J.D. Hansel

1931

Dracula (1931) Review

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This is a fun one, folks.  Scary?  On occasion, but it’s mostly just bizarre.  It’s just strange watching one of the first sound horror films because it’s difficult to tell how I’m supposed to react to each scene – I don’t know what’s supposed to be chilling, what’s supposed to be funny, and what’s supposed to be somewhere in between.  I think most of the film is meant to be in the middle – it knows not to take itself too seriously seeing as how it is about Count Dracula, after all.  If it were remade today, it would have to either be completely changed into an entirely different (and probably greatly inferior) thriller, or it would have to be a comedy, because too much of it is just plain silly.

The film’s plot is a little hard to follow at times, and by the end of it I’m left with more questions than answers.  How does his hypnotism work?  Shouldn’t his life be a breeze if he can just hypnotize people into doing whatever he wants?  How does he always manage to stay away from mirrors?  Does he ask how many mirrors there are in any location he plans to enter before his arrival?  And since when can vampires turn into wolves?  Most importantly, how is turning into a bat helpful when you’re pulling a carriage?

But hey, I had a good time – at least when I followed along and when I wasn’t bored – so who am I to complain?  Besides, who doesn’t love Bela Lugosi?  THAT is a fun performance to watch.  The smartest move on the part of the filmmakers was making the movie short, and most other horror films from the time followed suit, making them very easy watches that can easily be squeezed into the schedule of even the busiest movie buff.  This leaves me very interested in watching more of the classic Universal Monster films, if only because the visual style helped establish Hollywood Expressionism, so naturally I find it visually enthralling.

Animal Crackers Review

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UPDATE 2017-03-01: I wrote that this was the first Marx Brothers film, but it was not.  Excluding Humor Risk – a silent film that was previewed but never released and is now lost – their first film was The Cocoanuts.

The films of the Marx Brothers are generally divided into about three different eras, and this film, being their first, obviously belongs to the first era.  This was the time when they were essentially just taking their stage plays that had done well on Broadway and putting a camera in front of them.  Consequently, most of Animal Crackers really doesn’t feel like much more than a standard comedy play about an unlikely mix-up – one that could be performed at any high school – and now it has been badly filmed with poor editing and the sound quality one would expect from a studio that had just made its very first sound film a few months prior.  The one thing that keeps this film from feeling too much like the above description is the fact that a few of the characters are played by the Marx Brothers, which changes everything.  While it is apparent that the brothers haven’t quite hit their stride yet, their characters are already reasonably well-defined here, or at last as defined as they would ever be (I’m looking at you, Zeppo).  When the boys are allowed to simply be funny, they generally succeed in this film, but much of the movie drags on and focuses too much on plotlines that Marx Bros. fans don’t really care about.  Not all of the jokes are funny, as Groucho admirably admits to the audience, and the random musical numbers are awkward, slow, and forgettable, but over all, it’s still a pretty fun movie that I would gladly watch again.

Girls in Uniform (1931) Review

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Mädchen in Uniform is a 1931 sound film about a girl in a boarding school who finds herself falling in love with one of the women who teaches there (see image below).  This film is highly dramatic, and puts the audience in her shoes as she suffers greatly at the boarding school and (minor spoiler warning) considers committing suicide.  It has an all-female cast and a female director, and it’s based on a play by Christa Winsloe.  Needless to say, this is not a Hollywood movie – it comes from Germany – but it was highly successful internationally.  In part because of the time period in which it debuted, it is considered to be an anti-Nazi film, even though Nazis are (to my memory) never seen nor mentioned.  Welcome to European cinema.

What we have here is a film that is doing a lot of things at once.  On the one hand, it shows what girls are like at their most normal and ordinary through its exceptional realism, while at the same time presenting us with girls who are quite strongly attracted to other females and thus represent a distinct minority of the population.  It relies on elements of German Expressionism in some scenes, particularly in its lighting, but most of it has the style of the New Objectivity movement, which was oppositional to the aforementioned movement.  It is a very personal story about the problems that come with a strict, unfeeling manner of bringing up children that lacks compassion and understanding, yet it can also work as an allegory for the issue of overly strict authoritarian governments.  To me, it is the personal story of living in a strict school that gives the film so much power over me, if only because I’m still rather resentful about the arguably overbearing schooling I received, and the perfect blend of realism and theatricality sells it brilliantly.  I do think that most of the first half of the movie is rather boring, but by the climax, it gets my blood boiling in just the right way – a way so few stories since Carrie have been able to do – and for that I appreciate it greatly.

City Lights Review

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It’s often said that “film is a visual medium,” and I’m starting to think that, if cinema were a religion, this would be its most holy of dogmas.  One of the marks of someone who’s trying to create the sense that he/she is an expert on film is an insistence that the most impressive and most pure filmmaking is that which focuses on visual storytelling.  The trailer for STAR WARS: The Old Republic was immediately hailed as an excellent short film upon its release both on the web and at my college because it told a story using hardly any dialogue.  Surely the success of films from companies like PIXAR that like to show off their ability to tell stories this way (think of the first twenty minutes of UP) tells us that film is indeed a visual medium and that its storytelling must be primarily visual, right?

No.  This idea is a load of elitist bull-crap that should have died with Epstein.  My evidence for this is obvious: no one today wants to watch silent films.  No one.  I know because I spent my autumn semester at the University of Maryland sitting in a classroom filled with film students taking a course on silent cinema, and they skipped whichever films they could, trying to watch as few as possible.  These are the film majors – the next generation of movie critics, movie-makers, and movie-lovers – and they did not have the patience for any silent films longer than fifteen minutes.  On the other hand, the film that does get a positive reaction – and is even shown to non-film students in classes in other departments from what I hear – is Modern Times.

Modern Times works well because, in spite of the fact that it has hardly any spoken dialogue, Chaplin had complete control over the soundtrack, and the same is true for City Lights.  While storytelling without dialogue is often very impressive, it’s not the same as visual storytelling so long as it incorporates a soundtrack that’s controlled by the filmmakers.  Ever since Eisenstein first wrote about vertical montage, filmmakers and film critics should have accepted that sight and sound work together in film to create the cinematic experience, playing off of each other even in the presence of dialogue, constantly changing each other’s meaning, value, and power.  I think Chaplin understood this, and this understanding makes City Lights far better than any silent film I’ve ever seen.  Actually, I think some of the film’s strongest jokes are the ones built around audio, such as the part when the Tramp swallows the whistle or the opening scene that casts kazoos as the voices of the churlish officials and aristocrats – each of which I have seen imitated in one form or another in later comedy productions (The Three Stooges and the Charlie Brown specials, respectively).

I think this film is just barely better than Modern Times, although I think I should have given that film I higher rating than I did now that I’ve seen it twice and appreciate it more, if only because City Lights has a stronger plot.  Modern Times has a very loose narrative structure, as if Chaplin wrote the screenplay saying, “And now we’re going over here to do this gag, and now we’re going over there to do that routine.”  With City Lights, there’s a bit more focus on two main storylines, and the film’s primary weakness is the separation of these two plotlines, almost making me wonder why this is one feature-length film instead of two different short films.  Still, they’re tied together just enough that the story is engaging and entertaining, even if it is a little bit too dramatic and depressing at times given how much suffering our beloved Tramp endures.  It’s worth noting that each of these two storylines is based on a brilliant idea, the first being a man who’s the Tramp’s best friend when drunk but a stranger to him when sober, and the second – the one that’s so intelligently stupid it seems like it must have come from the Monty Python troupe – a blind girl falls in love with a silent comic.  In the end, with its heartwarming charm, captivating romance, clever comedy, unique potpourri of cities, smart use of sound effects, and enthralling musical score, City Lights is one of the greatest displays of Chaplin’s genius as a cinematic craftsman.