Douglas Fairbanks – This Film Is 100 Years Old

Seven Chances is a silent comedy from 1925, directed by and starring Buster Keaton, and based on a 1916 play by Roi Cooper Megrue.

Buster Keaton is a stockbroker who must marry a woman (any woman) before 7 o’clock this evening if he wants to inherit $7 million, which also seems to be the only way he can avoid financial ruin and possibly jail after “accidentally” committing some sort of massively fraudulent crime.

After annoying his sweetheart by revealing the machinations of the film’s plot to her, Buster has only 7 hours to find a new bride, and retreats to the local country club to chat up and proposition 7 local women, with a complete and unsurprising lack of success.

Luckily everything eventually spirals out of control and Keaton’s character finds himself caught up in an ever-escalating nearly 20-minute long chase scene that begins with him trying to outrun an army of potential brides in the middle of the city and ends with him being chased down by a mountain by hundreds of ten foot boulders. I assume this sequence wasn’t in the original play (although I’d quite like to see it if it was).

It’s an incredible ending, though, especially after the fairly sedate and ever so slightly boring first 40 minutes have lulled you into a false sense of security.

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Notes

1. I watched this on Mubi, although how long it’ll be on there I don’t know.

2. But you can’t take screenshots of films on mubi for some stupid reason, so I had to capture them from this version on youtube instead.

3. The first two-thirds or so of this is unfortunately marred by constant racist interruptions.

4. Which kind of under cut the charm of the whole thing to be honest.

5. The final 20 minute action sequence really is astonishingly spectacular though.

6. And almost entirely racism free.

7. Which is a bit of a relief

8. The first few scenes in this are filmed in early technicolor colour, too, which is nice (although then it reverts to Buster’s usual beautifully shot black and white)

9. There’s a real dreaminess to mid 20s technicolor films that I love.

10. As seen in The Black Pirate

11. An actual 100 year old film which I’ll review next week sometime hopefully

12. Doing this website’s only job on time for once

13. (1926 seems to be a good year for films, because I’ll get to watch The General and The Adventures Of Prince Achmed too)

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Film Information

Title: Seven Chances
Director: Buster Keaton
Year: 1925
Duration: 1 hour
Watch: youtube

Written by, produced by, and starring (though not directed by) Douglas Fairbanks, The Thief Of Bagdad is an impossibly lavish and incredibly beautiful retelling/remixing/mangling of various stories from The Thousand And One Nights.

Douglas Fairbanks plays the irrepressible and irascible thief who, in falling in love with the princess, finally finds some sense of morality and purpose.

Roughly structured in two parts, the first part involves the thief winning the heart of the princess by a mixture of subterfuge, charm and mightily impressive muscles, while in the second he has to go on a mythic quest to save her from the hands of some nefarious arsehole or other (who might well be good at subterfuge, but lacks the thief’s charm and muscles).

The first half of the film is by far the best, with an exuberance and charm that almost dissipates away at times in the second section.

But there’s still a lot to like there too, including some genuinely incredible terrible monsters that the thief kills with a nicely manic fervour (and some impressive gouts of blood, smoke and what looks a bit like bile occasionally).

That first hour or so is just wonderful in pretty much every way, though, so if for some reason you’ve only got time to watch half of a 2 and a half hour silent film that’s 100 years old now, watch that half).

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Notes.

1. I first watched this on mubi, but it’s not on there any more. I grabbed the screenshots from youtube, where it will presumably be forevermore.

2. I’m not sure I’ve seen Douglas Fairbanks in anything else, but he’s incredible in this.

3. A huge swaggering proto-Brando of a performance.

4. This also has a brief but significant role for the always wonderful Anna May Wong (who was in The Toll Of The Sea) as a treacherous handmaiden (although considering she’s more slave than handmaiden, she’s probably right to be treacherous).

5. I still haven’t ever seen one of those American coins she was on.

6. I still want one.

7. This also has some lovely use of screen tinting (a nice delicate yellow for the outdoor scenes, a cool purple for the indoor scenes, some silvery black and white for the night time, and even green and reds for the forest and fire levels later on).

8. Which all gives it the feel of some 8-bit adventure game at times.

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Film Information

Title: The Thief Of Bagdad
Director: Raoul Walsh
Year: 1924
Duration: 2 hours 20 minutes
Watch: youtube