1910: FRANKENSTEIN

Director:  J. Searle Dawley
Starring:  Augustus Phillips
Length:  12:40 minutes

   This is J. Searle Dawley’s “Frankenstein”, the first film adaptation of the Shelley novel ever made.  For some reason, it seems commonplace to refer to this movie as Thomas Edison’s version of Frankenstein, since it was his company Edison Studios that financed it... but Edison Studios also financed “The Great Train Robbery” and “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend”—how come nobody ever talks about “Edison’s Great Train Robbery”?  ‘Tis a mystery!

   The film was considered lost until a copy was found in the 70’s, and that copy must have been quite badly damaged because this is the most deteriorated movie I’ve watched since “Fred Ott’s Sneeze”.  Half of the scenes have that sickening piss color that only old worn-out silent films can be, and one sequence is blue.  I have no idea what kind of damage has to be done to a film reel to turn it blue—what did they dump it in drain cleaner or something?  Better to have the movie beaten and blue, than to not have it at all, though.  Now they just need to find a copy the lost 1913 film "The Werewolf".

   “Frankenstein” is, as its opening title card says, a “liberal adaptation from Mrs. Shelley’s famous story”.  I wouldn’t know the difference, since I’ve never read the novel, and no two film versions of Frankenstein are ever all that similar to each other... (my favorite is the Hallmark one made in 2004).  Frankenstein goes to college, does his famous experiment where he creates a monster, and afterward tries to court and marry his sweetheart while the creature endlessly pursues him.  The monster also pines after Frankenstein’s darling, and when he first sees in a mirror how hideous he is, he despairs, and then uhh... disappears.  He simply vanishes into a mirror, "overcome by love".  Is that part from the book?

   This version of "Frankenstein" does away with the whole element of exhuming corpses to harvest their organs—doubtful that that would've gotten past the censors.  Here, Frankenstein creates the monster by putting the secret ingredients into a cauldron and then cooking them in an oven.  There’s an interesting special effect, of the monster slowly taking shape inside the oven, that was made by filming a dummy being burnt down and then playing it in reverse.  Honestly, the imagery looks pretty gruesome for 1910;  it reminds me of the famous face-melting scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark".

   In the early scenes, after the monster is first made, there are some shots that I could easily see scaring an audience back in the day:  when the monster is first revealed, all we see is his creeping hand reaching out from inside the oven, grasping towards Dr. Frankenstein—well, the title cards say he creates the monster after two years of college, so I don’t suppose he’s a doctor yet in this version.  When the full monster is first seen, he appears suddenly behind Victor Frankenstein, in all that funky monster makeup.  Later, however, the movie enters into comedy... a decision I don’t get at all.  Maybe they didn’t want to scare the primitive moviegoers too much.

1909: A CORNER IN WHEAT

Director:  D.W. Griffith
Length:  13:50 minutes

   “A Corner in Wheat” is the first real “serious” film discussed so far on this blog, dealing with the effects of monopolies and magnates during the Progressive period.  “Serious”, yes, but owing to its length (and to hindsight) it is still a bit simplistic.  The story is like something I might have read in middle school for an assignment.  Still, even if I prefer a movie about submarines and flying beds, there’s something to be said for taking a more sober approach to filmmaking.

   The director of this was D.W. Griffith, a newcomer who probably made few if any movies after this, didn’t significantly impact the film industry, was soon forgotten, and definitely never made a 3-hour epic film lionizing the Ku Klux Klan.  Of course that’s all assumption and speculation on my part—I don’t have time to research the filmographies of each and every director on my list—and if it turns out I’m mistaken on any of those points, I’ll be sure to get back to you.

   “A Corner in Wheat” begins with a poor wheat farmer somewhere in Iowa or Nebraska or shit I dunno, making the rounds on his field sowing the seeds for next season’s crop.  It then cuts to a scene of a wealthy fatcat, and it’s here that I see my very first intertitle!  I was wondering when they were going to show up.  The intertitle introduces the fatcat as “The Wheat King”, who sends his cronies to “The Wheat Pit” (the stock exchange) to buy up all the stocks of grain.

   Having cornered the world’s market, he doubles the price of flour, which means the poor folks can’t afford bread.  But karma eventually catches up to him, and the Wheat King slips and falls into a literal wheat pit and is drowned by the avalanche of wheat.  Oh man, the symbolism.  By the way, I don’t know how many of my dear readers have spent much time around grain elevators, but take my word for it—it’s one of the most unpleasant ways I can think of to die.

   The story is pretty simple and the theme is not very riveting, at least for people of my generation who didn’t grow up during the Cold War and so weren’t taught that anything less than absolute unregulated tyconic hypercapitalism inevitably leads to socialism which leads to slavery and/or atheism.  Nevertheless, Griffith does some interesting things here, such as giving the fatcat and the stock exchange these pretentious wheat-based titles despite neither of them having anything to do with wheat... but that is probably taken from the book this movie’s based on, now that I think about it.

1908: FANTASMAGORIE

Director:  Émile Cohl
Length:  1:20 minute

   This is “Fantasmagorie”, and it is barely over a minute long—the shortest movie I’m watching for my 101 Movies project (though, of course, many of the pictures I watched for my post on nineteenth-century films were this short or much shorter).  I realize it might seem like cheating, watching a movie that’s barely long enough to be a movie, but this one is special.  Why?  Because it’s the first animated film... kinda.  I say kinda, because I ran across many other hand-drawn movies when researching earlier years.  Those apparently don’t count.  According to my reference book on the history of movies,

"Until then animation had been nothing more than bits, tricks, and pencil drawings jumping about.  Fantasmagorie elevated the whole medium, showcasing its storytelling possibilities." - Alex Ben Block

   It’s funny that he would say that, because “pencil drawings jumping about” is almost exactly what this movie is.  "Fantasmagorie" was designed based on an artistic style called the Incoherent movement, which is an apt description.  I’m not even going to bother explaining what this movie is about—that would be impossible.  Stick figures leap about and transform into this or that with all the impatient energy of a four-year-old high on sugar.  And crack.  The only brief section that even vaguely “showcases” any “storytelling possibilities” is a bit where the main character goes to the theater to watch a play (or a film, which might make this the first movie to portray a character watching a movie), and is frustrated by the woman sitting in the row in front of him wearing an outrageously-sized headdress.  The rest of the movie is extremely difficult to follow and even harder to describe.  If you’re that curious, you can watch it yourself—it's only a minute long, after all.

   Despite its incoherent non-narrative style and extreme brevity, though, I wouldn’t consider “Fantasmagorie” to be a move backward, as I might “Baby’s Toilet”, or even “Fire!”.  The reason is that those choices were intentional.  This movie resembles the proto-films of the 1890s, but that is because of a deliberate style—Émile Cohl made this movie simplistic and nonsensical because he wanted to.  In fact, aside from Méliès, he is the only filmmaker so far featured on this blog who I would say has a distinct, identifiable style.

   Also, you can’t really compare the length of this movie along the same scale as you would live-action films.  Émile Cohl himself drew each of the 700 frames of “Fantasmagorie”, using an illuminated glass plate to align each frame with the one before it.  The process took four months, which was a long time for a movie to be made in 1908.  During that year alone, James Williamson made 14 movies, Edwin Porter made 46, and Georges Méliès made 61.  So comparatively speaking, this movie might as well be forty-two minutes long.

1907: LAUGHING GAS

Director:  Edwin S. Porter
Starring:  Bertha Regustus
Length:  8:26 minutes

   Today I’m looking at another film by Edwin S. Porter, this one called “Laughing Gas” and HOLY SHIT it actually stars a real life black person!  That was pretty damn impressive for its day, especially considering some of the movies I’ll be watching in the next couple weeks.  Sure, there had been previous films starring black actors (ahem ahem...), but for a movie in 1907 to feature a black actress in an, uhh... normal... role must have made a few monocles hit the floor.

   Unfortunately that’s about the only impressive thing about this movie.  The plot of “Laughing Gas” is so simple as to be almost nonexistent, and now that I’ve moved out of the “Oh my god did that photo just move?!” era I no longer feel bad saying that.  The film opens with the protagonist visiting the dentist’s office on account of a toothache.  The dentists put her under and pull the tooth, but they give her too much nitrous, because she spends the rest of the day stumbling around laughing like an idiot.  And everywhere she goes, her laughter proves contagious.  And boy did somebody think that was hilarious...

   First it’s the subway, where she makes the passengers enter fits of laughter.  Then she bumps into the milkman, making him laugh so hard that he drop his bottles of milk.  The bobbies show up and they start laughing too.  Then the lady and the milkman are brought before a judge, who starts laughing.  Then... you get the idea. 

   I had originally wanted to watch Georges Méliès’ “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” for today, but I couldn’t find the full version on Youtube.  That’s very disappointing, because a movie by the famous filmagician of France would have certainly been preferable to this.  “Laughing Gas” beats its one and only joke to death longer than Seth MacFarlane performing to a laugh track on loop.  Oh well.  Next week I start getting into the feature-length pictures, which hopefully have a bit more thought put into them.

1906: DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND

Director:  Edwin S. Porter
Starring:  Jack Brawn
Length:  5:20 minutes

    

   Ha ha, I was not expecting this one.  I figured that I should have more than one Edwin S. Porter movie on my list, since he’s hailed as such an important early filmmaker, but after the borefest that was “The Great Train Robbery”, I wasn’t expecting very much that would entertain from “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend”.  Even the title sounds dull and opaque:  the hell is a rarebit?  How does one become a fiend thereof?  This movie’s probably going to suck!, proclaimed I in my ignorance.

   Instead, what I got was a psychedelic nightmare ride with some hilarious imagery and interesting special effects.  “Dream” opens with the unnamed protagonist, at a diner, gorging himself on rarebit and beer.  Rarebit, by the way, is apparently the name of a Welsh dish made from cheese and toast (and zero rabbit).  Thoroughly wasted and stuffed, the protagonist staggers home in what is actually a pretty interesting scene.  There are two shots overlaid on each other—one is a POV shot of the camera reeling around tipsily, the other is of the drunk desperately clinging onto a street lamp post which in his disorientation seems to swing to and fro like a massive pendulum:

   Once home, he goes to bed, but his ordeal doesn’t end there.  He has a delirious nightmare in which little imps crawl out of a pot like the one he was eating out of, and prods his throbbing head with tiny pitchforks.  Then, his bed starts jumping around like an enraged bull, and leaps out of the window with the man clinging for dear life.  The shot is, I would guess, done with stop-motion, and the effect is pulled off well.  I was not expecting it, and it made me laugh.  The bed flies through the night sky over the city, as the man pilots it as though it were a motorcar (or one of those newfangled flying aero-mobiles).

   The dream ends with the man crashing through the roof of his house and landing back in bed, where he wakes to find his room as he left it:  no hole in the ceiling, no shattered window, and absolutely zero pieces of furniture possessed by Satan.

   “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend” is based on a series of comic strips which all have the same plot:  a man eats too much rarebit, has a dream where craaaazy stuff happens, and wakes up, regretting haven eaten so much rarebit.  However, the film version makes it pretty clear that it was the copious amounts of alcohol—not the rarebit—that was the cause of the protagonist’s disorientation and delirium.  I’m not even sure how just eating rarebit would give you nightmares anyway—it’s just cheese and toast.  If any of you have ever eaten Welsh rarebit, and know it to have psychotropic properties, then please do tell me.

1905: RESCUED BY ROVER

Director:  Cecil Hepworth
Starring:  Blair
Length:  6:25 minutes

   1905 wasn’t a great year for movies.  I wasn’t able to find very many options for what to watch:  there was the Macedonian film “The Weavers” which, despite being the first example of Balkan filmmaking and allegedly featuring a 114-year old woman, was unavailable.  There was also “Esmeralda”, a French adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which might have been a fine choice.  However, I had already decided not to watch more than one movie based on the same thing for this project, and—spoilers—there’s another Hunchback adaptation I’m planning on seeing.  (More spoilers:  there’s also one instance where I’m planning to break that rule.)

   That just left the films of Cecil Hepworth, a British filmmaker who made at least two movies in 1905, according to Wikipedia.  One of them, “Baby’s Toilet”, was a three-minute film showing his infant daughter Elizabeth being given a bath.  That is pretty weaksauce—an in situ domestic scene like that might have been impressive in 1895, but this was ten years later.  Hepworth had been making movies since 1896, too, so I suppose he was just a slow learner.

   Fortunately, there’s a bit more going on in “Rescued by Rover”, his first real effort in fictional narrative.  “Rover” is about a wealthy, upper-class woman who has her infant daughter (in a returning role by Elizabeth Hepworth) kidnapped by an poor old beggar lady...  and before you get too judgmental, remember this was the post-Gilded Age, when a movie camera still cost as much as a cruise liner, and the mere thought of a wretched, lower-class untermensch getting her claws on a poor innocent babe caused your typical moviegoer to shriek in horror.

   So the kid's rich bitch—err, I mean “job creator” mother runs home and laments the kidnapping to her sister.  But luckily, the faithful family dog Rover is there to help, and runs off to find little baby Liz.  And this is where the movie gets adorable ^_^!  Rover runs all about town searching for the infant, to the assuredly-constant words of encouragement coming from the audience:  “Go get her, boy!  Go get her!  Good dog!...  Find the baby! Good dog!...”

   Rover finds the kidnapping hag in an old, run-down shantyhouse—the just rewards of her indolence, no doubt!—where she’s been keeping the baby in horrid conditions ill-befitting the child’s blue blood.  It (the dog) runs back to get reinforcements, who retrieve little baby Elizabeth and return her to the safety of her aristocratic acropolis.

   “Rescued by Rover” was the world’s first dog movie, so you owe it a great debt of gratitude if you’re a fan of “Lassie”, “Old Yeller”, “Turner & Hooch”, “Beethoven”, “Wishbone”, “Air Bud”, “Beethoven’s 2nd”, “Cop Dog”, “Air Bud: Golden Receiver”, “Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey”, “Beethoven’s 3rd”, “Karate Dog”, “Air Bud: World Pup”, “Beethoven’s 4th”, “Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch”, the “Homeward Bound” remake, “Beethoven’s Big Break”, “Hotel For Dogs”, “Air Bud: Spikes Back”, “Snow Dogs”, “Beethoven’s Christmas Adventure”, “Air Buddies”, “The Dog Who Saved Christmas”, “Snow Buddies”, “Space Buddies”, or that one made-for-tv movie where Kirk Cameron and a dog exchange bodies.

   One last interesting note:  apparently this movie is responsible for the name “Rover” becoming commonplace as a dog’s name.  Before then, naming dogs “Rover” wasn’t really a Thing.  So there’s that.

1904: THE IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE

Director:  Georges Méliès
Length:  20 minutes

 

   This movie begins with an eccentric gentleman, played by director Georges Méliès, who convinces a room full of stuffy society types to join him on an improbable-sounding journey in an untested experimental vehic—wait, this is sounding familiar.  They don’t go into space in this one too, do they?  They do!?  Oh, goddammit!

   But I kid.  This is “Impossible Voyage”, Méliès’ spiritual successor to “Trip to the Moon”, based on the play of the same name by Jules Verne, and though it borrows heavily from his previous film, it’s not a rehash.  The movie opens with the aforementioned stuffy society types taking a tour of the special locomotive factory, before embarking on their journey.  The first leg of their voyage is not so impossible:  a standard train ride to Switzerland.  But after this they travel into space, flying into the mouth of the sun in a shot taken directly from “Trip”.  It’s okay, though, because they brought along a giant freezer to keep them cool!  After escaping the sun, they end up swimming a submarine through the ocean, watching jellyfish swim by, until a fire in the engine room explodes the vessel out of the sea and back to terra firma.  Along the way they manage to crash at least one vehicle on every single leg of their journey.  Again: must be a French thing.

   This movie is my favorite so far.  I love the set design—the environments are complex, colorful, and multilayered.  I believe they used painted wooden image at different depths, like a giant diorama, but it’s so seamless that it looks more like a live-action/animation hybrid, with characters even interacting with the painted images.  And the sets are not just intricate but dynamic, with rotating pistons on furnaces, steam erupting from moving locomotives in the background while characters act in the foreground, and real water flowing over a waterfall while above it a miniature train travels across a model bridge.

   I could probably write several paragraphs about how almost each and every shot has so much going on in it.  The child in me, who used to love building things with Legos and K’Nex, really wishes he could have taken part in making this movie.  The scenes are so fun to watch that it doesn’t matter at all that this movie's so similar to “Trip to the Moon”, nor that Méliès shows few signs of having borrowed from Porter’s more advanced narrative technique.  I’m gonna miss him after I don’t have any more Georges Méliès movies to watch.