Igenlode Wordsmith

I do not recommend playing a concert on 3 hours' sleep (and a twelve-mile cycle ride following a similar one returning at 11pm the night before).
I got through it, but it was a bit unfair on the rest of my section -- of which I'm supposed to be the leader! The effects are of course similar to drunk driving; habit gets you through the actual notes and dynamics, but reaction speed and concentration are affected. I kept losing my place in the complex/repeated passages, which is pretty much my job to keep...

I had been to see 'The Final [restored] Cut" of "The Wicker Man", although it is still apparently missing 7 minutes or about 50% of the shortened material. https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-wicker-man-the-cut-may-be-final-but-the-film-is-still-incomplete I had just been reading Christopher Lee ("Tall, Dark and Gruesome"), who talks about all the little character parts having been cut, the butcher, the chemist etc., while the archive video introduction warned us that the crucial scene establishing that the protagonist 'had never known a woman' was missing and needed to be inferred in order to understand the plot. I could well imagine that a significant proportion of the film's intended charm might have lain in the background detail (as with the abridged translation of "The Phantom of the Opera"), so this seemed like a good opportunity to see it.( Read more... )

I took a guest to see the silent film Kampf ums Matterhorn ("The Struggle for the Matterhorn") on Bank Holiday Monday, since there was nothing showing at the local cinema save for children's films presumably scheduled to keep the little darlings occupied while they were out of school...

I'm not sure she'd seen a silent film before, and if she had it would have been the Laurel & Hardy type. Her reaction: "Gosh, they could really act with their faces, couldn't they?"
My (unspoken) reaction: 'Clearly someone who hasn't seen Sunset Boulevard :-p'

( We had faces! )

The film was showing as part of the National Film Theatre's 'Weimar Season', but it's really nothing at all like the 'Cabaret'/'Lulu'/'Dr Caligari' stereotype of weird, transgressive art from the decadent Weimar Republic. It's a straightforward morally unambiguous story, a member of a genre that has no English equivalent: a Bergfilm (mountaineering melodrama).( Read more... )

Cobra Woman

This is an absolutely unashamed B-movie... and about as sophisticated as can be expected of any picture featuring a beautiful, wicked snake-priestess, human sacrifice into a volcano, good and evil twins separated in infancy, a gigantic mute assassin, a lost heir(ess), a cobra-worshipping cult and a pet ape wearing a skirt for decency! It's technicoloured in more ways than one -- this is the pulp fantasy material of boys' comic papers come to life, and wouldn't be out of place as a lost novel by Robert Howard or Rider Haggard. Just about everyone sports a bare midriff at the slightest provocation, most of the women spend the entire picture clad in a skimpy band of material round their top half, and Sabu wears next to nothing throughout thanks to a magnificent young physique.

As the reader may have gathered, most of it is unabashed fun. There are a couple of suggestions that hint at something deeper: the idea that perhaps Tollea really ought to stay and improve life for her people instead of marrying her rescuer, for example (though the final outcome makes sense -- she was only ever herself a pawn in the hands of the would-be reformers, after all), and, despite the missionary upbringing of the main protagonists, an unexpected treatment of the cobra cult as a genuine religion, where offending the Powers can have consequences and people deserve to worship as they see fit.

The special effects are rather better on the costume front than they are where dangerous items are concerned, although there is a brave attempt at showing an advancing lava front by merely illustrating its effects, which works surprisingly well. The dialogue veers wildly between pidgin and fluent English as spoken by the same character at different times (sometimes within the same speech) -- it would be nice to think that this reflected an attempt to show whether they are trying to communicate in English or addressing others in their own native tongue, but I suspect it wasn't thought out in that much detail! Otherwise, the main criticism I'd make is that the final fight goes on perceptibly too long and in too repetitive a way: it could, with advantage and with more credibility, have been cut by several minutes to provide a more explosive climax.

But the film is thoroughly enjoyable for what it is. It has no pretensions to be anything more, and the characters generally look as if they're having a good time (when not being tortured, threatened with death, etc.) Sabu plays the hero's mischievous sidekick without a hint of embarrassment and tends to steal every scene in which he appears. Lon Chaney Jr has presence. Maria Montez plays a naive South Seas islander and a power-crazed priestess with aplomb and smoulders out of the screen (her snake dance in a scintillating costume is definitely a memorable scene).

Jon Hall makes an engaging romantic lead, though the plot suggests that the character is perhaps more honest than bright: his approach is generally to walk straight into danger and hope that circumstances will work out in his favour. Occasionally they do (this is the sort of film, after all, where you can walk straight into the inner sanctums of the palace after changing clothes with a high official, and nobody so much as notices) but generally he needs rescuing from the consequences!

I wouldn't actually describe this an unmissable camp classic, not because it's too bad but because it isn't. It's a perfectly good piece of entirely escapist entertainment which was never intended to be taken seriously, and while it has zero emotional depth it's easy on the eye.

Rating: 7/10 (worth taking the trouble to watch: not worth going out of your way for)

This is a fascinating remake of a classic early French 'serial drama', of the type that doled out their revelations in lurid weekly thriller instalments. I haven't seen the original Judex, but I've seen Ultus, the equivalent British serial of the era... and I definitely recognise the style here. Multiple disguises, hairbreadth escapes from death, jawdropping coincidences, gadgetry and sleight of hand... and villains who never kill their victims when they ought to!

The print in the BFI National Archive was in beautiful condition (save for some oversized and rather intrusive subtitling), and this film is visually and musically stunning; the Maurice Jarre soundtrack is lovely, fitting and eerie. The morality of the story -- despite its simplistic chase format -- is surprisingly grey, with Jacqueline the only pure innocent (and thus, alas, the least interesting character). It's hard not to sympathise with Favraux in his situation, despite everything that we learn, or with young Morales, caught between the ruthless woman he loves and his long-lost father, and Judex himself finds his self-appointed mission of punishment harder and harder to fulfil.

Scenes like the masked ball (shrouded in almost surreal mystery, since it is not until afterwards that we have any idea what was going on!) and the spider-like climb of Judex' minions to the roof are very memorable, while the film also has a nice line in self-deflating humour, courtesy of the fiction-obsessed detective Cocantin and his rapport with small children. For such a preposterous comic-strip confection the plot holds together quite well, although having displayed such crowning ineptitude in their first attempt to kill Jacqueline (and what happened to the original idea of questioning her first?), it's hard to understand why the plotters don't just make away with her immediately the next time they get the opportunity!

The one thing that really grated, as with all old historical dramas, was the very 'modern' hairstyles and make-up used on all the eye-candy characters in order to make them attractive to a contemporary 1960s audience -- the result now, of course, is that instead of appearing subconsciously appealing they appear distractingly out of period. It's hard to credit a swooning damsel of 1916 when she is made up to look more like Brigitte Bardot...

Casting a professional magician as Judex enables the character to perform some impressive sleight-of-hand, and there are some subtle references to the original era, like the opening iris shot, the super-advanced (and supersized) antique surveillance gadgetry, and the title cards setting the various scenes. But perhaps the most impressive thing is that this is basically played entirely 'straight': it's not a tongue-in-cheek homage to pulp serials, it's presented in its own right as a piece of poetry for us to suspend disbelief -- a 1914 adventure of a mysterious caped avenger, an athletic, resourceful villainess, and a celestial innocent who sought to redeem her father's deeds.

Importing old blog entries...

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For my latest bout of research I decided to look into those two mysterious 1927 film credits on Sonnie Hale's record, "On With the Dance" and "The Parting of the Ways".

I still haven't been able to confirm the existence of "Parting of the Ways" (although the IMDB gives some pretty specific details whih suggest that someone, somewhere, has access to records about it), but I can definitely confirm that "On With the Dance" exists -- and Sonnie was almost certainly in it!

From Bioscope's list of new releases, July 1927:

"On With the Dance" Series
Offered by: Pioneer
Directed by: Harry B. Parkinson
Length: series of twelve, 600 feet each.
Release Date: First week in October (approx)
Type: Interest
Cast: Binnie Hale, Sonnie Hale, Laddie Cliff, Phyllis Monkman, Leslie Henson, Madge Elliott, Cyril Ritchard, Bobby Howes, Sid Tracey, Bessie Hay, Leslie Hatton, Devina and Charles, The Tiller Girls, Annie Croft, etc.
IN BRIEF: Dances by well-known stage stars. Some good slow-motion pictures.
Suitability: Excellent short reel subjects for all houses.

An earlier article ("Pioneer Film Agency announce that they are nearing completion of their 'On With the Dance' Series...") again proclaims that the films "will feature such well-known favourites as Binnie Hale, Sonnie Hale..." So Binnie and Sonnie were not only in the series, they are repeatedly ranked as the top attraction!

Kinematograph Weekly runs an entire half-page article on "On With the Dance" on July 28th 1927 ("Something New in Dance Films"), which likewise refers to "such household names from West End theatre and cabaret as Binnie Hale, Sonnie Hale" etc., although in this case it gives a full list including such faces as Billy Leonard and Claude Hulbert. Even more excitingly, it publishes a set of eight stills underneath the article: not specifically captioned, unfortunately (the group caption mentions only four named couples, plus the Tiller Girls). But the top right-hand couple, with the man supporting his partner in a lift, looks distinctly like Sonnie and Binnie Hale.

So much for my deep scepticism as to whether this pairing (pace Gwynplaine Macintyre) ever worked together on stage: it looks as if they actually did do a demonstration dance for the benefit of Pioneer Films' cameras. What's more, at least two of these short films survive in the National Film Archive (and at least one of them was apparently screened at the National Film Theatre in 1995), so the record may even still be viewable today....

Alla Nazimova in the silent "Salome" at the National Film Theatre:

The film and accompaniment were much more enjoyable than I'd been expecting from what I'd heard of it (and, alas, from last year's precedent of female performers...) I can see why it has been described as too long: the whole thing is more operatic than filmic, and I do remember marvelling even at the time over the way that a single line in the Bible story -- "Bring me the head of John the Baptist!" -- is strung out over half-a-dozen shots before the detail of what Salome wants is even disclosed. Never mind the fact that it's repeated five or six times at great length before she actually gets it ;-p

But the key to "Salome" is Aubrey Beardsley; apparently Nazimova deliberately set out to create a work of art based on the Beardsley illustrations to Oscar Wilde's play "Salome". As the lady who did the introduction told us: sometimes it's a bit too obvious that the director is more interested in reproducing the original illustrated poses than in any kind of dramatic plausibility!

Now, I don't *know* the drawings for Wilde's "Salome", and even so I could recognise the inimitable Beardsley style :-) If her main concern was trying to animate the drawings, it's a brilliant job... But I found it quite compelling as an experience as well.

Really it isn't a true silent film at all: it starts off with about six screens of pure text, for heaven's sake! It's a series of tableaux illustrating each utterance as it's given -- more like a ballet than a piece of cinema, only easier to follow the plot of :-p It's pure spectacle, with a cast of grotesques (the only one I didn't take to was the implausibly hairy Herodias -- I can guess at the sort of illustration that was supposed to echo, but that sort of hair just looks messy in photographs, as opposed to being delineated in wave after wave of close-drawn lines).

But it didn't strike me as too long at all, and that was on account of the music. It was the sort of thing I'd never encounter normally, let alone choose to listen to -- just as I'd never normally subject myself to a heavily stylised, 'arty' film whose acting is about as artificial as it gets. ("Salome" is about as naturalistic as "Beyond the Rocks"... but it's so far over the top that it gets away with it, whereas the Swanson/Valentino picture just sags.) The performer was a young Indian-looking woman credited only as "Bishi", with an impressively long list of achievements and venues which meant nothing at all to me -- evidently we move in quite separate worlds. Her costume resembled that of Herodias, while her golden hairpiece would not have appeared amiss within the film itself ;-D

The music was a 'fusion' of sitar, electronica, live percussion, quarter-tone-sounding vocals and simple Western-style melodic lines to the song; quite indescribable and very alien and exotic to my ears. But for this queer off-beat decadent style it worked amazingly well: unsettling and beautiful in equal measure. Even snatches of English lyric over the action -- let alone over the intertitles! -- worked: the words she was singing were no part of the words on screen, and yet they formed an extra dimension describing the characters, and returned and fitted later, linking back. It was uncanny. During those long, long shots you were sitting there absorbed in the music, and the music and the images fed on one another...

Casting was good. Herod was a loose-lipped tyrant weakling reminiscent of Charles Laughton's later Henry VIII; Nazimova is a tiny slip of a thing who can pass as a child (she must have been pushing forty when she made this, surely?); Jokanaan is an incredible beaky emaciated charismatic, wild and ugly and yet believable as an object of lust. Herodias I didn't care for (and the music didn't work so well where moments of comedy were intended).

Costumes and make-up are... so far over the top as to be an art in themselves. Again, the reference is clearly Beardsley. We don't get to see the severed head, which is a bit surprising -- it's usually the pièce de résistance of the special effects department -- but probably a wise decision, as the idea of kissing one of those smeared drained mutton-like objects is always deeply unalluring! The image of blood seeping over the moon, on the other hand, is uncanny.

Apparently the American press were deeply suspicious of the film on its release, while the English press said it was Great Art... "Salome" is far too static and wordy to be a feature film in the terms of 1923: it's verging on being experimental art (Nazimova supposedly thought of it in terms of a Russian ballet). But in combination with the music of Bishi it's a mesmerising experience unlike any normal cinematic entertainment. I found it still a little stilted at times ("thou rejectedst me"!?) but in its own terms very largely successful.

If I'd known what I was getting into, I shouldn't have gone. But I'm certainly glad that I did!

Today was the start of the British Film Institute's much-advertised 'Weekender'; my chief interest in it was that it offered a chance for me to take a guest to see The Rat, which I had enjoyed so much when it was shown as part of a special evening in 2004 and never expected to see on the big screen again.

We were promised all sorts of extravagant entertainments — live musicians synchronised with those on screen, burlesque dancers at appropriate moments — but in fact all that happened was that they put up the auditorium lights during the nightclub scene and people gradually noticed some ladies in shiny costumes appearing in the aisles and walking across in front of the screen. The second time, they didn't raise the lights (which was less distracting) but then you really couldn't see the dancers at all. It was a good idea but it didn't come off in performance; I suspect the practicalities hadn't all been thought through. A pity for the girls who were supposed to have been the highlight of the show...

But the film, although playing to a youthful audience who had been promised decadence and burlesque, survived the entire experience triumphantly. For the first few minutes the audience sniggered at just about everything shown on screen. Intertitles? — intrinisically hilarious. Ladies in 1920s fashions? — oh, so screamingly old-fashioned! But "The Rat" is a fast-moving piece of low-brow entertainment, designed to thrill, amuse, and hook 'em in... and within about five minutes, the audience had apparently stopped laughing at the film and started laughing with it... save for when they were waiting in breathtaken silence to find out what would happen next....

Response afterwards, in wondering tones: "But Ivor Novello could act!"

He can indeed act, and infinitely better here than in Hitchcock's notorious The Lodger. Novello's sense of mischief as the irrepressible Rat seems to be rather better developed than his attempts to appear sinister and darkly significant for Hitchcock, and his desperation and heartbreak at the end of this film are far more effective than his saintly crucifixion pose in the later production — possibly another case of the Novello curse, whereby he only seemed to be able to achieve stage success in scripts that he'd penned himself!

By the end of the film I was actually starting to wonder if I'd got completely the wrong end of the stick on my previous viewing, and interpreted a tragic ending as a happy one or vice versa — and I knew roughly what was going to happen. The tension was terrific, and a couple of scenes brought tears to my eyes again.

After the disappointment that followed taking a guest to see The Crimson Pirate (I didn't know anyone existed who wouldn't enjoy at least the acrobatics on display...) I was very much relieved that this piece of unashamed melodrama went down so well, from sweet little Odile to the swaggering Rat and beautiful, bored Zélie de Chaumet. It's a film with no pretensions to sophistication — shop-girl stuff — and tremendous fun.

The National Film Theatre has just started running a 'Robert Donat season'; the star exhibit is of course Hitchcock's "Thirty-Nine Steps", which I'm afraid I never much cared for (I'm going off Hitchcock in general, after a promising start), but there are other films I'm interested to see, quite apart from the question of Donat himself. On that matter, on current showing, I remain mildly well-disposed but still to be convinced — on the other hand, at this stage in the Buster Keaton season I didn't think much of Keaton either...

Exhibit Number One was "The Private Life of Henry VIII", which of course I remember like everyone else for the famous chicken-bones on the floor scene... and had no idea that Donat was even in it. It was Charles Laughton's film, of course, and remains rightfully so, even though it's a bit creaky. (He over-does the swaggering and laughing at the beginning of the film, and the structure remains inherently episodic, despite an attempt to use Donat's character as a linking device — unfortunately it's not really much of a role. John Loder, in another very minor part, made more of an impression on me...)

Today's exhibit was Donat's sole Hollywood movie, the 1934 "Count of Monte Cristo". I was eager to see this, as I like swashbucklers and it has a good reputation; I also had an ulterior motive! The good news is that this turns out to be, as I hoped it might, my "long-lost Monte Cristo" -- the film I once caught the end of, thanks to the BBC, on holiday twenty years ago, and have never been able to find again since. The bad news is that, alas, the part I missed isn't actually nearly so good as the remainder...

The Reliance Pictures production of "The Count of Monte Cristo" is a queer mixture of success and banality; of studio polish and poverty-row shortcuts; of genuine emotional power and thumping cliché; of briskly-moving adaptation and bizarre moments of staging (revolving witness-box, anyone?) A literal version of Dumas it is not — one would not expect it of any film spectacular made at this period — but many of the changes made are entertaining or effective, and the happy ending provided works at least as well as Dumas' rather unsatisfactory version. The meandering original is reduced to a bare two hours' running time by dint of concise scripting and cutting out most of the sub-plots involving the de Villefort and Morrel families, an attempt which is by and large successful. It works less well at the beginning, where there are simply too many unidentified characters popping up and scheming without any of them really being established properly, particularly as Morrel and de Villefort's father are then pruned from the plot, never to appear again. And de Villefort's downfall as presented here really doesn't work for me: lacking the damning evidence of infanticide, the script doesn't seem to come up with any terribly convincing alternative to turn the tables on the prosecutor. On the other hand, introduced material such as Mercedes' (completely uncanonical) aristocratic snob of a mother and the tableaux in praise of Fernand at which Haydee accuses him works very well.

Ironically — given the Hollywood studio's doubts as to their unknown English import's ability to pull off anything but a fresh-faced lead — Robert Donat shines mainly in the latter half of the picture as the older, embittered and sophisticated Monte Cristo. His guileless Dantes makes little impression, for it could be any generic juvenile lead role — the character as written is not so much naive as uninteresting. Donat fares better where he can give a sense of some hidden depths to the part, and his best features are his strong eyes and brows rather than his cheery grin. As Monte Cristo, however, he is both debonair and dangerous, an intelligent schemer with a dry wit at his enemies' unknowing expense, and he is supported ably by both Douglas Walton as the young Albert and Elissa Landi as Mercedes.

It was Miss Landi's performance with which I was truly impressed here; she ages with utter conviction from the wilful girl to the resolute mother, and lends her scenes opposite Donat the real impact that is lacking from so much of the film. In a plot that has been re-angled to concentrate far more closely on the Edmond/Mercedes relationship, her role is vital, and her character provides most of the emotional engagement of the story, from light-hearted charm to heartbreak (Valentine de Villefort, here paired off with Albert, is a mere cypher in comparison).

The film starts off in outright formulaic guise, from Napoleon's appearance (in full uniform and cocked hat, with his hand duly thrust in his breast like that) to the standard storm-at-sea sequence with water poured across the screen. It continues to suffer from crude musical underlining almost throughout, almost sabotaging for example Donat's scene with the dying Abbé Faria, which he otherwise pulls off with conviction, while certan characters, such as Morrel and the mute Nubian Ali, appear to have been retained despite the loss of the plot elements which actually involved them (possibly as a result of cuts to the script later in filming?) Overall, however, the adaptation does a pretty good job of conveying information quickly and concisely — Albert's entire Italian adventure is dealt with effectively in a matter of a few minutes with none of the essentials lost, and Haydee's brief role introduced without seeming contrivance. It borrows little in practice from Dumas' wordy original save the bare outlines of its plot, and sometimes not even those; but as an initially uninspired Hollywood adaptation it improves considerably as it goes on. Literary fidelity isn't everything, and if it were not let down by certain sections I would have rated it considerably higher; alas, this production remains an odd mixture of the powerful and the pedestrian.

The French are ardently patriotic; the Germans swell with tender pride; the Americans get earnest and emotional; but surely only the English can ever have acquired the idiosyncratic habit of making propaganda by raising a laugh at our own expense? It's a trait that, I suspect, may well leave other nations mystified; but it is this sting of self-deprecating irony that leavens the best of British war films and is characteristic of its era. Coincidentally, it also helps to make them notable long after the event, where more conventional propaganda tends to become ponderous and slightly embarrassing. Englishmen of a certain class have always made a virtue of never taking anything quite seriously — and so, in lieu of John-Wayne-style heroics, we have Leslie Howard or Rex Harrison serving King and Country under the mask of the charming, seemingly-incompetent amateur.

In Night Train to Munich, Charters and Caldicott illustrate perhaps the epitome of English humour at its own expense — as caricatures they could almost have stepped out of propaganda for the other side. We are intended to laugh at them, and we do. But they represent also all the dogged and prized eccentricity of the nation, a red rag in the face of Nazi efficiency and uniformity. They are insular and sport-obsessed, far more interested in their own affairs than in interfering with the rest of the world: but by jingo, if they do—!

As a comedy-thriller "Night Train to Munich" went down very well at the National Film Theatre, and I was very glad to have caught the final screening of the season after missing them all when it played here last year. I did feel that the comedy elements were ultimately more successful than the pure action sequences, though. Given the constraints of wartime filming it suffers understandably from an absence of location shooting and some rather obvious model-work, and the big battle at the finale is riddled with unintentionally comic clichés, such as the revolver that fires dozens of shots without reloading only to come up suddenly empty for dramatic convenience, the enemies who couldn't hit the proverbial barn-door with a rifle while the hero is unfailingly accurate with a hand-gun, and a crippling wound that is conveniently forgotten when it comes to mid-air acrobatics. The beginning of the film also features one of the most bizarre episodes of would-be brutality that I've ever encountered — presumably censored for audience sensibilities — where a concentration camp inmate is apparently being savagely beaten by a guard, but the sound effects attached suggest something more along the lines of a petulant tapping with a fly-whisk!

Watching Rex Harrison infiltrate Nazi Germany armed with nothing more than supreme impudence and a monocle, on the other hand, is pure unalloyed delight, as are his undercover scenes in England as he endeavours to hawk popular songs by means of persistent performance. His double-act with Margaret Lockwood as they portray the warring couple who inevitably end up united is both amusing and genuinely credible: the film admirably refrains from underlining the moment when she — and the audience — realise that she really does care for him. And, as always with actors originally recognised from performances in middle age, he comes across as amazingly young and debonair, and yet still unmistakably Rex Harrison — a slightly disorienting experience!

The real disorientation, however, comes from the casting of Paul Henreid in the rival role of Karl Marsen, the Nazi intelligence agent, a coup that becomes quite unintendedly effective from his subsequent Hollywood career featuring parts as romantic leads. Given that I'd last seen him as sensitive confidant of Bette Davis in "Now, Voyager", I instinctively assumed that his clean-cut Czech resister was to be the hero of the piece, and the role reversal took me as completely by surprise as could have been hoped for. But the character remains an oddly sympathetic one — indeed, the Germans in general are depicted as harassed human beings rather than monsters — and it is hard not to empathize with him as he watches his 'womanising' rival supposedly sweep the girl they both love off her feet. In the final scenes, as he lies wounded in the path of the returning cable car, I found myself frankly terrified on his behalf that the action clichés would culminate in Karl's death crushed beneath the cabin that has carried his rival to safety, and surprised and relieved when he was allowed — albeit bereft — to survive the battle.

"Night Train to Munich" is probably most effective when it is at its most flippant, whether at the English or German expense, and at its most formulaic where it tries to be 'serious'. But it has moments of genuine tension and feeling and is a fast-moving, entertaining picture. It's a long time since I saw "The Lady Vanishes" — of which this is often cited as a pale shadow — and the Hitchcock production doesn't seem to have left much impression on me over the intervening years; but I thoroughly enjoyed "Night Train to Munich", for all its flaws, and remain impressed by its sheer sangfroid as a wartime morale-raiser.

I was seriously debating yesterday whether or not to go to see "Laughing Anne" at the National Film Theatre in place of attending the (belated) Guy Fawkes party tonight. I'd got to the extent of looking the film up on the IMDb to check whether the omens were hopeful (they weren't; the film's average score was very low) and still dithering, when out of the blue I came upon a Usenet posting announcing that the BBC would be showing the Buster Keaton programme from Paul Merton's Silent Clowns series in prime time on mainstream TV that night.

My mind cleared instantly. Keaton or Conrad? Given that choice, my priorities turned out to be absolutely unquestioning: Keaton without a qualm, every single time. Considering the amount of time I'd spent dithering, it was almost funny.

The really silly thing is that I'd actually already seen the TV programme in question at a special sneak preview session before its original BBC4 transmission and it doesn't in any case tell me anything I don't already know, or show any footage I haven't already encountered. I just can't resist Buster Keaton under any circumstances; I suppose that's what they call addiction, although it feels more like religion...

A contributory factor was that the Conrad on Film season has been somewhat mixed to date, at least from my point of view. I'd already narrowed my planned viewing down to a handful of the pictures on offer, for one reason or another (my main interest is in the early film era itself, rather than in Conrad's work), and "Laughing Anne" had been one of the few survivors. (I was interested to see what Herbert Wilcox plus Margaret Lockwood would produce, and the plotline sounded my style.)

So far I've seen two of the three "Victory" adaptations in the season — the silent and very early sound versions — and the silent "Lord Jim".

The "Victories" were both pretty mediocre, verging on bad. The plum part in that plot seems to be the villain Ricardo, who comes across as the most lively and amusing character: the main reason why I watched the silent version was to see the famous Lon Chaney in the part, and he doesn't disappoint. Alas, that is more than can be said for Richard Arlen, the reason why I watched the sound version; he was terribly wooden in the leading man role of Axel Heyst. And after he'd been so good as a silent actor in "The Four Feathers" and "Beggars of Life", too. After watching this film, I frankly assumed that his career must have fallen casualty to the coming of sound — since although he has a perfectly good voice here, he seems unable to act with it — and was quite surprised to find that he went on getting parts for many years afterwards; maybe he was just having a bad day here. It's not a rewarding character to play.

The 1925 "Lord Jim", on the other hand, was unexpectedly excellent. Enough to make me go and read the book, which I was not at all tempted to do after watching a double-bill of "Victories"!

It has to be said that this film gets better as it goes along. There's nothing wrong as such with the beginning, but it's a bit pedestrian somehow. But comparing it with the original novel, I found it all in all a very good adaptation, and generally a better piece of storytelling than Conrad's long framing passages and non-chronological plotline allow: I'm not clear if the author was trying to rack up suspense, indulge in philosophical exploration or simply to be clever, but I actually felt that the film — with the benefit of almost no words at all, being silent — got to the heart of the character much more accurately and clearly than the book had. And as a piece of compression it's actually very clever.

The most significant example is the combining of the two villainous captains into the same character, thus adding extra personal impact on Jim when he encounters the pirates in addition to shortening the cast list and cutting back on exposition; but the depiction of Jim's wanderings after his disgrace is very well done by piecing together various separate incidents mentioned in Conrad's meandering account of that era, and making them into a coherent chain driving the hero back to seek help from the sympathetic merchant (again, a conflation of several characters making passing appearances in the book). The trial scene is also conveyed with remarkable skill, given the constraints posed by title cards and the imperative not to have too many of them.

But basically I strongly suspect that I liked it much better because I could identify with the central character in the plot. My masochistic streak coming out again, I suppose — but expiation, honour and heroic self-sacrifice were always my thing. In the end scene, where I have a feeling we are supposed to be willing Jim to yield to Jewel's pleas and escape fulfilling his word to his benefactor, I was sitting there thinking 'isn't that just like a woman? She simply doesn't understand, does she? Don't listen to her...'

And of course he doesn't.

My only complaint about this scene would be that they really shouldn't have staged it so that a dying man has to stagger back across a long bridge; Jewel should have run to meet him, for plausibility's sake...

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A big grumble, though, goes to the elderly (and possibly deaf, if you take the charitable view) American couple who were seated towards the front of the auditorium, and persisted in supplying a running commentary to each other, in addition to crinkling sweet papers and sucking and slurping loudly. The last straw was when they started ad-libbing dialogue at one of the most intense moments: I'm sure they were thoroughly enjoying the film, and it was all relevant chatter, but they didn't half put me off. I'd like to claim that I took no action in order to avoid disturbing the rest of the audience, but actually I was too inhibited to do more than sit there seething as they exchanged comments almost in my ear. In any case they took absolutely no notice when I did try.

Grrr.