Silent Classic

Shadows
1922 / B & W / 90 minutes

People who never watch anything in black and white regard fans of silent movies with the same bemused tolerance with which they regard dorks who read for pleasure  and weavers with looms in their dining rooms.

Can fans of flickers blame them?

Silent movies have dated morality and silly histrionics. The actors and actresses seem to look the same because of goony make-up and weird lighting. With stories so melodramatic, the pace so slow, the literary values so low, taste-makers of the 1920s like Dorothy Parker gave movies the same short shrift they gave radio plays.
 
Another turn-off for us nowadays is the unabashed prejudice typical of that era. The full-length film Shadows was released in 1922 has the usual guff. A Caucasian actor – Lon Chaney – is cast to play an Asian. The inter-titles have pidgin English – “velly likee.”  Chaney has the character walk stooped over as if he’d been bending in rice paddies all his life instead of working as a ship’s cook and laundry man.

On the plus side, producers were testing audience prejudice by having a Chinese character in a sympathetic, even heroic role, whereas most Chinese characters at that time were diabolical villains or other Yellow Peril types.

Lon Chaney, known for his skill with pantomime and make-up, plays Yen Sin, a Chinese man who washes up at the small fishing village of Urkey, Maine after his ship goes down in a storm. The locals send him laundry to do, but they shun him because he’s not Christian. With his sweet nature, he wins over the bad boys who hassle him, though he needs the protection of the new preacher in town to make the older thugs back off. The new preacher, disappointed that he didn’t land a missionary job, sets his sights on converting Yen Sin. His example does have a profound effect on Yen Sin.

Like members of visible minorities must in order to stay in one piece, he keenly observes people around him, watching behavior and monitoring currents of feeling that might boil over into dangerous behavior. The range of attitude and deed he notes makes us wonder if the writers forgot anything: love versus malice, compassion versus pride, fallibility versus dignity, marriage versus spousal abuse, racial prejudice versus tolerance, forgiving friendship versus jealous betrayal, and religious hypocrisy versus too fervent faith.

As for the acting, we post-moderns must endure exaggerated dramatic gestures designed to attract and hold the attention of unsophisticated movie fans of the 1920s. The preacher stares in stricken distress. While ruminating, he holds his fists to his temples. He sinks to his knees in exhausted anxiety. His wife can put her hands out in no other way but imploringly. Pee-yew. Like I said, no wonder Alexander Woolcott held his nose at the movies.

It doesn’t do to go on so about a style of acting of bygone days. In fact, Lon Chaney plays the part of Yen Sin with a lot of heart and conviction. As the preacher’s wife, the marvelously named Sympathy, Marguerite De La Motte is more restrained and less sickeningly winsome than many actresses of her day. Being stone beautiful helps too. Harrison Ford (no, not the same – how the hell could he be?) as the preacher brings to mind the tormented minister in The Scarlet Letter.

The scenes near the beginning, when Yen Sin washes up, surprise us with their careful composition and drama. The dramatic look in this scene, sadly, is not sustained and not terribly arresting, though scenes and artifacts look real enough to persuade me it really is the early 1920s. One odd thing is that the preacher’s daughter does not seem to grow. That is, we see her as a newborn, a year goes by, and she is still quite small, being carried around in her mother’s arms. Little kids grow faster than that, don’t they?

The full length Shadows has believable performances, marvelous visuals, and themes related to social problems and lofty philosophies.

Le ali della sfinge

The Wings of the Sphinx by Andrea Camilleri
ISBN-10: 0143116606

In the eleventh book the gears are starting to grind. The plot manages to be both familiar and dreary with – again! – the theme of globalization as racket with the vulnerable being exploited by the ruthless. Yeh, yeh, we know. Even the meals are not described with usual voluptuousness of previous outings. But then perhaps the love trouble with Livia has put Salvo off his feed. Or maybe it’s me – this novel was after all nominated for various awards.

Memoir of a Scholar

On Familiar Terms by Donald Keene
ISBN-10: 1568361297

Donald Keene studied Japanese in the naval intelligence during WWII. In this interesting memoir, he talks about his scholar’s journeys in New York, Japan, and England. He tells stories about the luminaries of post-war Japanese literature such as Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe. Readers into Japanese literature or autobiographies of people with unique careers will enjoy this book.

Hollywood in the Forties Mystery

The Case of the Solid Key

by Anthony Boucher

Fans of vintage mysteries express regret that Anthony Boucher (same sound as “voucher”) wrote only three mysteries starring his private eye hero, Fergus O’Breen. Like Nero Wolfe, O’Breen is less a character than a collection of quirks. He drives a canary yellow roadster and his gaudy wardrobe makes people think the circus is in town. To think he needs to pace, so when he twists his ankle in this one, he feels hemmed in and bummed out.  He has a super-human capacity for adult beverages.  A well-read scholar, he calls himself an “introspective extrovert with manic-depressive tendencies.” With his eccentricities, red hair and larger than life personality then, we may safely conclude he’s indeed a son of the Emerald Isle.

The second of Boucher’s trio of mysteries, The Case of the Solid Key, was released in 1941. The setting is Hollywood. Not the glamorous City of Dreams showcasing big stars and major studios, but the Tinsel Town of No Pity. The characters are mainly young actors and actresses scrambling to get noticed by agents and talent spotters. They toil at menial jobs to pay the rent and put on plays in a little theater which is mainly a racket run by a sharper. O’Breen’s sister Maureen (really – Maureen O’Breen) is the Head of Publicity for Metropolis Pictures so we get fascinating descriptions of a film studio as work environment during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Boucher must have been writing about milieu – young actors vs. big studios  -  that he knew intimately because setting and characters ring true.

The mystery unfolds gradually, with the murder occurring about half-way into the book. Usually this would be a problem for me, a guy that likes the corpse discovered by the end of chapter one. But, as I hinted, the authentic setting and skilled characterization more than make up for the lack of detecting.

Period touches and heavy themes add interest. Boucher tosses into the mix a spoiled rich actress grousing about the socialistic ways of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and lefty theater managers that connive to make the little theater into a worker-owned cooperative. But Boucher was by no means a heathenish New Dealer because at the end of the story the perp discusses sin in terms of reason, free will, personal responsibility, and the voluntariness of ignorance.  While the Catholic theology takes only a couple of pages of the book, it will surely perk up readers who re-read Chesterton’s Father Brown tales.

This vintage mystery is well-worth reading. I can see why discerning readers wish Boucher had written more mysteries and not turned his attention to science fiction and criticism.  He is remembered so fondly, in fact, that the Anthony Awards are given at each annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention.

When it flies, someone dies!

The Bat
1959 / B & W / 80 minutes

Cornelia Van Gorder, a writer of mysteries and thrillers, rents a mansion named The Oaks in a small town. People warn her that everybody who has ever lived in the manse has accordingly suffered tragedy but she pooh-poohs their fears. The good citizens, in fact, live in fear of a local serial killer known as The Bat. They should be also worried about the fact that, as in most towns in noir movies, its best citizens – in this case the banker and the doctor – are the worst kind of greed-heads and psychopaths.

This movie works as a crime drama, creepy old house story and slasher movie. The psycho killer is masked and wear a glove with sharp spikes on the fingers designed to rip out the jugular and other main cables of the human body. We don’t know his motivations excerpt for the rather pedestrian incentive of finding a big stash of money in The Oaks. He just has to cut his way through four women to get at it. Though the violence against women is graphic and upsetting, the movie is not gory.

There’s a gratuitous murder that’s rather a symptom of the muddled elements, jerky pace, and slightly confusing unfolding of events.  These flaws, strangely enough, make us a bit more alert, eager not to miss something. Agnes Moorehead as the mystery writer plays her usual grande dame; she played the same character as Endora, Samantha’s mother in Bewitched. Vincent Price, as a doctor who has conveniently forgotten his Hippocratic Oath, is his usual charming cad.