Cast: Romuald Joubé, Séverin-Mars, Maryse Dauvray, Maxime Desjardins, Angèle Guys, Mancini, Angèle Decori
I thought it would be a fun idea and beneficial to youth culture to follow in TCM's footsteps and have a Silent Sunday Edition, in which I review the silent film that TCM (Turner Classic Movies) is playing. So with that said, welcome to the very first Silent Sunday at the Psycho Ward!
Where to begin with silent films...well, first of all, it still boggles me that the movies were filmed talking, yet they somehow could not transfer that to the screen. Then again, I guess that's what makes silent movies so interesting to me.
The only negative about silents is the music. Usually a silent will be accompanied by an organ or piano. Organs, of course, are typical of horror silents (Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera being the most notable). Oftentimes silents use repetitive scores which sometimes work, as in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). I personally find the music in silents absolutely terrifying and chilling, except in Laurel & Hardy's silent shorts, and silent comedies in general, especially in Keaton and Chaplin's films.
Well, on to the film. This week I'm reviewing Abel Gance's 1919 World War I epic J'accuse.
The film is divided into parts, and though I only saw Part 1, I believe I've seen all I need to see. The film was made in 1919, it's a silent, and it's still fucking 3 HOURS LONG, for Christ's sake.
Anyway, the film circles around two men from a French village (the film was originally French, all the more reason for me to review it) who love the same woman. One, Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé) is a poet, while the other, François Laurin (Séverin-Mars) is an extremely jealous man who is married to Édith (Maryse Dauvray). The year is 1914 and the two enlist in the war serving in the same unit against the Germans. François rightly suspects that Jean is having an affair with the former's wife, so he sends her to live with his parents in Lorraine, where she is captured and raped by the Germans.
In 1918, Jean returns from the front due to ill health to find his mother dying. Édith returns from captivity with a daughter, Angèle (Angèle Guys). When François comes home on leave, Jean and Édith fear his reaction to the illegitimate child and try to conceal her from him, which merely revives his jealous suspicions of Jean, and the two men fight. When the truth is revealed, François and Jean agree to seek their vengeance in battle and both return to the front.
Later on, François dies in the field hospital after a great battle (supposedly a mythical figure aids the soldiers). Jean becomes insane due to what he has experienced. He returns to the village and gathers the inhabitants together to tell them of his vision on the battlefield: from the graves of the dead, soldiers arise and gather in a great cohort that marches through the land, back to their homes. Jean challenges the villagers to say whether they have been worthy of the men's sacrifices, and they watch in horror as their dead family and friends appear on the threshold. The soldiers return to their rest, and Jean goes back to his mother's house. There he finds a book of his own poems which he tears up in disgust, until one of them, his Ode to the Sun, drives him to denounce the sun for its complicity in the crimes of war. As the sunlight fades from the room, Jean dies.
MY REVIEW: Well, that's kind of a Haxan-ish twist at the end there (review coming once I muster enough courage to sit through the entire movie) with some Nosferatu thrown in. One might even say that Jean becomes a type of Renfield character, though this was 12 years before Dwight Frye would steal the show with that classic performance.
One thing that bugs me about silent films is that the women (and oftentimes the men, if you watch Stan Laurel's solo shorts) wear way too much makeup. That doesn't happen in this film. That's good. I wish they had kept it that way through the 20s.
Even if you haven't seen it (and you probably haven't), doesn't the plot seem kind of surreal for a war film? When I think of a war film, I don't think of people going nuts and dreaming up dead soldiers. That's what happens in real life. I think of Saving Private Ryan or, just because this is me, Lon Chaney's war comedy Tell It to the Marines (1926) or All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), the war film that made Lew Ayres a star. I mean, really, what's with the skeletons dancing? Is this a film studying heresy in soldiers (luckily for Abel Gance, Benjamin Christensen would show him how to make an effective film about witchcraft with 1922's Haxan)? I don't think so. Really, I don't consider this a war film. Sure, it has war in it, but a real war film wouldn't have skeletons dancing or the dead rising from the grave. For that, I give it 2.5 stars.
Trailer
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