Scaramouche (1923)

Though produced by Metro, not Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Rex Ingram's Scaramouche, starring the upcoming Ramon Novarro, was released by MGM during their first year in business. Like Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, also rereleased by MGM, Scaramouche is an epic film, with huge, sixty-acre lot sets, seemingly hundreds of extras and immaculate, astonishing set design.

Scaramouche, though, is a much better film than The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It's a rousing, swashbuckling spectacle that's free of most of the mawkish tendencies of many later MGM epic films (Mare Nostrum, I'm looking at you).

Set during the time leading to the French Revolution, Scaramouche is based on Rafael Sabatini's enormously successful novel released only two years earlier. Though straining credulity (Novarro is an outcast aristocrat and a law student and a playwright and actor and a master swordsman and a leader of the revolution), the screenplay and directing are smooth and captivating, the actors entertaining and the choreographed scenes full of life.

Alice Terry is Novarro's love interest and Lewis Stone, who so wonderfully played cads during this period in his acting career, plays one you especially love to hate here.

Scaramouche is filled with half-shadowed knick-knacks, ornate costumes, kids playing games and other extraneous manifestations of life. I can describe it no better than historian Kevin Brownlow: Scaramouche is "primarily a work of art in the 18th-century tradition. The period has been so beautifully evoked that it seems inconceivable that the picture belongs to this century. It looks as though the combined efforts of several 18th century painters, sculptors, scenic designers, costumiers and architects have reached a climax of rococo glory on celluloid."

The compimentary and full-bodied orchestral score (commissioned, I think, by Turner Classic Movies) used for the Warner Archives DVD-R I watched is by Jeffrey Mark Silverman. While it may not have any memorable themes, neither does it detract from the film as so many composed or hodge-podged scores for silent films do.

The same print is shown from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and can also be ordered from Warner Archives here: http://www.wbshop.com/product/scaramouche+1923+1000179701.do

The Fire Brigade (1926)

Eager to see The Fire Brigade since Kevin Brownlow used scenes from its climax to open his 13-hour Hollywood documentary 29 years ago (!), I was very glad to see it shown at this year's Cinevent film convention.

The Fire Brigade exemplifies for me the sort of stirring, glossy, serious, but leavened with humor, big-budget (yet sensitive to small, sentimental details) movie that MGM excelled at in the '20s - a specific kind of atmosphere that was lost when sound came in. A tribute to firefighters everywhere, The Fire Brigade hones in on a Irish family of multi-generational firefighters, headed by the young Charles Ray.

The film is unsparing in its depiction of the costs and bravery involved in fire fighting. The depictions of building contractor negligence and governmental corruption, though somewhat simplified, are as relevant today as then. And the showpiece sequence, involving the rescue of orphans from a burning, collapsing building looks amazing - one can only imagine how it played in 1926.

The Fire Brigade was accompanied at Cinevent by Phil Carli (http://www.philipcarli.com/keyboard.html), whose thunderous yet subtle piano playing served and elevated the film.

The Fire Brigade is not available on DVD or VHS.