Le signal de feu

"Annie Laurie" was just posted to YouTube a few days ago. However, after watching it, I really wish I'd waited and perhaps seen it elsewhere. I noticed in one of the reviews, EauDouce marveled at the experience of seeing the film with a live orchestra and on the big screen. Well, my experience was quite underwhelming and I think that whoever copied it, literally snuck a video camera into a theater or held it up to a video recorder and copied the movie that way! No music, a poor print AND periodically the camera fell down and the person duping it had to set it up once again! Crazy.

From what I could see of the film, it was a decent silent epic, though I have seen better. My feeling is that the film was a bit slow and relied a lot on guys repeating Scottish poetry.

The story is about the feud between two Scottish clans, the Campbells and the MacDonald's. Why exactly they hate each other is unknown but what is known is that the leaders of the Campbells is an effete and duplicitous jerk-face. Although the king has ordered and end to the feud and has promised to restore the lands to the MacDonalds, the Campbells haven't told the MacDonalds about this or the king's threat to whichever clan refused to sign a peace treaty.

As for Annie Laurie (Lillian Gish), she's a Campbell but has fallen for an ultra-manly man. When she learns of her clan leader's evil plans, she risks her life to aid the MacDonalds and save her beloved.

The film seemed slow and could have been better. However, the copy was so horrid. As I said above, if you really insist on seeing it, try to see if you can get a different copy or, better yet, see if it's playing in some theater.

A copy of this film was recently found and restored by the U.S. Library of Congress. It is well written, directed, acted and filmed. It is about the need to end cycles of vendettas and the courage required to say that you will not allow the cycle of death and hatred to continue. It is about the fact that humans by nature are loving and that only a perverse heart hates indefinitely. This is a story about courage and the cowardice of people who misuse power to their own petty ends.

Some dangerous stunts from a time in which leads did their own stunt work. Miss Gish's fall down a mountain face might not have been as dangerous as jumping around on ice flows as in Way Down East. Yet it reminds us of a time when actors no only did their own stunts in uncontrolled environments but COULD ACT as well!

I saw this film at the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema with a specially commissioned live score by Shona Mooney that was so mind- blowingly good that it's hard to separate out the film itself from the combined experience. However that's silent films I suppose, they are new each time in a way that talkies aren't. Although I've just had the best night out at the cinema for a long time, the film as a stand-alone item isn't perfect. That said it's pretty damn good and, note, one of those ones where you'd be foolish to decide whether to go and see it based on a You Tube clip. Like a Scott novel, you might dip into it and think it ludicrously antiquated, but accept its own rhythms and logic and you get hooked. The film really is Annie Laurie, it's her (Gish) and not any of the men who is the pivot, who makes the important choices good and bad, deals with the consequences, drives the narrative and has a full physical part in the very well-done and action-packed finale. It's funny at times, romantic or suspenseful at others.

The music though, in the performance I saw: simply stunning, and the best live film score I've experienced. The performers were, appropriately, Scottish traditional musicians and aside from being good music, pure and simple, the score was pitch perfect at every point in interpreting and enhancing the action. As one small example, one of the film's big problems, for a modern audience, is that the male love interest Ian MacGregor (this is the old story of the Campbells and the MacGregors leading up to Glencoe) is hard to take seriously. Unlike the character of his brother, who gets the 'other' girl and could probably pass muster in a current Hollywood film in a Paul Rudd kind of way, the way Kerry plays Ian, and the way his character looks, are just not what we are conditioned to expect and initially seem comic. However Mooney's music believes in him, just as Annie Laurie does, and it's the music that, building up to a climactic and decisive mid-river kiss, made us feel the moment as Annie Laurie does and, at that point and thereafter, buy into the deal that she does.

Even a ridiculous Hollywood postscript comes, rather nicely, in colour when all else is in black and white; whatever the actual explanation, it felt like a cool, self-subverting marker that we'd shifted realities, and made for a great close - reminded me of a similar effect from the extending of the aspect ratio in Dolan's Mommy - which I'd recently seen.

All in all, go to see Annie Laurie at any point, but if you get a chance to see it with the Shona Mooney score (the HippFest audience were told it would be touring at least to the Barbican in London), you should go considerably out of your way not to miss it.

The restoration of this movie had its Turner Classic Movies premiere, and I have spent a pleasant couple of hours looking at it. It stars Lillian Gish as Annie Laurie ... but it is more accurate to say that it co-stars Miss Gish and Norman Kerry as Ian MacDonald in one of those I-love-you-I-hate-you plots that was often used while some minor event was taking place, like World War II or the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, to give the movie a little gravitas. Here it's the Massacre of Glencoe, laid here entirely to the perfidy of the Campbells, led by Hobart Bosworth. Look it up if you care to know what it was. In this movie it's an excuse for a bang-up battle sequence at the very end, made possible by Miss Gish being shot, but still scrambling to the top of a hill with a bloodthirsty highlander close behind her, trying to stop her setting alight the signal that will call the the MacDonalds to save their embattled chieftain. Will she succeed? Will the lovers survive for a final two-strip Technicolor sequence?

Miss Gish decried her comedic abilities as "Funny as a barrel of dead babies", but she has a very funny sequence, in which, as mistress of her father's house, she is very full of herself as she prepares the place for a peace meeting between the clans. At other times she runs through her gamut of serious emotions, and does very well with them, thank you. Kerry is boisterous and charming in the early part of the movie, trying to buckle his swashes (whatever those are) like Fairbanks or Milton Sills. The rest of it has the usual late-silent players -- Creighton Hale, Patricia Avery, and Russell Simpson playing their parts very well. Although it appears to have been shot entirely on sets, director John S. Robinson does an impeccable job. Alas, it didn't do well at the box office.

I should mention Robert Israel's score, full of traditional Scottish airs and occasional bagpipes. He shows a dab hand at his job, as might be expected, with the title tune occasionally bringing a tear to my eye, and not just in pain at hearing the pipes.

Hundreds of years ago, two Scottish clans feud in the highlands surrounding their neighboring castles. These families are led by patriarchal chieftains Hobart Bosworth (as MacDonald) and Brandon Hurst (as Campbell). Their sons and subjects raid each other's cattle, kill an occasional serf, and take their women by force. Our heroine, lovely Lillian Gish (as Annie Laurie), is aligned with the Campbell clan not only by blood, but also through best friend Patricia Avery (as Enid Campbell). Ms. Gish has caught the eye of arrogant cousin Creighton Hale (as Donald Campbell), but exchanges more passionate glances with bigger, brawnier rival Norman Kerry (as Ian MacDonald). With his broad shoulders and big grin, Mr. Kerry brutishly arouses Gish...

The family feud heats up when the MacDonald clan abducts Ms. Avery, as part of a revenge attack. A truce is reached, but Avery shocks all parties by announcing she has fallen in love with handsome abductor Joseph Striker (as Alastair MacDonald). When Gish seems likely to follow cousin Avery into the arms of another rough and ready MacDonald, Mr. Hale plots the Campbell clan's final solution to the age-old family feud. This leads to a thrilling last act, with Gish trying to stop a massacre…

MGM made "Annie Laurie" a blockbuster for their high-prestige star, which turned out to be one in a series of miscalculations in handling Lillian Gish. On balance, her final silent films had to be considered, at the time, a modest success; still, the bottom line was money, and too much was being spent for too little. This expensively made film lost a bundle.

"Annie Laurie" hasn't achieved the classic status now afforded other Gish fare from this era, like "The Scarlet Letter (1926) and "The Wind" (1928); importantly, both were directed by Victor Sjöström. Another reason is that Gish became a spokesperson for silent films, and decided against promoting certain films. Her efforts had an unquestionably positive effect on film preservation, overall, but she left a few jewels behind. "Annie Laurie" isn't thematically up to Gish-Sjöström levels, but it's an excellent example of silent cinema. Director John S. Robertson, who was considered one of the best directors available in the 1920s, turns in some of his finest work. The castle massacre, frantic mountain chase, and Technicolor finale are exceptional.

******** Annie Laurie (5/11/27) John S. Robertson ~ Lillian Gish, Norman Kerry, Creighton Hale, Hobart Bosworth