(1922)
Dir - Dudley Murphy
Overall: GOOD
Made by American filmmaker Dudley Murphy's ultimately very short lived production company Visual Symphony Productions that set about syncing orchestral music to on screen visuals, Danse Macabre was the first and only movie the company ever made. Superimposed footage of a skeletal, violin-playing Death character on a large soundstage makes for an alluring visual all on its own. Yet as a six minute dance sequence with Russian-born choreographer Adolph Bolm, his partner Ruth Page, and all based off of the tone poem of the same name by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, it is an interesting, brief snapshot of the silent era just before sound was beginning to reinvent the entire medium. It was not the first work of its kind to be deliberately set to a live musical accompaniment, but it is a striking one that also manages to utilize animation, as well as being essentially a ballet showcase.
(1928)
Dir - James Sibley Watson/Melville Webber
Overall: GOOD
Coherent storytelling is willfully abandoned in James Sibley Watson and Melville Webbers' avant-garde short The Fall of the House of Usher. Not to be confused with the French, full-length version released the same year, this one is in fact far more expressionistic with dutch angles, superimpositions, experimental lighting, backgrounds made of primitive, pointy shapes, tracking shots, and most of the scenes being shown through various prism effects. There are no intertitles, but those familiar with Edgar Allan Poe's source material and/or the numerous screen adaptations that would continue to be made should be able to follow the incessantly empirical visuals. The unmelodic score which was later synced and added by original composer Alec Wilder in 1959 is appropriately distressing as well.
(1928)
Dir - Charles Klein/Leon Shamroy
Overall: MEH
"A picturization of Edgar Allan Poe's immortal classic" as the opening titles proclaim, The Tell Tale Heart is yet another Poe adaptation from 1928 that leans heavily on German Expressionism. Handwritten, chickenscratch is overlayed over closeups of penetrating, vulture eyes and the sets and props are once again made of abstract, jagged shapes. The lead performance from Otto Matieson, (done up deliberately to look like Poe himself), is more subdued than most from the silent era, even as he is playing the author's token madman. With some humor coming into play by the odd, in-sync behavior of the two investigators, (who speak and nod in unison), and an overall penetrable presentation, all of the positive elements still cannot quite overcome the incredibly laborious pacing. For such a condensed telling of the source material, nearly every shot drags far too slowly and if all of the other pieces were in place with a more hasty flow, it would certainly hold up more prominently than it does.
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