Les nuits du désert

Kidnapped by jewel thieves, the manager of a British diamond mining operation in Africa spends long DESERT NIGHTS plotting his escape...

John Gilbert is most enjoyable in this lively yarn, his last starring performance in a silent film (he would appear in the William Haines' picture A MAN'S MAN, which was released a few months after DESERT NIGHTS, but that was in a cameo role as himself). His verve & vitality propel the (sometimes silly) plot and make the movie into a very enjoyable action picture.

Ernest Torrence - in a fine portrayal - makes a florid, hammy villain. Beautiful Mary Nolan enacts the sort of woman any red-blooded male viewer would gladly walk the Kalahari to gain.

By 1929 silent films were truly an art form in their own right. (Witness the piano sequence early in the picture, with Gilbert & Nolan waltzing on the porch, to see the kind of nuance possible in this not-so-silent medium.) MGM was at the apex of the industry & Jack Gilbert was the Studio's greatest male star. Which is what makes DESERT NIGHTS so poignant. Before the year ended silent cinema, that most emotionally penetrating of all the photo dramas, would be dead & Gilbert's career would be dying. A new crop of stars would be on the rise & Noise would be king.

Desert Nights (1929)

*** (out of 4)

John Gilbert's final silent picture is a pretty interesting one even if its reputation isn't that high. In the film he plays Hugh Rand, a diamond mine owner in South Africa. One day a father (Ernest Torrence) and daughter (Mary Nolan) show up on invitation for some good hunting but it turns out they're a pair of thieves who take Hugh hostage as well as steal $500,000 in diamonds. The three head off into the desert for their escape but soon they're out of water and not sure which way to go so the thieves must depend on Hugh to save their lives. Watching this film there's no doubt that it was rushed together just to save time before MGM had to put Gilbert into a sound feature. I'm really not sure why they selected this one to remain silent as the material could have made for an interesting early talkie but I must say it's a good thing that they kept it silent. The movie runs an extremely quick 62-minutes and for the most part is very entertaining. The reason I say it works best as a silent is because of the hot sexuality throughout the film between Gilbert and Nolan. The two of them certainly heat up the screen and this is apparent early on in a simple dinner sequence where the two begin to get to know one another. Just the way they look at one another just tells you all the sexual undertones you'll need to know. Once the film moves out to the desert it picks up the entertainment as it's clear Gilbert's character is just having fun tormenting the two thieves by constantly reminding them that death is near. I really loved the way Gilbert played the role in a sort of madness that his character finally breaks through and decides to have some fun with the people who kidnapped him. The way he torments the "Father" by coming onto the girl was a lot of fun and just added to the sexual tension running through the film. Gilbert is a lot of fun in the role as he gets to play that tough guy everyone loved him as and I'm sure the women really ate up seeing him burning in that hot sun. Torrence is a real blast as the bad guy as he eats up every scene he's in and you can't help but love to hate him. He's such a arrogant jerk at the start of the film so it's fun seeing him tortured by Gilbert. Nolan is incredibly beautiful in her role and this includes a great sequence with her bathing naked. We don't actually see anything but the implications of the scene are easy to see. Her and Gilbert really burn up the screen and make it worth sitting through. In many ways this film reminds me of a silly serial that has just about everything happening. This film offers up some nice tension but there's also plenty of sexuality, comedy and even camp value especially the scene with the machine gun tied on the side of a car. Fans of silent cinema will really eat this thing up but even those who aren't fans will probably find themselves having fun.

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.

Hugh Roland (John Gilbert) manages an African diamond mine. He is told that Lord Stonehill and his daughter Diana are visiting the mine. It's been three years since any white woman has joined them. The father and daughter turn out to be two diamond thieves. They kidnap Hugh and escape into the desert. They are abandoned by their black servants. With no way to survive, they are forced to depend on Hugh.

Gilbert was a silent film star. He's not well known today. One could see the dashing leading man in him. The turns in the second half are a little weak in terms of action. I was expecting something more thrilling. It seems to be trying for comedy which it didn't start out with. It's still fine. It's just not I was expecting.

John Gilbert's charisma is evident here as the manager of a diamond mine in Capetown, South Africa, forced to accompany the five diamond thieves into the desert to prevent him from "squealing." Among the thieves are Ernest Torrence and Mary Nolan, who gained admittance to the mine in the first place by pretending to be the expected Lord Stonehill and Lady Diana. Although the acting was uniformly good, I found there were too many plot holes that distracted me and made me dislike the film ultimately. I did enjoy seeing the beautiful Mary Nolan, an actress I was not familiar with.

I was also bothered by the abbreviated print shown on the Turner Classic Movies channel, which ran only 62 minutes. The copyright length of the film indicated the film should have run 80 minutes at the sound speed. A cut was obvious at one point where Torrence suddenly acquired a gun, whereas Gilbert had the upper hand in the previous scene. Perhaps this is the only print available these days.