At the end of the 20s of the last century, one of the greatest revolutions of the cinema, if not the biggest one, was about to take place, the silent cinema had the hours numbered, the sound was already close to being born for the cinematographic art, an unparalleled change. In England, one of the directors who best knew how to direct films at that peak moment, was Adrian Brunel, whose career was a bit slow with that great revolution, because during the 20's it was his moment of greatest artistic brilliance. For this, one of his final films of that period, the briton adapts a successful and controversial novel by Margaret Kennedy, in which even Alma Reville, the famous wife of Hitchcock, collaborated in the development of the script. This is the story of some artists, one, a young musical composer, who goes to visit the other, old and in the final stretch of his life, who lives with his family, exclusively formed by women, in a remote cabin. The mature composer dies, and when a cousin of the family is going to take the girls to a study center, she falls in love with the young man; what the boy does not consider is falling in love with one of the daughters of the deceased. A film full of great stars of the moment in silent movies, with a direction certainly not extraordinary, but very correct, which is part of the work of a respectable british director of the silent era.
In a train, the young musician Lewis Dodd (Ivor Novello) travels to see an old master, retired in the austrian countryside with his wife and daughters. Upon arrival, he meets the beautiful Tessa (Mabel Poulton), his childhood friend, in addition to Antonia (Benita Hume), Pauline (Dorothy Boyd), daughters of Albert Sanger (Georg Henrich), the elderly composer, and the third wife of this one, Linda (Mary Clare). Lewis spends very good times with the family, they have dinner, they laugh, they get along, while Ike (Peter Evan Thomas) courts Antonia, but Albert dies suddenly. Ike and Antonia will marry, an uncle of the girls goes to the remote house, Tessa and Pauline will go with him to England to study; the daughter of this uncle, Florence (French Double), after a brief courtship of Lewis, falls in love, commits, and marries the musician, to the disappointment of Tessa. Weddings happen, already in England, Lewis is uncomfortable because Florence organizes meetings with her influential friends to benefit his musical career, the frivolity harasses him, while Tessa and Pauline, fed up with the english school, escape and go to their house; Florence receive them with reluctance. Lewis snubs Florence and her meeting with musical friends, humiliates her several times, while a powerful mutual attraction with Tessa is born, Florence notices it, but there is no turning back, the lovers plan to flee together, they do it, they leave everything; however, a tragic outcome awaits them.
The end of the 20s, and early 30s, more specifically 1929, with
The Jazz Singer, implied irreversible changes for the seventh art, in the form of the arrival of sound to the cinema; some careers ended, they abruptly came to an end as the artists could not adapt to such a change. Problems of diction for some actors, silent directors who could not make the leap to the sound -the giant Chaplin predicted that the arrival of sound was something temporary and without a future in the cinema; it was difficult for him to adapt, but he finally succeeded-, various reasons, many careers that were not the same again. In this context, just before that great change, this film is released, still framed, naturally, within the guidelines of the silent cinema, as we will see. To begin with, the film is characterized by having in its totality, moveless, static shots, there will be close-ups, general shots, the perspective will vary, but never the lack of movement, the eternal stillness of the camera, a null dynamism, an almost non-existent development; with the camera locations, also, it approaches the theatrical representation. The only thing that breaks warmly, timidly, that flatness and linearity in the narrative and visual language, is the employment, ephemeral, of some superimpositions of frames, in which we see the bell of the Sanger steward, and the musical notes during some interpretations, or the lyrics of the respective song; but apart from that, nothing more, the whole film will be narrated in a conventional and flat way. Being the arrival of the sound to the world of the cinema just about to happen, during the integrity of the film, will not vary that unfolding of the camera, static like a tree, and with the aforementioned exception of the succinct frames overlayings, that visual rigidity will not be broken.
To compensate for this somewhat sterile development of the camera, the acting quality of the actors was necessary, and of course the stars fulfilled with the work. We have Mabel Poulton, one of the biggest female stars in the decline of the silent film, accompanied by Ivor Novello, at the peak of his career, a sex symbol of the time, before the arrival of sound truncated his stardom, for the days in which the master Hitchcock would discover him for the year before released
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), perhaps mediated by Alma, his wife. The hitherto meteoric career of Novelo continued its course, here surrounded by women, reinforcing his image of masculine star, one of the main references of the british cinema, before of course that the sound changed everything forever. The decade of the 20 was the most successful for the filmmaker, making this patent in the work now analyzed, serious staging, and reinforced by, as we see, the flashing stars of the moment. Likewise, as in so many other films of the time, brilliance, greater ambitions and technical complexities -technical liberties, freedom of the camera, which, naturally and being just, would come successively in coming years- are sacrificed, to give preponderance to the drama, the drama that is represented is everything, the vicissitudes and tragic hardships are the center of everything, before whose primacy is dispensed any greater technical ornaments. It is thus in the movie preponderance of human beings, their actions, their avatars, over greater virtues, tricks or technical devices in the staging, and that is one of the causes why the picture is much more closely related to a set in a theatrical scene that to a purely cinematographic exercise, sticks more closely to the conception of the original work, the theatrical drama.
The drama is, by the way, a great human sketch, but mainly, a feminine sketch, numerous females, each one in their inner world, they are flourishing, discovering the maturity, the sexuality, the necessity and almost obligation to marry; many are the prospects but naturally Tessa is the main character, facing a severe duel with Florence. The women who discover a new world are the nucleus of the film, their father has died, the situation is urgent, they are sent to study in England and to avoid it, they can not think of a better idea than to marry, with different destinies each, from the butler of the family, to the wealthy Ike. Disparates are their destinies, as is normal in life, but the need is the same, marriage as a necessity, a way out to a radical change in their existences, they become women, life with the sisters has to change, to seek husband, live with a man, although only Antonia achieves it immediately. Something controversial and taboo unleashed the film, by the way, by the subject of some adolescents who discover in a relatively forceful way, for the time, sexuality and adulthood, although in the film that adolescence is diminished a little fot the older females featured. The females overflow the film, being of course the central duel the most tense, Tessa faces Florence, the naive young girl against the dominant and eager to rise socially Florence, in a contrasting and remarkable feminine and actoral duel. However, within the general trend of the film, one of the most interesting sequences is that of the concert, in which normality is broken, the monotony that hitherto prevailed unbreakably in the film, the distribution of people is contrived and of the camera, and the framing of those shots in a precise way, giving these sequences a nature that is noticeably different from the rest, a sequence that, together with the short ones of outdoors, are the most different from the film in the technical aspect. As it was said, although it can hardly be considered a masterpiece, the film is a remarkable exercise in silent films, british silent films, always supported by the great solvency of its stars in the cast; it is also important the picture because, after the arrival of the sound, and the decrease in production of Brunel, many of his sound films were declared officially lost, being considered today as valuable cinematographic gems to be rescued, so this feature is one of the last works of this great filmmaker that are preserved. Finally, the drama must have a tragic end, according to the nature of unleashed passions, jealousy, lack of love, frustration, poor Tessa can not enjoy the warmth of her beloved, fatally closing this appreciable film adaptation, by a director almost never mentioned between the best or most famous, but not in vain some critics try to vindicate and rescue his work.
At the end of the 20s of the last century, one of the greatest revolutions of the cinema, if not the biggest one, was about to take place, the silent cinema had the hours numbered, the sound was already close to being born for the cinematographic art, an unparalleled change. In England, one of the directors who best knew how to direct films at that peak moment, was Adrian Brunel, whose career was a bit slow with that great revolution, because during the 20's it was his moment of greatest artistic brilliance. For this, one of his final films of that period, the briton adapts a successful and controversial novel by Margaret Kennedy, in which even Alma Reville, the famous wife of Hitchcock, collaborated in the development of the script. This is the story of some artists, one, a young musical composer, who goes to visit the other, old and in the final stretch of his life, who lives with his family, exclusively formed by women, in a remote cabin. The mature composer dies, and when a cousin of the family is going to take the girls to a study center, she falls in love with the young man; what the boy does not consider is falling in love with one of the daughters of the deceased. A film full of great stars of the moment in silent movies, with a direction certainly not extraordinary, but very correct, which is part of the work of a respectable british director of the silent era.
In a train, the young musician Lewis Dodd (Ivor Novello) travels to see an old master, retired in the austrian countryside with his wife and daughters. Upon arrival, he meets the beautiful Tessa (Mabel Poulton), his childhood friend, in addition to Antonia (Benita Hume), Pauline (Dorothy Boyd), daughters of Albert Sanger (Georg Henrich), the elderly composer, and the third wife of this one, Linda (Mary Clare). Lewis spends very good times with the family, they have dinner, they laugh, they get along, while Ike (Peter Evan Thomas) courts Antonia, but Albert dies suddenly. Ike and Antonia will marry, an uncle of the girls goes to the remote house, Tessa and Pauline will go with him to England to study; the daughter of this uncle, Florence (French Double), after a brief courtship of Lewis, falls in love, commits, and marries the musician, to the disappointment of Tessa. Weddings happen, already in England, Lewis is uncomfortable because Florence organizes meetings with her influential friends to benefit his musical career, the frivolity harasses him, while Tessa and Pauline, fed up with the english school, escape and go to their house; Florence receive them with reluctance. Lewis snubs Florence and her meeting with musical friends, humiliates her several times, while a powerful mutual attraction with Tessa is born, Florence notices it, but there is no turning back, the lovers plan to flee together, they do it, they leave everything; however, a tragic outcome awaits them.
To compensate for this somewhat sterile development of the camera, the acting quality of the actors was necessary, and of course the stars fulfilled with the work. We have Mabel Poulton, one of the biggest female stars in the decline of the silent film, accompanied by Ivor Novello, at the peak of his career, a sex symbol of the time, before the arrival of sound truncated his stardom, for the days in which the master Hitchcock would discover him for the year before released The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), perhaps mediated by Alma, his wife. The hitherto meteoric career of Novelo continued its course, here surrounded by women, reinforcing his image of masculine star, one of the main references of the british cinema, before of course that the sound changed everything forever. The decade of the 20 was the most successful for the filmmaker, making this patent in the work now analyzed, serious staging, and reinforced by, as we see, the flashing stars of the moment. Likewise, as in so many other films of the time, brilliance, greater ambitions and technical complexities -technical liberties, freedom of the camera, which, naturally and being just, would come successively in coming years- are sacrificed, to give preponderance to the drama, the drama that is represented is everything, the vicissitudes and tragic hardships are the center of everything, before whose primacy is dispensed any greater technical ornaments. It is thus in the movie preponderance of human beings, their actions, their avatars, over greater virtues, tricks or technical devices in the staging, and that is one of the causes why the picture is much more closely related to a set in a theatrical scene that to a purely cinematographic exercise, sticks more closely to the conception of the original work, the theatrical drama.
The drama is, by the way, a great human sketch, but mainly, a feminine sketch, numerous females, each one in their inner world, they are flourishing, discovering the maturity, the sexuality, the necessity and almost obligation to marry; many are the prospects but naturally Tessa is the main character, facing a severe duel with Florence. The women who discover a new world are the nucleus of the film, their father has died, the situation is urgent, they are sent to study in England and to avoid it, they can not think of a better idea than to marry, with different destinies each, from the butler of the family, to the wealthy Ike. Disparates are their destinies, as is normal in life, but the need is the same, marriage as a necessity, a way out to a radical change in their existences, they become women, life with the sisters has to change, to seek husband, live with a man, although only Antonia achieves it immediately. Something controversial and taboo unleashed the film, by the way, by the subject of some adolescents who discover in a relatively forceful way, for the time, sexuality and adulthood, although in the film that adolescence is diminished a little fot the older females featured. The females overflow the film, being of course the central duel the most tense, Tessa faces Florence, the naive young girl against the dominant and eager to rise socially Florence, in a contrasting and remarkable feminine and actoral duel. However, within the general trend of the film, one of the most interesting sequences is that of the concert, in which normality is broken, the monotony that hitherto prevailed unbreakably in the film, the distribution of people is contrived and of the camera, and the framing of those shots in a precise way, giving these sequences a nature that is noticeably different from the rest, a sequence that, together with the short ones of outdoors, are the most different from the film in the technical aspect. As it was said, although it can hardly be considered a masterpiece, the film is a remarkable exercise in silent films, british silent films, always supported by the great solvency of its stars in the cast; it is also important the picture because, after the arrival of the sound, and the decrease in production of Brunel, many of his sound films were declared officially lost, being considered today as valuable cinematographic gems to be rescued, so this feature is one of the last works of this great filmmaker that are preserved. Finally, the drama must have a tragic end, according to the nature of unleashed passions, jealousy, lack of love, frustration, poor Tessa can not enjoy the warmth of her beloved, fatally closing this appreciable film adaptation, by a director almost never mentioned between the best or most famous, but not in vain some critics try to vindicate and rescue his work.
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