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333 Adrian Brunel

Archival Spaces 333

Adrian Brunel and British Cinema in the 1920s

Uploaded 27 October 2023

Back in 1978 when I began researching Hans Richter’s film program for a 50^th anniversary reconstruction of Film und Foto (1929), a seminal exhibition reprising the avant-garde photography and film of the 1920s, I first came across the name of Adrian Brunel. The official FiFo catalog only listed “three English burlesques by Brunel” in its 11^th film program, which included Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924), and E.A. Dupont’s Varieté (1925), so in 1979 we screened A Typical Budget (1924), Cut It Out (1925), and So This is Jollywood (1925), short films which parodied Topical Budget newsreels, government censors, and the British film industry, respectively. The Brunel name only seldom turned up in subsequent years, so my ears pricked up when I met Josephine Botting, Fiction Curator at the British Film Institute, who told me about her book, Adrian Brunel and the British Cinema in the 1920s. The Artist vs. the Moneybags (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), which is based on her PhD. Research in the huge Brunel Estate Collection at the British Film Institute (https://euppublishingblog.com/2023/04/05/adrian-brunel-blog/). Discussing whether the eight Brunel burlesques made between 1923 and 1925, should be considered avant-garde films, Josephine Botting mentions their similarity to both the Leger film and René Clair’s Entr’Acte (1925), as well as the fact that Jacques Ledoux screened another Brunel short, Crossing the Great Sagrada (1923), in an experimental film program in Brussels in 1949. The generic uncertainty regarding the Brunel shorts had very much to do with the state of Britain’s film industry in the 1920s.

Born in London in 1889, Adrian Brunel entered the film industry in August 1915 as a booker for Moss Empire’s Bioscope, having been excused from war service. A little more than a year later, Brunel formed his first film production company, Mirror Films, with Harry Fowler Mear, releasing the five-reel melodrama, The Cost of the Kiss in February 1917, which however failed to find a distributor. As Botting notes, over-production on the one hand, and lack of quality, on the other, seriously hampered the development of British cinema in the silent era. As a result, generally negative views about British cinema by film historians meant the silent cinema was very much under-researched, except for Alfred Hitchcock, Brunel’s one-time assistant. While Hitchcock soared in subsequent years, Brunel struggled at the fringes. Botting argues, then, that studying Brunel’s seemingly failed career tells us at least as much about the structural weaknesses of the British film industry, as it does about Brunel as an auteur maudit.

The fact was that Brunel’s work, according to his own statements in his autobiography and elsewhere, quoted by Botting, was considered too “high brow” for the low expectations of the commercial film industry. That Brunel was a founding member of the London Film Society which screened art films, also did not endear him to commercial film producers. Referencing the partially commercially successful but hard-to-categorize burlesque films, Botting quotes Brunel’s friend and colleague Ivor Montagu, another talented but marginalized director: “(the burlesques) were responsible for Brunel’s negative reputation within the industry: ‘he was accounted a dangerous intellectual because he specialized in satirical one-reelers . . . it was axiomatic in the trade that audiences would not accept satire and that anyone intelligent enough to be satirical was dangerous’.” (p. 34) Brunel’s up-and-down career is thus marked by industry unwillingness to hire Brunel except for quota quickies and salvaging jobs, while the features he did complete were subverted by unstable industry conditions.

After a brief stint at the Ministry of Information, Brunel joined the British Actors’ Film Company in January 1919, where he wrote three screenplays, including The Auction Mart (1920), which the producer labeled “high brow,” then viciously attacked the distributor for destroying his work, before resigning in March 1920. Almost immediately he joined Minerva Films, a company founded with writer A.A. Milne to produce four short comedies, which the company could not sell, despite good reviews; Botting retrospectively evaluating them as “highly cinematic and containing some original and genuinely amusing devices.” (p. 59). After another stint with Solar Films which also only produced financial messes, Brunel directed The Man Without Desire (1923) for Atlas-Biocraft which was modeled on the paintings of Pietro Longhi, did good business in its initial West End run in February 1924, then quickly sank into obscurity, possibly due to resistance by film renters who objected to the film’s high art pretentiousness; Botting mentions its expressionist lighting (shot in a German Studio) and Venice locations. It’s a “Ripple van Winkle” story of an 18th-century count waking up 200 years later. Botting states the film is one of Brunel’s most impressive achievements.

Next, Brunel joined Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Film, where the director again felt that he was undervalued, plum assignments going to former assistants, like Graham Cutts. In 1926, Brunel was assigned to direct a war film, Blighty (1927) which detailed life on the British home front during World War II. Despite a low budget, Brunel and Montagu managed to craft an art film that garnered good reviews and was a financial success. He next directed The Vortex (1928) from a Noel Coward play, which flopped miserably in April 1928. However, his follow-up, The Constant Nymph (1928), proved to be his most successful film, both commercially and artistically, despite the fact that he was forced to work with novice director, Basil Dean. A 1929 readers poll for Film Weekly named Constant Nymph the most popular film of the previous year, while Blighty made it to 8th place. Despite being considered one of the great directors of British cinema in that moment, Adrian Brunel could subsequently only get work making quota quickies, most of which have not survived.

**Brunel directing *The Vortex* (1928)**

In a final chapter, Botting reviews Brunel’s ever more marginal career in the British sound cinema, until his death in 1958. Botting concludes: “Adrian Brunel’s career, which looked so promising at various points, was ultimately a failure in terms of his own ambitions and aspirations. This was partly attributable to the difficult and unstable conditions that existed within the British film industry, but also to Brunel’s own reluctance to compromise his artistic ideas. This led some in the trade to regard him as a highbrow, and his views on the lack of culture of industry bosses undoubtedly did not endear him to them.” (p. 209) This is a quick, informative, and entertaining read for anyone interested in the British film industry before it stepped on the world stage with the arrival of Alexandre Korda.

332: The Spanish Dancer (1923)

Archival Spaces 332

The Spanish Dancer (1923) on Blu-Ray

Uploaded 13 October 2023

I first saw Herbert Brenon’s The Spanish Dancer (1923) in 1996 at the Giornate del Cinema Muto, when the Festival presented a mini-retrospective, “A Kiss for Herbert Brenon.” I had first discovered la Negri in her German films with Ernst Lubitsch, most of which I watched on a Steenbeck at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin in 1974, the Summer I was researching my master’s thesis on Ernst Lubitsch and the Rise of Ufa. A year later as an intern at Eastman Museum, I fell in love with many of her American films, in particular Forbidden Paradise (reunited with Lubitsch), A Woman of the World (1925), Hotel Imperial (1927), and Barbed Wire (1937). My boss, Jim Card, was also a big fan of Pola’s – he had a thing for dark-haired actresses: Louise Brooks, Eleonore Powell, Sybille Schmitz. – and showed me Willi Forst’s Mazurka (1935), an Austrian production where Negri spoke and sang German. With Lubitsch, but also with American directors, Pola Negri exuded an exotic sensuality, her wild dark hair promising passion without restraint.

The color print with Dutch titles shown in Pordenone had originated at Amsterdam’s EYE Institute, which had made a copy from the original tinted nitrate print that had been donated to the then-named Nederlands Filmmuseum by a private collector back in 1957. At the time, this was not a lost film; numerous abridged copies of varying lengths had been in circulation through Kodak’s 16mm Kodascope Libraries. But it was also clear that there were still missing scenes, which made it difficult to follow the plot. In 2008, Kevin Brownlow announced he had a 16mm print of The Spanish Dancer, which included scenes that were not in the Amsterdam print. Another 35mm nitrate print with Russian intertitles was then found at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels but was missing two of its nine reels. But figuring out what went where would have been very difficult, even with a direct comparison of all the surviving versions, at least until in 2009 a shooting script was found at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences that listed all the intertitles and the duration of each scene. That paved the way for a new digital restoration by the Eye Institute that premiered at Pordenone in 2012 and is now available on Blu-ray from Milestone Films.

Based on an 1844 play, “Don César de Bazan” by Adolphe d’Ennery and Philippe François Pinel Dumanoir (and a subsequent 1872 opera comique by Jules Massenet), the “Spanish Cavalier” was announced by Paramount in 1922 as a big budget production, starring Rudolph Valentino and Nita Naldi and directed by Fred Niblo. At virtually the same time, United Artists announced that Lubitsch would also adapt the play for his first American film, starring Mary Pickford, Rosita (1923). Lubitsch had brought his script with him from Berlin, “Karneval in Toledo,” written by Hanns Kräly and Nobert Falk for Lubitsch’s star, Pola Negri; they had however had a falling out after their last German film, Die Flamme (1923). When Valentino pulled out of the project in September 1922, Paramount rewrote it for Pola Negri (who had arrived in America a couple months before Lubitsch), then cast Antonio Moreno as Don César de Bazan in February 1923. In May, an English director known for his elaborate costume dramas, Herbert Brenon was hired; a year later he would make Peter Pan (1924). Both Lubitsch’s Rosita and Brenon’s The Spanish Dancer were released within a month of each other in September and October 1923, which according to one source negatively impacted Rosita’s box office potential. Both films are big-budget extravaganzas, but critics have been divided about which version was the better film, even while a comparison of the plots reveals significant differences.

The digital restoration of The Spanish Dancer, now on view on Blu-ray, was supervised by Rob Byrne, Annike Kross, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi at Haghefilm. While the script indicated 253 intertitles, the Dutch and Russian language versions only had 172 each. Forty-eight percent of the final restoration came from the Dutch print, while the Soviet print contributed 29% of the new image; all 253 intertitles were recreated from either translations or the shooting script. Kevin Brownlow’s (Photoplay) contributed several crucial sequences from their 16mm print, as well as English titles that could be matched to the screenplay, while Lobster’s 16mm print provided one important sequence of 17 shots not seen elsewhere. The final restoration includes 1170 shots, while the script lists 1228 shots. It is possible that many of these shots were never produced.

Pola Negri plays Maritana, a Roma dancer and fortune teller who falls in love with Don Caesar de Bazan (Moreno), an aristocrat, who is sentenced to death by hanging in the Court of Phillip IV (Wallace Beery) and his wife Isabel (Kathryn William) for dueling on Mardi Gras. Meanwhile, the King has designs on Maritana, with a crooked minister (Adolphe Menjou) conspiring to have Don Caesar marry Maritana shortly before his execution, so the King is free to take as his mistress the newly minted Countess. Of course, this is Hollywood, so all ends well.

The pleasure of the film lies not so much in the conventional plot as Brenon’s ability to integrate monstrous sets and massive crowds with more intimate proceedings. Brenon loves to frame his crowd scenes with architectural details, for example, cutting between Roma dancers in a huge hall, framed by Gothic arches, and Negri reading the cards for Don Caesar. The Mardi Gras scenes in Madrid’s town square show literally thousands of revelers, dancing, and singing in what appears to be utter chaos, yet Brenon manages to focus viewer attention on Don Caesar saving a young boy from the captain of the guard. And finally, it is Negri’s star presence, visibly playing off her Roma roles in Lubitsch’s Carmen (1918) and The Wildcat (1921) as a passionate, unbridled, sexual being, which sold her to American audiences, making her an undisputed star, second only to Mary Pickford.

331: Budapest Classics Film Marathon

Archival Spaces 331

Budapest Classics Film Marathon

Uploaded 29 September 2023

The 6^th iteration of the Budapest Classics Film Marathon happened from 12 – 17 September with an eclectic mix of restored films, 48 of them to be exact. The Festival this year featured a focus on Hungarian filmmakers abroad, Alexander Korda, Emeric Pressburger, and Andre de Toth, but also the work of Andrew and Kevin McDonald, Emeric’s grandsons (Trainspotting, Last Kind of Scotland), Gazdag Gyula – my former colleague at UCLA -, Hungarian women directors, Kinuyo Tanaka, Sports films, Films about cinema, animation, and the grab bag Open Archives. Curated by National Film Institute Director, György Ráduly and his team, the Fiilm Marathon program strategy has been ever more successful, drawing huge crowds and sold-out theatres. There was also a three-day symposium, two days dedicated to archival work, one day film history, focusing on Hungarian filmmakers abroad. In the interest of transparency, I should note I was invited to Budapest to participate in that symposium.

*Two Girls on the Street* (1939, Andre de Toth)

*None Shall Escape* (1944, Andre de Toth)

“Familiar Strangers,” as the morning session was titled, opened with Steven Kovács guiding the audience through the truths and fictions in the biography of André de Toth, who fled Hungary in 1939 and became a cult director in Hollywood, turning out crime dramas and westerns with style, despite B-film budgets. There was a lot of discussion, spilling over into cocktail receptions of whether Endre Tóth was Jewish, half-Jewish, or not-Jewish; no final conclusion. Catherine Portuges followed with a talk on de Toth’s None Shall Escape (1944), the only wartime anti-Nazi film to visualize explicitly the Holocaust. Next, Galina Torma discussed art director Marcell Vértes, who began his career as a cartoonist in Budapest and would win an Oscar for art direction for Moulin Rouge (1953).

*The Private Life of Henry VIII* (1933, Alexander Korda)

The afternoon session, “The Kordas and their Circle,” included talks by Josephine Botting on archival traces of Alexander Korda in the British Film Institute’s collections; Korda’s career began in Hungary in the 1910s, moved between Berlin, Paris, and Hollywood in the 1920s, and settled down in London as one of the U.K.’s most important producers, the founder of London Films, after the worldwide success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Ágnes Széchenyi discussed the similarly meandering career of Lajos Biró, an exceptional Hungarian scriptwriter who worked for Korda and Ernst Lubitsch. Finally, Ferenc Takács discussed the British cinema’s nationalistic fantasies of Empire, directed by the Hungarian emigre Zoltán Korda, Alexander’s younger brother.

What this mini-symposium (and corresponding films in the program) demonstrated was that while there has been much research on Russian film exiles from 1917, and on German émigrés from Hitler, little has been published on Hungarian refugees, probably because most were viewed as economic immigrants, rather than as forced emigrants. Many Hungarians, like Korda, Michael Curtiz, Victor Varconi, Moholy-Nagy, and Bela Balasz fled after the failure of the 1919 Hungarian Communist revolution, others, like Steve Sekely, Lici Balla, Szöke “Cuddles” Szakall, Ladislaus Fodor, Emerich Kálmán, Alexander Laszlo, Lili van Hatvany, Andrew Marton, and Joe Pasternak, after anti-Semitic laws in Hungary barred them from employment. After the conference, Steven Kovács sent me his piece, “How Did Hungarians Do It? The Hungarian World of Ernst Lubitsch” (Bright Lights Film Journal), in which he argues that the contributions of Hungarian writers have been undervalued in Hollywood historiography, including writers, like Ferenc Molnár, Lajos Biró, Melchoir Lengyel, Ernest Vajda, Géza Herczeg, Miklós László, and László Bús Fekete. Furthermore, Hungarians penetrated all the Hollywood film professions, whether Bela Lugosi (actor), Laszlo Szusc (agent), George Pal (animator), Erno Metzner (art director), Miklós Rózsa (composer), Leslie Kardos (director) or Ernst Matray (choreographer). Then … there was a whole other group of Hungarians who made German films for the Third Reich, like Géza von Bolváry, Arzén von Cserépy, Josef von Báky, Marika Rökk, and others. Co-curator of the Marathon, Janka Barkóczi, has identified more than 800 Hungarians working in the film industries of Paris, Berlin, London, and Hollywood.

Thanks to the hospitality of the Hungarian National Archive, I attended a McDonald family screening of The Old Scoundrel (1932), Emeric Pressburger’s only Hungarian language film, and his last UFA film, before he emigrated to England. The film is a charming if stereotypical story of life on the Puszta with a faithful old bailiff squirreling away the money of his gambling-addicted Baron, and being accused of embezzlement, when in fact he has saved the fortune for the Baron’s daughter and heir. After the film Kevin and Andrew McDonald wondered how to interpret what or may not have been an anti-Samitic remark in a film written by their grandfather. A sentimental and nationalistic affair, the German version, Es leuchtet die Pusta was not released until February 1933 with much the same cast. Its female lead, Rose Bársony, however, would be fired by the UFA on 29 March 1933, along with two dozen other Jewish employees, while Hungarian star Marika Rökk would become UFA’s “Nazi Ginger Rogers.”

*State Department Store* (1952, Viktor Gertler)

André de Toth’s Two Girls on the Street (1939) follows the fate of two young women, one who works as a musician in an all-girl band after being disowned by her family due to an unwanted pregnancy, the other a peasant who comes to Budapest for work. Seemingly proto-feminist, it’s mitigated by the fact that the young farm girl is nearly raped by an engineer at the construction site where she works, then falls in love with him with a happy end: marriage. Not to mention the fact he’s at least fifteen years older. Much of the film was shot on location in Pest’s Újlipótváros district, which experienced a housing boom in the 1930s, featuring much modernist architecture influenced by the Bauhaus.

I was also happy to see Viktor Gertler’s State Department Store (1952), a Stalinist propaganda musical-comedy about a Budapest Department Store whose empty shelves are blamed on the CIA. Gertler had also been sacked in the infamous March 1933 meeting of the Ufa Board, despite having edited Ffa’s biggest moneymakers (Drei von der Tankstelle, Congress Dances). He moved back to Hungary the same year and started directing, but was blacklisted again as Jewish in 1937, living illegally in Brussels during World War II, then returning to Communist Hungary, where he resumed his career as a prolific film director. Despite its propagandistic elements, the film was not without charm, light-hearted with lots of singing and dancing along the Danube.

*The Whistling Cobblestone* (1971, Gyula Gazdag)

Finally, I caught two documentaries by Gyula Gazdag, The Selection (1970) and The Whistling Cobblestone (1971), which were amazing for their biting critique of Communist society. The short visualizes the selection process for a band for a Party event, while the feature concerns a group of high school boys who volunteer for a labor camp in the countryside, but are left hanging without work, because of absolute mismanagement. Both films reveal the astounding level of everyday corruption under Communism, the latter film being banned, but then released to become a cult film, championed by younger generation Hungarians. My teaching colleague, Gyula Gazdag taught for years at UCLA, before retiring in 2015 to Vienna, so I was delighted to see him again.

330: Foolish Wives

Archival Spaces 330

Flicker Alley’s Foolish Wives (1922)

Uploaded 15 September 2023

I met Arthur Lennig several times in the mid-1970s to late 1980s, mostly at IAMHIST (International Association of Audio-Media and History) Conferences, where he talked about his work on Stroheim and Griffith. He was really quite passionate about his research, that energy resulting in his Stroheim book (Lexington: U. Press Kentucky, 2000). He didn’t have much good to say about MOMA, I remember. Prof. Lennig gets a big credit from James Layton (and all the restorers in the booklet to Flicker Alley’s release of the restored Foolish Wives (1922). In 1972, Lenning attempted an early restoration, working from two different prints.

When Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives opened on 11 January 1922 at the Central Theater on Broadway, it had a length of 14 reels (14,120 ft) and was hailed by critics, like Harriet Underwood of the New York Herald Tribune, as another masterpiece by one of America’s greatest directors. It was the first film by Carl Laemmle’s Universal to play Broadway, the studio previously producing mostly low-budget programmers and shorts. Yet, immediately after the premiere, the film was cut down to ten reels (10,620 ft), then even further, due to censorship cuts demanded by State Censorship Boards. Irving Thalberg, Universal’s Boy Wonder had demanded the cuts because the film’s extreme length would not play in the Hinterlands, Universal’s usual market, therefore its astronomical costs could not be amortized. The film played for a year on Broadway but still lost money; von Stroheim’s reputation never recovered; he became known as a manically uncompromising and wasteful director.

However, that was not the end of the carnage; Stroheim’s first cut came in at 30 reels, to be shown in two parts on two consecutive evenings. In 1928, Universal planned to rerelease the film, probably with sound, re-editing it down to a mere eight reels and replacing the titles, then scraping the project. That version, which survived at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as a second Italian source, as Lennig (and Richard Koszarski) discovered, were all audiences had ever seen, until in October 2017, Rob Byrne of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Dave Kehr of the Museum of Modern Art decided to attempt a reconstruction which would approximate von Stroheim’s film. They found an Italian release print, which had also originated from the 1928 version, but from the export version negative; crucially it included the film’s climactic fire scenes missing in MOMA’s version. Working with a team that included James Layton, Kathy Rose O’Regan, and Peter Williamson, Byrne and Kehr were able through extended research in print archives to reedit the film closer to Stroheim’s vision, consulting an original shooting script and continuity, and Sigmund Romberg’s piano score, among other documents. Using censorship records they also recreated many of Stroheim’s original titles, while Foolish Wives’s color, consisting of tints, tones and hand-colored scenes was added, based on the Italian print and other hand-colored films by Gustav Brock.

Dale Fuller in *Foolish Wives* **(1922)**

A restoration plan was made for the 1,953 surviving shots and then restored frame by frame in a digital edit, the restoration premiering in 2020 at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The restoration team also made the decision to preserve both the film’s grain structure and other surface imperfections to retain the film’s original look. That 147-minute version (9,766 ft) has now been released by Flicker Alley, allowing for the first time a glimpse of what Stroheim’s film had achieved.

Iris Barry, later founding film curator at MOMA famously wrote in her book Let’s Go to the Pictures (1926) that Stroheim had taught Americans about nuanced acting, the importance of the tiniest gesture in establishing character. He not only directs himself, defining his character with minute changes in physiognomy, but also his costars, in particular Maud George, Mae Bush, Cesare Gravina, and Dale Fuller who would become Stroheim regulars in subsequent films. Indeed, Stroheim’s insistence on realism in the gigantic exact replica sets of Monte Carlo, the costumes, and acting was unlike anything American cinema had previously produced. It had taken 11 months to complete shooting, all the while R.H. Cochrane, Universal’s P.R. man announced the rising dollar costs on a giant billboard on Times Square. Stroheim was still shooting close-ups when Thalberg had the cameras confiscated; moving to Metro, Thalberg would next butcher Stroheim’s magnum opus, Greed (1923).

**Maude Geoge, Helen Hughes (aka Miss Dupont)**

Shooting his most important scenes first, so the studio could not remove him from the picture, von Stroheim played the lead role of the fake Count Sergius Karamazin, who with his two “cousins,” the Princesses Olga and Vera Petschnikoff, operate a counterfeit money scheme, while cheating at the Casino. It is implied that the thoroughly amoral Count not only sleeps with his cousins, but has impregnated the maid, attempted to rape the feeble-minded daughter of his counterfeiter, and seduced the wife of the American Ambassador. Karamazin can’t help himself, he is obsessed with sex and money, his ever-present monocle and elongated, burning cigarette exuding his supreme arrogance and egoism. Things, of course, all end badly for the crooks, but never had American audiences seen such unapologetic evilness and corruption, given that American films almost never strayed far from the boy meets girl happy ends. The film’s melodrama is however mitigated by the film’s realism, which Stroheim achieved through extreme compositions in depth, masses of extras in crowd scenes, and attention to details everywhere. Indeed, the film’s realism allows von Stroheim to peel away layers and layers of artifice to reveal the sordidness and corruption of a post-World War I society bent on pursuing pleasure for its own sake.

This film is a must-see for anyone only familiar with the mangled 16mm versions previously in circulation or anyone who has never seen a Stroheim film. Flicker Alley’s Blu-ray/DVD is also chocked full of bonus materials, including an original short from 1922 on the making of the film, several new documentaries, before and after comparisons, a photo gallery, and an illustrated souvenir booklet with more information on the film’s fate and restoration.