Lilian Gish

  • The Wind (1928)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) I did not expect to like The Wind. I’ve seen and reviewed enough silent-era melodramas to know that I don’t like the subgenre in the first place, so anything I’m going to watch faces an uphill climb for me to even say nice things about it. On paper, The Wind feels like a redundant film, as a southern belle encounters hardship upon settling in the American west – from romantic struggles to outright sexual abuse and always, always the omnipresent wind making people mad. This being said… The Wind does have two things working in its favour. The first is the atmosphere of the film, nearly taking on the feeling of a science fiction film in depicting an alien landscape where the desert is subjugated by a near-omnipresent wind kicking up dust, demolishing buildings, destroying hairdos and making life even more unbearable for everyone. The sequence in which a storm threatens a church offers a few thrills midway through, while the climax is set during a sustained gust either burying windows or revealing things hidden under the sand. (The production of the film was reportedly unbearable, with extreme temperatures and the physical pain of sand blown by aircraft propeller engines for the camera.)  Director Victor Sjöström strips everything down to very simple elements and if the pacing of the film remains silent-era-dull, there’s nothing a bit of fast-forward can’t fix. More than many other westerns, The Wind drives the point that the frontier wasn’t all pretty horses and sunsets – that its lack of niceties extracted a real toll on settlers. The other asset of the film is Lilian Gish – a gifted actress, but made more interesting here due to the film letting her hair run free. It’s meant as a visible effect of the constant wind, but it makes her look unusually modern, absent the period hairdo that usually stylizes the actresses of the time. Both of those elements combine to make the Wind far more interesting than anticipated. It’s somewhat appropriate that the film is now regarded as one of the peaks of silent-era drama – coming so late in the era that it was obsoleted by talking pictures by the time it made it in cinemas, but now stands are a remarkable achievement of 1920s filmmaking.

  • The Scarlet Letter (1926)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) As horrifying as it may sound to purists, the secret to enjoying silent dramas may be watching them in fast-forward. There’s a noticeable change in pacing that goes with the passage from the silent to the sound era, and having the text IN YOUR FACE as title cards rather than subtitles makes the fast-forward strategy quite viable even on less optimal viewing platforms. This is not necessarily recommended for comedies depending on physical humour, but dramas? Silent-era dramas are deathly dull—the pacing is off, the emoting is difficult to take seriously and the title cards barely summarize the action (in addition of further ruining the pace on their own). But slam The Scarlet Letter in fast-forward and the result becomes much more interesting, with a density of plotting that starts approaching sound-era standards. A classic of American literature, The Scarlet Letter has been made and remade many times, but this silent-era version has a few things going for it. Lilian Gish stars as a woman whose romantic indiscretion with the priest of her small New England community leads to further complications. There’s enough narrative substance to make it interesting once the story gets going, and it helps that the production values of the film were good enough. Director Victor Seastrom credibly re-creates a settlers-era small town, and some of the exterior shots are much, much better than we’d expect from films of that era—early in the film, there’s a rather amazing long tracking shot of two lovers walking along an outdoor path that seems far more modern than it is. In the end, I was not exactly bowled over by The Scarlet Letter—but thanks to the fast-forwarding, I didn’t waste as much of my time as I anticipated, and finally could be swept up in the increasingly dramatic nature of the plot as it went along.

  • The Cobweb (1955)

    The Cobweb (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Unlike many other psychiatric institution movies, The Cobweb isn’t solely concerned about the therapy of its residents. Oh no — this film is about nearly everyone involved with the institution — patients, doctors, administrators and their spouses, as a question of drapes manages to ignite a near-vicious power struggle for the well-being of the institution. (The film is bookended by two title cards: “The trouble began” and “The trouble was over.”)  Richard Widmark stars as a workaholic doctor who gets involved in the trouble, and has to juggle patients, faculty infighting and marital troubles. The supporting cast is probably more interesting than you’d expect, what with the ever-beautiful Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame, a matronly Lilian Gish as well as an Oscar Levant as a patient. (Legend has it that Levant was incredibly difficult to work with, which feels entirely unsurprising.)  The Cobweb isn’t exactly a high-octane film — for all of the strife that it works toward, it all feels mild-mannered, even academic. Levant is underused in a role unusually close to his persona, while Bacall doesn’t have all that much to do either. Still, the film does offer a glimpse into mid-century mental health attitudes without quite delving into the usual clichés of the genre. It’s not that good but not that unbearable either, although careful viewing is required to remain invested in the ongoing story before it heats up to serious drama.

  • The Unforgiven (1960)

    The Unforgiven (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2021) In the pantheon of revisionist western movies, you could be forgiven for initially mistaking 1960’s The Unforgiven with 1992’s Unforgiven. But while both movies are independent from a storytelling perspective, they do share an intention to question some of the unexamined tropes of the genre. Clint Eastwood’s 1990s masterpiece was a deep meditation on violence that cleverly rifled through decades of doubts about impassible virtuous gunslingers, but if The Unforgiven isn’t anywhere nearly as successful, it does tackle the legacy of racism against Native Americans on film. But the way it gets there, though… can be problematic. Burt Lancaster ably stars as a rancher who learns that his sister (played by Audrey Hepburn) is, in fact, an adopted Native girl. That doesn’t go very well among the white settlers, and it doesn’t take a long time for them to become at odds both with their neighbours and with the Native Americans coming back to claim the girl as their own. It all climaxes in a scene that, for once, feels decently original — that of a dirt house being set on fire as Native Americans ride on the rooftop. The meditations on racism are atypical and rather welcome, considering the state of Native Americans in 1950s Hollywood, but the film itself is far from being as accomplished as one could have expected. Reading about its production history does help explain why, with enough behind-the-scenes drama (deaths, injuries, near-death experiences, and a disengaged director) to make a movie of its own. Suffice to say that the herky-jerky scene-to-scene rhythm of the film may not have been in the initial plans. Of course, there are other issues — as much as I love Audrey Hepburn and the lovely long hair she has here, she’s perhaps not the best pick for a Native American. Her performance bulldozes through objections of ethnically inappropriate casting, but it’s one more thing in a long series of issues with The Unforgiven. Lilian Gish and Audie Murphy are quite a bit better in supporting roles, each of them having a few standout sequences. Meanwhile, Lancaster provides yet another example of how he was willing to use his stardom to enable projects that poked at the kind of leading man he was supposed to play. In the end, The Unforgiven remains a provocative, big-budget revisionist western before it was cool to make revisionist westerns and in that, at least, it has appreciated from the underwhelming critical and commercial reception it got upon release.