Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

YOU NEVER KNOW WOMEN (1928)

With a much bigger cultural footprint than today, CIRCUS themed movies were mainstays in Hollywood from silents to the ‘60s.  But extra caché and something of an explosion in A-list interest came after the international success of E.A. Dupont’s VARIETÉ in 1925.  From HE WHO GETS SLAPPED/’24 and SALLY OF THE SAWDUST/’25, just before, to THE DEVIL’S CIRCUS, THE UNKNOWN/’27, THE SHOW/’27, FOUR DEVILS/’28, THE CIRCUS/’28, many others, exceptional films from Victor Sjöström, D.W. Griffith, Benjamin Christensen, Tod Browning², F.W. Murnau*, Charles Chaplin.  And this little gem, long thought lost, but beautifully resurrected on KINO.  Director William Wellman is in good early form a year before he made his rep with WINGS.  Like VARIETÉ, and many of these circus films, there’s a romantic triangle, here between millionaire ne’er-do-well Lowell Sherman and Houdini-like illusionist Clive Brook.  Both pining for lovely Florence Vidor, stage assistant to Brook (whom she loves like a brother and Sherman who by chance keeps taking credit for saving her from danger).  Eventually, a death-defying stunt goes wrong and sorts out loyalties.  The story is piffle, but the atmosphere (Oo-la-la!) really holds your attention with the ‘Moscow’ Circus troupe stunningly caught in constant foreground or background action by cinematographer Victor Milner, and the wonderful art direction of Paramount’s Hans Dreier, brought over from Germany (by Ernst Lubitsch for FORBIDDEN PARADISE/’24?), then staying for the rest of his career.  What luck the one surviving print was in near pristine shape!

DOUBLE-BILL: *Murnau’s FOUR DEVILS . . . and good luck finding this lost film.  Leave it to Hollywood to lose Murnau’s follow up to SUNRISE!  Any of the others mentioned above will do nicely, especially Browning’s unbelievably sick THE UNKNOWN with Lon Chaney as an armless wonder in love with a very young male-averse Joan Crawford.

No comments: