San Francisco Silent Film Festival

By Dennis Harvey

“We didn’t need dialogue — we had faces!” sniffs unhappily retired former silent star Norma Desmond (played by actual former silent star Gloria Swanson) in Billy Wilder’s macabre 1950 noir classic “Sunset Boulevard.” Audiences then and now are cued to laugh at Nora’s has-been self-regard — her ebbing sex-appeal, her delusions of lingering grandeur, and in particular her trumpeting of silent cinema as a superior art form rather than the hoariest of media antiques.

Of course, silents had only been dead for 20 years when “Sunset” came out. One generation’s cultural norms always look ridiculous to the next generation, which invariably thinks itself the zenith of modernity and cool. It takes more than a couple decades to actually sort the silly from the sublime. And a half-century onward, Norma’s puffy pronouncement now seems pretty dead-on: Silent cinema did indeed create star personalities all the more vivid for their having to communicate solely through pantomime.

You’ll get a big dose of star power — circa Roaring Twenties — this weekend as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents its 11th annual weekend of archival features and shorts. This year’s bill is lighter on foreign titles (there’s just one French and one Russian feature) than usual, but delightfully heavy on Hollywood star vehicles showcasing some of the era’s most beloved and still-charismatic screen talents.

That’s certainly the case with opening night presentation “Seventh Heaven,” which won the very first Best Actress, Screenplay and Director Oscars in 1927. This luminous love story directed by Frank Borzage (who gets his own retrospective salute at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive starting July 29) made Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell into big stars, a hugely popular team whose box-office appeal in wistful romances lasted into the early sound era. It’s a hokey but beautifully handled tearjerker about a Parisian waif and her sewer-worker suitor. These days, Gaynor’s twee appeal has dated while Farrell’s unaffected sincerity holds up pretty well — a reversal of how they were perceived back then. Saccharine yet lovely and lyrical, “Seventh Heaven” is a fine example of Borzage’s ability to elevate sentimentally contrived material. It was one of the last silent films to be a massive hit; in fact, its gross earnings were exceeded that year only by “The Jazz Singer,” which got the whole “talkies” ball rolling. Gaynor’s son Robin Adrian will introduce the SF Silent Fest screening.

Janet Gaynor isn’t the only fetching femme in this year’s program. The mother of all cinematic waifs, Mary Pickford, is featured in her last but perhaps best vehicles as The Girl With the Golden Curls. 1926’s “Sparrows” has the then 33-year-old actress/producer/Hollywood tycoon as a spunky orphan leading nine others in escape across alligator-infested swamps from a hellish child-labor farm. This dark Dickensian fairy tale, directed with considerable skill by future notorious “one-take” hack William Beaudine (“Black Market Babies,” “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula”), was Pickford’s swansong to the child roles that had made her the world’s most popular movie star. Very grown-up business instincts had also made her one of the richest; yet when she started playing grown-up roles the next year, her fortunes faded and acting limitations were exposed.

Such limitations were painfully clear from the start for Marion Davies, a “Ziegfield Follies” showgirl who became the mistress of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst from 1918 to his death in 1951. (His Catholic wife steadfastly refused him divorce to the bitter end.) Hearst’s love, money, and power was such that he virtually willed Marion into being a movie star, no matter how skeptical the press or indifferent the public reception. Thus Davies was glorified in a series of lugubrious costume dramas that only exposed her lack of histrionic skill. (Of course, the Hearst papers disagreed — their raves were later parodied by Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane’s” ruthless promotion of an off-key opera singer wife’s career.) But Marion Davies had a hidden talent for comedy, and despite Hearst’s reluctance to see his beloved in “undignified” vehicles, she did get to exercise it now and again. In 1928’s “Show People” she’s a delight, parodying the grand manner of silent-screen divas as a hicksville wannabe crashing Hollywood’s gates. This King Vidor-directed satire features cameos by Chaplin, Fairbanks, John Gilbert and other massive stars, as well as a leading-man turn by preppie charmer William Haines, whose career was eventually torpedoed by his unwillingness to stay in the closet.

All the above-mentioned actresses had plenty of time to demonstrate their range, in and beyond the silent era. But some were less lucky, though not for lack of talent. One of the most celebrated (in retrospect) of all Hollywood failures was Louise Brooks, a gorgeous flapper child who by age 20 was noted as “extraordinarily vital and alive” on-screen, a Hollywood comer. By age 25 she was worse than a has-been, a never-was doomed by her own impetuosity and by the studios’ inability to see her as anything special.

In between, however, Kansas-born Brooks made some movies that secured her place in eternity — if not in the immediate here-and-now — as a movie star among movie stars. SF Silent Fest is showing the most-famous first among them, G.W. Pabst’s 1929 “Pandora’s Box,” in which she plays Franz Wedekind’s doomed omnisexual seductress Lulu. I’ve a personal preference for the actress and director’s second (and last) collaboration, “Diary of a Lost Girl,” in which her naturalism renders Dickensian melodrama almost unbearably poignant. But neither of these films were given much respect outside Germany until many years later; when Brooks returned to the U.S. (after one more European film, the delightful French “Prix de Beaute”), she was fast reduced to the unemployment line. Much later she re-emerged as a witty commentator on the silent era, rediscovered by film buffs and historians.

Conversely given a big-time Hollywood launch that bombed was Anna Sten, the Russian actress whose memorable debut in Boris Barnet’s 1927 “The Girl with the Hat Box” gets revived this weekend. That delightful comedy stood in stark contrast to the tragic tilt of her later European films, let alone the tragic floppage of her vehicles as “the new Garbo” for Hollywood tycoon Samuel Goldwyn. Dubbed “Goldwyn’s Folly,” the heavily-accented thesp fled back to Europe after such notorious duds as “Nana” and Vidor’s 1935 “The Wedding Night” with Gary Cooper. She seldom worked thereafter, spending later decades living in New York with her husband.

Not quite so unlucky was Dita Parlo, a German-born actress who emerged at the same time as Brooks but was able to make her way in films of various nations (Germany, France, plus a brief Hollywood sojourn) until the late 1930s. In SF Silent Fest presentation “Au Bonheur des Femmes,” a 1930 film by director Jean Julien Duvivier, she plays a bob-haired country bumpkin getting a hard-knock education in the economic and romantic ways of the big city. Parlo later had memorable roles in Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante” and Renoir’s “Grand Illusion.” Then wartime deportation by French authorities seemed to throw a wrench into the gears. She did make a couple post-war films before her 1971 demise, but it was a sputtering end to an initially glorious career.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s plenty of Guy Power in the current Silent Fest as well. Additional highlights include a 1917 John Ford western, “Bucking Broadway,” starring lifelong Ford regular Harry Carey. There’s also the marvelous 1928 Lon Chaney vehicle “The Unholy Three,” in which he plays one-third of a carny-con trio (the others being ‘s midget Tweedledee and a shockingly hot young Victor McLagen as strongman Hercules, that “mighty marvelous mastodonic model of muscular masculinity”). Chaney is remembered now (when at all) as “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” a makeup-chameleonic freak, but he was a real actor — watch his face after he hits con-woman Mae Busch, as it traces the gamut of emotions from fury to shock to ache at the knowledge that his love will never second that emotion.

Last but not least, there’s a program of seldom-seen silent shorts by Laurel & Hardy, a popular team long before the movies started to speak. Perhaps most memorable is “Wrong Again,” in which their inept stablehands read in the paper that “Blue Boy” has been stolen, a hefty reward offered for its return. Assuming that a racehorse of the same name must be the kidnappee, they duly return “Blue Boy” to its “home,” where the grateful millionaire owner asks them sight-unseen to place the prize “on top of the piano, where I usually keep him.” L&H duly manage this, albeit to disastrous ends. Need I clarify that the desired “Blue Boy” is a certain masterpiece of portrait painting, not a blueblood riding steed? This news dawns late — too late, alas — for our poor heroes.

The 11th S.F. Silent Film Festival plays July 14-16, Friday-Sunday, at the Castro Theatre, Castro & Market Sts.. San Francisco. (925) 866-9530.

07.13.2006