mysteriesofedgarwallace

Excellent choices.

mysteriesofedgarwallace

A few more:-

The Small World of Sammy Lee
The Counterfeit Plan
The Great Van Robbery
Cat and Mouse

mysteriesofedgarwallace

We are obviously men of taste

arty-dave

Me too - particularly if it's raining or, better still, foggy

arty-dave

A perennial favourite, here at A-D Towers

Wilfried Mueller

Cheers! Let's have a nice winterwarmer on that!

Wilfried Mueller, Germany

Steve Crook

Damn that Clean Air Act. You don't get any decent fogs in london any more.
You don't get as many people suffering from TB either
Steve

penfold

In which case you should look for some British silent film.....Hitchcock's best British thrillers were silent IMHO - he made his name with The Lodger - genuinely creepy, very expressionistic, and plenty of fog....Blackmail? You may have seen the talkie version, but the silent version is quite different and, to most people, the better film. Dupont's Moulin Rouge is a romantic thriller, but sexy as hell, set in Parisian nightclubs. His Piccadilly is set partly in a London nightclub, partly in the chinese quarter of the East End..Maurice Elvey's Palais De Danse is set in a far seedier London taxi-dance club, and has a gripping finale that I think Hitch borrowed for Blackmail - but Elvey did it better!! Asquith has three candidates; Underground, set in London, and uses the tube as a great location; Shooting Stars, set in a London film studio; and A Cottage in Dartmoor, which despite its title is mostly set in a big-city barbershop.
If you are unused to silents, or associate them more with comedy, I think you will be pleasantly surprised...

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

arty-dave

Gulp, never heard of any of them...

Rob Compton

How easy are these films to get hold of, penfold?

rgds
Rob

penfold

Not that easy to get hold of, I saw most of them either on screen at the NFT, Nottingham British Silent Weekend, Pordenone or at Bristol Silents. A Cottage on Dartmoor turns up as a perfomed music film quite often, and all over, generally because the 'score' that Stephen Horne has worked out for it is one of the best scores around for any silent film. Piccadilly is available in a stonking restoration and with a great score from Bfi video; The silent Blackmail is available as an extra to the Sound version on the German Arthaus label DVD release; I think The Lodger came out on Bfi video; a dvd may come later, but it does play now and again on Film Four or Sky Movies if an off-air will do.

BFI - or those in the know there - have been trying to get a dvd release of the Asquiths out for some time; perhaps a petition would help; but silent DVD's are expensive to do properly, music to be commissioned and performed, film to be cleaned up and digitalized, for what is at the end of the day quite a small niche market. It's a tragedy really, these really are fine films, unknown outside of a very few. When the Asquiths in particular were shown at Pordenone in 2004, the reception from an international audience was that of astonishment; so many writers, mainly British of course, had been disparaging these films and filmmakers for decades, based on the writings of Paul Rotha and his descendants. Once they got the chance to see them for themselves, they loved them and the history of British film in the tens and twenties is at last being reappraised, and the British films of the period are being taken more seriously..

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Rob Compton

Thanks, penfold. Definitely seems to be a role for the BFI here, in my view.

rgds
Rob

penfold

Oh they have been trying - or at least some within the bfi have been trying - to raise the profile for British Silents for years. Hence the British Silent Weekend at Nottingham, created by three women , one from Nottingham's Broadway, plus her sister, and a bfi curator - in their spare time. It's been going for seven or eight years, is semi-academic, featuring many film screenings with great live accompaniment, papers from the top people in their field, and has published the collected papers, mostly annually. It exists, funding-wise, hand to mouth, but it achieves remarkable work. Amongst the books inspired by it, are Christine Gledhill's seminal account of British silent film, Michael Williams' book on the films of Ivor Novello, and Matthew Sweet's Shepperton Babylon

There was a tremendous season - curated by the same lady at the bfi - in 2004 at the NFT; two months of the best British films of the twenties; headlined by a sell-out performance of the restored Piccadilly at The Barbican, the DVD release followed soon after. On the back of this season, one of the strands of the internationally important Pordenone Silent festival was devoted to Asquith and some of his contemporaries; it was a triumph, and as a result of this exposure, the films were played in the States for the first time since the twenties, if indeed, ever.

Hitchcock's silents - previously the only ones to receive much attention - were released on VHS by the bfi some time ago; the powers that be have been less than keen to repeat that move due to low sales, even by niche standards. However, Piccadilly, with a few reservations, is a fine DVD presentation and heartily recommended if you haven't seen too much silent film. (The ending , in the courtroom is clunkily handled by the director, and the tinting is heavy handed - just turn the colour down) - but the cinematography is stunning, the performances (especially Anna May Wong - spellbinding) are great and the designs brilliant - by Alfred Junge, better known now for his contribution to the Powell and Pressburger films
of the forties. The sequence where Shosho (Wong) makes her nightclub debut will have your jaw on the floor; one of the greatest sequences in film history; any time, anywhere.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

mysteriesofedgarwallace

I'm amazed I've forgotten to mention:-

The Clouded Yellow

A thriller of Rolls-Royce quality

Fellwanderer

A bit of a Yellow Rolls Royce, then?

FELL

All the best
FELL

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