O Absalom, my Absalom!

The trip to Camille at the Silent Film Festival was such a big success that I returned to the Castro Theater a week later, this time for a different silent film at a different festival: His People from 1925, presented by the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival with a live jazz sextet performing Paul Shapiro’s rousing and effective new score (I read an interview beforehand in the Chronicle in which the writer didn’t seem to understand that “silent” films were always accompanied by music – I thought everyone knew this, or is that just one of the many erroneous assumptions I make about what I consider general knowledge?). Somewhat surprisingly the audience was even more receptive and open to silent film style than the Silent Film Festival audience had been. You never can be sure how people will approach silent movies. In those sad days long-ago before DVDs, and even before VHS, I finally had a chance to see a movie I’d wanted to see for years, Griffith’s Way Down East (Gish on the ice flow!) but I went in with some trepidation since it was showing at the Harvard Center for the Visual Arts and I was figuring the likely viewers would consider themselves too sophisticated (see my previous entry for my opinion of sophistication in audiences) for what is basically a creaky melodrama. On the contrary, they were ideal. When the man who done her wrong suggests to Gish that she might want to move out of the neighborhood, she gives him an cold look and (via the intertitle) suggests that perhaps he should get out of town, and the audience erupted in cheers. Even the bumpkin comedy was warmly received. You should never underestimate the power of even the most ancient theatrical tricks. His People is somewhat similar to Way Down East in that it is also a melodrama, this time about the Cominskeys, a family of immigrant Jews in New York City, and in beloved Biblical and folkloric style there is a good son and a bad son. The elder boy Morris becomes a lawyer (he’s bookish, so the father favors him) and then tells his wealthy girlfriend’s family that he’s an orphan because he’s ashamed of his Old Country parents, a pose he maintains even when his sick father shows up at the fiancée’s house. The younger boy, streetwise Sammy, is a stand-up guy who provides the money for his brother’s school and his father’s medical bills by boxing professionally. When his father finds out that “Kid Rooney” is not some Irish brawler but his younger son, he is so shamed at his “box fighting” that he throws him out of the tenement. Nonetheless Sammy, his mother’s favorite, continues to support his parents and even stands in for Morris when he refuses to come to what might be his father’s death bed, like Jacob over Esau only motivated by love rather than trickery. Eventually Sammy drags Morris back home and forces him to apologize, to the cheers of the audience, which was so into the action that they even were harsh towards the fiancée, who actually has no knowledge of the deception and is portrayed sympathetically, with some hints that she’s getting a little old not to be married. The plot machinery of melodrama does its business but it’s always the actors who lift it up and make it memorable. In this case Sammy was particularly charming and appealing, managing to withstand even the constant smiling required of early leading men. He’s played by George Lewis, and after seeing this film I was surprised he didn’t become a better known star, but a quick trip to IMDB reveals that he was actually born in Mexico, so perhaps like Novarro he had an accent that handicapped him in Hollywood once sound came in. That might explain why most of his later credits are Zorro-related. But who knows the vagaries that fall on any career, let alone an actor’s. Best of all was Rudolph Schildkraut as the father; one of the film’s subtler touches was the speed with which he forgives his favorite Morris and the great unctuous condescension with which he lets generous-hearted Sammy back into the family. Some of the Festival publicity materials seemed surprised that the boxer was the good kid, but boxer over lawyer is not too unusual in a populist medium. I wish they had given us more background on the movie (there’s not a whole lot on IMDB either) –some of it, especially the opening scene among street peddlers, looked as if it was actually filmed on the Lower East Side, and the film was definitely made for a Jewish audience and assumed familiarity with Sabbath candle-lighting and other rituals, which made it strange that one intertitle helpfully explained that “ ‘Shabas’ is the Jewish word for Sabbath” which got a big laugh from the audience, which already knew. There is one Irish family in the neighborhood; the father doesn’t seem to be around and the mother is of course a big, good-natured washerwoman who frequently stands with her arms akimbo. She has a daughter named Mary (again of course), and one peddler informs us early on that “she’s so sweet you wouldn’t know she was an Irisher!” She and Sammy the boxer are in love, but there’s no Abie’s Irish Rose angle. There’s a charming melting pot moment when the Irish mother sends Mary over to the Cominsky place to find out how to prepare gefilte fish, since Father O’Malley is showing up for dinner on Friday (speaking of familiar rituals, this was back in “fish on Friday” times). The Jewish Film Festival featured Jewish boxers this year, and once there were many of them (read all about it in Allen Bodner’s When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport), but that was back when boxing was more mainstream and immigrant Jews weren’t. Like Sammy, some of them fought under Irish pseudonyms, though that seems like a lateral move for the time. In these days when athletic garb is street apparel it’s strange to see the fighters train by running through the snow in suits and dress shoes, though in the gym they wear trunks and tanks and the boxing moves are the same. I was hoping for a few more boxing scenes, but that’s not really the focus of the movie except for the big battle at the end (with very effective tympani accompaniment). Unfortunately the director shot the big fight with a faster camera speed to hop up the action, just the way TV shows today think people walking into a house or out to the car will be more exciting if it happens at high speed with rock soundtrack added, though regular boxing should be exciting enough. None of these tricks are new; I remember hearing about the MTV quick cuts back in the 80s and thinking, “What’s the big deal? Hasn’t everybody already seen all that in the films of Abel Gance?”