The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards Redux (1927-1928)

Some of you are probably too young to remember, but I originally started this blog to peddle (in a non-remunerative way) something I like to call the "Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards"—alternate Oscars (who should have been nominated, who should have won) but which as you know are really just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.

Then I got distracted by silent movies and will continue to be distracted for the foreseeable future.

But what about the Katie Awards?

Well, rather than let them wither on the vine, I'm going to post them, one year at a time, one post a day, until I run out of them, say sometime in February. I've been serving them up on the stand-alone pages highlighted on the right hand side of the blog, but people rarely head over there (why would they) and while some of my choices may be no better than "meh," the pictures that accompany them are, all modesty aside, dynamite.

So here, in case you've forgotten, are my first year's worth of picks, covering the Oscar year running from August 1, 1927 to July 31, 1928.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox)
nominees: The Crowd (prod. Irving Thalberg); The Last Command (prod. Jesse L. Lasky and Adolph Zukor); Laugh, Clown, Laugh (prod. Herbert Brenon); The Man Who Laughs (prod. Paul Kohner); Wings (prod. Lucien Hubbard)
Must-See Drama: The Crowd; The Last Command; Laugh, Clown, Laugh; The Man Who Laughs; Sadie Thompson; Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans; Wings

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Jazz Singer (prod. Warner Brothers)
nominees: The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin); My Best Girl (prod. Mary Pickford); Speedy (prod. Harold Lloyd); The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (prod. Ernst Lubitsch)
Must-See Comedy/Musical: The Circus; The Jazz Singer; My Best Girl; The Patsy; Speedy; The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Spione (Spies) (prod. Erich Pommer)
nominees: Berlin: Symphony Of A Great City (prod. Karl Freund); October (Ten Days That Shook The World) (prod. Sovkino)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)
nominees: Emil Jannings (The Last Command); Conrad Veidt (The Man Who Laughs)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer)
nominees: Charles Chaplin (The Circus); Harold Lloyd (Speedy)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Janet Gaynor (7th Heaven; Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans and Street Angel)
nominees: Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd); Gloria Swanson (Sadie Thompson)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)
nominees: Marion Davies (The Patsy); Norma Shearer (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)
nominees: Paul Leni (The Cat And The Canary and The Man Who Laughs); King Vidor (The Crowd); Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command); William A. Wellman (Wings)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Charles Chaplin (The Circus)
nominees: Ernst Lubitsch (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg); Lewis Milestone (Two Arabian Knights); Ted Wilde (Speedy)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)
nominees: Lionel Barrymore (Sadie Thompson); Gary Cooper (Wings); Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Spione); William Powell (The Last Command)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Clara Bow (Wings)
nominees: Evelyn Brent (The Last Command); Gladys Brockwell (7th Heaven); Louise Brooks (A Girl In Every Port); Mary Philbin (The Man Who Laughs)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Herman J. Mankiewicz (titles) and John F. Goodrich (writer), from a story by Lajos Biró and Josef von Sternberg (The Last Command)
nominees: King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd); Elizabeth Meehan; titles by Joseph Farnham; from a play by David Belasco and Tom Cushing (Laugh, Clown, Laugh); Raoul Walsh; titles by C. Gardner Sullivan; from a story by W. Somerset Maugham (Sadie Thompson)

SPECIAL AWARDS
George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography); Roy Pomeroy (Wings) (Special Effects)

(Note: I'll cop to having changed one of my picks from when I originally posted them back in 2009. Originally, I went with The Crowd, King Vidor's blistering take on the American Dream, for best screenplay. At the time it struck me as edgy and unique. In fact, now that I've watched 800+ silent movies, I realize that The Crowd actually arrived at the tale end of a long series of social message pictures that dated back to D.W. Griffith's one-reel wonder A Corner in Wheat and included tales about the hot button issues of the day—immigration, white slavery, abortion, etc. Far from being cutting edge, The Crowd was in 1928 something of a cliche—a well-made cliche, perhaps, but no more brave than, say, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner was in 1967.

Instead, I've gone with The Last Command, Josef von Sternberg's moving story about a Russian general reduced after the revolution of 1917 to begging bit parts as an actor in Hollywood. It won Emil Jannings a well-deserved Oscar and also starred William Powell in one of his darkest dramatic roles. A real must-see.)

Silent Cinema Stocking Stuffers

Is there anything more heartbreaking than the disappointed face of a child who didn't find a silent movie in his or her Christmas stocking? Probably, but why risk it? If the little shavers on your shopping list are anything like me, they hunger and thirst after a working knowledge of the silent film era. Don't let them down!

"But Monkey," I can hear you say, "I don't know where to start. What movies would you recommend to help start my son's or daughter's (or even my) silent film collection?"

Glad you asked. Here are a baker's dozen guaranteed to make you an expert in no time. (And no, I have no financial stake in my recommendations or your choices.)

Landmarks of Early Film, Vol. 1 [Image Entertainment]
With film pioneer Georges Méliès back in the popular consciousness thanks to Martin Scorsese's terrific new film Hugo, maybe it's time to figure out where he actually fits in the history of film. You could read about it here, but why waste valuable eyeball space on my yack and blather when you could fill your senses with the real thing? This DVD is a good way to dive into the work of film's earliest pioneers, including works by Méliès, Thomas Edison, D.W. Griffith and the Lumière brothers, among others.

(I understand there's a five-disc collection of Georges Melies's work from Flicker Alley which purports to include every Melies film in existence, 173 in all. Holy cats. But I haven't seen it and it's temporarily unavailable at Amazon.com.)

Chaplin at Keystone: An International Collaboration of 34 Original Films [Flicker Alley]
A magnificent restoration of all 34 of the films Chaplin made at Mack Sennett's Keystone studios, including the first feature-length comedy ever made, Tillie's Punctured Romance. This is not only a nice introduction to Chaplin, but also includes terrific work by Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler. Start with The Rounders, move on to Tillie, then go back and see them all.

Intolerance [Kino]
Are you a connoisseur of mind-blowing cinema? Then watch this D.W. Griffith epic and consider your mind blown. Still belonging on a short list of the most ambitious movies ever made, Intolerance (from the "Griffith Masterworks" series) weaves four storylines from different points in history together to examine and expose man's inhumanity to man. Its kaleidoscope of images influenced filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, its depiction of the fall of Babylon and a woman racing a train to save an innocent man from the electric chair are unforgettable, and Constance Talmadge is a hoot. Also includes orgies, beheadings and the life of Christ—something for everybody!

Male and Female [Image Entertainment]
What silent film collection wouldn't be complete without an entry from director Cecil B. DeMille and his favorite star, Gloria Swanson. Although DeMille would later become known for his turgid Bible epics, he really made his name with a series of sophisticated sex comedies, most starring Swanson. In this one, aristocrat Swanson winds up stranded on a desert island with her butler, and when the hired help are the only ones who know how to get things done, upstairs quickly becomes downstairs and vice versa. Norma Desmond was right—they didn't need dialogue; they had faces!

Nosferatu (The Ultimate Two-Disc Edition) [Kino]
You're going to want at least one example of German Expressionism, one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th century, and one film from F.W. Murnau, who directed some of the most beautiful films of the silent era. Why not kill two birds with one stone and go with the vampire classic, Nosferatu. Be careful, though—there are many versions of this film floating around, some virtually unwatchable. Me, I'd go with the two-disc edition from Kino.

The Black Pirate (Blu-Ray) [Kino]
There never was a better movie pirate than Douglas Fairbanks—not Errol Flynn, not Tyrone Power, not Johnny Depp. And this early color film (using a primitive two-strip process) might be his best. With the graceful and athletic Fairbanks at its heart, The Black Pirate is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with all the swash you'd ever care to buckle. (Don't have a Blu-Ray player? Don't despair. Try The Thief of Bagdad from Kino instead.)

The General (Blu-Ray) [Kino]
There are no wrong choices when it comes to Buster Keaton on Blu-Ray. So I'll just go with the best choice—The General. Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, it's also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame. Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him only adds to the modern feel of the production. (No Blu-Ray? No need to feel blue. It's also available from Kino in the "Ultimate Two-Disc Edition.")

The Complete Metropolis (Blu-Ray) [Kino]
If The Black Pirate is a swashbuckling ballet, Fritz Lang's Metropolis is a science fiction opera, and in this newly restored edition, as close to Lang's original vision as we're likely to get. Its story of a world divided into haves and have-nots, with a populist political movement secretly controlled by the corporation it aims to topple, feels as up-to-date as anything you're likely to see at the theater this year. Oh, and it boasts a beautiful robot played by Brigette Helm. What more do you want? (Also available as a DVD.)

TCM Archives: The Garbo Silents Collection [Warner Home Video]
Flesh and the Devil was the first pairing of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, who would soon become one of movie history's most torrid, tempestuous couples. Garbo created a sensation with her ethereal beauty, cool, exotic manner and thoroughly modern characterization of an amoral woman who slept with whomever she wanted, while Gilbert further cemented his reputation as the screen's greatest lover. The collection also includes The Temptress and The Mysterious Lady. Considering it's going for $8.99 at Amazon.com, that's an exceptional bargain.

It [Kino]
Prefer your sex symbols served hot? Then you don't want to miss It, starring the original "It" Girl, Clara Bow. This mischievous comedy catapulted Bow to superstardom—and tabloid notoriety, most of it, unfortunately, pure fiction. The disc also includes the documentary Clara Bow: Discovering the "It" Girl, which will give you insight not only into the troubled life and times of Clara Bow, but also into the transition from silents to talkies, the most pivotal event in Hollywood history since the invention of the camera. (Note: The DVD of another Bow picture, Wings, winner of the first Oscar for best picture, finally goes on sale January 24, 2012.)

TCM Archives: The Lon Chaney Collection [Warner Home Video]
The obvious choices for an introductory Lon Chaney film would be The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Phantom of the Opera (Image Entertainment just released a Blu-Ray of the latter in November), but I'm going with this collection that includes The Ace of Hearts, Laugh, Clown, Laugh and The Unknown. Laugh, Clown, Laugh shows off Chaney's acting chops at their finest, while The Unknown (from legendary horror director Tod Browning) captures Chaney at his creepy, crazy best.

The Passion of Joan of Arc [The Criterion Collection]
The true story of the trial and execution of one of history's most famous leaders, The Passion of Joan of Arc is beautiful, engrossing and deeply moving. It's also startlingly fresh, telling truths about the self-serving, corrupting nature of power as current as today's headlines, proving once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way. Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.

Pandora's Box [The Criterion Collection]
Virtually unknown in her day, Louise Brooks today might be the silent era's most recognizable actress. Playing the prostitute Lulu with a unique combination of wide-eyed innocence and unabashed sexual appetite, Brooks created a character so unforgettable that twenty-five years later French film historian Henri Langlois declared "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!"

What? No Mary Pickford? Well, I'll tell you. There are some good ones from The Milestone Collection, but they're all out of print and going for $50 and more through third-party sellers on Amazon.com. If you want to spring for one of her films, I'd say go for Stella Maris—it's my favorite Pickford film.

Likewise, Harold Lloyd is out of print again. I have The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection Vols. 1-3 myself—7 discs of absolutely wonderful comedy. If it ever shows up again, I'll let you know.

The Obligatory End-Of-Year Top Ten List

"But Mr. Monkey," I hear so often on the street, "while it's true our lives rise and fall on the rhythms of your wonderful prose poetry, a movie blogger can never aspire to the status of cultural icon without posting an end-of-the-year top ten list." And even as I'm running away, I'm thinking, yes, it's probably true, I must write an end of the year top ten list. So as the decade of the 'Naughties comes to a close, I give you a list of the ten best movies I not just mentioned but wrote full essays about this year (thus the absence of The Kid, Safety Last, Sherlock Jr., Metropolis and many other).

As always, my choices are a reflection of my values and are in no way binding on the universe as a whole.

In chronological order and suitable for mounting on your refrigerator door:

The Thief Of Bagdad (1924)—Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Douglas Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie made before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.

The Gold Rush (1925)—A 72-minute comedy about a gold prospector in the wilds of Alaska, chock full of laughs, action and some of the most inventive bits of business ever committed to film. I mean, there is something pretty entertaining about watching a man eat his own shoe. This is also the movie that introduced two oft-imitated bits, the one where a starving man thinks his partner is a chicken and the one where Chaplin spears two dinner rolls with forks and does a little soft-shoe with them under his chin. Throw in a little romance, an attempted murder and a happy ending and you've got the recipe for a real good time.

The General (1926)—Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which [Buster] Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame. Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as "The Great Stoneface"—only adds to the modern feel of the production.

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)—Directed by the great F.W. Murnau, who had previously helmed such classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Sunrise starts out as a silent era film noir with a beautiful temptress from the city persuading a handsome young farmer to murder his wife then becomes a surprisingly touching story of reconciliation and redemption. The exaggerated story is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)—The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being. More importantly, though, the movie reminded me that telling a story in such a simple and straightforward manner, letting the chips fall where they may, can uncover truths about human nature so eternal that even an eighty year old film based on a nearly six hundred year old historical event can be as relevant and timely as this morning's news. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way. Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)—This Buster Keaton comedy is a classic fish-out-of-water story, the reunion of a ukelele-playing, college-educated fop (Keaton) with his strapping, working class father (Ernest Torrence). In the course of the seventy-minute story, Keaton contends with shipwrecks, hurricanes and an unreasoning prejudice against French berets to win over his father and get the girl. The most unforgettable sequence of Steamboat Bill, Jr., perhaps the most famous single sequence of Keaton's career, is the one where a cyclone blows a house over onto Keaton, who only misses being killed because he miraculously happens to be standing right where an open attic window allows him to pass right through. Keaton always dismissed talk of his greatness—"How can you be a genius in slapshoes?"—but there's no doubt in my mind, or anyone else's these days, that a genius is exactly what he was. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert calls him simply "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."

All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)—In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either. These are boys, raw recruits who soil their underwear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.

City Lights (1931)—Released more than three years after The Jazz Singer's premiere ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. The romance is as delicate as the flower the Tramp carries around with him throughout the movie, and if there's one thing I prize in a romance, it's delicacy. Still, what City Lights mostly is, is funny. Fully fifty-seven of the film's eighty-three minute running time is devoted to comedy, and even those moments of tenderness with the girl are usually punctuated with a laugh—the first meeting, for example, concluding with a dash of cold water in the Tramp's face as the girl rinses a flower pot. A masterpiece of comic timing and invention, on my short list of history's great comedies, great romances, and well, great movies, period.

Le Million (1931)—A musical comedy about a struggling artist, in debt to his landlord and every shop owner in town, who discovers he has won the lottery—if only he can find the ticket. He remembers it's in the pocket of a jacket he left with his fiancee, but she's given the jacket to a beggar on the run from the police and soon everybody is scrambling to get their hands on that jacket. Director René Clair gets great mileage out of the deference we pay to money and the people who have it regardless of their worth as human beings, and we laugh at the contortions of the shopowners to ingratiate themselves to a man they had just minutes before been chasing through the streets. The story is tight and precisely put together, the songs and dialogue are witty and memorable, and the resulting comedy is as light and frothy as a glass of cold champagne.

M (1931)—Fritz Lang's M is a masterpiece of psychology, not just the psychology of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre in a performance that launched his career), but the psychology of the audience as well. Using nothing much more than sound and shadows, Lang created a genuine sense of suspense and horror by exploiting a basic fact of human psychology, that we are most afraid of what we can't see. Indeed, the most explicit act of violence Peter Lorre does in M is to the orange he surgically skins with a switchblade. Had it been just an exercise in style, M would still be one of the most effective thrillers ever made, but Lang is interested in more than just a resolution to his police procedural, instead shifting the focus to a study of vigilantism and mob rule. In so doing, Lang raises questions about the balance between freedom and security, justice and efficiency, and the rule of law and the rule of the mob, that are still relevant today. If you watch carefully, you realize nothing much has changed—we've just moved the proceedings to cable television.

Happy New Year!

The Must-See Movies Of 1927-28

Director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has called 1928 the greatest year in the history of movies, which is definitely saying something. If we expand the time frame a bit to include both 1927 and 1928, I will agree that he's on to something.

Between January 1, 1927 and the end of 1928, more than a dozen films were released which might reasonably make a list of the best movies ever made, including The General, Metropolis, Napoleon (released too early in 1927 to qualify for this year's Katies), Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, The Crowd, The Man Who Laughs, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, The Circus, Wings; Laugh, Clown, Laugh and a handful of late 1928 releases, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, The Wind, The Cameraman, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Docks Of New York and The Wedding March (eligible for next year's Katies). Greta Garbo was never more popular, Gloria Swanson was still doing great work, Emil Jannings hadn't joined the Nazi party. Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish gave the best performances of their careers. Directors Murnau, Chaplin, Keaton, Lang and Dreyer were at or near their peaks, and Lubitsch was emerging as the next great director. Movie audiences wouldn't see such an outpouring of quality again until 1939, the year most film historians fix as the best ever, and it's clear, at least in retrospect, that silent movies had reached their highest ever level of artistic achievement and were poised for even greater breakthroughs.

And yet, once The Jazz Singer hit theaters, studios couldn't pay audiences to see anything but talkies. Silent movies were better than ever but for the audiences of the time, they might as well have never been made. It's as if the "Mona Lisa" were hanging in Louvre unseen while art lovers rushed past it to crowd around a McDonald's placemat.

There wouldn't again be such a disconnect between quality and box office receipts until the present age.

Commercially speaking—in the long run, the only language Hollywood speaks—silent movies were dead and there was no going back.

Unfortunately, the new sound technology was primitive, relying on large, immobile cameras and unreliable microphones that glued actors in place and returned movies to that place from whence they had just escaped, the stage-bound theater. It took about five years for sound technology to become workable enough for directors to move the camera again and more than a decade for Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland to remember that they could.

In the meantime, in case you need reminding, this is my list of movies that I consider the must-see movies of 1927-28. Unlike my list of Twenty Silent Movies To Cut Your Teeth On, not all of these movies are equally accessible to a viewer unfamiliar with silent movies, but I do believe every one of them is worth the time and effort is you are so inclined.

The Circus—Charlie Chaplin's comedy of a tramp who finds love and work in the circus

The Crowd—King Vidor's gritty tale of the American Dream turned nightmare

Laugh, Clown, Laugh—Lon Chaney as a man destroyed by love

The Man Who Laughs—a macabre love story about a man with a face that inspired Heath Ledger's Joker

The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—a bittersweet romantic comedy about a prince who falls for a commoner

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans—my pick for the best movie of the year, about a marriage in crisis

Wings—a rip-snorting war picture about World War I flying aces and the girl they left behind

All but two of these movies, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg and Wings, are available on DVD.

You might also check out Sadie Thompson, the 1928 Gloria Swanson-Lionel Barrymore movie based on Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain." Time hasn't been kind to the print and the last reel has been lost, but film historians reconstructed the ending with the use of still photographs and what remains is very good. Sadie Thompson earned Swanson an Oscar nomination, the first of three, and might have earned her and Barrymore (the latter in a supporting role) Katies for their work if I could have been more certain of what I was seeing. Sadie Thompson is available on DVD.

What can I tell you? This whole business of handing out awards, even with eighty years of hindsight, is a frustratingly subjective business. It only gets worse the closer to the present we get.

Best Director Of 1927-28: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)

At the time studio head William Fox coaxed him to Holly- wood with the promise of an unlimited budget and complete control over the final product, F.W. Murnau was Europe's best director. Working out of Berlin, which hosted the continent's largest and most important film industry, Murnau had made seventeen films, including two classics of the era, Nosferatu, still the best telling of the Dracula story, and The Last Laugh, possibly the only silent movie ever made without title cards.

Fox's offer was a rare gift in the history of anything, much less motion pictures, and Murnau grabbed the opportunity with both hands. The movie he made, Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, was not only the best picture of 1927, winning three Oscars in the awards' inaugural year, but is one of the greatest movies ever made.

Sunrise is the story of a marriage in crisis told in a lyrical style that taps into the audience's most basic emotional memories to make it feel the events on screen rather than to simply observe them. The exaggerated story—with attempted murder, near drownings and illicit trysts in muddy fields—is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.

Because I have already written about Sunrise as the best picture of 1927-28, I want to focus here on Murnau's technique, first, his use of the camera and second, his use of sound.

Watching Sunrise, I was struck by how fluid and modern the camera work is, not just compared to other silent movies but to every movie that followed it until 1941's Citizen Kane. Murnau took advantage of a new electric-powered camera belonging to cinematographer Karl Struss to create swooping, seemingly hand-held tracking shots that helped establish the unsettled and unsettling mood of the story. Because Struss (who with Charles Rosher won the first Oscar for cinematography) did not have to hand-crank the lightweight camera from a stationary position, the camera could be hung from wires and float along with the actors as they moved through fields or through crowded city streets. This floating camera created a sense of "displacement" in the audience, that is, making the seemingly familiar just strange enough to force the viewer to see again as if for the first time.

Murnau also drew on other Express- ionist tech- niques to force his audience to see the familiar again for the first time—sets that looms over the farmer and his wife at impossible angles, strong lighting reminiscent of much-later film noir, and double exposures that reveal a character's thoughts such as the ghostly image of the man's lover embracing him and urging him on to murder.

Murnau also made effective use of sound at a time when other directors saw the new technology as a simple novelty and an excuse to shoe-horn a musical number into every movie. Released two weeks before The Jazz Singer, this was Fox Studios' first tentative foray into sound, and while Sunrise is silent in its lack of dialogue, it included a film score, sound effects, and although not yet synchronized to the images on the screen, even human voices.

After watching dozens of silent films while working on this blog, I was reminded again from the first moments of Sunrise just how powerful a music score is and what a difference it can make in setting a mood. Even before the opening credits are finished, the violin score establishes a sense of foreboding and the viewer is prepared for the conflict and violence that soon follows.

It seems obvious to say that a score written specifically for a movie creates a deeper emotional involvement that does a little random Wulitzer music, but if you see enough of these back-to-back-to-back, it jumps out at you nevertheless.

The score does something else, too. By creating a mood with a simple tune, it eliminates the need for many of the movie's title cards (those bits of written dialogue or explanation inserted between frames) which is a welcome relief. Pure exposition doesn't work any better in a movie than it does in a novel and it certainly doesn't work well when it's typed up and inserted into the middle of a love scene or an action sequence.

The use of sound isn't limited to the score and its effect is not merely a way to keep your ears busy while your eyes are working. Any number of sound effects—train whistles, barking dogs, squealing pigs—convey information beyond mere ambiance. Chiming clocks, for example, signal shifts in mood in Sunrise that might otherwise come as a surprise to the viewer.

And shifts in mood is as much what this movie is about as any mechanics of the plot. That Murnau was one of the first to understand how to use sound to create a specific effect is just one more reason why he is still considered one of history's greatest directors and wins the Katie for best director of 1927-28.

Unfortunately, Murnau's achievements went largely ignored. Sunrise was a masterpiece but failed in the only way that mattered to the studio—at the box office—and although the Academy acknowledged the film with three awards, including the only Oscar ever given for "Unique and Artistic Production," Murnau himself was not nominated for best director (neither, for that matter, was William A. Wellman who had directed the "other" best picture winner, Wings). The studio clipped Murnau's wings, limiting his budgets and reasserting control over the content and final cut of his movies.

Worse for the development of movies themselves, however, was the fact that cumbersome new sound-recording cameras made it impossible for other directors to follow Murnau's lead even had studio owners encouraged them to do so. Cameras of the era, even the hand-held ones used in Sunrise, were so loud they made sound recording impossible and they had to be enclosed in soundproof booths with the camera operator locked inside. The result was the theater stage look—medium and long shots with no movement whatsoever—that makes early sound movies so off-putting to a modern audience. It was not until 1958 that France's New Wave directors rediscovered the hand-held camera.

His creative freedom drastically limited, Murnau made two more movies for Fox, both critical and commercial failures, then left America for the South Pacific to work on the last great film of his career, Tabu, a love story between a young fisherman and a woman whom religious authorities have deemed sacred and therefore taboo. A week before the film's premiere, Murnau was killed in an automobile accident. He was 42.

I find it interesting that the greatest directors of the silent era, Murnau, Keaton, Chaplin, von Stroheim, Griffith, largely failed to make the transition to sound movies. There were individual reasons in each case—Griffith never progressed beyond the same simple story of virginity imperiled, Keaton's new contract with MGM proved to be a straightjacket, von Stroheim was an egomaniac, Chaplin was a slow-working perfectionist. And of course Murnau had the best excuse of all: he died.

But the overall impression is that an entire generation of great directors vanished, leaving the field to inferior hacks, and that this is how the studios wanted it. Film historians have suggested that the studios used the transition to sound as an opportunity to break well-paid directors (and actors) who had become too big for their britches.

I also suspect that to a degree, the directors themselves failed to adjust to the necessity of telling stories so badly after a decade of telling them so well. I'll note that given the opportunity to make Tabu as a sound picture, Murnau chose to make it a silent. Like many great directors of that era, if given the choice, he preferred silent pictures. The marketplace simply didn't allow that choice.

In any event, with the greatest directors gone or their output severely limited, and with the technology restricting their artistry, the directors who were left seemed to have forgotten how to make movies. It was more than a decade before John Ford, Orson Welles and others rediscovered the lessons Murnau taught and used them to bring motion pictures into the modern era.

A final postscript. Almost seventy years after Murnau's death, John Malkovich played him in the movie Shadow Of The Vampire, a fictionalized account of the making of Murnau's most famous work, Nosferatu. The movie is a sometimes funny, sometimes violent meditation on the damage an artist does in creating a masterpiece. In the case of Sunrise, a true masterpiece, the damage Murnau did was to his own career.

Meaningless Trivia: Out of curiosity, I looked up the total number of votes on the Internet Movie Database for movies made during the Silent Era (1900-1928). Not the average vote, mind you, just the raw totals, to get a sense of how many 21st century eyes have watched silent movies and which ones they're watching.

The top ten movies released before 1929 in terms of total imdb.com votes (with the director's name in parentheses):

Metropolis (Fritz Lang) 32,291

Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau) 24,422

The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin) 17,038

The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman) 16,397

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) 14,815

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine) 14,115

The Kid (Charles Chaplin) 10,275

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer) 9,048

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau) 8,851

The Birth Of A Nation (D.W. Griffith) 7,524

Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) 5,284

Well, there it is, for what it's worth, which is, admittedly, not a lot. I would recommend any of the movies on the list except The Birth Of A Nation which would come as quite a shock to a modern audience and likely turn you off silent movies for good unless you've really prepared yourself for its stunningly racist views on American history not to mention its three hour running time which in a silent movie can feel like three weeks.

By the way, in case you're wondering, the most voted upon movie (as far as I can tell) is The Shawshank Redemption with 421,872 votes ...