As the Castro Theater is still closed for renovations, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival took place this year at the Orinda Theater. This is a much better choice than last year's location, the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, which is fine if a bit generic inside as a venue but too difficult to reach via public transportation & too isolated: the Festival tried to make up for that with some food trucks, but in general it was an uphill battle out there. I ended up not seeing many films (in fact, only one) because anything that was first or last on the schedule just didn't work out transit-time-wise for me. The Orinda Theater, by contrast, is easily accessible via BART (& has plenty of parking, if that's your thing) & surrounded by all kinds of restaurants (even more so than the Castro Theater, actually), as well as being large &, as an Art Deco exemplar, close to period appropriate. Even so, I only made it to a few programs this year, for a number of reasons (none having to do with the quality of the films),. This is what I saw:
The Wreck of the Hesperus
1927; directed by Elmer Clifton
This recently rediscovered & restored film is based on a poem by Longfellow about young lovers separated by her father, a ship's captain who bears a romantic grudge against the young man's uncle, but that drama is topped by the final storm at sea & the wreck of the captain's vessel. It's quite beautiful to look at & very well cast. I was particularly impressed with Ethel Wales as the captain's sister, assigned by him with looking after his stubbornly lovelorn daughter; it's a very small role, but you immediately see that she is not the sort of moony spinster who is going to sympathize with young love. Nor is she a dragon guarding the treasure, or a fussy old maid; she's just a sort of fretful & annoyed person who seems to wish everyone would just behave, or at least leave her alone, though she does of course her duty.
The film was intended as a step towards stardom for the young romantic leads, Virginia Bradford & Frank Marion, though, according to the SFSFF's always richly detailed (& free!) program book, neither one took off with the public. I found this quite surprising, as both are very appealing. She is, not surprisingly, a beauty, with long dark curls & a demeanor earthy enough to make her convincing as the daughter of a flinty New England sea captain but with a touch enough of the fey so that she seems a bit out of the ordinary. He, too, is a curly-haired beauty, & as the movie was illustrated in both brochure & program book with a dreamy close-up of him, I'm apparently not the only one who thought so. The close-up comes from his first scene, when he is found adrift on the sea, the only survivor of a shipwreck (not the one of the title); once he recovers, we find that he has an engaging presence & a killer smile, so once again I am left befuddled by the taste or lack of it of the American public.
The storm & shipwreck scenes are quite spectacular, & though you can try to parse which shots are done with models, which with sets, & which with who knows what, it's all cut together seamlessly & with verve, so that you get caught up in the events rather than the technique, & it's all so much more convincing & more beautiful to look at than the computer-generated fakery, with its false pixel sheen, that we get these days. Our young hero, in a stylish & visually helpful ruffled white shirt (which helps him stand out against the dark lashing waves, the ruffles echoing both the waves & his curls) rushes towards the sinking ship to save his beloved, who is tied to the mast. It's an exciting & satisfying film. It was new to me (I'd never even heard of it), so I was very glad to have seen it. If it's ever released, I'd buy a copy.
KoKo!
a series of Fleischer Cartoons: Jumping Beans (1922), It's the Cats (1926), KoKo at the Circus (1926), KoKo in 1999 (1927), KoKo's Kane (1927), KoKo's Klock (1927), KoKo's Kink (1928), KoKo's Earth Control (1928)
The early Fleischer Brother cartoons are always delights of homegrown surrealism. This batch, only a few of which I'd seen before, features KoKo, the Out of the Inkwell clown maybe best remembered now as an occasional sidekick of the inimitable Betty Boop, a star of later Fleischer cartoons. It's nice to see him in his early days as a headliner. I read somewhere long ago that the Fleischer Brothers used to say, "If it could really happen, it's not animation" & that's a guiding principle here, as what's going on up on the screen stretches & shapes & contorts & changes from scene to scene, hung on the thinnest of storylines. That's a good thing. I also love the strongly blocked black-against-white designs of the cartoons. I'm going to continue my above dismissal of contemporary computer-generated films by contrasting these evergreen shorts with today's animation, most of which seems to be filmed on location in the Uncanny Valley. I'm not a big fan of the Pixar films (the only one I've really loved is Luca, about the boys who are sea serpents, though in fairness I will also admit I have not seen a lot of the more highly regarded Pixar films), & a lot of that is their look: they labor to make things look "realistic", but if it's that important to you to get hair so accurate you'd think it's real, why not just film real hair? Anyway this was a delightful set.
Song
1928; directed by Richard Eichberg
In a complete change of mood & aesthetic, the KoKo shorts were followed by Song (original title: Die Liebe eines armen Menschenkindes, which is, according to Google Translate, The Love of a Poor Child). This was Anna May Wong's first European film, when she felt her American film career was stalled & mired in stereotypical secondary roles. Earlier this year I read an excellent book on Wong (Daughter of the Dragon by Yunte Huang) so I couldn't remember if I'd actually seen this film or only read a description of it. It turns out I had not seen it. I gather it's sometimes spoken of a bit dismissively but I thought it was extremely good. Wong is, as most people know by now, just luminous, & subtle & convincing in her portrayal of a lonely young woman who falls in love with a circus performer, a knife thrower, (Heinrich George) who rescues her from an attempted rape by two men on the beach. He is not interested in her, though, as he is smitten with his former lover, a dancer (Mary Kid) who thought he had died & who has moved on anyway (she's an appealing character, not shown as bad or scheming or bitchy: just someone who's over someone who isn't over her). As is often the case, plot summaries make the film sound thinner & more melodramatic than it is; as portrayed by the actors & staged by the director, it's a moving portrait of a roundelay of misguided loves. Wong is naturally the big draw these days, & the theater was quite full for this one, but it has many good points in addition to its star.
Kohlhiesel's Daughters
1920; directed by Ernst Lubitsch
This is one of Lubitsch's early German films, though unlike many of those it's not an historical epic but a comedy, based (very loosely) on The Taming of the Shrew. It was one of his biggest hits in Germany but is little known here, apparently not even receiving a theatrical release at the time (which was too close to the end of World War I, when the boycott of German films continued in the USA). Even now, when Lubitsch is a presiding deity of Sophisticated Cinema, & many (most?) of his early films are easily available, this one isn't (Kino, where art thou?). Not surprisingly, it's a lot of fun. It's set in the Bavarian mountains & involves two sisters (both played by Henny Porten), the elder a foul-tempered frump & the younger a prettier & more conventional sweetie. As in Shrew, the father insists the elder sister must be married (& taken off his hands) before the younger one can choose among her suitors. Emil Jannings is the sort-of Petruchio, who ends up with the elder sister. It's all very good-humored; you never feel that the elder sister is being vilified or mocked, & her rampages are more comical than anything else. Porten gets laughs as the younger sister as well, which is more of a challenge than with the over-the-top older sister. As I said, lots of fun, &, again, as with all these movies, if it's released, I'd buy a copy.
The Song of the Scarlet Flower
1919; directed by Mauritz Stiller
Lars Hanson stars in this Swedish film, based on a 1905 Finnish novel (Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta by Johannes Linnankoski), which was popular enough to be filmed several times after this initial version. It's the tale of the headstrong son of wealthy farmers, who ends up leaving his family home in anger & working in a logging camp, before eventually maturing & marrying the proud daughter of another wealthy landowner. It's maybe less tidy than this makes it sound, as she falls for him, & her father opposes him, without knowing his privileged background, which he has kept from them; before he ends up in this class-appropriate coupling, we see the tragic effect he's had on a lower-class serving girl on his parents' farm. What most viewers are going to carry away, though, is the memory of his log-rolling towards dangerous river rapids, a bit of bravado made all the more striking (to continue a leitmotif of this post) because it's not faked with computer imaging as it would be nowadays. It's an emotionally satisfying film, full of beautiful vistas, though maybe a little more conventional than I was hoping for. A friend of mine thought that Hanson occasionally overdid the stalwart manliness, but I thought that was just who the character was, & it provided an interesting contrast with some of Hanson's more tortured roles (The Saga of Gösta Berling, The Scarlet Letter, & let's not forget his anguish in Flesh & the Devil). Again, I'd buy a release!
The next festival will be back at the Castro Theater, from 6 to 10 May 2026. Before that, there will be a special Festival screening at the Castro on 22 March of Clara Bow in It, with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. See you there!
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