In what will likely be my last column in these pages, I’ve mainly tried to highlight releases and films that I’ve been meaning yet failing to watch for ages, following the assumption that it’s now or never. As most of my examples make clear, this avoidance has something to do with the unhealthiness or pessimism these films tend to leak from every pore.
But before getting around to these overdue discoveries, I’d like to celebrate a couple of “late” arrivals that are just over a century old. Frank Borzage’s Back Pay and what survives (about 50 minutes’ worth) of The Valley of Silent Men, both 1922 features made for William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions, had to wait 101 years to wend their way towards us, at least for the purposes of this column. The former is a three-hanky sob story adapted by Frances Marion from Fanny Hurst; the latter is an action-adventure filmed in Canada. They’re jointly available on both DVD and Blu-ray from Undercrank Productions.
By recently collecting some of my literary and jazz criticism along with some of my film criticism, as related activities and interests that can serve and clarify one another, I’ve sought to avoid the routine capitalist censorship that forbids relates to Borzage only tangentially: rather, it comes from feeling cinematographer Chester Lyons’ exquisitely tinted and toned landscape shots alternate with scene-setting intertitles decorated with illustrations of the same scenes and settings. The graceful transitions between these complementary, yet distinctly different, renditions of the same visual subjects are, paradoxically, very literary—even though the images sometimes matter more than the words, because they correspond to the ways we can imagine separate visual settings for the narratives while we’re reading or hearing them read. Two-part inventions of sound and image that play catch with one another, they’re clearly invested in the same storytelling game. This orchestrated polyphonic flow takes on an even richer texture in talkies, e.g., the smooth, bumpless relays and exchanges between spoken narration, music, and onscreen dialogue in the very literary openings of Orson Welles’ and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s (1957), with its similar percussive, Wellesian cadences.
