Burl reviews The Penalty! (1920)

Shh, it’s Burl! I’ve got a silent picture from a century ago to review for you today: in fact a starring vehicle for the great Lon Chaney! Ha ha, yes, this must be one of the absolute jewels in his crown, as we have on view all at the same time his astonishing physical feats, his makeup prowess, and his tremendous acting! And maybe I’m just not listening in the right places, but I don’t hear this one talked about as much as I do some other Chaney pictures! It’s The Penalty!

It’s a crime-horror-melodrama as rich as a ripe pear! Ha ha, it even has nudity in it! It begins in the past, with a boy who has been injured by traffic brought in to the surgery of a young and untested doctor! The sawbones lives up to that colloquial name for his profession and saws the boy’s bones! But an older doctor arrives and instantly diagnoses that the boy’s legs didn’t need to be cut off after all! The older medico reluctantly pledges to cover for the younger one’s mistake, but the boy overhears this exchange, and thus begins a lifetime of rage and resentment, and the longest-term revenge plot outside of Oldboy!

Twenty-seven years after his unfortunate dismemberment, the boy has grown into Blizzard, music lover and legless genius of the underworld! Ha ha, Chaney’s performance as this near-demonic crime czar is really something to behold, and it’s no surprise when the sculptress daughter of his great doctor enemy asks him in all innocence to pose for a bust of the Ol’ Scratch she’s making! There are times when Chaney’s face becomes so devilish you expect to see horns, and it’s impossible to say whether at those times he’s wearing one of the crazy makeups he was such a genius at, or was just harnessing the power of gurning like no actor before him or since!

The story, by Gouvernor Morris (ha ha, just what did he gouvern, if anything?), is intensely melodramatic in that crazy silent movie fashion, and if you don’t like that sort of thing this will not be for you! But if you don’t mind implausibilities stacked like cordwood, impenetrable motivations (to our twenty-first century minds, anyway), and what some may consider wild overacting, you’ll stand a good chance of loving this picture as much as I did! Ha ha, can you buy a scheme that might have inspired Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, but involves the secret manufacture of hundreds of pretty straw hats? Or a special brain operation that will transform a raging, evil lunatic into a nice and helpful guy? I did, and felt amply rewarded for my open-mindedness!

It’s got some great sets and beautiful inky cinematography, and the direction by Wallace Worsley is effective enough that you wonder why Worsley, despite his premature passing and the fame of his Hunchback of Notre Dame, he wasn’t more famous! It’s black as pitch and sports a tragic ending - the penalty of the title, in fact - and so, as silent films go, this is most certainly not The Lonedale Operator! I give The Penalty three and a half leather stumpholders!

Burl reviews The Lonedale Operator! (1911)

With a silent ha ha, it’s Burl, here to review The Lonedale Operator, one of the hundreds and dozens of short subjects that D. W. Griffith made in the days before his ambition brought him to make Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and all the rest of the pictures that made his reputation for both good and ill! Ha ha, I think this might be the first silent picture I've reviewed for you since Eternal Love, and I found it on a compilation tape of old silent railroad dramas! There were a couple of Griffiths on that tape, and a less interesting film about rescuing an old grouch from an oncoming train that was produced by Thomas Edison’s company, and a little mini-documentary on the railroad genre as well!

But The Lonedale Operator was well worth a gander! If you’re anything like me, you’re wondering “Ha ha, but what does he operate? A station? A telephone exchange? A train?” It turns out he’s a telegraph operator, but he’s feeling poorly that day and turns over the operation of his post to his lovely daughter! She’s having an affair of the heart with a train engineer, and they share a happy moment before he zooms off in his iron horse!

The next thing you know another train arrives, this one bearing the payroll! But it’s also bearing something else: two rail-riding hobos who climb down from the rods and observe our pretty young operator hauling the heavy cash bag into the station! Ha ha, they seem to say as they rub their hands together with glee! An easy mark! Or so they think!

The young damsel espies these rascals lurking outside her window and almost falls into a faint, but manages to lock the door just in time! As the scoundrels begin bashing their way into the hut, she hurries to send a telegraph of her predicament to the next station down the line - but the operator there is asleep, the dirty dog! The bandits are that much closer to getting in - the door is starting to buckle! Meanwhile the sleepy telegraph man wakes to hear the frantic beeping! He conveys the situation to the young engineer, who jumps into his train and speeds to the rescue!

But alas, he might be too late! The hobos have crashed through two doors now and are in the telegraph office! But wait! What’s that shiny object in her hand? It must be a gun, and the two would-be thieves are kept at bay until the engineer and his fireman burst in! And what was the metallic item in her hand? Not a gun, but a wrench! The two rapscallions offer humble bows before the bravery and bluffing artistry of the heroic young woman! The end!

So it’s got a pretty good plot, but it’s a noteworthy bit of cinema too, being one of the hundreds of one- and two-reelers Griffith made for Biograph, where he was helping to figure out the visual language of narrative cinema, ha ha! He hadn’t fully gamed out reverse shots yet, or eyelines - the bandits outside the window are not at all in line with where the young woman is looking, for example! But on the other hand there are thrilling shots taken from the train’s tender, and a great early example of crosscutting for suspense! It’s a sweet little country thriller, and I give The Lonedale Operator two and a half enormous black bowties!

Burl reviews Eternal Love! (1929)

Shhhhh! It’s Burl, here to review a silent movie for you! I really enjoy a good silent picture, and often think I should watch more of them! I haven’t seen that one that came out relatively recently, The Artist, though it seems like the silent aspect might be a bit of a gimmick more than anything! I’ve never seen Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie either, which circumstance I really must remedy one of these days!

The silent movie I’m talking about today is called Eternal Love, and it’s an early picture by Ernst Lubitsch! And yes, before you ask, it has his touch, more so I’d say than his later-period Heaven Can Wait, which was delightful but a bit more ponderous than one hopes for from this brilliant cinematician!

Eternal Love is a mountain picture, and that’s a genre for which I feel a perpetual fascination! From the works of Dr. Arnold Fanck to Leni Riefenstal’s The Blue Light all the way up to Guy Maddin’s Careful, the mountain picture has proven itself to be as packed with delights as a Taverner’s tin is full of fruit drops! Drama, pathos, romantic love: it all seems much magnified in the thin air of the upper altitudes!

In Eternal Love, the hawk-nosed Mr. John Barrymore plays Marcus, a mountain hunter in an early 19^th Century Swiss alpenvillage! He’s in love with the beautiful Ciglia; meanwhile, a wild mountain girl (there’s one of these in every mountain picture, it seems!) named Pia is in love with him! And an upright fellow named Lorenz Gruber is in love with Ciglia! Well, this romantic quadrangle is spun into dissaray when the demon drink gets involved one night after a town dance is held to celebrate the departure of the filthy French! Marcus’s hands get a little too busy, and the next thing you know his bedroom’s been invaded! Ha ha, it all goes south from there, with wedding bells a-ringing, but for the wrong sets of people!

A fearsome alpenstorm sets up the final conflict, as is so frequently the case in mountain pictures! Pia thinks Marcus is lost in the storm, and knocks on every door of the village trying, absurdly prematurely, to raise a search party! She ends up at Lorenz Gruber’s house, and he sees by Ciglia’s reaction to the suggestion that Marcus may be lost that his wife is still in love with this rugged mountaineer! Marcus ambles out of the storm safe as a linebacker, and Lorenz Gruber offers him money to leave the town forever! But Marcus, unhappy in his marriage to Pia – and prone to upending the dinner table every now and then – isn’t going to budge! This sets up the climactic events, which involve an absolutely stunning shot of an avalanche, and is altogether one of the most emotionally devastating endings I’ve seen in a movie for some time!

The narrative is pretty compelling, and the acting only occasionally lapses into the big-eyed gesticulating silent melodramas are known for; but it must be said that Eternal Love’s primary virtues are pictorial! It was shot in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, and there are no end of breathtaking shots and sequences! There are great camera movements to remind us of how free the camera was in the days before microphones hidden in planters, and just plain marvelous direction! I give Eternal Love, which must have been one of the last silent pictures made (and was goat-glanded with a few sound effects here and there, actually) three and a half grimacing gargoyle masks!