Month: August 2023

A cheesy romance, a seaside class-war, a vehicle for the biggest female star of the time

The actual top film of 1914 was an epic 23-part serial called The Million Dollar Mystery, which it turns out is lost (how do you lose 46 reels of smash hit movie history, I find myself wondering?). So, I watched the second-highest-grossing film of that year instead.

Black and white photo of actor Mary Pickford, sad and barefoot, sitting on the floor of her shanty home in the 1914 film Tess of the Storm Country
TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY, EDWIN S. PORTER, FAMOUS PLAYERS FILM COMPANY, 1914, 88 MINUTES.

You’ll definitely like Tess of the Storm Country, but only because of absolutely magnetic Mary Pickford – in feisty waif mode, right at the centre of it – owning the whole thing really. She’s surrounded in this cheesy melodrama by many big slabs of men, implausible blocks of motion picture timber – all tragically rendered exactly identical (apart from their hats) by Pickford’s brilliance.

Three male characters from 1914 film Tess of the Storm Country, including, at right, the film's villain, a miserable capitalist called Deacon Elias Graves, who is joyfully reading the text of a law he's just had passed that will make life harder for the landless squatters on his beach-front land

They are either utterly unconvincing landless fishermen or slightly-more-convincing heartless landowners. The miserable, small-town capitalists involved live in the big house above the beach and resent the presence of the squatters below. The film was shot in Santa Monica and Del Mar, so this could literally be the house that Robert De Niro seemed so unattached to in Heat.

Robert De Niro, in silhouette, looks out of over the ocean from his modernist apartment in Michael Mann's film Heat

Of course, this big house is really a classic bourgeois pile, with a columned entrance and a carriage drive, indicating prosperity and respectability (surely demolished and replaced a dozen times since). It menacingly overlooks the strand where the fisherfolk’s makeshift camp cowers.

Two hefty gamekeepers holding a gun menace a fisherman they've detained on a rocky beach
Gamekeepers

Doing the actual menacing, down there in the lower, realm close to the sea, are various thugs in heavy suits – they are gamekeepers – circulating authentically, armed and dangerous, on the beach and in the squatters’ camp. In the exalted upper section of the narrative swooning ladies in hats and some callow students are also present. The intermixing of these two realms becomes a plot point.

The Great Train Robbery’s famous final shot

Tess of the Storm Country was directed by Edwin S Porter, a veteran who’d made his name with the extraordinary The Great Train Robbery. Pickford, who by this time was already essentially co-directing the films she was in, was unhappy with his old-fashioned ways. The Great Train Robbery was the absolute state of the art when it came out. But that was over ten years earlier and the haphazard, static, flat scene-making we see here was already very out-of-date.

The story is flat too, based on a best-selling news-stand romance by Grace Miller White. Pickford apparently disliked the crudity of this standard-issue morality tale – featuring the staples of the era’s melodramas: dignity in poverty, illegitimacy and extra-marital sex, love between classes, murder and a wrongly-convicted man. Hypocricy in authority also makes an appearance. She recognised a hit when she saw one, though, and signed on without further objection.

TV mobster Tony Soprano smokes a cigar in his swimming pool. He looks menacingly at the camera
Conflicted plutocrat

In movies of this period the wealthy could still be depicted as unproblematically wicked. These are not the ‘complicated’ villains of later eras, nor the conflicted plutocrats or tormented mobsters of post-depression or neoliberal America. These are simply capitalist thieves, exploiters of the vulnerable. In this film (as in others of the period) our principle villain, the head of the wealthy family at the top of cliffs, literally whips Pickford’s character Tessibel.

Tessibel Skinner (Mary Pickford) collapses, whipped by wicked businessman Elias Graves (William Walters). A distressed woman enters from the rear to try to stop him

It’s wooden but sometimes it’s actually clumsy too. There’s an arresting scene where Pickford sics a (very old and gentle-looking) dog on one of her gentleman harassers. She sends the dog off out of the left-side of the frame and, bewilderingly, it arrives, barely slathering, at its victim’s location also out of the left-side of the frame. Pickford then sets off by the same filmically impossible route, arriving in time to steal her pursuer’s gun and depart, with the dog, out of the right-side of the frame.

Inter-title from 1914 film Tess of the Storm Country reads, in dialect: "I know we ain't married, Ben, but yer ain't never kissed our baby since he cum."

The film was a massive hit, yielding many times its $10,000 budget. Pickford told a biographer it was “the beginning of my career.” She’d been making films for five or six years, including 75 for D.W. Griffith, so this is meaningful. It was one of the first movies to be made in the emerging Hollywood creative complex and the beaches are all Californian. The community described, though, is somewhere on the New England coast or perhaps even in the old country – the hokey dialect in the intertitles is something between West Country English and Newfoundland Irish. Or something.

Bus drivers, bus conductors and the spirit of Tobruk in Sloane Square

Loyalty, respect and transgression on the number 10s.

Black and white photo taken through the window of a London bus showing part of an older open-platform Routemaster bus in the background, a passenger visible through the smeary glass

I’ve been reluctant to share this story over the years because I’ve always suspected it’s a bit too perfect and that it might be an urban myth or bus crew folklore or something – a story passed around by bus conductors – but, thinking about it, my mum didn’t do that sort of thing, so here it is…

In the 1950s my mum and dad were both London bus conductors. It’s how they met – at Vauxhall bus garage. My mother, Bridie, from Ireland and not long out of her ATS uniform and my dad, George, from South London, between the river and the Elephant. He was a young lad, three years younger than her but they were both in their twenties.

Black and white photo of a young George Bowbrick, wearing his London bus conductor's uniform and Brylcreme in his hair, sitting in the driver's seat of a bus - in the early fifties
George Bowbrick, bus conductor, apparently pretending to be a driver. This is not his story

There were so many stories from that period. I imagine working on the buses is all stories, even now. My dad was the storyteller in the family so most of them were his but mum used to tell this one story that I always felt was so rich in meaning – about the period, about the people she worked with, about London and working life and all that.

My parents worked on the 10s and the 73s, both long routes that ran right through town. I’m pretty sure the number 10 went from Vauxhall to Kings Cross (via Victoria) and then out into the Eastern suburbs – Wanstead, Woodford and so on (bus nerds, correct me).

Black and white photo of a young Bridget (Bridie) Bowbrick in the early fifties, wearing a spotted party dress and a cardigan, handbag hooked over her right arm, smiling quizzically
Bridie Bowbrick, née Quirke, bus conductor. This is her story

Along the busy bit of the route – through the West End – the buses were crowded almost the whole time and they ran frequently – at the busiest times of day they’d leave the garage every 90 seconds or two minutes. London’s population had peaked in 1939 but even in 1951 it was still above eight million. It was teeming with working people day and night.

A lot of mum and dad’s stories centred on the strange, sometimes quite intense relationships the conductors had with their drivers. It was a partnership and a hierarchy. The driver was the boss, captain of the ship, sometimes a father figure, and the conductor was a kind of apprentice – often younger and less experienced. The war had thrown everything in the air, of course, as it had before. Women had entered the bus service to cover for conscripted men and then, afterwards, many men brought the driving skills they’d acquired in the forces back to the buses. Drivers, consequently, in this period, were often literally battle-hardened military men. They’d driven tanks and ambulances and trucks in theatres of war all around the world.

According to mum, these men were fascinating and charismatic – fearless and sometimes a bit unhinged. The way my mum put it, if you’ve been chased by Nazis across the Libyan desert you probably feel a bit less concern for what you’re told to do by a man with a notebook and a peaked cap. Managers and inspectors deferred to these men, left them to it.

So this story takes place on a number 10 going approximately North, in the early evening. The route’s still busy with commuters, it’s dark and it’s raining. My mother’s on the platform. Behind her, bunched up by traffic and rain, she can see five other 10s, in a line going back down the Kings Road. This is the worst-case scenario. Her bus is at the front of a convoy of others, during rush hour and in the pouring rain.

Bus conductors hate this. If you’re at the front of the convoy, all the crews behind you will make it their business to keep you there – that way you get to every stop first and have to pick up all the passengers and, of course, take all the fares, fold all the pushchairs, shove all the luggage into that space under the stairs, help all the pensioners into their seats by the platform…

Meanwhile, if they’re lucky, the buses behind won’t have to pick up more than a handful of passengers and their conductors can continue to lounge at the back of their half-empty buses all the way through town, watching the city go by. There are various strategies for dealing with this terrible situation if you’re the crew at the front – you can stall and wait a bit longer at each stop or try to persuade passengers to hang on for the next one – “the one behind’s empty!”

But ultimately it’s not up to you. The drivers behind will make a superhuman effort not to pass you – it is, after all, their duty to their conductors. And these are very loyal men, as I’ve already explained, men schooled by war, by years in the cabin of an armoured car or at the wheel of an ammo truck. They will not yield.

A London Transport RTL1125 bus waiting for a new crew from Gillingham Street, probably in the 1950s
This number 10 is of the right vintage – it could even be the one in Bridie’s story. It’s from London Bus Route Histories.

So, my mother and her driver – I’m pretty sure his name was Len, a Desert Rat – communicating through the bus crew’s code of taps with the conductor’s budget key or by banging on the roof of the cab – are resigned to their fate. The whole schlepp through the West End will be a nightmare and it will not ease up till the quieter roads beyond when the drivers behind might finally give up their stations in the convoy and generously overtake, waving sarcastically as they go.

But, on this occasion, on this cold and rainy night, Bridie’s driver has a better idea. Sloane Square is coming up and he has a plan to get out of this bind. All six buses are now in a tightly-packed convoy with no gaps. The scene is set for an audacious escape. Our driver is going to do something so bold, so wrong (so in contravention of the rules in the drivers’ handbook) that he will be remembered for it for years afterwards – and quite possibly disciplined for it, if anyone can pluck up the courage to do so.

Map of Sloane Square area in London with the route of the No 10 bus (now defunct), from Kings Road, through the square and along Eaton Square shown overlaid
Pretty sure this is the correct route through Sloane Square

He doesn’t tell Bridie about his plan – there’s no code he could use to communicate this kind of transgression anyway – he just does it. The bus enters Sloane Square and proceeds clockwise around the oblong, past Peter Jones but then, instead of exiting the square in the prescribed manner, through Eaton Square and up to Victoria, he does the unthinkable and continues round the square, past the Royal Court, past the tube station and on round. You’ve already guessed it. His plan is to join the back of the convoy, escaping from the bind in one brilliant, incisive move, bold like he’s back at Tobruk. And this is a bold move. In the code of the buses there’s really no greater transgression that diverging from your route (or even getting out of timetable order). It’s right at the top of the list. If they were seen they’d be in real trouble, and the driver might even be dismissed. And it’s worse – there are very often inspectors at Sloane Square. This is high risk.

The thing is, though, it doesn’t work. Our driver doesn’t break out. He doesn’t break out because driver number two sees the first one dodge the exit from the square, instantly divines his plan and – I told you they were bold – follows! So now two buses have broken the rules and two have headed back round the square. And, obviously, the third bus follows too. And it goes on, no one backs down. The fourth, the fifth, the sixth – they all follow!

They don’t stop at one circuit either. The whole convoy is now, like a big, red fairground ride, going round and round Sloane Square. And this is now a game of chicken. The first driver to lose his cool and turn off the square will inherit all the passengers for the rest of the journey across town. He will dump his conductor right in it and there will be hell to pay. It’s a matter of honour.

This is now all a bit wild, unprecedented, a thrill for all involved. The conductors are all hysterical – shouting to each other as they circle the square. The way my mum put it, this was a career high and the absolute peak of naughtiness in her whole respectable working life. She was giddy with excitement, giggling on the platform, swinging out as the bus took the corners of the square. She told me they made several circuits – passengers beginning to yell and complain, ringing the bell – before one of the drivers gave it up and turned North.

But the thing is, it wasn’t Len! It was one of the other drivers and Bridie was liberated, relegated to third or fourth place in the line of buses. Her heroic driver had taken an enormous, bold chance to save her a bit of work on a miserable Winter’s night. You can imagine what this did for their bond.

  • I’d love to have met Len – mum and dad stayed friends with a lot of their old friends from the buses – but my mother told me he died not long after this.
  • If you ever jumped onto the second or third bus in a convoy like this you’ll remember the disorienting experience of getting the bottom deck to yourself while the bus in front is so full it’s popping rivets.

A visionary work of art, a hateful apologia for slavery and Jim Crow… and a really bad film

The Birth of a Nation was the top-grossing film of 1915…

Actress Lillian Gish is at the head of a huge group of hooded KKK men in D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic film The Birth of a Nation

THE BIRTH OF A NATION, D.W. GRIFFITHS, DAVID W. GRIFFITH CORP., 1915

So I did it, I watched the whole thing. I felt obliged to, as part of my project to watch every top-grossing film since 1913 – 110 years of Summer blockbusters.

This one’s obviously different from the other films on the list. A cause célèbre, a landmark in the emergence of a new, assertive, 20th Century racism, perhaps the most famous revisionist text in history. Everything I’d ever read about The Birth of a Nation led me to believe that it was a brilliant work of art that happened to be ugly and immoral, but that’s not quite it – the film’s certainly an appalling document but, I’m now persuaded, it’s a second-rate film too.

The Birth of a Nation is obviously and in many ways a groundbreaking work – it’s the first 12-reeler (over three hours in length), it’s a complex multi-threaded narrative that sets a family drama against the epic of a country’s self-creation, it’s ambitious, self-confident and totalising.

The back-and-forth between claustrophobic living room and battlefield, rural shack and columned state capitol, tense close-up and chaotic crowd scene – is expansive and grandiloquent. The canvas is the whole history of the United States, the whole of the post-emancipation era. Griffith obviously saw himself as a Tolstoy or a Victor Hugo for the civil war and the reconstruction.

An example of the vignette technique used by D.W. Griffith in his 1915 film The Birth of a Nation - a close-up of man is seen inside an oval vignette against a black background

And the film is certainly packed with new storytelling techniques. Griffith obviously had a kind of technical intuition that’s hardly been matched since. The list of techniques we see for the first time here is long: deep-focus shots where action takes place at different depths; huge scenes in which an enormous cast is choreographed with precision; close-ups that expose character and explain motive. Montages that alternate intimate and overwhelming scale. Sets and locations are used cleverly and there’s an extraordinary sensitivity to mise-en-scène – scenes that are constructed with elaborate care at every scale.

There are breakneck moving cameras, multi-camera shots, aerial shots, mind-bending vignettes that isolate action and emotion, superimpositions and double-exposures (the bewildering final sequence that features the devil and Jesus in quick succession depends on several techniques that I feel certain are brand new).

But other aspects of the film – before we even get to its irredeemable nastiness – are odd, old-fashioned, clumsy, maddening even. Acting is uneven, stagey, 19th-Century. Performers sometimes look like they’re barely directed (especially in the big scenes). And before you argue that this is 1915, before the conventions of screen performance had solidified, contrast this film with the sophistication and subtlety of Traffic in Souls, a six-reeler that was 1913’s top grossing movie.

Still from D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation - a scene recreating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Interleaved with the narrative, there are some fascinating and awkward tableaux, in which scenes from the history of the period – including Lincoln’s assassination – are carefully re-staged, with actors holding static poses for an achingly long time, before the action proceeds, absurdly. These odd, static scenes – reminiscent of tuppenny fairground dioramas – are introduced with portentous intertitles (and every card bears the prominent brand of the Griffith Studio and a big logotype, just in case we forget the source of this brilliance).

And then there’s the nastiness. Beyond the grotesque and unrelieved racism that seems almost impossible to account for even from over 100 years later, we encounter an incoherent and parochial morality, a grim misanthropy masquerading as love of people and nation. The nearest thing to politics here is a kind of domestic-scale feudalism – desperate, scrabbling, landowner revanchism. Some have tried to characterise the Ku Klux Klan idealised in the Birth of a Nation as embodying some kind of benign collectivism; community volunteers turned bad – but this theory is weak and excuses the self-conscious brutality of the group and its programmatic suppression of black people. Their Christianity – which is prominent – is a deformed, dehumanised settler creed.

And, necessarily perhaps, there’s not a single sympathetic character – no one you could think of as the film’s hero or heroine. The hundreds of black actors and extras never escape caricature – they are universally monsters or idiots. The dozens of black-face actors – some made-up in paler tones to represent ‘mulattos’, most required to produce debased or retarded or violent – form a kind of shameful battalion. Lillian Gish, one of Hollywood’s first huge stars, never less than 100% committed to the drama, is asked to yell and howl and make terrifying gestures of fear and hysteria – to embody hatred.

Silent actress Lillian Gish screams at a window in D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of the Nation. In the background an actor in black-face grimaces

Griffith gives us multiple close-ups in this new style, bringing the camera as close as the optics of the period would permit – and uses vignettes to take us even closer – but the faces he asks us to contemplate are in almost every case bizarrely twisted and tormented – gurning, hysterical, weirdly sexualised, hate-filled, terrified. It’s a bizarre detail, and one I initially doubted (am I over-reading this?). Silent movies obviously require some degree of mugging, emoting, swooning, declaiming – but actors’ faces in this film are either mild and expressionless or wildly over-producing, often animalistic.

Actors are asked to make faces from a mediaeval tableau of hell. It’s one of the most striking aspects of the film, an unavoidable difficulty. The characters we come so close to and spend so much time with repel us. We leave the film indifferent to or hating Griffith’s many principle characters – even the children, even the luminous Gish.

The Birth of a Nation has spawned a whole industry of film analysis, hundreds of books and dissertations and a never-ending stream of newspaper op-eds and features, right up to the present day. When you hear a ‘debate’ about whether slavery was really that bad you’re hearing the continued influence of Griffith’s inversion of antebellum reality.

Worse, its remarkable, out-of-proportion contribution to the culture of Jim Crow reinforced segregation and probably lengthened the battle for black civil rights. At the fringes, the film continues, preposterously, to provide cover for the KKK and its culture of permanent terror. And, as a film, I want to confirm, it does not come close to redeeming itself or its creator and, in fact, is never less than horrifying and infuriating.

An organised crime drama with a dramatic police raid and an ultra-modern remote surveillance storyline

It’s called Traffic in Souls and it’s an extraordinarily modern movie – a prototype for a whole new category

Still from 1913 film Traffic in Souls, showing criminals and victims gathered at the police station after the raid
Bang to rights – the pimps and crims face their accusers down at the precinct
TRAFFIC IN SOULS: WHILE NEW YORK SLEEPS, GEORGE LOANE TUCKER, UNIVERSAL, 1913

Here’s my latest Quixotic project. I’m going to watch the top-grossing film from every year since 1913, which is when they started recording that sort of thing. I say Quixotic because this is the kind of thing I do all the time and my grand plans don’t usually come to much… I’ve got a list on Letterboxd.

Anyway, the first film is essentially a pre-code exploitation flick: kidnapping, pimps and prostitutes, corruption and hypocrisy in high places. The theme capitalises on the popular dread in this period of ‘white slavery’, what we would now call human trafficking.

This film’s got everything: almost thirty years before the first recognised film noir, fifty years before all those gritty 1970s studio explorations of urban crime and degradation. There’s cross-border organised crime, the kidnapping and trafficking of vulnerable immigrants (Ellis Island is an early location), prostitution, money-laundering, high-level corruption, the hypocrisy of the urban elite, the tense meeting of old and new money (and a fancy sweetshop that turns out to be a front for the crime gang).

Advertising poster for 1913 film Traffic in Souls. Stylised, brightly coloured, comic-book illustration shows a man in a suit wielding a long whip which snakes around the frame, terrorising a group of four young women: "A powerful photo-drama of today! 6 reels, 700 scenes, 600 players. White slave trade of New York!"
6 reels, 700 scenes, 600 players

The film has a terrific remote surveillance storyline (surely the first?) that features an audio relay between offices, a not-very-well-concealed mic, wax cylinders, a kind of recording tablet that looks a lot like an iPad. Our boyfriend-girlfriend heroes work as a team, set up their kit – laying cable, hiding bugs, swapping recording cylinders – like they’re from CSI – it’s kind of disorienting to see this ease with modern tech in a film from years before the electronic mic and the tape recorder. A wireless ship-to-shore telegram also makes an important appearance (I can imagine the producers demanding more cool tech for the younger crowd). We really are at the birth of the communication revolution – the critical evidence in the case against our villain is a wax cylinder (although there’s no evidence of a warrant so I’m worried the case might not have held up at appeal).

There’s an ‘invalid inventor’ (the heroine’s father) who is essentially a sketch for Harry Caul from The Conversation and a dramatic police raid that’s close in scale and execution to the SWAT raids of contemporary police drama. Dozens of coppers, armed with night-sticks and axes, crowd into a room at the precinct where they’re briefed by their captain about the infamy they’re about to uncover (if he actually says “be safe out there” it doesn’t make it into the intertitles). They then stream down the steps out of the station purposefully and pile into a convoy of cars. Watches are synchronised, the operation is triggered by a rooftop lookout (although he just blows his whistle, really). The raid’s denouement is dramatic (no spoilers here).

A big cast includes every possible archetype of disreputable America – the procurer, the blowsy madame, the shifty pimp, the enforcer, the hard-working immigrant, the fallen innocent, the unscrupulous middle-man, the courageous cop working on a hunch. The procurers wear nice suits and straw boaters, the enforcers trilbys or, in one case, a splendid squashed pork-pie hat. Respectable ladies and whorehouse Madames wear the same, high-Edwardian corsetry and big feather hats. Men and women alike count big wads of ill-gotten cash ostentatiously, like Scarface, and move between street corners, brothels and fancy offices with the confidence of generations of movie hoodlums.

The villain here is a wealthy man, William Trubus, a morally-bankrupt confectionery mogul whose candy business is a front for prostitution on a grand scale. If his administrative workforce is anything to go by it’s a huge enterprise. We visit a bustling office and two brothels and assume the existence of more. Nothing backstreet about this operation.

In America this is the era of the plutocrat, the robber baron and the money trust. The year of release is right at the peak of the antitrust era, the year of AT&T’s first run-in with government. In the following year the Clayton Act came into force. President Taft , who had just left office when the film came out, was an antitrust President and action against the monopolists was central to Wilson’s post-war platform too. The popular press is alive with stories about their malfeasance and their comeuppance. Trubus may be a self-made entrepreneur (there’s a storyline about the family’s introduction to society via the daughter’s marriage to “the greatest society catch of the season” – a monocled gent with no personality) but he’s uncomplicatedly wicked. Are there any sympathetic movie portrayals of businessmen from this period?

Mary and Larry, the central couple, are sweethearts – shopgirl and cop – the kind of civilian-police pairing that went on to be central to dozens of movie narratives, although this is more of a loving collaboration than the kind of messed-up marriages of more recent cop movies, where plots turn on the damage done by the pressures of being a police, by the single-minded, round-the-clock pursuit of evil, by late-night stake-outs and compulsory bourbon (see Die Hard, Heat, Mall Cop, Thunder Road, a thousand TV cop dramas). The lesson from Traffic in Souls is that the couple that polices together stays together.

There’s a very visible absence in the film, though. The figure we don’t meet is the punter. Not a single John appears. The seedy rooms and bleak hallways of the various brothels are busy with maids, pimps and prostitutes but not a customer is to be seen. Was it too much for even a pre-code feature to include the actual purchaser of sex? Would it have spoilt the neat two-sided narrative to introduce a complicating third?

Traffic in Souls is a splendid, complex, big-hearted action movie, an essentially perfect 88 minutes of entertainment from a director who, if we’re honest, didn’t really break through in his other work. When I mentioned the film on Twitter, film composer and historian Neil Brand called it “a bona fide one-off masterpiece” and used the hashtag #BetterThanDWGriffith, which is intriguing, because 1915’s biggest-grossing movie was Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, so I’ll be watching it soon.

It’s on Amazon Prime and you’ll find it on DVD here and there.

  • I don’t have a good reason for this but I like the fact that there are two Irish immigrants in the cast: William H. Turner (the invalid inventor) who was from Cork and appeared in 46 motion pictures between 1913 and 1938, and Matt Moore (the cop) from Mayo, 221 pictures, between 1912 and 1958.