rfwilmut

It's an interesting example of how to make a film on a low budget. All the music is from pre-existing music libraries. All the major comedy sequences are filmed in very long takes, and have every indication of hardly being scripted at all, just blocked out and leaving Randle and his experienced team to improvise. The plot is much the same as all the other Randle films - set in the Army (an excuse for cheeking senior officers and the sergeant), and involving a younger well-off recruit whose home they end up in. In the end sequence here Randle adopts a kilt and a dubious Scots accent for no apparent reason.

It's interesting to note that Winifred Atwell plays everything in key C, unlike most jazz-type pianists who tend to use b or E flat. The 'historical' piano she uses at the end if of course an ordinary piano in disguise, with one string on everyh note detuned slightly to produce the 'honky tonk' effect she was famous for employing. (Side note - originally 'honky tonk' meant brothel, something everyone had forgotten by then.)

Siegfried and its sequel, Kriemhild's Revenge, stand as an oustanding achievement of spectacular silent cinema, but are also of interest because of the music score used for the original showings.

Silent films often had special scores composed for the premieres and the biggest cinemas, but these were usually cobbled together from bits of Liszt and Mendelssohn. Even well into the 1930s film music was fairly primitive - honourable exceptions being King Kong (Max Steiner) and the 1933 Alice In Wonderland (Dimitri Tiomkin) - until Erich Wolfgang Korngold's symphonic scores for Captain Blood (1935) and other swashbuckling epics completely revolutionised film music.

For Die Nibelungen, ten years before Korngold, Gottfried Huppertz wrote a remarkable symphonic score, somewhat in the style of Wagner though not using any of Wagner's themes. Though not as complex in its construction as Korngold's scores, the themes are used in a Wagnerian manner for the various characters, and the music supports the very slow acting and gives it an epic strength and excitement - seen without the score the action often seems ponderous but the score supports it and makes it flow. It's a remarkable achievement for the period: Huppertz also scored Lang's Metropolis, but his Nibelungen score stands out as the first great film score.

Fortunately both films are available on Blu-Ray in excellent transfers and restored to their original length, together with the complete score.

Marion Davies is remembered for being the mistress of the mogul of the American yellow press, William Randolph Hearst. He though she ought to star in big historical film epics, and paid for her to do so, but the films flopped. Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane, loosely based on Hearst, presented a girl-friend who Kane tried unsuccessfully to turn into an opera singer, and the film has done some damage to Davies's reputation, suggesting that she was no good at all as an actress.

In fact she was an accomplished comic actress, with a tremendous and hilarious presence on-screen, and would have been more famous if Hearst hadn't interfered in her career. The Patsy, directed by King Vidor, shows just how funny she could be. She plays young Pat, bullied by her domineering mother (a magnificent performance by the great Marie Dressler) and her selfish older sister: her henpecked father tries to defend her but is hopelessly ineffectual. Her having a crush on her sister's boyfriend doesn't make life any easier,either.

Trying to improve her personality, she studies a book of smart things to say, leading her to come out with gems like 'Nature gives us many of features, but she lets us pick our teeth'. Not surprisingly, this behaviour convinces her mother that she has gone insane and has to be humoured... this ploy doesn't work for long. A visit to a smart Yacht Club leads to further complications (her mother comments 'Don't you know it's not good manners to be polite to a waiter') but in the end she gets the boyfriend, her father explodes at her mother, who subsides (for the moment), and even the sister becomes a little more sympathetic.

Despite the lack of sound (and hence the need for subtitles) the dialogue is witty, and Davies's performance is charming, sympathetic and hilarious.

The film is an excellent silent comedy, well up to the standard of many better-remembered films. There is one delirious sequence involving Bill, and another soldier inside a pantomime horse. They are taking part, reluctantly, in a daft play for the troops, in a French village close to enemy lines, and manage to muck it up in various predictable ways. Most comedians would have stopped there, but the gag is built up and built up for about twenty minutes.

Firstly, there is a surprise attack by the Germans. The troops withdraw hurriedly, but the two inside the horse are trapped by falling scenery. By the time they get clear - having to attack a couple of Germans in the process, their own troops have gone.

Realising their position, they shuffle over to a horse trough and join a couple of real (and rather surprised) horses. Two German soldiers, too drunk to realise that not all the horses are real, lead the two real and the pantomime horse to a stable. As the Germans get more and more drunk and Old Bill and his mate try to get away there is a good deal of byplay: then Bill manages to snaffle some cognac and he and the other soldier proceed to get pretty drunk themselves. This does nothing for the realism of their act as a horse, but the Germans are now pretty well gone. They attempt to shoot the disobedient pantomime horse, but can't hit anything except its rump (to the annoyance of the soldier in the back). Then a dog, who has been introduced into the story earlier, gets involved, so that there is a scuffle with two Germans, the dog, and the 'horse'.

The Germans manage to pull the head off the horse and stagger back, knocking themselves out temporarily. The dog has no intention of being left out of the fun and climbs inside the horse, causing even more contortions. The two in the horse try to get away by climbing over the stable gate with a good deal of difficulty. Staggering about in the street outside, the appearance of a headless horses scares some more German soldiers witless: then the dog manages to realign himself so that his head is poking out of the front.

Finally what appears to be a mis-shapen and lurching horse with a dog's head stumbles into a barn where a number of German soldiers are sleeping, causing them to run away in bewildered panic.

That's the best sequence in the film, but there are several other classic sequences: it's a pity that it isn't more widely known - it certainly deserves to be. As I write it's available on a DVD in Amazon with its original Vitaphone score.

Though rarely seen, 'Hallelujah' is famous in film histories for having an all-black cast, and for being amongst the earliest sound films to attempt a complex use of sound, including location recording. The story is simple enough - a black preacher (Daniel L, Hayes) is seduced by a dance-hall singer (Nina Mae McKinney). Though some of the dialogue and acting is somewhat awkward, the film does represent black characters as human beings, rather than the stereotyped sassy maids and shuffling porters all too common in many Hollywood films.

It's particularly worth commenting on the musical side. The film gives, in some sections, a remarkably authentic representation of black entertainment and religous music in the 1920s, which no other film achieves. Unfortunately some of the sequences are rather Europeanised and over-arranged. For example, the outdoor revival meeting, with the preacher singing and acting out the 'Train to hell', is entirely authentic in style until the end, where he launches into the popular song 'Waiting at the End of the Road'. Similarly, an outdoor group of workers singing near the beginning of the film are saddled with a choral arangement of 'Way Down upon the Swanee River' (written by Stephen Foster, who never went anywhere near the South) - no black workers would sing that!.

The best sequence (and one which is of vital importance in the history of classic jazz) is in the dancehall, where Nina Mae McKinney gives a stunning performance of 'Swanee Shuffle' - just the right sort of popular song; although actually filmed in a New York studio using black actors, the sequence gives the most accurate representation I've ever seen of a low-life black dance-hall - part of the roots of classic jazz. Nothing else on film comes near this: most Hollywood films sanitized black music out of all recognition; and later, in the 1930s, when black artists began to show their real styles, jazz had moved on to become more sophisticated and the whole style of behaviour had changed. All this makes the film a unique document: and it's worth adding that the soundtrack is a remarkable achievement, given the primitive equipment available at the time, with a much wider range of editing and mixing techniques than is generally thought to have been used so early on in talkies.

The previous poster can't have been paying attention. Laura LaPlante's character is not a gold- digger - she works in a department store, but she falls for the boss's son when she thinks he is the chauffeur.

The shadow sequence mentioned isn't as described - she is sent to the son to be sacked for arriving late: he sees her coming and hides (to prevent her finding out he isn't the chauffeur): she knows that her immediate boss, who sent her, is on the other side of the frosted-glass- panel door: she pantomimes apologising, then puts on a bowler hat and a cigar and pretends to be the boss's son (in silhouette) forgiving her, to fool her immediate boss. Her boyfriend doesn't come into it.

I would agree that the boyfriend (Charles Delaney) isn't very good, and the film is certainly no classic: but it's enjoyable enough, the plot is quite well developed. I have to say that I found the gags added to the intertitles intrusive - the comedy lies in the situations and the characters.