21. Strike

From master to magician to miracle – and I’m sure I’ll squeeze marvel in at some point. Eisenstein is a great propagandist because he’s a storyteller first. Strike is the first 2 chapters of Animal Farm, when the workers must rise up and battle the corrupt, fat, and despicable corporate parasites.

Much greater than the movie’s unsubtle message is Eisenstein’s vision. Here’s a filmmaker in full command of the camera’s power. The long shots here, the beauty of thousands of machine pieces humming along at one time, the poetry of a crowd, the high theater to be shot in just a few seconds of a close-up – Eisenstein simply gets it, seemingly born to know, somehow, how to become the camera. Griffith’s preachiness is gone as is the self-indulgence of Gance and Stroheim. Just over 90 minutes, Strike takes your breath away countless times with the beauty, humor, and fireworks evident in pretty much every shot. Superimposition, dissolves, quick cuts, longer takes, the movie is a perfect marriage of story, cinematography, and editing. The filmmaker’s craft is so compelling you fall hopelessly into the ideology; Reds takes over twice as long and isn’t nearly as effective (despite its many admirable aspects, it’s still Hollywood all the way).

Strike additionally reinforces the joys of watching the 1001 Movies in chronological order. To follow La Roue with Strike is to see filmmakers learning from their peers, then raising the ante. A thrill.

20. The Thief of Bagdad

Douglas Fairbanks basically invents the action hero in this one – or, since his over-the-top performance is clearly honed from a lot of experience, packages up all the brand attributes in one big flashy package. Shamelessly entertaining and jampacked with every swashbuckling pose you’ve ever seen, the movie showcases Fairbanks’ stunning athleticism alongside lavish, sets that are even more painstakingly detailed than Griffith’s (in fact, the outdoor/balcony scenes call up Stroheim with their no-expense-spared density). It’s wonderful fun to watch, especially if you start counting all the times Fairbanks throws back his head and shows his perfect choppers in a hearty guffaw; Errol Flynn clearly learned everything he knew from this guy. The set designs are lush and imaginative, and the influence of this on every Aladdin cartoon as well as on the first Indiana Jones movie and The Wizard of Oz is clear.

One of the nicest things about the movie is the bare minimum of intertitles, and in fact, you don’t need about half of the few that are there. That may be because the Disney Aladdin rips this one off plot-wise pretty closely, so you already feel like you know it. It’s a great lesson in letting your frames do the talking and storytelling.

It’s nice to get an epic without a lecture attached. This one’s a treat.

19. La Roue (The Wheel)

Griffith is the master, but Gance is the magician. This baggy monster of a movie does things with and on film that are still stunning today. Gance called cinema “a cathedral of light,” and he frames and lights every single shot with appropriate reverence.

It’s fairly easy to get caught up in the story (at least in the first half of the film) given how beautiful everything looks. In particular, there is a sequence that cuts between 2 windows. In one, a brother and sister who aren’t really siblings but who are in love with each other, have a tender exchange; in the other, the father of the two receives devastating news. By juxtaposing the two pairs in the same context with the same light and yet with completely different content, Gance creates an exquisite study in contrasts that would be difficult to accomplish in any other medium. Throughout the movie, windows figure importantly, not just for the necessary light they furnish, though Gance exploits that beautifully. Additionally, cross-cutting suspense scenes are pumped up to an epic scale; Gance has taken the chase beyond Griffith’s brilliant early work to an even more suspenseful place. Finally, the use of location shooting is stunning, and hard to fathom given the difficulties of hauling heavy film equipment up to the Alps in the period.

All of this helps to make up for the overblown story, with its thwarted love, upper-class oppression, and rather bizarre incest angle. At times, the acting is quite wonderful and naturalistic; a scene with the son and his father on a train in the last third is one of the most powerful depictions of quiet despair I’ve seen. But often, particularly in the latter part of the story, a lot of time is spent in uncomfortable close-ups with glycerin tears, particularly on Ivy Close, the actress playing the daughter. Charming as a young and athletic tomboy early on, her perpetual sad expression once she’s married off to a rich libertine becomes hard to watch after a couple of hours. As the main character grows blind, the the otherwise terrific actor Severin-Mars rolls his eyes back in his head (see the photo above); I found it extremely distracting after a while, particularly given the heavy proportion of close-ups in the final third of the film (with the main relief being Close looking sad and a little simpery).

The ending is quite beautiful, but it’s a long haul to get there, and even so feels milked to the last drop. Clocking in at 4 and 1/2 hours, the movie took several sittings to get through. An extraordinary technician, Gance presents emotions on an epic scale that’s hard to relate to nearly 100 years after the original release. Still, for the sheer weight of his influence, the movie is worth the haul, particularly given Cocteau’s assertion, “There is cinema before and after La Roue as there is painting before and after Picasso.”