Reviews for
​SHOES and THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI

Sir Frederick Ashton
on Anna Pavlova
“Without question Anna Pavlova was the greatest theatrical genius that I have ever seen. her personality of such power and vibrancy that on her first entrance on to the stage she sent an electric shock throughout the audience...

I first saw her in Lima, Peru, as a small boy, and I immediately became infected by her. From that moment, I never wished to do anything else but be connected to the dance. At the other end of the world in Australia she did the same to Robert Helpmann, and to countless others wherever she appeared.

Of her epoch she was undoubtedly the most famous name throughout the world. Her name can never die, and such a living and passionate spirit must continue to haunt the world to which she gave so much delight and inspiration.”

                  SHOES                                                    THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI

“A major find in terms of film culture: it helps write women filmmakers back into the historical record… As always, Milestone has unearthed a bevy of extras for this [home video] release. ” – Glenn Erickson, CineSavant

”Lois Weber may not be a widely-recognized name today, but in the silent era she was described by the industrial press not only as the top “woman director” but simply as one of the top directors in America. Known best for her socially earnest “problem films” from 1914-1921 (her career extended into the sound era, however), Weber was, at her peak, the highest paid director at Universal, and was also considered one of the young industry's major innovators.“ – Christopher Long, DVD/Blu Review

“The film reveals Eva’s stifled hopes and dreams to us within the context of hard material reality. Scenes shot on location throughout then-contemporary Los Angeles have their drama—and intimate sympathy—concentrated on a human being’s face.” - Aaron Cutler, Brooklyn Magazine

Lois Weber, Eloquent Filmmaker of the Silent Screen By MANOHLA DARGIS DEC. 15, 2016
“Once upon a Hollywood time, one of filmdom’s biggest directors was Lois Weber. Woodrow Wilson was president, and women couldn’t have voted for him even if they had wanted to, but inside the movie industry, women thrived, and Weber thrived above all others. An auteur before that word entered the cinematic lexicon, she wrote, directed and edited films and was admired for her sensitive work with actors, her on-set meticulousness and her stories about women. Her name was invoked alongside the likes of D. W. Griffith, yet, like most female directors of that era, she faded into obscurity.
This weekend, the Anthology Film Archives is giving New Yorkers a chance to discover Weber again with the premiere of a beautiful restoration of her 1916 film “The Dumb Girl of Portici.” A lavish historical drama from Universal — with pictorial sweep, revolutionary conflagrations and severed heads bobbing atop spikes — the film was considered to be that studio’s most ambitious production to date. It’s also notable for being the high-profile Hollywood debut of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (“the Incomparable”), though Weber finally seems to have received better reviews than her star did. Some critics deemed Pavlova not camera-ready, but Weber was seen as a titan.
Although Weber developed a lot of her own original material at Universal, where she was under contract, the studio assigned her to take on “The Dumb Girl of Portici,” one of the 10 (!) features she directed that were released in 1916. (The studio boss Carl Laemmle said he “would trust Miss Weber with any sum of money that she needed to make any picture.”) She wrote the film, adapting it from an 1828 opera, set in Spanish-controlled Naples in 1647, that tells the story of Fenella, a mute woman seduced by a Spanish nobleman, who promptly abandons her. As passion sours into betrayal, a personal affront quickly feeds a political outrage that, in turn, ignites a violent peasant uprising.
Pavlova stepped into the role providentially. In 1915, with World War I making a return to Europe difficult, she was touring with the Boston Opera Company, when it nearly went under. She apparently helped save it by accepting Universal’s offer — and a $50,000 payday — to star in “The Dumb Girl of Portici.” Weber started shooting the film in Chicago (the production later moved to Los Angeles), where Pavlova was performing. Pavlova and her company are said to have worked on it in the morning before going off to give matinee performances. One account claims that the film features the Hollywood debut of Boris Karloff, although it’s hard to pick him out among the hundreds of thronging extras.

There isn’t all that much pirouetting in “Dumb Girl,” which probably matters less to film lovers than to dance aficionados. Pavlova twirls on occasion, including during a charming, folksy frolic on a beach, complete with a shaking tambourine, but, for the most part, she delivers a heightened version of silent-era realism. Her exaggeration makes sense for her character, who, after all, cannot speak. Fenella gestures to her mouth to explain her muteness, throws her head back in pleasure and uses her entire body to express herself. Pavlova’s thin, pale arms are especially striking — they’re trembling parentheses — whether she’s throwing them up in joy or thrusting them forward in entreaty.

Weber doesn’t lavish a lot of close-ups on Pavlova, preferring instead to show the dancer-star in longer shots. This may have had to do with Pavlova’s age (she was in her 30s and not remotely girlish, at least here), but it also comes across as a shrewd directorial choice that serves both the story and the star. Throughout “The Dumb Girl,” Weber shifts between intimacy and spectacle, but in the end this story — and its scale — becomes larger than Fenella, who’s a tragic, sacrificial pawn. Weber also clearly understood that because there is no ballet in this tale for the world’s most famous ballerina, Pavlova, nevertheless, must be seen head to toe — her body must lead. (Pavlova does appear on point in two brief bookending sections that come across as strategically commercial.)
In the end, though, what thrills in “The Dumb Girl of Portici” is Weber, who handles the large-scale rioting as persuasively as the intimate interludes, including a nakedly carnal seduction. It’s no surprise that Universal put its trust in her. A concert pianist turned stage actress, Weber had entered movies as a writer. After selling some scenarios, she and her husband, Phillips Smalley, ended up at Gaumont, the same studio where Alice Guy Blaché, often thought to be the first female film director, was working. As Shelley Stamp points out in her recent book, “Lois Weber in Early Hollywood,” Smalley followed Weber into the business, where they acted in, and made, their own films. Although they often shared credit (including on “Dumb Girl”), Weber soon emerged as the visionary.
Weber is known for her films about women, families, social problems and religious themes, but her range was larger than many summaries suggest. She directed a few films about birth control (including the sensational “Where Are My Children?”), but she also adapted Shakespeare (“The Merchant of Venice”) and directed an anti-capital-punishment film (“The People vs. John Doe”). Like a lot of silent directors, she was somewhat of a self-promoter and gave many interviews to writers who seemed to feel compelled to let readers know that Lois Weber was also Mrs. Phillips Smalley. Female directors may have enjoyed independence in the industry; outside was another matter.
By the 1920s, Weber’s career was headed into dramatic decline. As the industry consolidated into a big business, women were effectively shut out from positions of studio power, including directing. She directed her last film, the interracial romance “White Heat,” in 1934 and died five years later. It’s hard not to think she had so much more to offer. In 1915, in an article about how she became a director, she wrote that she had found the writing in films “a jumble of melodrama and stage tricks, hastily thrown together, quite adequate to meet the demands of the public.” Instead of thinking of the possibilities of “the boundless art,” writers “were satisfied to keep the characters moving through a thin plot, insipid in conception, and pathetic in sentiment.” Weber sought to change that, and got to work.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“Pavlova’s artistry is something that we are often asked to take on faith, something where you had to be there. Watching “The Dumb Girl,” you are there.” - Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

“A GREAT BALLERINA’S EXPLOSIVE MOVIE PERFORMANCE
By Richard Brody
   December 15, 2016
 
There’s a special sad canon of directors who made only one feature film, and the evidence that it really is a canon is in the fact that their films’ artistic merit maintains their names; it’s headed by Barbara Loden(“Wanda”), Charles Laughton (“The Night of the Hunter”), Herk Harvey (“Carnival of Souls”), and Leonard Kastle (“The Honeymoon Killers”). The list of one-film actors is harder to compile—Candace Hilligoss, the star of “Carnival of Souls,” is the first who comes to mind, and nobody else does, offhand. But with the restoration and reissue of the 1915 film “The Dumb Girl of Portici,” showing Friday through Sunday at Anthology Film Archives (and forthcoming on home video, from Milestone, on March 8th), the film becomes a canon unto itself—it stars the ballerina who may be, even a century later, the very icon of that art form, Anna Pavlova, in her one and only screen role.
 
Pavlova’s performance in the movie is no fluke or stunt—it’s a fully realized, deeply committed performance that reveals Pavlova to be, from the very start, one of the greatest movie actors, a charismatic and expressive actor who’s as forceful in repose as in action, as vital in quiet scenes as she is screen-bursting in melodramatic ones. What’s more, “The Dumb Girl of Portici” is directed by Lois Weber, one of the most prominent—and one of the best—directors of the time, whose place in the business and, more important, in the art of movies is only belatedly achieving the recognition that it deserves. (Several of her films, including the daring 1913 short “Suspense,” were shown earlier this year at Anthology.)
 
The story is based on an opera that’s based on a historical incident that took place in Naples, in 1647, when the Italian population, under the leadership of a fisherman named Masaniello, rose up against the oppressive authority of the region’s imperial Spanish overlords. The movie’s protagonist, played by Pavlova, is Masaniello’s sister, Fenella, who, as the title suggests, can’t speak. Despite the poverty of the town’s hard-pressed citizens—a poverty redoubled by the Viceroy’s oppressive taxes and confiscation of their foodstuffs—Fenella bears her domestic labors lightheartedly, as a sort of dancing sprite whose very presence is an adornment of her neighbors’ lives. But when Alfonso, a Spanish aristocrat in disguise, seduces and abandons Fenella, he realizes his misstep—not the seduction itself but inflaming the rage of Masaniello—and, under the guise of inviting her to the castle in the name of love, imprisons her there and subjects her to torture.
 
Knowing that she’s at the castle and sure that the occupying aristocracy is up to no good, Masaniello vows revenge—and, by chance, his opportunity comes quickly, when the Viceroy imposes a new tax on fruit. The enraged residents vehemently protest. To quell the rising riot, soldiers are sent in—and Masaniello, leading the townspeople in their counterattack, personally takes on Alfonso, spurring a mighty revolution that unleashes hordes of people and wild explosions of violence. Meanwhile, Fenella plots her escape and witnesses the furious revolt up close in bewilderment and exaltation.
 
As Fenella, Pavlova brings dance to even the slightest and humblest gesture; she acts with her whole body, with gestures even in repose before she breaks into angular dramatic agonies; even alone, in contemplative reminiscence and solitary yearning, she choreographs Fenella’s inner world. Her style offers something of a forerunning blend of Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, with the terrifying intensity of her performance matching an impenetrable and implacable mystery; her sense of physical command seems nonetheless wildly spontaneous; her dramatic expressivity appears painfully impulsive. For all the theatricality of the performance and the artifice of the spectacle, Pavlova has the rare quality of cinematic aliveness and immediacy that leaps out of its context and its story to appear ever-modern.  
 
Weber’s bold and imaginative direction has its own independent artistic identity, in which the composition of images for and with Pavlova is only one part. Despite the distant historical setting, she invests “The Dumb Girl of Portici” with a strong and bracing physical power. Filming the dilapidation of seaside huts and the turbulence in the town, the rats swarming about Fenella in her cell and the anguish of desperate hunger, she depicts poverty with unflinchingly detailed specificity and ardent empathy. (She also does so in a contemporary context in her 1916 feature film “Shoes.”) The depiction isn’t limited to noteworthy material details; Weber raises it to an object of cinematic style and invention, as in a rueful, relentless pan shot—something of an oddity at the time—that scans the marketplace for the signs of misery and frustration in a relentless litany of quasi-documentary revelations.
Weber films the modest dwellings of the townspeople and the shores of the fishermen in dynamically unbalanced compositions replete with diagonals that feel like vectors of brewing action. By contrast, she films the royals in their palace with a rigid and stifling frontal symmetry, and she makes much of the cultural contrast between the two realms. The formal dancing staged for the aristocrats’ pleasure is similarly symmetrical and geometrical—even as, filmed from a high angle, it foreshadows the abstract inventions of Busby Berkeley. The commoners’ dances, on the wide-open and unstructured seaside spaces, have a free-flowing energy and informal diversity that convey vitality and an inner freedom contrasting woefully with their oppressions.
But, once the revolution gets under way—and the rapidity of its outburst is itself a dramatic marvel—Weber’s own imagination is inflamed by the passions it unleashes, and she delivers visual flourishes of a mighty inspiration. Working with colossal sets, Weber assembles crowds seemingly as large as those of Griffith’s “Intolerance,” and she puts them even more thrillingly and terrifyingly into motion. (It would be a miracle if extras didn’t trample one another in the human tsunami.) There’s a brief scene on a majestic outdoor staircase that anticipates Eisenstein’s far grander one from “Battleship Potemkin,” but, even more than Eisenstein, Weber captures the horrifying bloodthirsty fury of even a justified revolution, with her depiction of cavalier, uncontrolled killing and burning, and scenes of heads on pikes that evoke an exultation in blood, as highlighted by the gory symbolic detail of a red tint suffusing the screen. As the revolt reaches its height of successful destruction, Weber does something unusual for 1915—she puts the camera on a rolling platform and tracks through the burning and ravaged palace, lending a grim historic majesty to the outpouring of rage.
Weber also uses double exposures to capture flights of imagination, and does so most fully in a prologue and an epilogue that break out of the action to depict Pavlova, detached from the character of Fenella, displaying her artistry as a dancer. “The Dumb Girl of Portici” is a crucial rediscovery—as are the art of Weber over all and, for that matter, the celebration of Pavlova’s single screen performance and regret that there were no others. Along with the specifics of their genius, “The Dumb Girl of Portici” is a welcome reminder that the history of cinema still belongs to the future.” - Richard Brody, New Yorker magazine

"It’s risky to make broad artistic claims based on gender, but the fact remains that Weber’s movies don’t look like those directed by her male colleagues. And throughout her career she made creative choices that ran counter to prevailing ideas about and depictions of women in the industry...." — Daniel Eagan, Film Comment

"At the time of its making, The Dumb Girl of Portici was the most expensive film that Universal had ever produced. It was also the largest film production ever directed by a woman, and one of ten features that the prolific, socially conscious filmmaker Weber made for the studio that year. This century-old, recently restored film embodies a beguilingly Hollywoodian paradox by using large sets and a cast of hundreds in the service of an epic 17th-century-set period drama about the struggles of poor and oppressed people. Weber even focuses in intimate fashion upon one person whose struggles are rendered with sensitivity, delicacy, and a touch of grace..." -- Aaron Cutler, Brooklyn Magazine

There are a number of poorly shot films of Anna dancing, but there is only one in existence of the great Pavlova's voice!

Join The Milestone Private Email List Now!

Join Now