| For Tribune : BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER [The British Silent Film Festival; Nottingham, April 2006] |
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 "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" You don't have to be much of a movie buff to know that the above line comes from Billy Wilder's ever-popular Sunset Boulevard (1950), or that it was spoken by Gloria Swanson as the bitter, reclusive former-star Norma Desmond ("I am big - it's the pictures that got small!"). What isn't that widely known is that Swanson herself was one of the silent era's biggest stars - though such ignorance perhaps isn't that surprising, considering how this fascinating period was for so long neglected and marginalised. It's particularly encouraging, then, that the last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in what's properly referred to as "early cinema" - 'silent' being a rather (offputting) misleading term, as before the advent of synchronised sound all films were projected with a live musical accompaniment ranging from a single piano to a full orchestra. There are now several film-festivals entirely dedicated to pre-sound cinema - the most prominent being the October event in Pordenone, Italy (run by British critic David Robinson). In Britain, accompanied 'early cinema' is much more than a quaint curio: there are regular showings in London and Bristol, while prints of Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera, F W Murnau's Nosferatu, Faust and Sunrise receive many showings around the country every year. And for the past decade Nottingham has hosted the British Silent Cinema Festival (BSCF), showcasing gems from the treasure-trove of prints held by the BFI's National Film and Television Archive - as well as key titles borrowed from foreign cinematheques. The screenings are open to the public, and there is also an impressive programme of presentations and extracts for the specialists and academics who avail themselves of festival passes (for more details go to www.britishsilentcinema.com). While the festival's home is the cosy city-centre Broadway cinema, this year featured a one-off detour to the nearby St Peter's church where packed pews watched a film by the one British director who remains a household name: Alfred Hitchcock, who completed nine silent features before making the transition to sound with 1929's Blackmail. He was often sniffily dismissive of Downhill (1927), a melodramatic vehicle for the UK's number one matinee idol of the era, multi-talented Ivor Novello. Though in his 30s at the time of filming, Novello is surprisingly convincing as a public schoolboy who takes the fall for a pal's indiscretion and becomes a hapless pawn of fate - the latter represented by a string of rapacious, manipulative femmes fatales. It's easy to share Hitchcock's scorn for the picture - a rather misogynistic affair in which we're invited to sympathise with and cheer on a decidedly unpleasant 'hero', one who is very much the author of his own misfortunes. But the 'boy wonder' director does his level best to keep us (and himself) interested, embellishing the creaky story with all manner of striking technical touches that display in embryo the mastery which would soon after propel him to worldwide fame. Another compensatory factor was the sterling work performed by the five accompanists at the screening (three pianists, an organist and a violinist) - who were rightly rewarded with a noisy and prolonged ovation by the assembled 'congregation'. Back at the Broadway, Novello was also on view in Adrian Brunel's The Constant Nymph (1928): appropriately enough given his musical renown (see Jeremy Northam's portrayal of Novello in Robert Altman's Gosford Park), the star plays a young composer whose self-absorption leads him into an ill-advised marriage to an ambitious, bourgeois-minded woman. His true love is lifelong pal Tessa - played with a terrific combination of humour and pathos by Mabel Poulton, one of the biggest British stars of the silent era - but the pair find happiness all too brief and too late. Poulton was in many ways the 'find' of this year's BSCF - she also showed off her range and appeal in the enjoyably berserk comedy-drama-thriller-whodunnit The Alley Cat (1929), and would surely have gone on to much greater renown if she'd been able to adapt to the coming of sound. Unfortunately for all concerned, Mabel's broad Cockney accent proved a major stumbling-block and she retired from the big screen in 1936, though she reportedly continued to work on television well into the 1960s (she died in 1994). The other big British female attracation of the era was Betty Balfour - who, with her expressively large eyes, was known as the English answer to Hollywood's megastar Mary Pickford. Balfour popped up in Daughter of the Regiment (1929), a bit of romantic fluff based rather loosely on Donizetti's opera in which Balfour is an orphan brought up among the soldiers of a barracks on the Spanish/French border. She catches the eye of a dashing bandit chief, but neither the bandit nor Betty turn out to be what they seem. Breezy nonsense, but diverting enough as a wildly romantic kind of old-school entertainment. Similarly low on nourishment but high on entertainment was American director Harry Lachman's French-set and filmed Weekend Wives (1928), a suitably convoluted bedroom farce showcasing the deft comic skills of rotund Monty Banks - a popular comic actor who later became better known as the long-serving husband of Gracie Fields. Though frothily disposable, Weekend Wives was rather more watchable than B F Doxat-Pratt's ever-so-serious The Skin Game (1921) - the first of many filmings of John Galsworthy's play (even Hitchcock had a go, a decade later). But while stodgily creaky to modern eyes (one is reminded of Philip Larkin's "fools in old-style hats and coats", The Skin Game is most relevant for the way it captures a particular historical/socio-economic moment: the post WWI realisation by the upper classes that their old way of life was vanishing before their eyes. The film (melo)dramatises this by juxtaposing two families who both live on the Worcestershire / Staffordshire border. The Hillcrists are mansion-residing old money, who are horrified by the encroaching pottery works owned by the brash Hornblower clan. Complications ensue - (slowly) revolving around the 'dark past' of the woman who has married into the Hornblower family. As the lady in question, Mary Clare goes through all manner of woes before hurling herself into the nearest convenient gravel-pit: she, and the audience, had rather more fun when she played a trampish grand-dame in The Constant Nymph. And Swanson / Desmond was right: Clare, Balfour, Novello and (especially) Poulton really did have "faces" - capable of conveying such intense emotion that the film's intertitles often became superfluous, even intrusive. It's a "lost world" which is now being rediscovered by new generations - and which looks set for even wider exposure thanks to the BBC's upcoming 90-minute documentary Silent Britain and the accompanying series Paul Merton's Silent Clowns, these programmes following in the wake of the enormously successful Mitchell & Kenyon compilations which have attracted large audiences on TV and in cinemas. You heard it here first: old, it seems, really is the "new" new. Neil Young 11th April, 2006 for TRIBUNE magazine individual comment on each film shown at BSCF '06 can be found here (pt1) and here (pt2)
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