Too much of everything

Pretty Good

best movie i've ever seen.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

1st watched 10/20/2013 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Rex Ingram): Heavy handed anti-war movie comes across very one-sided as far as the perspective on a war between Germany and France in this epic family drama, love story & war movie wrapped into one package. Rudolph Valentino plays a son of a Parisian who departed to Argentina fleeing the country from an earlier conflict, but returns after his grand-father's demise. The son has a weakness for the woman-folk and becomes involved with the wife of one of his German cousins causing scandal between the two families. He is an artist who lives off his father's money until he decides to join the cause of the war. The four horsemen come into play as an allegory against the biblical reference(referred to in the movie as an old book) in Revelations where each horsemen represents a different side of the results of war activity and the movie does some special effects introducing these horsemen at different points of the movie. Rudolph's father hordes antiques in an old castle in France, but it's destroyed by the German's in an almost naturally occurring guilty verdict on his original escape from the draft. This is a departure from the rest of the movie's otherwise emotionally pointed view about the negative perspective on war. There is not much detail given to the war only that Germany is the conqueror and France takes the blunt of their blows. I believe the piece would have been stronger if the motivations of both sides would have been revealed better. The romance in the story is lessened and seems to just be an opportunity to show off the good looking Valentino's occasional dancing with the ladies. I'm sure the actual re-percussions of World War I prompted the novel and the movie and this played real well to packed houses in America when it first came out, but doesn't play as well to the current age. Overall, I just didn't see that the movie made it's point very effective -- which appeared to be that war should be avoided. In my opinion it wasn't bold enough in it's assessment.

Valentino was in New York when he read in a trade paper that this movies was going to be made. He had already read the book and wanted to play the tango scenes. He had much experience with the Brazilian Tango when he made his living as a "Taxi Dancer" (A dancer that is picked up by a partner and paid for the time he dances with them - like a taxi) in New York. When he came back to Los Angeles to inquire about the tango scene in the movie, he learned that the casting office had been looking for him and already wanted him to play the part of Julio. He was so thrilled! Some people aren't aware that Valentino had come to Los Angeles in the first place because he wanted to work in agriculture. He was tired of taxi dancing and he also had been involved in a scandal in New York that ruined his reputation as a dancer. When he filled out an application to work at Metro studios, the question on the application asked "Why do you want to work in movies?" Valentino wrote the answer "Tired of ballroom dancing." Valentino loved to dance. Many times he kept a dancing job on the side before he was making big money. Then he still danced for fun.

World War One might truly have been the apocalypse of its age, but from today's enlightened perspective beneath the Damoclean Sword of nuclear escalation it's just another quaint Old Empire slaughter. Considered a classic by some scholars, this passionate but dated attack on the war-to-end-all-wars serves today only to highlight the shortcomings of serious silent drama: overwrought histrionics; an emotional dependence on expository title cards; simplistic moralizing; etc. Granted, the best-selling novel from which it was adapted had its own problems: to explain how two brothers could be fighting each other from opposite sides of the trenches it had to first establish a mutual history in neutral South America, where a large ranch family becomes divided by filial allegiances to, respectively, the distant flags of Germany and France. Of chief historical interest is the fiery tango scene that made young Rudolph Valentino an international star, but the dance merely accounts for five lively minutes in an otherwise moribund two-hour-plus melodrama.

I came across this film on TCM while flipping channels, having no idea what it was or who the actors were or how far into the story it was, and not usually having the patience to watch silent films. It was the scene where the young woman is admiring herself in what appears to be a nun's or nurse's dress she must've just put on for the first time, and the young man is troubled, talking with her, and I was caught by her attractive face and the natural acting of both of them, and decided to watch until it got boring. Well, I watched it all the way through to the end more than an hour later. The girl, and the white-haired french aristocrat, intrigued and impressed me the most, and the young man was also very good whenever he was appearing with her. And it was clear from the scene of the invasion of the town, Villeblanch, that this was a very big-budget production, and that the film must have been a very big deal back in its time. The music, which I knew must be a modern addition, was very effective and felt just right. I was amazed at the emotional power of the film, because I have almost never before had a real emotional reaction to a silent film, certainly not for so long a stretch; the stiff acting, or the static camera, or the muddied visuals, or the clumsy pacing always get in the way. From the small-print logo at the bottom of the title cards I learned the film was "Four Horsement of the Apocalypse" (which, as I am no great film history student, I'd never heard of) and as soon as it was over I came to IMDb to learn who the actress was. Imagine my surprise to discover the young man was Valentino! The girl was Alice Terry, a name I vaguely recognized; she was really a wonderful, emotionally powerful actress. This is the first silent film I've seen that gave me a glimmer of how the people back in the days of silents could have thought silent film acting was better than talking film acting; when Valentino and Terry were together it was like they could communicate by telepathy -- words would only get in the way. (I just saw Singing in the Rain again last night, which involves the film industry in the moment of transition from silents to talkies). One of the techniques that made this film work, I think, was the fleetingness of the emotional images: the face of the actor or actress would catch the emotional expression in close-up, and often, almost immediately the film would cut to a title-card or another shot. This avoided the unnaturally-long holding of an expression on the face that makes so many silent films feel false. I suppose to most directors in those days, and to self-centered actors, the idea was, the producer is paying so much to get that face on the screen, better to leave it up there as long as you can. But in real life emotions flash onto and off of our faces so quickly, some of the most powerful communications are made in the shortest instants. The editing in this film, at least in the last half (I've never seen the first half) understands that.