The Ship of Lost Men (1929)

The Ship of Lost Men is a mediocre film with a great ending, and that’s a problem for me. First, because I try not to reveal endings (though I’ve never sworn anything to that effect); and second, because the ending of this film is both its salvation and the best summation of why it fails. So here’s what I’ll do: I’ll describe the scene without context—its architecture but not its intent—and hope that’s enough to make my point.

Sex In Chains (1928)

Sex In Chains isn’t the exploitation film it sounds like, but if you did find it shelved—accidentally, we’ll say—next to a stack of early-70s convent skin flicks and womens’ prison dramas, you wouldn’t be wholly misled. Those films, like this one, are about people veering to extremes. They’re about people in heat.

Sex In Chains—an often delicately shot, honest film with compassion for its suffering married couple, Franz and Helene—is at a low boil even in its quietest moments. But director (and star) Wilhelm Dieterle isn’t satisfied with mere melodramatics, even of a kind lurid or borderline nymphomaniacal enough to hold our attention. He wants us to be more than observers. He makes us care about these people, all the while tackling social issues that remain, to this day, contentious. I’ll not soon forget Sex In Chains, or the people in it.

Repost: Different From the Others (1919)

I burn easily, so I'll be skipping today's Pride Parade here in Toronto. But here's a repost about a film that shares Pride's overall themes and dedication to advocacy. It's also damn near as long as the Parade... [blogger pauses a moment, pining for the days when he had so much times on his hands.]

Activist films, as they age, face a gradual reckoning. What shocks one era may not shock the next; assumptions evolve or reverse themselves; problems are solved—often, the most pointed ‘message movies’ are the first to seem antique. We appreciate them for being ahead of their own time, but they’re still behind our own. They can no longer run a current of indignation through us.


Different from the Others is, well, different. It’s still ahead of us, or at least, most of us. This silent film is about homosexuality, and it approaches the topic with more blunt conviction than any film, from any era, that I’ve seen. Men hold other mens’ hands in this movie. They caress and comfort one another. They suffer and die for the prejudices of others, for whom the film has no sympathy. The oppressors are not pious, they’re bigoted—and through knowledge, they can be healed.

Back to God's Country (1919)

Well it IS Canada day...

“Canadian law knows no excuse for killing. I must take your father to the post.”

Damn right! Nobody messes with Canadian law, especially in the thick of rural Quebec; and never when it’s Captain Rydal of the RCMP slapping the cuffs on you. Rydal’s got his man, alright—a backwoods Quebecois who’s just stabbed a drifter to death on his own front stoop. Now, he only did that because the drifter’s pal was trying to rape his daughter, but that’s up to Canadian law to sort out, so off he must go. And off he does go—right off a cliff, because the would-be rapist is Rydal, who’s ‘captain’ by virtue of running a ship, and only wears a Mountie’s uniform because he had the real Mountie shot. When you live in the woods, the only people you can trust are the animals.

The Man From Texas (1915)

Tom Mix was the prototype Western superstar—the strutting dude in chaps, tassles and ten-gallon white hat, armed with six-shooters, aided by a smart horse and powered by a heart of gold. His cowboy saved the day in hundreds of tidy adventures, adored by millions of children in the silent era. Mix played characters a young boy could idolize without complication—heroes who never shot first but always hit their targets once they did; outdoorsmen who loved the right women and fought for causes both just and clearly defensible. His sanitized adventures seem like parodies of the Western genre today, but Mix, a former circus performer with legitimate frontier skills, was uninterested in exploring the gunslinger’s psyche, or the consequences of life on the edge of civilization. His aim was to entertain, and most of his 300+ movies, including The Man From Texas, reflect this. IMDB quotes him thusly:

“I try to make the pictures so that when a boy pays—say, 20 cents—to see it, he will get 20 cents’ worth, not 10. If I drop, you see, it would be like putting my hand in his pocket and stealing a dime.”