Prospero's Essential Movie Guide Part 2

Director Tod Browning

Right up there with Science Fiction, Comedy and Drama, Horror movies played as much a part of early films as they do today.

Lon Chaney, "The Man of a Thousand Faces" was THE star of silent horror and his contribution to the genre is immeasurable. I was lucky enough to attend a screening of Phantom of the Opera at the Princeton chapel (really a Cathedral) with a live organ accompaniment, using the film's original score. The organist was a true professional, never skipping a beat when almost an entire reel was accidentally replayed. Chaney made an astounding number of silent genre films, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame; He Who Gets Slapped; The Unknown; London After Midnight (directed by Browning) and two versions of The Unholy Three (the original also directed by Browning). Chaney's son, Lon Chaney, Jr. had a lucrative career playing The Wolfman in the 40's and 50's, though he never rose to the height of his father's fame.

Sadly, not much footage remains from London After Midnight:



Luckily, Browning went on to direct two of the genre's iconic films: Dracula (Uncle P's introduction to horror) and the once-banned Freaks, both of which are readily available.

Of course there are those (Uncle P included) who think the Mexican Spanish Language version of 1931's Dracula (shot at night on Browning's sets) is superior in both tone and technical fimmaking:

I'll be moving on to more "talkies" in the next installment. Again, if you've never seen these films, I urge to seek them out.

More essentials, anon.
Prospero

Prospero's Essential Movie Guide, Part I

Georges Melies - The Father of Narrative Film

Let's try this again, shall we? The original version of this post was lost to an unfortunate keystroke, which may well have been for the best. 

Anyway, a few days ago, a friend of a Facebook friend posted a list of 10 'essential' movies he thought his daughter should see. The list was made up of mostly good films, but was hardly comprehensive. And while I have no children of my own to advise about the movies that helped shape my view of the world, I thought I might like to pass on a list to my sweet Caitlin M, who loves movies, but also loves Zombies; the Cthulhu Mythos and Python. 

Of course, as I compiled my list, it grew rather unwieldy. I soon realized that I loved too many films to reduce them to a list of just 10. How can any cinephile create such a limited list? I know I couldn't possibly. And that was how my first ever series was born. Will I ever finish it? Maybe. 

Bear in mind, these the movies that inspired, excited, confounded and ignited my imagination and my personal love of film. Your list may (and probably should) vary. I've tried to keep the films in as much chronological order as possible, though I would highly recommend watching the in the groupings I have placed them (or not). I saw and shared many of these movies with my sister, who is almost as big as a cinephile as I am.

So let's get on with it, shall we? This first group of films everyone should see comes from the early days of cinema, using the technology available (some of it very clever) at the time:

Metropolis: Fritz Lang's visionary Sci-Fi classic serves as an indictment against both Mechanization and Economic Imperilaism.

Modern Times added Chaplin's silent voice to the anti-machine movement:

And Chaplin went on to create one of film's iconic sequences in The Gold Rush, using only forks and dinner rolls:

But the silent era wasn't just about fantasies and comedy. Sergei Eisenstein brought the horrors of war home with Battleship Potemkin:

Perhaps the most controversial (though well-worth seeing) film of the silent era is D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which depicts the KKK as the film's heroes. The Civil War was still a very sore subject in the South in 1915 and Griffith's movie was understandably popular there.

There are many more essential silent films to talk about and I will do so in the next installment. If you haven't seen these films, I suggest you seek them out.

More, anon.
Prospero

My Favorite Silent Film

Obsessed with Film has this review of the newly restored version of Fritz Lang's iconic silent Sci-Fi film, Metropolis. A nearly full-length version was discovered in a Argentinian museum in 2008, and the current version was taken from that print.

Uncle P has been a fan of this movie for almost as long as he can remember. It's the movie that taught me that images can be so more more powerful than words and was my choice for viewing in the first film class I ever took. Released in 1927, Metropolis garnered rave reviews, but was cut down from its original 205 minute running time (extraordinary for a film made in 1926) for subsequent releases. In 1984, musician/filmmaker Giorgio Moroder released a 90 minute version with a pop-music score (the first CD I ever bought) and additional title cards to make up for the assumed-missing scenes. 25 minutes have now been added to the film, including new title cards for the scenes too damaged to include. While not exactly Lang's cut, the current re-release is probably the closest modern audiences can come to the original version of this 84 year-old classic.

Best known for this film and the Peter Lorre classic M, Lang's movie was exceptionally ahead of its time in both terms of special effects and story-telling. Indeed, Karel Capek had only introduced the word "robot" into the language just 6 years earlier in his play R.U.R. (a dreadfully boring play in which Uncle P made his college theatre debut).

With a screenplay by the original novelist Thea von Harbou, Metropolis is rather simplistic by today's standards, telling the story of a supposedly Utopian society where the privileged live in luxury above ground, while proletariat workers toil like slaves in a vast underground complex. Enter the beautiful Maria, who preaches peace and equality to the proles, and with whom the protagonist Freder, falls hopelessly in love. Of course, Freder's father runs the whole place and wants to incite a riot among the workers so he can justify replacing them with machines. To that end, he hires mad scientist Rotwang to replace Maria with a robot who will rile the workers into a frenzy. Creating effects that would be used well into the 1960's, Lang managed to make a movie that would influence filmmakers from Stanley Kubrick to Stephen Spielberg and  inspire writers such as Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. A rather extraordinary accomplishment for a burgeoning media, don't you think?

Here's the trailer for the film's latest incarnation:

More, anon.
Prospero

PS - In semi-related movie news, Uncle P received an email today from a director interested in Army of the Dead. Keep your fingers crossed (again).