Luna - Park

When it comes to quality silent film releases on home video, Milestone Films is one of the top companies. The British film HINDLE WAKES is a masterpiece. It shows fully what the silent cinema was capable of when all the necessary elements were in place. Based on a famous play about life in the Lancashire mills (the title refers to vacation time for mill workers in a small town), it was a British version of A DOLL'S HOUSE which scandalized audiences in 1912 with its plucky heroine who defied convention and was determined to live her life her way. The storyline is traditional soap opera. A mill foreman's daughter has a romance with the mill owner's son and the problems and conflicts it has on their respective families.

What made the play important was the statement that women had the right to choose their own lives. What makes the film a masterpiece is its use of documentary style footage of the mills and the vacation spot Blackpool (a British version of Coney Island) to highlight and emphasize the lives of the characters and the conflicts they face. It's like a silent film version of ANGELA'S ASHES. The photography is absolutely astonishing as it creates images that linger in the mind long afterwards (especially the Blackpool scenes). This is one of the greatest virtues of silent cinema. The acting from the leads down to the smallest parts is flawless drawing us into the characters and not allowing us to let them go. Rarely have I seen such a perfect balance between the acting and the technical aspects of a silent film. It is simply exquisite. HINDLE WAKES was obviously a big influence on King Vidor's THE CROWD which came out a year later.

High praise should also be given to In The Nursery, the British group who scored the film. It is among the best modern scores that I have ever heard accompanying a silent film and easily the best to incorporate a synthesizer. There is also a traditional piano score by Philip Carli which is also quite good on its own terms. The British Film Institute restored this movie in 2001. If you're a fan of dramatic silent films (as opposed to silent comedy) then it doesn't get any better than this. Thanks again to Milestone Films for giving us yet another high quality little known silent film...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

HINDLE WAKES (1927) Maurice Elvey's version of the controversial story set during a workers holiday week in Lancashire. Several other versions followed but this is apparently the most notable. Often cited as the start of the British cinema's characteristic strain of social realism which pervades so many later films - Powell & Pressburger providing the main creative island of respite - this one has some convincing opening shots documenting the workers in their mills and then off to Blackpool for their holidays. WAKES' story is mostly the familiar, melodramatic one of poor girl 'led astray' by rich man and suffers from a long middle section containing all the expected moralistic, and now dated, chest beating about the perils of natural fun outside marriage. What entirely redeems the film from this fossil nose dive is the character of the heroine, Fanny (Estelle Brody, later to appear in TV's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, of all things) who ultimately is entirely unrepentent towards her days of sexual indiscretion in Llandudno, and even dismisses the affair as just a "little fancy" before leaving home to seek freedom elsewhere. Slightly shocking, when seen in context of the times, even today.

The twenties version of the once sensational Stanley Houghton play must be considered central to it's makers' work and the British film of the pre-WW2 era. Both director and producer filmed it twice, Elvey shortly after the first stage performances in 1918 and Saville after the coming of sound. Mc Kinnel as the mill owner, who originated the part in the theatre, is in all of the productions and John Stuart played this son in the twenties and thirties films.

The work was notorious for showing a mill girl heroine, for who casual sex was as normal as it was taken to be for men - one of the most intelligent representations of the then celebrated "Single Standard."

Until we get a look at his first try, we must take Elvey's twenties version as the most important. It is remarkable that Elvey regulars Humberstone Wright and Marie Ault register more effectively than Saville's imposing Edmund Gwenn and Sybil Thorndyke doing the parent rôles with sound. The scene in Blackpool's Tower Ballroom is a quite hallucinatory climax to the extraordinary, protracted Hindle Wakes holiday sequence which outclasses similar material in the King Vidor THE CROWD.

Indeed the Elvey HINDLE WAKES may be considered the best English silent film surviving, more imposing than the Asquith and Hitchcock films that have been thrust at us down the years. With his recently recovered LIFE OF David LLOYD GEORGE this marks Elvey as the most important English film maker of the period and one of the most important in Europe. We can only wonder about an industry and its commentators who did so little to nourish his output and allowed him to die in obscurity.

Has anyone seen his Berlin and Hollywood work?

In a Lancashire mill-town, probably Bolton or Oldham, but here called Hindle, Fanny (Jenny in later film versions) Hawthorne scandalises her family by refusing to conform. The play has always been a favourite and this version of it is terrific. It has a modern feel, some of the shots in Blackpool are brilliant (the rides in particular), and the new soundtrack by In The Nursery, although perhaps a bit too contemporary, somehow fits (and makes a difference from the dreadful Hammond organ scores than accompany some silents). In the cinema the ballroom sequences were augmented by special lighting effects which worked well, but on video it shines as a good British silent (hooray!) well done, well acted, well written.

Three things are at work here.

The first is the music. It should be the image or the story or whatever first, but the music sticks out predominantly. It's actually really amazing music and very etherial, ephemeral, all those good dreamy-soft tones and stuff. They at first make the film seem VERY romantic and soft, and it's nice to watch and gets you into the film immediately.

Unfortunately, it sets the tone for a film that doesn't really keep that tone all the way through. The second element of this film is its story, the most simplistic part of the entire movie. High-class guy meets low-class girl, have a scandalous affair, and try to work it out in the end. It's just simplistic enough to surprise modern-day viewers, and yet complicated enough that it's not clichéd and throws a real curve-ball at the end. It's a nice story that, with the music, seems like it should be a kind sort of sad, but which is really less transient than that. This is why this movie is difficult to watch, the music is so gripping in mysticism and the story isn't really mystical at all.

The third element is the imagery. The music is great, but disjunctive. The story is great, but a little odd. The imagery is fantastic. Everything from this long, surreal shot of people dancing that is just amazing to a first-person roller-coaster ride that's more realistic-feeling than the many that have been made in color and with sound ever since.

Thus, it's really a good movie. Acting is pretty good too, forgot to mention that. You can get into it and enjoy it (the music sucks you in like that), so it's a great experience. It's just that after a while the plot will start to feel a bit "off" because of the tone of everything else not necessarily working for the tone of the story proper.

--PolarisDiB