‘Mohicans’ Launches Silent Movie Festival Tonight

The Silent Movie’s third annual film festival gets off to a strong start tonight at 8 with the first of several rarities, “The Last of the Mohicans” (1920). Maurice Tourneur directed and his assistant and protege of five years, Clarence Brown, was soon to become one of MGM’s major directors.

Although not as swiftly involving as the Daniel-Day Lewis remake of the James Fenimore Cooper novel set against the French and Indian War, it possesses the very quality that version lacks: genuine pictorial grandeur. Barbara Bedford and Albert Roscoe (as the noble Uncas) star.

Tuesday brings a terrific Cecil B. DeMille double feature: “The Golden Bed” (1925), one of the director’s most effective pictures, and “Triumph” (1924). A great popular artist, De Mille was such a vigorously entertaining storyteller, clearly believing in his material no matter what, that he could get away with the most blatant moralizing and outrageous melodrama.

The first is the story of a spoiled Southern belle (Lillian Rich) of an impoverished aristocratic family who marries for money only to bring her husband (Rod La Rocque), a candy magnate, to financial ruin through her spendthrift ways. The tragic climax of the film verges on Faulknerian decay and irony, bringing to mind “The Story of Temple Drake,” the 1933 version of Faulkner’s “Sanctuary.” The second finds La Rocque as the playboy owner of a tin can factory vying with his manager (Victor Varconi) for aspiring opera singer Leatrice Joy in a cautionary reversal-of-fortune tale.

MGM was quick to follow up “Our Dancing Daughters” (1928)--which made Joan Crawford a star as a flaming but vulnerable flapper--with the equally enjoyable “Our Modern Maidens” (1929), which screens Wednesday. Crawford plays a vital, headstrong nouveau riche heiress who foolishly toys with suave Washington bigwig Rod La Rocque so that he’ll give a crucial career assist to her secretly betrothed (Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who was to become Crawford’s first husband).

A work of unpretentious studio artistry directed by Jack Conway, “Our Modern Maidens,” which has superb Art Deco sets by Cedric Gibbons and stunning Adrian costumes, shows Crawford to have fully mastered silent-screen acting in a vibrant, expressive portrayal. Anita Page, who beautifully plays Crawford’s tormented friend--as she did in “Our Dancing Daughters”--will make a personal appearance.

James Cruze’s patriotic “Old Ironsides” (1926), screening Thursday, could lose about 30 minutes of its plodding buildup to its bravura climactic naval battle in which the U.S. frigate Constitution defeats the nefarious Barbary pirates of Tripoli in the early 1800s. Among the rescued are beautiful Esther Ralston (who will appear in person) and handsome Charles Farrell; on hand for comic relief are Wallace Beery and George Bancroft.

One of the Silent Era’s great collaborations was between Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning, masters of revealing pathos in the grotesque. Screening Friday, “Where East Is East” (1929) is one of their lesser efforts, but “West of Zanzibar” (1928) is one of their best.

In the first, Chaney plays a great white hunter in Indochina who battles his long-absent wife (Estelle Taylor), a stereotypical evil femme fatale whose reappearance menaces the happiness of their innocent daughter (Lupe Velez). It’s pretty straightforward stuff from Chaney and Browning, but they do come through with a typically gruesome act of retribution--and suggest that the father-daughter relationship is tinged with an unconscious incestuousness. In the stronger “West of Zanzibar,” Chaney plays a stage magician left paralyzed in a fight with his wife’s lover (Lionel Barrymore).

Anita Page returns to the Silent Movie Friday to reminisce about Chaney and again on Saturday to discuss Buster Keaton, with whom she starred in “The Sidewalks of New York” (1931), which in honor of Page will be the very first talkie to be shown at the Silent Movie in its 51-year existence.

Co-directed by Jules White and Zion Myers, “The Sidewalks of New York” is as fascinating as it is painful to watch. The lovely Page made the transition from silents to talkies without missing a beat, but Keaton seems agonized as he strains to preserve as much as his purely visual comedy as possible.

He’s a millionaire slumlord smitten with Page, his down-to-earth tenement tenant. That Keaton’s mastery of the silent medium, bordering on the surreal in his sense of life’s absurdity, was without peer, may well have made it all the more difficult for him to adapt to sound.

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