Feel My Pulse

"Feel My Pulse" is a wonderful film that gives a feel for how people must have enjoyed the "moving pictures" in the earliest years of filmdom. Production and technical qualities were quite crude. Some labs and film preservation groups have been restoring films from that period. Often times that includes digital enhancements and improvements that render films clearer and crisper than some may have appeared on original showing. The DVD I bought of "Feel My Pulse" is not one of those. But for the lower quality, I would have rated this film even higher.

This is one of the best of the full-length silent feature films that had a plot. It has a crazy plot, and is very funny. Without sound, of course, the humor has to be carried even more strongly by the story lines projected on the film, and by the acting of the cast. Some modern movie fans are quick to chide early cinema for its over-acting. But, the physical expressions and gestures were how the humor and drama were conveyed, thus the varying degrees of them. This is a wonderful film that shows very well how that was done. It's as amusing to me today as it must have been to audiences nearly a century ago.

Bebe Daniels plays Barbara Manning, Richard Arlen is Wallace Roberts (aka, Her Problem), William Powel plays Phil Todd (aka, Her Nemesis), and a hilarious character by the name of Thirsty McGulp is played by Heinie Conklin. Powell was a seasoned actor already in the silent era, and his character here is a real hoot. The cast are all quite good.

Daniels was just two years younger than Gloria Swanson when she appeared in her first full-length feature film, "Male and Female" in 1919. It was the start of the last decade of the silent film era. Bebe's film career shot up just as fast as Swanson's from then on. She had made dozens of shorts since childhood, but now she was set in a film career that included a range of roles from comedy, romance, crime, mystery and adventure, to drama, war and western films. Of course, until 1929, these were all silent films. She was one actress who made a successful move to sound films. She was very talented as a singer, dancer, writer and producer.

Daniels has many films to her credit, but left Hollywood behind in the late 1930s. She married actor Ben Lyon, and the two performed for years in London. Ben served in the U.S. Army Air Force and was in charge of Special Services in England during World War II. The couple had a long-running radio show on BBC that was popular with the Americans serving in England. It was called "Hi, Gang!" After a short return to Hollywood in 1946, they went back to England and did another long-running popular radio show, "Life with the Lyons." The Lyons made their last film together in 1955. It was a British comedy take off from their radio show, "The Lyons Abroad," and their son and daughter were in the film as well.

The couple was married 40 years until Bebe's death at age 70 in 1971. She had suffered strokes in the early 1960s. The IMDb trivia section has an item that particularly interested me. Bebe had a second cousin, Lee De Forest, who was a prolific American inventor and early pioneer of radio. According to the entry, De Forest visited the set of Bebe's 1929 movie, "Rio Rita," and lent his technical skills to improving the sound quality of that and other films to follow.

This is a silent film well worth having in a movie collection. I think it's one worth restoring and making into digital.

Here's a sample of the scripted humor in this film. Roberts drives Miss Manning to the sanitarium over a very bad road. She is bounced all over the back seat. When they get to the sanitarium, she gives him a piece of her mind. The film script reads, "If you were a doctor, I could show you bruises that would astound the medical world."

And, here are some more pieces of dialog to match the very funny video. Uncle Wilberforce (Melbourne MacDowell), "What's wrong? I don't kiss often, but I've never had a complaint." Uncle Edgar (George Irving), "What shall we do? He'll ruin 21 years of antiseptic supervision."

Typewritten note: "Dear Miss Manning. Things is pretty dead. Hoping you are the same. Sylvester Zilch, Caretaker."

Todd, "Stop talking and give your nose a rest."

Barbara, "Do whatever one does to start the vehicle – and let us away over hill and dale."(sic) … "Keep the vehicle stationary while I lubricate my larynx."

Todd, "Wilfred sprained his head in a conference… Mr. Brewster has laughing asthma." Barbara, "Remember, Mr. Brewster, a spray a day keeps the microbes away."

Feel My Pulse casts Bebe Daniels. as a rich girl who because of her parents' fear of germs has been raised like a hothouse geranium. Howard Hughes or television's Adrian Monk has nothing on her.

Because of some 'excitement; it's decided that Daniels needs a rest cure and the family has endowed a sanitarium located on an an offshore island. But the mental health field just ain't that lucrative and the one they put in charge of the place has turned it over to William Powell and a gang of rum runners. Remember this is the time of Prohibition.

One of Powell's gang is roughneck Richard Arlen and while Daniels may have led a sheltered life she sure knows what she likes in men. Though the two don't hit it off at first she comes around.

The film is directed by Gregory LaCava and he would go on to direct William Powell in one of his greatest films My Man Godfrey. When he decides to play along with Daniels and treat her like a patient in her own sanitarium notice his body language. It really does look like Godfrey Park in My Man Godfrey.

The climax is hysterical as Daniels shrugs off all the inhibitions her hot house upbringing has given her. Can't say any more, you have to see it.

Glad this silent film has not been lost.

"Feel My Pulse" is quite an entertaining late-silent comedy from Paramount Pictures. This one takes an extremely offbeat premise and runs with it in a pleasing semi-deadpan style. Has been raised to be a hypochondriac according to the eccentric terms of a will. Now her skeptical Texan uncle has custody of her, so she escapes to the family-owned sanitarium, which has unfortunately been taken over by rum-runners.

Daniels plays this an understated, almost straight way that lets the comedy of the situations come through all the more, and, of course, much of the premise is an excuse for playing on the juxtaposition of Daniels' sheltered, mannered, stilted character among rough bootleggers, and this comes off well with the scenes of a newly-arrived Daniels trying to navigate riding in a taxi cab are some of the funniest.

It doesn't make sense to call this film talky since it isn't actually a talkie, but it is curiously dialgue-dependent, with frequent use of longer-title cards to carry scenes. This isn't usually too intrusive in the case of this particular film, but it's curious. The scenes that take place just after Daniels' character have arrived at the sanatorium, in fact, is essentially carried by a series of good puns that make ailments sound like drinks and vice versa ("local bruise" / "local brews"). This is a later silent feature, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were written before the studio knew if it would be made silent or not.

As others have pointed out the scene where a bottle of liquor is confused for medicine goes on a little long -- and so does a slightly disconnected scene of Daniels floating on an errant board that doesn't really come of as a stunt. Overall though the pacing is good the film moves a long at an enjoyable clip.

Bebe Daniels is the pampered heiress who believes she has a dicky ticker, and William Powell's the shady doc fronting a bootleg operation disguised as a care home. Lightweight and inoffensive, and it makes a change to see Nice Guy Bill cast as a villain.

Bebe Daniels stars as a hypochondriac heiress who retires to her family's sanitarium for a rest. Her Texan uncle says what she really needs is adventure and romance--not a rest cure. On the boat trip to the rest home, which is on an island, Bebe runs into hunky Richard Arlen (a dead ringer for a young Harrison Ford) who zooms her across the sea--just the beginning of Bebe's adventures. The rest home is actually a bootlegger's paradise run by fake doctor William Powell. Lots of complications and plot twists with Arlen actually an undercover reporter. Bebe looks great and is very funny. She had once been Harold Lloyd's leading lady in a series of films, so she knew comedy. Powell is appropriately hammy as the doctor; Arlen is handsome as the leading man; Charles Sellon is the caretaker. All good fun. Bebe Daniels is best remembered for her talkies 42nd Street and the first Maltese Falcon with Ricardo Cortez as well as her long marriage to Ben Lyon. With this film Bebe Daniels joins Colleen Moore and Marion Davies as the best silent comediennes.