Un drame au studio

After revisiting this film it became clear to me what a great gem it is. And it is definitely too obscure, much more people should know this film.

The three main characters are well-acted, the directing is phenomenal, the pacing is admittedly somewhat questionable here and there, but all in all, it was very enjoyable.

The film follows actress Mae Feather, who lives a life of publicity, though most of her public image is acting too as can be seen in an interview she gives in the beginning. She is married to a guy named Julian, who also works on the film she currently acts in

One shot during the start stands out - a tracking shot beginning at a man working on the set light, then moving to a Mae, following her from her film set, which is being wrapped up at that very moment, up the stairs to another film shot parallel in the same studios. This introduces us to the third part of the love triangle - Andy Wilks an actor in that other film.

This is not just a classic love triangle story though, this is an absolutely intense ride from comedy, suspense, drama and tragedy. Two scenes, in particular, are very suspenseful, I am sure Alfred Hitchcock was inspired by this to further develop his suspense technique (though Anthony Asquith definitely also used Hitchcock's The Lodger from a year earlier as influence to create suspense in this film).

The lighting in this film is phenomenal; the number of scenes that amazed me because they aren't lit with normal ceiling light, but rather by table lamps spread throughout the room, therefore creating depth in the image is immense.

Several artistic touches also stand out, such as words edited into the images to symbolise a radio report, or creative intertitles during a scene in a film shown in the cinemas (in the plot of Shooting Stars).

Yes, this film is absolutely about films, similar to Singing in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, 8 1/2, and one of my personal favourites: The Last Command. Shooting Stars also demonstrates filmmaking, some parts are almost documentary like. And Shooting Stars absolutely deserves to be a part of that list, as it is in of itself a master class film.

Anyway, the main flaw in this film is the pacing, as some parts towards the beginning and towards the very end are somewhat dragging (though the final conclusion is very well made).

Definitely check this film out, it is such an underrated film that deserves to be a classic.

--- SPOILERS FROM HERE ON ---

This film is a masterclass in symbolic filmmaking, foreshadowing, suspense and a perfect depiction of a ruined life.

When Mae Feather and Andy Smith start having their affair, you can see the blinking text: "Mae Feather in My Man" in the background in the cinemas. At that very same moment, one can see Julian watching the very film. In it, we can see how Mae is saved from an evil count by Julian, and the film has a happy ending. This shows how Julian's and Mae's relationship is to the public, and how it should be. The blinking sign, which can be seen through Mae's window constantly watches Andy and Mae, therefore symbolically also reminding the viewer of the third part of the love triangle.

Mae then gives Andy her key (also a visually impressive scene, only the hands of the two people are in the frame and the background shows parts of the elevator, while she gives him the key, the elevator comes up to their floor and opens, therefore visually reminding the viewer of her departure from Andy, whilst the key visually tells the viewer that they will meet in the future.) She says that her husband won't be home the next evening. Then, the next day, Andy plays a man in his film, who is also given a key from a woman (in fact, Mae's key is used as a prop), however the husband overhears the conversation and begins shooting Andy's character. During the shooting, Andy's stunt double is tragically injured, and reporters temporarily mistake him for Andy himself.

This scene is just full of foreshadowing: the husband will find out, and Andy will die.

Then three very suspenseful scenes follow, Julian is not out that evening, which encourages Mae to play loud music in order to overshadow the noise of Andy's entrance - her efforts for doing this are however stopped after the radio (falsely) reports of his death. This leads to Julian finding out. The next scene is on the film set again. In a film scene, Julian's character is to be shot. Mae, in an effort to get rid of him, puts a real bullet into the firearm. The next part is just pure suspense. During the shooting, there is even a slow-motion shot of the bullet travelling through the air - not something that I would expect from a film of the 1920s.

However, it turns out that, as there are multiple bullets in the firearm, the real bullet hasn't been fired yet. And just as it has to come: Andy gets shot with that one. Yet another very suspenseful scene, seeing Andy sitting on a chandelier and then falling all the way into the dark corners of the film studio - figuratively moving him from the height of his fame to the darkest parts of death. When Julian finds out about the incident, he figures out Mae's plan, and she then faints. This entire sequence has many interesting cinematic touches, such as the shadow of the chandelier still moving through the image after Andy fell down, over shocked people reacting to the incident. Or the camera movement towards Julian resulting in a closeup for added tension.

Unfortunately, the final 10 minutes drag a little, though they are still very well made: Mae Feather now lives in complete obscurity, whilst Julian is a film director. When by chance she is chosen as an extra for one of his films, she cries, as she remembers the time when she was a famous film star. The lights for the set are turned out one by one, putting her into darkness. She is the last person to leave the room (apart from the director) and just before that asks Andy: "Do you want me anymore?" A sentence that is of course loaded with emotion due to its multiple meanings. He doesn't even look at her and just shakes his head - he didn't even recognise her. The final shot sees her leaving the set, slowly becoming smaller and smaller in the frame filled with props, lights etc. She is now figuratively leaving her life of films behind completely. When she enters the doorway leading out of the room - now a tiny silhouette in the massive screen filled with camera equipment, one can just about see her looking back into the room. One last glance at her lost career, one last glance at her lost husband, one last glance at - figuratively - her lost love, and then she exits the screen, leaving only the studio in sight.

Superb silent film that offers a "backstage" look at filmmaking in Britain at the end of the silent era. Story centers on a married couple who are starring in "Prairie Love." He (Brian Aherne) is a rather dopey leading man who is totally unaware of his wife's (Annette Benson) bitchy temperament or her affair with a low-comic movie star (Donald Calthrop).

When Aherne is scheduled for some on-location filming, Benson wastes no time to giving Calthrop her apartment key. But the shooting schedule is changed. When a stunt double is killed on another on-location shoot, Benson assumes her lover is dead, but....

After Benson (as Mae Feather) finally gets her comeuppance and loses her contract to go to Hollywood, there's a powerful and bittersweet ending with Benson as a lowly extra and Aherne as a powerful director.

Filled with astonishing lighting and camera work and boasting excellent performance by Benson and Aherne, this film gets progressively mesmeric as it spins its story. Co-stars include Chili Bouchier as Winnie and Wally Patch as the prop man.

In a bizarre parallel to this film's ending, Annette Benson would herself disappear after two failed attempts at talkies in 1931. There is virtually no biographical information available on this star actress.

BFI recently issued a BLU/DVD restoration of this superb film.

I watched the movies Shooting Stars and Underground because it was Brian Aherne's time as Star of the Week and I was interested to see him in silent films. I'm so glad I found them, because they were both fantastic! They're both directed by Anthony Asquith, a man with a vision far ahead of his time. Both films look like they were filmed in 1958 rather than 1928. The inventive angles, use of foreground and background, and refusal to conform to static shots were groundbreaking at the time.

In this one, Brian Aherne, Annette Benson, and Donald Calthrop play silent movie stars. There's an incredible shot that shows different sets filming on the same lot. In modern movies, we're used to seeing such a depiction of a silent movie studio, but in 1928, it was a thrill to show audiences what it was really like. Brian and Annette are married, but Annette isn't happy. She's a diva and finds excitement with Donald, who plays a Charlie Chaplin-esque slapstick star. Will their affair cause a scandal and damage their careers? Will Brian find out? This drama will keep you on the edge of your seat, even though no one speaks a word. It's extremely entertaining and riveting, and Asquith's directing is a marvel. You've got to watch one of his movies (or preferably more) to see his fantastic talent.

DLM Warning: If you suffer from vertigo or dizzy spells, like my mom does, this movie might not be your friend. When the stunt double starts riding his bicycle, look away for about a minute since there are some handheld shots that will make you sick. In other words, "Don't Look, Mom!"

I had the good fortune of seeing this film the other day in the Brussels film museum. The only names I had heard of were those of Anthony Asquith and Brian Aherne. What a discovery this unique look behind the scenes of British film-making of the twenties was!

At heart Shooting Stars is a melodrama, but what makes it special is the fact that it is set in a British film studio (plus some location work at the seaside). If you're just interested in film history, you can sit back and marvel at the scenes where several silent movies are made a the same time in one studio. While two main characters are filming a western, the third lead is filming slapstick on the neighboring set. During the location scenes it is shown how bystanders are watching scenes being shot, sometimes just feet away from the actors. That was possible in the silent days. The character of Andy Wilkes clearly references Charlie Chaplin, and - as he is anything but a happy clown or even a nice man off the set - you may wonder whether some criticism of Chaplin is meant here.

Yet, there is more. Annette Benson, Brian Aherne and Donald Calthrop create believable characters, even for viewers used to the modern acting style. There is still a bit of that slight overacting typical of the silent movies, but especially Donald Calthrop uses as little movement as possible to convey emotion. The fact that you can also see the three leads in their sightly more hysterical movie character roles helps you to appreciate the naturalistic style of the more intimate scenes. Memorable moments are Brian Aherne's enjoyment of his own film (he gets caught up, like the audience in the cinema, in the excitement of a film he made) and Annette Benson's character realizing her horrible mistake.

A third reason to watch this film is its technical quality. There's a moment where the camera follows Benson's character leave the set, walk up some stairs and visit another set. To get that focus and the lighting right, must have entailed painstaking preparations. At other times important pieces of information are framed beautifully, sometimes in the corner of the screen, in such a way that your eye is drawn to them.

Two final remarks. The film ends with a jump ahead in time, with one of the characters now a film director. Apparently Asquith didn't believe in talkies yet, because the fictional director is still making silent films in the future. And then there's Annette Benson. Her character disappears at the end of the film. When you look up Miss Benson's bio, you discover that there is no information about her after the early thirties...

I get comparisons here to "Citizen Kane" (1941), claims of "the greatest film ever" aside. Like that production, "Shooting Stars" was the debut of an acclaimed prodigy who brought the best techniques of the age (in this case, sparse intertitles, German lighting, Soviet montage and Hollywood glamour, basically) to bear within a controversially reflexive narrative construction. There's also deeper parallels between the two films if we dive deeper into the scandalous history of silent cinema.

As well known and often over-emphasized, the main basis for the character of Charles Foster Kane was yellow journalism media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Much muckraking was made of Hollywood in the 1920s and, perhaps, the most famous example was Hearst's newspapers libelously accusing slapstick comedian Fatty Arbuckle of rape and murder in the death of Virginia Rappe. It was this sort of dubious narrative construction, also including Hearst inventing the colonialist Spanish-American War, that underlies the multiple, non-linear perspectives of "Citizen Kane." If we look at another Hollywood rumor from the era, coincidentally also involving Hearst and a slapstick comedian, we might get an idea of where "Shooting Stars" is coming from.

Although equally unfounded, scurrilous hearsay has persisted, including in the movie "The Cat's Meow" (2001), regarding the death of Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince, one of the principal architects of the studio system, by the way, in which Hearst and his mistress, actress Marion Davies, worked. All of whom were on Hearst's yacht when Ince, reportedly and officially, became ill and died shortly thereafter. As an assuredly false and seemingly karmic narrative out of Hearst's control would have it, though, Hearst killed Ince when he missed his target of another passenger on the yacht and the man who supposedly was having an affair with Davies, Charlie Chaplin.

One last piece of Hollywood trivia fit for this puzzle is that the auteur behind "Shooting Stars," Anthony Asquith, stayed for three months in Hollywood as a guest of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and visited other stars, including Chaplin on the set of "The Circus" (1928), before setting out to make films in Britain.

What's my point? Asquith basically made a film about Charlie and Mary making a cuckold out of Doug. And, there's also Chekhov's gun, or at least bullet, to be accounted for in the yacht that is the film studio of this reflexively ravishing late-silent masterpiece. Making a dramatic (as opposed to comedies, as there were lots of those) movie about the business of making movies was a novel enough concept at the time to be considered controversial, if even daring. Talk about shooting for the stars when Asquith makes his debut by centering it around thinly veiled adulterous caricatures of Hollywood's three biggest stars. And, that's even before getting into the disillusioning pulling back of the curtain on filmmaking here. It's little wonder, then, that as reprinted in Tom Ryall's biography of Asquith, that some contemporary reviewers were outraged:

From "Kine Weekly," "The result appears to be an attempt to poke fun at production (at a time when we all trying to take it very seriously), and to present to our public the very aspect of our business which we desire should remain a mystery."

And, as more succinctly put by "Variety," "a disgrace to the film industry of any country."

Now, veteran director A. V. Bramble is the one who received screen credit as director, but since its release, it's generally considered to have been Asquith's picture, as he also wrote the scenario, with Bramble having served in some supervisory or technical capacity with the first-time director. Whether that's a fair or not assumption, Bramble's career seems largely unknown today--some of which is just lost, as with most silent films, such as his "Wuthering Heights" (1920) adaptation, and reportedly he left the studio after this film to continue to make others elsewhere that today also go largely ignored. Asquith, on the other hand, besides having an aristocratic and educated pedigree, the son of a prime minister, had a long and celebrated career, while his silent films have received renewed attention in recent years. His subsequent and solely-credited "A Cottage on Dartmoor" (1929), which features a talkie film within the silent film, is an especially outstanding reflexive follow-up to "Shooting Stars." The film-within-the-film in that one is "My Woman;" here, it's "My Man," and both films base their deconstruction around a simple love triangle.

Throughout, the debts here to European art cinema are readily apparent. I also especially like the mirror and window motifs--the neon movie sign outside one window and cutting between a tryst and a film screening are especially great. Ryall rightly points out, especially in the scenes of production accidents, the visual quotations of canonical masterpieces such as the impressionistic cutting of "Battleship Potemkin" and the unchained camera of "Variety" (both 1925). These allusions start with the opening revelatory sequence that begins like a romantic Western before the camera pulls back to divulge that it's one of the films-within-the-film in production in a studio set. Before we learn the cowboy is riding a toy horse pulled by crewmen and the camera smoothly tracks over the artifice of the rest of the set, the scene involves star Mae Feather (Annette Benson as perfect parody of "America's Sweetheart," curls an' all) throwing a tantrum over kissing a bird, which immediately reminds one of Lillian Gish in "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) or some such absurd depiction of femininity in a D. W. Griffith film.

Funny enough, there's an entire thread entitled "Bird Kissing. It's not just for Lillian Gish" on the Nitrateville message boards, where it's determined that Pickford both said, on her time working with Griffith, "I wasn't one of his simpering bird-kissing actresses," and kissed birds herself, both for Griffith and in her own production, "Stella Maris" (1918). Regardless, the last-minute-rescue sequence of "My Man" viewed at a movie theatre adds to the references to that fourth founding member of United Artists, Griffith.

Besides Mae's marriage to her co-star resembling the real-life, so-called "Pickfair" (oh, what, did you really think they invented portmanteaus for the likes of "Brangelina?") and Donald Calthrop giving a good impression of a second-rate Chaplin cutting between this Pickfair, "Shooting Stars" does rather well to demonstrate not only how scandalous silent cinema could be, but how dangerous were its productions. Forget shotguns, Harold Lloyd blew off part of his hand because what he thought was a prop was an actual bomb. Cecil B. DeMille intentionally had live ammunition fired during filming only for the inevitable mistake in switching back to blanks resulting in a fatal shooting to the head. The scandal of star Wallace Reid's drug-induced death is because he got hooked on morphine to dull the pain from an injury on set. Ditto others. Another actress burned to death in her inflammable costume. They literally drowned extras in "Noah's Ark" (1928). And, the list goes on.

The irony is that Asquith claimed a great deal of respect for his Hollywood friends and even genre pictures such as Westerns. Some of the reflexive themes in his work and the subtle direction of actors are especially striking in their debt to Chaplin, particularly, as with all dramatic satires, "A Woman of Paris" (1923). That's where Ernst Lubitsch learned about constructing scenes around looks, too. But, there's no holding back in "Shooting Stars." It's enough to make all but the best of the numerous versions of "A Star Is Born" (the best is obviously the 1954 film, by the way) look starry-eyed. As fantastic as the opening sequence is here, the ending may be even more apt, alone on a church set. Vapid movie fans and press aren't spared, either. The entirety is a brilliant blend of tones and genres, foreshadowing and style that not only reveals one layer of the film-within-film fantasy of making and watching movies, but layers of artifice beyond that in the persona that the stars present to the public and in their private lives. These actors break character only to fall into another and wrap for the day only to walk onto another set offstage.