Masterpieces You Don't Really Care For

[Gagman 66]

BrianG,


I'm sure glad someone agrees with me. I really hated PANDORA'S BOX. Have to be honest, I have never watched DIARY OF A LOST GIRL yet either, although I have the DVD. I sure hope it's allot better than PANDORA'S BOX though. I would have rather popped a blister!

About the only G. W. Pasbt films that I have really liked are THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY, and THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU, both of those were great. I'll take Edith Jehanne over Louise Brooks. Fell in love with her in THE CHESS PLAYER.

It's not really beauty that I am talking about. It's subtle things, nuances. I mean neither Colleen or Renee made my top 10 list of Silent Screen Beauties some time back. Nor for that matter did Louise. It's just that Colleen and Renee have a charm and endearing quality about them that I haven't found so far in Miss Brooks at all.

PANDORA'S BOX just didn't do it for me. Lulu was supposed to be a great dancer, but we never really saw her dance in the film? I kept on waiting, and nothing happened?

[Arndt]

I watched G. W. Pabst PANDORA'S BOX for the first time in a long time. Actually, I had only watched the Second Site version before, and didn't even remember it. So this was my first time to really watch much of this film with the Jillian Anderson score on the Criterion release. I have had the 2 DVD set for a couple years or more, but only had seen the first 10 minutes or so, until just last night.

To be frank, I didn't much care for this movie the first time that I saw it, and didn't like it all that much better now. I know it supposed to be a Masterpiece, and many people think that it is really great and everything, but I just didn't get it? Part of the problem was that I'm not overly enamored with Louise Brooks, like allot of guys are, and the supporting cast did nothing for me. I didn't like anyone in it! Probably would have enjoyed LAZYBONES much more which I had planned to watch for awhile now. I hated the father, He was just awful! You have to care about the characters, and these characters just skunked it up for me! I really wanted to like this movie, but I didn't!

Lulu seemed to me to be allot more trouble than she was worth! Yet the ending is a shocker, and just left you perplexed. The whole story seemed so pointless? And the murderer walks of into the mist scott-free? What the devil? Terribly unsettling stuff. In all candor, I liked LOVE EM' AND LEAVE EM' with Louise and Evelyn Brent allot better than PANDORA'S BOX, and that is just a programmer. So go figure?

Jillian Anderson's score was maybe not as good as I expected overall, but I like some of the themes. It didn't seem to be all that well thought out to me. Haven't listened to the other two alternate scores on the disc. So why do so many people think this picture is so great??? Please explain. Louise Brooks beauty escaped me? Looked great in some scenes, not so hot in others. Give me Renee Adoree, or Colleen Moore! Both much better actresses in my opinion. Sorry, that's just how I feel.

Have you considered the possibility that you simply don't "get" DIE BUECHSE DER PANDORA? That happens sometimes.
I normally love Griffith, but I don't get ISN'T LIFE WONDERFUL?, which I know many people love, Mike and the Graf notably among them. I don't see it as the film's fault, though. For some reason I just don't get it.
I love DIE BUECHSE DER PANDORA on the other hand. Even though none of the characters are cuddly and the villains don't get their comeuppance in the end. To me it is beautiful, mysterious and very alluring. And at least 50% of that is down to Louise Brooks.

[BrianG]

Maybe it is that charm that's missing from the Brooks films. I thought it was the films. Maybe it's Brooks. I just did not empathize with her character. I don't seem to have that disconnect with others like Renee or Corinne Griffith or even Clara Bow and Garbo. There's a warmth or realness (well, maybe not this last one in Garbo's case) about them that draws me in. I haven't seen Colleen Moore yet, but another actress that fascinates me is Musidora. I wish more of her films were available. She certainly stole the show in the 2 Feuillade serials she was in.

[boblipton]

Arndt, the statement that people don't get something is often a putdown. Louise Brooks is a very peculiar talent. It is obvious that she is one of those people whom the movie camera loves, but there is something very uninvolved about her performances in the silent era. In the hands of a director like Pabst who knows how to make use of that, it can work, but in other films, like LOVE 'EM AND LEAVE 'EM or THE SHOW OFF, she is like an alien creature dropped into the middle of the proceedings..... not even dropped into the proceedings, like someone who happens to be in the same space without paying much attention to them.

Even when the performance is appropriate, like BEGGARS OF LIFE, where her distance can be laid to the shock and trauma of rape the result is .... not particularly interesting. Yes, it is may be true to life, but if the character takes no interest in her life, how are we supposed to?

I honestly believe that what you find so compelling about PANDORA'S BOX is not Miss Brooks, but Pabst. It's a brilliant study in anomie, but the emotions it raises in me are generally anger at the character.

Bob

[Arndt]

Arndt, the statement that people don't get something is often a putdown. [...] the emotions it raises in me are generally anger at the character. Bob

I'm sorry if it came across that way. I didn't mean it as a putdown. As I said, there are films that I don't get and I realize it's not down to the film. It just happens.
I don't think Wedekind's Lulu is ever meant to be a likeable character. She is the ERDGEIST, the earth spirit, who devastates without wanting to and has no capability of caring about the wrecked lives she leaves behind. I recently saw the first film made from the Wedekind plays, Jessner's ERDGEIST of 1923, in which the great Asta Nielsen plays Lulu. It was very interesting to compare the two approaches to the role. It seems to me that Nielsen uses more of her art and Brooks relies more on her natural charisma.

[BrianG]

I'm sorry if it came across that way. I didn't mean it as a putdown.

I, for one, didn't take it that way. I've had this conversation with my daughter's boyfriend. His main interests are German expressionism, Murnau, Pabst. He liked Pandora's Box. I readily admit that I don't get any of it. The best part is that with different interests in silent films we are constantly exchanging DVD's that we normally wouldn't buy ourselves. The last DVD he lent to me was Hypocrites and the last I lent him, besides Pandora's Box, was the US and UK versions of Les Vampires. Discussing those should make for an interesting conversation on Easter when he comes over. If it weren't for silent films we'd probably have nothing to say to each other.

[N_Phay]

Have to be honest, I have never watched DIARY OF A LOST GIRL yet either, although I have the DVD. I sure hope it's allot better than PANDORA'S BOX though.

I put off buying the DVD of "Diary of a Lost Girl" for a long, long time, because for all I think "Pandora's Box" is a very good film, I find it very depressing to watch, and I had the idea that "Diary..." was a similar downer. However, when I did watch it, I enjoyed it a lot, and I think it's loads better that PB. There's a bit of humour in it, for one thing, which I don't recall much (or any) of in PB.

I find Ms Brooks' acting in the 2 Pabst films to be frustrating, at times (EG in the sequence where Dr Schön tried to get her to kill herself) she seems to me to be very good, at others, it's like she can barely be bothered to even be there! Good for the myth that's been built up around her I guess, but annoying when you keep getting into the film, then getting knocked back into reality again. I tend to like Ms Brooks fine, but a lot of that is to do with that she seemed to be quite a fascinating character in her old age, and when she was younger in the late '20's, well, if I ever met a girl like that, I'd really want to spend the night with her, and that tends to throw your critical faculties right out of the window!

Out of the films from Ms Brooks' back catalog that I have seen, the 2 real stinkers would be "Beauty Prize" and "The Canary Murder Case", I think

[Einar the Lonely]

Throw stones at me, but I never quite warmed up to SUNRISE. The strength of earlier Murnau films was their real, tangible sense of time and location. I am of course especially thinking of NOSFERATU here, which is my favourite film of all times. SUNRISE on the contrary presents a world rather constructed than created. SUNRISE's blend of European/Germanic and American imaginery and ambience and it's deliberate anachronisms give the setting of the film a dislocated, all-too-artificial, all-too-self-conscious feeling. Many of its motives and scenes just dont seem to join for a convincing work.

Also the characters lack a convincing development. How George O'Brien can turn from a brooding golem planning to kill his too-cute-to-be-true wife into a humourous loving husband innocently joking for example is really hard to swallow. SUNRISE has many of such moments. Everything about the characters is painted with a very broad pencil without subtleties or psychological fluidity. This goes a lot against today's conventions and you have to accept that before you can enjoy the film. To me SUNRISE remains a film more to be admired on a technical and pictorial level than to be really loved or to get full-heartedly enthusiastic about.

[boblipton]

Einar, I look upon SUNRISE as a deliberately experimental film. I believe there was a piece several years ago on why it was held in such esteem: because it was anti-Hollywood, as its successor as Greatest Film Ever was...... was it Mike Schlesinger who wrote that piece? Whoever it was, it would definitely be worth reprinting here.

I much prefer CITY GIRL.

Bob

[Mike Gebert]

I believe there was a piece several years ago on why it was held in such esteem: because it was anti-Hollywood, as its successor as Greatest Film Ever was...... was it Mike Schlesinger who wrote that piece?

Maybe, though it's also reminiscent of my how-Citizen Kane-became-the-greatest-movie thing, I should dig that up.

Certainly if you look at something like the earliest Sight & Sound critics' polls, to be an American director with a film on the list meant being, in some way or another, a Hollywood outcast, a rebel against the system-- whether an outsider like Chaplin or Flaherty, or a victim (supposed) like Stroheim or Griffith or Welles. It wouldn't be until the Cahiers crowd came along that people who had successful careers within the studio system, like John Ford, could make the list.

[Harlett O'Dowd]

Einar, I look upon SUNRISE as a deliberately experimental film. I believe there was a piece several years ago on why it was held in such esteem: because it was anti-Hollywood, as its successor as Greatest Film Ever was...... was it Mike Schlesinger who wrote that piece? Whoever it was, it would definitely be worth reprinting here.

I much prefer CITY GIRL.

Bob

I don't - but I admit to being prejudiced. I am absolutely obsessed with George O'Brien - especially in Sunrise. Ridiculously stylized and archetypical or not, I buy every frame of it - the guilt-ridden golem, the man re-courting his wife, the pig-catching yokel. I don't care. O'Brien in this film makes me postively weak in the knees.

Perhaps I raised the bar too high for City Girl before I saw it. When I finish with the Borzages in the Fox box, I'll try it again - but it may be my least favorite Murnau (after Schloß Vogeloed - which I also need to give a second chance.)

[Penfold]

Out of the films from Ms Brooks' back catalog that I have seen, the 2 real stinkers would be "Beauty Prize" and "The Canary Murder Case", I think

Which version of 'Beauty Prize/Prix de Beaute' have you seen ?? If you haven't seen the Bologna restoration of the silent version, then perhaps you haven't seen it at its best. We screened it here in Bristol for Louise's Centenary, brilliantly accompanied by Stephen Horne, and you could cut the atmosphere with a knife come the climax. It has an affinity with The Iron Mask, in that you could read it as a valedictory for silent cinema....

[Einar the Lonely]

PRIX DE BEAUTÉ, either sound or silent, is a fascinating film, and the final scene is almost avangardistic, in any case one of my favourite death scenes in cinema.

[Lokke Heiss]

[quote]Jean Renoir in the 30s. Okay, I'll grant you that Rules of the Game is one of the flat out, top 20, great films of all time. But I really have never found another one out of the bunch that does much for me; Boudu, La Chienne, La Bete Humaine, whatever, they all leave me with the suspicion that the critics who love them love them because they don't make the concessions to popular taste and entertainment that, say, Pagnol or Duvivier or Carne do in the same period. They're more realistic. Social realistic. Drably realistic. Uninterestingly realistic.

I bet you've seen these on TV, or on a small screen. I had the luxury of watching Renoir once a week during a fall film festival, on a big screen, and afterward decided I had never seen a more wonderful body of work by one man.

Then, I have caught up to some of his films on TV in the last few years, and it's all I can do to finish them out.

It's very hard to identify exactly what makes his films so untelevisiongenic, but his films, often project a mood that goes along with the story, and helps carry you along with the characters. If that mood isn't there, the story, the characters, all run the risk of falling flat as a pancake. Thinking about this a little more, stretches of his films are deliberate, which is code for slow-paced. Magical if you're into the story, because you care about the people, boring if watching it on TV and can't enjoy all the subtle stuff going on that is so hard to catch on a small screen.

Wuthering Heights. It's not my type of story, one of those overheated frustrated romance things, but even more than that, it's irritating having to watch the great Olivier and Geraldine Fitzgerald kowtow to the less than great Merle Oberon. Though I suppose it was good practice for Olivier for future roles in things like The Jazz Singer and The Betsy.

Merle Oberon sinks this ship single-handedly. It may be Oliver's best performance on film, and it's like you want to shake him and say: Such consuming passion for such a block of wood? What gives?

It could have been the role of a life-time, and such a large list of great British actresses who could have so great...

[Einar the Lonely]

More risky confessions...

Another one I never get is THE GENERAL. Have I seen just bad prints, or screenings with wrong speed projections? I don't find it funny, just unspeakably dull, and I don't see whats so special about it in the first place. I loved SHERLOCK JUNIOR, though.

I have an unsurmountable antipathy to almost all of Chaplin's major works, with the exception of later films such as GREAT DICTATOR, MONSIEUR VERDOUX and even LIMELIGHT. I positively dislike the tramp character and I'm unable to bear the sentimentality and the inherent masochism of Chaplin's humour.

But then, I must admit I'm among the minority of silent cinema fans who generally (with few exceptions) have no use for silent comedy. Silent movies to me are basically melodrama, epics and expressionism.

[Einar the Lonely]

Jean Renoir in the 30s. Okay, I'll grant you that Rules of the Game is one of the flat out, top 20, great films of all time. But I really have never found another one out of the bunch that does much for me; Boudu, La Chienne, La Bete Humaine,

What about GRANDE ILLUSION? EVERYBODY loves that one, no?

[Norma Desmond]

De gustibus non disputandem est or There's no disputing taste said the lady who kissed the cow.

I, too, wonder who invents such claims as the greatest of the top 20 or top 100? It is all a matter of taste, but the taste is best honed by experiencing hundreds if not thousands of movies.

One of the worst movies I've ever experienced is von Sternberg's THE SALVATION SEEKERS. Chaplin, Pickford, & Fairbanks are no doubt laughing from the grave that their practical joke has caused thousands of film buffs to watch this piece of &%$#@#$.

I have a copy of this in case anyone wants to trade.

[Harlett O'Dowd]

More risky confessions...

Another one I never get is THE GENERAL. Have I seen just bad prints, or screenings with wrong speed projections? I don't find it funny, just unspeakably dull, and I don't see whats so special about it in the first place.

I would hate to see The General for the first time on TV. It's not nearly as funny as his other major work, but it's a good (marginally true) story and chase film. In other words, a real movie movie. Question to the comedy experts here - was Keaton trying to ape (or even send up) Llloyd with this one? It seems more akin to Speedy than Our Hospitality.

[YS]

I would hate to see The General for the first time on TV. It's not nearly as funny as his other major work, but it's a good (marginally true) story and chase film. In other words, a real movie movie. Question to the comedy experts here - was Keaton trying to ape (or even send up) Llloyd with this one? It seems more akin to Speedy than Our Hospitality.

THE GENERAL was released at least a year before Lloyd's SPEEDY ('28), but Keaton's COLLEGE ('27) has an obvious affinity with Lloyd's THE FRESHMAN ('25), though that may be due more to pressure from Joe Schenck to produce a comedy similar to the highly successful FRESHMAN rather than an attempt to parody Lloyd outright (although you can interpret the fade-out of COLLEGE as such). Both Keaton and Lloyd, however, did have similar storylines throughout their '20s features (where the inept boy has to prove himself)...plus both had some of the same gag writers working on their staff at various points throughout the decade.

[Mike Gebert]

I bet you've seen these on TV, or on a small screen. I had the luxury of watching Renoir once a week during a fall film festival, on a big screen, and afterward decided I had never seen a more wonderful body of work by one man.

No, I'd say most were seen on a big screen, albeit in 16mm circa 1980s, so maybe better quality would help.

[rollot24]

I first saw Renoir's classics in 16mm and "admired" him, then in the last 10+ years saw the restorations in 35mm and was blown away. I find his films hypnotic in a good way. Almost immersive. After seeing them on big screens with audiences, they just don't work on TV. I would hate to think of someone's first exposure to him via TV.

[Einar the Lonely]

I saw almost all of 1930s Renoir on Video or DVD, and it worked perfectly for me.

[Einar the Lonely]

Did anyone mention Eisenstein already? Great images, great montage, unforgettable scenes, but... in the end it's all in the service of a very simple black & white demagogy, great style but little content, this films are basically huge, good looking commercials for communism, in the end not much different than Riefenstahl's glossy ads for National Socialism... there are just so many lies and simplifications in them, and that might seem even more apparent today, when the political passions these films inflamed and answered upon have become history. All this seems so cold, constructed and dated today. POTEMKIN is another "best movie"-case like CITIZEN KANE worth examining.

I would never accuse Eisenstein (or anyone else) because of the political things he believed in at some point, but I do feel a low point is reached in films as THE GENERAL LINE with its rather silly machine- and progress-fetishism and its stereotypical, phony "socialist realism". What makes it worse is that in fact this film and others (such as the admired EARTH by Dovshenko) were designed by Stalin to justify and prepare the extermination of the Kulaks. One really should not forget that.

Equally bad I find the schematic "evil vs good" that runs through many Eisenstein films, and the robotic Teutonic Knights in ALEXANDER NEWSKY burning babies etc is a really cheap trick. Anyway, this is probably the greatest "blood and soil" movie if there ever was one, and as such it really works.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE is a different case and this is one of the few Eisensteins I really like. But Sternberg's SCARLET EMPRESS is better still!

[greta de groat]

My problem with Eisenstein is that he has trouble with people. He's great with crowds but individuals tend to be swamped--it takes me multiple viewings to figure out which characters are which and i don't care about them anyway. To me the only time he has an identifiable character in his films is when he has an exceptionally charismatic actor like Nicolai Cherkassov to hold it together--Though the cute little old lady in The General Line comes close.

greta

[Einar the Lonely]

I guess Eisenstein's artistic failure in that respect can also be counted among the misdeeds of collectivist ideology...

[Mike Gebert]

As I said earlier in this thread, Pudovkin is Eisenstein with a sense for people-- I think Storm Over Asia and The End of St. Petersburg are cracking good pictures with genuinely interesting main characters. Potemkin deserves its place in history-- editing worldwide gets crisper and more precise after everyone's seen it-- but most of his films are tough sits because of the lack of a main character with recognizably human impulses. That's a BIG flaw in my book of cinema...

[Einar the Lonely]

[Note: this is an old post that was held up by the spam filter, which is why it repeats some things Einar later said above --Mike Gebert]

I guess this thread is only fun, if you pick the big ones:

SUNRISE: One cannot help but admire this film for its visual beauty and cinematic inventions, but really love it? I have a strong dislike against much that is in it. NOSFERATU was great because everything was so real and believable: The cast, the locations, the time-setting (even a year is indicated in the titles). SUNRISE doesnt really have a time or a place. There is a dislocation going on, a mix of European and American elements. This makes the film somewhat abstract and lifeless. The peasant couple lives in a teutonic house and Janet Gaynor is made up to look very german, yet George O'Brian appears far more American. The Big City and the City Woman are unmistakenably American, yet the latters behaviour seems to come more from European traditions of decadent deadly females. All this ecclecticism gives the film an all-too-artifcial self-consciousness that is not very convincing in the end. Further is does not work at all on a emotional basis. It is hard to follow their feelings and changes of character. The couple is way too easily reconciled after the blatant murder (!!) attempt and it is hard to believe that O'Brien really is the type to murder his wife, especially when you see him having fun with his wife in the city later-on. There is a large comedy style sequence in the middle of the film which doesnt fit there at all. But then nothing seems to fit in this film.

TABU is very different in concept, but I never got it either. It makes me die of boredom each time I see it. I cant remember the story, the people, the images...nothing lingers.

THE GENERAL: I'm always stunned about the praise this film gets. I just dont get any of it. I have tried to sit through it several times, but this remains one of the least funny, dreariest films I have ever seen. Maybe I saw bad prints at wrong projection but then again I have a general dislike for silent comedy. I loved SHERLOCK JUNIOR though.

EISENSTEIN in general: some truly marvellous sequences aside, I feel very bothered by the simplicistic, black & white propaganda. I can imagine this had a huge impact in it's days, but today not much is left. The style is great and eloborate but the content is in the end very banal and abstract. Like a commercial: Polished, attractive surface but weak content, not much different than Riefenstahl's Nuremberg. The lowest point is THE GENERAL LINE, a cardboard piece of faux-optimist Stalinist propaganda, in which happy peasants adore machines like gods. To think that this Anti-Kulak film also was shot just a few years before the millions of kulaks and reluctant peasants were killed by the regime makes it even more loathsome. I'm not against Propaganda in general, Vertov's ENTHUZIASM is great, though also full of nasty demagogy.

[T0m M]

Pandora's Box was probably the most disappointing film I've ever seen. Granted, my expectations were probably unrealistically high, given the plaudits it usually receives. Being used to the sensuality Brooks projected in her stills, I just couldn't get past the inital apartment scenes where Pabst has her jumping around like a pre-War Griffith ingenue. For me, the Lulu character was totally unbelievable and that killed the rest the film.

As for Diary of a Lost Girl, I loved it, in the trunctated Laserdisc version. The moment I saw the DVD version with additional scenes, it dropped off my top 10 list and and made me wish I'd never sold the Laserdisc. One of these days, I'll get around to making a new copy without the offending scenes.

In the meantime, I make due with Brooks in The Show Off, which I find to be an entertaining, little film.

[Einar the Lonely]

[Note: this is an old post that was held up by the spam filter, which is why it repeats some things Einar later said above --Mike Gebert]

Oh, thanks, I already forgot about it. It would not have mattered if you lost that one since I said most of it a second time... at least it proves I'm quite consistent with myself, which is a thing I am often not so sure of...

[myrnaloyisdope]

Well I've seen Potemkin three times now, and really I only would ever want to watch the Odessa Steps sequence again. I don't like the rest of the film at all, and don't quite understand why it rates so high, especially compared to Stachka, or Alexander Nevsky. Is it simply the Odessa Steps sequence?

As for masterpieces I can't stand, well Lawrence of Arabia is top o' the list. 4 hours of desert, with out a smidge o character development. I even watched this in a cinema and was terribly disappointed. I do really enjoy Lean's work though, but give me Ryan's Daughter 4 Hr cut over this anyday of the week.

I also hated Last Year at Marienbad, but fell I should give it another shot, if only for the visuals.

Oh and La Strada was terrible in my books. I generally like Fellini, and 50's era Anthony Quinn, but Giullietta Masina is so smack worthy it hurts. I mean she's a total idiot who mugs constantly for the camera. A bad combo in my books, though she was very good in Nights of Cabiria.