Lady of the Pavements

D. W. Griffith: Lady of the Pavements (US 1928).

Sydämen laulu / Kärlekssången / Le Lys du faubourg / La Paiva (Germany) / Die Lady von der Strasse / La canzone del cuore. 

    US © 1928 United Artists. Released in 1929. PC: Art Cinema Corp. P: Joseph M. Schenck. 

    D: D. W. Griffith. SC: Gerrit J. Lloyd, Sam Taylor – based on the novel La Paiva by Karl Vollmöller. DP: Karl Struss, G. W. Bitzer. AD: William Cameron Menzies. Original song: "Where Is The Song Of Songs For Me?" (Irving Berlin). 

    STARRING: Lupe Velez (Nanon del Rayon), William Boyd (Count Karl von Arnim), Jetta Goudal (Countess Diane des Granges), Henry Armetta (Papa Pierre), Albert Conti (Baron Finot), George Fawcett (Baron Haussmann), Franklin Pangborn (M’sieu Dubrey, dance master), William Bakewell (a pianist). 

    7697 ft /22 fps/ 94 min.

    US premiere: 22 Jan 1929.

    Finnish premiere: 21 Oct 1929.

    Print: MoMA. Original in English with Italian e-subtitles, grand piano: Donald Sosin, the original Irving Berlin song performed by Joanna Seaton.

    Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 9 September 2008. 

Previous viewing: 26.4.1996 Lady of the Pavements (D. W. Griffith, US 1929) Silent Movie Theater

Steven Higgins (GCM 2008): "Schenck announced that Griffith would begin production on The Love Song, working from a script by Sam Taylor that was, in turn, based on a story by German author Karl Vollmoeller. (...) His solidly crafted shooting script for what would become Lady of the Pavements offered Schenck the hope of a box-office success."

"Griffith was given two rising stars as his romantic leads – Lupe Velez (...) and William Boyd, an actor who would later make his mark as Hopalong Cassidy. Jetta Goudal, a dark beauty who had gained some notoriety as an exotic vamp, was cast as the vindictive countess. Karl Struss, assisted by Griffith veteran G. W. Bitzer, beautifully photographed William Cameron Menzies’ evocative sets. Gerrit J. Lloyd’s titles were well-suited to the Ruritanian flavor of the story and avoided the Victorian prose so characteristic of Griffith’s more personal films."

"The result of all this was a well-made film, one that paid tribute to the wonders of the Hollywood studio system. Like many American releases of the late silent period, Lady of the Pavements was a polished production that entertained its audiences through a deft combination of attractive onscreen talent, obvious high production values, and efficient behind-the-camera support. Without a doubt, Lady of the Pavements was a stylish entertainment, and with it Griffith revealed that he was able to suppress his natural inclination to dominate a project, disappearing into the spirit of the piece just like any other contract director. Unfortunately, Griffith also was utterly unsuited to the milieu of the Second Empire, a historical period for which he had little feel and even less interest; as a result, for all its stylishness, the film is curiously cold, without substance or wit."

"What one admires about Lady of the Pavements is its surface, not its soul. For all of the flawed and unsuccessful films he had directed during his career, never before this could Griffith have been accused of making a film lacking conviction. Here, two of his three lead actors work as if he is barely even on the set. In the case of supporting players Henry Armetta, George Fawcett, and Franklin Pangborn, Griffith gives them a great amount of latitude, allowing them to experiment with their characterizations in such a way as to suggest that he understood they would infuse his film with what little vitality it might hope to have. Jetta Goudal and William Boyd sleepwalk through their parts. Only Lupe Velez gives any indication of having worked through her character with her director, searching for the connective tissue that would explain, however tenuously, Nanon’s growth from a heedless cabaret performer to an elegant, intelligent woman deserving of love and respect. Such a wide variety of performances can make for a light-headed experience, and without a director’s careful consideration of how all the many and varied pieces should fit together, one can have the uncanny experience of watching several films at once. As well considered and clearly drawn as it is in terms of its art direction and photography, Lady of the Pavements is unfocussed in its characterizations. (...) He did attempt one bit of old-fashioned camera trickery, as a way to put some sort of personal stamp on the project. At the film’s end, when Nanon returns to the cabaret from which she was plucked, she sings a mournful song, and, while looking out at the audience, sees her husband, von Arnim, in every man in the audience. This wonderful moment was accomplished by special-effects expert Ned Mann, who filled the Smoking Dog cabaret with 13 William Boyds by exposing the camera negative 36 times. (...) Ultimately, Lady of the Pavements had its true success as a vehicle for Lupe Velez. It was released with a synchronized orchestral score, into which was interpolated at several key moments her rendition of an Irving Berlin song composed specially for the film, “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?”." Steven Higgins [DWG Project # 621]

AA: A good print with a beautiful definition of light, but there are two major passages where the original material has been decomposing.

The film is smoothly made, and has impressive camera movement.

There is an affinity in the scorned woman's revenge plot with the Denis Diderot story which Bresson filmed as Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.

It is a pleasure to see Lupe Velez and Jetta Goudal as completely atypical Griffith women. Both have passion.

Several other actors are good. William Boyd is bland.

The Battle of the Sexes (1928, D. W. Griffith)

D. W. Griffith: The Battle of the Sexes (US 1928) with Phyllis Haver (Marie Skinner) and Jean Hersholt (J. C. Judson).

Sukupuolten taistelu.
    US 1928. PC: Art Cinema Corp. P+D: D. W. Griffith. SC: Gerrit J. Lloyd - based on the story "The Single Standard" by Daniel Garson Goodman. CIN: G. W. Bitzer, Karl Struss. AD: Park French, William Cameron Menzies. Cast: Jean Hersholt (J. C. Judson), Phyllis Haver (Marie Skinner), Belle Bennett (Mrs. Judson), Don Alvarado (Babe [Jim] Winsor), Sally O’Neill (Ruth Judson), William Bakewell (Billy Judson);
    7846 ft /24 fps/ 87 min,
    print: GEH, original in English, with e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Stephen Horne.
    Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 8 October 2008.

J. B. Kaufman (GCM Catalog 2008: "Few films can offer as revealing a perspective on Griffith’s late-1920s career as his 1928 remake of The Battle of the Sexes. Remakes were a rarity in Griffith’s career anyway, but his two versions of this story were separated by a gap of 14 years – turbulent years that saw a world war, the rise of the Roaring Twenties, and vast social changes with which, we have often been told, Griffith could not keep up. In a sense The Battle of the Sexes disproves that notion, for it takes place in a world very different from that of 1914. Unfortunately only a fragment of the 1914 Battle of the Sexes is known to survive, but from that fragment and from contemporary publicity and reviews we can gather a sense of the tone Griffith took in that version. As Donald Crisp strayed from his loving wife and children to dally with an adventuress, there can be little doubt that Griffith depicted such infidelity seriously, delivering a stern warning to anyone (erring husband or adventuress) who would threaten the sanctity of the home – a warning not unlike those he had delivered more than once in his recent Biograph films."

"What a difference in 1928! The plot is the same, but the 1928 Battle of the Sexes is framed as a comedy, complete with wisecracking titles and designed almost exclusively for entertainment value. An index to the contrast between the two versions can be seen in their casts. The straying husband, played in 1914 by rock-solid Donald Crisp, is portrayed in 1928 by the short, pudgy, vulnerable, and frequently ludicrous Jean Hersholt. The temptress, as played in 1914 by a young Fay Tincher, was attractive enough but clearly a lightweight. In 1928, as played by blonde bombshell Phyllis Haver, she’s the star of the picture. Her golddigger (in updated late-1920s parlance), a voracious glamour girl with a heart of brass, is both firmly in control of the plot and thoroughly likable, quite the most entertaining thing in the film. Hersholt hasn’t a chance against her formidable charms, and his character becomes more sympathetic as a result."

"Griffith has not, of course, abandoned his value system altogether, and midway through the picture he shifts gears. The damage wrought upon the businessman’s family is clearly meant to be taken seriously. Here again, however, the film’s cast works against a severely moralistic preachment: the members of the businessman’s family, the bedrock of the original film, are played in the remake by the weakest members of the cast. Belle Bennett, fresh from notable “mother” roles in such films as Stella Dallas (...) and John Ford’s Mother Machree (...), was probably an obvious choice to play the wife/mother, but she registers little or no impression; as Variety observed, she “is inclined to be monotonous in her simplicity”. Sally O’Neill and Billy Bakewell, as the businessman’s children, are hardly a match for Lillian Gish and Bobby Harron in the original, and their disconcertingly strenuous efforts to project youth and vivacity are no help at all."

"The surviving fragment of the 1914 The Battle of the Sexes is the scene in which the businessman and his paramour are discovered at a cabaret by his family. Comparing this fragment with the corresponding sequence in the remake allows us to see how Griffith’s technique has changed in the intervening years. The 1928 version has been expanded in every way: more camera positions, more varied activity by the principals and by the other nightclub patrons (with a running gag involving a diner at a nearby table), not to mention a much larger and more glamorous nightclub – surely a reflection of how such places had changed in real life during the 1920s. This eye-popping nightclub set is the work of William Cameron Menzies (...)"

"The fluidity of the sequence, and the rest of the film, is further enhanced by occasional dolly or tracking shots. Billy Bitzer had photographed the 1914 The Battle of the Sexes (...) single-handed, but for the remake he was teamed with the distinguished cinematographer Karl Struss, whose mobile camera had recently been used to good effect in Sunrise (...) Perhaps the most striking of the moving-camera shots (...) comes as Belle Bennett, in a daze, wanders deliriously on the roof of the apartment building. As she totters dangerously near the edge, the camera, in a sudden point-of-view shot, plunges sickeningly straight down the side of the building."

"(...) released late in 1928, the key transitional year of the talking-picture revolution (...) with a synchronized score, augmented with sound effects, and in Phyllis Haver’s singing scene the sound of her voice was loosely synchronized with her singing image onscreen. This was apparently the film’s one concession to the talkies, but it was enough for Variety to classify it explicitly as a sound film. Griffith, for his part, was unhappy with the soundtrack and registered a futile complaint with United Artists over the music in the opening and closing scenes. Where Griffith had envisioned a tender arrangement of “Together” or “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” in these scenes, the score supplied up-tempo comedy music instead."

"(...) Critics were unanimously disappointed in the film, more than one comparing it unfavorably with Paramount’s The Way of All Flesh (...), which had featured a similar plot situation and Belle Bennett and Phyllis Haver in comparable roles. (...)" J. B. Kaufman [DWG Project # 619].

AA: DWG in a new mood with a moving, swinging camera, glossy surfaces, in touch with the Jazz Age. The framing scenes are the mother's birthdays. In the final birthday party the present is the father, who in between has strayed with the flapper. Fun with the middle-age father trying to get in shape with the flapper via calisthenics. This is no masterpiece, but it is interesting to see DWG succeed with the new kind woman (Phyllis Haver).

There is in the beginning the "hands, feet only" device also seen in a couple of other films of the Festival, the most famous use of which is in Strangers on a Train.

It is a comedy, but with a dimension of tragedy with the mother's suicide attempt and the daughter's murder attempt.

The Drums of Love

Kahden veljen rakkaus. US 1928. PC: United Artists. P+D: D.W. Griffith. SC: Gerrit J. Lloyd.DP: G.W. Bitzer, Harry Jackson, Karl Struss. AD: William Cameron Menzies, cast: Mary Philbin (Emanuella), Lionel Barrymore (Duke Cathos de Alvia), Don Alvarado (Count Leonardo de Alvia), Tully Marshall (Bopi), William Austin (Raymond of Boston), Eugenie Besserer (Duchess de Alvia), Charles Hill Mailes (Duke de Granada); 16mm, 3318 ft /20 fps/ 111 min [including alternate ending 178 ft /20 fps/ 6 min]; print: LoC, original in English with e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Gabriel Thibaudeau. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Ridotto dal Verdi, 7 October 2008. - A bad 16mm print, I watched just a sample. - Scott Simmon: "From the time of his first Biograph films, D.W. Griffith was always seducible by solemn “art”. Presented with art director William Cameron Menzies (...) and cinematographer Karl Struss (...), Griffith came up with a story inspired by doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca for a film that is beautifully crafted but off-balance in structure and slow in pace. Variety’s positive review (“a sweet comeback for Griffith”) nevertheless recognized that it would be a hard sell to the mass audience: “Drums of Love is a loge section film. The art centers will love it. That’s sure. Its basic appeal is to the playgoer who thoroughly enjoys the Theatre Guild.” The most telling initial notice was from the New York Telegram: “Reviewing a Griffith picture is like nothing else in the experience of an American picture fan. For, after all, D.W. has been our first and foremost, our best beloved, our pet genius whom we could always count on when the great lords from overseas – the Murnaus, the Lubitsches and the Stillers – arrived with their great bag of tricks to show us how it is done. And that’s why it’s so tarnation sad when the Grand Old Man turns out a Drums of Love.”
Were it not such an extraordinarily dark tale, it would be easier to see this strangely titled film (“drums” of love are nowhere to be found in it) as Griffith’s first “Hollywood” movie. When he had last directed in Los Angeles in 1919, he had still been his own producer. Now he was back with an excellent employee’s contract for what turned out to be the first of four features produced by Joseph Schenck (initially at his appealingly named Art Cinema Corporation) for release through United Artists, of which Schenck was also president. These films would essentially put an end to Griffith’s career.
The structure and style of The Drums of Love are unconventional, and not without interest. After a static scene of the Alvia brothers swearing eternal love for each other at their father’s deathbed, shot with Karl Struss’ recognizably misty diffusion, the perspective switches to a sequence more characteristic of Griffith. The brothers lead troops to victory in a large-scale battle against the Duke of Granada’s forces. It’s the sort of scene, however, that would usually climax a Griffith film, and here it’s tossed off perfunctorily. Most of the rest of the film will rely for spectacle on unconvincing glass-shot effects. Unusual for Griffith too is the fluid mobility of the camera in early scenes, especially of carefree Emanuella at her father’s home. The tone of the rest of the film seems also to weigh down the camera.
The performances are so varied in expressiveness as to lead to a disastrous imbalance in the film as a whole. Top-billed was Mary Philbin, a pleasant-enough actress who was developing an odd career repeatedly playing the lovely consort of deeply deformed but good-hearted men (...) Dolled up in a Goldilocks wig and “recently home from the convent”, she is here paired with Don Alvarado, one of the low-rent Latin Lover replacements after Valentino’s death. His acting range appears so extremely limited that, by the climax of The Drums of Love, his character’s passion and guilt register as a Kuleshov test – an identical expression distinguished only by whether it is edited next to Emanuella or a portrait of his brother: “Sometimes there is a lethargy about his actions,” in the New York Times’s understatement. The human interest in the film arises from the convincing and even endearing performance of Lionel Barrymore as Duke Cathos; it was “this actor’s outstanding camera achievement to date,” in Variety’s verdict. When Emanuella first sees Cathos, he’s shadowed in Expressionist darkness that emphasizes his heavy brow, broad mustache, and hairy hands, but he’s also immediately rather winning in mocking his own hump and letting her know that she’s quite free to withdraw from the marriage “and none will be the worse”. (It’s her father who again forces the union.) Barrymore provides the rare flashes of wit in a film too weighed down by intertitles penned by Griffith with his former publicist Gerrit J. Lloyd; “it would … have been far more satisfactory to include in the captions phrases that were less hard and contained an element of charm,” noted the New York Times. As the un-comic jester, Tully Marshall skulks around melodramatically, as if testing out the character he will use to drool on Gloria Swanson later that year in Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1928). It becomes evident that Griffith’s rooting interest in all this court intrigue is entirely with Barrymore’s sad, lonely, deformed duke, and we too become increasingly impatient with pampered Emanuella for preferring the dim, handsome brother. The Drums of Love comes close to being a fascinating film – if we weren’t forced to spend so much time with the two lovers.
The difficulty that Griffith and Schenck had in marketing the film is evident in the survival of two different last reels. The plot description above recounts the film’s original story as seen at the Los Angeles and New York premieres. After Cathos is informed by the jester of the liaison between his brother and his wife, they enact a long, heavy finale of guilt, honor, sacrifice, and murder. Emanuella declares “I must die”. Cathos kisses and stabs her, then even more regretfully must stab his brother: “Death before a stain on our honor.” Anticipating another Lionel Barrymore film, Duel in the Sun (...), the two dying lovers crawl toward each other, even while they beg Cathos’ forgiveness, and Struss’ photography gets even mistier. In a strikingly composed and dark coda, Cathos kisses the hands of the two bodies on a bier and walks slowly off, tormented and more hunched than ever. “The closing incident” might be a problem, the New York Times hinted. Variety elaborated that “doubts have been expressed as to whether the beauty values here can overcome the tragic double killing at the finish,” but noted that “Greta [Garbo] passes on in both Flesh and the Devil and Love …”. However, MGM had come around to revising the end of Love (Edmund Goulding, 1927) – an adaptation of Anna Karenina – so that Anna and Vronsky live happily ever after, a version released widely earlier in January 1928. Griffith and Schenck apparently decided to try the same thing. In the revised final reel of The Drums of Love put into general release by late February 1928, the brothers again fight and Emanuella again recognizes “I must die”. However, this time Cathos stabs the ever-intrusive jester, and is mortally wounded in return. There is no record that the revised ending improved the film’s box-office appeal." – Scott Simmon [DWG Project # 618]. - With a film interesting mostly because of its beauty values, it was a pity that only such a bad 16mm print was available. I did not stay and am looking forward to a good print!

Reign of Terror

Anthony Mann: Reign of Terror (US 1949). Wade Crosby (Danton) and Richard Basehart (Robespierre). Cinematography: John Alton.

031110 / 16 / US / 1949 / Mann, Anthony / / historical thriller
Reign of Terror / The Black Book / Yllämme giljotiini. © Pathé Industries, Inc. Presented by Walter Wanger Pictures. P: William Cameron Menzies. D: Anthony Mann. SC: Philip Yordan, Aeneas MacKenzie - based on the story by MacKenzie. DP: John Alton. PD: Edward Ilou. M: Sol Kaplan. CAST: Robert Cummings (Charles D’Aubigny), Arlene Dahl (Madelon), Richard Basehart (Robespierre), Arnold Moss (Fouché), Jess Barker (Saint Just). 89’. B&w Academy. MPAA 13481. British 16 mm print carrying the title The Black Book and the Eagle Lion distributor’s logo. Viewed in Helsinki, SEA, Cinema Orion, Tuesday 7 April 1998. **** A Dumasian adventure plot is mixed with a film noir ambience. It is about a race against time - the quest for Robespierre’s black book. The whole film is based on a chase, often on horseback. The dialogue is sharp and the production design effective. Most memorably, the cinematography is masterful and can be appreciated even in this 16 mm print.