NFR Project: 'The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra'

 

The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra

Dir: Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich

Scr: Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich

Pho: Gregg Toland, Paul Ivano

Ed: not stated

Premiere: 1928

11 min.

Hollywood avant-garde film is an oxymoron, pretty much. Not a lot of non-standard narrative work has emerged from the confines of Tinsel Town.

Yet here is a remarkable example of DIY filmmaking, right on the cusp between the silent and sound eras. It was the brainchild of Frenchman Robert Florey, but it involved two who would become the most honored film professionals in Hollywood – Slavko Vorkapich and Gregg Toland.

Florey was an ambitious film journalist who migrated to Hollywood in 1921, finding work in various capacities until he began to catch on as a director. Shortly after his first film, One Hour of Love (1927), he created this satirical short, paying for the production out of his own pocket – working with a budget rumored to be only $97.

Using handmade sets and miniatures, one 400-watt lightbulb for illumination, and the efforts of a few friends, Florey and Vorkapich crafted a 13-minute mini-epic that relates the sad tale of John Jones, a naïve aspiring actor who wants to make it big in the film world. Instead, his forehead is embossed with the number 9413, and he is condemned to an existence as a lowly extra, little better than a living puppet.

Meanwhile, another extra who’s able to hold masks of stereotypes in front of his face is acclaimed and given a star on his forehead, elevated to prominent status.

Poor 9413 continues to run up against the sign: “No casting today.” His bills pile up, he wastes away, and expires. Magically, he is transported to Heaven, where his number is erased from his forehead and he is given wings.

Florey showed the film to his friend Charlie Chaplin, who loved it. Chaplin in turn screened it for some of Hollywood’s high and mighty, and as a result got the film a bit of distribution – a surprising turn of events for a film that so solidly criticizes the industry.

Florey would go on to be a prolific and competent director of B movies, including the Marx Brothers’ first feature, The Cocoanuts, and the Expressionism-tinged Murders in the Rue Morgue. Vorkapich would become a master cinema craftsman, whose specialty was creating montages for mainstream Hollywood films. The camera operator, still at the beginning of his career, was Gregg Toland, an innovative cinematographer who would become legendary for his work on such films as Citizen Kane, winning an Oscar for Wuthering Heights (1939).

So much talent focused on so intimate a project gives the film a rich beauty, and makes its message just as current today as it was in 1928.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Seventh Heaven.

NFR Project: 'The Jazz Singer' (1927)

The Jazz Singer

Dir: Alan Crosland

Scr: Alfred A. Cohn

Pho: Hal Mohr

Ed: Harold McCord

Premiere: Oct. 6, 1927

89 min.

There are a few American films that are landmarks, but that are also fatally flawed. Such is the case with D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which peddled animistic views of African-Americans, portrayed by white men in blackface. Such is the case with The Jazz Singer, whose more casual and unspoken racism is almost more disturbing.

It’s the central character’s use of blackface twice in the film that sinks it for us today. We can handle the idea of guy wanting to grow up and become a great jazz singer. What we are no longer capable of understanding is how making oneself up as a caricature of a Black person and singing sentimental ballads was ever a big and ever-present thing, the height of the entertainment experience.

It was and continued to be a thing. The minstrel show began in the 1840s, and remained popular for decades among white audiences. Blackface can be found in Babes in Arms (1939) and Holiday Inn (1942). Jolson would go on to appear in blackface on film nine more times. Only the post-World War II generation began to think of such antics as distasteful.

It’s The Jazz Singer’s prestige as the first sound film that preserves it in our memories, although it’s sound sequences are brief, a half-dozen strung along the course of the narrative, mostly musical numbers.

Despite the ridiculous level of background racism, oddly the film isn’t about that. It’s about GUILT, Jewish guilt specifically. Young Jakie Rabinowitz is the son of a Jewish cantor (a singer of sacred songs), one of generations of the same. His father wants Jakie to follow in his footsteps, but Jakie likes to hang out in beer parlors and sing that low-down jazz. His father forbids him to sing jazz, and Jakie runs away, breaking his very understanding mother’s heart in the process.

We fast-forward to an adult Jakie, now the Americanized “Jack Robin,” played by the inimitable Al Jolson. There was something extraordinary about Jolson’s manner. He was the last of the great pre-microphone era singers, someone who could project and make himself felt all the way to the back row of the theater. He had big, expressive eyes and a ready grin.

Above all, he had energy. His live-wire, shuffling, gesticulating attack of a song transmitted his nervous enthusiasm to the crowd, who responded with adulation. This technique adapted itself well to film. Jolson was as one time termed “the world’s greatest entertainer,” and it is arguable that it was so. He certainly impresses with his renditions of “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” and “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” early on in the film. (Look close, you’ll see William Demarest; Roscoe Karns and Myrna Loy have small parts, too.)

Jack Robin finally gets his big break on Broadway, and he returns home to kiss and hug his mother, give her presents, and sing a few songs for her. His father, who has disowned him, comes home unexpectedly while Jack is riffing on “Blue Skies.” “Stop!” he shouts, the last time a line of dialogue is heard in the movie. The sanctimoniousness of the cantor ironically squelches sound.

Opening night of the big show approaches – but so does Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a day of fasting and repentance. Jack is ready to take the stage, but then his mother shows up at the theater – his father is dying, and there is no one to sing the Kol Nidre, the unique, beloved, and ancient song that opens the Yom Kippur ceremonies. Can Jakie do it? What about his career? What’s he going to do, ruin his future or break his mother’s heart?

Suffice it to say Jack gets his cake and eats it too. The audience is given a solemn, tear-jerking ending to Jack’s story, then gives him one more number in the spotlight, all blacked up and singing “Mammy” for an adoring crowd that includes his mother, who always believed in him and told him that God made him an entertainer. The levels of mother love in this film are near toxic.

So, to our modern minds, in order to understand the film you have to take everything with a huge grain of salt. When Jakie becomes Jack, he suppresses his Jewishness to be more acceptable. When he dons blackface, he assumes the privilege of the white entertainer to mock his supposed inferiors. When he turns around and stakes claim to his Jewish identity, he restores his integrity and reconnects himself to his past. And then it’s back in blackface again for the big finish.

It’s a story about assimilation, about fathers and sons. It’s the pioneer of a new technology. Thanks to the evolution of society, what we mostly have now though is a problematic milestone in cinema history.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra.

 

 

 

The NFR Project: "It" (1927)

‘It’

Dir: Clarence Badger, Josef von Sternberg

Scr: Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton

Pho: H. Kinley Martin

Ed: E. Lloyd Sheldon

Premiere: Feb 19, 1927

72 min.

This is a story about early cross-promotion, or, as you might call it, a racket.

Elinor Glyn was an English writer who specialized in popular literature – that is, lightly erotic and racy material, stuff to amuse the casual reader of romances. She went to Hollywood, and crafted 28 screenplays there in the course of a decade during the silent period. She was phenomenally successful, and she began to be regarded as an arbiter of taste.

She coined the idea of “It” in 1914. A simple euphemism for sex appeal, she wrote on “It” in Cosmopolitan, a popular magazine. She dubbed up-and-coming actress Clara Bow as the “’It’ Girl.” Glyn supplied the source material for the film “It”, adapted it, and appeared in the film starring Bow to boot, to define her concept of “It.” The film was a smash hit, and everyone involved profited. Bow was now a star, and Glyn’s name and ideas were cast broadly across the culture.

“It” is an inoffensive, Cinderella story about a lowly shopgirl (Bow) who finds love and contentment with her boss, the young and sociable Cyrus (Antonio Moreno) despite a few minor setbacks and misunderstandings. Bow plays Betty Lou as an energetic, charismatic do-gooder with a heart of gold, a spunky lass whose big eyes and healthy grin make her an ambassador of the “It” concept.

Badger, who also directed two of Raymond Griffith’s best silent comedies, would see his career slow to an end at the beginning of the sound era. Von Sternberg would of course move on to sweeping epics with Marlene Dietrich at their centers. Bow would continue to make films for a decade, finally retiring young at the age of 28. Glyn returned to England and went back to writing novels.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Jazz Singer.