Celebrating Cinematic Anniversaries in 2015

New Year's has always been my favorite holiday. I was born on October 9 but due on October 1, and if you dial that back nine months, you see I'm not kidding about "always." Even before I gleaned this tidbit, and before the ritualized annual viewing of When Harry Met Sally..., I always liked this holiday's equal soliciting of introspection, retrospection, and speculation, plus its hospitality to the greatest activity of all time, which is list-making. (I'm more of a stay-home-and-think New Year's celebrant than a crash-the-hotel, let's-get-drunk-on-the-minibar type. And despite what we pretend on New Year's, people don't change.) For many years, starting in high school, I would make a list on New Year's Eve of 24 movies I wanted to see and 24 books and 24 plays I wanted to read in the coming year. Though I never finished them, I made great discoveries that way. I also found these to be more motivating resolutions and easier ones to keep than "exercise more," "learn Spanish," or "chug less Mountain Dew."

This year, I'm reviving that habit. Each month I will write short reviews of at least two films celebrating an anniversary in 2015, starting in January in 1895 (often cited, however debatably, as the birth-year of "the movies") and ending in December in 2005. One will be a film I've never seen but clearly should have. Another will be a title I'm eager to revisit—not necessarily a "best" or a personal favorite, but the kind of artistic or cultural landmark that scores high on my recently-reinstituted VOR scale. Beyond filling out some viewing holes and clarifying my takes on challenging milestones, I'm hoping this cycle will re-habituate me to at least publish capsules about films I watch, will further clarify what I mean by "VOR," and might approximate the phantom film-history survey I rarely get to teach in my day job but would happily offer for free. And it'll keep me on track for other major changes to the entire site I'll be unfolding over the year.

Am I aware that I never finish website projects? Yes. But New Year's Day is the global day of optimism! And it's just two movies per month—more when time permits, and/or when being a Libra impedes my ability to choose. Best of all, I've already gotten a head start in the waning weeks of December. So I hope you'll keep me going through this marathon with your comments and clicks, and I hope you'll enjoy following along!

For our first installment, we begin in 1895, as crucial a year in the history of sexuality as in the history of movies, which brings us quickly to Thomas Edison's laboratory and the Dickson Experimental Sound Film...

Actress Files: Jeanne Eagels

Jeanne Eagels, The Letter
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1928-29 Best Actress Oscar to Mary Pickford for Coquette)

Why I Waited: For a long while, I had no choice, but thank God for eBay. By the time that transaction came through, I'd become a big fan of The Letter in its later incarnation, and Eagels's tawdry but glorious reputation had excitingly preceded her. Plus, the rest of her category had really struggled to yield a front-runner, even after my recent viewings of Betty Compson and Corinne Griffith, so my hopes were somewhat nervously pinned here.

The Performance: For the 1940 version of The Letter, Bette Davis gets one of the best entrances in movies, striding out of her Malaysian rubber-plantation bungalow in chic blouse and long skirt and emptying a pistol into the back of a doomed, staggering man. As a first impression, it would intimidate anyone, possibly excluding Chicago's Velma Kelly, who'd make a great cellmate for Leslie Crosbie, the cartridge-emptying diva and manipulative plaintiff-adulteress of W. Somerset Maugham's renowned story. Indeed, Davis's entrance is so instantly galvanizing that some viewers may be surprised by the deliberate, psychologically nuanced route that she and William Wyler pursue into the material. It's a very tense and engaging film, but defined more by the parsing of criminal perversity, by moral quandary, and by threatening characters slowly skulking around the sidelines than by electric action. By contrast, 11 years earlier, when Jean de Limur directed and co-adapted the previous screen version of The Letter, he in some ways reversed this relation between first impressions and follow-up. At 61 minutes, de Limur's version is exceedingly brisk even by the economical standards of late-20s Hollywood, mounted as the cinematic equivalent of a short story, tracing a clear arc of beginning, middle, and end. The staging is not particularly varied or inspired, and certainly attempts none of the surgical dissection of Leslie's mental state that Davis, Wyler, and cinematographer Tony Gaudio achieve. De Limur intends to move us through a juicy narrative at a steady, unembellished clip, notwithstanding his few cuts and static frames. Yet, for all this, the film starts slowly, cutting and tracking through three minutes of quiet establishing shots of Singapore Harbor and the inland community before finding the Crosbies at home together. Jeanne Eagels's Leslie is settled into a rattan chair, sewing some lace.

Not until 15 minutes into this hour-long film does Eagels's Leslie even get around to Davis's opening gambit, grabbing her handgun and firing her six shots. Eagels does this with a slow, heavier cadence, and with an almost pugilistic fury to contrast Davis's murderous sangfroid. Eagels, her loose and damaged blonde hair waving in frazzled tufts around her face, thrusts her arm forward with each separate shot, as if she's sawing a log, or as if she's trying to propel each bullet even more lethally into Geoffrey Hammond's body. The actress transfixingly overwhelms the left side of the frame, admittedly looking more like what she was—a notorious drug addict barely hanging on at the end of New York's roaring 20s—than she does like a voluptuary stewing in the tropical swelter. As such, though, she nonetheless cuts the kind of disturbing figure that The Letter needs, particularly since de Limur's prosaic use of the medium requires that Leslie unsettle us in fairly outward ways, not through the kinds of subtle, affective insinuations on which Davis & Co. thrive. Frankly, it could hardly be more obvious that de Limur has shaped The Letter as a vehicle for Eagels more than as an inquiry into Leslie. He and Eagels come across as bigger fans of flashy transformation than of gradual evolution and enigmatic tensions. They evidently enjoy taking Leslie from a calm-looking housewife with a secret to a shamelessly cynical courtroom witness to a repulsed and absurd target of blackmail to a woman who seems beaten at her own game, until she finally lets loose with a howl of erotic satiation and wifely contempt that literally brings things to a halt.

Eagels has an appetite for capital-A Acting, then, in ways that align her performance closely with t hat of fellow nominee Ruth Chatterton in Madame X, equally intent on leaving us breathless with her slideshow of the penitent, the zombie, the harlot, the lioness, the mother, the screamer, the martyr. If you're looking for subtlety, shop somewhere else. Beyond her proudly high-pitched approach to Leslie Crosbie and her desires, Eagels is manifestly caught in that collective Hollywood moment of learning to calibrate a performance register appropriate to the talking screen. She plows ahead with a haughty but unplaceable accent, bobbing somewhere in the sea between British upper-class snobbery, New England nouveau riche, Midwestern bitchiness (Eagels was born in Kansas), and pure Broadway affectation, rooted in no zip code or line of longitude I could pinpoint on this planet. Her name is bigger than that of the film in the opening title card, and she appears to have scaled her performance with that sense of proportion very much in mind. Just as the shrill vocal mannerisms belong indistinguishably to the actress and the character—the generous assessment would affix Eagels as an inspiring forebear for Davis's later, much-admired ethos of being as ugly or unpleasant as a role demanded—it's impossible to draw a line between Leslie's disingenuous prevarications on the witness stand and Eagels's insolent tests of the audience, plying us with see-through layers of actorly self-indulgence. She dares us to question her shameless chutzpah as anything but a perfectly apropos character choice, though it's plain as day how she enjoys sailing over the top of her own role.

I was happy to let her have her day in court, and happy to clear her of all charges, even where I knew she was guilty. The courtroom encompasses just too delicious a scene of who-me? self-theatricalization, for Eagels as for Leslie. I was frankly in her grip even when the performance was more obviously flawed, as in her fidgety, awkward physical carriage during her scene of furtive negotiation with Lady Tsen Mei, playing Geoffrey's Asian mistress. Even if it's a blight on de Limur's gifts as a filmmaker, it's worth underscoring how many of Eagels's scenes she plays in long, uncut master shots, during many of which she is allowed no more mobility than the camera. In noteworthy contrast to the heavy reliance on close-ups we see in the performances of her fellow nominees, in line with the relative aptitudes or at least the relative attempts of their movies to generate feeling through editing, Eagels is the show for the bulk of The Letter. Her lust, her bigoted disgust, her lack of compunction, notwithstanding her pretenses of being saturated with compunction, her boredom with the tropics, her sense of having triumphed, her dawning recognition that punishment has not been avoided, and has only just begun: they all feed and swim off of Eagels's body, her significant poses, her unpredictable rhythms, her weird energy. Even her aura of working hard in some scenes and of somewhat lazily coasting by in a few others, which should baldly hamper the work, actually articulates something credible, even entertaining, about Leslie's own blended propensities toward trying to get away with murder while nonetheless seeming to flaunt the artificiality of her own good-wife façade.

Chatterton, Swanson, Crawford, Bankhead: who knows how many of their opportunities they might have lost to Eagels, had she not manifested such a chronic unreliability in life, and then taken herself out of the game with her final, possibly suicidal overdose—an event that interceded between the wrapping of The Letter and her reaping of this unofficial Oscar nomination. Anyone who can hold the screen this vibrantly would have been a major force in Hollywood, especially as she got better at scaling her voice and her other effects. Look how arrogant but also weirdly poignant she is, blatantly culpable but newly vulnerable, as she explores with her lawyer the dangers posed by the titular, incriminating letter. She may resort a bit too often to the tic of gagging, momentarily, on an admission or an utterance for which she feels revulsion, but I appreciated her refusal to disguise Leslie's racism ("some sort of scandal with a ...half-caste Chinese woman!"). I relished even more how she chokes on the phrase "planter's wives," as though belonging to or even being associated with such a soul-killing species gives her physical and spiritual acid reflux.

And, showboater though she clearly is, Eagels does not always opt for the brashest possible gesture. One of the quietest scenes in the performance could easily have been one of the loudest, as she puts down her lace and heads to her writing desk in that first long sequence, penning the missive that will eventually cause her such trouble. At the end, she dispatches it to Herbert Marshall's Geoffrey via one of her errand boys, and then settles back in her favorite chair. The vamping possibilities seem endless here—she might easily have slunk around her suddenly-empty bungalow, writing the letter in a furious pantomime of lurid passion, simmering with a gustatory smugness in her own treachery, her wantonness, her power, after sending off such a carnal plea for attention and relying on an unpaid servant to deliver it. But Eagels stays quiet, glum, and restrained in this scene, as though Leslie really despairs of losing Geoffrey. She cuts off any assumption that the character enjoys betrayal for its own sake or that she can't get enough of her own amorality.

It's a canny snapshot of vulnerability to plant near the outset of such a tough and daringly embroidered performance, and it allows more meaning in her final, famous, high-pitched indictments. "With all my heart and soul, I still love the man I killed," she repeats. The first time she says it, she is obviously firing a crossbow of withering, undisguised faithlessness right into the heart of her husband. The second time, though, because Eagels has earlier revealed a woman who really did love this bored and rebarbative rake, she seems only to be lacerating herself. Once more, with subtly different feeling: "With all my heart and soul, I still love the man I killed!" Who knows how long that despondent, raging thought will echo in Leslie Crosbie's mind? Since this version of The Letter ends right there, who knows who long it will echo in mine, too?

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 5 to Go

Actress Files: Corinne Griffith

Corinne Griffith, The Divine Lady
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1928-29 Best Actress Oscar to Mary Pickford for Coquette)

Why I Waited: Unavailable for a long time, especially since I can't cotton to watching movies on YouTube. My brother was nice enough to tape a rare broadcasting on Turner Classic Movies, but I wound up deferring anyway till the Warner Archive Collection produced this DVD.

The Performance: So, here she is, the shadowy question mark, the nebulous presence. I had never seen anyone list Griffith as one of the runners-up for the second Best Actress Oscar until suddenly, there she was, interpolated as a highly anomalous sixth nominee in Robert Osborne's 60 Years of the Oscar. Does she "count"? Oscar queens, when they aren't banging their heads against the problem of world hunger, sometimes debate this. Granted, the question is almost entirely obviated by the Academy's oft-repeated insistence that there were no official "nominees" for this second ceremony, and that the listings now commonly reproduced for those years were really just retroactive write-ups of films and performances that were bandied about by the very small voting body, before consensus finally swung around to the announced winners. If that's how things went down, Griffith's inclusion, however belatedly instated, makes good sense. The Divine Lady won the Best Director Oscar for Frank Lloyd and earned a cinematography nod, too, so her vehicle was obviously on the voters' collective radar. Plus she was a high-echelon star at that time, having appeared in nearly 70 features by 1929.

Even more than having the riddle of this nomination solved, though, I would like to know what particular depressants the AMPAS College of Cardinals were hooked on when they had these discussions. Prohibition was on, but it must have been something, since Falconetti in Joan of Arc, Marion Davies in Show People, and Lillian Gish in The Wind are just three examples of landmark performances from this eligibility period that got passed over for subpar work by important talents (Chatterton, Compson) and light, limited turns at the center of films that Oscar obviously fancied (Love, Griffith). We know how I feel about the ghastly winner, and I'm still holding out hope that the late, legendary Jeanne Eagels will redeem the category as fully as she's reputed to. Otherwise, it's a foursquare gaggle of essentially two-star performances that, on days when the sun's shining and the coffee is good, I'm willing to grant a third. After all, Chatterton was probably doomed to overdoing her Madame X by her famously hambone director, Compson gets better when the script gives her more to work with, and Love compensates in some late scenes for what is plainly mediocre in the rest of her performance.

Griffith, meanwhile, is a fine, energetic, but dispiritingly superficial vessel for The Divine Lady's rather chintzy retelling of the fable of Admiral Lord Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton, revisited more famously by Vivien Leigh in 1941. Lloyd mounts the heck out of the very exciting sea battles, setting himself up for Mutiny on the Bounty six years later, but his visual and narrative approach to the expository scenes and to the political and romantic buildup is stagebound and thoroughly antique. Eventually, this means lots of broad emoting in proscenium frames with forty-foot ceilings and theatrical light, which clearly encourage Griffith and the other actors back into an already-anachronistic style of Nickelodeon-style poses and overstatement. But this isn't how things start, and in fact Griffith gets an initial entrance we might all envy, popping brightly out of a late-18th century hackney coach just moments after hefty, scowling Marie Dressler, playing her mother, has gotten wedged in the doorway while trying to do the same. Emma sports the world's floppiest, widest-brimmed hat, and she can barely stop chuckling and clapping at how lovely and youthful she is. You'd be hard-pressed to see the kernel of what the opening titles refer to as "England's greatest beauty" inside this coltish little sylph, but Lloyd and cinematographer John F. Seitz at least help her turn on a little heat. Fifteen years before Seitz followed Stanwyck's glittering anklet down the stairs of Double Indemnity, he adopts the point of view of rakish aristocrat Charles Greville as Emma climbs into his house—first as an ivory foot peeking unexpectedly from behind a first-floor curtain, then as a long pair of bare legs sliding all the way through the window.

You can see why Greville is briefly moved, but even setting aside his cynical preoccupations—all he cares about is his precarious position as the likely heir to his unwed uncle, the famous Lord Hamilton—it's equally easy for the audience to relate to his rapid cooling of affection. Griffith is bubbly but rather free of personality, as though her top billing and the well-known real-life tale guarantee that anything she does will be received as impossibly enticing. I find her a bit fidgety, like Clara Bow having a go at one of Lillian Gish's true-heart Susies. When this mostly silent picture requires that she sing, Griffith is too stiff and arbitrary in her movements to communicate any musicality at all, much less any relation to the song we actually hear (even if, as is quite possible, this track was selected later). You'd have to be stonier than I am not to take pity on her as Greville sends her packing to Naples, especially since that's not the worst of it. He's assuming that her sparkling youth, matched with her social impossibility in every other respect (she's the cook's daughter!), will be enough to prompt his elderly uncle's infatuation while standing in the way of an actual marriage, thus preventing any biological sons from dislodging Greville's claim to Lord Hamilton's fortune and influence. We know all of this, while Emma knows none of it. What she renders, as a result, is a simple but plaintive impression of a broken-hearted teenager. I do wish, though, that Griffith had struggled a bit more with her feelings, or with such an open disclosure of them, and maybe that she ahd showed more of an intuitive hunch that Greville's motives are stained with greater sins than fickleness.

Without implying a categorical improvement, Griffith hits several of her peaks in the passage between Emma's arrival in Naples through Lord Hamilton's surprise proposal. She is desperate but also a bit funny as she busily "improves herself" by learning the harp and, you know, changing some of her outfits—prepping to dazzle Greville completely when, as he has promised, he appears in Naples to collect her. I remember her very clearly in a series of shots in which she's trying to adopt precisely the right pose for receiving her erstwhile lover, as he at long last arrives: seated at her harp? before an arras? lounging suggestively in a high-backed chair, hugging a bouquet of flowers? For an actress who gets stuck for longish passages of The Divine Lady in one basic guise (the Flitting Imp, the Tearful Castoff, the Ardent Pleader, the Weepy Adorer), it's pleasing to see Griffith playing around with so many personas, and showing us an Emma so self-conscious of how she comes across. Her vindictive blast of anger when she realizes Greville never meant to rejoin her is something to behold, and portends exciting changes in psychological texture for the second half of the film (though unfortunately, these promises are barely remembered, much less kept, in the rest of the performance). And in two very memorable close-ups—a Sternberg-style glimpse through the glistening strings of her harp, around the time she first meets Nelson, and then a later image, well into the heart of their affair, of her carnally stroking her cheek with the blooming head of a rose—she cuts through all the Cavalcade-ish rubbish in the script ("Those Frenchmen, with their infernal Revolution, are upsetting all of Europe!") and strikes some real sparks. Griffith reveals in moments like these that she is capable of playing Lady Hamilton as an aroused, headstrong, and risk-taking woman. Her extra-marital and politically inflammatory acts on Nelson's behalf, whether bringing provisions to his starving sailors or imploring the Queen of Naples to offer safe harbor to their fleet, are temporarily credible as the behavior of a woman who is smart enough to think strategically and far-sighted enough to think outside the confines of her own immediate experience, even as they are also heedless gestures in the name of a selfish love, itself laying a certain path to spousal reprimand and social ostracism.

Given all that, it's disappointing that Griffith doesn't stand up more often for any sense of Emma's intelligence, of her knowing that she's plunging ahead into dangerous waters and maybe even enjoying it. Her clinches with the utterly unenchanting Victor Varconi as Lord Nelson are washouts more often than not, partly because she plays so many of them in a register of teary, brow-knitting, frankly pathetic passion. This wet-tissue approach would make as much sense for some farmgirl's crush, nursed for a local boy whom her family doesn't like, as it does for a high-flying and knowingly controversial historical actor. "I am the one thing England will never let you have!" she sighs to Lord Nelson, who is raising British hackles for taking so suspiciously long to come home for his hero's welcome. So she understands, surely, how many stakes are attached to their illicit bond, and how many sentiments (despair, anger, arrogance, wistfulness) are merged in such an utterance. She's too broadly melodramatic, though, playing Forbidden Love in too lachrymose a fashion, without implying a more detailed sense of this formidable woman and her particular, extraordinary dilemma. Non-fans of silent cinema sometimes assume there was no room for subtlety or layering in the heightened style of performers working without dialogue. It's hard, though, to imagine even as lunar a presence as Janet Gaynor or as fine-boned a creature as Lillian Gish, much less a tougher customer like Betty Compson or Gloria Swanson, playing so close to such a dewy surface, and letting sentimentality overwhelm so many other traces of the pragmatism, insolence, and introspection that are pivotal to this character.

Griffith pours a lot of herself into her bustling approximation of youth and then into the passionate commitments and quivering lips of her adult years. I expect she viewed this ability to age the character as one of the major tasks of her characterization, since she seems to underestimate so many of its other demands. She isn't an unaffecting actress, and I didn't experience her as a blemish on her movie so much as an impediment to it cutting deeper and communicating more than it ultimately does. Emma, after all, doesn't just get older, or happen to pass from a preening village beauty to a fabled personage. She has to grow more complex to make the choices that she does, putting herself right in the line of social fire and inviting the man she clings to as a soul mate to do the same, in the name of their own addictive longing for each other as well as professed political convictions—and with the people of at least three nations watching closely. To fill out that drama of strong but irreconcilable allegiances takes more than a solid, steady cryer, an amiable but hardly extraordinary beauty, or an ability to look shocked at the worm-infested food being served to the navy of Europe's mightiest empire. The Divine Lady aspires to grand historical fiction, which it only achieves in the thundering naval standoffs. Griffith, meanwhile, gives a performance better-suited to paperback romance, with engaging but infrequent flashes of something more. The touch of the divine is nowhere apparent.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 14 to Go
(More info about Griffith, plus the poster I swiped above, can be found here.)

Happy 100th!

Having spent the last month looking back to the beginning of the decade (and we're not done yet!), I'm taking us back ten times farther. 'Tis the season for fall-term course preparation, which has prompted me to investigate films from 1909, and though I've only been through seven so far, I've already covered a gamut from incredible work to inert misfires, occasionally from the same director. You all generally like the contemporary stuff and the Oscar champions best, but trust me, for once the reviews are as short as the movies! Surely, you are titillated by titles like Nero, or The Fall of Rome and Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy? (A tip for weekend fun: reprise an old trope and add a second or, title to recent releases: Julia; or, A Woman So Under the Influence She's Almost Beyond the Influence, or Away We Go; or, Boy, I Hope Our Baby Is Cooler Than Our Friends, etc.)