Dancing Mothers (1926)

Director: Herbert Brenon

Cast: Alice Joyce, Conway Tearle, Clara Bow, Norman Trevor

Have I Seen It Before: Never.

Did I Like It: There’s a famous runner through <Singin’ in the Rain (1952)> where Kathy Selden dismisses—before the advent of talking pictures, naturally— the entirety of cinema as a lot of “dumb show.” “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” she says. I always wince when I hear this, and wonder why she can dismiss the brilliance of Murnau, or Eisenstein, or even Chaplin…

Then I think she’s actually talking about movies like Dancing Mothers, and I get a lot more forgiving of Debbie Reynolds. Action still works without synchronized sound. Any Black and White film—especially the silents—can put more horror in the shadows than most can do with color. Comedy probably works better if we don’t bring a lot of dialogue into the process.

But a soap opera? And a cheap one at that? It’s, sadly, just a lot of dumb show. Somebody’s in love with somebody else. They shouldn’t be. Some sturm and drang follows to fill out the middle reels, and everyone comes to a sad end. The housewives who flocked to this are reminded that they should stick to the rivers and the lakes their used to. Everybody wins?

Early sound pictures were locked into being recorded productions of stage shows, and while the movie business was still trying to figure out how to use microphones, that flaw is at least understandable. Trying to adapt what absolutely had to be one of the talkiest plays this side of Our American Cousin for the screen might very well be the first instance of the plague that would completely subsume motion pictures for a large audience: The best reason to make any film is if its already based on something which people will readily recognize.

Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean that there’s something worth preserving in there.

Peter Pan (1924)

Director: Herbert Brenon

Cast: Betty Bronson, Ernest Torrence, Mary Brian, George Ali

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Here’s a little tip for the uninitiated. This was the film featured for this month’s Second Saturday Silents at Circle Cinema. I’ve been going to those for the last several months and enjoying them quite a bit. Thus, with Mother’s Day weekend upon us a confluence of scheduling snafus led me to walk out of the film (a thing I have not done since my second view of The Scorpion King (2001), for reasons I won’t go into here. I figured I would be fine, as the film has long since lapsed into the public domain, and I could easily find it only to pick up the last twenty minutes.

I do not recommend seeing the first three-fourths of a silent movie with a good, friendly crowd and live organ accompaniment, only to pick up the last half an hour watching a print any old person bothered to upload on YouTube. The experiences are starkly different.

Did I Like It: There’s more than enough charm in this, the only cinematic adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s story upon which Barrie himself had a creative influence, that it’s not hard to imagine this becoming a foundational movie for a young Walt Disney. You can see the influences for his eventual animated adaptation.

Even now, I’m left surprised by a few things. I was consistently surprised at how much Ali could manage to be in a dog suit for his entire role and not make a violent mockery of the uncanny valley the entire time. As film technology advances, we keep missing that mark somehow.

What’s more? The first introduction of Tinker Bell (x) left me sitting in the theater (as indeed, this was still the part where I was in the theater) what I would imagine was just a light on a pole flew through an open window, a window of which I can clearly see all four edges. How did they do that? How can a movie leave me wondering “how did they do that?” when it is nearly 100 years old?