

This is a very lightweight movie but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else and it has a breezy charm. Highly recommended if you’re in the mood for something frothy.

The Warner Archive DVD presentation is very good.

I haven’t seen a huge number of Norma Shearer’s films. I want to see more but her movies are remarkably difficult to find. I do highly recommend one of her earlier silent pictures, Lady of the Night (1925), in which she plays dual roles.

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

Diary of a Lost Girl was the second of the two silent films Louise Brooks made in Germany for director G.W. Pabst. Pandora's Box is by far the more famous and celebrated of the two.

I have to put my cards on the table right here. While it’s generally regarded as a cinematic masterpiece I am not a great fan of Pandora’s Box. For me it’s an interesting but flawed movie and its only claim to greatness is the performance of Louise Brooks.

One thing that the viewer needs to bear in mind is that not all German movies of the 1920s belong to the Expressionist movement. Pabst most definitely did not adhere to that school. He was a realist.

Diary of a Lost Girl is a realist film but with a plot that is pure melodrama.

Thymian is an innocent young girl. Louise Brooks had many virtues as an actress but playing an innocent virginal young girl was quite outside her acting range. Thymian’s father owns a pharmacy. Thymian is cast out by her family when she falls pregnant to her father’s sleazy assistant pharmacist Meinert. He knocked her out with a sleeping draught in order to have his way with her.

The family is outraged that she then refuses to marry Meinert. She also faces implacable hostility from Meta, her father’s housekeeper. Meta intends to marry Thymian’s father.

Thymian is sent to a reformatory. It’s like a cross between a workhouse in a Dickens novel and a women’s prison in a 1970s women-in-prison exploitation movie. It’s run by a couple of crazed sadists who would be more at home in a horror movie.

Thymian’s only ally is the young Count Osdorff (André Roanne). With his help she escapes, along with one of the other girls, Erika (Edith Meinhard).

Thymian then suffers a personal tragedy, discovering that her child is dead. This is one of the film’s narrative weak points. No woman would bounce back so quickly after the death of a child.

Thymian becomes a high-class prostitute. The nicest, sanest, happiest people in this movie are the madam and the girls in the brothel. They are cheerful and easy-going. The madam obviously looks after her girls and is fond of them, and they’re fond of her. The brothel is an oasis of camaraderie and happiness in an otherwise bleak world. And this is the one time Thymian seems really happy.

Then another plot twist kicks in, followed in quick succession by several others. Pabst seems to be aiming for irony here, and also to give the movie a satisfying cyclical twist.

I believe Pabst was forced to change his original ending which would have been more satisfying and more in keeping with the tone of the film.

On the surface this is a conventional melodrama with an innocent girl corrupted and forced into a degrading life of prostitution (she becomes a “lost girl”) but Pabst was clearly trying to give the story an ironic twist. In this movie trying to be respectable and conform to society’s rules will get you nowhere but if you become a lost girl, a prostitute, you paradoxically find happiness and friendship. It’s a message that might be too radical for many modern viewers.

This movie doesn’t really pull its punches. It’s made quite explicit that Thymian falls pregnant after being taken by force by Meinert. There is no attempt at all to disguise the fact that the brothel is in fact a brothel. It’s also made quite clear (and this might certainly be too radical for some viewers today) that the brothel girls enjoy working in a brothel.

After a shaky start Louise Brooks gives a superb performance. Anyone who thinks actresses in the silent era were not capable of subtle naturalistic performances needs to see Brooks in this movie.

Some of the other acting turns are rather bizarre. The villains in this movie are outrageously over-the-top, almost as if they were appearing in a pantomime. There’s an uneasy mix of tones in this film. Pabst was by inclination a realist but here he’s working with material that is not just pure melodrama but melodrama of an extreme type.

This movie is a bit of a mess in many ways but it has its compensations. Thymian is never presented as a bad girl, or even a good girl gone wrong. Becoming a prostitute is seen as just a perfectly reasonable way to make a living. For all its flaws it’s an oddly fascinating movie, recommended for that reason.

I’ve also reviewed Pandora's Box (1929).

The Greene Murder Case (1929)

The Greene Murder Case was the second of Paramount’s Philo Vance murder mysteries and the second of four outings for William Powell as Philo Vance. Many other actors later got to play the role but truly there was only ever one screen Philo Vance and that was Bill Powell.

The detective story had been around for quite a while but in the early 1920s a new variant appeared - the fair-play puzzle-plot mystery. It was understood that the clues had to be there to allow the reader to solve the mystery. It was up to the author to provide enough misdirection to make sure this didn’t happen. This new type of murder mystery first appeared in Britain. S. S. Van Dine (real name Willard Huntington Wright) has a strong claim to having introduced the form to American readers. He was certainly the one who popularised this new type of detective story in the United States.

It didn’t take long for Hollywood to get interested. Van Dine’s first novel was published in 1926. The first movie adaptation, The Canary Murder Case, came out in 1929.

It’s worth pointing out that this movie was released before the Wall Street Crash. At this stage Hollywood was still booming and it’s obvious that Paramount spent quite a bit of money on The Greene Murder Case. It’s technically quite ambitious with some rather nifty shots. I love the overhead shots of the roof garden. The sets do not look cheap. There’s a well-conceived well-executed action finale.

The Greene family is very rich and clearly very dysfunctional. Old Tobias Greene left one of those nasty wills calculated to cause his heirs a lot of inconvenience and misery. To inherit his money they have to live in the Greene mansion for fifteen years, not a very pleasant prospect since they all hate each other. Old Tobias’s widow is paralysed. She’s miserable and querulous. The elder son, Chester (Lowell Drew), is a good-for-nothing layabout. The younger son, Rex (Morgan Farley), is a neurotic mess. The elder sister Sibella (Florence Eldridge) is a bit of a party girl. The younger sister Ada (Jean Arthur) is adopted. She’s sweet but nervy. There’s also the family doctor Dr Von Blon who seems to spend most of his life at the Greene mansion.

Now somebody seems intent on killing off the family one by one. Gentleman dilettante detective Philo Vance handles difficult cases for District Attorney John F. X. Markham on a semi-official basis. He is invariably assisted by Detective Sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette). Lots of things about this case puzzle Vance. The killer seems to be staying one step ahead all the time.

It’s a neat plot. Anybody in the Greene household could be a suspect, given that they certainly all hate each other enough to start killing each other. This is pretty much a fair-play mystery. The clues are there.

William Powell is of course marvellous. Not everybody likes the Philo Vance of the novels but Powell softens the character a bit, taking the edge off his arrogance. And he has that William Powell charm.

One thing I really like is that the film resists the temptation to make Sergeant Heath a comic relief character. Heath is often wrong but his reasoning is far from foolish. He’s a competent policeman and Vance clearly respects his professionalism. At no time does Vance make Heath the butt of jokes. It’s obvious that despite their very different backgrounds these two men like each other.

Jean Arthur is good as the perpetually somewhat frightened Ada. The supporting performers are all quite good, with Morgan Farley as Rex being the only one who goes a little over the top at times.

Director Frank Tuttle is sometimes dismissed as a hack which is a bit unfair. He handles things here with reasonable skill and he keeps the pacing taut.

The Greene mansion itself becomes a character in the movie. The layout of the house is important, as is the atmosphere.

Very early talkies have a reputation for being clunky, with too many excessively static shots. That’s not the case here. Frank Tuttle’s directing is rather lively. The actors on the whole seem quite comfortable with the new sound format.

The Greene Murder Case is a fine murder mystery. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Kino Lorber’s three-movie Philo Vance Blu-Ray boxed set. The Greene Murder Case gets a very nice transfer. As is usually the case these days the audio commentary is best dispensed with.

I've also reviewed the wonderful The Kennel Murder Case, also with Powell as Vance.

The Canary Murder Case (1929)

The Canary Murder Case is both an incredibly important movie historically and an oddity. Its importance lies in the fact that it’s one of the first detective story movies made with sound, and you can see the way the challenges presented by the genre were approached. Its oddity lies in the fact that it’s a hybrid - it was shot as a silent movie and then turned into a sound picture. That accounts for its peculiarities and its weaknesses.

S. S. Van Dine (real name Willard Huntington Wright) was the most significant pioneer of the new style of detective story - the fair-play puzzle-plot mystery - in the United States. Paramount saw the cinematic possibilities immediately. In 1929, just three years after Van Dine’s first novel was published, they released the first cinematic adaptation.

The opening sequence is fascinating. It introduces us to the Canary (Louise Brooks) but it was shot for the original silent version so instead of hearing her sing we see her on a swing, sailing above the heads of the audience. It works superbly. It’s unusual and striking and it’s a fantastic way to introduce Louise Brooks and to show off her glamour and seductiveness. This is a girl who likes to play. We’re not at all surprised to find out that she likes to play with men.

The Canary is nightclub star Margaret O’Dell (Louise Brooks), and she’s a very bad girl. At the time the Canary would have been described as a vamp but she is in fact a figure who would become familiar in movies in the 40s - the femme fatale. The Canary is a blackmailer but it’s not money that she wants. She’s more ambitious than that. She intends to blackmail the young and foolish Jimmy Spotswoode into marrying her. Jimmy is heir to a fortune but more importantly he is part of the social elite. And the Canary is determined to be part of that social elite.

She is also blackmailing a number of very rich middle-aged men.

This leads to murder and since the plot contains some rather cool elements I will be very very vague about it. There are at least five suspects.

The very early sound pictures have a reputation for being clunky, with too many excessively static shots. Various technical problems initially experienced with the sound recording technology made static camera setups necessary. It also meant that if you wanted to shoot a movie fairly quickly it was desirable to use very few sets, and very simple sets.

It took a while to find an easy convenient solution to that. The Canary Murder Case does suffer from having very static camera setups which gives it a stagey feel. And there are too many scenes shot on the same one or two very bare sets (such as the District Attorney’s office) using the exact same camera angles.

The Canary Murder Case was in fact shot as a silent picture. It was directed by Malcolm St. Clair. Reshoots were needed to turn it into a sound picture (these were done by Frank Tuttle). Those very static scenes are presumably among the reshoots. Dialogue was also dubbed over silent footage. The biggest problem was that Louise Brooks refused to do any of the reshoots. As a result her voice was dubbed (horribly) by another actress. The Canary Murder Case destroyed Brooks’ career in Hollywood, which is sad because it was a great role that should have boosted her career.

It’s interesting to compare this movie to the next in the Paramount series, The Greene Murder Case, released just six months later. The technical problems associated with sound had been solved. The second movie was directed with energy and flair by Frank Tuttle. The Greene Murder Case has none of that clunky static early talkie feel. It also had a bigger budget and some very cool sets. Progress in sound picture production was breathtakingly fast.

One thing needs to be said about the detective hero of the story, Philo Vance (played by William Powell). Vance is not a rich American. He is an upper-class American. He is from a family who are very much Old Money. He is American aristocracy. As such he has had an education and upbringing very much like that of an English gentleman of that era. He is highly cultured. Like Willard Huntington Wright himself he is an aesthete. He has the exquisite manners of a gentleman. But it would be a mistake to think that he is effete. He is entirely masculine, but in the self-assured manner of a gentleman. He is an upper-class American of a type that no longer exists, which can cause the character to be misunderstood.

Many actors went on to play Vance. William Powell is the only one who counts. Powell was born to play Philo Vance. He is a joy to watch.

Eugene Pallette as Detective Sergeant Heath is always fun. The other actors are competent but a bit stiff, probably because when this movie went into production in 1928 no-one was quite sure how to approach acting in this new medium, the talking picture. Louise Brooks looks fabulous but as I mentioned earlier her voice was dubbed which somewhat ruins her performance.

For all its problems The Canary Murder Case has its virtues. It has an excellent plot with some clever and ingenious elements. The poker game is a fascinating example of the use of psychology in crime-solving. There are plot devices that might seem clichéd today but in the late 20s when the novel was written and when the film was made these were fresh and exciting plot devices. And they’re executed pretty well.

If you can ignore its technical flaws The Canary Murder Case is quite enjoyable and it’s recommended.

This movie is part of Kino Lorber’s three-movie Philo Vance Blu-Ray boxed set. It gets a very nice transfer.

I’ve also reviewed The Greene Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case (1933).

Anna Boleyn (1920)

I’ve been watching lots of early Ernst Lubitsch silent movies. At this stage of his career the man was a crazed visionary genius. You just never knew what he’d come up with next but you know it would be weird and exciting. Which may be why I was disappointed by Anna Boleyn (1920). I wasn’t prepared for a very conventional historical melodrama.

It starts of course with Henry VIII (Emil Jannings) becoming obsessed with his queen’s new lady-in-waiting Anne Boleyn (Henny Porten). The king is also concerned that his queen, Catherine of Aragon, has only given him a daughter and is clearly not going to have any more children. Henry feels that he absolutely must have a male heir. From the point of view of the future stability of his kingdom he is quite justified in fearing that a female heir might not be strong enough to hold on to her crown. So Henry is motivated both by lust and by reasons of state and the movie succeeds in making that clear.

English church leaders are willing to grant Henry an annulment but this is blocked by the Pope, which leads Henry to declare himself head of the Church of England. Now he can free himself of Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne. The movie takes no interest in the details of these church and political dramas - the focus is on the human dramas.

Anne already has a young man with whom she is in love. That will lead to problems. Anne produces an heir but it’s a girl. Queen Anne is accused of adultery and we all know what happened to her next.

Of course such a familiar story can only be made interesting if we get a sense of the personal motivations of these people. This movie does make some attempt to do this, and to be a character-driven historical film.

Jane Seymour is definitely cast as the villainess in this movie. She’s a ruthless schemer. She is motivated by pure ambition and has no scruples.

We never really get a totally clear sense of the King’s motivations. Obviously he’s motivated partly by reasons of state. And partly by lust. As to whether he feels any genuine love for Anne, we have to be pretty sceptical. It’s not easy to make Henry VIII a sympathetic character and this movie makes no real attempt to do so.

Anne Boleyn is of course the primary focus and she has at least some complexity. She comes across as a woman swept along by events. She knows she should resist the King’s advances (she’s in love with another man) but lacks the strength of character to do so. While the movie suggests that she is not actually unfaithful to the King she is somewhat indiscreet, and a queen cannot afford to be indiscreet. A queen must be above suspicion. She really has no idea how vulnerable a queen is to malicious accusations, or how dangerous her position could become.

Of course no-one could really have predicted Anne’s fate. Henry was now head of the Church of England. He could have divorced her for adultery. In reality Anne was under suspicion of treason, which would certainly have given the King grounds to have her executed (assuming there was any validity to the charge). The movie makes no mention of this, which is interesting. This may have been deliberate. The movie seems to intend to portray Henry as a man so corrupted by power that he will have a woman executed purely out of personal spite.

It’s also clear that the movie is intent on portraying Anne as a tragic victim (which she may or may not have been in reality). Whether the Anne Boleyn of the movie actually loves the King remains uncertain, perhaps because her feelings really are conflicted. Initially she is both horrified and flattered (mostly horrified) by his attentions but she is quite attracted by the idea of becoming queen.

I’m not much of an Emil Jannings fan but he’s perfectly cast here. One major problem is Henny Porten’s lifeless performance as Anne. No matter how hard the movie tries to make her the sympathetic heroine it’s hard to care about such a dull character. She is totally overshadowed by Aud Egede-Nissen as Jane Seymour - Jane is a bad bad girl but she’s lively and much more fun to watch.

It’s by no means a bad movie and my disappointment with it is mainly due to my hopes that we would see more of the wild imagination and visual splendour of Lubitsch’s other movies of this period. Anna Boleyn doesn’t really feel to me like a Lubitsch film. There’s no trace of the famed Lubitsch Touch.

Overall I thought Anna Boleyn fell a bit flat. It’s a by-the-numbers historical tragic romance epic and it just lacks the necessary vital spark.

This is included in several Lubitsch in Berlin boxed sets (both DVD and Blu-Ray). They’re worth buying because the other early Lubitsch movies are so fabulous. If you’re buying the boxed set anyway give Anna Boleyn a look by all means but set your expectations fairly low.

I’ve reviewed some of Lubitch’s wild crazy early movies (all of which are better than this one) - The Doll (Die Puppe, 1919), The Wildcat (1921) and Sumurun (1920).

The Single Standard (1929)

When people talk about Greta Garbo’s great movies they usually don’t mention her very late (1929) silent movie The Single Standard. Even when people focus on her silent films this one doesn’t get much attention. It was directed by John S. Robertson, from a novel by Adela Rogers St. Johns.

Arden (Greta Garbo) obviously belongs to the wealthy fashionable set. This was 1929 so this is a pre-Great Depression movie. This is still the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper.

Arden is rather fond of her handsome hunky chauffeur. One night she decides on a midnight drive, just her and the chauffeur. Arden is in the driver’s seat, and this is clearly a signal that Arden always likes to be in the driver’s seat in life. They find a romantic spot down by the lake. Just the two of them. They kiss. The movie doesn’t show us what happens next but I think it’s reasonable to assume that it’s what you would expect to happen between a healthy red-blooded young man and a healthy red-blooded young woman in a romantic setting in the moonlight.

Unpleasant consequences could probably have been foreseen, but this moonlight tryst has totally disastrous consequences.

There is of course a major class issue here. Women of Arden’s social class are not expected to offer their favours to servants.

Arden then meets Packy Cannon (Nils Asther). He’s a prize-fighter turned artist. He gives a demonstration of his pugilistic skills. Arden is impressed. Packy is artistic and very manly. He’s her sort of man. Romance is clearly going to blossom.

We’ve already figured out that Arden is a Modern Woman. She wants to lead a life of honesty and freedom. Which for her includes sexual freedom. We also know that she likes men, with a preference for masculine men. Arden believes that she has the right to make her own decisions where men are concerned.

Romance does indeed blossom. Arden and Packy sail off into the sunset together on Packy’s yacht. Things don’t quite work out and another situation arises which could potentially end as disastrously as Arden’s midnight cavortings with the chauffeur.

The title might tempt one to think that this movie was intended as an attack on the supposed “double standard” - the idea that women were held to a different moral standard compared to men. I am however not convinced that that makes sense in relation to this movie. In the context of this movie there really is only a single standard - scandal must be avoided. Morality doesn’t matter. Social approval is what matters.

Of course that is still true today. The things that bring social approval and social disapproval have changed, but social conformity still matters more than morality. Whatever the prevailing societal mores might be, however much they may change, conformity to those mores will still be ruthlessly enforced.

Arden’s mistake, which had nothing very much to do with her being a woman, was to assume that society will tolerate those who believe they have the right to make their own decisions. That has never been the case and never will be the case. This movie is really not dated at all.

We don’t think of silent movies as pre-code movies but of course a movie made in 1929 is indeed a pre-code movie, and The Single Standard feels very very pre-code. It is strongly implied that Arden and the chauffeur are lovers. It is made pretty explicit that Arden and Packy are lovers. It’s also made very clear that the audience is not meant to condemn any of these people for immorality. In fact the message of the movie appears to be that if love is on offer you should grab it. The complications that ensue for these people are not actually caused by sexual wickedness. In fact things would have worked out much more satisfactorily for everyone had Arden and Packy continued with their illicit love affair.

The Single Standard is more interesting than its reputation would suggest and I recommend it highly. And of course Garbo is terrific.

Sadly there’s a great deal of print damage evident in the Warner Archive DVD transfer but with silent movies we always have to be grateful that they have survived at all.