Am I blue? Not any more!

Oh Lor', I've had another one of my famous sojourns into 1929-land. Turner Classics has started showing a lot of (very) early talkies, most of them fairly unwatchable except for the novelty. It's strange that there are silent films right up to 1927, then an abyss in 1928, then a veritable explosion of cheap entertainment in 1929 which drew crowds like flies because, gee whiz, Mabel, these pictures can really TALK!

I suffered through a good chunk of Street Girl, which is not as racy as it sounds and is just a thinly-disguised attempt to showcase the talents of a passably-good dance band. But it's not the musical numbers (and some of the music was written by Oscar Levant) that intrigued me.

Early talkies are hybrids (see the related phenomenon of "goat glanding", below), most with at least some subtitles, and often major glitches in synchronization that give you an odd disjointed feeling. The static nature of these things, with everyone sitting around a table or on a sofa talking into a potted palm where the microphone is hidden, seems to suggest a badly-transcribed stage play. But that's not the weirdest thing: it's that damned infernal noise you keep hearing. It's as if someone is working heavy machinery outside.  It was worse in Street Girl than in any I've seen, with a whirring, vibrating hum alternating with a low rushing noise, and, sometimes, a grinding sound like a garburator.

I think it was the camera. No, really. I think I read this as a movie-curious child in that big coffee table book we kept in the den (I think it was called "The Movies" or some-such, and yes, it did have a full-page spread of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock). The noise of the camera was such a problem that they had to stuff the camera and the cameraman in a soundproof booth. Every few shots he'd come lurching out of there dripping wet and ready to pass out. At some point somebody must've said, gee, wouldn't it be better if we just put the CAMERA in the box? Inventing quieter cameras was an even better idea (though nobody had bothered to think about that before). It's a mystery to me why no such noise-dampening method was even attempted in Street Girl, unless it was made on a budget of 49 cents.

The other one I saw, or semi-saw because I can never get through them all, was called On With the Show, and predates even 42nd Street as a hat-check-girl-becomes-a-star vehicle for some nascent starlet. In fact it seems like a sort of prototype for the whole genre. I was nearly halfway through it and getting bogged down in a sort of bizarre fashion show (which didn't seem to fit in with the fox hunt with real horses that preceded it) when I realized I'd seen the whole thing before. I remember because I thought the women all looked like drag queens, and who knows, maybe they were!

But then. 

Seems a shame that she was required to come on with a bale of cotton under her arm, dressed vaguely like Aunt Jemima, but being the fearless artist she was, Ethel Waters overcame every conceivable stereotype the minute she began to sing. All the flailing around without a recognizable theme didn't matter any more: as they say, she owned the stage, or, more accurately, owned the whole show. 

The best singers sing as if they're enjoying the hell out of the song, but the truly great singers somehow bring you on-side so that YOU are enjoying it at least as much as they are. This joy and sunniness and self-possession and the warm earthy quality of her voice almost, well, yes, they DO erase the mediocre acting, bawling sopranos and flailing choreography of a really bad show that probably drew them like flies. Calling Busby Berkeley! We need you! But then, it wouldn't be too many years before he rushed into the void. 

And now, beloved reader, just because you are you, I have a few luscious factoids about this sweaty transition period that might just interest you as much as it interests me. Well then, here it is anyway.

Goat gland (film release)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Goat gland was a term applied c. 1927–1929, during the

period of transition from silent films to sound films. It referred

to an already completed silent film to which one or more talkie

sequences were added in an effort to make the otherwise

redundant film more suitable for release in the radically altered

market conditions.The name was derived by analogy from the

treatment devised by Dr. John R. Brinkley as an alleged cure

for impotence. 

This "goat gland" succeeded mainly in causing previously sympathetic audiences

to abruptly lower their opinions of the characters' personalities

and level of intelligence.

Painted dolls, Harold Lloyd and other miracles

OK, children: who do you think this is? In light of what I posted yesterday, rare photos of Harold Lloyd in his Mack Sennett/pre-Glass-Character days (hell, even before Lonesome Luke!), you might think this is the same guy. Particularly since he's dressed like a minister, and appears to be wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

It ain't.

I don't know who this guy is, but he isn't Harold Lloyd. Not by a long shot. That scares me, because one would think his face and demeanor would be practically trademarked by then.

These few grainy shots, one of them blown up to make it more discernible, are from an atrocious but interesting early talkie, in fact the first "all singing, all dancing" musical, the notorious Broadway Melody.

It wasn't called the BWM of 1938, or 1947, or anything like that, because there had never BEEN a Broadway Melody on film before, and though audiences loved the novelty of sound numbers with chorus girls flailing all over the place, it's a good thing this particular movie never happened again.

The musical numbers, though bizarre, aren't so bad. My favorite: Wedding of the Painted Doll, a quirky little number full of xylophone music and a tenor singing in the high, wavery voice favored in the 1920s. For this musical came out in 1929, just at the turning point of sound films. Whenever  one of these early talkies comes on Turner Classics, I watch it, no matter how atrocious. In fact, the more atrocious it is, the more fascinated I am.

It's a sort of sociological exercise which tells us where audiences were in 1929: mostly confused. The studios were even more confused, panic-stricken in fact. The minister in this oddball wedding scene is an acrobat who flips and cartwheels onstage as if he's made of rubber. I doubt if Harold Lloyd could do as well. But he's not billed anywhere, and I'll be damned if I'll try to look it up and turn into one of those 93-year-old silent film afficionados who remember exact statistics and scream at you if you misquote them even a little bit, as if it's a mortal sin to forget what Louise Brooks had for breakfast.

So I won't even take a stab at it, though knowing these folks there's probably a whole blog about it: That Minister Guy Who Turned Cartwheels On Stage in Wedding of the Painted Doll from Broadway Melody.

Likely he was pulled out of the chorus of some obscure stage musical, or even taken from a circus. He had his thirty seconds of fame, and that's it.

But doesn't he look a whole lot like Harold Lloyd, and is there a reason for that? Lloyd was just releasing his own first talkie, the abominable Welcome Danger, which I've tried to like but can't. My stomach keeps rejecting it like some food I am violently allergic to. It's an ugly, ugly picture, full of thumps, thuds, bad and mis-dubbed dialogue, and even a mean main character I can't warm up to, as if Harold's personality and charm had to change along with the times. 

But it didn't matter then. Maybe this minister in his frock coat was a stock figure, much like the minister Harold played for Sennett in 1915. Strangely enough, there is a connection: the movie was called Her Painted Hero.

Who knows what else lurks in the dusty, fusty vaults. I am sort of hoping nothing, because I am really getting obsessed here and soon have to leave it alone. My manuscript has gone to the proofreader now, meaning the galleys will soon come back to me and I will have my last chance to correct small glitches. For the past few days, all I can think of is a possible mistake I made in continuity, but I am afraid to look at the manuscript to confirm it. I think if I look at it one more time, I'll simply expire.

POST-SCRIPT. Let's do a little comparison, shall we? One of my famous "separated at birth" things. Might be fun.

  

Harold.

Not Harold.

Harold.

Not Harold.

Just a coincidence?  I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!

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Eraserhead: turn off the sound!

There are many things I love about the internet - and it's all the same stuff that I hate about the internet.

It's like Alice's Restaurant - you can get anything you want - and if there's nothing there, try coming back in a couple of months. It is ever-evolving, a ravenous monster engulfing mostly garbage and crap, but once in a while. . . 

What I don't like about it, since I am such an avid collector of images, is the utter impossibility of finding the provenance of nearly all photographs. Yes, there are various methods to trace the sources, and I've tried them all, but they don't work. These images, pretty much all of them, have been Pinterested and Tumblrd and Flickred and Facebooked and blogged and reblogged so many times, no one knows where they came from.

So I always feel a bit guillty about using them. Only once did I take a post down because someone protested I had used an image that belonged to him, and when that happened I was happy to oblige. 

But now and then. . . 

I was up late, too late as usual. My hours have been as inverted as a dabbling duck in the past few years: I used to wake around 5:30 in the morning, and go to bed by 8:30 or so. Now it's. . . I hate to tell you, but sometimes my husband has to wake me up by bringing me coffee at 9:00 a. m. (a pretty good deal, come to think of it).

So. . . last night. . . or, early in the morning. . . I was nosing around Google images, probably looking for more from the tens of thousands of Harold Lloyd images on the net, and found. . .a couple of weirdies. 

I don't get the first one, I don't. It's some demented-looking guy surrounded by rolls of paper towels. He looks a little like an insane James Mason. Beams radiate from a point on his forehead. The whole thing has the feeling of a nightmare.

Then there's. . . this. He or it has holes for eyes and the look of an embalmed corpse. I don't want to look at it, or him, someone or something from a silent movie that never should have been made.

As always happens on the internet, one thing leads to another as surely as in an incipient affair. And creepiness is magnetically attracted to creepiness. Last night, or morning, in my near-stupor, I stumbled on the David Lynch horror classic Eraserhead on YouTube - the whole thing. It was late enough that I had turned the sound off my computer. It became a silent classic, complete with John Nance as a sort of Twilight Zone Harold Lloyd with his hair perpetually standing on end. 

I had heard things about this movie, how horrific it was, a surreal and almost senseless drama about a man fathering (?) a deformed, screaming "baby" with a head like E. T.'s bastard child, its body all wrapped up in layers of gauze like a bad injury.

But without a sound track, it was - well, it was actually kind of stupid. It couldn't have been less scary, even boring, and the special effects were laughable, even the live chicken dancing around on the main character's plate. 

Alfred Hitchcock, who knew everything about horror and jerking his audience on a string for 2 hours, once said that it was the sound track that made a horror film resonate on a primal level. Think of the stabbing scene from Psycho: without that screeching music and the awful sound of the knife penetrating  flesh, it would be nothing.

Why is this? In the womb, babies are very sensitive to sound. We hear before we see. I can attest to this. Having been pregnant twice, I recall my babies jumping at loud noises (particularly my daughter, the kind of child who used to be called "high-strung" and is now called ADHD, QRSTUV, and any number of other dire disorders. By the way, she's 36 now and just fine.)

Point is, we need sound to anchor us in reality. Think then of the magic of a silent movie. Think of how actors had to make up the deficit, the anchoring we all depend on for a movie to make sense.

How did they do this? At first, kind of badly. Over-gesturing, over-the-top facial expressions (even in dramas - ever seen Birth of a Nation or Intolerance?). Very gradually over the 25 years or so that movies evolved towards sound, acting became more subtle. But it must have also been much more demanding for the actors. 

The switch to sound movies, then, must have been a horrendous jolt, because suddenly the medium had to take an unprecedented leap. The missing element was plugged in, the baby could hear again, and another part of the brain had to be engaged to make sense of it at all.

And you can imagine what the actors went through.

I knit a lot while "watching" TV, and in many cases it's more like I'm listening to the radio. But if the sound were turned off, what I was watching would make no sense at all. It would make very little sense even if I were actually watching it. Dialogue tells us how to feel, where to laugh or cry. For the most part, it tells us everything we need to know. 

So how did actors communicate so well during the silent era? It was a new kind of acting, nothing like stage acting, that would - eerily - disappear forever in less than three decades. Silent film (which until then had been called "film", or rather "pictures") would seem as irrelevant as some inane Marcel Marceau walking-against-the-wind sketch from the Red Skelton Show.

Ah, but now it emerges from the grave. People are sick of Charlie Sheen barking at us and are in the mood for some real acting. This strange twilight medium has begun to tunnel its way into the light. The fragile frames take us to a "there" that no longer exists, and can never be duplicated.

CODA: As always, there are post-blog reflections, but this time they are mighty strange.

This morning I decided to watch at least part of the YouTube video of Eraserhead, which I (mostly) watched last night with the sound turned off. I couldn't find it. The complete video of it that I had watched had been taken down, with one of those intimidating crooked face-things on it. Gone.  I doubt if I will have a chance to watch it again (somehow I don't think it will be shown on Turner Classic Movies), so I will always wonder how much the sound track contributed to its stomach-turning atmosphere. 

One wonders at the timing. I was only given one chance. But creepiness leads to creepiness. Something else will ambush me - soon.

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