Stills

The Oyster Princess (1919)

Fante-Anne (1920)

The White Heather (1919)

The Bat (1926)

Saxophone Susy (1928)

Song (1928)

Recently-seen silent films, three from HippFest at Home, two from HippFest in person (captures from YouTube, which is sadly lacking the very picturesque Mountain of Destiny), and one from Matthew Jarron’s ‘Germany to Hollywood’ evening class (his course on Ealing Studios is booking now).

The Oyster Princess instantly became one of my favourite films, for its ultra-vivid design and uniquely rollicking German humour. There’s a fair amount of the latter in Saxophone Susy too: the setting is London, the production is not. The programme mentions ‘Weimar Slapstick’, which sounds like the ideal genre to me.

I watched The Bat, a proto-Batman tale full of (effective) suspenseful nonsense, not really expecting to find any connection to Citizen Kane, with whom it shares cinematographer Gregg Toland. There definitely is, though, in the diffused lighting and chiaroscuro, the tall sets, and, here, a view through a skylight which prefigures the crane shot which brings us to a washed-up Susan Alexander right at the start.

The shot from The White Heather is part of an underwater sequence that is the film’s main draw. The plot certainly isn’t: the two fighting divers (you’ll see them if you let your eyes adjust) are trying to retrieve / destroy a marriage certificate from a wrecked yacht on which hangs, on the one hand, the honour and future of a woman and her son, and, on the other, the solvency of her dastardly, denying husband.

If that all sounds a bit silly, Fante-Anne and Song are altogether more moving tales of jealousy; a poster of the main character’s rival in the latter is used imaginatively for a flashback, and, in the shot here, is destroyed in a fit of rage.

Stills

Mickey 17 (2025)

The Apartment (1960)

Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

Bacarau (2019)

The Piano Accident (2025)

Stills

Moving (1993)

Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (1976)

Days of the Bagnold Summer (2019)

The Lunchbox (2013)

House by the River (1950)

Winter in Sokcho (2024)

Had a few of these to catch up with. I'll let the images speak for themselves, except to say I like the echo between 'House by the River' this time and 'The Pleasure Garden' last time.

Aperitif

Stills

Tokyo GA (1985)

The Lady and the Beard (1931)

Pavements (2024)

Bad Seed (1934)

The Pleasure Garden (1925)

First films as directors in this lot by Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, the former’s The Pleasure Garden slightly pre-figuring the great The Wind (1928) in the pictured scene where guilt and terror spill over into a superimposed, ghostly image. It’s effective but not really the focus here. Wilder’s Bad Seed recalls the great People on Sunday (1930), for which he wrote the screenplay, in a scene towards the middle in which the gang of car thieves take the afternoon off to go for a swim. The spoilt rich kid of the title is driven to crime when his father sells his car right before he needs it to impress a woman on a date. It’s daft, funny and sometimes tragic, with such an energy. Wikipedia has a quote which might explain why:

We didn't use a soundstage. Most of the interiors were shot in a converted auto shop, even the living room set, and we did the automobile chases without transparencies, live, on the streets. It was exhausting. The camera was mounted on the back of a truck or in a car. We were constantly improvising . . . We were doing nouvelle vague a quarter of a century before they invented a fancy name for it.

Meanwhile, The Lady and the Beard is a hoot, based largely around the fact that beards were scarce in Japan, and (apparently) hilarious to eligible young ladies and prospective employers alike. Abraham Lincoln is the inspiration for it, but our hero has to shave it off in order to get a job in a restaurant. Not before it gets tittered at an awful lot, though. I’d been looking for an alternative way in to Yasujirō Ozu before making my way back to the later films, and this turned out to be a great place to start. Tokyo GA is pleasingly miscellaneous, being partly a search for Ozu’s Tokyo twenty years after his death: it features a touching, illuminating interview with the cameraman who shot most of his films, and a visit to his grave. But it also has many scenes which have nothing to do with him, such as this one, where young people gather in a park one drizzly day to dance to Blondie’s ‘Call Me’ and other western tunes.