The Great White Trail

This is an unintentionally hilarious silent film, and I do know how to appreciate the good ones. It has every dramatic Victorian trope under the sun, but the problem is Queen Victoria has been dead for 16 years when this film was made. The title cards are as talkie as an early sound film and with language so flowery I expect to see "Twas a Dark and Stormy Night" on one of them. But I guess this much literary detail was needed because this production is not exactly a hallmark of the art of pantomime. Also the plot is impossible to follow and full of holes. For example, a preacher is tending to a man with chronic amnesia. The preacher receives a letter that appears to be written in the same hand as a letter in possession of the amnesiac. Aha! He now knows who the amnesiac is! But these letters were written by two different people. It is things like this as the film drifts about that make it feel like the story was written as part of a relay race. It plays like one writer starts then hands off to the next writer and so on. At the beginning, the film makes a grand introduction of an evil man who was heartless to his children. And then he disappears ten minutes into the film.

What is good about it? It is perhaps an unintentional story of female empowerment. The lead actress in the film plays a woman unfairly accused of infidelity and booted, along with their baby daughter, from her husband's house . Isn't it her house too? I guess community property was not all it was cracked up to be in 1917, but I digress. At any rate, this wronged woman manages to become a nurse in record time AND patrol Alaska's "Great White Trail" and become handy with a gun and dog sled with no training. When her husband arrives in Alaska to track her down, he doesn't exactly demonstrate the same resourcefulness. Instead, upon arrival he is almost immediately hit over the head and robbed by the film's villain, "The Vulture", which seemingly turns him into Santa Claus as he is reduced to wandering about incoherently with a long white beard looking to be about 70 at this point although he is in fact about 40.

And what of the baby daughter? She grows to marriageable age - which is apparently 14 in 1917 - becomes an animal hoarder, a pyromaniac, and develops a taste for harmless goofy men. But there is much more to her story than that. Let's just say that complications ensue.

It certainly is not boring but it is incomprehensible as far as the details go.

Cinema is a complex thing and woe betide anyone who believes that one can somehow apply one single scale of values to all films. There are, for instance bad (sometimes very bad) good films (only a complete fool would consider L'Année dernière à Marienbad JUST a bad film) ang there is clearly a very long list of good (sometimes very good) bad films (how does one rationalize with any credibility one's enjoyment - and all these films have a substantial corpus of fans - of the Universal Invisible Man series or the superb 1940s Sherlock Holmes films or of the Mr. Moto films or the films of Shammi Kapoor or the films of Norman Wisdom or Hammer horror or the films of Louis Funès or the Rajni Kanth epics?), Then there is another even more extraordinary category - the film that is unintentionally hilarious. At least one imagines it is uniutentional but who knows and who in any case is doing the intending? A classic example is Louis Gasnier's now cult film Reefer Madness. But this film by the Whartons comes into the same category. It is pointless to describe the plot but it is so jam-packed with melodrama, nonsense and coincidence, not a cliché unturned, each element succeeding the other with such lightning speed that, even if one was inclined to emote over such twaddle, one would never have the time to do so. And the result is really very funny - at times laugh out loud funny - from beginning to end. And it makes for a most enjoyable film.

I do not know quite why it is that this is unintended, whereas with the great serial of Feuillade one knows that the effects are intended - is it because the film is anomalous in a US realist tradition? - but it is difficult not to feel here that is not so much laughing with the film as laughing at it (rather as one laughs at the Japanese film that became Woody Allen's Tokyo Rose). But what does it matter. From the moment one has paid one's seat in the cinema, so to speak, it is the film-makers who are doing the laughing.

It is almost equally difficult to analyse what is so marvellous about the Feuillade serials (Fantômas, The Vampires, Judex) but what is certain is that none of the contemporary serials anywhere in the world that attempted to emulate his achievement came anywhere near to doing so, that the only modern version that approaches them is Farju's 1960 Judex which is straightforward hommage and that and that they remain to this day a unique achievement. But in its own way The Great White Trail is the US serial that comes interest, its complete ludicrousness somehow allowing it to get as close as was possible, within the ever-tightening straitjacket of US (formal) "realism", to Feuillade's avant l'heure surrealism. And it is possible to understand something about the Feuillade serils themselves from it - the lack of emotional identification, typical also of Feuillade's films and consequent distancing of the action gives an enormous freedom to th film-maker - he can, for instance, here as in the Feuillade serials, introduce new subplots and new characters at any point in the film and they immediately establish themselves (within the context of the ambient absurdity. It is true ghere for instance of the Vulture, who appears very late in the film and even of the Vulture's mother who appears even later, or of the brief subplot about the dying man who's daughter is in moral peril at the dance-hall (saved by the muscular priest). This freedom is something Feuillade makes use of in his serials with consummate skill, but, while the same cannot really be said with any truthfulness of the Whartons, there is nonetheless a sense in which this film, intentionally or not, belongs in the same lineage.

Do I recommend the film? Most certainly I do, It really is a lot of fun to watch.

The best scene - the moment when the dog strolls up and discovers the basket containing the baby that has just been abandoned by the temporarily insane mother under the old tree stump in the forest and trundles off with it to the vicar and his mum is hard to beat! And the little baby-shoes, the little baby-shoes, what perverse genius thought up that idea?