London After Midnight

[Jeff Wilson]

Rick Schmidlin's re-construction of this Tod Browning/Lon Chaney film debuts Thursday night on Turner Classic Movies. Those here who have followed the Ambersons reconstruction project would be encouraged to check it out if possible, as we can see another example of what can be done with the stills format to replace missing footage, this time to rebuild an entire film.

[Jaime N. Christley]

as we can see another example of what can be done with the stills format to replace missing footage, this time to rebuild an entire film.

I've seen it done well (Metropolis) and I've seen it done poorly (Lost Horizon, to name just one), so it could go either way. Looking forward to it, regardless, Jeff, tanks for the recommendation.

[jaime marzol]

..............

i didn't mind "lost horizon" reconstruction, actually i liked it. didn't like "metropolis reconstruction so much, and "a star is born" reconstruction was just piss poor.

watching tower of london is on the agenda.

if it's half as good as greed, it will be great.

maybe i did not see the same version of metropolis that this person saw. i saw one with georgio moroder music. and i did not like the original metropolis to begin with. maybe i need to go back and give it another shot.

[mteal]

I've seen two different reconstructions of METROPOLIS. One is Georgio Morodor's from 1984, which took a lot of liberties with the material, and added an MTV-style rock score to it, but made creative use of stills and tinting, and is generally fun on it's own terms. The other is the new restoration done last year by the Munich Film Institute, which is much more faithful to Lang's original conception - it uses the original music score, which is a revelation in itself - and is much more discreet in it's depiction of the missing scenes. Too discreet in fact, for my taste. Stills were not used and the missing footage is represented by black title cards saying things like, "the real Maria gets attacked by the angry mob but manages to escape". This is a more respectful, but somehow less interesting approach.

I think the optimal METROPOLIS reconstruction probably lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Rick Schmidlin's version of GREED is probably the best reconstruction of a silent film I've seen so far. I'm also looking forward to LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT.

[Welles Fan]

I did not care for the Lost Horizon reconstruction either. I think the still photo method simply does not work for talkies. In a silent, since one is already used to reading the subtitles, the idea of reading about what is missing to the accompaniment of the appropriate still is not terribly unlike watching an intact silent movie.

Rick's work on Greed was remarkable, and the missing scenes were among my favorites in the film (and absolutely essential for the film to really work).

I will be checking out London After Midnight as well (or at least taping it), but I still wonder if a reconstruction of an entirely missing film is gonna work. At least we will get an idea of what the film was like.

[sergio]

I finally got to see Rick Schmidlin's version of GREED projected on the big screen at the National Film Theatre in London and it was an absolute revelation to me as I already knew the Stroheim film pretty well (or thought I did).

The four hours just flew by - it was magnificent.

I must admit that the use of stills in Ron Haver's version of A STAR I BORN isn't terribly convincing, although I certainly prefer it to the alternative.

The new restoration of METROPOLIS certainly looked very good when I saw it last year, but it was also frustrating in that it didn't use some of the stills that do exist, preferring to use text instead - in fact, there are a number of stills in the Moroder version (which I like to be honest, though it is very far from Lang's film, no question) which aren't in this latest version, which I think is a real shame.

We probably won't get LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT until next year...

What is the status on the AMBERSONS project then?


Sergio

[fantomas]

i didn't like LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT as much as GREED. i don't know exactly why it isn't really convincing but there are some points to think about.
first at all: LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT is neither the best chaney film nor the best browning film. so it's disappointing to find out that the legend is better than the real film was.
then: the film uses a lot of close ups. and these close ups need reactions in the faces, not only zooms in the same stills we just saw before.
at last: in my eyes the rhythm of the editing sometimes is not good, even some intertitles are too short (compared to the others).
in general i appreciate rick schmidlin's work. but in this case there were too few materials to get a better result. the mgm-lion in the beginning is the only moving image of a film which is a kind of motionless.
nevertheless of course it is better than nothing - now you have a much better impression how the original film has been. but, as i said, unfortunately you have to face the fact that it wasn't a masterpiece.

[jaime marzol]

.................

ambersons project moving along. we are to the diner scene.

it got a shot in the arm when i saw what mteal did with the porch scenes, and the major's buggy scene. very emotional stuff. when i receive this stuff, and get knocked out by it, it's easy to sacrifice living life and spending time in the editing room assembling these raw elements. as most know, this is a by-the-seat-of-our-pants production. we are not subsidized yet. we restore at home in our spare time.

this is an 'experimental version.' the final version will be made from this version we are working on now.

experimental because we are trying all kinds of things to see what works. you can't recreate missing footage, all you can do is represent it so the viewer gets a sense of how the narrative originally unfolded. there is no comparison to watching the narrative unfold in context. if tower of london has no narrative worth mentioning, then the restoration is in trouble because stills do absolutely nothing to advance facial expressions, etc. ambersons has an incredible narrative that needs to be restored.

who knows, maybe schmidlin's work on tower of london will shed some light on which way to go on our project. we have the extra sack to haul that ambersons is a sound film.

[Jeff Wilson]

I've heard for years that London After Midnight wasn't particularly good, but I am curious to see the reconstruction nonetheless. The American Masters series just ran a show on Chaney that was quite good, well worth seeing.

[jaime marzol]

...............

i saw the thing on chaney turner showed, don't know if it was the american masters thing, but it was quite excellent. only chaney films i've seen have been PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, UNKNOWN, HE WHO GETS SLAPPED, and the one sound film he made, forgot the name, and loved all of them.

also liked the chaney bio pic cagney made, MAN OF A 1000 FACES.

have heard about TOWER OF LONDON for years. even if it's not a good film, i'm curious what schmidlin (a subsidized restorer) did with it.

[Jeff Wilson]

The American Masters show was the same as the TCM one. As far as other Chaney, THE PENALTY is well worth looking at, and is available on a very nice DVD from Kino, which includes as an extra a tour of Chaney's makeup box, as seen in the American Masters docu.

[jaime marzol]

................

i programed my vcr to tape TOWER OF LONDON, and dreyer's VAMPYR. all night i looked forward to coming home and grooving on these 2 classics. loser that i am, i did not turn off vcr to put it in timer mode, and no groovy flicks. it's 3:00 am now, and i sit here broken hearted.

questions:

a) how was the restoration? was it anything different than greed?

b) anyone that got a copy of either one of these 2 flicks care to make a trade?

cinema_vortex@yahoo.com

[Welles Fan]

I watched London After Midnight and taped Dreyer's Vampyr (alas in slp mode). I've never seen the Dreyer film, so I taped it to watch it later.

I thought London After Midnight was worth watching to see what the film might have been like. After seeing the photos of Chaney's makeup for all these years, it was interesting to see it in context of the story (though I had an idea how the story would go, having seen the remake-Mark of the Vampire-several years earlier).

I cannot say that this project was as successful as Greed. At least we have 2+ hours of Greed in moving picture form, along with all those stills. The lack of ANY of the footage from L.A.M. made it impossible to get a feel for how the film was edited, how "fast" it moved, etc. It did appear to be a faster-moving version of the story than the talkie remake.

But, it is interesting from a historical perspective at least, to get an idea of what this extremely popular (apparently it was THE most popular Browning/Chaney effort) movie was like. Had I taped it, I don't think I would watch it very often (like I do watch Greed from time-to-time), but I am glad I got a chance to at least get a glimpse of a lost film. It's a good thing they took so many stills!

After London After Midnight, TCM showed the remake-Mark of the Vampire, followed by Vampyr and Nosferatu. All-in-all, an interesting lineup for Halloween.

[mteal]

I also taped LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT last night and watched it, appropriately enough, just after midnight. The stills restoration is very interesting, like a comic-book version of the film with music. However, I found it somewhat saddening too, because it wets your appetite for a film that apparently no longer exists. Besides facial expression changes, the stills also cannot convey Chaney's vampire walk, which was said to have inspired Groucho Marx's. Yes, I'm sure LONDON was probably no masterpiece, but from the surviving stills it is obvious that Chaney's vampire was one of his most remarkable creations. Therefore, it's unfathomable why there was only one existing print left by the 1960s (later destroyed in a fire).

[Harvey Chartrand]

If you want to see a great bowdlerized silent film classic that is as monumental a cinematic achievement as Greed, check out Abel Gance's La Roue (1923). I wonder if any attempts are being made to restore La Roue to its original eight-hour running time. (Von Stroheim wasn't the only film director back then who thought big.) La Roue now runs at about 150 minutes.