Les nuits du désert

The standard foci in John Gilbert studies have always been the early talkies and the great successes of the twenties. Everything has been directed to the great John Gilbert question: his precipitous fall from grace - did he fall or was he pushed? Seeing Desert Nights raises more questions than it answers. It certainly, to paraphrase Defence Secretary Rumsfeldt, lets us know that there are more secrets that we didn't know that we didn't know.

There is this last John Gilbert silent film for example. Very late. So there was something of a reluctance to commit to sound films for John Gilbert. Was this the reasoning of Louis B. Mayer or John Gilbert? This late silent film could only have added to the general high tension surrounding Gilbert's transition to sound. Was this a deliberate psychological ploy by Mayer who knew both how to make stars and unmake them or were other reasons such as changing tastes, a high pitched voice either in fact or because of a sabotaged sound recording, or the fact that Gilbert was now obliged to vocalize the romantic swill which had previously been expressed with his face and body.

Was Gilbert merely not as clever as he thought he was or were his weaknesses noted by Mayer and used to drive Gilbert off the cliff? Who was the driving force behind making this last silent film might go a good way to sorting these this questions out.

Certainly Gilbert gets to do a lot of the Gilbert schticks that made him a star. He waltzes the same way he did in the Merry Widow, his shoulder and his arm are as stiff as if set in plaster, his body gilding ever so smoothly across the floor, the lady inseparable from his force field. He appeared with his usual super macho devil-may-care persona, hands on hips, bending backwards and laughing loudly signature move, literally laughing at danger.

Still however good or bad he was and no matter how good or bad the film was, it's being released as a silent in 1929 doomed it to obscurity the moment it was first threaded into a projector. In the world where you're only as good as your last picture, a total and absolute flop like this made Gilbert's transition to sound just that much more problematical.

As it is Desert Nights isn't very good, what there is of it. Someone has written that it's copyright length is listed as 80 minutes and the version available on Turner Classic Movies, which I presume is the MGM library copy, is only 63 minutes. In the film as shown there are vast problems in continuity. Transitions from the automobile escape to a safari are strangely incomplete giving it something of the routine illogic which drove French Intellectuals wild for a time in the late 20s and early 30s as surrealism was the desired aesthetic. This of course wasn't a deliberate artistic decision. Later in the film even stranger things happen. Does he escape or doesn't he? Who has the drop on whom? Does he love her, does she love him or are they both playing a game which turns into love? With so many missing scenes, even with a bit more information, who would possibly care? Apparently in one scene John Gilbert gives Ernest Torrence, as the heavy, directions, which cause him to wander along a lush river for days until he arrives back at mine where he is promptly put in chains, but the scene has been dropped though referred to in the denouement. Time passing isn't expressed at all at any point in this picture. It all seems to just be happening then and now on the screen. Very surrealistic.

Even if it had been complete, even if it had been a talkie, it would have been a bad picture. Maybe something epic could have been wrung out of the desert sequences but this was shot on an intimate yet superficial manner.(Fantastic photography from James Wong Howe). Everything is pretty perfunctory and Gilbert can't pull this one out with his famous charm alone. These were perhaps the last fleeting shots of the old self confident Jack Gilbert, as the utter failure of Desert Nights and the changeover to sound seems to have sapped the Gilbert screen persona and cast him o'er with the pale cast of doubt forever.

So was this film actually released this way, or did it play a week full length and then go out to the nabes cut, perhaps as part of a double bill? Was it cut and dumped or did it fail and then cut and dumped? The Variety review might be the thing to see. So was this a disaster that Gilbert had been talked into or pressured to make or did he do it willingly and even enthusiastically and if he did was it something that Mayer use to his advantage in his plan to destroy Gilbert? Gilbert's next appearance was a cameo as himself in William Haines' A Man's Man, a dangerous title considering Haines was perhaps the most widely known homosexual leading man in the movies.

Gilbert would go on to make his first Talkie in a Romeo and Juliet sequence in The Hollywood Review of 1929 where he delivered the role of Romeo in the balcony scene in something less than dulcet tones but perhaps most damagingly wearing tights and rouged up in early color. Its the conceit of the sequence that Gilbert and Norma Schearer are being directed by Lionel Barrymore.

Barrymore would direct Gilbert in the famous disaster of His Glorious Night (of the famous I love you, I love you, I love you...) which, with Redemption, dug Gilbert a hole from which he could never get out. By this time he was a marked man with everyone referring to him in the past tense and leaving the foot note about his high voice to explain his fall.

This film is a little bit different from Gilbert's other silent films. Usually Gilbert was cast in films in which there was a tremendous amount of action and/or romance. This time, much of the film is just Gilbert in a somewhat psychological battle against two thieves and the elements.

Gilbert plays Hugh Rand, manager of a South African diamond mine. He gets news that two visitors are due - Lord Stonehill and his daughter Diana. They arrive ahead of schedule, and against Rand's own predictions Lady Diana turns out to be a beautiful woman. However, it soon turns out that the two are imposters, but are found out by Rand before he can notify anyone else. The pair of thieves take off into the desert with their stolen diamond and their company of co-conspirators with Rand as hostage.

Things begin to go wrong for the thieves, and pretty soon it is just Rand and the two imposters on foot, in search of water before the sun of the desert does them in. Throughout their journey Rand is laughing off the situation as well as laughing at the two thieves, now suddenly penitent and afraid of death. Rand has a right to laugh - he has control of the last canteen of water.

Gilbert often reminds me - in this and his other silent films - of Errol Flynn, showing temper and passion when it is called for, but usually laughing in the face of danger, having a genuinely good time in whatever situation he is put, and inviting us to join in the adventure with him. I've often wondered what would have become of his career had he been ten years younger and started out in talking pictures instead of silent film. Would he have been MGM's answer to Flynn in the age of the swashbuckling picture? This film is highly recommended for the silent film enthusiast.

John Gilbert DIDN'T exit pictures because of a high voice. In fact, his voice was a gravelly baritone; not mellifluously romantic, but perfectly suited to the characters he played in his later sound films. It's too bad this was released as a silent.

This pre-code desert adventure film features solid performances by the leads (I always perk up when I see Ernest Torrance in the cast list), beautiful photography, and a plot full of tension from shifting power and sexual tension.

Gilbert plays a bad good guy-- roguish, gritty, full of dark humor, and willing to play his captors off each other with anything it takes for his survival. One reviewer compares him to Errol Flynn. I can see that, but also the Clark Gable of "Red Dust".

A good, suspenseful film with all the advantages of the late silent period.

Of all the major American studios, MGM was the slowest to switch from silents to talking pictures. The studio head, Louis B. Mayer, insisted that talkies were just a fad...and so they continued making silent films up through 1929. Other studios had pretty much gone all talking by 1929. One of the later silents, and John Gilbert's last silent, was this dandy film "Desert Nights".

The film is set somewhere in Southern Africa. You aren't sure of the country but you know that the Kalahari Desert is in the region. This desert plays an important part because the boss of a diamond mine, Hugh Rand (Gilbert) is kidnapped and a fortune in diamonds is stolen by some clever crooks. However, Rand turns out to be the clever one as he ends up taking the crooks for a strange adventure.

There really wasn't anything I didn't like about the film. Gilbert is good, as always and the film is well written and exciting. Additionally, the end if smart and works well. Surprisingly, I don't think this film was ever re-made as a talking picture and with such an interesting plot, it should have been.

If Desert Nights had come out in 1926 instead of 1929 people would be far less critical of it. I thought it was a super sexy melodrama and romance, with great performances by John Gilbert, beautiful Mary Nolan, and Ernest Torrence, the perfect villain with a touch of humor.

My favorite scene is in the beginning, before the trouble begins, when Ernest is playing the piano and the young couple, played by Mary and John, waltzed on the front porch. John Gilbert could have been a professional dancer, he was that good.

The story is about a bunch of jewel thieves caught in the desert, but you really won't care. Just watch it for the stars, and to see just how gorgeous John Gilbert still looked in 1929. Sigh.

9 out of 10 stars.