J. Toister – American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films

Автор: J. Toister
Название книги: American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Театр и Кино
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

During the Silent Era, when most films dealt with dramatic or comedic takes on the “boy meets girl, boy loses girl” theme, other motion pictures dared to tackle such topics as rejuvenation, revivication, mesmerism, the supernatural and the grotesque. A Daughter of the Gods (1916), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Magician (1926) and Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) were among the unusual and startling films containing story elements that went far beyond the realm of “highly unlikely.” Using surviving documentation and their combined expertise, the authors catalog and discuss these departures from the norm in this encyclopedic guide to American horror, science fiction and fantasy in the years from 1913 through 1929.

Well, for the five of us listed on the title page, this has been
quite a trip.
At first—naïf that I am—I thought to go this alone, estimating
that I might need three years, or longer even, to complete
the manuscript. I own videotapes, laser-discs (remember
them?), and/or DVDs of the more popular genre titles and had
a pretty good idea where I could get copies of some of the other,
scarcer films I would need. While I am still not an insider (in
the rigorous and close-knit brotherhood of film collectors), I
was closer to being in that loop than I had been in the mid–
1990s, when—despite dozens of queries for help in tracking
down Universal’s The Last Performance—I received nary a bite
until after my book (Of Gods and Monsters; McFarland, 1999)
was published. The leads I received afterwards were very much
appreciated and have led to the (hopefully) cogent commentary
on that film—and other obscure and/or otherwise unavailable
titles—herein.
Naïve but not stupid, I quickly came to see that working alone
on this deathless opus might very well take me to the point of
my own demise, so I reached out to some cinematically-adept
friends. Soon thereafter—thankfully—Henry Nicolella, Steve
Joyce, Harry H Long, and Bill Chase signed onto the project.
We sharpened our pencils (passé euphemism for “we fired up
our computers” but one that is apropos when dealing with antique
celluloid), assembled our reference materials, made appointments
at the Library of Congress, the George Eastman
House, UCLA Television and Film Archives and other impor –
tant repositories of film history, and set off to our toil.
What we hadn’t anticipated was how tedious, time-consuming,
and uncertain the process for separating the silent-genre
wheat from the chaff would be. Using The AFI Catalog as our
guide, we soon discovered that just because a title was listed
topically in the AFI index was no guarantee that, upon closer
inspection, it would merit mention in these pages. It turns out
that there were more silent features made that incorporated (for
instance) a palm or tea leaves reader, an entrails inspector, a
phrenologist, a handwriting inter preter, or a crystal gazer (see
The Crystal Gazer) than there were silent features that featured
dogs, cats, or Model-T Fords. It turns out (further) that, in most
of those features, said prognosticator might just as well have
been a physician, a marriage counselor, or an advice-to-thelovelorn
columnist, for all the (usually ersatz) supernatural element
mattered to the story. Really, what’s the difference
between being told by your mother that you’re an SOB who’s
headed for a bad end, and hearing the same sort of open-ended
malediction from some old darling gazing into a crystal?
We also came to realize that there may well have been yet
other pictures cranked out that included seers or sayers or mutterers—
or hypnotists, also way up there on the Hit Parade—
but that (a) have disappeared, leaving virtually no trace; (b)
have disappeared, leaving behind only the sketchiest of critical
details with which to work; or (c) have disappeared, leaving behind
only the sketchiest of critical details with which to work,
but those vary wildly from one reviewer to another. With whose
screed does one go?
Putting aside these issues for the nonce, we had to consider
that, in the 1910s and early 1920s, hypnotists (frequently identified
as hailing from India, although traditionally enacted by
Caucasians from the Midwest) also popped up everywhere—
like dandelions in a garden—as if the presence of an Oriental
master of the mental arts was as de rigueur in well-to-do homes
as a flirtatious young chambermaid or the butler who drank.
Now if one of those film reviewers—whose published comments
may be the only guidelines that have survived regarding the
story—was sick to death of yet another picture dealing with
mesmerism and decided to focus instead on some different aspect
of the photoplay altogether, we’re at the mercy of what has
become his historical record and must proceed accordingly.
Thus, while we were more readily attracted by evil, grasping,
conniving hypnotists (no matter their race, creed, religion, or
political affiliation), we also had to pause and consider vapid
watch-twirlers whose attempts at ameliorating the heroine’s
headache produced side effects that no one save the film’s
backers or the actress’s mom could have found even remotely
interesting for four or five reels.
In a few cases, our only logical choice was hard liquor.
We knew in advance that we could not afford to fly off to
Europe or the Orient to spar with some national film archive
over a flatbed’s accessibility, its projectionist’s schedules, or its
(usually outrageous) fees for copying stills. We suspected at that
point that many of the write-ups herein would be unaccompanied
by illustrations of any kind. Once the hit-and-miss source
of affordable ephemera on cinematic obscurities, eBay is nowadays
mined regularly and rigorously by a small circle of
moneyed collectors out to enlarge their holdings, and… well…
we can’t blame them. (We approached one successful bidder
about copying the piece he had just won for $55, and we were
offered a laser print of his treasure for—you guessed it—$55.
We all have day jobs and mortgages, so at least one of our writeups
is picture-less due to our penury. Most are picture-less due
to a lack of extant pictures.)
In addition to the aforementioned AFI Index, we consulted
any number of lists of genre features, and we pounced—right
off the bat—on a couple of hitherto obscure titles that seemed
like manna from heaven. Boy… talk about primrose paths.
Take, for instance, the Eclectic three-reeler from 1913, The Message
of the Dead; as they say in New York, we nearly plotzed over
that one. Upon closer inspection, though, we found that we
didn’t have a moody piece on séances and such, but, rather, a
hackneyed film centering on an accusatory note that takes a
decade or so—and some unbelievable melodramatics—to result
in the arrest of a killer. Ditto with Vengeance of the Dead, another
title that elicited a Pavlovian response from us. I killed an hour
or so (and myself, nearly) screening this 1914 four-reeler on a
Steenbeck at the Library of Congress, only to find out that said
vengeance was nothing more than the sort of last-will-and-testament-
screwing that has gone on everywhere, everyday, ever
since that first bacterium evolved into a lawyer.
It soon became obvious that our problem with identifying
authentic genre-imbued pictures called for more than facile solutions.
The need to narrow the focus of our work became our
biggest problem and arriving at an equitable formula for inclusion
and exclusion led to no little debate among us and will
doubtless lead to some dissatisfaction among a number of readers.
We had agreed that we would offer commentary on
anything relevant that was released during or after 1913 and
during or before 1929, and that was four reels (or longer) in
length. (Nota bene: nonetheless, we have made mention here
and there of a few shorter items of especial interest.) Still, even
after narrowing our scope, Henry, Steve, Harry, Bill, and I continued
to agonize, à la the Lady or the Tiger, over a fair number
of movies.
Many (most?) of the features discussed in this work are lost,
so plot recaps—taken from The AFI Catalog, copyright descriptions
on file at the Library of Congress, contemporary critiques,
and so forth—are all we had to work with a good deal of the
time. That means that in some cases we had no really good, objective
idea as to how important a role was played by the supernatural
or super-science element that qualified the picture for
inclusion here. As stated above, there were, for example, about
ten zillion silent films that featured, to one degree or another,
fortune telling or hypnosis or faith healing or thought transference.
(There are also about a half-zillion that dealt with opera
and opera singers. Think about that for a moment, won’t you?)
So, we had to fine-tune further.
Dealing with faith healing is tricky, as treading on religious
turf always runs the risk of involving epiphanies, and God—
with very few exceptions, mostly limited to Old Testament fits
of pique—is normally seen as being a good guy. During the
Silent Era, if Jesus showed his serene face at some point in the
screenplay, you’d never get close to even money on anything
but the happiest of endings, and where was the dramatic tension
in that? In Thomas Ince’s rather strange Civilization (1914), for
example, the heretofore bellicose Count Ferdinand—having
purposely drowned himself as a pro-peace statement—is revivified
by his followers and is now filled to the brim with the
soul of Jesus Christ! Not much later, Christ materializes in the…
errr… flesh, and the film speeds toward its divinely-endorsed,
pacifistic conclusion. Such proactive, in-Person meddling makes
for an awkward call—particularly when bringing somebody
back from the dead would be a no-brainer, otherwise—so we
arbitrarily decided that, while cameos by the King of Kings (or
Whomever) are indeed instances of supernatural activity, they
are religious—not thrill-oriented—and would not be considered.
(We did include Civilization, though, as it is the standard
against which all other cameos are measured.)
Also, miracles (of whatever size) occurring as a direct result
of onscreen conversion experiences, religious artifacts
(crucifixes, grails, Stars of David), or a combination of furrowed
brow and folded hands—without an attendant appearance by
Christ, Jehovah, Allah, and the like—have been dealt with in
The Miracle Man. We also opted to pass on the sundry cinematic
takes on Samson (and the Philistines), David (and Goliath),
Joshua (and his Sousaphone), and other fearless types from the
Books of Kings and Judges, as we don’t wish to fit religious icons
into the mold at hand. Nevertheless as acolytes of the ancient
Greek and Roman gods are probably no longer sufficiently wellorganized
to seek legal recourse for our including accounts of
the intrusions of Jupiter/Zeus and the Mount Olympus gang,
we’ve chosen to do just that.
More distinctions cry to be made when one stops to gawk at
the numerous feature films that turn on the invention of some
damned thing or another, and the numbing melodrama or guaranteed
laff-riot that ensues when the villain plots to relieve the
inventor of same. Enemy governments lusting after super
weapons has always been number one, of course, but there are
also loads of semi-super weapons, drilling devices, mental-enhancement
machines, etc., that greased the narrative wheels.
Again, we’d like to think we chose wisely and well where inventions
were concerned, and that’s why no ink was spilled on those
pictures that pivoted on unbreakable glass (even when it was
W.C. Fields looking to market it), extremely soft inner soles, or
underwater writing implements.
Then, too, anyone who has more than the most casual of acquaintances
with movies made before 1960 will nod vigorously
(but resignedly) at the statement “Never, ever go see a Western
and expect any kind of horror or sci-fi content, even when the
title promises ‘Ghost’ this or ‘Haunted’ that.” Okay, okay…
maybe Universal-International’s Curse of the Undead (1959) cuts
it close. (And just to refresh your memory, the infamous double-
bill of Billy the Kid vs Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s
Daughter didn’t visit its own particular plague upon us
until 1965.) Nonetheless, there were loads of “Ghost” and
“Haunted” Westerns that disappointed generations of kids hoping
that Buck, or Tom, or Hoppy would finally get to mix things
up with something other than rustlers, Indians, shifty-eyed
gamblers, or devious mortgage-holders planning on making it
big once the railroad came through. There be no Westerns in
these pages.
Nor serials. We all love serials and strongly feel that the definitive
study of silent serials has yet to be written. It’s just that—
by definition—a feature film is not a serial. Sure, several of the
most popular serials of the Silent Era (and quite a few of the
later, sound chapterplays) were subsequently re-edited and released
as features, but this usually resulted in not much acclaim
at all, save for the sort of studio hype to be found in the Exhibitor’s
Trade Review and other industry publications.
While there was no national film censorship in America during
the 1910s and 1920s—at least nothing that came within miles
of the rigors of the system the Germans concocted (when they
didn’t do away with it altogether, briefly)—there were quite a
few pictures that were made on both sides of the Atlantic specifically
for children. In the U.S., Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin
were all thus pressed into service, and some motion pictures
tailored to tykes were populated chiefly by tykes: Fox’s Aladdin
and the Wonderful Lamp (1917)—a complete print of which is
nestled at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York—
had most of its major roles played by children (although big
old Elmo Lincoln got to gush out of the titular lamp). We took
a bye on these. We’ve also opted out of fairytales (excepting
Betty Bronson’s Peter Pan, which we all love to death and which
will be our template) and Shakespearean adaptations; somebody
must have done a book on these already, anyhow. And Strindberg.
Come on…
We passed on straight mysteries, even if the heavy and his
henchmen hung their caps in an Old Dark House. (Adieu, ergo,
to Seven Keys to Baldpate.) Ditto with some pictures that have
segments set in prehistoric times. Unless there’s some under –
lying anachronistic cleverness to marvel at, why does having
footage of our Neanderthal ancestors usually result in a film’s
being listed among the horror or science fiction efforts of the
Silent Era? If the segment under discussion featured dandies
donning plumed hats and bearing rapiers—rather than fur-clad
club-wielders—no self-respecting genre archivist would give
the thing a second thought. There were a couple of anti–phonyspiritualism
flicks released, too—like 1923’s You Are in Danger
(aka The Little Girl Next Door [?]), supposedly based on reports
from the Illinois Vice Commission—but these were cinematic
examples of crime-busting, and not instances of genre fiction.
No documentaries, either.
In short, our trying to keep this magnum opus shallower than
a well and narrower than a churchyard probably means that
some of our inclusions will be dismissed as piffle and some of
our exclusions will be questioned as passionately as did Torquemada
the Flemish heretics.
The reader will note that this book has two main parts. The
films which are obviously—in some cases, egregiously—linked
to the horror, science fiction or fantasy genres constitute the
main section, while those whose relationship to the genre(s) is
more tenuous are assessed in the appendix.
Being one of the 85 titles relegated to the appendix is not a
sign of a film’s having little cinematic value or its displaying
some sort of unworthiness. Rather, it may have been placed
there because its genre elements were adjudged to be either uncertain
(probably because extant critiques or publicity materials
are vague on that point) or tangential by us, or because it was
the silent version of a picture that was released as a talkie.
In several cases, our decision to list a movie in the appendix
or to include it in the body of the book was the result of some
debate, and my vote was the tie-breaker. We acknowledge that
some of the choices we made might merit further discussion.
We hope that in the finished work we have shed some light
on a passel of silent genre features that to this point have been
left in the shadows. It goes without saying that there are still
pertinent veins to be mined and springs to be panned. Nevertheless,
we’d like to add our discoveries and our perspectives to
those of Walt Lee and William K. Everson and Roy Kinnard et
al., and wish the next batch of prospectors success in unearthing
still more cinematic treasure that may lurk in temperature-controlled
underground vaults or behind stacks of dust-covered,
empty beer bottles in Latvian garages.