Packaged Goods, part 2 (2011)

A little more than two months ago I was invited to a screening of Packaged Goods, a selection of international short films, music videos and TV spots produced by commercial directors. The whole thing was programmed by Rae Ann Fera, former editor of Boards Magazine, and it included content I’ve remembered ever since. For her second installment, press-screened yesterday, Fera gave herself a more serious challenge. She explains:

3-D is in the midst of a renaissance, with Hollywood banking on the trend and consumer electronics bringing the format into the home. The second installment of Packaged Goods looks at works that have experimented with the 3-D format in creative ways.

Ah, 3-D: The technology that turns critics into shortsighted snobs and defenders into dreck-merchants. Don’t look for me to attack the process here; regarding the destiny of 3-D I have no insight and frankly, nothing invested. However the movies evolve, I’ll still go to them. I love them too much to give up. As a fan of silent films, I could hardly draw the line at something as pointless as depth.

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

Each day is like a century for the driver of the Phantom Carriage. Literally. For three-hundred and sixty-five of our days he travels the world, harvesting the souls of dead sinners, taking them to a place we never see, for reasons we’re never told. But whatever his purpose, the year he spends at his gruesome task is spent alone, and it amounts to 36,500 years of introspection.

Il Posto (1961)

A talkie, courtesy TIFF Bell Lightbox.

As a title, ‘Il Posto’ plays lightly against my ear. Not speaking Italian myself, I hear the words first as sounds, and as sounds, they seem upbeat. But the movie’s English title is “The Job,” which seems like something else. My English, a southern Ontario-version that swallows vowels, drops those words with a thud—there’s a lot of ‘aw’ in my ‘job’, followed by a heavy ‘buh.’ The Italian sounds better. However, the English captures Il Posto best.

Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925)

Ninety years later, it’s still easy to see why Douglas Fairbanks’ adventure films made the money they did. Fairbanks was the lighthearted trickster onscreen; a man who dispatched all manner of threats with total confidence; won the pretty girl with a combination of charm and skill, and did it in exotic places.

For the factory worker, the desk jockey or the housewife, this was escapism; and a safe investment, too. Fairbanks’ ‘big’ productions, like The Mark of Zorro (1920), Robin Hood (1922), and The Black Pirate (1926), were all of one type: reliable mixes of drama, action, romance and laughs that you could count upon to entertain you when handing over your cash.

This makes them predictable, but not necessarily good. I’ve often found Fairbanks’ work hokey and formulaic; his stock character, while charmingly upbeat, is so many steps ahead of his enemies that he rarely seems imperiled. No peril, no drama. Joie de vivre gives way to mere silliness, and I begin to feel overtaxed, since his films aren’t particularly short, either.

Don Q, Son of Zorro has these same flaws, but I liked it alright. Maybe because it maintains a balance some of the others don’t—allowing a talented supporting cast to carry more of the relevant screen time. Or maybe because it feels more… brisk? Sure. Don Q is brisk, and Fairbanks’ eponymous character moves through it briskly. How Don Q moves is, I think, the thing I want focus on most.

The Unholy Three (1925)

I’ve seen Lon Chaney look plenty ugly on the silent screen: a Hunchback, a Phantom, a ghoulish take on Dickens’ Fagin—and by that standard, his cross-dressing turn in The Unholy Three doesn’t even rate. It occurred to me, as I watched him play the role of a ventriloquist playing the role of a jewel-thief disguised as a grandmother, that Chaney’s face seemed rather appealing. Not lovely or anything, just believably, warmly, grandmotherly. Maybe there’s a point in that: for all the accolades I’ve read of Chaney and his ‘thousand faces,’ I don’t remember it ever being called warm. There’s femininity in those lines and creases, I think. See if you can find it.

Tod Browning’s The Unholy Three, in which Chaney stars as sideshow performer Professor Echo, is not the actor’s most memorable part, nor is it the director’s most memorable movie (Browning directed both Dracula and Freaks a few years later, and Freaks, in particular, is a film you can’t review so much as recount). It is, however, light entertainment, and that’s precisely what it’s trying to be, so it is good. I believe that if you described the plot of this film to someone else, they’d sit down next to you and watch it.