A BOLOGNA DIARY - IL CINEMA RITROVATO DAY 4 - Daisuke Ito, Henry King, Paule Delsol - Updated critics' chart

Kinuyo Tanaka, Masahiko Tsugawa, Shishi No Za/ The Lion's Throne 

And finally a Daisuke Ito movie that justifies in spades all the attention...and that was notwithstanding a false start when it turned out the 35mm had been laced into the projector back to front. Record minimum time to get it fixed and we sat enthralled by Shishi No Za/ The Lion's Throne (Japan, 1953). Set in the 1850s it's a drama about a family who present a classic Noh play once every generation. The young son who has a crucial part, is shaking with nerves and isn't helped by his mother, played by the luminous Kinuyo Tanaka, whose attempts to get him ready involve, basically, child abuse. Finally a reason to see why Ito is admired and another reason to regret missing the three silent films in the retrospective, the period when Ito was apparently at his peak.

But the day began with a viewing of a film it's taken me my lifetime to see, Henry King's Tol'able David (USA, 1921) starring Richard Barthelmess and presented as part of a strand curated by Tamara Shvediuk devoted to "Matinee Idols: Women's Male Stars". Not all sure of the syntax there but we get the idea as we are offered silent movies starring Rudolph Valentino, Wallace Reid, Thomas Meighan, and the aforementioned Barthelmess. I recall missing the movie at a MUFS Classic night and its taken  60+ years to make up the oversight. It's a wonderful movie, made even more wonderful here by Tamara's excellent intro and John Sweeney's fine piano accompaniment.

Then there was Paule Delsol's La Derive/Drift from 1964, an early post-New Wave movie, a rarity in being directed by a woman in the male-dominated French industry. (What national indutry wasn't male dominated when you come to think of it?). The film was apparently not appreciated even by the French censors who slapped ban on it for under 18s. Dick Prowse would have banned it back in the day if Erwin Rado or David Stratton had attempted to bring it in for an MFF or SFF screening. The ubiquitous "low moral tone" category which was employed to ban films where people had a lot of casual sex would have been activated. Its a terrific little movie and the crowd in the Arlecchino loved it.

Updated opinion chart below.

Film	Geoff Gardner	Spiro Economopoulos	Ross Barnard
L’Innocente (Luchino Visconti)		****
Kuroi Junin No Onna/Ten Black Women (Kon Ichikawa)	*	***
Ten Seconds to Hell (Robert Aldrich)		***	***
Osho /The Chess Master(Daisuke Ito)	*
Amma Ariyan (John Abraham)	*
Geru No Kobi/The Servant’s Neck (Daisuke Ito	***
Oborokago/The Inner Palace Conspiracy (Daisuke Ito)	***
Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra)			***
Sunrise (F W Murnau)			****
Night Nurse (William A Wellman)			***
The Overcoat (Grigory Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg)			*
La Bugiarda (Luigi Comencini)			***
Putney Swope (Robert Downey)			***
Eight Girls in a Boat (Richard Wallace)	*		***
The Devils (Ken Russell)			****
Mirages de Paris (Feodor Ocep)	**
The Cycle (Dariush Mehrjui)	****
Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher)			***
La Derive (Paule Delsol)	***		**

 

On Blu-ray - David Hare anticipates the new German edition of THE GOLD RUSH (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1925)

I’ve just ordered this German Arthaus 4K of last year's centenary restoration from Bologna of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. They very wisely dodged the 72 minute 1942 reissue with a new score and Chaplin’s own horrible, maudlin narration track. Like the wiser heads at Criterion ten years ago the decision was made to basically tell the Chaplin estate‘s insistence on solely supporting the 1942 abortion to fuck off. Happily in 2025 all parties re-proposed that choice.

This new restoration does several quite radical things. Apart from meticulous correction of jiitter, tears, emulsion damage and frame skipping, all of which were still there in the previous restoration, they made the fascinating and radical decision to print the frame right back to the full exposure aperture corners. This was originally cropped slightly to avoid consistent frame edge damage. Now as you can see in the video comparison clip, the exposed image is wider by maybe 5% and the full exposure is clean and visible. I think it’s fascinating. 

Anyway given German Arthaus/Canal has jumped the gun on Canal and Criterion who will release next year. I am happy to jump the gun with them. My order is due before December 31.

NOIR NOVEMBER IN BRISBANE - Joel Archer presents CHARMING UNDESIRABLES

 

Brisbane's own supercinephile Joel Archer is back with another special selection of classic noir. He writes: we are thrilled to announce we will be returning in Mid-November 2025 for Brisbane's 4th Annual Film Noir Festival: Noir November 2025: Charming Undesirables. 

 

Noir November 2025: Charming Undesirables is a celebration of one of the most edgy, dark, moody and atmospheric slices of Classic Hollywood. From Friday 14th November to Sunday 16th November 2025 at Palace Cinemas James St we will be screening no less than 10 films from this iconic genre. Two of them will be a Mystery Noir Double Bill screening in the heart of Last Man Standing Brewery in Milton in between the pipes and the barrels. We are also introducing a new segment this year called Noir before Noir in which we highlight films that have a distinct dark style to them from the 1920 + 1930's before the typical Film Noir Cycle. 

 

The selection this year includes:

IN A LONELY PLACE (Nicholas Ray, USA, 1950)

COVER UP (Alfred E Green, USA, 1949)

BEWARE MY LOVELY (Harry Horner, USA, 1952)

THE BIG HEAT (Fritz Lang, USA, 1953)

ANGEL FACE (Otto Preminger, 1952)

DANS LA NUIT (Charles Vanel, France, 1929)

THE SNIPER (Edward Dymytrk, USA, 1952)

KISS ME DEADLY (Robert Aldrich, USA, 1955)

We have tickets for each individual screenings but to experience the true scope of the festival you can't go past a Festival Pass you get access to all 8 films at Palace James St, a free Ticket to Last Man Standing Brewery Double Bill on Saturday 15th of November 2025, HardCover Book and more!

 

We encourage you to secure your pass before 24 October so you don't miss out on a HardCover book, any orders after 24 October may not include a HardCover Book. 

 

Below is the link to tickets and the Full Program for the weekend.... we are so excited to see you there! Come dressed up and enjoy a weekend of films that I can assure you are NOT on lacklustre streaming options. Noir November couldn’t be possible without the support of 4MBS Classic FM, Reel Moving Cinema & Last Man Standing Brewery Milton.

 

TO BUY TICKETS CLICK HERE

IL CINEMA RITROVATO - Pre-festival screenings slowly slip the event into gear...

Laurel & Hardy in Two Tars 

Il Cinema Ritrovato slowly slipped into gear since last Monday with some screenings at the remarkable Modernissimo Cinema If you had been in Bologna since Monday you could have seen among others King Vidor's The Big Parade, Ernst Lubitsch's One Hour With You, Lewis Milestone's Of Mice and Men and Luigi Comencini's Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole and evening screenings in the Piazza Maggiore of Comencini's Le Avventure di Pinocchio, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence and George Stevens' Woman of the Year. 

Yesterday they kicked off the selection from 1905 with a dozen short films. It was introduced, at length in Italian by Mariann Lewinsky and in English by Karl Wratschko. Karl let us know they had watched 'every film made in 1905' to make the selection and in case you think that was daunting, if they had decided to screen everything made that year it would take less than a day to get through them. The first program devoted to he strand Cinema in 1905, was focused on actualities, a little violent slapstick comedy (Les Farces de Toto Gate-Sauce), and a recording of a steeplechase horse race. That film, all seven minutes of it, clearly (from the varying numbers of horses approaching each fence) was an amalgam of the races of the day but did include four actors pretending to respond to various events. In a way that reminds us that the very first film made in Australia, The 1896 Melbourne Cup, featured not merely the first recording of the day but also the first acting performances and staging of scenes in an Australian movie. (That occurs when a man rushes into shot waving his hat and suddenly the crowd pick up his cue and wave theirs as well.)

That program was rounded out by a restored 1928 Laurel & Hardy Two Tars, part of a concerted effort to restore all the silent films made by the pair. There are DVD releases of the 1927 films they made and the 1928 films will be out soon. Two Tars is one of their films that quickly descends into ever escalating violent retribution. The pair pick up a couple of girls (funny jokes with a chewing gum dispenser) but the mayhem moves up many notches as they get out on the road and car after car is slowly demolished mostly by hand. Subtlety had yet to appear in their comedy. Pratfalls were the go...

Coline Serreau

That was followed by the first film in the series devoted to a retrospective of films by Coline Serreau. Serreau was introduced by Mariann Lewinsky who noted it was the first time she had ever introduced a living film-maker. Very important. Serreau's Chaos (2001),  was not known to me and apparently not to many in the audience. The film was screened on 35mm with subtitles under the screen which might indicate that it hasn't circulated widely. A frenetic and often very funny film about family and domestic relationships which become entangled in a case where a bunch of pimps beat a prostitute into a coma and slowly an incredibly complicated revenge comedy gets moving as a family of grandmother, father, mother, son plus son's array of girlfriends start to revolve around the rehab of the prostitute, her extraordinary back story of drug addiction, family violence and exploitation....very edgy fun throughout. 

In the evening in the Piazza there was a screening of Henri Decoin's 1951 Simenon adaptation La Verite sur Bebe Donge,  a film that fits into two strands - a new restoration and a nod to an exhibition devoted to Simenon which will also include a talk by Simenon's son....

At Cinema Reborn - Barrie Pattison's introduction to the Sydney screening of STELLA DALLAS (Henry King, USA, 1925)

Editor's note: This post was first delivered by Barrie Pattison as the introduction to the Sydney screening of Henry King's 1925 silent Stella Dallas  at the recent Cinema Reborn season. In Melbourne the film was introduced by critic Jake Wilson. Jake later expanded his piece and posted it on his Substack blog MOVING TARGETS. Click on the link to read Jake's thoughts (and consider taking out a modestly priced paid subscription). Barrie has now slightly expanded his thoughts on the film and they are published below.

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Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Lois Moran, Stella Dallas

I’ve been curious to see how today will go, because we have an odd situation now. Streaming has put more money into recovering early film than ever before. Outfits like Turner, René Chateau and the Warner Archive, along with national organisations have recovered titles that we never thought we’d see again, besides some we didn’t know existed. There is more vintage film available now than there’s ever been during my life time but the traditional ways of accessing it are going away. TCM, Home video and Film Societies are all fading and, of course, Australia hasn’t had a National Film Theatre for fifty years - a scandal in its own right.

YouTube is a great resource but it has not been embraced by opinion makers. Movies still don’t exist unless they are launched with free liquor and press books or at least tea and a biscuit. However old judgments are being challenged. Veteran Hollywood directors like Leo MacCarey and Norman Taurog, who were thought old fashioned and ham-fisted, turn out to have been the lively young men of their day.

 Henry King, who made today’s film, was associated with snooze fests like his stodgy Song of Bernadette or Love Is a Many Splendored Thing but, when I finally made it to the ground zero for all this activity - the the Pordenone Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, which Google translates as a “festival of dumb films”, the first thing I saw was a young Henry King doing action hero in a World War One serial.

As a director, King pulled away from the pack with his 1921 Richard Barthlemess Tol’able David, whose groupings and pace suggest a departure point for the So-Called “Golden Years of Hollywood” - and a milestone in the Americana dramas that are still today one of their productive streams.  

 Five years later, when Sam Goldwyn wanted to prove the value in his new association with United Artists, he recruited Henry King for his prestige production of Stella Dallas, from a best-seller by a woman named Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote Now Voyager,  another dysfunctional mother- daughter relationship piece.

Goldwyn’s strategy of recruiting the best people for his productions asserts here. His masthead performer Ronald Colman would get top billing. Colman would be the only silent movie leading man to remain an A-Lister into the fifties. However Belle Bennett was not a star though she had been a featured player in some ambitious productions. Bennett campaigned for the key role, Stella Dallas, making herself over, putting on weight and dressing cheap - not unlike Shelley Winters promoting herself for A Place in the Sun. This was Bennett’s own place in the sun, her one remembered performance. She's billed below Colman and elegant Alice Joyce. Following this she did have the lead in a few similar films. She comes well out of The Woman Who Was Forgotten, of which I have a copy, but Belle Bennet would die young in 1932.

 The support cast is notable -  Doug Fairbanks junior still a teenager, the appealing Lois Moran, who had been an item with Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Hersholt from Von Stroheim’s Greed, later to become the forties’ The Courageous Dr. Christian and young writer-to-be Winston Miller. You’ll see his credit on My Darling Clementine. The script of Stella Dallas itself is by the prestigious Frances Marion,  one of the most important women in Hollywood as a result of her work with Mary Pickford. She would be given one of the first writing Oscars for Norman Taurog’s The Champ. Stella Dallas is shot by the great Arthur Edison, who filmed Frankenstein, Mutiny on the Bounty and Casablanca and cut by Stuart Heisler, later director of the admired Storm Warning, one of the first screen treatments of the Ku Klux Klan.

Their combined efforts returned Goldwyn’s over-spend and a handsome profit, along with enthusiastic notices even with the perceived resistance to these “women’s picture” melodramas. Stella Dallas  is more a “weepy” than any comment on division in what was claimed as a classless society. 

It was definitely state of the art for 1925, though the film never became a film studies favourite. 

 This substantial success must have factored into getting Henry King his Fox Corporation contract, which would run thirty years and make him one of the most influential - and richest - people in Hollywood. He’d make the Will Rogers State Fair, the Dionne Quintuplets movie with Jean Hersholt again and Tyrone Power films including Americana hit Jesse James. King’s most notable work was a run with Gregory Peck, starting with The Gunfighter and 12 O’Clock High. 

 Delmer Daves, one of the next generation directors on the Fox pay-roll, told me he always found himself tongue tied, going into Henry King’s office and seeing a photo of Lillian Gish in The White Sister on the wall. "What could you say to someone like that?" Delmer quit Fox because he could see all the best projects would be given to people Studio Head Darryl F. Zanuck had been working with for twenty years - like John Ford & Henry King.

Among the later Henry King films, I rate the neglected David and Bathsheba the most interesting and revealing. Zanuck expected another nice Sunday school production like The Robe or Song of Bernadette but King had become a determined Catholic, after a conversion while making The White Sister with Colman in Italy. He double crossed Zanuck and delivered a film for grown-ups  -  incorporating all that Biblical scholarship that gets re-cycled in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and Bruce Beresford’s King David. 

 A wealthy Hollywood Studio employee and Catholic - it’s easy to see why Henry King was never canonised by Marxist commentators.

 Stella Dallas itself also had an afterlife. Goldwyn produced a terrible sound do-over with Barbara Stanwyck directed by King Vidor and there’s a 1990 Bette Midler film, along with rip-off versions. In one, it’s Al Jolson standing in the rain, as the grief-stricken parent, watching the daughter’s wedding through a window.

None of these have the resonance of Henry King’s film. Like other repeatedly re-cyled properties - think Beau Geste, Ben Hur or Rain - all pieces anchored in the attitudes and values of the silent period, subsequent filmmakers have their effort cut out to time-shift them

 Well, I don’t know whether you’ve thought about it, but we are among the first few people in history who are able to experience one hundred year old drama in pretty much the form of its original presentation. Myself, I rate that a great privilege. 

The Road to Bologna (7) - Double Acts - Jean Arthur, Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Frederick Hollander

Who could have predicted....The hottest ticket in town has proven to be a seat for passholders among the 8000 or so who turned out last night for The Wind, Victor Sjostrom's 1928 silent. Part of the attraction was the orchestra conducted by Timothy Brock which played Carl Davis's score, composed way back in 1983. That Lillian Gish can sure sell tickets....

I was not among the 8000 but Angelica Waite sent through some photos....

As Norman May once said..."I dont want to sound incredulous...but I cant believe it."

But back indoors in real cinemas there was the well-known sight of Jean Arthur as the zipped up Congresswoman in Billy Wilder's achingly brilliant A Foreign Affair and there was Jean Arthur in the until now very hard to see The Talk of the Town. George Stevens was still trying to make pictures with a little drollery back in 1942 and Talk of the Town hits that spot sweetly. Cary Grant is also in it along with Ronald Colman whom Arthur's character finally rejects in favour of Grant. On the strength of the story her decision was ridiculous. Colman's law professor was clearly a far more desirable object.... Music for both of these movies was supplied by the great Frederick Hollander...Grant also pursued Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, one of the four Sternberg pictures on show in the Marlene strand. And for the completists, David Hare take note, the little cut David was the first to notice years ago in Shanghai Express remained in the copy screened here on DCP.

For Silent Film aficionados in Brisbane - Joel Archer brings back THE ROARING TWENTIES featuring first up GIRL SHY (1924) starring Harold Lloyd

 Good Evening All,

We are so excited to announce that Roaring Twenties Cinema Brisbane will be returning and our new home will be the Arcana Arts Centre in the Garden Bar. 

This stunning private area will include the options for a terrific Menu of Food cooked on site and a Bar that has cocktails and drinks available throughout the film. So you not only get Amazing Films and Live Music now there are some terrific food and drinks options on site.

For our opening night on Thursday 18th of April 2024 at 6:30pm we will be screening Harold Lloyd's Girl Shy 1924 which is celebrating its 100th Birthday plus a mystery comedy short. 

Bri and I look forward to meeting you again for Brisbane's Cheapest Form of Time Travel! Thanks so much for all your support and enthusiasm over the years. We can't wait to bring you such a unique cinema experience. 

Tickets are on sale now: 

https://www.trybooking.com/CPRFI

Kind Regards...

Joel Archer (Director of Roaring Twenties Cinema Brisbane)

0409 620 670

Coming Soon on Criterion Blu-ray - Marshall Deutelbaum alerts to the release of THE UNKNOWN (Todd Browning, USA, 1927)

One of the October Criterion releases will be Todd Browning’s The Unknown. 

It’s a great movie! It was thought for many years to be a lost film. All that time a print of it was at the Cinematheque Française in cans labelled “inconnu” (“unknown”). People thought it was an unidentified movie. 

Only when someone opened a can to look at the film was it discovered that it was actually the Lon Chaney film. Criterion have probably used the Eastman House print for the transfer. 

I haven’t seen the movie in more than 40 years and will be thrilled to see it again. Lon Chaney plays Alonzo the armless circus knife thrower who throws knives with his feet. Joan Crawford plays a woman who loves him because he can’t touch her. She hates to be touched. 

It’s wonderful.

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Editor's Note: The Unknown will be released in a three film package (cover below) along with two other Browning titles Freaks  (1932) and The Mystic (1925).

Good luck trying to to import Criterion to Australia but there are ways.

A Diary (4) - The Road to Bologna and IL CINEMA RITROVATO - Plus ca change

A welcoming face in the Tre Vecchi Breakfast Room. Thomas the always smiling, always helpful waiter. The Covid years saw the hotel closed for close to three years but its back and bustling.

But it was down to business, kicking off with a an early Sunday morning screening of Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1945) that followed it being screened the night before to thousands in the Piazza Maggiore. Beautiful black and white restoration by Disney and the Academy Film Archive. Just before it started an announcement was made from the stage for us not to be alarmed when we commenced with four minutes of music played on a black screen. Who knew. What had I forgotten. Well the fact that Norman Lloyd, only recently departed at the age of 102, was one of the villains and the sultry Rhonda Fleming had a part as what Hollywood used to call a "nymphomaniac."

On to one of the real treasures  Amori di Mezzo Secolo. Made in 1954 it's one of those portmanteau films and its not quite complete because one of the starting six episodes by Domenico Paollela was instantly removed and all trace of it destroyed. The other five stories than had a chequered existence with initial censorship cuts on matters deemed too sensitive for the Italian people follwed by TV releases that were forced to screen the version with the cuts. Inevitably the standards vary but old master Roberto Rossellini bowled everyone over with his contribution - a WW2 love story between a film starlet, played by an absolutely gorgeous Pier Angeli, and a soldier set amongst the bomb shelters in Rome. It ends badly, another cause for concern by the authorities at the time. The intro explaining all of this by Marta Donzelli and Alberto Anile of the Cinteca Nazionale was a model of its kind.

Lunch  was another treat. A return to the terrific pasticceria Gamberini, another fond memory, just a short walk away and a black rice risotto on a bed of mashed avocado, topped with smoke salmon and accompanied on the side with sun-dried tomatoes. 

Then things got a bit dire at least for me if not for the crowd packed into the Jolly Cinema for Ousmane Sembene's Ceddo. The intro by Sembene's son Alain, Cecilia Cenciarelli doing double translation duties, and Lee Kline of Criterion/Janus, who did the superb restoration, started seven minutes late and was still going 20+ minutes later. I'm afraid lunch caught up with me and I have to reserve any report though it did seem like everyone in the film shouted a lot.

 Les mystères du château de dé (Man Ray, 1929)

Much more interesting because i was back awake was the program of films by Man Ray made between 1923 and 1929. Full on surrealist experimentation, abstraction, abstract narratives and every trick known to a camera at the time. These films may have been more famous if they had had some shocking element like an eyeball being slashed but they remain obscure and more preservation work needs to be done. What made it a standout was the muiscal accompaniment by Sten Horne and Frank Boeckius with Horne alternating between flute and piano and Boeckius coming up with some amazing drumming.

Michel Simon, Tire-au-flanc

Finally an unseen Renoir, his 1928 silent Tire-Au-Flanc, a farce about military service and love finding its own sweet way. After setting up class division in the first sequence where Michel Simon as a clumsy butler and George de Pomies as his dreamy would be poet master have to cope with being drafted. The butler fits right in to the barracks but the poet is the subject of practical jokes and endless bullying. The officers who attempt to control this are variously incompetent or aloof. Easy to see why this was smash on the stage and why Renoir would have been attracted to its mix of knockabout comedy and some very tender romance between the soldiers and their various women. The knockabout does go on a bit in a film that runs for 115 minutes. 

Decades later Tire-au-flanc  was remade by Claude de Givray (produced by Francois Truffaut). Never seen that either but now quite curious. Maybe David Stratton has a copy.

TRAITOROUS - Barrie Pattison excavates the life and career of early British master Maurice Elvey and his 1929 film HIGH TREASON

Barrie Pattison writes: This is material from my proposed book-length study of British Film director Maurice Elvey. 

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Maurice Elvey

 

Consider poor Maurice Elvey. For a quarter of a century he was acknowledged the leading figure in British film making. David Wark Griffith treated him as his English equivalent. However, came the1950s and Elvey was their forgotten man. The London National Film Theatre never ran his films and he wasn’t referenced in BFI literature. The season that marked his death was pathetic and the brochure, produced on the office duplicator, dismissive. I called up their file on his work and it was seven pages, four of them duplicates. If anyone said he was their equivalent of Abel Gance or Maurice Tourneur, they would have been laughed at - I did and I was.

 

Diana Dors, Bonar Colleano
Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary

I had skin in that game. Elvey had been a lecturer at the London School of Film Technique and supervised my graduating film. We all liked him and appreciated the fact that someone with his experience took the time to work with us but without access to his best films, he was to us Diana Dors’ director on 1952’s Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? The students would have been more motivated if a visiting instructor had a couple of James Bond films on his resumé.

 

I managed to locate a (DIN Standard) copy of his 1933 second go-round on The Wandering Jew and had him introduce it at a screening, which was rewarding - working with someone who had directed Conrad Veidt and launched the film career of Peggy Ashcroft. I wish I had that chance over again.

Conrad Veidt, The Wandering Jew

However, the movie was even then a relic, author E. Temple Thurston’s piece of Devotional Theatre put down on film. Elvey's silent was a better match with its period ... and that would have been the last word on Maurice Elvey except for a succession of lucky chances and some enterprising people taking the opportunity they presented.

 

First, the newly printed up Gaumont library was sold to Australian television - presumably to score the Dirk Bogarde movies. Included were half a dozen of Elvey’s first sound films revealing him to be a popular entertainer who could hold his own with contemporaries spending their retirements fronting retrospectives round the planet - Elvey’s Heat Wave, Princess Charming, Soldiers of the King or My Song for You were clever and amusing but it turned out that they were not his best work.

 

Title Card

That boat started rocking when a stack of cans Loyd George’s grandson found in the family attic turned out to be Elvey’s edited but never shown 1918 The Life Story of David Lloyd George, suppressed because the British Liberal Party thought such a laudatory account might have a negative impact on its subject’s re-election. The newly active Welsh Film Archive jumped at the chance.

 

Just finding it (never facing the prospect of defending it from critics, Elvey described it as his best work) was an event but it turned out to be quite possibly the best film of its day. I saw it, with its Neil Brand accompaniment, get standing ovations in two hemispheres. Curiously the late Maurice Elvey’s stock didn’t rise. Too many people had bet their reputations on writing him off.

Norman Page and Alma Reville in The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918)

David Robinson had to battle serious opposition to contextualise Lloyd George with a season of Elvey silents at Pordenone. They weren’t all masterpieces but they did go towards filling in this major gap and one, Elvey’s 1927 second filming of Hindle Wakes, proved to be even better than Lloyd Georgeand debatably the best British silent film. This one hadn’t been sitting in an attic. It was in place in the archive without anyone showing any interest. After Pordenone, its topicality made it a regular in archival showings and literature.

 

       

The reason I’m going over this old ground is that there’s been another discovery - not unfortunately another masterpiece but a film that has extraordinary curiosity value. Elvey’s High Treason  makes it a (one of four) contender for the title of first British talkie. 

 

It was released before Hitchcock’s Blackmail. People dismiss the idea that, for the first of the years their careers ran parallel, Maurice Elvey was considered the more prominent and substantial talent. A comparison of their two films of the Ivor Novello The Lodger is fascinating and frequently doesn’t favor Hitchcock.  

        

High Treason was thought to have been lost in its original form. A bogus silent version, which was the surviving sound film negative, printed up mute with a few captions, played at Pordenone.

 

However now the original has surfaced on YouTube. The quality of the new copy is excellent, offering substantial differences.  However, the version is Tiffany’s cut-down for its American release. English films regularly had their original negative amputated by a reel to show in the US. I have yet to hear of any attempt to restore Elvey’s The Lodger orThe Man in the Mirror, which suffered from this process.

 

Expectations on High Treason ran high, a prestige undertaking for Gaumont British.  It was a pioneer science fiction film locating between Metropolis and Things to Come, often cited in reference works. The stills of archaic visions of the future, which has now become the past, looked intriguing.

"...between Metropolis and Things to Come.."

 

We kick off with a border (where?) incident when there is already tension over card cheating among the guards from the European and Atlantic Federations, after they find six aces in their card players' deck. “None of your dirty Europe tricks on me.” A couple of Rum Runners in a tinny-looking future car try to crash the frontier and shots and a grenade are exchanged leaving several dead.

 

TV coverage gets equal time with footage of bathing beauties. This film competes with the U.S. Pre-Code films in offering scenes of girls in their slips.

 

The establishing shots of the London Headquarters of the Peace League, which looked so nice in the stills prove to be undercut by obvious surface tension in the waves in studio tank models. The table top buildings lack detail, though the night-time skyline is not unimpressive. The TV screens (see still below), which appear to be done with framed performers live using trompe l’oeil perspective, are striking. The effects are the first work of specialist Philippo Guidobaldi who will also work on the more imposing Things to Come. The film's design by Elvey's talented & neglected regular art director Andrew Mazzei is often imposing.

 

More damning however is the declamatory delivery and the simple minded attempt at humanising the issues. Working late, Air Corps Major Jameson Thomas (Dupont’s Piccadilly, It Happened One Night) feeds the line “Cold soup is worse than any war” to his date, the appealing Benita Hume, daughter of Peace Federation secretary, Elvey regular Humberston Wright. Hume gets to take a shower behind the frosted glass screen and turns up in her skimpy lamé dress and cap at the dance with the automaton band and fencing girls live show. Her career (include the excellent 1933 Clear All Wires) became less notable than her marriage to Ronald Colman. They later did the radio & TV series Halls of Ivy together.

 

However, war monger profiteers, handing round thousand pound drafts, have recruited villainous saboteurs, Asian Kiyoshi Takase prominent, to dump a bulky explosive device in the Channel Tunnel (no clunk), out the window of their dining car during the evening meal off the gummed on the table plates. A so so explosion compares with corresponding scenes in Bernhard Kellermann’s much filmed The Tunnel, of which Elvey would do a 1934 version.

 

Thomas declaims “No man who gives his life for his country gives his life in vain” but Benita goes all Lysistrata on his ass  - clearer in the silent version. We get “They wouldn’t dare fire on women.”  (That bit is very Metropolis.)  Dad Wright comes on Holy and prevents Federation President Basil Gill from sending the world to war, at a terrible, if anti-climactic, cost. “There shall be peace on earth and goodwill to all men.”

Dissent in the Common Market
Raymond Massey (standing) declaims

There are glimpses of Rene Ray, Wally Patch and Raymond Massey, struggling to register in his first film - more of that than we got in the silent.

 

Add in attempts at style, like the leads declaiming into the camera in tight close-up and the Soviet-style montages - Luger pistols firing in close up at the border, the tunnel collapse and, better, the bombing of the Peace Society with disturbing scenes of leather gear firemen digging crushed survivors out of the rubble. Most of this however just disrupts the narrative.

Benita Hume, Jameson Thomas take in the show
High Treason

 

Well, more conspicuous filmmakers screwed up their first sound films. That’s you, John Ford and William Wellman! Later Europeans had the chance to learn from their mistakes before facing the sound camera and generally avoided the calamities. Maurice Elvey undaunted launched into the new process and if he didn’t exactly triumph he left a spectacular try. Maybe conviction was lacking. By the time I encountered him, he had lost faith in the once fashionable Pacifist cause, citing his own volunteering for WW1. We disagreed on my making the protagonist in my film a draft dodger.

 

Still, any way you approach it, High Treason leaves the viewer even more curious about its director’s two hundred (!) missing films.