City Lights

In the late 1920s film stars, directors and producers faced a dilemma. 1927’s The Jazz Singer had opened the world’s eyes and ears to the talkies; movies with sound and the revolution had taken off quickly, brushing former silent stars aside and ushering in a new era of spoken dialogue. Arguably the biggest star of the silent era was Charlie Chaplin. His films had been hugely popular in every corner of the globe, from London and Los Angeles to Leningrad and Lahore. His universality came not only from his popular and identifiable Tramp character but because people from any country could understand the language of the film. Each film’s themes and jokes worked in any language and were loved by all.

It was because of The Tramp’s universality as a silent character that caused Chaplin to shun the talkies for a decade after they first became the norm. City Lights was his first film produced after The Jazz Singer and he stuck to his guns, despite outside influence, and kept The Tramp silent. The movie’s opening scene gently mocks the new medium at a statue unveiling. The City Mayor proudly strides to a podium to dedicate a new statue and when he speaks an amusing Donald Duck type noise is emitted from his mouth. His lady wife then takes the stand with similar, higher pitched results. To me this is Chaplin’s way of proving his point to the English speaking world. We can’t understand what the characters are saying so how would his fans in France, Russia or Brazil understand him if he spoke? With this opening scene we not only have our first laugh but also a taste of an ever maturing Chaplin, a man who isn’t afraid to express his opinions on screen.

Charlie Chaplin - The United Artist Films and Beyond

Last year I watched and reviewed over forty films made by one of my cinematic heroes, Charlie Chaplin. It’s taken a while but after cataloguing all of his Essanay, Mutual and First National Films, I’ve come back to the tramp to look at the final portion of his career. Even as I write these words I realise how absurd ‘final portion’ sounds as the years I’m looking at cover over four decades and include his first dramatic film, his first talkie and his final British films following his exile from his adopted United States. This period also coincides with what is today, his most iconic era; the fifteen years between 1925’s The Gold Rush and 1940’s The Great Dictator. Despite having been one of the most famous men in the world for over a decade, 1925 marks the beginning of the era which still defines Chaplin’s motion picture career. It was between the years of 1925-40 that he created some of the most essential comedy moments in film history and all but one of his films from this period has been added to the US National Film Registry. For me and indeed many film fans these films are gems but as with many of the silent shorts that I reviewed last year, some of the films surrounding this golden period will be new to me.

Most of the films listed below were produced through United Artists, the company co-founded by Chaplin and fellow stars D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks (pictured above). The company is still going strong today but lost its independence in 1967 and is now a subsidiary of MGM. I have, in the past year and a half, reviewed some of the films on this list already but I’ll be watching the rest in order and may decide to re-watch the ones I have seen anyway. As usual you can click on a film’s title to read my full review.

Frankenstein

1931’s Frankenstein remains after more than eighty years, one of the most recognisable, influential and respected horror movies of all time. While it may do little for the gore hungry Saw generation, to those of us who appreciate the art of film, it stands up against the test of time and despite numerous subsequent attempts at the iconic story, this version will undoubtedly be the one you have in your head. From the imposing gothic architecture and magnificent use of shadow to the distinctive and now ‘go to’ flat head, Frankenstein is a movie which many of us will know before even seeing it in full.

The plot is taken from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel of the same name and should be known by anyone with at least one functioning sense. The story and its characters are some of the most iconic and recognisable not only in horror history but also literary history and the tale has been repeated and twisted in everything from Mel Brook’s spoof Young Frankenstein to TV classic The Munsters to the recent animated film Frankenweenie and has influenced countless books, TV shows and movies. This adaptation is relatively faithful version of the timeless original text.

Cimarron

In the rush to claim newly opened lands in the Oklahoma Territory, a man takes his Upper Middle Class wife Sabra (Irene Dunn) to the barren prairie to claim his piece of the wilderness. That man is Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), a polymath with dreams of opening a newspaper in the burgeoning boom town of Osage. As the town thrives, Yancey becomes a local hero and leader but his itchy feet urge him to move on and his adventures out of town leave his wife to fend for herself in the dangerous South West while running his newspaper and raising their children in his absence.

Cimarron won the 1931 Academy Award for Outstanding Production (subsequently renamed Best Picture) and was the first movie to be nominated for seven Oscars as well as the first to be nominated for the ‘Big Five’. In addition to its critical reception, the movie was also RKO’s most expensive picture to date and would remain so for close to a decade. The expense, coupled with the Great Depression meant that the film produced a loss for the studio and didn’t recoup its budget until a re-release several years after its initial release. Despite the large budget and critical success I thought Cimarron was a slightly messy and uninspiring film which left me bored for most of its two hour run time.

M

Fritz Lang’s first sound film and his penultimate German movie, M is loosely based on a number of serial killers in 1920s Germany. The people of Berlin are in a state of mob like panic as an unknown man is killing little girls in the city. Everyone is a suspect and the police are getting nowhere despite thousands of (conflicting) eye witness testimonies. With unwanted attention falling on the ‘innocent’ criminal fraternity, local crime bosses take it upon themselves to capture the killer and use the large homeless and beggar community as their spies, watching little girls in the hope of discovering the man behind the attacks.

M is often, and rightly, considered as one of the first masterpieces of the sound era. Not only is it a terrific, tense and surprisingly violent film but its use of sound is up there with the best of the period. Realising that sound could be used for more than mere dialogue Lang employs it as part of the plot and has sound off screen along with long periods of silence interrupted by loud noises which together with a deep and complex score and haunting whistle help to make M one of the best of the early talkies. The film also features Lang’s famed use of light and shadow and a fantastic central performance from Peter Lorre.

The Public Enemy

One of the earliest true gangster films, The Public Enemy charts the rise and fall of gangsters Tom Powers (James Cagney) and Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) through the first third of the twentieth century. From street hoodlums tripping up girls in 1909 to prohibition era bootleggers, Powers and Doyle become top dogs in a world of crime, money, women and violence before getting their studio orchestrated comeuppance.

The movie starts with some fantastic streets scenes set in the first few years of the twentieth century. Anyone who has read my reviews of Chaplin films or other early cinema will know what a huge fan I am of seeing these sorts of shots, especially if they’re real. Here they look like sets but are still great. Early on there is a sort of Oliver-Fagan dynamic featuring Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell) as a gangster who employs children to do his thieving. It is soon obvious that he is ripping them off and the two boys strike out on their own. Although the film was produced in the pre-code era the violence is very tame by today’s standards and my DVD copy was rated as PG. The story is the driving force here though and the plot has been repeated numerous times in both versions of Scarface, the similarly titled Public Enemies and countless others.