J. Franklin's choice of 50 American classics of the silent era

This is the first "list challenge" type of thing I am doing, and the choice is entirely due to chance. Franklin's Classics of the Silent Screen was published in 1959 (his research assistant being William K. Everson) and is dated in attitudes, but presumably whatever he found to like in his selection is still there for others to notice and perhaps appreciate equally.

Although I've already seen, sometimes more than once, nineteen out of the fifty films he lists, I intend to watch them again wherever possible. I won't observe the chronological order, but choose whatever is convenient.

A few films he describes were lost, at least as of the time of his writing. In addition to the individual films, he lists 75 movie stars of the silent era, most of whom I don't know. If I succeed in finishing off the movie list, I'll move on to them.

The films, chronologically, 1-25:

1. The Great Train Robbery (1903)

2. The Perils of Pauline (1914) SERIAL

3. The Spoilers (1914)

4. The Birth of a Nation (1915)

5. Intolerance (1916)

6. Hell's Hinges (1916)

7. Broken Blossoms (1919)

8. Till the Clouds Roll By (1919)

9. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)

10. Way Down East (1920)

11. The Mark of Zorro (1920)

12. Tol'able David (1921)

13. Orphans of the Storm (1921)

14. Nanook of the North (1922)

15. The Last of the Mohicans (1921)

16. Safety Last (1923)

17. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

18. Greed (1923)

19. The Covered Wagon (1923)

20. The Ten Commandments (1923)

21. The Iron Horse (1924)

22. Sherlock Jr. (1924)

23. Peter Pan (1924)

24. The Big Parade (1924)

25. The Gold Rush (1925)

The films, chronologically, 26-50:

26. The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

27. The Lost World (1925)

28. A Kiss for Cinderella (1925)

29. Son of the Sheik (1926)

30. Sparrows (1926)

31. The Scarlet Letter (1926)

32. Stella Dallas (1926)

33. The Black Pirate (1926)

34. Don Juan (1926)

35. Seventh Heaven (1927)

36. Flesh and the Devil (1927)

37. What Price Glory? (1927)

38. The General (1927)

39. Wings (1927)

40. The Strong Man (1927)

41. White Gold (1927)

42. Sunrise (1927)

43. Ben-Hur (1927)

44. Beau Geste (1927)

45. The Cat and the Canary (1927)

46. White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

47. Our Dancing Daughters (1928)

48. The Crowd (1928)

49. City Lights (1931)

50. Tabu (1931)

Was he, perhaps, confining himself to American cinema? No Metropolis, no The Cabinet of Dr Caligari?

>3 alaudacorax:

Yes, this is American-only; that is, produced in the US. Even so, he has two Murnaus up there, Sunrise and Tabu.

The first off the list I saw: Hell's Hinges, 1916 (link goes to a copy on YT). A western! but wow, what a story... a young preacher unsuited to the vocation ends up sinning with a scarlet woman in the "Western Sodom" (the titular Hell's Hinges) and burning down his church. "To hell with the church!" a title card reads. In the ensuing mayhem, only the cynical gunfighter Blaze defends the handful of the good people in the wicked town, including the preacher's sister.

Another title card: "Look out! Blaze is comin', killin' mad, and with a gun in each hand!"

Blaze is played by a great Western star of the times (so Franklin tells), William S. Hart. There's a scene where he jumps with amazing precision onto a horse from a ridge and almost from the side.

The preacher's sister is interesting. It's her faith and strength of character that persuade Blaze there must be something to this religion thing, her eloquence that charms the crowd--basically, she's the true preacher, although she wouldn't be allowed on the pulpit.

A scene with the church burning:

Another for the list, The mark of Zorro, 1920: WOW, just WOW! All the wows for Douglas Fairbanks leaping like a hare hither and tither and up the walls etc.

Here he is in full flight, mid-leap-with-a-turn over a table:



He actually jumped off the ground in the right corner facing the screen and will end up on the left, three quarters back to the screen. And that's one of the minor feats--in one scene he seems to jump straight up a wall about double his height.

Story, what story? ;)

Well you know the story and actually it's quite funny, Zorro's weakling incognito--Superman and Clark Kent, you know, with Zorro's girl disdaining Don Diego same as Lois later on--and the background characters, especially the soldiers and the Indians, look great, très picturesque.

Once a great action movie, always a great action movie.

Years ago I saw The Sheik (1921) and The Son of the Sheik (1926) on the big screen, my Valentino firsts (and "onlies", to date). There were some surprises.



For one thing, if you haven't seen them and are inclined to scoff about the whole erotomaniacal legend of Valentino, watching these movies makes the legend--his sex appeal--more understandable.

And not merely because it's easier to appreciate the quality and grace of Valentino's looks on film, but because of the kind of story it is. I think it's all too easy to mistake where most of the attraction lies, if you go by hearsay.

Franklin lists the sequel, The Son of the Sheik, and I would agree it is a better movie (still not saying much...) but it is the original that is truly significant--the more so as it encapsulates a philosophy that would shortly be abandoned in romance on screen and in the books.

The story is the epitome of romantic (as in commercial romance) cliché: a headstrong young Western woman foolishly attracts the dangerous notice of a smouldering "native" tribal chief; he kidnaps her, apparently with the intention of seducing her; in the process they fall in love. So far so well known.

What's refreshingly different here, compared to everything that was to follow the degeneration of the formula (which I would argue is visible already in Valentino's sequel), is that the man isn't a callous, brutal macho but a sensitive lover who, as another character (male!) points out to the girl, is "tender and faithful".

Sensitivity, tenderness and sexual faithfulness have never been characteristics men in general liked or praised in other men or themselves. In fact, they are typically seen as feminine traits--or traits desirable in women, not men.

This underscores and is in turn underscored by Valentino's ambiguous, androgynous beauty. Not only does he look "pretty", or more beautiful-like-a-woman than men usually do, he is actually credited with certain "feminine" virtues.

It's as little a wonder that women went crazy for him/his avatars, as that men hated him.

David Thomson sounds uneasy writing about Valentino, although at least he isn't openly scornful as some other. I don't expect straight critics can be fair. What can they even see? How ridiculous is it, really, that someone as hollow and spineless as John Wayne gets propped up into a symbol of masculinity, but the man who turned on millions of women--and still can!--gets derided as a "powderpuff"? (If Thomson's report is accurate, Valentino was deeply hurt by the attacks of this kind directed at him, even on deathbed.)

He wasn't a great actor, not even a good one. No one singled out his smarts or character. In the stills, he appears pleasantly symmetrical enough, but not exactly earth-shakingly so, certainly not uniquely ("pretty"-looking heavily made up male actors are a dime a dozen).

I say that what made Valentino as much as his body did, was the story of The Sheik, in which a man loves like women do--tenderly, faithfully. For the first and last time, ironically enough.

>6 LolaWalser: - In fact, they are typically seen as feminine traits--or traits desirable in women, not men.

I'm wondering if you could be looking at a point in time when that was just becoming so in popular culture? I'm sometimes surprised when reading stuff from the early years of the last century to come across a passing reference to men or boys walking arm in arm; something that had completely gone out of fashion by my childhood in the '50s--I can't even picture what exactly it would have entailed. I suspect that somewhere in the first half of the 20thC was a new self-consciousness about 'manliness'. Possibly as a reaction to advances in independence of women in the Great War?

>7 alaudacorax:

Yes, I think you are right. And this were still relatively early days of the medium--the medium with a unique capability of projecting images of desirability to millions of people at a time--so there was still some competition between various ideas on representation.

But I think we can date the women's defeat about what sort of men women are supposed to like to the 1920s--coincidentally enough, cca Valentino's death.

I'm entering CDs and blasting Edith Piaf at the moment so not thinking very clearly--but what a very interesting topic it is, to be sure.

Throwing out an aphorism to unpack by-and-by: all cinema is queer.

There's another movie and star I'd discuss in this context: Clive Brook in Sternberg's fantastic Underworld, 1927.

I think that's the last time a "Valentino-Sheik" lover-type beat the "manly-man" brutal macho to the girl.

>8 LWMusic:

'Bull Weed'???!!!

>9 alaudacorax:

Whoa! I never read past 'Bull Weed' before rushing to post, but ... 'Rolls Royce'????!!!!

Don't be a palooka, get hep to the jive of the Jazz Age, my man! Rolls was a right Sheik--just ask Feathers.

Peter Pan, 1924--what an utterly delightful movie. If you have any interest in fantasy, special effects, puppetry, you must see it. Betty Bronson gives a legendary performance as Peter, the boy who would not grow up, who was "youth!" and "JOY!", as he tells Captain Hook (an equally marvellous Ernest Torrance).

Peter and Wendy



Tinkerbell trying to open the drawer with Peter's shadow



Tiger Lily--played by Anna May Wong!!--likes Peter too...



So many great sets and scene, tho', it's impossible to choose--the Lost Boys, the mermaids, Hook and his pirates, the Darlings' nursery and dog (costume role, as is Hook's nemesis the crocodile)... just a wonderful movie all around.

Another great movie, the 1920 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde with John Barrymore, still gorgeous and un-ravaged by alcohol etc.

Nita Naldi the sultry tavern dancer tempts the goody-goody Dr. Jekyll with sins unnameable...



and in order to indulge, he creates a conscience-free alter ego



Barrymore's transformation and double role are possibly the greatest such committed to film, however great some other interpretations have been (Fredric March has his champions, I admire also Jean-Louis Barrault's version for Jean Renoir). It's not just the virtuosity of the makeup, I think there hasn't been another Jekyll so angelic, rosy and beautiful, as Barrymore's. Thus the contrast is especially shocking. Every Jekyll tells us he's good, but here we see an angel falling, that (apocryphal) rose Sade is supposed to have dragged through the mud whilst chuckling horribly.

Another one off Franklin's list, The Birth of a Nation, 1915.

This was only the second time I saw it--the first being over thirty years ago. Back then, in my earlish teens, I was a completely naive viewer (regarding the film, I only knew Griffith was a "great director"), but at least knew my American history in broad strokes... and so was completely bewildered by the sequences of Reconstruction, with black people shown as dissolute criminals etc. and the glorification of the KKK.

On second viewing the shock is even greater, I mean, it's far more glaring what a strange, evil fantasy this movie is. It's truly... bizarre.

I'm not enough of a cinephile to go unconditionally into transports at technical virtuosity and whatnot at the expense of the story. There's no doubt this is still amazingly watchable and everyone knows what an effective propaganda piece it was--it engages the viewer easily. But to me, at least, it fails grossly as film art because the integrity of the story does matter.

That it also fails as culture, as politics, as history goes without saying.

I got the Kino Video 3 DVD set from 2011 with two versions of the restored film, documentary extras, and footage of Griffith talking about the film with Walter Huston plus some other contemporary material. The third disc includes all the shorts Griffith made on the topic of the American civil war before 1915.

One of the extras, a documentary, includes some of this footage from the KKK rally in Washington in 1925 by British Pathé:

Item title reads - 40,000 Ku Klux Klansmen clad in full regalia, make wonderful spectacle. Washington, USA (U.S.A.).

There's no doubt that without Griffith's movie there would not have been a KKK revival in the 20th century.

>14 LolaWalser: Just to add to his infamy, Griffith was a complete troll. He’d shot hundreds of shorts, including ones that were anti-Klan. Birth of a Nation was his first epic, he wanted a lot of attention, so he deliberately chose Thomas Dixon’s book (and play), which was already a huge flashpoint. He didn’t particularly like the Klan himself, but he didn’t care. He was completely cynical and manipulative. He knew a movie based on that material would be hugely controversial and bring in the crowds.

I think, if you want a sense of Griffith's technical virtuosity, Intolerance is a far more watchable film. Also, as an aside, Anita Loos and Todd Browning worked on the title cards.

>15 robertajl:

Oh my, hundreds of shorts--the set I borrowed included maybe 8-10. But yeah, even in that subset the focus changed, sometimes on the Union sometimes on the Confederacy side. Judging from that, I'd say Griffith presents both the white Northerners and Southerners as essentially good and noble in the shorts as much as in The Birth.... It's the depiction of black people that ruins The Birth... IMO beyond repair.

Oddly enough, Intolerance was the first Griffith movie I'd seen (as well as my first feature-length silent movie). It was all part of the retrospective during my first year's membership in the local arthouse ever--once in high school, you qualified. (No notion of grading movies for youngsters either--happy 1980s!) It made a huge impression, I remember writing an impassioned essay in my diary about The Root Of All Evil and How To Save The World etc. :)

But, as it happens, although I'd see other Griffith movies when properly adult, Intolerance is another I haven't seen since. It's next of his for sure (Broken Blossoms, Orphans of the Storm and Way Down East I've all seen more recently).

Great tidbit about Loos and Browning. I read her bio (is there more than one?) but don't remember her so employed.

>16 LolaWalser: Loos writes about working for Griffith in A girl like I (and I think there was quite a lot else about the early days of cinema, but it's a long time since I've read it).

Aha... I'd read Kiss Hollywood Good-by. Very little memory of it, though.

Sherlock Jr., 1924, Buster Keaton

What can I say that hasn't been said a million times before... between Méliès and this, it's practically everything movies would ever do. I'd seen only bits of it before, for instance the scene where Keaton disappears into the necktie-vendor's suitcase... but the rapid-edit of backgrounds, where he freezes in one position in one scene and then continues from the same position in a completely different surrounding, or that magnificent ride on the motorcycle... those made me hoot with gleeful astonishment. And the "meta" of it, as when Keaton's character takes cue from the movie lovers for his own actions with his girl--and then is stumped by the quick-cut from kisses and embraces to the final scene with two babies on the actor's lap... wonderful.

And another Keaton off the list, The General. Pure brilliance. As with Harold Lloyd's movies, there's a special charge in knowing the actors did all that tremendous physical work themselves (Keaton most of all). The inventiveness of the gags and the daring and precision of the stunts elevate Keaton's work to a genre of visual poetry like no other.

The Lost World, 1925--based on Conan Doyle's book, and featuring the author himself in the intro!

So THIS is where Godzilla and similar got their start! Is it a spoiler if I say there's a brontosaurus rampaging through London at the end? Not to shame anyone, budget constraints being what they are, but o weh, Doctor Who's Invasion of the Dinosaurs, a movie from 1925 shows you up, and how.

Actually, the model work is brilliant--the dinosaurs not only blink but have facial expressions--snarling, curling their lips etc.

I also love the implication that the escaped brontosaurus is Nessie (from the Thames to the Loch Ness--how hard can it be...)