Frank Lloyd

  • The Divine Lady (1928)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) Despite a demonstrable love of older cinema, my patience runs thin on silent drama films, and The Divine Lady (despite synchronized sound and music) is clearly from the silent era. Deathly dull pacing doesn’t help this historical costume drama about Lady Hamilton’s scandalous relationship with Horatio Nelson—a topic better covered in the later 1941 film That Hamilton Woman. It’s not all dull—the marine battles are executed with some spectacle, although I can’t quite be sure if they were shot for this film or taken from another one. The film remains notable for being an early favourite of the Academy Awards—winning an award for director Frank Lloyd and earning two more nominations, for lead Corinne Griffith and cinematography. But even then, The Divine Lady is not a must-see for anyone but fans of the filmmakers involved or Oscars completists.

  • Weary River (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) From a contemporary perspective, the most striking thing about Weary River is how it straddles the frontier between silent films and the earliest sound era—parts of the film are silent, whereas others have sound and music. It doesn’t work all that well—the sound segments overpower the silent passages (especially given how the title song is so predominant toward the end), and there’s not that much of an artistic justification for the passage from one medium to another. (There’s obviously sound whenever the characters are singing, but there’s not as big of a structural justification as would have been, say, the protagonist leaving prison behind to take up a music career.)  At 86 minutes long, it still feels long—one of the underappreciated impacts of sound film was a more consistent narrative rhythm, but this too is only partially achieved here. There’s some visual innovation from director Frank Lloyd (including a shot taking us “inside” a radio to the studio—fancy!) and some of the gangster/prison material prefigures what Warners would churn out throughout the 1930s. Otherwise, though, Weary River remains more a curio for students of the transition between silent and sound film—it’s not completely dull, but there’s an artificiality to the way it transitions from one paradigm to the other that calls attention to both.