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I've got a rush order from London for a Brashingham to play Hamlet
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nineweaving and weirdquark: John Ford's Upstream (1927) is a delightful backstage comedy set in a New York boarding house full of actors and vaudevillians. It is funny, affectionate, and full of theatrical in-jokes; Angela Carter couldn't have seen it because it was a lost film until 2009, but it's pretty much taking place in the slipstream of Wise Children (1991). The title has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Apparently the studio had already announced an upcoming picture by the name of Upstream when the production stalled, so in order to deliver on their advertising, Fox Film Corporation slapped a last-minute replacement title card on Ford's The Public Idol and sent it out into the world, including New Zealand, where the current print was discovered with a cache of other silent films previously believed lost. Someone in the southern hemisphere please thank New Zealand for me.
The plot is the kind where a spine of narrative provides scaffolding for the character work; it's not difficult to describe, but it's not in some ways the heart of the story. There's a loose romantic triangle, which resolves in a remarkably sweet and sensible fashion. There's a lot of time spent with the boarders, who run the gamut of theatrical types from a medicine show, a mother-and-daughter sister act, a sultry "Soubrette," a gallantly aging "Star Boarder," and a pair of inseparable vaudeville hoofers to the wistful ex-tragedian who lights candles to a bust of Shakespeare and the memory of Edwin Booth and owes a lot of back rent.1 And then there are the fortunes of Eric Brashingham, the last and pointedly least ofthe Barrymores a celebrated theatrical family; his ego hasn't prevented him from taking work in a knife-throwing act, but the pay grade hasn't prevented him from regularly complaining that it's beneath him. The girl in the act is the lively, modern Gertie Ryans; the knife-thrower is the dashing Castilian Juan Rodriguez—John Rogers from Iowa to you. He's carrying a torch for Gertie, she's carrying one for Brashingham, if Brashingham is carrying a torch for anyone it's probably himself, the starry thespian he's always known he deserves to be. When a famous theatrical agent comes knocking in the middle of dinner, it's a shock to everyone that it's self-absorbed slacker Brashingham he's looking for. But the boarders are a staunch, if threadbare family; they rally around the young man and cheer him off to London, especially after an emergency boot camp in Shakespeare from reverent old Campbell-Mandare draws something out of him that looks like a real gift after all. The audience may now place their bets on the chances of Brashingham's success not going to his head. But on some wonderful level, he's really not the protagonist of the picture. That's the community of the boarding house, symbolized by John and Gertie, who may never tread the boards before the King of England, but at least they don't go around assuming everyone wants a picture of their left profile.
I had heard of very few of the actors in this movie. They are uniformly terrific and often cleverly cast—the Soubrette is Jane Winton, a Ziegfeld girl turned screen siren; the Star Boarder is Raymond Hitchcock, a Broadway veteran of musical comedies and revues; Campbell-Mandare is Émile Chautard, a prolific French director who became a character actor in Hollywood. I can't figure out why Nancy Nash's career ended after a handful of roles, because the word that keeps coming to mind is vivacious; she has a wide-eyed, kittenish face, sure, but it's her expressive quickness I remember, her flashing gamine grin. She does not make Gertie a sap for responding to Brashingham's flirtations. It does not hurt from my perspective that she looks great in a waistcoat and a jacket, either. Grant Withers is a good-looking chameleon, because I saw him a few months ago in a fantastic pre-Code called Other Men's Women (1931)2 and didn't recognize him here as John, whose potential stiffness as the steady alternative to Brashingham's romantic peacocking is undone by the engaging goofiness with which he does things like propose. He became one of Ford's stock company. Earle Foxe as Brashingham was utterly unknown to me and emerges from the film as a really talented clown. The moment at which he assumes the mantle of his destiny is both a testament to the power of acting and a beautiful burlesque of the same—suddenly seeing Hamlet looking back at him from the foxed depths of the parlor mirror, the young Brashingham's brows draw sensitively together, his mouth assumes an ironical cast, he grows a chin on the spot and by God it is noble. The picture of the melancholy Dane in a loosened tie and romantically disarrayed hair, he glides back through the boarding-house crowd with the lofty distance of a man whose mind is now firmly on finer things than soup crackers and unpaid bills. You can hear his accent polishing itself up to cut glass. The accompanying squeaky balloonlike noise is his head inflating. And he hasn't even set foot on a stage. Brashingham in full star plumage is a thing to behold.
I must also admit to an instant affection for the aforementioned vaudeville double-act of Callahan and Callahan, played by the real-life comedy team of Ted McNamara and Sammy Cohen. We turned out to have seen them last year as a similarly joined-at-the-hip odd couple of army recruits in Raoul Walsh's What Price Glory? (1926), but I suspect the Callahans are what they will look like when I remember them from now on. Together they make a light-footed, rubber-faced pair of presiding spirits, given to literally dancing their way out of touchy situations (like the rent) and mixing a celebratory punch to a spit-take degree of high octane. They are indefatigable zanies and they are also jobbing performers; we see them working on their routines.3 The gag of Cohen's Callahan only looking Irish by way of the Pale of Settlement is taken one step further by knowing that McNamara was Australian.
Anyway, highly recommended. It appears to be on DVD with other rediscovered silents from the New Zealand archive, so if it's in your local library, go crazy. And then tell me about the rest of the movies. The existence of Birth of a Hat (1920) fascinates me.
1. To be fair, everyone in this story owes a lot of back rent. A running gag involves the escalating incredulity of various boarders that the money they sent home from the circuit didn't reach their landlady, who gives them an "A" for effort.
2. Referred to and not reviewed here. Because it's a pre-Code film, it has a plausibly bisexual leading man and a plot revolving around extramarital attraction where the jealous husband is in the wrong and the happy ending sees the lovers together again. Three years later, it would have had to end in tragedy. Oh, well. Originally titled The Steel Highway, Other Men's Women also contains marvelous location footage of trains and railyards and a fascinating soundtrack where there is no extra-diegetic music at all, even in the credits; it builds a score out of the rolling clack of rails and ties, train whistles, rain, and the songs the characters themselves hum or sing. James Cagney plays a supporting character and gets to dance a bit. William Wellman directed. I loved it.
3. Cohen's Callahan, complaining that the mice fighting in the walls of his room kept him up all night. McNamara's Callahan, responding: "Well, for seven dollars, what did you expect, a bullfight?" It is likely from the use of the name "Mr. Bones" that this will be a minstrel sketch when performed, but since they're rehearsing, it's their own faces and therefore it just sounds like something Groucho Marx would have snapped at Margaret Dumont. In terms of ethnic humor, this film did not bite me anywhere near as much as I was faintly worrying from its copyright date. There is one black character in the film, a kid apparently named Deerfoot; he's a gofer around the boarding house and I was concerned about him because he never spoke, but he quite sensibly walks out of being the knife-thrower's target when Gertie is threatening to leave, so good for him.
nineweaving and weirdquark: John Ford's Upstream (1927) is a delightful backstage comedy set in a New York boarding house full of actors and vaudevillians. It is funny, affectionate, and full of theatrical in-jokes; Angela Carter couldn't have seen it because it was a lost film until 2009, but it's pretty much taking place in the slipstream of Wise Children (1991). The title has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Apparently the studio had already announced an upcoming picture by the name of Upstream when the production stalled, so in order to deliver on their advertising, Fox Film Corporation slapped a last-minute replacement title card on Ford's The Public Idol and sent it out into the world, including New Zealand, where the current print was discovered with a cache of other silent films previously believed lost. Someone in the southern hemisphere please thank New Zealand for me.The plot is the kind where a spine of narrative provides scaffolding for the character work; it's not difficult to describe, but it's not in some ways the heart of the story. There's a loose romantic triangle, which resolves in a remarkably sweet and sensible fashion. There's a lot of time spent with the boarders, who run the gamut of theatrical types from a medicine show, a mother-and-daughter sister act, a sultry "Soubrette," a gallantly aging "Star Boarder," and a pair of inseparable vaudeville hoofers to the wistful ex-tragedian who lights candles to a bust of Shakespeare and the memory of Edwin Booth and owes a lot of back rent.1 And then there are the fortunes of Eric Brashingham, the last and pointedly least of
I had heard of very few of the actors in this movie. They are uniformly terrific and often cleverly cast—the Soubrette is Jane Winton, a Ziegfeld girl turned screen siren; the Star Boarder is Raymond Hitchcock, a Broadway veteran of musical comedies and revues; Campbell-Mandare is Émile Chautard, a prolific French director who became a character actor in Hollywood. I can't figure out why Nancy Nash's career ended after a handful of roles, because the word that keeps coming to mind is vivacious; she has a wide-eyed, kittenish face, sure, but it's her expressive quickness I remember, her flashing gamine grin. She does not make Gertie a sap for responding to Brashingham's flirtations. It does not hurt from my perspective that she looks great in a waistcoat and a jacket, either. Grant Withers is a good-looking chameleon, because I saw him a few months ago in a fantastic pre-Code called Other Men's Women (1931)2 and didn't recognize him here as John, whose potential stiffness as the steady alternative to Brashingham's romantic peacocking is undone by the engaging goofiness with which he does things like propose. He became one of Ford's stock company. Earle Foxe as Brashingham was utterly unknown to me and emerges from the film as a really talented clown. The moment at which he assumes the mantle of his destiny is both a testament to the power of acting and a beautiful burlesque of the same—suddenly seeing Hamlet looking back at him from the foxed depths of the parlor mirror, the young Brashingham's brows draw sensitively together, his mouth assumes an ironical cast, he grows a chin on the spot and by God it is noble. The picture of the melancholy Dane in a loosened tie and romantically disarrayed hair, he glides back through the boarding-house crowd with the lofty distance of a man whose mind is now firmly on finer things than soup crackers and unpaid bills. You can hear his accent polishing itself up to cut glass. The accompanying squeaky balloonlike noise is his head inflating. And he hasn't even set foot on a stage. Brashingham in full star plumage is a thing to behold.
I must also admit to an instant affection for the aforementioned vaudeville double-act of Callahan and Callahan, played by the real-life comedy team of Ted McNamara and Sammy Cohen. We turned out to have seen them last year as a similarly joined-at-the-hip odd couple of army recruits in Raoul Walsh's What Price Glory? (1926), but I suspect the Callahans are what they will look like when I remember them from now on. Together they make a light-footed, rubber-faced pair of presiding spirits, given to literally dancing their way out of touchy situations (like the rent) and mixing a celebratory punch to a spit-take degree of high octane. They are indefatigable zanies and they are also jobbing performers; we see them working on their routines.3 The gag of Cohen's Callahan only looking Irish by way of the Pale of Settlement is taken one step further by knowing that McNamara was Australian.
Anyway, highly recommended. It appears to be on DVD with other rediscovered silents from the New Zealand archive, so if it's in your local library, go crazy. And then tell me about the rest of the movies. The existence of Birth of a Hat (1920) fascinates me.
1. To be fair, everyone in this story owes a lot of back rent. A running gag involves the escalating incredulity of various boarders that the money they sent home from the circuit didn't reach their landlady, who gives them an "A" for effort.
2. Referred to and not reviewed here. Because it's a pre-Code film, it has a plausibly bisexual leading man and a plot revolving around extramarital attraction where the jealous husband is in the wrong and the happy ending sees the lovers together again. Three years later, it would have had to end in tragedy. Oh, well. Originally titled The Steel Highway, Other Men's Women also contains marvelous location footage of trains and railyards and a fascinating soundtrack where there is no extra-diegetic music at all, even in the credits; it builds a score out of the rolling clack of rails and ties, train whistles, rain, and the songs the characters themselves hum or sing. James Cagney plays a supporting character and gets to dance a bit. William Wellman directed. I loved it.
3. Cohen's Callahan, complaining that the mice fighting in the walls of his room kept him up all night. McNamara's Callahan, responding: "Well, for seven dollars, what did you expect, a bullfight?" It is likely from the use of the name "Mr. Bones" that this will be a minstrel sketch when performed, but since they're rehearsing, it's their own faces and therefore it just sounds like something Groucho Marx would have snapped at Margaret Dumont. In terms of ethnic humor, this film did not bite me anywhere near as much as I was faintly worrying from its copyright date. There is one black character in the film, a kid apparently named Deerfoot; he's a gofer around the boarding house and I was concerned about him because he never spoke, but he quite sensibly walks out of being the knife-thrower's target when Gertie is threatening to leave, so good for him.
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