These notes on William Wellman’s Beggars of Life by film scholar Thomas Gladysz are adapted from his new book, Beggars of Life: A Companion to the 1928 Film, as well as his audio commentary to the movie, which can be heard on the recent Kino Lorber release. A recently restored DCP, featuring a score by the Mount Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, will screen as part of our Silents Please! series on Friday, December 1 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

By Thomas Gladysz

In 1928, thirty-two year old director William Wellman was at the top of his profession. He was still basking in the critical and commercial triumph of Wings when his latest production, Beggars of Life, hit screens in the fall. Considered one the studio’s most important dramatic productions of the season, Beggars of Life was a film which couldn’t help but provoke. Wellman was already developing a reputation as a maverick director. And this film’s gritty realism stood at odds with the otherwise carefree glitz and glamour of the Jazz Age.

Beggars of Life was loosely based on a bestselling book of the same name by Jim Tully, a celebrated, rough-and-tumble, two-fisted “tramp writer of Hobohemia.” In Tully’s book—a kind of novelistic memoir, the author gave a grim account of the nearly seven years he spent wandering America as a “road kid.” It is a book not only about Tully’s journeys (many of them made jumping trains), but also about the colorful and sometimes unsavory characters he met along the way—in jails, bars, hobo camps and small towns across the Midwest.

Though cut from the same rough cloth, Wellman’s movie tells a different story. Beggars of Life is a tersely filmed drama about an orphan girl (Louise Brooks) dressed as a boy who flees the law after killing her abusive stepfather. With the help of a young tramp (Richard Arlen), the two hop a freight train, ending up at a hobo camp ruled by Oklahoma Red (future Oscar winner Wallace Beery). In this male-dominated underworld, with the police on their trail, danger is always close at-hand.

Wellman’s artfully photographed, morally dark tale of the down-and-out stars Beery. He receives top billing, and gives an especially vital performance. Arlen, an otherwise indifferent actor, is also good. However, it is Brooks (the only woman in the film) who dominates the screen in what is arguably her best role in her best American film. Brooks stands out, and not just for her appealing, androgynous appearance. Rather, she captures our attention through her authentic performance. As a young girl in Kansas, Brooks was sexually abused. It marked her life. In Beggars of Life, she plays a vulnerable young woman who is sexually assaulted.

In Wellman’s film, Brooks seemingly reached down inside herself to give an authentic performance. She would do so again in Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, two 1929 films where she once again plays a character who is sexually abused. Too what degree Brooks’ childhood experience affected her performance in these films we can never know, but, in all likelihood, it’s there in ways the camera could only record superficially. Watch Brooks’ face.

Beggars of Life is a film filled with transgression, acts that go against a law, rule, or code of conduct. In the film, Brooks plays a character identified only as “The Girl.” Her abuse at the hands of a farmer who has “adopted” her, and the assault that leads to his manslaughter, in turn causes this orphan to flee disguised as a boy.

On the run, this cross-dressing young woman descends into a desperate social stratum even lower than her standing as an orphan. Brooks’ and Arlen’s characters enter a “hobo jungle”—a camp of homeless men where criminal activity is rampant. We see fighting, theft, drinking (this was during prohibition), trespassing, attacks upon the police, and the suggestion that Brooks’ character would be claimed by another and in all-likelihood again sexually assaulted. Set in America’s heartland, this is pastoral life gone awry. And too, there is race mixing at a time when black and white characters were seldom shown as equals. In fact, the sole African American actor in the film, Edgar “Blue” Washington, plays one of its very few noble characters.

The late 1920’s marked a period of transition in the film industry, as the studios came to grips with emerging sound technologies. At the time, Wellman was resistant to using sound: according to film historian and Wellman authority Frank Thompson, Wellman felt its intrusion into his carefully constructed drama would prove disturbing to the mood of the film. The director, however, was overruled, and Paramount instructed special effect engineer Roy Pomeroy to supervise a scene that would feature a bit of dialogue and a song sung by Beery.

At the time, the use of sound equipment was notorious for slowing down a film’s action. Actors had to stand still in order to be heard in near proximity to hidden microphones. And that was a problem in the making of Beggars of Life, which was all about movement. Throughout the film, its many colorful characters are frequently in motion, either walking down a road or across a field or riding on trains, automobiles, or even a slow-moving bread-cart. When Wellman wants to indicate a character’s mood, he will show us their feet.

A bit of dialogue (song lyrics actually) was first heard well into the sound version of the movie, in the scene when Oklahoma Red first enters the story. Paramount executives wanted the stout actor to arrive, stand in the midst of the hobo camp, and sing a hobo song. Wellman thought such a scene would prove too static, and the director asked Beery to instead walk into the camp while singing and carrying a barrel of moonshine. The soundman insisted it couldn’t be done, and that the microphone couldn’t be moved.

The director’s near obsession with movement led to a solution, and something of an innovation. Others have been credited with first moving a microphone during the making of a film, but according to David O. Selznick, Wellman did it first for Paramount. Selznick made his claim to Kevin Brownlow, who included it in his 1968 book, The Parade's Gone By. “I was also present on the stage when a microphone was moved for the first time by Wellman, believe it or not. Sound was relatively new and at that time the sound engineer insisted that the microphone be steady. Wellman, who had quite a temper in those days, got very angry, took the microphone himself, hung it on a boom, gave orders to record—and moved it.”

Though a few earlier Paramount releases had also utilized music and sound effects, Beggars of Life was notably the first studio release to include spoken dialogue. The film was released in September of 1928 as both a silent and sound film (the latter with added music, sound effects—including the dramatic sounds of a locomotive, and a bit of dialogue, all of which are now considered lost). The sound version played in larger markets like Madison and Milwaukee, while the silent version played in smaller towns and those markets not yet “wired for sound.” Despite not being a full-fledged talkie, Beggars of Life remained in circulation for nearly two years, as both sound films and the Depression overtook the country.

Beggars of Life has long been a somewhat little known and little seen film. Within the last few years, however, things have begun to change. A rare surviving 16mm print of Beggars of Life (owned by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York) was optically enlarged to 35mm, making it available to festivals and other special screenings. And earlier in 2017, Beggars of Life enjoyed its first real commercial release when Kino Lorber issued the George Eastman print on DVD/Blu-ray.

According to Wellman’s son, Beggars of Life was the director’s favorite among his silent movies. Not as grand in scope as Wings, Beggars of Life is, rather, a small masterpiece. It is also a film which speaks to our troubled times.

These notes on George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead were written by Lillian Holman, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A newly restored DCP, personally supervised by Romero, will screen as part of a tribute to the late director on Saturday, November 18 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

By Lillian Holman

On its surface there is nothing scary about a middle aged man staggering slowly through a cemetery. He is not grotesque and he is wearing a suit; he is the prime example of unassuming. Yet this man is the first big scare of Night of the Living Dead (1968), one of the forerunners of decades of zombie movies made in its image. You’ll forget how harmless said man appeared when he is banging on your car door, blank-faced, and determined to kill you. The late George Romero directed Dead and it is his incredible power of taking the unassuming and making it terrifying that makes Dead iconic. Much like B-level horror movies from the studio era, Romero makes use of a low budget to generate horror from the unexpected and tension from the cinematic.

Most of the plot takes place in one house during one night, as Ben, played by Duane Jones, shelters in place and works to protect himself and the rest of the house’s occupants against the oncoming swarm of the mysterious undead. As the night wears on, Ben and the group (a young woman named Barbara, a family called the Coopers and a teenage couple named Tom and Judy) try to survive and also piece together what on earth is happening through snippets on the radio and TV. The threat of the dead is always there as the zombies linger outside waiting either for the humans to slip up or their numbers to grow strong enough to break through. This ticking time bomb frightens us as much as the zombies themselves. Ben is remarkably competent, but the implications are that he will have to maintain perfection in order to survive the night. Therefore, his competence is a double-edged sword. We can have more faith that he will make it, but we can take no comfort in potentially knowing more than he does. Romero doesn’t give us privileged information and Ben seems to anticipate anything we would. We are forced to fear the unexpected, therefore, and wonder at what window Ben is going to miss or what loophole the dead are going to find. If we were the ones in Ben’s place, there is little chance we could do better than he does and it is all the more likely we would end up like Barbara.

The horror does not just lie in the oncoming dead, however. Jason Zinoman of the New York Times wrote in a reflection about George Romero, that “Romero will always be known for turning hordes of dead people into a new kind of mainstream monster, but what made him a revolutionary artist is that he didn’t let the living off the hook.” As Ben works tirelessly to board up the house, he has to balance his fear of the zombies with the terrifying incompetence of the shell-shocked Barbara and the actively unhelpful blowhard, Harry Cooper. Barbara was our red-herring protagonist, who lives on in the film as mute reminder of our own fear and helplessness. She follows Ben in a catatonic state and even though she is technically another living adult, she must be protected like a child. Cooper, meanwhile, is a different kind of problem. His ego and his selfishness is as life-threatening as the zombies themselves. He is confident that he knows best and refuses to listen to Ben’s sound logic. He also continues to choose what will save his family over what will save the group. While not heavy-handed, the fact that it is 1968 and a middle aged white man is refusing to listen to or care about a young black man is not insignificant. Neither Cooper nor Ben references the color of Ben’s skin, but the implied racism is there. According to Matt Thompson of NPR’s Code Switch, who in turn cites Joe Kane, “Ben was not originally envisioned as a black character. But the casting of Duane Jones in the role gave it a societal resonance that later zombie fiction would strive to recreate.” This is present in Ben’s relationship with Cooper, but becomes even more tragic and impactful during the iconic ending that is not worth spoiling here, but maintains chilling relevance to this day.

In his obituary for Romero, director Edgar Wright remarks that “‘Romero’, immediately conjures more images and themes than 99 percent of writer/directors out there.” Night of the Living Dead was the first conjuring of those images and themes and it is remarkably prescient to this day. As the dead walk across our movie and TV screens, it was Romero who released them and warned us with the ever chilling “They’re coming to get you, Barbara…” Get us they did and oddly enough, we are grateful.

These notes on of Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito, 2011) were written by Tim Brayton, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of The Skin I Live In will screen as part of our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen series tribute to Almodóvar on Sunday, October 29 at 2 p.m. in the auditorium of the Chazen Museum of Art. Free admission!

By Tim Brayton

Just in time for Halloween, Cinematheque's ongoing series celebrating the work of director Pedro Almodóvar turns to the Spanish master's closest brush with horror cinema. 2011's The Skin I Live In, like any other Almodóvar film, is ultimately too densely packed with a wide variety of styles and narrative ideas to belong in any one genre: questions of gender and sexual identity rub elbows with a melodramatic tale about a bereaved doctor trying to make the synthetic skin that might have saved his unfaithful wife from suicide. It's the usual Almodóvar mixture of absurdity, horniness, and unapologetic grotesquerie, far more than it slots into any conventional category.

But what else are we to make of a film whose story mainly focuses on the demented revenge plot of a genuine mad scientist? Dr. Robert Ledgard (played by Antonio Banderas, reuniting with the director 22 years after Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) is a perfect example of a latter-day Dr. Frankenstein, his desire to make the world a better place through the power of a medical scientist turning into something curdled and perverse as a result of his suffering. Almodóvar himself was quick to notice this in interviews immediately following the film's premiere at Cannes:

"I was most interested in the thrillers of the 1940s of filmmakers like Fritz Lang… but the screenplay did not fit this perfectly. Finally, the only clear reference was George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or better yet the myth of Prometheus on which it’s based, is a better reference that I noticed only afterwards."

The Franju comparison is obvious from any piece of promotional artwork used around the world to sell the film during its initial release: one of the most striking images in The Skin I Live In is the translucent plastic mask Robert attaches to the face of Vera (Elena Anaya), the chief victim of his mad science, whose face has been replaced with the bad doctor's new synthetic skin. It's an obvious visual reference to the unnaturally smooth, expressionless mask worn by Edith Scob throughout most of Franju's art-horror classic, and certainly the most tasteful, respectable nod to the work of horror films past.

Not that Almodóvar has ever been a filmmaker overly concerned with good taste! The Skin I Live In borrows from substantially less critically-approved sources than Franju's film. The sordid, violent sexuality that underpins everything about the movie (the plot hinges on two separate rapes, and that's saying nothing of Robert's maniacal plan, a sex crime that I'll not spoil except to say that it seems carefully designed to offend the maximum number of people of every political leaning) has more to do with the sleazy thrillers being made across the globe in the 1970s, with a particularly seedy hub of production in the director's own Spain.

In fact, though Almodóvar has never apparently spoken of this connection, The Skin I Live In bears a remarkable number of similarities to 1962's The Awful Dr. Orlof, a rip-off of Eyes Without a Face that's often credited as being Spain's very first horror film. Dr. Orlof was one of the earliest works directed by Jesús Franco, whose critical reputation comes as close as possible to being the exact polar opposite of Almodóvar's: frequently castigated as morally crass and aesthetically incompetent even by the trash cinema fans most likely to make excuses for the prurient grind house fare that was Franco's stock in trade. Still, the unapologetic excess and front-and-center sexuality in Franco's work bears no small similarity to Almodóvar's most extravagantly lurid work, including The Skin I Live In.

Still, while we can position The Skin I Live In as the arthouse successor to the Spanish exploitation films of generations prior, there's no denying how far beyond their model Almodóvar's body horror melodrama goes. Robert is a '50s-style mad scientist, all right, but he's also a quintessential Almodóvar sexually obsessive male, funneling his broken lust into cruelty and control. Vera is an emblem of the fluidity of identity and desire who could fit comfortably in any of the director's most transgressive early films, though the extraordinary black-hearted tawdriness hiding in her backstory would have been extreme even by the standards of Almodovar's '80s films.

The result is one of the director's most aggressively sexual works (it is difficult to find reviews from 2011 that managed to avoid the word "kinky"), though it lacks virtually any of the eroticism that typifies so many of his sunnier, more openly comic efforts. The Skin I Live In isn't without its campy humor, or its self-amusement at the extremes of its scenario, but camp wasn't Almodóvar's main goal. "It promises endless cruelty," he said in that same Cannes interview, and while it's not as bleak as all that, it's certainly impressive how successfully the film takes the gaudiness of something like Dr. Orlof and transforms it into a sober-minded psychological thriller. In the absence of gore or jump scares, The Skin I Live In proves to be a much more effectively adult kind of horror film: one where the source of horror isn't a movie monster, but the nasty, squalid evil of respectable human beings.

These notes on Frederick Wiseman's Central Park were written by Matt St. John, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 16mm archival print from Wiseman's Zipporah Films will screen on Friday, October 20 as part of our ongoing Wiseman series in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

By Matt St. John

Within our Cinematheque Frederick Wiseman series, Central Park may seem like a surprising follow up to High School (1968), Hospital (1969), and Welfare (1975), the more clearly institution-focused films that we have already screened. This is not solely a result of our selections, as critics commented on Central Park’s departures from Wiseman’s previous twenty-two documentaries when it aired on PBS in 1990. The Los Angeles Times’s Robert Koehler notes that the park “seems like an utterly eccentric subject choice” for Wiseman after so many films about “environments ruled by stress.” In his Washington Post review, Tom Shales describes it as “one of the most accessible and salutary films ever made by master documentarian Frederick Wiseman -- it's even in color.”

Compared to films with extended sequences of people fighting for their welfare benefits or doctors pleading with stubborn patients to remain in their care, a documentary about New Yorkers inhabiting an iconic public space is, in some ways, a shift. While a few of Wiseman’s earlier films dealt with seemingly lighter topics, like Model (1980) and the Neiman-Marcus-focused The Store (1983), Central Park is a notably relaxed portrait of a space that takes on many different meanings for its visitors, supporters, and employees. Wiseman has always attended to the various groups involved with his topics, but Central Park often highlights the people who use the park. And they use it in plentiful ways––exercise, romance, performance, and activism, to name a few.

There are moments of tension and drama, but overall the film offers an impression of a space created for leisure and public gathering that generally fulfills its purpose, even when that requires meetings about rule-breaking cyclists or fiery debates like the hearing about a new tennis house. While the film does acknowledge problems like drugs and homelessness, Wiseman emphasizes the vast array of recreational daytime activities in the park, rather than its widespread associations with crime and fear at the time. As Shales writes in his review, “For the most part, this is a portrait of Central Park smiling. Wiseman seems to be smiling too.”

Even with its different topic, Central Park contains many similarities to Wiseman’s other documentaries. The film lacks voiceovers, explanatory titles, and interviews, and it was produced using lightweight equipment that allowed Wiseman and his cinematographer, John Davey, to be flexible in their shooting locations and selections. Wiseman recorded sound, as he typically does, and worked closely with frequent collaborator Davey to define the aesthetic tendencies of the project. In a 1991 interview with Documentary Magazine, Wiseman stated that he and Davey discussed the film’s style between shots and while watching rushes, saying, “We're talking about it in one way or another all day long and all night long.”

Defining this style, Wiseman explained that Central Park “is not so dependent on talk; it is more of a movie where the pictures tell the story and the sequences are short and each shot that I've used is meant to suggest a story.” This quality appears through the wider shots of the film. In contrast with Welfare’s tight close-ups on faces in intense conversation, for example, Central Park is about a larger scale of activity, with parades, demonstrations, marathons, and picnics. Wiseman also balances the short scenes with longer sequences, like the activist group that passionately argues with park officers over a merchandise-selling policy. This balance of brief and extended events allows Wiseman to include a remarkably varied set of observations in the three-hour film, culled from the eighty hours of material he and Davey recorded in a five-week shoot.

Within these observations, Wiseman uncovers topics that appear often in his other films. While the fundraising and board meetings in Central Park are not a primary focus, they provide some of its most candid discussion about the meanings and functions of the park. The complex interactions of business meetings feature heavily in some of Wiseman’s later projects, like At Berkeley (2013) and this year’s Ex Libris (screening in this series on November 3). In Central Park, his attention to artistic performance includes theater rehearsals, opera productions, and film shoots, and his interest in performance is the structuring topic for films like Ballet (1995), La Danse – Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris (2009), and the Paris-cabaret-set Crazy Horse (2011). In all of his films, Wiseman discovers unexpected social practices, behaviors, and events, and that tendency is on full display in Central Park, from a festival for Mississippians to a dinosaur celebration, complete with a dinosaur-impression contest. And like all of Wiseman’s work, Central Park contains pronounced traces of the period when it was produced. These range from amusing celebrity cameos (keep an eye out for a younger Francis Ford Coppola) to sobering reminders of crises––a father takes his young children to the AIDS quilt to remember a family friend.

Despite its unusual subject matter, Central Park remains a Wiseman film to its core, endlessly curious about the intricacies of human behavior and emotion, especially in public. He considers it similar to his other films about institutions, because, as he told the New York Times in 1990, “Central Park is a vehicle in which people express their social concerns.” They certainly express (and argue over) concerns in the film, but they also paint, play, sing, dance, mourn, and relax. Above all, people actually choose to be in Central Park and choose what they want to do there, making it one of Wiseman’s most revealing, engaging films about contemporary American life.