Month: February 2020

The March of the Machines (1927)

THE MARCH OF THE MACHINES (1927)
aka La marche des machines
Article 4212 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-25-2013
Directed by Eugene Deslaw
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Abstract machinery montage

Imagery of machinery in motion is shown.

It’s a shame that the copy I found of this short on YouTube didn’t have a musical soundtrack; its images of machines in motion should inspire a creative one. It might even help me like this short more than I do. That’s not to say that it’s bad, but I do think that an abstract short like this will only really work if it taps into a certain type of visual magic that transcends the mere editing together of images that makes the whole somehow greater than the sum of its parts. Though the editor does have a decent feel for which images to match up, the only time it really transcends itself is in a shot of a pair of machine arms that end up looking like clutching human hands, easily the most striking moment in the short. The rest of it feels merely cute. I’m also not quite sure if I can call this short genre or not. The emphasis on machinery and technology gives it a science fictional air, but that’s undercut by the fact that all of the machinery existed at the time of its making. And it doesn’t quite reach the level of abstraction to make it a fantasy by default. So let’s classify it as a marginal curiosity.

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The Little Match Seller (1902)

THE LITTLE MATCH SELLER (1902)
Article 4211 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-24-2013
Directed by James Williamson
Cast unknown
Country: UK
What it is: Christmas tear-jerker

A young girl who sells matches is left alone and freezing outside of a shop window. She lights the matches and sees visions of Christmas in the window.

I don’t remember ever seeing any versions of this story during the Christmas season when I was a kid. But then, I think there’s a reason for that; this is easily the most depressing Christmas story I know of. Yes, it could be argued that it does have a happy ending, but it’s not one that leaves you with one shred of warmth to your fellow man in this world. The special effects consist of mostly the visions of Christmas in the window, and they’re pretty basic. However, my favorite effect is towards the end of the story, when a policeman shines a flashlight; it’s obvious that the light projected is a special effect rather than an emanation from the flashlight, and gives the movie an interesting texture. It’s effective enough, but, by the very nature of the story, it’s certainly not very cheery.

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The Love Magnet (1916)

THE LOVE MAGNET (1916)
Article 4210 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-23-2013
Directed by Lloyd Hamilton
Featuring Lloyd Hamilton, Bud Duncan, Ethel Teare
Country: USA
What it is: Slapstick antics

When his best friend Ham steals his girl, Bud visits a scientist who has created a love magnet, which is capable of causing women to fall in love with the one who points it.

Here’s another foray into the silent slapstick world of Ham and Bud. They’re about their usual type of business; stealing a prime newspaper-selling location from a child, short-changing customers, etc. Once the love magnets show up, the movie turns into a variation of one of the oldest cinematic routines, the chase scene; it turns out that you can get too much of a good thing. On top of the magnets themselves, the fantastic content is augmented by the appearance of a couple of women that may be sirens or mermaids, though that’s a bit ambiguous. It’s mildly amusing at best.

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Out of the Fog (1962)

OUT OF THE FOG (1962)
aka Fog for a Killer
Article 4209 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-22-2013
Directed by Montgomery Tully
Featuring David Sumner, Susan Travers, John Arnatt
Country: UK
What it is: Crime thriller

An ex-convict’s attempts to go straight are compromised when he finds himself suspected of being a serial killer who has been knocking off blondes in the park during nights with a full moon.

The serial killer is the horror content of this movie, though I should point out that the movie doesn’t really use it as an element of horror. In fact, for most of the movie the killings are only talked about rather than shown. That means that this movie is a bit on the marginal side as far as its fantastic content goes.

The movie itself is a crime thriller that tries to build its suspense on the fact that we’re not supposed to know whether the ex-convict is really the serial killer or not. To its credit, the movie tries to be a little deeper than that; it’s also dealing with the theme of the difficulty of going straight for a man who already has a record and may find himself pre-judged because of it. Though I admire its attempt to be something more, the movie ends up illustrating how difficult it is to balance the mystery/thriller angle with its exploration of the deeper theme. In order to be effective with the “difficulties of an ex-con” theme, the movie really needs to be direct and up-front about the character of the ex-convict; after all, it will be his story that we’re trying to experience. However, in order for the mystery/thriller angle to work, the movie has to make the ex-convict a man of mystery, and that’s not easy to reconcile. It might have worked had the movie been a lot subtler about its deeper theme so that we wouldn’t really know what it was about until the end. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here; the movie wears its theme on its sleeve, and that hoodwinks the mystery aspect of the movie to a great degree. It becomes pretty frustrating when the ex-convict starts acting all suspicious, because we know it’s because the mystery aspect is requiring him to do so, even if it’s out of character for him. Still, the movie is efficiently directed and avoids becoming tedious, so it is a watchable diversion.

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The Spook Raisers (1915)

THE SPOOK RAISERS (1915)
Article 4208 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-21-2013
Directed by Chance Ward
Featuring Lloyd Hamilton, Bud Duncan, Harry Griffith
Country: USA
What it is: More slapstick shenanigans

While trying to escape from the police, two bums stumble into the home of a fake medium plying her trade. When they discover the medium’s tricks, they steal her paraphernalia and decide to go into the spiritualism racket for themselves.

Sometimes for this project, I’ll buy whole collections of shorts to get one title I’m looking for. One of the positive benefits of this is that sometimes those collections turn out to have more than one title I’m searching for. Yesterday’s movie featured a comedy team from the silent era known as Ham and Bud (Lloyd Hamilton and the diminutive Bud Duncan), and it turns out that the collection of shorts I purchased not only had HAM AND THE SAUSAGE FACTORY, but a couple of others that were on my hunt list, such as this one.

Lloyd Hamilton, though mostly forgotten nowadays, has a bit of a cult following, but most of it seems due to his work after he left this team. In these earlier shorts, he sported a huge bow-tie shaped mustache and engaged in fairly primitive slapstick antics with his team member. Even by slapstick levels of the time, the humor is pretty lowbrow; for example, in yesterday’s short, one of the big gags has Ham sticking a knife in Bud’s butt, and Bud running around in pain with the knife still protruding.

This one doesn’t sink quite as low, though I do gather from what I’ve seen of them so far, one of their common tricks is to hit people over the heads with huge mallets. The humor in the first half is mostly of the “it’s spooky and I’m scared” variety, with Ham panicking over the appearance of a ghostly Indian guide and Bud being terrified by a dancing skeleton in a closet. Yes, the fantastic content is faked, but that’s part of what drives the plot, such as it is. Probably the biggest laugh here is when Bud appears as a hyperactive ghost near the end of the short.

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Ham and the Sausage Factory (1915)

HAM AND THE SAUSAGE FACTORY (1915)
Article 4207 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-20-2013
Directed by Marshall Neilan
Featuring Lloyd Hamilton, Bud Duncan, Charles Inslee
Country: USA
What it is: Slapstick shenanigans

Two starving bums are tempted into taking a job with a grocer who has a sausage making machine in his basement. One man makes the sausages. The other is assigned the task of providing the raw materials for the sausages; dogs, stray or otherwise.

This one ended up on my “ones that got away” list, but I was quickly pointed to a source for it. It’s your basic manic slapstick silent comedy, and let’s face it, it really isn’t in the best of taste. Still, I do think it is interesting to consider in the light of the fact that it’s one of the later manifestations of one of the earliest cinematic science fiction contrivances – the automatic sausage-making machine. In this one, some of the sausages even come to life and follow one of the men around a bit; this adds to the fantastic content. It’s hardly a comedy classic, but I do have to marvel at the chutzpah of this one.

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Milk and Money (1936)

MILK AND MONEY (1936)
Article 4206 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-18-2013
Directed by Tex Avery
Featuring the voices of Billy Bletcher and Joe Dougherty
Country: USA
What it is: Cartoon

In order to save the family farm from foreclosure, Porky Pig takes his horse to the city in order to find a job. He gets a job as a milkman, but will lose his job if he breaks a bottle. And then a hungry horsefly shows up….

The fantastic content here is standard cartoon fare; we have anthropomorphic animals (Porky and his father) and that general sense of animated cartoon surrealism. I do think it’s interesting to balance out the anthropomorphic animals with a human character who occasionally acts like a snake (the aptly named villainous landlord Mr. Viper). Both the Warner Brothers cartoon department and Tex Avery would go on to better things, but if you compare it to their other work at the time, this was a pretty strong showing; you can even see some of the boundary-stretching touches that would become Tex Avery trademarks. My favorite joke is a subtle one; try to figure out why the horsefly attacks Mr. Viper in the final moments. (Hint – What does the horsefly usually attack?)

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The Naked World of Harrison Marks (1967)

THE NAKED WORLD OF HARRISON MARKS (1967)
aka The Dream World of Harrison Marks
Article 4205 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-17-2013
Directed by George Harrison Mark
Starring George Harrison Marks, Chris Bromfield, Deborah DeLacey
Country: UK
What is is: Bizarre nudie

The life of photographer/movie-maker Harrison Marks is explored, and he is featured in several dream sequences.

Here we take another foray into the world of exploitation. Harrison Marks was a nudie director who must have made something of a name for himself, and if this movie is any indication (a fake documentary about himself as a photographer of beautiful women), he at least had some peculiar and offbeat ideas about how to approach his subject. Perhaps the most interesting thing conceptually about this one is that it deals with the subject of identity; there’s a lot of discussion about how Marks sees himself in contrast to how he is seen by others, and the dream sequences are sometimes his own, and sometimes those of other people. This is an interesting enough subject that I really wish his skill as a film-maker was strong enough to pull it off, but when you consider that his ultimate goal was probably to see how many topless women he could get on the screen, maybe it’s no surprise that the movie is more of a curious oddity than anything else. It’s the dream sequences that push this one into the realm of the fantastic, with the final sequence (a parody of a horror movie in which he finds himself in a script being judged for his faults by a vampire-like character) being the most notable in this regard. Let’s chalk it up to being another one of those odd types of movies that this project occasionally throws my way.

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Excursion dans la Lune (1908)

EXCURSION DANS LA LUNE (1908)
aka A Trip to the Moon
Article 4204 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-16-2013
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Mimicked Melies

A scientist concocts a scheme to take himself and a bunch of travelers to the moon.

This movie entered my list as A TRIP TO THE MOON (1903), though it was actually made several years later, but I gather that a great variety of misinformation made the rounds about this one. One thing is for sure; it is a blatant imitation of the Melies film from 1902. Every scene here has an equivalent scene in the Melies film, and the story arcs are largely identical. Still, it isn’t a slavish imitation; for one thing, this one is much shorter and more compact. Chomon also restages and retools certain scenes so that the effects are slightly different; for example, the rocket doesn’t hit the eye of the moon, but enters through its mouth, giving it indigestion. Oddly enough, one of the biggest differences between the two movies is that Chomon adds a dancing girls sequence to the “court on the moon” scene; though no dancing girls appear in that scene in the Melies film, it is exactly the sort of scene you’d expect from Melies. No, it’s not as significant a film as the original, but it’s fairly entertaining in a “variations on a theme” way.

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The Melomaniac (1903)

THE MELOMANIAC (1903)
aka Le melomane
Article 4203 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-14-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Musical trick short

A bandleader uses his head in creating music for his band to play.

This is one of the easier Melies shorts to find, as well as being one of his better and more creative ones. In it, Melies (initially disguised as a clown bandleader, but he ditches the disguise to reveal himself) writes the melody of “God Save the Queen” on a musical staff over his head; he throws a musical instrument up there to create a treble clef, tosses batons up to separate the measures, and then uses his own head (which he pulls off several times and pops into the staff) to create the notes. It’s quite fun, especially if the accompanying music chooses to follow the lead and play the appropriate melody. I do notice the French must have some different notes in their “do-re-mi” scale than we do; the musicians display the notes in cards, and one is called “ut”.

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