The White Shadow

1924, UK, directed by Graham Cutts [Assistant Director Alfred Hitchcock]

The streaming version of this film was made possible in part by the 2012 For the Love of Film Blogathon, and I'd urge you to watch the film at the National Film Preservation Foundation site, while it lasts -- streaming is an expensive business, and the site is unable to host the film on a permanent basis.

The White Shadow was originally a six-reel picture but only the first three reels survive -- or I suppose to be more accurate only the first three reels have been found thus far. The picture is in many ways a pretty standard melodrama from what we can judge, though based on surviving plot descriptions the potboiler aspects really kick into high gear in those lot reels.

I won't pretend to see too much of the nascent Hitchcock in what's available here -- my knowledge of his silent work is very limited, and there's a considerable gulf between the style of this film and 1930s sound films like The Man Who Knew Too Much (particularly when it comes to framing and camera movement); Hitchcock had learnt much in the intervening years, and the art itself had evolved. There's also another important presence, of course -- the actual credited director Graham Cutts, and while it's not hard to imagine Hitchcock's vision contributing to, say, the striking staging of the scenes in The Cat Who Laughs nightclub in Paris, or the effects that show Betty Compson in a dual role as very different sisters, Cutts was a competent and occasionally imaginative director himself, and shouldn't be entirely dismissed from the picture. Still, it's an intriguing glimpse into the great man's apprenticeship, and wonderful that such historical treasure still crop up from time to time in distant corners of the globe.

Hitch and Lye

This is a contribution to the (third annual) For the Love of Film Blogathon, co-hosted by the Self-Styled Siren, Ferdy on Films, and, for the first time this year, This Island Rod. Please read the posts, participate as a poster or commenter, and, most important of all, donate!

The cause this year is an especially fine one: the blogathon aims to raise the funds needed to put recently rediscovered reels from the 1924 film The White Shadow, a hitherto-lost component of Alfred Hitchock's early career, online for all to see Free of Charge.

The aftermath in Secret Agent

Though the discovery of several reels of The White Shadow in a New Zealand shed is understandably being celebrated as Hitchcock's most notable antipodean connection -- unless we count the backlot Australia of his film Under Capricorn -- there is at least one other New Zealand association buried deep in the master's filmography. Sadly, though in the spirit of this particular blogathon, the snippet of screen history on which I'll focus is lost to film viewers; in the event that someone can rectify the loss, perhaps with dusty materials from a London attic on this occasion, the film preservation community will have another coup to fête...

Len Lye, in movie villain mode

Back in 1936, as Hitchcock was putting the finishing touches to his film Secret Agent, he employed the services of a New Zealander filmmaker/artist by the name of Len Lye, who had been in London for a decade after making his way across the Pacific and eventually northwards, his perambulations the partial inspiration for his film Tusalava, which got the British censors in something of a lather because they just knew that Lye was up to something funny with his weirdly biological imagery even if they couldn't figure out quite what was going on.

Lye was very much an artistic polymath, in the midst of one of his most productive periods as a filmmaker at the time he crossed paths with Hitchcock: in the mid-1930s he made several wonderful and wildly colourful films for John Grierson's GPO Film Unit as well as advertising shorts for clients ranging from Shell to Imperial Airways, with the occasional foray into the commercial cinema. Hitchcock somehow came across Lye on the London film scene and asked Lye to try his hand at some special effects for the climactic train-crash sequence of Secret Agent. Roger Horrocks' wonderful biography of Lye doesn't go into great detail on the encounter between the two men, and most of the very many Hitchcock volumes don't mention Lye at all, though perhaps Secret Agent star John Gielgud, of whom more below, had a hand in arranging the encounter; equally, that GPO Film Unit experience surely helped open doors at the time.

In any case, however the two men ended up meeting, Lye delivered as requested, and apparently his efforts made quite an impression. As the train disaster unspooled, Lye created a colour effect in this otherwise black-and-white film that gave all the appearance of the celluloid itself going up in flames, to further underline the point that the sequence marked a radical, emotionally wrenching break for the characters -- the shattering impossibility of going back to the world before the crash. However, it had occurred to precisely no-one that this apparently very realistic visual trick might cause alarm for the unfortunate projectionist, who initially assumed that there was a fire in his booth.

The incident came to the attention of the higher ups at Gaumont British, who were concerned that audiences, well aware of the flammable properties of film at the time, would similarly panic when they saw Lye's trickery -- with potentially grave consequences (not an empty fear: as an example, I came across reports of a stampede at a New York cinema in 1913 caused when a film caught fire, with two women killed in the ensuing panic). Hitchcock was apparently quick to agree with the higher-ups request that the sequence should be cut, not least because he seems to have thought the idea was a bit pretentious to start with, although he makes use of a similar idea in Spellbound a decade later, with a couple of tinted red frames at a key moment. Hitch's  producing partner Ivor Montagu wanted to make a stand on artistic grounds -- or just because he wasn't willing to comply with the bean counters -- but once the master had made clear he wasn't too worked up about the cut, the sequence was inevitably if unfortunately discarded. Apart from that one test projection, the Lye-enhanced version of the train crash never seems to have been seen by an audience, not even the press corps, and so the Hitchock-Lye connection sadly remains in the realm of the curious anecdote.

Lye's signature from Free Radicals

Much of Lye's other film work has survived, and indeed the 1979 version of his film Free Radicals, reworked in several iterations after Lye relocated to the United States, was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2008. However, there are still key gaps, perhaps most notably his 1935 short film Full Fathom Five, which featured a pre-Secret Agent John Gielgud as narrator. Gielgud read three passages from Shakespeare over images from Lye's first "direct" film, where he manipulated the film stock itself to achieve his effects, a departure from the more conventional animation techniques he had previously employed. Full Fathom Five film is virtually lost, and other of Lye's works exist only in fragmented or partial form, while still other portions of his filmography are in need of preservation -- future projects all!

I can't help but spare a thought for poor old Graham Cutts, too, as film-lovers across the globe shunt him stage-left off his own project in favour of the youthful, yet-to-be-rotund Mr. Hitchcock (it's nice to see Cutts get a little bit of his due from David Cairns in this very blogathon). As much as I bow to the reality that the preservation of The White Shadow is a priority in large measure because of its illustrious connections, I'd argue that it's ultimately worthy of preservation in and of itself, even if it is of more limited interest as "a film by Graham Cutts" -- as an illustration of what was being made, and watched, in 1924.

Cutts has some history with the experience of being written out of his own films: The Sign of Four, his 1932 Sherlock Holmes adventure, is noted chiefly for the credits of a variety of behind-the-scenes American contributors who went on to greater things, though the film is a solid adventure with the occasional dash of genuine flair, and Cutts makes nice use of sound to generate suspense (in other words, it's pretty typical early sound fare, a little creaky to be sure, and the available prints are in parlous condition).

The Sea View Hotel, Accra, long past its days of glory

Similarly, when Cutts' 1935 Oh Daddy! is remembered -- which is rarely -- it's largely as a film to which Michael Powell made some early contributions rather than for Cutts' own work. Oh Daddy! is intriguing on at least another level, though -- it showed up a couple of years later in a colonial movie theatre in Accra, advertised with some fanfare at the Sea View Cinema as an attraction in December 1937, presumably one of many locations the world over where the by-all-accounts rather modest film was eventually seen. That's the kind of out-of-the-way, end-of-the-line place that films like The White Shadow eventually found a home so perhaps there's an overheated room somewhere in the Ghanaian capital yet to yield a treasure for a future blogathon -- or even just a copy of Oh Daddy!

Click on Hitch to donate!

Not quite a femme fatale

This is my contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon, hosted by the Self-Styled Siren (Farran Smith Nehme) and Ferdy on Films (Marilyn Ferdinand), to benefit the Film Noir Foundation. Please check out the various contributions - and most importantly, please donate!

Kathleen Ryan in Odd Man Out (1947, UK, directed by Carol Reed)

Before a film unspools, you never quite know what's going to pique your interest. Just after the credits of Cy Endfield's Try and Get Me (also known, aptly, as The Sound of Fury), Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) arrives home after an all-night drive which establishes his precarious circumstances, out of work in California after a long trek west from Boston. In a brief sequence that recalls Ozu's I Was Born, But... Howard walks through his neighborhood, surrounded by children, before striding up to the path to his own house. Inside, his wife Judy (Kathleen Ryan) and son Tommy await, and when the woman opens her mouth she has an unmistakable Irish accent - no stage brogue here but the actress's natural voice. I'm Irish myself, and my curiosity was immediately roused: I'd been searching for an interesting Irish noir connection, and it was only after I'd given up in frustration and set out in a new direction that I happened across what I'd been looking for all along.

Kathleen Ryan in Try and Get Me (1950, US, directed by Cyril Endfield)

I confess that before that scene, I had no idea who Kathleen Ryan was: her relatively brief career in the 1940s and 1950s was overshadowed in the Irish star stakes by Maureen O'Hara, and Ryan essentially disappeared from the screen after 1957, with few of her films enjoying a long afterlife. She should have been familiar to me from her best-known role, in Carol Reed's 1947 Odd Man Out, except that I hadn't seen the film, an omission I rectified immediately afterwards: Ryan's two performances form a rare bridge between American noir and its more fitful British incarnation.

Although the subject matter is crime and - mob - punishment, Try and Get Me is a film filled with consciences: Howard's own conscience, constantly gnawing at him, the Italian professor who tries to oppose reason to emotion, the sheriff who seeks to preserve the integrity of the law (it says much about Endfield's view of American society that he sees more honour among the officers of the law than among the gentlemen of the press), or the wife who tries to give a sense of the pitiful reality that led to her husband's terrible choices.

Judy Tyler is a woman beaten down by the worry of making ends meet, by the dashed hopes that lie behind her. The Tylers' journey from Boston has revealed that there's no California dream, and their new life gives the lie to the idea that the 1950s were a time of untroubled prosperity for the war's returning soldiers. Inadvertently or not, that Irish accent also suggests a longer journey, one made in response to an American ideal sold - in films as much as anywhere else - to the hopeful and the desperate across the globe. That's one of the most subversive aspects of Endfield's film: he's using one of the most powerful of American publicity tools to undermine the images of American prosperity and success so often seen onscreen (the previous year, Endfield's fellow blacklistee, and beloved noir director, Edward Dmytryk, cast Kathleen Ryan in Christ in Concrete, another examination of the harsh realities of the American dream).

Ryan's character is, for most of Try and Get Me, a background presence, remaining at home while her husband goes in search of work. Still, there's a lovely scene where Howard massages his wife's aching back: pregnant again and desperate to avoid the expense of a doctor, she turns to her husband for some relief from the pain, and the sequence gives a vivid sense of their life together. Judy leaves her home behind late in the film, determined to provide an alternative take on the tabloid headlines spun by the local newspaper. It's Ryan's strongest scene in the film: she reads haltingly from a letter written by her husband, a handkerchief balled in one hand, before finding herself overcome with emotion.

Three years earlier, Kathleen Ryan's role in Odd Man Out, her first film appearance, was another portrait of a woman living in the same house as a troubled man - the leader of "the Organisation," a stand-in for the IRA. Again, Ryan's character, Kathleen Sullivan, is a background presence for most of the film, stuck at home - despite her best efforts - while the men enmesh themselves ever deeper in illicit activity. Both films invite us to sympathize with morally compromised men - doing the wrong thing for perhaps the right reasons - while trying to give us a sense of the consequences on the home front.

It's presumably at director Carol Reed's request, but Ryan's expression in Odd Man Out is almost always downcast: she's often literally looking downward, or else remains below the eyeline of the other actors, as though she's subdued by the tensions around her. It's unfortunate, though, for her fixed expression makes it rather more difficult to believe that Kathleen hides deep passions, or that she's capable of inspiring similar passions, since her emotions seem entirely sublimated into a dutiful mask. Even later in the film, when she refuses to be bound by the injunction to stay behind closed doors, there's a dourness to her character that's at odds with the world-weary wisdom of the film's older female characters, though her mask serves her well in the film's shocking, self-immolating climax.

Ryan's own life was a world away from these intense working-class women, though she may have learned a thing or two about inner strength from her mother, Agnes Harding. Kathleen was one of eight children, and her father died when she was just ten, leaving behind a thriving chain of shops, the Monument Creameries, which Agnes further expanded - suggesting, perhaps, that the business skills belonged as much to wife as to the more celebrated husband, Seamus Ryan, who served briefly in the Irish senate. (The first of the Monument Creamery stores was on Dublin's Parnell St, and Kathleen's second film, Captain Boycott, features a brief appearance by Robert Donat as Parnell).

That business empire seems to have provided Kathleen and her siblings with a very comfortable upbringing: though her parents were self-made people from Tipperary villages, Kathleen grew up in the patrician surrounds of Burton Hall (the extensive grounds are today part of a mental health rehabilitation institute), and her 1944 wedding, to Limerick doctor Dermod Devane, garnered extensive coverage in Dublin's social columns. The family seems to have been well-connected in Irish artistic circles - Kathleen's younger brother John was a well-known artist and patron of the arts, while Kathleen served as the model for Louis Le Brocquy's Girl in White, from the very beginning of the artist's career (as of this writing, Le Brocquy is still alive, closing in on a century of life).

The Girl in White - Louis Le Brocquy, 1941

After Ryan's early success, she attracted the attention of Hollywood, with The Irish Times blaring about a seven-year contract on its front page in 1950; Ryan regularly appeared in the newspapers about to jet off to a shoot on the next plane from Shannon, though she always returned home to husband and children in between (with the exception of one 1969 appearance, her entire screen career took place during her marriage, which was annulled in 1958 for reasons I've been unable to determine). Newspaper pictorials from the period depict her buying presents for her children and trying on haute couture; a memorable photo from 1950 shows her smiling with a spoon in hand and a "genuine giant-sized banana split" in front of her, with the newspaper helpfully adding that "According to American films these concoctions are the staple diet of American adolescents".

Still, it wasn't all roses: Ryan found herself in serious legal hot water in 1954 when she had a car accident, injuring a travelling salesman so severely that he lost a leg, and compounding her problems by leaving the scene. While she managed to avoid criminal penalties, the civil courts weren't as kind: she had to pay the unfortunate man £7,000 (well into six figures in today's money). Despite the initial promise of a seven-year Hollywood contract, Ryan's screen career was entering its final phase by then, as she only made a couple more films after the civil trial (she managed to have the initial case postponed for three months to accommodate her work on Douglas Sirk's Captain Lightfoot, although that film was shot in Ireland). Whatever the reality of her circumstances, it's hard not to imagine that by the late 1950s Ryan, her marriage and career now over, may have understood better than ever before something of the terrible pressures in the lives of the two women to whom she gave life a decade earlier, her own life taking on echoes of the kind of plotline - financial ruin, marital strife, cars careening out of control - that set many a noir in motion.

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Thanks to our son Shay, born two-and-a-half weeks ago, who cooperated enough to allow us to watch several films since his birth, and to my wife, who allowed me to make the viewing selections at a time when she really deserved full control of the remote.

Update April 2011: A reader alerted me to the fact that Kathleen Ryan's final screen credit on the IMDB is incorrect. The Kathleen Ryan who appears in the 1969 film The Tree is a different actress (indeed, the New York Times review of that film calls the actress Kathy Ryan, and indicates that she is much younger than Kathleen Ryan would have been).

Film Preservation Blogathon

Bar Harbor Movie Queen (1936)

The camera is unsteady, and the editing is brusque, but the face of Vera Sleeper, a newlywed from Bar Harbor, Maine, still has the capacity to light up the screen when she flashes a smile at the audience. She's the star of Bar Harbor Movie Queen, one in a series of films made by the elusive Margaret Cram (Showalter) in the 1930s. Cram would take her camera to a New England town, find a local beauty and film the same plot every time: the lovely lead actress, ostensibly a Hollywood star returning to her humble roots, would admire the town's stores before being "kidnapped" by a gang of heavies played by the town bigwigs, and then rescued by a handsome local hero. As soon as the reels were in the can, Cram would return to Boston for processing and the following week she'd project the unedited film to an eager local audience, many of whom were there to see their own performances.

Free Radicals (1957)

At the opposite end of the scale of cinematic accomplishment, perhaps, are the brief films of Len Lye. Painstakingly constructed over many months and often involving laborious drawing or scratching on individual frames of film, Lye's films are just one facet of an extraordinarily diverse artistic output across three continents, with a tremendous sense of space and rhythm - the relationship between sound/music and image is critical in most of his work - and a constant experimentation with colour or, later in his career, its absence.

Road Bowling (1957)

In another category again, there's something like Pathé's brief report on a road bowling meet in Cork in the late 1950s, a bit of ephemera fascinating both for its subject matter - even though I grew up in Ireland, I've never seen road bowling - and for the way in which the British filmmakers present the material, with (bad) imitations of the Irish accent or a throwaway reference to the Irish and gambling.

There are dozens of other examples, all of which underline the richness and diversity of film culture. What's important about these three is in many ways the simple fact that they have, happily, survived. The preservation of Margaret Cram's films is an ongoing labour of love for Northeast Historic Film, an organization that has received grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation, among many others, and which focuses on work from and about New England. On the other side of the world Weta Digital, part of the Peter Jackson empire, was responsible for repairing and transferring Lye's Free Radicals, one of his most challenging works, to digital form to ensure its long-term survival, part of an important project of reclamation of an artist who generally worked far from New Zealand (David Bordwell has a great piece on the special challenges of preserving certain avant-garde or experimental films). British Pathé has worked, rather admirably, to ensure the preservation of its own archival materials, recognizing the value in the vaults.

That, to me, is only the first part of the story, however. If such films survive but are invisible to a wider audience the preservation effort seems to serve little purpose, except perhaps for the academic researcher (Kristin Thompson has a lovely anecdote about watching a Len Lye film in a refrigerated room at the British Film Institute, but unfortunately few of us can enjoy that experience). People have worked hard to ensure that these films, once preserved, are made available to as many people as possible, whether through organization of exhibitions - the way I saw the beguiling Bar Harbor Movie Queen - or transfer to DVD (a new book on Len Lye will include a DVD of his films), or the creation of an Internet archive, as Pathé has elected to do (with preview copies of every clip available free of charge).

That impulse, to preserve and present, is of a piece in many ways with the vast explosion of material on a site like Youtube - making available what is hidden or what doesn't exist in any other format. That and other sites indicate to me that we have an enormous desire to see and share images, to tell a friend, to understand our world through what we see - whether it's a clip from an acknowledged classic or a brief moment of more local interest.

It's an extraordinary way to spread the word, although it comes with the problem that watching someone's upload of a Len Lye film, for instance, doesn't contribute much in a direct fashion to the preservation of Lye's films. Like virtually everyone else, I've watched dozens of clips, and entire short films, on Youtube because it's easy and often the only place to find something unusual, and I worry that I've started to accept the blurred images and the seventeenth-generation copies. I'm hopeful that those in the film preservation community can somehow harness our enthusiasm for online watching as they seek to resuscitate and distribute our filmed heritage, perhaps especially because many of the most-ignored films - the avant-garde experiments, the newsreel clips, the local histories - are so well-suited to archiving and distribution online given their brevity.

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This is my contribution to the Film Preservation Blogathon; you can follow all of the contributions here or here, and I would encourage you to also visit the National Film Preservation Foundation to contribute in very concrete terms to the aims of this blogathon. the Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

Update (June 7, 2010): As the Siren has revealed, the funds raised through the Film Preservation Blogathon have had a very practical and happy impact - the preservation of an early silent film, The Sergeant (1910), shot on location in Yosemite. The National Film Preservation Foundation has a clip online.