Jeanne d'Arc (1899)

The 40-some-odd years of the Silent Era was a period of fertile artistic growth—not just in terms of artistry and subject matter, but technology, too. As the years crept by, the camera grew less fragile and more portable. It began its first stiff pans around 1900 and by the 1920s was sweeping gracefully across the actors’ faces, catching glimpses of ever-subtler performances. A pristine close-up, a long take and the face of, say, a Greta Garbo, was a potent and profound combination.

It was different in 1899. It was theatrical. The actors in Jeanne d’Arc appear to us as they would have on-stage: small, with outsized gestures and elaborate costumes to confirm their roles and actions. Denied their speeches (or even title cards, as 1899 was a bit early even for that), they rely on their pantomime skills, accompanying music, and the presumed voice-over work of a live narrator. The effect, to our eyes and perhaps nineteenth-century eyes as well, can be goofy. We marvel at director Georges Melies’ accomplishments with this film (at 10 minutes, a very long film for the time), but chuckle a bit at the naiveté.

This could be our problem, rather than the film’s. I believe that one of the things preventing some modern movie-fans from fully embracing silent movies is their tendency to impose modern assumptions about cinema’s purposes onto older work. To put it less awkwardly, we take for granted that a film has a plot, which the film’s scenes are strung together to support. The purpose of those scenes is to elicit some response from the viewer, whether it be laughter, grief, fear or awe. And it is the filmmakers’ responsibility to achieve all his or her aims within the boundaries of this single film, because chances are very likely that it is the only film you’ll be watching in that theatre, that day. A complete experience is both the best we can hope for and the least we expect.

Alright, but what if the films you watched were projected on a screen in a carnival tent, or the white-painted wall of your local dry goods store? Suppose they were 10 minutes long, at the very most, and you could expect to watch 10 or more of them at a sitting—all different types and themes, from documentary footage to comedies to melodramas? The voice-over and musical accompaniment might change from one show to the next, not just because the performers changed, but because each might bring a different interpretation of what he or she saw on-screen. And then there’s the guy showing the films: the one who took your penny. He has 10 films on the ticket and he can show them in whatever order he chooses. Maybe he’s showing live theatre and magic tricks, too. How will his particular mix of entertainments affect you, the viewer? And how would a director, conscious of this semi-chaos awaiting his film’s premieres, adapt them for it?

In Melies’ case, this meant creating a film of breathless pace; one that never stops for contemplative moments or establishing shots, because the narrator can fill in the audience on anything it doesn’t know going in, and there’s no close-ups to project heavy feeling, anyway. It meant cherry-picking key episodes from the Joan of Arc legend (up there, to be sure, with the sinking of the Titanic in terms of filmic malleability) and doing his best to blow the audience away with his presentation of each as a standalone piece.

Melies did not begin life as a movie-man—you couldn’t have, in 1899. He was an actor, cartoonist and stage magician who knew how to make sets and backdrops that evoked what they could not mimic, and were beautiful. So in Jeanne d’Arc, we open with Jeanne/Joan (Bleuette Bernon) in a phony, but very prettily painted forest glen, being addressed by the Archangel Michael. Michael floats above her, gesturing solemnly with his sword as Joan exhibits her concerns below him. The angel and his shimmering crown disappear and both Joan and the live deer around her get to scurrying.

While Michael’s garb recalls the depictions of angels and the Heavenly Host common in the real Joan’s era, you can also see a second, more elegant point of recollection. Much like the medieval artists he’s emulating, Melies builds scenes that are obviously flat, absent perspective, and relevant unto themselves, rather than as parts of a whole composition. However, unlike those early painters, Melies’ signature look draws from his background in another medium: theatre. Jeanne d’Arc unapologetically merges the clearly fake (the sets) with realest real (the actors). This is not shoddiness, or primitive F/X at work: it’s deliberate.

Jeanne d’Arc’s most remarkable scene is set in Compiègne. In this sequence of about two minutes, French soldiers storm a castle, which is presented as a backdrop against the fixed camera. There is fencing (that is, a fence) in the foreground. Joan appears first, on horseback. She is huge before the camera (especially by the standards of this film) and then we see the castle gate open. Burgundian soldiers spill from inside, drag Joan off her horse and into the castle. Now the French arrive, frantic, spilling into the frame from either side. They, too, are close to the camera—at a proximity no stage show could provide us—and so we are pulled into the scene as they tear down the fencing and, through a bit of falsified perspective in the form of a second stage level, appear to charge into the distance and scale the walls. A smoke-filled battle ensues. The sequence concludes with a captured Joan recollecting her call to arms by the angel—through a flashback in the form of a window above her head. Within the window is the alternate variation of the film’s opening scene. Melies here proved not only what cinema could reproduce from the stage, but also what it could improve.

Every Joan of Arc film must conclude with the same scene. And I don’t mean the obligatory stake-burning, which Jeanne d’Arc delivers rather limply. No, it’s all about what happens after Joan is dead, and the director is left to contain, for us, the content of her ultimate victory over Death and her captors. Different films have done this in different ways, some more literally than others. Melies, for whom subtlety in film was quite alien, stays true to form here. We cut away from the torched Joan to a multi-layered, painted set-piece of clouds, and among them, angels playing stringed instruments. Into the centre rises Joan, emancipated from the world of sin through the trapdoor of God. She turns, triumphant, and the lovely backdrops part above and below, and so she’s accepted into the bosom of the Lord. It’s all so fake.

And I’ve never forgotten it.

Georges Melies’ most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (1902) has also been featured on Silent Volume.

Where to find Jeanne d’Arc:
I’ve never found the film on video, I’m sorry to report. This leaves us with the ever-blurry YouTube, or this version, which includes a voiceover narration. The narration does help you keep track of things, but it is out-of-sync with the action (at least on my computer), and gets a bit aggravating.

While neither is a perfect experience, the film remains worth a look, and the tinting, I might add, is gorgeous.

Sadie Thompson (1928)

To modern eyes, Sadie Thompson looks like a drag queen. Her lids and lashes are black. Her lips recall cherry tomatoes, even when seen in black and white. She is, in the best tradition of silent archetypes, the Fallen Women. She’s also the heroine of this film.

Sadie Thompson tells us what a lady-of-the-evening’s life is like during the day. Like night, it has its ups and downs. Sadie (Gloria Swanson) is lovely and fun and always up for a party, and because she is lovely and fun, she always finds one. This is particularly easy to do on the Samoan island of Tutuila, where the weather is always warm, even when it rains, and the members of the local military detachment are most hospitable to a young lady, even if she seems to be running from something.

Sadie is stranded on Tutuila until her passenger ship is again ready to sail. The enlisted men hope that’s none too soon, and in the mean time, she’ll be their chief source of entertainment, though the movie never tells us precisely how. It does, however, imply a great deal. There’s that turnstile that marks the entranceway to the inn she’s staying at—for example. And then there’s her drinking, and smoking, and gum-chewing, and her graceless way of stomping through a room as though she has no idea what it means to be a lady. And of course, there’s her makeup.

For the soldiers, this is all gravy. Director Raoul Walsh, to the movie’s aesthetic advantage, but general discredit, makes sure every one else on the island, native or otherwise, is downright off-putting. Sadie could be below average and still have her pick. If she’s hot (and loose), it’s almost overkill.

This was certainly no visual leap for Gloria Swanson. Swanson was a talented actress who could be mis-cast because of her look, most memorably (for me) in Beyond the Rocks (1922)—a film that challenged us to imagine the smoky starlet as third daughter of an impoverished fisherman in a nowhere seaside village. Swanson was, of course, naturally beautiful, but her Sadie getup is more a caricature of her standard film appearance than a costume. In its way, it’s perfect.

Unfortunately for Sadie, her passenger ship also deposits Mr. Davidson (Lionel Barrymore), a self-righteous moralist of enormous political influence. Davidson is quite happy to stick around Tutuila, since there’s so many hell-bound natives to convert. In Sadie he sees an opportunity, though precisely what kind of opportunity she is to him becomes the meat of the flick.

The last of the major players is Sergeant Tim O’Hara (Walsh, also in front of the lens), whom Sadie nicknames ‘Handsome.’ O’Hara is a big-hearted, inexperienced goof who falls for the Fallen Woman the way big-hearted goofs in earlier silent films always did. It’s hard to guess what a woman like Sadie would see in Handsome (who’s not even that handsome), unless he represents stability for her. F.W. Murnau built a whole movie around that idea: the deeply cynical drama, City Girl (1930). Sadie Thompson, however, isn’t cynical in the least. It is, in fact, as straightforward and shallow a morality play as anything by D.W. Griffith, only with the possessors of righteousness reversing their roles. This film is as uncompromising in its defence of Sadie as earlier films, such as The Mothering Heart (1913) or The Busher (1919), were in flaying their versions of the whore.

The key to the movie’s success isn’t Sadie’s relationship with Handsome, since we don’t trust his judgement in complex matters. Nor is it Sadie herself. It’s a fact that audiences usually sympathize with the screen character they see most and know best, viewing even upstanding supporting characters as intrusive. Happily, we don’t require our friends to be perfect, either. So Sadie gets our love. That leaves us with Davidson.

Like Swanson, Barrymore is particularly well-cast in his role. The elder brother of John and Ethel Barrymore (and great-uncle of Drew) was a fine actor with a notably uncharitable face. He looms tall and stiff over the rest of the inn-keeper’s guests and never cracks a smile that doesn’t seem rueful. But ‘rueful’ isn’t the right word—not if you really study his face. There’s less sorrow than sadism in the way Davidson looks at people, as though their moral failures please him. He’s iron-willed, and they aren’t. His snippy little wife (Blanche Friderici), with whom good sex must have been impossible, spends her afternoons reminding people how correct her husband is on all matters. She’s no challenge for him, and challenges are what he lives for.

Sadie Thompson was the first film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story, Rain. The story would be adapted again, only four years later, as Rain, a talkie starring Joan Crawford. I prefer Crawford’s Sadie to Swanson’s, but I’ll take Barrymore’s Davidson over the remake’s version, as played by Walter Huston. Huston was, of course, another talented actor, and he approaches Barrymore’s feat of bringing further, forbidding weight to an already awful man. However, Huston must talk a great deal, and although Davidson would be the type prone to speeches, it is not his words that reveal his character. To see what does, watch an early scene in Sadie Thompson, as Davidson, Sadie and other guests share a table at the inn. Barrymore fixes his gaze upon Swanson and with his squint and grin tells us how fascinated he is by her. Not intrigued by the opportunity to help—no, more by the opportunity to gain, as one might apprehend a silver-mine, or a well-cooked free dinner. The silent medium gives Barrymore the advantage of a long take, uninterrupted by chatter, and he uses it to forge a character far more terrifying than Huston’s.


Note: The last reel of Sadie Thompson is lost. Kudos to the restoration team, however, for making the best of it. Be assured the film remains coherent through to the end.

My thanks to Caren Feldman, of the Toronto Film Society (TFS), for screening this film.

Where to find Sadie Thompson:
Sadie Thompson occupies disc five of The Gloria Swanson Collection, a set that includes a number of rarities and several of her films with director Cecil B. DeMille. Swanson and DeMille were good friends in real life, and appeared together in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), starring Swanson. The Gloria Swanson Collection is produced by Passport Video USA and can be ordered through Amazon.com.