Category Archives: Silent

Black and White, Comedy, Imaginary French Cinema, Silent

#65 – Vélo du diable (Devil’s Bicycle, The)

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(1920, Fr, 27 min, b/w) Dir Patrice Vasqueaux.

Friendly postman Alain kisses his wife good day and makes to leave for his rounds on his bicycle but upon leaving his house finds, in dismay, that it has been stolen. Thankfully a passing bicycle selling gypsy offers him an astonishing discount for a new one which Alain can’t help but take. The salesman – it is revealed to us once Alain is gone – is none other than Beelzebub himself and the bicycle he sold Alain is demonically possessed. Poor Alain soon finds himself flying through the countryside at a terrifying speed, flinging his letters left and right as he vainly tries to do his job regardless and setting into motion all kinds of catastrophes. Due to a Rube Goldbergian confluence of events spurred by a flying parcel the devil gets his comeuppance by the end. The ingenuity of the filmmakers in realising the hilarious accidents caused by the careering postman is to be applauded. Though never mentioned by the man, this was undoubtedly an influence on a young Jacques Tati (in particular, of course, on his short film L’École des facteurs) and it’s a miracle to have survived in the pristine condition in which I saw it.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Action/Adventure, Black and White, Drama, Imaginary British Cinema, Silent

#56 – Captain Clock & Co.

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(1938, GB, 42 min, b/w) Dir Albert Clock. Cast Albert Clock, Samuel Teats, the Workers of Yew Street Pot Factory.

By 1938 the film world had been taken over by sound and even holdouts like Japan had been converted. The islands of resistance were few. One such island was that of Northern Irish auteur Albert Clock who quietly produced sixty films from his base in the city of Belfast from 1910 to 1942, all of them silent. “Sound perverts the purity of the medium,” he once said and while the ideal is shared by many, it seems unusual for Clock to be invoking the notion of purity when his films are of the quality he achieved. Albert Clock was the last in the line of the once great Clock family who sold his inheritance so that he could realise his dream of becoming to Belfast what the studios were for Hollywood. The only difference was that while the studios made films made by lots of different people, Clock’s studio had only the one artist – Albert Clock himself. On the one hand Clock had a firm grip on the medium technically, deploying all the tricks that would have Griffith revered but lacking the populist touch for sure, being that all of his films depicted usually made up tales from Clock family history. In Captain Clock & Co his grandfather (played by Clock) is portrayed fighting the Zulu (local pot makers in blackface) at the Battle of Blueford (which is made up). Despite the variable quality of the acting and the fact that the battles take place mostly on the beaches of Murlough Bay (for the sand, presumably) it’s stirring stuff with the kind of grit and realism that would be commendable were it in the service of actual history.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Black and White, Drama, Imaginary US Cinema, Silent

#55 – Lodge-House, The

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(1915, US, 65 min, b/w) Dir Rudolph Henry Barrett. Cast Thoda Deane, Thomas Meecham, Alice Batt.

One of only six films made in the space of eighteen months by the unknown Thoda Deane who was being positioned by upstart company Star Film Productions as a ‘vamp’ rival to the likes of Theda Bara, Valeska Suratt and so on. Unlike the other five The Lodge-House was a success, even inspiring a minor craze in ‘cat’ collars (although I’m not sure what these are exactly). Unfortunately for Deane that success didn’t transmute into popularity for herself and soon enough she was, like so many others, tossed aside for the next in line. With all prints lost pretty much everything we know about The Lodge-House comes from posters and lobby cards that survive and there aren’t many of those. The most substantial source is an issue of Film Explosion found in a Long Island coal bunker in 1982 which includes a summary of the plot as such: “Mean Deane is at it again and this time she has Meek Tommy Meecham in her sights. Can he resist? Can YOU? Sweet Alice Batt will have to fight for her man in the ‘Lodge-House’ of SIN that she calls HOME! She demands PEARLS! She demands DIAMONDS! She demands THE WORLD!!” As you’ll admit, that’s some pretty vague stuff. The pictures show a pretty boilerplate melodrama of the day enlivened by the striking Deane with her slim face and big, dark, cavernous eyes and the set of the Lodge-House itself, which looks like an Orientalist’s opium nightmare.

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Black and White, Drama, Imaginary German Cinema, Silent

#16 – Götz von Berlichingen

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(1927, Ger, 156 min original (44 min surviving), b/w) Dir Lupu Speyer. Cast Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Wera Engels, Alfred Abel.

The product, like the same years’ Metropolis, of the late twenties film budget excesses and, also like Metropolis, a less than resounding success at the box office. The two film’s paths have diverged since, with Metropolis accumulating praise and restorations while Götz von Berlichingen has never been easily available in any format. This reviewer, for example, has only seen it by virtue of the shockingly truncated copy held as part of the collection of a wealthy aficionado (whose name must remain anonymous). Loosely based on Goethe’s play of the same name, the surviving film includes the most famous parts of von Berlichingen’s life such as the loss of his arm by cannonball (rendered in full gory glory) and its replacement with one made of iron. In a move typical of the liberal national mood of the time, von Berlichingen’s famous statement during the siege of his castle at Jagsthausen – “…sag’s ihm, er kann mich im Arsche lecken!” – is included in full as a title card, something unthinkable before or after. It is perhaps this, in addition to the films irreverent attitude to a person who had both submarines and a Panzergrenadier division named after him by the Nazis, that meant that it was suppressed in the years that followed as ‘degenerate art’. It’s not a perfect film – at least as far as can be judged in its current form – but its well shot, well acted and deserves to be seen by more than the occasional dedicated hunter.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms