Man With A Movie List

Director: Josef von Sternberg Year: 1928 Run-time: 1 hr 16 min Source: Youtube Silent films were certainly on their way out in 1928, at least if you were an American studio director who's not Chaplin or Keaton, and this was one of those little gems that went largely unseen due to that transition.  It feels a bit like both a proto-noir and a proto-gangster film, but neither of those labels quite fit.  It's actually an effective, unconventional romance film, something that starts out cynical but ends up very sweet. I enjoyed the film more than I thought I would, but with this entry in the list, I can't help but notice the big American studio system of the mid-century is falling into place, with Keaton now making films like The Cameraman  for MGM (a studio which would ultimately ruin his career), and this film released by the newly renamed Paramount Pictures.  Along with it, the rough edges are getting smoothed down a little bit.  Certainly, the standards in...

Director: Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton Year: 1928 Run-time: 1 hr 7 min Source: Paid Youtube Most of the well-known Buster Keaton bits revolve around a set-piece - a train ( The General ), a build-it-yourself house ( One Week ), a movie projector ( Sherlock, Jr. ) - so The Camerman  is somewhat unique for giving us a chance to see what a great physical comedian Keaton could be on his own.  And there are some absolutely hilarious moments that rival anything else in his career, most particularly the dressing room scene. The plot revolves around Keaton's bumbling attempts to break into the early newsreel industry with a shoddy second-hand camera.  The camera's ability to either deceive or reveal is hinted at, but the message here isn't as poignant as in Sherlock, Jr.   The best scenes occur when Keaton tries to woo a clerk at the newsroom.  By this point, Keaton had mastered the "innocent idiot" character completely, and we alternately laugh at and root ...

Director: F.W. Murnau Year: 1927 Run-time: 1 hr 35 min Source: Paid Youtube The day before watching Sunrise  for this list, I was looking late at night on HBO Now for something to watch.  Partly to make my wife laugh, I settled for Fifty Shades Darker .  Halfway through, I jokingly titled this film Red Flags :  The Movie , since what makes the film so squeamish to watch is that Christian Grey is an almost entirely unredeemable jerk, and Anastasia Steele should run far, far away.  (I do think the film has its slight merits, but I'll save those for a think piece that will never be written.) Fans of Sunrise  should admit that it too is  Red Flags: The Movie .  However, Sunrise  is one of a handful of films that on any given day, I could consider to be my favorite.  Every time I watch it, it strikes the core of my being, and reduces me to tears.  The pure fantasy of this film - and in our society it's a dangerous one, to be sure ...

Director: Fritz Lang Year: 1927 Run-time: 2 hours 28 min Source: Kanopy "I have recently seen the silliest film. I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier," begins H.G. Wells' review of Metropolis .  He found it to be extremely unrealistic, and hopelessly sentimental.  In modern terms, Wells wanted hard sci-fi, and Lang's film is as soft as it comes.  One of Wells' main points is based on economics.  In a truly mechanized society, Wells claims, there would be no lower-class workers, since the machines would equalize the distribution of wealth. Our future doesn't look on the surface like Lang's steampunk nightmare, but here he gets it right.  When machines can replace men, men need to act more like machines to get by.  Wells is right, though:  Metropolis  isn't hard sci-fi.  The strength of this movie is that it cares more about people.  We remember it for its stylized art style, and the incredible performance of Br...

Director: Abel Gance Year: 1927 Run-time: 5 hr 30 min Source: PAL region DVD I didn't need a 330 minute silent Napoleon biopic in my life.  Despite the rave reviews I'd found comparing a screening of this movie to a religious experience, I was slightly dreading this one.  To give a brief summary of the ambitious lunacy that French director Abel Gance brought to this production:  Napoleon was envisoned in 1923 as a six-part film covering all of the dictator's life.  Four years later, Gance had spent his entire budget filmed nine hours worth of material, covering 2/3 of the first part, and ending with a 27-year old military commander just beginning his campaign in Italy.  The film never got any wide release, but instead a scattering of screenings, each with a different cut.  Most of these screenings ended with the famous triptych sequence, in which the film played on three separate screens simultaneously.  Today, film scholars have reconstructed ...

Director: Boris Barnet Year: 1927 Run-time: 1 hr 7 min Source: Kanopy Bed and Sofa is well-known, at least in cinephile circles, for being the last Soviet film in some time that avoided any element of propaganda.  The Girl with the Hatbox, , from the same year, has several similar themes to Bed and Sofa .  It also features a love triangle (even sharing one of the main actors), and the housing shortage in Moscow plays a large role.  This film, however, was ostensibly commissioned to promote Soviet lottery bonds.  However, these play a relatively minor role in the main plot, and even though the main character does surreptitiously win a great deal of money from one, it's hard to say that a contemporary viewer would be convinced to go out and buy them. For the film itself, it's much more slapstick than Bed and Sofa , but I enjoyed it a great deal.  The comedy is simple, but effective.  I particularly like the scene where one of the suitors attempts to s...

Director: Raymond Bernard Year: 1927 Run-time: 2 hours 15 min Source: DVD We've seen a few films on this list, such as Intolerance  and The Big Parade , that could be considered blockbuster extravaganzas, but nothing fits that description as well as the lesser-known French classic The Chess Player .  The director Raymond Bernard took a fine bit of historical fiction (based on a French novel) and turned it into a grand spectacle, the ancestor of the kind of Oscar-bait like Braveheart  or The English Patient . This one has a couple interesting aspects that might put it one step above those popular, but ultimately flawed examples.  First, the source material really is compelling and relatively unknown.  The film is centered around the occupation of part of Poland by Russia in the late 18th century.  Although we mainly see things from the side of the Polish - the fashion of Polish men having two small pigtails is really endearing, by the way - it has sy...

Director: Abram Room Year: 1927 Run-time: 75 min Source: Kanopy Bed and Sofa  really surprised me.  Regardless of culture or country of origin, films that are this early will adhere to a set of moral standards that only the most child-friendly of films today would.  However, Bed and Sofa  could fairly be described as a sex comedy, and a fairly progressive one at that.  It's got a wry sense of humor, but very little cynicism. The plot shouldn't be spoiled if your interest is peaked, but Bed and Sofa  is about a married couple in a tiny apartment who are visited by the husband's friend, who's come to the city to work.  The husband offers him a place in the apartment (against his wife's wishes).  However, while the husband takes a work trip, the wife and the visitor fall in love.  Because the visitor can't keep a secret from his friend, he admits it - the husband, in a surprising move, leaves the new couple and tries to find anoth...