Silent movies - Falling Leaves

I had planned to look for some autumnal silent movies, but only found this one to have a vague connection to the season.
Actually I had heard about this film before because it's one from the Solax Studios directed by Alice Guy-Blaché - "Falling Leaves" from 1912 (original title: Les Feuilles chéant).

This is the plot (with spoilers).

First, we meet bacteriologist Dr. Earl Hadley who "exhibits the result of his wonderful cure for consumption" by showing off patients he has cured.

Then we're with the Thompsons. Winifred, the older daughter, is sick with consumption. When she collapses, the doctor is called in and the news are not good.
He lets the parents know that "when the last leaf falls, she will have passed away".

Little Trixie is very worried and tries to think of a way to help her sister. Suddenly she has an idea.

She takes a ball of string, goes outside in the garden, and starts tying the fallen leaves back up to the branches because, if the leaves don't fall, Winifred will get well again, right?
Just at that moment, Dr. Hadley walks by and asks her what she's doing. She explains and he tells the family that he can help with his "wonderful serum" which he happens to have on him.

Three months later, Winifred is so much better that she eats with appetite again which makes all of them happy, also Dr. Hadley who comes by to check on her.
Trixie happily pulls their parents out of the room.
As the "Moving Picture News" put it "The doctor restores her lungs, but takes her heart".

The movie is said to be inspired by O. Henry's short story "The Last Leaf", but if it was, only that leaf stayed and the fact that a young girl is sick, those are the only similarities. Maybe only the title was the inspiration?
The young artist in the story has pneumonia and is convinced that she'll die when the last leaf falls, but her old neighbor paints a leaf on the window to give her hope.

It's a cute film (even if we might not be used to the actors delivering their speeches to the audience a lot, especially Trixie can't seem to resist having a look).
Who wouldn't be touched by little Trixie and her idea? Well, and the happy ending of course.
Okay, the idea of letting a stranger coming in from the street injecting your child may seem a little suspicious to us, but we believe a lot of things in movies, so why not that?
Although it looks as if Trixie isn't a fan of needles ...

Tuberculosis was a very real problem at the time (it'll come up again in a post later this year). I'm sure people would have wished for such a miracle serum.
How lucky Winifred was to have her little sister, too.
I'd recommend watching the film even just for "The Solax Kid".

I have written about Alice Guy-Blaché before. She's one of the big film pioneers (female and male) and was almost forgotten, but she's worth knowing about, really.

Silent movies - Teddy at the Throttle

I know that this isn't a Halloween movie, but I had to make a last minute change. At least we have a villain!

You may know Gloria Swanson not so much as the silent movie star she used to be, but from the movie "Sunset Boulevard" in which she plays a former silent movie star.
Anyway, today I'll be talking about "Teddy at the Throttle" from 1917.

First the plot (with spoilers).

Gloria Dawn, her trusted four-legged friend Teddy, and her sweetheart Bobbie Knight live in the same building.
As does evil Henry Black. He's Gloria's guardian and Bobbie's estate manager (until he's married) diverting money to his own account. He wants his sister to marry Bobbie to hide that which would suit Bobbie's aunt who doesn't approve of Gloria but thinks Black's sister will help her climb the social ladder.

And Bobbie indeed falls for her immediately - he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer - despite just having given Gloria a ring.
Although Gloria reminds him of that, Bobbie can't resist "his new girl" and starts neglecting her, yes, he even tells Gloria to give the ring back when the sister demands it. 

Then Black is informed by Bobbie's lawyer that a new will has turned up saying that Bobbie only gets the money if he marries Gloria. If he doesn't, the money will go to Gloria.
Black is delighted to see Bobbie and his sister together and decides to marry Gloria himself to get to the money.

There's only one problem. Gloria doesn't want him.
At a ball, however, Bobbie leaves his love on the dance floor (after a hilarious dance) because he just can't stay away from Gloria.

Not allowing the plan to go wrong, the Blacks quickly separate the lovebirds again, but Gloria finds out about the new will and calls the lawyer for help. 
Meanwhile, despite a huge storm, Ms. Black and Bobbie elope by car, followed by Gloria who's followed by Mr. Black. As the car is stuck in the mud, Gloria manages to catch up with them and she shows Bobbie the letter. Of course, he changes his mind once again, but Gloria has enough and tells him to marry the sister.

Unfortunately, Black catches her, and to save himself from prison he chains her to the tracks to be run over by the train in which the lawyer is sitting (which they of course don't know).
Again, this is a comedy and if you want to read more about one of the most prevalent ideas about silent movies - the villain tying a damsel to railroad tracks - I have three posts for you on that trope in the sources below.
Gloria can't escape by herself and whistles for the true hero of this film - Teddy!

That must be some powerful dog whistle.

When Teddy arrives, Gloria gives him a note to take to Bobbie.
Both come to her rescue, but the chains are too strong.

Teddy leaps into the train with the note and the engineers stop the train, but not in time. Bobbie jumps out of the way, but Gloria is right under the train which snaps the chains under its wheels.

Gloria Swanson insisted on doing this dangerous stunt
of disappearing into a hole just in time herself!

Bobbie pulls Gloria out from under the train.
Black tries to escape when he sees that his plan has failed, but once again we can trust Teddy to do the right thing.

Black gets arrested and Gloria and Bobbie get their happy ending!

Ok, ok, I'll admit it. Of course, I chose this film mainly for Teddy.
That doesn't mean it's not interesting in other ways, even dark if you know the background of some scenes.
First, we have a spoof of the damsel on the tracks. Like the idea that there was nothing subtle about silent movies - keyword "overacting" - many of us probably have that trope in our heads. I really enjoyed reading the posts below telling me more about it.
Second, not unusual for early silent movies there are some rough scenes, but the ones with Swanson and Wallace Beery as Mr. Black are not all play. They were married at the time, but Beery had been abusive, so the marriage had already fallen apart. It makes watching those scenes harder knowing Swanson's fear and Beery's abuse are in fact real.

Nevertheless, this is a charming comedy and not as chaotic as the plot might suggest. My favorite bit is the over the top dance scene.
Honestly, I'm not sure if I would still want "fickle-hearted" Bobbie in the end, but he might grow up under Gloria's strong hand - she really knows what she wants and what not!

Now let's get to the really important stuff.
Teddy the Dog or Keystone Teddy (after Mack Sennett's "Keystone Film Company") was a 42” tall, 145-pound Great Dane who was in at least 60 movies, mostly shorts, from 1916 to 1924. He died in 1925 at the age of 14.
Wasn't he gorgeous?

Public domain via Wikipedia

Sources and further reading:

Article on Teddy:

Larry Harnisch: Mary Mallory / Hollywood Heights: Teddy the Dog, Mack Sennett's Best Friend. On: The Daily Mirror, July 6, 2015


Articles on the "Damsel tied to the tracks trope":

1. Fritzi Kramer: Teddy at the Throttle (1917) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, December 12, 2021
2. Fritzi Kramer: Silent Movie Myth: Tied to the Railroad Tracks. On: Movies Silently, March 12, 2013
3. Lea Stans: The “Damsel Tied To The Railroad Tracks” Trope Revisited. On: Silent-ology, September 29, 2026

Silent movies - The Haunted House

Hold on to your seats, ladies and gentlemen, it's going to get really scary now.
Please welcome Mister Buster Keaton in "The Haunted House" from 1921!

Are your nerves ready for the plot (and spoilers)?

Keaton is a bank teller.
And one of his co-workers is a crook who deals with counterfeit money and plans to rob the bank together with his gang and then hide in a "haunted house" in spooky disguises.
The morning goes by with business as usual, that is if you count getting money and glue mixed up.
Now if you think that isn't scary, you seem to have forgotten my toxic relationship with glue. I swear I yelled out loud when I saw this! 😉

Glue, glue everywhere,
hands, floor, bottoms, pockets, and hair!

At that moment, the gang turn up and thanks to the glue Keaton almost manages to thwart the robbery, but when the manager sees him with the gun, they all run after him.
He manages to escape and unknowingly hide in the "haunted" house, but he's not the only one. A theater troupe flees the stage after royally messing up "Faust" and being pelted with vegetables - guess where they end up.

So now we have Buster, the theater people, and the gangsters in the house, scaring and getting scared.
It doesn't help that the stairs keep turning into a slide so Buster has to find ways of avoiding falling down again and again.

GIF by nishaane on Tenor

This isn't the only surprise in the house, though. We have the exploding candle, a trap door, the "living" chair, and of course ghosts, skeletons building a real man, and the devil (Mephisto from the theater)!

Keaton runs and jumps and climbs and falls, but then he finds out that the "ghosts" are just men in sheets.
And finally the bank manager and police have also made it to the house. They fall through the trap door into the basement and arrest the whole gang thanks to Buster who has disguised as a ghost himself by now.

Before being taken away, the boss hits our hero on the head, though, and he's dead.
Two angels show him the long stairway to heaven which he walks up ...

... where he's refused entry by Saint Peter who pulls the lever and turns the stairs into a slide ...

... right into hell.

A helper devil gets to work poking Buster with a burning fork ... which wakes him up as it has just been a dream, but the fire is real!
The bank manager's daughter is very happy to see that he's alive and they embrace.

The two-reeler (runtime 24 minutes) is clearly divided into two parts, the bank and the haunted house.
While there are some fun gags in the bank, such as Buster's clothes being caught for hours in the door of the time locked safe (why didn't he try to take them off?), that part is quite repetitive with the different glue shenanigans.

"After searching everywhere else
the police found him where he was."

The second part, however, was hilarious thanks to Buster Keaton's energy. There were some great pratfalls and jumps, and I liked the choreography of the characters meeting or missing one another.
The main protagonist beside Keaton (and the glue) was of course the stairs/slide combo whose heavenly version may look familiar to you if you have seen the 1946 movie "A Matter of Life and Death" with David Niven (which I can recommend, by the way).

I loved the different ways Buster tries to avoid the fall down the slide by jumping up the last few steps, trying to slide down while it's still stairs, sliding down the bannister, even running up the slide!
So while it wasn't the funniest Keaton film I have seen so far - you also have to keep in mind this was one of the earlier ones - I still enjoyed it.

I hope I didn't scare you too much 😉

Silent movies - Eerie Tales

Today's film is sliiiightly longer than the last two and so is the post (sorry). We will stay in the Halloween spirit with it.
I just wanted to say that I didn't have one like it on my blog before, but then I remembered "Waxworks" - it's another anthology film, bonus point is it's also with Conrad Veidt (and Anita Berber and Reinhold Schünzel)!
Welcome to "Eerie Tales" from 1919 (the original title is "Unheimliche Geschichten" or "Grausige Nächte").

Here's the plot or really the plots as we have a frame story and five episodes within it.

We are in a used bookshop shortly before closing time.
There are three huge paintings on the walls, "The Devil", "The Harlot", and "Death".

As the shop owner has left, the three emerge from their frames and start reading.

1. "The Apparition" by Anselma Heine

Dr. Riedhammer walks through the park and helps a young woman who is assaulted by a man - her husband as she tells him later. They check into two rooms at a hotel. Although they feel attracted to another and kiss, he then leaves her alone as she isn't feeling well.

Riedhammer spends the evening with friends, but goes to the woman's room when he comes back.
He finds it completely empty, she is gone, all the furniture is gone. The wall looks like blood and as if the paper has been torn off it.

When he asks for her the next day, everyone tells him that he has checked in alone, and the room looks normal again, too. At the police where he also gets attacked by her husband, they also tell him that they are informed and that he has been alone.
He's beginning to doubt himself, but then he's told by an undertaker that she had been taken away secretly because she died of the plague that night ...

2. "The Hand" by Robert Liebmann

Two men are in love with a woman.

When she dances with another man, they get jealous, go home, and decide to roll the dice for the right to court her.
The loser can't bear it, though, and strangles the winner, then escapes after he has pried the dead man's hand from his sleeve.

Years later, he meets the woman again, she invites him to her first dance performance, but there he has hallucinations seeing his opponent. Then they invite him to a séance and the dead man comes back ...

3. "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe

A man is interested in a drunkard's wife. When the husband notices, he takes it out on his wife's beloved black cat, but doing so, he kills her instead and then walls her body up in the cellar.

The man hears rumors about the drunkard's wife having disappeared. He calls the police and they search the house. When they come to the cellar, they hear a strange wailing noise ...

4. "The Suicide Club" by Robert Louis Stevenson

A man joins a special club. You join the regular way, but you leave it only by death. Whoever draws the ace of spades, well, you know ... and unfortunately the new member is the "lucky winner".

The president locks him in his chair by pushing a button (don't ask me how that works) and tells him that he will die at midnight. Then he unlocks the chair and leaves the panicking man behind going through a passage in the clock.

And then the man dies, killed by the fear. Or does he?

5. "The Specter" by Richard Oswald

A cavalier has an accident with his carriage and is taken to a castle where he immediately starts flirting with the owner's neglected wife.

Then the husband has a plan ...

The bookshop owner comes back, shocked to find the three in his shop. He fetches the police and is relieved to see the them back in their paintings. When the policemen are gone, however, they come back to life and he runs off.

Let's have a look at the stories behind the stories now.

Anselma Heine was a German writer.
Her novella "Die Erscheinung" from 1912 has a lot of atmosphere and explores the Dr. Riedhammer's feelings when he first sees Johne Stevens in a cloud of dust looking like an apparition, then meets her on his ship slowly growing closer to her, and then his shock when Johne suddenly disappears. I was glad to find it online and really liked it.
As we have three leads, that episode adds the strange husband, who is just mentioned in the novella, and also leaves out the backstory.
In my opinion, it's the strongest and eeriest story of the five.

Robert Liebmann was one of the most successful scriptwriters in the Weimar Republic.
The story is a classic, a guilt-stricken man being haunted by his victim, but not before he meets the woman again who was the reason for his crime. Also, he's not the only who can see him.
A special treat is that Berber actually has a short dance scene in this episode. You may (or not) know, for example through the famous painting of hers by Otto Dix, that she was an icon in the Berlin clubs as a dancer and known for the scandals in her short life.

I don't think I have to say anything about Edgar Allan Poe.
Knowing the story, I was wary about watching this episode (while the animal abuse was toned down and no cat was killed, I still wasn't happy at all about the way the drunk husband treated the black cat in one scene).
We have another triangle to allow for the three actors.
The ending could have been more dramatic, but I thought it was okay given you couldn't hear the wailing cat.

I haven't read "The Suicide Club" (actually there are three stories about the club) by Stevenson yet, but from the synopsis that I skimmed they really just kept the concept of the club for this episode.
There's a very nice twist at the end.

The last story was written by the director and, how should I say it, it's not eerie, but seems more like comic relief to me.
Frankly, I thought it was boring because you mostly saw the cavalier and the wife smiling at each other weirdly, uhm, I meant flirting with each other.
I don't know what the director intended with this one, but think the movie would have been better off by putting the episode first or leave it out completely. The costumes are nice, though.

All in all, I enjoyed the movie. Putting eye makeup on Veidt would make any movie eerie, don't you think?
Seriously, though, he did a fine job. Schünzel, on the other hand, was a little too dramatic for my taste as the crazy or drunk husband. Berber was best as the cat loving wife (no, I'm not saying that because Gundel made me!).

Further reading:

1. Fritzi Kramer: Eerie Tales (1919) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, September 22, 2024
2. ?: Movie Review - Eerie Tales (1919). On: The Revenant Review, October 27, 2015 (interesting more for the part about the leads than the short review)

Silent movies - The Monster

I really put some time in today's movie by investing two and a half minutes! Talk about attention span, people ...
The short I have for you is "The Monster" from 1903 and is by Georges Méliès, so you may know what to expect. It's a kind of magic .... (admit that you sang it)

Here's the very short plot full of spoilers 😉

An Egyptian prince and a priest meet in front of the Sphinx during a full moon.
 

Please note that the Sphinx still has its nose 😉

The priest brings a decorated chest and takes out a skeleton which makes the prince turn away in distress.
Next the priest wraps the skeleton in fabric and it starts a strange dance during which it distorts, gets smaller and taller.

The priest wraps more fabric around the skeleton and when he takes it off again, it has been revived to a beautiful young woman. The prince can't believe it, he reaches out for her longingly ...

... but the priest wraps her up again, lifts her, and throws her at the prince who's shocked to find she has turned into a skeleton again, drops her, and runs after the fleeing priest.
 

Last week, I boldly claimed that the narrative probably wasn't the important part in these films. Yes, there is a "but" now.
BUT obviously there was more to the story. This film was supposed to have a spoken narration (remember that I mentioned a "benshi" or film narrator in the post on "Namakura Gatana" as well?) which is known from Méliès's catalogs (see the source) and which tells us that the skeleton is the prince's wife.
Has anyone seen "The Mummy" with Boris Karloff? He also tried to revive his love almost 30 years later and didn't succeed, either.
Let this be a warning to you.

People have been fascinated by the old Egypt for a long time and they still are today, in literature, art, movies, science (and I haven't been completely immune to it myself how one of my jewelry pieces inspired by Khepri shows (I hadn't planned it that way, but it's still one of my personal favorites)).

Now the question is - did the priest fail or did he do this on purpose? And who is the monster in this film? What do you think?


Source and further reading:

Fritzi Kramer: The Monster (1903) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, October 6, 2017