Indian Summer is in full effect here in the Valley. T'was 92 degrees today and bone-dry, though thankfully not windy. This morn I put up the Halloween decorations here at Pearl's and then took her on a wheelchair push around the neighborhood so we could enjoy the weather and look for other cool Halloween houses, of which we saw about a dozen.
Elizabeth, I liked your sunset photo this morning, and the little tower in the background that appears to have a light on. Is it a lighthouse? The tower is one of those small details that can give a picture an exclamation point, so to speak. I looked up Grand Marais and see that it is a resort with only a small permanent population. I asked Pearl if she knew it but it is hard for her to remember names nowdays. She is from Mankato, a suburb of Minneapolis, so she would have been about the same distance from Grand Marais as you are in Madison, give or take a few miles. It sure is a beautiful place. I'm glad you got to go and thanks for posting the pictures! Keep shooting, wherever you may be. :)
Tonight I watched a movie that was both really good and unusual : "Roland West's 'Alibi' " (1929). The name of the film would technically have been "Alibi" but for some reason the studio found it necessary to include the director's name, maybe because the movie had been a hit play beforehand, or maybe because Roland West was a name director and thus a "draw" in that era. I do not know. At any rate, what is unusual about "Alibi" is that it was made in 1929, the year that movies transitioned into sound. I need to make an aside here to say that it sort of blows my mind that all movies were silents only 31 years before I was born, which makes me feel ancient, but only because the Silent Era feels ancient.
But it wasn't ancient. It just looks that way on screen. As advanced as motion pictures have become, they are still not much more than 100 years old. As usual, time is short and long at the same time, the old rubber band effect.
1929 was a transitional year for movies because it was the year in which the Sound Era was ushered in. All of a sudden actors and actresses had to use their voices and speak dialogue. Some had the great faces necessary for Silent films but not the vocal dynamics for sound pictures. In "Alibi", a movie about a gangster who has just been released from prison and appears to have gone straight, it is interesting to watch the various actors as they adapt to a movie with sound. The star, Chester Morris, who went on to continue his career in sound pictures, is still mugging for the camera here, using the exaggerated facial expressions of silent film. He is very good as The Gangster, although his voice wavers between weak and strong. You can see him adjusting to the new format, which would have been a substantial leap for any actor who had not done previous stage work. Another actor, Regis Toomey, who went on to have a major career as a character actor for several decades, is also good in his role as an undercover policeman, but his diction is so constrained and off-kilter as to be downright weird. It's as if he doesn't know the technique to speaking into a boom microphone (as I am pretty certain there was no voice-over looping in 1929).
When we did our Buster Keaton retrospective at CSUN a year ago, Professor Tim showed us some documentary footage from one of the movie sets, and you could see how bulky and unwieldy the original sound recording equipment was. It took up a lot of room and got in the way of the actors, who now also had microphones hanging over their heads. So yes, it was quite a transition for the actors and a great many fell by the wayside when sound became the standard, either because they didn't have A Voice or because they could not adapt to reciting dialogue, which in silent films they only had to approximate by moving their lips at times.
"Alibi" is still one heck of a good movie. The script is rock solid. It had been a play, and has the seamless quality of that form of writing, which became the form of writing for the screen, i.e. the screenplay. I discovered "Alibi" during a search for movies that included William Cameron Menzies as an art director. After I saw his work in the recently reviewed "Mark Of The Vampire", which was incredible, I wanted to find more. "Alibi" was the one film that came back, that I hadn't seen.
It has the look of a German Expressionist picture, which - when coupled with the oddball styles of actors adjusting to sound - makes for an art house result that is pre-Lynchian in places. Regis Toomey's performance in particular is so off-the-wall as to evoke Dean Stockwell's act, 57 years later in "Blue Velvet". It's that weird, though the weirdness is clearly not intentional by Toomey.
The recitation of dialogue by all the actors shows a grappling with the new sound technology, and with the timing of how an actor should deliver his lines following another actor's cue.
But the direction is excellent, which is why Roland West got his name attached to the title, and the sets by Willian Cameron Menzies give "Alibi" the crazy art clubhouse look of "Dr. Mabuse" in places or even "Dr. Caligari".
Mostly it's a gangster pic, though, and a very good one strictly on that level.
But watch it for the 1929 changeover from Silent to Sound and you will see what I mean.
Two very big thumbs up for the accomplishment.
Dodgers win! See you in the World Series.
And in church tomorrow morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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