Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: Scott Lord Silent Film. The False Faces (Thomas Ince, 1919)

Scott Lord on the Silent Film of Greta Garbo, Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjostrom as Victor Seastrom, John Brunius, Gustaf Molander - the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film........Lost Films in Found Magazines, among them Victor Seastrom directing John Gilbert and Lon Chaney, the printed word offering clues to deteriorated celluloid, extratextual discourse illustrating how novels were adapted to the screen; the photoplay as a literature;how it was reviewed, audience reception perhaps actor to actor.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Scott Lord Silent Film. The False Faces (Thomas Ince, 1919)

The Paramount Artcraft publicity releases for 1918 divided their review into three columns, one announcing a "Startling Theory Suggested", another announcing a "Brilliant Leading Lady for Henry B. Walthall" and another announcing "Exciting Incidents Pictured in Production". (The starling theory was of a German UBoat submarine base off of Martha's Vineyard and as the present author was born and raised on Cape Ann, now and long since living on the Charles River, it remains entirely a matter of imaginative speculation.)

The script to "The False Faces" was adapted from a then current serial story printed in The Saturday Evening Post. "Irvin Willat directed the picture with unusual skill." The periodical Wid's Daily during 1919 wrote, "Adaptation of popular serial...offers plot of many complications suitable to screen presentation." Its direction was "responsible for numerous thrills in registering full force of dramatic climaxes."

Lon Chaney as well as having starred in the seven reel silent film “The False Faces”, during 1919 starred under the direction of Tod Browning in the seven reel film “Wicked Darling”.

Silent Film

Lon Chaney

.Lon Chaney Lon Chaney

No comments:

Victor Sjostrom

Victor Seastrom Swedish Silent Film More properly the headlines should read, "Garbo Talks, Seastrom Returns Home." Victor Seastrom, who had worked in the Swedish theater before pioneering in Swedish Film, returned to Sweden with the advent of the sound film, not to direct, but to act. As in Hollywood, the exterior of the Swedish landscape that had established Sjostrom, Stiller and Molander during the golden age of Swedish Silent Film, had taken the innovation of sound back to the proscenium arc of the interior with Molander managing the transition to dialogue centered films.

Victor Sjostrom

Several of the films directed by Victor Sjostrom use artistic experiments in camera technique conducive to conveying symbolic meaning and dramatically charged images, among them being Masks of the Devil, with John Gilbert, and the earlier Kiss of Death, made in Sweden. Victor Sjostrom had begun on stage as an actor in Sweden and appears both on screen as well as from behind the camera. it is an obvious tribute to The Phantom Carriage that Ingmar Bergman includes the actor Victor Sjostrom in a symbolic scene during Wild Strawberries. In his autobiography Images, Ingmar Berman regrets that his workbook to the screenplay to Wild Strawberries had been lost, but he continues to acknowledge the influence of Sjostrom as a director while he moved "spontaneously between different planes-time-space,dream-reality....the hearse that overturns with the coffin bursting open." Silent Film Victor Sjostrom