Recent Viewings, Part 2

[M.10rda]

THE RED MILL (1927):
For some reason I imagined this was about a spooky old haunted mill but then no, it's a light and frothy romantic farce, but then yes, at the end the spooky haunted old red mill appears!    THE RED MILL is the first feature-length film I've seen directed by Roscoe Arbuckle, working under the name "William Goodrich" during his official/nominal exile from the Hollywood spotlight. There's probably a good reason he stuck to making shorts for so long - maintaining hilarity for 75 minutes is tough. THE RED MILL is really more a romance w/ sporadic goofy comedy.

Marion Davies plays "Tina", a little Dutch girl  slaving away in rural Holland under the thumb of a sadistic master. There's a whole elaborate plot involving the arranged (by mail) engagement of Tina's wealthy Irish ex-boyfriend to her master's comically fugly daughter, who (sight unseen) the ex-boyfriend thinks is Tina 'cause she lied to him and told him she was rich and blah blah blah, hijinks ensue. All of it is just an excuse for Davies to look and act cute, which she does quite well. In THE PATSY Davies reminded me of Kirsten Dunst; here she's a redhead and looks more like Gillian Anderson or Tea Leoni.  The screenplay (credited to a female author) is far more pedestrian than the usual Arbuckle mayhem, but it does seem like he had some influence on the intertitles, and he creates one opportunity early on for Davies to perform some solo physical comedy in the kitchen that is really impressive and reminds one of the kind of stuff Lucille Ball would get up to on her show in the 50s. Davies was a far more capable actress than her legacy (painted alas by Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE) would suggest.

Then, in the last 15-20 minutes, Davies gets chased into the titular location, which is abandoned and reputedly haunted, though in fact it's just an OSHA nightmare. This sequence runs as long as many of Roscoe's shorts and was probably the reason he wanted to make THE RED MILL. It isn't peak Roscoe either but at least there's one climactic stunt that (in classic silent film tradition) looks appallingly unsafe.    3/5    Roscoe also has a brief and uncredited cameo as a bellhop. His head is shaved, kind of pointlessly as he's impossible to mistake onscreen, w/ or w/o hair.

[Jim H]

The Guyver - hadn't seen this since I was a teenager, rewatch in honor of Screaming Mad George's death.  It's...  Not good.  His creature work is great, but the film is thin.  Passably entertaining and not boring though. 

My favorite part is the bad guy's getting a little bit of side development that goes nowhere.  I wish there was more of that as they managed to be more interesting than the lead.