ROLL THE REEL: THE ROATING TWENTIES - 1927

There's a fantastic documentary about the emergence of grunge back in 1991 called 1991: The Year Punk Broke.  This post has nothing to do with that film.

However, 1927 is one of the years where cinema broke so I guess that's why I decided to include that little bit.  Or maybe it was the complaint of one reader that I don't have interesting introductions (pardon me for not having jetpacks like the intro to Thunderball).  Whatever the reason, it's time to get beyond that and step right into 1927 which is by far one of the most important years in movies!

I.     WINGS (AUGUST 12th, 1927)

Directed by William A. Wellman

     I personally find it pretty awesome that the first movie and the last movie to win the Best Picture Oscar are the only two silent films on the list.  Wings is the first big winner at the first Academy Awards and to many it stops there, but this film has a lot more to it than just that.  It's actually good (it's not Slumdog Millionaire or worst of all Titanic).

     With the inception of talkies back in '27, I'm gonna focus on some of the last great silent films from 1927.  This film broke grounds in terms of what you could show on screen and how they were shown.  This movie has Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen sharing a smooch!  It's got Clara Bow's boobs!  And it won an Oscar?  Controversial subject matter won an Oscar?  1927 must have been some strange, alien world where artistic talent is recognized and not subject to the scrutiny of prude soccer moms whose husbands haven't touched them in years so they take their weird sexual frustration out on us.  ANYWAYS!  This movie also revolutionized the way one could operate a camera.  The fluid, realistic flight sequences made some audiences gasp, gave a few WWI veterans a delusional bout of PTSD, and made a few of the friskier teenagers in the back think they were officially in the mile high club.

     Wings marked the end of true recognition for American silent cinema, but it was a fine note to end on.  Plus, along with It and Mantrap, exhibited Clara Bow during the peak of her career.

II.     METROPOLIS (JANUARY 10th, 1927)

Directed by Fritz Lang

      Fritz Lang is the King of Weird.  In terms of film, this guy's like Klaus Nomi's biological grandfather (his grandmother being David Bowie).  Metropolis is one of Lang's best, one of his weirdest, and perhaps his most important.

      One thing that a lot of moviegoers don't pay much heed to is sets.  Sets are one of the most complicated and important aspects of filmmaking.  Sets determine almost everything about a scene or a shot and Metropolis is one of those movies that defines what a great set is.  Taking a nod from other German Expressionist films, Lang and his set crew built sets (that's right, Fritz Lang was such a total bad ass that he helped build the sets so no one could screw it up) that are nightmarish, angled, and some of the sickest realizations of pre-Jetsons retrofuturism ever put on film.  This wild surrealist dream-like silent film experience is so revered that German techno band Kraftwerk released a new restoration of it with a complete electronica soundtrack.  When I say this film is golden folks, I mean it makes Saddam Hussein's palace look like the dilapidated cardboard box that Clint Eastwood was raised in by rabid wolves.

      The film deals with the then-current rise of fascism in Germany, as well as the pitfalls of capitalism and Soviet communism.  Metropolis is one of the first movies to give some academic/intellectual legitimacy to film, but especially science fiction and horror cinema.  That is why we geeks (like Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, and Stanley Kubrick) love it so much.  When a card-carrying member of the complete nerd community (such as myself) watches this movie, think of it as being akin to a Buddhist watching Siddhartha Gautama strumming out a few verses of WAR's "Why Can't We Be Friends?" on the old keytar.

III.     NAPOLEON (APRIL 7th, 1927)

Directed by Abel Gance

      Abel Gance is the greatest director of the Silent Era.  Rednecks and other racial purists might boast about D. W. Griffith; hippies and hipsters may talk about some weird Indian woman who recorded a Bengal Tiger sleeping for 8 hours and call it art; normal people who aren't easily categorized by wretched, terrible savages like me might say Cecil B. DeMille because they can't think of anyone else; then again they might also say "get away from me with that tape recorder you strange little shell of a man and quit asking me about movies", but that only happened to me once.  Movie people who know movies and love movies as if movies were some weird appendage flying out of their heads know that no one was able to do what Abel Gance did. Napoleon is this brilliant director's magnum opus.

      Napoleon tells the story of this dictator you probably haven't heard of: Genghis Kahn.  No, I'm just kidding it tells the story of everyone's favorite dwarf with a Freudian issue.  It weaves Napoleon's tale dramatically and theatrically, but none of  that would have been possible without two things: 1) A stone cold beast of a lead in Albert Dieudonné and 2) Some of the most innovative technical work to ever be spit out of a projector.  This movie has some of the first fluid moving camera work that wouldn't be seen again until movies like Citizen Kane and Paths of Glory.  Gance employed every handheld, dolly, tracking, and tinting technique that leave audiences in awe and film buffs crying dearly for their sweet, old mothers.  This is another one of those films that I'd love to say more but I'd rather have this beautiful pillar of French/all cinema speak for itself.

      Napoleon didn't gain the recognition it deserved back in the day because its technical beauty was beyond comprehension in these early, golden days of cinema.  Yet today in the modern world, it is revered and respected as one of the greatest pieces of all time.

     Well fair readers, we have to leave the Jazz Age in favor of the Great Depression (which makes this sound a lot worse than it is), but the effect of these early days will stay with us forever.  Especially with The Artist winning Best Picture, these movies are gaining more notice than ever before and deservedly so.  But now, with a tear in our eyes, a song in our hearts, and excitement in our unmentionables, we leave the Roaring Twenties for the 1930's: The Cinema Dust Bowl.  Next time here on Bad Craziness it's

1932!

     For a better look at the cinema of 1927 be sure to check out these movies folks OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES:

It

The Jazz Singer (the first talkie!)

My Best Girl

The End of St. Petersburg

     That's all from Bad Craziness!  Follow me on Twitter and like the Facebook Page for literally TOO MUCH information on movies!  Dancing Days are here again hombres and remember as always,

~Viva amigos,

      ~D. Merrick

ROLL THE REEL: THE ROARING TWENTIES - 1925

1925

    We're half way through the Jazz Age and film is on a fiery, dangerous trail hellbent on changing the world for good.  Movies were moving so fast it'd make your head spin with such centrifugal force, you may be mistaken for a blender.  1925 marked a year in innovation comparable to the invention of string cheese (meaning it was a groundbreaking, historic, celebrated time).  In the world of cinema circa 1925, things were like this in the words of a better man than, I fair readers:

I.     THE LOST WORLD (FEBRUARY 2ND & JUNE 22ND, 1925)

Directed by Harry Hoyt

      There are very few films that can say they've influenced as many movies as The Lost World.  And The Lost World can't say it because it's a silent film GET IT???  Anyways, before my comedy gets any worse, let me spin you why this movie changed so much.

      The effect that this non-Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation has had on visuals is equivalent -- if not beyond -- the effect that Star Wars or The Matrix has had.  The stop motion/Claymation we laugh at with love in our hearts during Christmas time when we watch Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer all began with this movie.  In fact, the special effects designer for another film famous for its stop motion (the original RKO King Kong), Willis O'Brien, got his start by pioneering his method in The Lost World.  It was so frightening back in the day that people became frenzied at the likeness, running out of the theater without realizing they didn't live in prehistoric times/an uncharted region of South America.  The interactions between the stop-motion dinosaurs and the actual actors was unprecedented until the 1940's with televised cartoons.
      This story of adventure, romance, and prehistoric animals shocked and exhilarated audiences; propelling cinema to new heights and probably causing several heart attacks in its wake.


II.     THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (DECEMBER 21st, 1925)

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein

      "That movie with the stairs and the old lady, right?"  To many in America, The Battleship Potemkin is a classic but they don't know why or they don't know it at all.  This Soviet propaganda film changed a lot about cinema in terms of themes and presentation.  Think like Quentin Tarantino only instead of snappy dialogue and Spaghetti Western references, it's got themes of Bolshevism and history that never happened.

      Potemkin was one of the first movies to have a discourse on violence.  It celebrates the death of a Czarist ship captain at the hands of a mutinous crew, but when the Cossacks shoot at will into a crowd, nobody's very happy about it.  Besides these philosophical quandaries, the film also revolutionized the "tracking shot".  You know how in movies the camera moves in sync with the action of a scene?  Like in the 1998 Godzilla when Matthew Broderick and the mini-Godzillas are chasing each other around adorably in Madison Square Garden?  Or in every shot of a Michael Bay movie?  Okay, that's a bad example, people shouldn't be watching Michael Bay movies.  But tracking shots are one of the basic "variant" shots in movies, and in the famous Steps scene of The Battleship Potemkin we find one of the most influential uses of all time (which is why it's the link up above).

      Every pretentious film school loser may talk about this film like it's God's gift to the Earth (but they use God figuratively, religion's too mainstream) and it's not; it's Sergei Eisenstein's and our good friends in the old USSR's propaganda office.  This movie showed people the value in moving the camera and using production as well as the plot line to introduce and analyze themes, thus setting the grounds for the study of film as an art form.

III.      THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (NOVEMBER 25th, 1925)

Directed by Rupert Julian

      No, sorry folks, this version is not the one with Gerard Butler.  This version (the original version) of Phantom stars the man of a thousand faces himself, Lon Chaney.  In one of his most revered roles (plus he's alongside one of the most beautiful ladies of cinema, Mary Philbin), Chaney dons the mask of the Phantom, but when it's stripped away, cinema changed forever.

      The Phantom of the Opera revolutionized a few things.  For starters, Chaney's innovative costume and make up gave the art of film design a greater depth than it had before.  On the same production note, Phantom changed the way we see movies.  To add to the theatrical and Expressionist vibes of the film, editors Lois Weber and Maurice Pivar and cinematographer Virgil Miller worked together to change the way we see movies.  While filming, Miller put colored gels on the lens of the camera to change the tint of the scene.  In some scenes in fact, Technicolor was used in the process thus making The Phantom of the Opera one of the first color films.  To bring out the colors, Miller used extreme lighting techniques (seen in Expressionist horror films like Dr. Caligari and classic film noirs such as The Big Combo or The Third Man) to accentuate the look of each shot.  In the editing room, Pivar and Weber sharpened the look of each frame and used dramatic cuts to make the whole thing work together.  In the words of a corny educational children's program: and the rest is history!

      Phantom may not be the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical that we all know (meaning it's actually really good), but with its history of experimentation and some of the most remarkable performances from the Silent Era, we here at Bad Craziness believe it's an enduring legend and one of our favorite films.

      For an even better look at 1925, check out these movies too readers!:
      - The Gold Rush
      - The Big Parade
      - Ben-Hur
      - The Freshman
      - Orochi

      That's it for 1925 folks, next time it's on to

1927!

      Follow me on Twitter and like the Facebook Page for your movie fix all you sick addicted junkies!  Happy Thursday hombres and as always,

~Viva amigos,

      ~D. Merrick