pastier-1

This film's plot and dialogue largely center on artists, designers, and their work -- paintings, sketchbooks, sculptures, and high-design furniture, display cases, armoires and vases, and the question of retaining, donating, or selling these rare and rarefied items after its owner dies.

Sophisticated visual objects are the core of the movie, yet its own appearance is surprisingly nondescript. Far more often than not, the cinematography seems haphazard or banal, as though its only purpose was to depict the actors speaking in this very talky film, or follow them around when they move. Its esthetic lacks visual ambition or a compositional point of view.

The art objects that are so important to the plot are treated indifferently -- we rarely see them depicted well or fully. No wonder that a majority of the deceased's children don't care about these treasures -- the director and cinematographer don't seem to either.

Is all this a subliminal way for the director to suggest that art is highfalutin', and less important than people?

I won't comment about the acting or plot -- there's plenty of that here already. What I'd rather do is call attention to the visuals -- the cinematography, lighting, costuming, and especially the set design.

Normally, horror films take place in ancient settings -- crude medieval fortresses and rustic castles that are dark, cluttered and gloomy. But this one is set in a perversely utopian sci-fi fantasy -- the clean lined, impeccably detailed, generously glazed modernistic and (usually) radiantly lit white-and-silver upper floor interiors of the house.

The lower floor is an expressionistic prison, also clean lined, but still dungeon-like with its windowless walls of exposed board-formed concrete. An elegant steel spiral staircase connects the two, and the angular expressionism reaches its culmination in the chamber used for the black mass.

Karloff's costumes recall Oskar Schemmer's Bauhaus-produced work -- angular, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and elegant. Even the haircut of this man of the future in sharp and angular. His character is an engineer and architect and is given the name -- Poelzig -- of a famous expressionist German architect and film set designer of the time, who was a colleague of the director on an earlier film. The elegant futurism in carried down to the detail level, including a digital night-table clock and an abstract chess set. Much of the genius of this movie is that it breaks the horror-movie visual mold, and floods it with light, creating a fascinating tension between plot and setting.

This is currently showing at the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto, as a bookend to The Freshman. Both films were made in the 1920s, are about upper-class college life, swank parties, overdressed and overaged students, and football, and feature Jobyna Ralston. After that, most resemblances end.

The Freshman is a wonderful silent film, a comedy that combines slapstick with subtlety, and Ralston brings depth, tenderness, and a delicate beauty to her role.

The College Coquette is an early talkie melodrama, ground out by a bunch of hacks. Ralston is ineffective and one-dimensional, as are the other characters. The plot is clichéd and primitive.

Usually the old films that survive are good ones, and we thus become spoiled, and assume that they represent the norm of their time. This turkey reminds us that there must have been quite a few times when Hollywood laid an egg, this definitely being one of them.

Bottom line -- this is by far the worst movie I've seen in many years.