Paul Fejos's BROADWAY (1929)

Roy Lane: I'd like to see someone make me stop talking!

Showgirl: So would I!

Was Paul Fejos Hollywood's answer to Abel Gance or the Michael Bay of the 1920s? The Hungarian polymath, whose life (at least as told by himself) reads like a pulp adventure novel, has made a name for himself anew with the Criterion Collection's DVD release of his expressionistic, experimental 1928 part-talkie Lonesome. With Lonesome came two more Fejos features, but the silent Last Performance instantly threw his talent into question. One hoped for a prototype for Universal's horror cycle from the story of a stage magician (Conrad Veidt) using his illusion skills to frame a romantic rival for murder, but the picture betrayed Fejos's deep disinterest in narrative. It comes to life only when the director can play with double-exposures and dissolves or can find excuses to move his camera around the set. Whatever that film's box-office fate, Carl Laemmle Jr. remained enamored with Dr. Fejos, entrusted him with a big-budget all-talking adaptation of a landmark Broadway show, and gave him what he wanted most: a new toy. This was the "Broadway Crane," developed by Fejos and cinematographer Hal Mohr to allow the camera almost literally to take flight, gliding, swooping and diving across seemingly vast heights and distances. D.W. Griffith could have used something like it to film the Babylonian scenes of Intolerance, but Fejos and Mohr applied it to the story of a song-and-dance man desperate to get out of a lousy nightclub gig and break into vaudeville. To make room for the crane, the Paradise Club, named ironically in the play, becomes an Expressionist cathedral, more fit for the Phantom of the Opera than the gangsters and showgirls clamoring for attention here.

Fejos is always out for sensation, and the opening to Broadway is sensational. Universal built a detailed scale model of Times Square, that lit up for night scenes, for the crane (or a smaller version of it) to explore as a thunderous overture blasts out. At night, a giant strides through town, an amazing colossal Bacchus who pours a drink from a bottle and cackles insanely (though silently) as the opening credits appear.

Earlier this summer I was watching Universal's 1939 Green Hornet serial and wondering where the amazing cityscapes in the chapter recaps came from. Now I know, but now the question is: who's the uncredited behemoth having a blast below?

After the credits comes the now-typical Fejos montage with lateral dissolves and multiple exposures, and while his tricks may be familiar by now this one still dazzles, conveying the immensity and energy of the Great White Way for which the play and picture are named.

We get an early hint of the scope of the Paradise Club as its proprietor takes a little walkabout, but we also get some character development. Glenn Tryon, Fejos's male lead in Lonesome, plays Roy Lane, the hoofing headliner of the Paradise floor show who hopes for better things. Can you blame him? Every night he has to walk something like the length of a landing strip from the curtain to the edge of the stage before he can begin to sing. That has to get hard on the legs, especially when they expect you to dance, too. His first appearance on stage gives the crane its first real workout, and it is kind of awe-inspiring or, to use a synonym, awful. Everyone's "Overproduced!" alarms will go off, but to the extent that Broadway is an Expressionist film Fejos probably should get a pass.

Glenn Tryon's ambitions are laid bare, nearly, in Broadway.

Tryon and the Broadway crane get from there to here in one tracking shot.

Roy has a rival for the affections of his dance partner Billie (Merna Kennedy, Chaplin's leading lady from The Circus). The rival, Steve Crandell (Robert Ellis), wants to muscle in on the bootleg liquor racket at the Paradise. To do that, he has to eliminate Scar Edwards and throw the body, with the help of a henchman (archetypal Hollywood drunk Arthur Housman at his most stone-cold sober, ever), into a dump truck. He also has to make sure that Billie, who saw him and Housman escort a "drunk" out of the club, keeps quiet about it, especially since another showgirl, the dangerously sullen Pearl (Evelyn Brent of Sternberg's Underworld) is Scar's girlfriend. Meanwhile, a police detective (Thomas E. Jackson) finds the body and starts hanging out at the Paradise to see who'll crack or who'll squawk. Jackson played the same part on stage and brings a certain "take them...for...a...ride" authenticity to the picture.

Arthur Housman knows better, for once, not to get high on his own supply.

He knows where the bodies are buried, too.

Broadway seems like the Warner Bros. picture the studio never made, an ultimate mashup of the Warners gangster formula and the Busby Berkeley backstager. Fejos's approach can only leave you wondering what Warners would have done with this story, or regretting that they didn't get a chance. Broadway fails as a backstager and a musical because the director appears to have no interest in the musical numbers. He has this incredible device with which he could have done incredible things with the numbers like filming amid the showgirls, but whenever the girls arrive en masse, that's usually his cue to rear back to the ceiling or cut away to the detective's cat-and-mouse game with the gangsters. His crane stunts eventually become repetitive; he even repeats some numbers and films Tryon's entrances the exact same way as before. He's more interested, as he was in Last Performance, in backstage activity. Some of the best shots are of the company proceeding through several layers of curtains as they take the stage, with the camera just ahead of them and parting the curtains for them, or a group of showgirls dashing from their dressing room to get into position. As ever, movement, whether of the camera or the people it films, is an end unto itself for Fejos, but he does achieve a payoff moment of poetry with his monster crane and monster set. It comes the morning after the show and a wild party that followed. The crane starts at floor level, just inside the entrance, as scrubwomen clean the floors, and rises to its full height before panning across the club's towering balconies before descending to the stage, where janitors are sweeping up.

I'm as much a sucker for pure spectacle as anyone, but I doubt anyone can watch Broadway without questioning whether all the apparently monstrous expense was necessary, or appropriate. You'll wish that Fejos had cared more about acting and gotten either better performers or better work from the obnoxious Tryon, the glowering Brent, and the simpering Kennedy -- who, ironically enough, would later be Mrs. Busby Berkeley. As the evidence comes in, it looks increasingly like the humane sentiment of Lonesome was a happy accident or Fejos's random choice of scenario. The man had talent and even some pictorial genius, but whether through Hollywood's fault or his own, he had a hard time finding proper vehicles for his peculiar genius. After being denied the directing gig for All Quiet on the Western Front he was done with Universal and on to new adventures and several more filmmaking careers. He left behind plenty worth seeing, including plenty of Broadway, but that film is a supreme case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts. If you're a specific fan of cinematic folly and overreaching ambition, Broadway is a fascinating trainwreck that's strongly recommended.

LONESOME (1928)

 

By the end of the silent era Hollywood seemed to see no difference between artistic innovation and technical innovation. Everyone was flush with the idea that their business was a new art form. Experimentation was encouraged for the sake of prestige, on the whim of a mogul, or in the sincere hope that it might make money. An auteur like Erich von Stroheim could still get in trouble for spending too much money and using too much film, but the studios kept giving him chances based on past hits. On the same principle, King Vidor's blockbuster war picture The Big Parade earned him an opportunity to make a comparably ambitious (yet certainly cheaper) portrait of working class life, The Crowd. Fox imported F. W. Murnau from Germany on the strength of The Last Laugh and threw a ton of money into his Sunrise. Meanwhile, Josef von Sternberg impressed Charles Chaplin with his low-budget indie film Salvation Hunters and got his backing for a United Artists film. That turned out disastrously -- Chaplin burned the film -- but Sternberg soon landed at Paramount and scored a hit with Underworld. Paul Fejos got encouragement from Chaplin as well, the comedian arranging for UA to distribute the Hungarian director's Last Moment, but managed to avoid the curse of Chaplin as a producer. Instead, Fejos found a patron in "Junior" Laemmle, the son of the head of Universal. Junior was taking an active role in production at an early age and would get the studio to make All Quiet on the Western Front and its signature horror cycle after sound came in. Sound was already on its way in when Junior overrode his dad's skepticism and gave Fejos something like carte blanche to film what he liked. Like Vidor, Fejos chose a vision of everyday life as his subject. Like the others, he was out to make his as distinctive and innovative a vision as possible. The result was Lonesome.

While his subjects are ordinary people, two lonely working stiffs who encounter each other accidentally at Coney Island, fall in love, are separated by a crisis, but rediscover each other in an O. Henry finish, Fejos has no thought of approaching the material with the austerity that might have been thought appropriate later. Instead, he tackles the subject as if he were making Napoleon, and the result is the nearest thing you'll see to an Abel Gance movie made in Hollywood. Lonesome is a work of expressionistic experimentation; the idea is to try anything and see if it connects. If that means substituting cutouts for the New York City skyline, go for it. If it means attaching your camera to the front of a roller-coaster and filming the actors as they ride, go for it. If it means hand-coloring scenes for the right look of romantic fantasy, ditto. This is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink picture -- and it's less than 70 minutes long -- and the only reason the sink isn't in there is because neither of the protagonists has one in their humble flats. Experimentation converges with technological exploitation in the incorporation of three spoken dialogue scenes; Lonesome is of that bastard species, the "part-talkie," from the brief period when Hollywood was desperate to show off its new sound technology before having more than a clue of how to use it in a narrative. 1928 and 1929 were full of films with the full fluidity of late silent film, except when the camera stopped dead to record actors slowly enunciating dreadful dialogue. Instantly obsolete, many are lost today. Of the survivors, Lonesome is probably the one where the transitions seem the least awkward. Since Fejos is trying everything else, why not stick some talking sequences in? I'm not going to say they're good, but at least they don't seem wrong, as is usually the case.

Fejos may represent the ultimate synthesis of late-silent cinema, finding ways to merge montage principles and the mobile camera favored by Murnau and his imitators. The ultimate merger of the two ideals comes when he shows us his protagonists at their jobs. Instead of cutting back and forth, Fejos employs a kind of sliding dissolve, more seamless than a conventional wipe, like an old typewriter cartridge sliding back into position after you hit the Return key. It's artistic and mechanical at once, with a constant frame of a clock reinforcing the monotony of each person's work routine. Within each shot, the camera is often moving, following the characters from locker room to work station, or from machine to machine. Here Lonseome is most like its slick contemporaries I've mentioned along the way.

But once the story gets to Coney Island Fejos runs riot, chasing his actress through a crowd with a handheld camera amid a general blur of mindless activity culminating in the roller coaster ride -- with a melodramatic fire angle thrown in. Most of what he tries works. You get a sense of industrious bustle that almost belies the pleasure object of going to the park but also underscores the film's main point about loneliness amid the multitudes. The stars may as well be playing in traffic sometimes, and it makes sense that when the boy and girl finally connect, the crowd vanishes and we're briefly in hand-colored fantasyland.

 The film is a fantasy, ultimately, down to its supremely implausible twist ending. And at heart it's as corny as anything else Hollywood was cranking out, playing for pathos in the most blatant way by giving the girl a doll, won for her on the midway by the boy, to cherish, to hug tearfully when they're separated; that weeps symbolically when rain smears the cheap paint on its face, and symbolizes the girl's heartbreak by falling off her dresser back home -- the girl bumped into it accidentally -- and smashing its poor ceramic legs. All of this comes with the territory of silent Hollywood, and you either can stand it or it can't. I think Lonesome has accomplished enough in its breakneck sensory ambition that it can be forgiven the corn.

Lonesome is so far from us, and yet so near. The star is Barbara Kent, who at the time of her death last year at the immense age of 103 was probably the last surviving person who had become a Hollywood star as an adult in the silent era. She first won notice in a supporting role in Flesh and the Devil, Garbo's breakthrough picture, and she went on to be Harold Lloyd's leading lady in his first two talkies. She soon repudiated the business completely; last witness that she may have been, she reportedly refused to give interviews about her career. I'm not sure how successful she thought she had been; some of the contemporary reviews of Lonesome are scathing toward her. But Lonesome is the sort of picture that should make actors critic-proof. By framing her character as an utterly ordinary, non-glamorous person, any perceived awkwardness or lack of brilliance on her part only authenticates her more. I think she's a little better than that, though, and when it counts she puts over the corn and the pathos probably as well as anyone could. I don't know what her last decades were like, but the thought of the centenarian being coaxed into recording her memories of the picture for a new century on the just-released Criterion DVD is too tantalizing not to regret the lost possibility.

Barbara Kent (1907-2011)

The DVD also contains two films Fejos made for Universal in 1929: the silent thriller The Last Performance with Conrad Veidt and the musical Broadway, for which the polymath director helped design an innovative and gigantic camera crane to make immensely swooping camera movements possible. Reviews of those films are coming soon to this blog.