LECTURE TWO NOTES
"The Garage" (1920), "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" (1912) and Broken Blossoms (1919) are all films from the second decade of motion pictures. The first starts Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, the second films made by D.W. Griffith star Dorothy Gish ("Musketeers of Pig Alley"), while the third (Broken Blossoms) stars her sister, Lillian.
In the Arbuckle directed "The Garage", the emphasis on visual comedy is apparent. There are a great number of sight jokes, physical comedy (Pratt falls) and the like are evident. Films after the arrival of sound often switched their focus to the verbal. Films like It Happened One Night or The Man Who Came to Dinner are not very visual at all in their comedic approaches. Later the return to the visual is marked by films like Airplane. This stress on the visual is typical of "silent" films and is something which many feel is lost after the arrival of synchronized sound. The action in the comedies is frenetic and slapstick. The four major comedians of the silents are Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Harold Lloyd.
Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle was one of the major comedians as well, and had been offered the first million dollar contract. (Initially performers names were not given. The studios were afraid that if the performers became known they would demand more money. Some were becoming famous like the "Biograph Girl" and finally Florence Lawrence becomes known and is considered by many the first "star"). Arbuckle however became involved in a famous murder trial in which he was accused of filling an aspiring actress and madam, named Virgina Rappe (who died from peritonitis as a result of a ruptured bladder which resulted from chronic cystosis, a urinary tract infection. She drank heavily, had had several abortions in less than ideal medical settings and had probably just had another. There were three trials, two of which ended in hung juries and the third acquitted Arbuckle completely. None the less, the Hurst newspapers (William Randolph Hurst is the character on whom Citizen Kane is based) made all kinds of false reports to up their circulation (Yellow Journalism).
The .Fatty Arbuckle scandal was just one of many that occurred during this time. Others included the murder of William Desmond Taylor, a silent film director and actor, who was killed (the case remains unsolved to today) on Feb. 1, 1922. This also sparked a tremendous amount of press. Actress Mabel Normand (who had worked with Arbuckle) was last person known to have seen Taylor alive. Already involved with drugs, she was cleared as a suspect, but the murder on top of her drug abuse virtually ended her career. Another actress. Mary Miles Minter seems to have been in love with Taylor although it was not returned. The publication of some of her letters to him tarnished her image and her contract was not renewed. Her mother, a domineering woman was also seen as a suspect as were Taylors cook and valet, convicted felon and army deserter who left Taylor's employ months before the murder. His replacement, Henry Peabody, was cleared by the police as a suspect as well.
Thomas Ince, another well-known actor and director and partner of D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennet in the Triangle Motion Picture Company, He died, officially. as the result of a heart trouble, but it was rumored he had been shot to death by Hurst in an argument over actress Marion Davis. There are many versions of the story which included Charlie Chaplin who claims not to have been on board that day - that the shooting was accidental - the shooting was deliberate. The only clear thing is that Ince left the boat, had been seen by several doctors and died three days after leaving th yacht in his estate in Benedict Canyon..
These and many other scandals plagued the film community.
D. W. Griffith was born in Kentucky in 1875. He is seen in many ways as the father of modern film for his development of "film language". Many of the techniques had been used by Edwin Porter who seemed not to recognize the importance of what he was doing in terms of structuring a "language".
Griffith first appears as a writer, who in 1907 wanted to sell a script to Porter of the Edison studios (known as Biograph). Although it was rejected, Griffith was hired as an actor, and did a few Mutascope movies in 1908. When one of Edison's directors, Wallace McCutcheon became ill, and his son was unable to produce a film with a profit, Griffith was asked to direct. Among the films he made for Biograph is "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" Often seen as the first gangster film" Griffith had come to believe that commercial films were viable which Edison did not and Griffith left and joined Majestic films. He later is involved with Triangle films with Thomas Ince (see scandal above) and Mack Sennett of the Sennett comedies. Griffith then produces what may be his two most famous films, the epic Birth of a Nation and eth equally (if not more so) epic Intolerance. Birth of a Nation was criticized for its depictions of African Americans and its positive take on the Ku Klux Klan (It is based on a novel by Thomas Dixon called The Clansman). Many people feel, that the film is great despite its take on the Civil War in the same way that Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will is powerful despite its subject matter. Many also feel that Intolerance is a kind of reaction to the criticisms leveled against the earlier film in much the same way that people feel Jonathan Demme made Philadelphia after severe criticism from the Gay Community about Silence of the Lambs. Whatever opinion one holds about the Birth of a Nation. it is clear that from the Biograph films through his later movies, Griffith was developing "film language" - From the shots of the gangsters moving along with wall at the edge of the frame and then walking out of frame directly in front of the camera, to the complex editing of Intolerance through four different stories, Griffith was pushing film further than it had gone before,
Broken Blossoms is a radical change from the epic style of his two major films. Small and rather intimate, the film contains no scenes with hundreds of extras but focuses on a relationship between three people, a young girl, Lucy (Lilian Gish), the daughter of boxer Battling Burrows (played by Donald Crisp) and a young Chinese man (Richard Bathelmess) who has moved to the Limehouse section of London to spread the message of peace as proposed in Buddhism.
Like many silent films, the acting style is closer on occasion to mime than what would normally thought of as "acting' today. Gestures and body language of necessity take precedence over dialogue which appears only on intertirtle cards.
Although the serial was made in 1936, it runs 13 chapters so we need to start it here to make sure we can see it all by the end of the term. It is the first of the three Flash Gordon serials which were made until 1940. The second Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars is arguably the best whereas the final one, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe is the weakest despite its use of much footage from Leni Reifenstahl's film, The White Hell of Pttz Palau. At this point, it is necessary only to point out that it was based on a comic book created by Alex Raymond who write the comic to compete with Buck Rogers (Flash became the more popular of the two) Buster Crabbe who plays Flash (and interestingly enough also played Buck Rogers in a serial of that name) was a Olympic medalist in swimming and went on to have s career in films. He and the others played their parts rather seriously rather than tongue in cheek. The comic book origins can be seen easily in the set design which is drawn in many cases rather than constructed. The Flash Gordon serials had a big impact on both George Lucas (Star Wars) and Steven Spielberg (E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind)..
There are some interesting connections between Flash Gordon and Broken Blossoms, which will be discussed later.