A Review: Tapas, Cherry Blossoms And The General

Katie- Bar-The- Door and I took our own advice and went to see The General at the Kennedy Center last night. How often, when you're writing a chronological history of the movies, do you get a chance to see one of the films you've been promoting in a theater (with the National Symphony Orchestra providing the backing music, no less) and then review it in a timely fashion.

Some things we learned:

1) The General is just as good as I said it was, in fact, better—and you'll remember that I said it was the best movie of the Silent Era. I had seen The General many times before but never in a theater and certainly never with the National Symphony Orchestra sitting in front of it. It turned out to be a great Saturday night date movie, as much fun as the best fun-stupid movie, with the emphasis heavily on the fun.

2) Before the performance, the conductor noted that Buster Keaton had sent out cards with the movie directing the audience to "cheer the hero and hiss the villain," and to its credit, the enthusiastic audience tried hard last night to hiss the villain. The only problem is, in Keaton there really is no villain—other than fate, bad luck and miscommunication. It's as if Keaton had anticipated the French existentialists nearly two decades before Jean-Paul Sartre published Being And Nothingness and decided it's life itself that's our biggest adversary.

3) The Kennedy Center is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to walk there. Except we did, having eaten tapas at Jaleo's earlier in the evening and then walked down to the Tidal Basin to see the cherry blossoms. For all practical purposes, the Kennedy Center sits on an island surrounded by a sea of interstates, bridges and exit ramps. It was opened in 1971 when I suppose it seemed clear to urban planners that human legs would soon become vestigial to be replaced in the course of evolution by the automobile.

4) The steamed mussels at Jaleo's are terrific. So is everything else.

5) Tickets at the Kennedy Center are half-price if you buy them in person after 6 p.m. on the night of the show. We wound up with good orchestra level tickets for the price of an upper deck nose-bleed seat.

Best Actor Of The Silent Era: Charles Chaplin (Part Two: "Chaplin Or Keaton: The Never-ending Argument")

Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, who was greater, is one of those perennial questions—like "Republican or Democrat" "Elvis or the Beatles"—that transcends its original context and ends up saying more about the people doing the debating than about the subject at hand. As with any debate of this type, there is no right or wrong answer, only a matter of taste.

My tastes, which are broad enough to include both performers, ultimately lean toward Chaplin.

At his peak, Chaplin was the most popular movie performer in the world and yet his reputation rests on a relatively small body of work. After beginning his career with a flood of forgettable short features (mostly directed by Mack Sennett), Chaplin worked meticulously and produced few films. Over a span of ten years beginning in 1921, he directed only three shorts (including The Idle Class and Pay Day) and five features, one of which—the drama A Woman Of Paris—included only a cameo on his part.

Keaton was more prolific. "[I]n an extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929," Roger Ebert has written, "[Keaton] worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."

The public, however, found Keaton to be an acquired taste and he was always scrounging for funding. Still, he managed to make some of the best silent comedies of all time, including The General, Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality and The Navigator.

Both wrote, directed and starred in their own productions. Both did most of their own stunts. And both were, at their best, hilarious. Neither truly hit their stride until they formed their own production companies and took full control of their work, United Artists in Chaplin's case, Buster Keaton Productions in the other.

The argument in favor of Keaton is a good one. He made what many, including myself, consider to be the best movie of the Silent Era, The General. In addition, the understated style of his comedy as his characters single-mindedly pursue their desires is a style at once familiar and easily-accessible to modern audiences. Finally, his movies have none of the unabashed sentimentality of Chaplin's films that some, though not me, find cloying and heavy.

In arguing for Chaplin the actor, I am relying on the handful of shorts and the feature-length films, including The Kid, The Gold Rush and The Circus, over which he exercised complete artistic control.

Watching those movies again, and comparing them with Keaton's, I was struck by the range of the emotions and comic situations in Chaplin, from the gentle humor in the domesticity of The Kid to the surreal slapstick of The Gold Rush to the acrobatic grace and athleticism of The Circus.

While I believe you can argue about who made the better movies, Chaplin, as a comedian and an actor, could simply hit a greater variety of notes with seeming ease than Keaton ever dared try.

I remember one terrific laugh in Chaplin's comedy, The Kid, that comes from a matter-of-fact flick of Chaplin's eyes from a foundling baby to an open sewer hole that certainly suggests one solution to the problem of unplanned parenthood.

And yet later in The Kid there's that unforgettable sequence when Chaplin races across the rooftops to rescue this same child, now a six year old boy he has raised as his own, from the remorseless representatives of the local orphanage. The reunion of Chaplin and the boy is one of the most touching scenes in movie history.

I guess that's what separates Chaplin from Keaton for me: both can make me laugh, but only Chaplin can make me cry.

If that makes me, to quote Louis in Casablanca, "a rank sentimentalist," so be it, I'll cop to the charge.

Audiences the world over related to the character Chaplin played in nearly every movie, the Tramp, the little guy living in squalid poverty, oppressed by the soulless machinery of a hostile society—which is pretty much the human condition in a nutshell for millions of people.

These same audiences longed, I suspect, to achieve the in-it-but-not-of-it insouciance with which the Tramp met his daily suffering. Oh, to relish the taste of the boot you've boiled for your Thanksgiving dinner the way the Tramp did—there's Chaplin's appeal reduced to a single scene.

The other key to Chaplin's allure is that more than any other silent performer, Keaton included, Chaplin truly did not need dialogue to convey action, jokes and especially emotion. As Roger Ebert has pointed out, children get Chaplin; it's only after they grow up that they forget how words serve mostly to confuse and distract.

Chaplin continued to make films sporadically during the sound era. Two of those films, City Lights and Modern Times, are masterpieces, and a third, The Great Dictator, is nearly so.

Chaplin was awarded honorary Oscars for his achievements twice, one at the very first Oscar ceremony in 1929, the second in 1972. He won a single competitive Oscar for his scoring of Limelight.

Nothing I've said here settles the debate—the debate can never be settled. Fortunately, I only have to choose between Chaplin and Keaton for purposes of handing out an award that doesn't even exist. My movie collection includes a healthy sampling of each.

You want my advice? Skip the argument, watch Chaplin and Keaton and become a fan of both.

Note: The boy in the photograph with Chaplin is Jackie Coogan, who not only played the title character in Chaplin's classic, The Kid, but later grew up to play Uncle Fester in one of my favorite television shows, The Addams Family.

Keep that in mind the next time you think, "Gee, what a cute kid ..."

Best Actor Of The Silent Era: Charles Chaplin (Part One: "And The Nominees Are ...")

Decades after the demise of silent movies, one star from that era remains instantly recognizable: Charles Chaplin. And when it came time to choose the best actor of the Silent Era, I didn't hesitate. I'm a Chaplin man, through and through.

My feelings on this matter, however, are not universally shared, nor should they be, this being a democracy of aesthetic preferences rather than a tyranny of objective certainties. But I think I can explain my choice in a way that will at least show it's an informed one.

First, let's run through the nominees one by one.

Arguably, Emil Jannings was the most respected dramatic actor of the Silent Era and in fact, he won the very first Oscar for his performances in The Last Command and The Way Of All Flesh (early Oscars were awarded for a body of work in a given year rather than for a specific performance).

But you don't hear much about Jannings anymore—and not just because he returned to Hitler's Germany in the early 1930s and became an ardent Nazi. As I have written before, silent movies didn't lend themselves to straight drama and watching Jannings work now is, in my opinion, strictly for film students.

Another fine dramatic actor was John Barrymore, a handsome matinee idol known as "The Great Profile." Still, to my mind, his best performances (until alcoholism destroyed his career) came during the early days of the sound era.

Then there's Rudolph Valentino, the male pin-up star of the Silent Era. He made thirty-eight movies, The Sheik being the best known. Frankly, though, Valentino was more of an icon than an actor—pleasing eye candy if that's your idea of a good time—and his appeal lies more in the idea the name evokes than in any actual performance.

Equally famous in his day was Douglas Fairbanks. He was in some fine movies, co-founded United Artists and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1940. But fairly or unfairly, I think of Fairbanks primarily as the Silent Era's greatest stunt man and swashbuckler than its greatest actor.

The strongest choice for best actor of the Silent Era not named Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin would be Lon Chaney, forever known, thanks to his brilliant makeup jobs and varied characterizations, as "The Man of a Thousand Faces." The title roles he played in the silent versions of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and The Phantom Of The Opera are among the most indelible in the history of motion pictures.

Nevertheless, as great as Chaney was, there are only two real possible choices for title of Best Actor of the Silent Era: Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton.

Next up, Part Two: "Chaplin Or Keaton: The Never-ending Argument"

The General At The Kennedy Center, Saturday April 4, 2009, 8 p.m.

Speak of the devil, the Kennedy Center in our very own Washington, D.C., will be showing Buster Keaton's The General this Saturday, April 4, at 8 p.m. The National Symphony Orchestra will perform the accompanying score.

Tickets are on sale now and range in price from $20 to $65.

Now hopefully this little announcement will buy me some time—I need another day to finish my essay on Charlie Chaplin ...

Another Look At The General

That's not a special effect, that's not a model, that's not computer-generated trickery. That's Buster Keaton dropping a real locomotive into the middle of a very real river.

I don't think I need to point out that he got this shot in one take ...

Best Picture Of The Silent Era: The General

If you're only going to see one movie from what I'm calling the pre- Oscars Silent Era, then Buster Keaton's masterpiece The General is the one to see.

Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which 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.

This being the real thing (Keaton did all his own stunts and used full-sized trains, one of which wound up sitting in the bottom of a river for fifteen years), it's a wonder nobody got killed filming it.

Like in the best silent films, the lack of dialogue is almost irrelevant. The outline of the plot is easy enough to follow: war breaks out and to impress the woman he loves, Keaton tries to volunteer. But as an engineer for the Western & Atlantic Railroad, he is more valuable where he is than in uniform, so the army's recruiters reject him.

Of course, the army doesn't bother to explain the situation to Keaton or to anyone else. The girl assumes he is a coward and the rest of this brief, 75-minute movie involves Keaton proving otherwise.

In case you're afraid you don't have the patience to sit through a silent movie, I can reassure you the set-up takes only 14 minutes before the spies to show up, hijack Keaton's train—which, by the way, was based on a real-life Civil War era steam locomotive named "The General"—and kidnap the woman he loves. Even then, Keaton has already treated you to one of the most famous sight gags in movie history.

From there, the story unreels at breakneck speed.

In addition to the two separate train chases that bookend the movie, there's time for a daring escape, a battle between the two advancing armies, and an endless series of gags. 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.

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Buster Keaton number 21 on its list of the greatest movie performers of all-time; Entertainment Weekly listed him as the seventh best director; and Roger Ebert has written "Today I look at Keaton's works more often than any other silent films."

Watching The General again, it's easy to see why. I'm giving it the Katie-Bar-The-Door Award for Best Picture of the Silent Era.

An Aside: Nosferatu

In honor of faithful reader lupner who professes to shake with fright whenever she thinks of F.W. Murnau's classic vampire movie, Nosferatu ...

On The Perils Of Watching Silent Movies

Silent movies are in some essential way not what we think of as movies at all. Yes, you sit in the dark and watch flickering images of light projected through celluloid onto a screen, but watching a silent film is much more akin to watching ballet or kabuki theater than anything like what we think of as the movie-going experience.

They say movies are a visual medium, but silent movies are a purely visual medium and you'd be surprised how quickly you can tire of interpreting purely visual information—I mean absent a nice-looking redhead in the picture.

Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard famously said, "We didn't need dialogue, we had faces," but let me tell you, a little bit of "faces" goes a long, long way and I don't know about you, but after ten minutes of a typical silent movie, I find myself yearning for dialogue, any dialogue, even dialogue written by Joe Eszterhas. And he wrote Showgirls.

Filmmakers by necessity had to develop ways to convey information without sound (or more specifically, synchronized sound—a line of dialogue or an aural cue tied to a specific image—there were all sorts of random sounds and musical scores in "silent" movies by the mid-1920s, but none that could be reliably synchronized to the picture).

Like with everything else, some were better at it than others.

Some, such as D.W. Griffith, realized the unique potential of the medium and invented ways to tell stories—with flashbacks, cutting back and forth between two parallel storylines, etc.—that wholly slipped the surly bonds of the stage and continue to influence how movies are made today.

Others, well, not so much.

There are, as far as I can tell, an ungodly number of silent movies that are as talky and dialogue-laden as a Noel Coward play—except without the benefit of any actual, you know, dialogue. Those are the silent movies that make you want to shoot yourself and if those are the only silent movies you've ever seen, then no wonder you don't want to see any more.

Because actors had to convey everything with their faces and bodies, you wind up seeing a lot of what to modern eyes looks like ham acting. Believe me, this exaggerated style was necessary. Without it, silent movies would implode into incomprehensible stillness. But because of this style of acting, it's the rare drama that doesn't turn unintentionally hilarious, like watching high school students perform Death Of A Salesman.

The medium lent itself best to slapstick comedy, action-adventure, broad melodrama and grand romance, slapstick and action because you don't need a lot of dialogue to elicit an emotional response, melodrama because the story is as broad and obvious as the acting necessary to convey it, and romance because—let's face it—most of what lovers say to each other in throes of passion sounds pretty silly unless you're lucky enough to be participating in the action.

So the most watchable silent movies—watchable by me, that is, the only person I can safely vouch for—are comedies starring Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, spectacles such as Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ or The Phantom Of The Opera, or anything with Greta Garbo or Louise Brooks who were, to my refined eye, really hot broads.

Most everything else tends to play as a bitter pill swallowed in the name of a well-rounded film education and I end up fast-forwarding through to the end. Sue me.

That audiences fled silent movies so quickly after the introduction of sound leads me to believe they weren't all that happy about the situation either. They just hadn't had a choice.

That said, I stand by my awards for the Silent Era—with certain caveats—as movies and performances I found accessible as a modern viewer, and which you too might find accessible, if you're so inclined.

I Know What You're Thinking

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "How long, O Lord, can he write about movies I'm never going to see?!?"

Well, I figure to get to the Marx Brothers by the end of April. Sooner if we're lucky. You've seen the Marx Brothers, right?

And before then, I promise to write about Jean Harlow's thighs, gangster movies and why men are not much more than big animals with clothes on. So it can't be all bad.

Career Achievement Awards For The Silent Era (films released prior to August 1, 1927)

PICTURE: The General

ACTOR: Charles Chaplin

ACTRESS: Lillian Gish

DIRECTOR: D.W. Griffith

Maybe this is what the Academy should have done to honor the three decades of movies that preceded the Oscars, instead of what they did do, which was to allow thousands of movies to molder away in the vaults as if they had never existed, until many of them did in fact no longer exist, having turned to liquified film and ashes long ago.

With the exception of The General, which I consider to be the best movie made before Charles Chaplin's City Lights in 1931, the Katie-Bar-The-Door career achievement awards are for a body of work accomplished prior to August 1, 1927 (the cutoff date for the first Oscars) rather than for a specific film. I'll explain my choices—next week—along with a brief essay on the problem of watching silent movies and finally a selection of "must-see" films from the Silent Era.

Enjoy your weekend. See a movie.