Tag: 1919

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

The Hayseed (1919)

In The Hayseed, Fatty Arbuckle plays a postman who woos a local girl, who is also being pursued by the corrupt local Sheriff. To spoil the plot somewhat, Fatty prevails.

This was another fairly slight Fatty Arbuckle short, in that there’s not much here that’s especially inventive or funny. But what it does have is a kind of charming sweetness that you definitely don’t usually get with Fatty Arbuckle at all.

Also there’s plenty of Luke the Dog, and Buster Keaton does some magic tricks, which he’s, unsurprisingly brilliant, like he is at literally everything else he ever did.

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Notes

1. I watched this on blu-ray agai. Stills taken from here, which isn’t the best quality copy, I’m afraid.

2. It’s hard to see on that youtube version, but I also very much liked the sign on the side of the shop that says “There’s no end to our pretzels.”

3. Which is a pretty good joke.

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Film Information

Title: The Hayseed
Director: Fatty Arbuckle
Year: 1919
Duration: 21 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Back Stage (1919)

In Back Stage, Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton play the stage hands at a theatre. After spending the first half of the film meeting (and alienating) the various performers, they end up having to put on the show themselves, with fairly predictably disastrous results.

Most of these Fatty Arbuckle/Buster Keaton films seem to oscillate between either being wildly terrible or wildly brilliant, but this one sits somewhere in the middle, really. There’s lots of good sight gags, quite a bit of dancing, and a fairly long fight at the end, but it never hits the highs of their best stuff, unfortunately, while neverbeing egregiously terrible either.

It’s perfectly fine but you wouldn’t exactly miss it if you’d never seen it.

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Notes

1. I watched this on blu-ray again. The screenshots here are from this youtube version (which is also the same version that’s on the disc).

2. This features an early version (perhaps the first version) of the famous house wall falling down stunt, though, as also seen in One Week and (most famously) Steamboat Bill Jr.

3. Although as that’s from 1928 it’s beyond the scope of this website for a good few years still.

4. Keeping up the theme of my notes on the One Week review there, I am still seeing instances of this gag backwards through time.

5. I hope there is a 19th century version of it somewhere lurking around for me to find.

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Film Information

Title: Back Stage
Director: Fatty Arbuckle
Year: 1919
Duration: 21 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Dr. Wise On Influenza (1919)

Dr. Wise On Influenza is a public information film, commissioned by the Ministry Of Health in 1919, to help make the population of Britain realise how dangerous the Spanish Flu was, and how important it was for everyone to try and minimise their chances of spreading it to others.

And so Dr. Wise (above) delivers a lecture, intercut with dramatised events, showing how you (yes, YOU!) can help save the lives of others, much of which now seems horrifyingly relevant now (although I’m pretty sure no-one really needs to follow the bit about gargling some vast array of chemicals).

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player

2. And have posted this review of it now for fairly obvious reasons

3. Which I am sure are readily apparent

4. (Please everyone do not die)

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Film Information

Title: Dr. Wise On Influenza
Year: 1919
Duration: 20 minutes
Watch: BFI Player

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Bamboozled (1919)

Bamboozled is a silent comedy directed by and starring Fred Rains, concerning the attempts of a man to woo his love by finding a park bench for them to sit on together. Unfortunately, as all the benches in all the parks in London are full of other couples already stting together, he has to hatch a devious plan. This plan of course involves buying a fully life-like automated robot human and getting her to sit on a bench so no one else can.

It is not a very good plan.

At the end it turns out that this human female robot is actually the father of the woman the man is trying to woo. The reasons of both the why and the how of this are never really adequately explained (despite the inclusion of an explanatory flashback), although then again it’s no more unlikely and baffling than the plan itself. So I suppose everything is okay.

I enjoyed this quite a lot. Even if the story doesn’t make a single bit of sense, the physical performance of Fred Rains as an automaton is great, and I really liked the way that British parks seem almost identical to how they are now (except, perhaps, for the noticeable lack of bins).

The direction and editing felt more modern than some of the other films I’ve watched too. There’s the use of explanatory flashbacks throughout (although these are introduced with a somewhat clunky fade out and fade in device), and there are a number of inserted close-up shots of items (expressions, pictures, buttons, instruction booklets, and so on) for clarity.

This watch, for example, is beautiful. I’d have quite happily have watched a full minute of it ticking.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI player.

2. This was produced by a company with the misfortune, from the point of view of those of us watching it here, now, one hundred years later, of being called Swastika Films. The way that every intertitle card throughout is emblazoned with a huge swastika in the corner was more disconcerting than perhaps it should have been.

3. There’s a scene in this where the main character sits on a chair and unties his shoelaces and then takes off his shoe. It’s pretty rare to see people untying their shoelaces and taking off their shoes in films, so it’s always quite nice to see.

4. When I make a film it’s going to be a solid 90 minutes of people taking off their shoes and nothing else.

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Film Information

Title: Bamboozled
Director: Fred Rains
Year: 1919
Duration: 35 minutes

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Smashing Barriers (1919) / Auntie’s Portrait (1915)

Smashing Barriers was originally a 15-episode adventure serial, where a sawmill owner and her impossibly boring boyfriend try to escape the attentions of an outlaw and his band of ruffians.

Directed by and starring William Duncan in 1919, these episodes (the plotting of which was described at the time as “incomprehensibly convoluted”) were eventually condensed down to a single movie a few years later, and then even further into this short film in the 1930s, for sale as a home movie.

It’s this ultra-condensed version which survives, the originals all having been lost.

The surviving film is only ten minutes long. Yet there’s time enough for rescuing a damsel in distress from a burning building, out of control carts careering down a hill, an improvised zipwire escape, someone leaping off a cliff into the waters below, people randomly fire guns, and more. The picture above is basically straight out of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Even though this was presumably all deeply generic at the time (100 years ago!) it’s sort of wonderful how much of the action here is still used repeatedly in everything right now. And for another hundred years yet, too, I expect, unless there’s some sort of catastrophic outbreak of originality just round the corner.

And no one wants that. We’d all be terrified.

I then watched Auntie’s Portrait, a not-especially comedic farce filmed in 1915, and made by the same company as Smashing Barriers, The Vitagraph Company Of America.

This too is deeply generic in almost every way, so much so that I can’t really think of anything to say about it. I wouldn’t have bothered reviewing at all, really, but there’s a nice fourth-wall breaking dog at the start, so I’ve decided to include it here so I’ve got an excuse to post a picture of its cheeky little face.

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Notes

1. I watched Smashing Barriers on amazon prime, where it appears to be one of about five silent movies in their entire catalogue

2. Although with amazon’s, let’s say, incomprehensibly convoluted search function, for all I know there’s actually billions.

3. I watched Auntie’s Portrait on the Harpodeon website, where it’s free for a week.

4. But usually costs two quid.

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Film Information

Title: Smashing Barriers
Director: William Duncan
Year: 1919
Duration: 10 minutes

Title: Auntie’s Portrait
Director: George D. Baker
Year: 1915
Duration: 12 minutes

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Feline Follies (1919)

Feline Follies is a short cartoon, directed by Pat Sullivan (or possibly Otto Messmer), and widely credited as being the first Felix The Cat cartoon (even though the cat in this is called Master Tom).

Feline Follies tells the heartwarming story of Master Tom, who romances a neighbouring cat called Miss Kitty White, gets her pregnant, then commits suicide rather than help bring up his huge litter of children.

Unlike in later Felix The Cat shorts, where he gets into increasingly elaborate and surreal adventures, here the setting is pretty prosaic, and there’s only really one playful visual gag in the whole cartoon, when Tom and Miss Kitty use the musical notes from Tom’s guitar playing to make themselves little cars to drive away in.

That scene is by far the best section of Feline Follies, where Miss Kitty dances to Master Tom’s guitar playing, while a group of mischievous mice take advantage of Tom’s absence to cause havoc in his empty home.

Interestingly, the animation and composition of the scenes gets more complex as the film progresses, almost like you’re watching them getting better and more confident at animating in real time.

While the first few scenes are all static short shots in a fixed environment, half way through the scene where Tom caterwauls his love on the back fence, they add cuts between different shots (although still with static backgrounds for each different shot).

Next we get two different scenes intercut with each other, switching back and forth between Tom and Miss Kitty dancing by the bins, while the mice are trashing Tom’s house behind his back. By the last scene, there’s a camera pan to reveal Tom’s kittens, and then a scrolling background as he escapes his responsibilities across the countryside.

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Notes

1. I watched this on youtube, in a version without any soundtrack. There’s plenty of soundtracked versions around, too, if you want.

2. Although this is often said to be the first Felix The Cat cartoon, the earlier Pat Sullivan short, The Tail of Thomas Kat (1917), might well have been the first.

3. Even though he was called Thomas then.

4. But unfortunately that’s a lost film, so no-one can check it to find out.

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Film Information

Title: Feline Follies
Directors: Pat Sullivan, Otto Messmer
Year: 1919
Duration: 4 minutes
Related Articles: Feline Follies (wikipedia article), which has a decent discussion of the authorship dispute about who actually directed this.

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Press (1919)

Press is a minute long piece of film showing a printing press going through its motions as it’s being set up for that night’s print run.

There’s not much here to review in the traditional sense, obviously, as it’s just a tiny snippet of documentary footage, but that doesn’t really matter. There is a beauty in the movement, a wonder in the slowness. And that’s enough.

One of the things I like about film is that pointing a camera at something and just letting it watch it exist, or occur, forces you, as a viewer, to really look at it. This narrowing of focus, this stripping away of distractions, somehow seems to elongate time, so that a minute of film stretches out more than a minute ever should, or ever would, imbuing it with a depth and density it might not usually have.

I do not know why.

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Notes

1. Another film watched via the BFI Player – Press
2. If you also like silent, wordless, minute long looks at things, you might be interested in watching some of my minute at a time series of videos
3. Although of course you might not be

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Film Information

Title: Press
Year: 1919
Duration: 1 minute

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Oh’phelia: A Cartoon Burlesque (1919)

Oh’phelia: A Cartoon Burlesque is a strangely charmless comedic version of Hamlet, directed and written by the humourist and animator Anson Dyer.

I think pretty much every joke falls flat here, not helped by the stilted pace of the animation. As with all things like this, maybe it’s just because I’m too far removed from the time to actually get any of them. But then again, when you watch some of his other cartoons, such as the cutting political satire shown off in Peter’s Picture Poems (1917), maybe Anson Dyer was just a tediously unfunny hack.

There is an excellent bit where a crow graphically eats a snail, though, and I did like this caption, too, so it’s not all awful.

The dog’s pretty cute too.

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Notes

1. I watched this on the free section of the BFI’s website, here: Oh’phelia: A Cartoon Burlesque
2. There are quite a few other things of his there as well.
3. Including another Shakespeare one, which I’ll presumably watch next year some time. And then immediately regret.
4. Also this has a moon with a face on it. I’m quite scared of moons with faces on them, and always will be.

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Film Information

Title: Oh’phelia: A Cartoon Burlesque
Director: Anson Dyer
Year: 1919
Runtime: 10 minutes

Title: Peter’s Picture Poems
Director: Anson Dyer
Year: 1917
Runtime: 3m minutes

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (1919)

Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (or, The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart) was the first film made by the wonderful Lotte Reiniger, who’s most famous for The Adventures Of Prince Achmed (1926). She was only 19 or 20 when she made this.

Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens is only 3 minutes long, and, unsurprisingly, quite simplistic in style (no scrolling images, nor any backgrounds yet), but it’s still lovely. Like most of her films, it’s all animated using paper cut-outs to create silhouettes, and I’m always amazed at how expressive her characters are purely through their movement.

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Notes

1. This isn’t on any of my Lotte Reiniger DVDs, so I watched this on youtube.

2. This version is soundtracked by the composer Jennifer Bellor, although originally it would have been silent, obviously.

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Film Information

Title: Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart)
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Year: 1919
Runtime: 3 minutes
Related Articles: Lotte Reiniger (wikipedia)