Part vamp, part homely hausfrau, part space alien, the only thing that seems certain about Brigitte Helm was that she was not quite of this world. But what world did she come from, and for what purpose? Equipped with a Roman nose, unnerving blue eyes, a prominent chin and a tiny mouth, Helm looked like Leni Riefenstahl’s perverted younger sister, less a mountain climber than a champion pelvic thruster. No one moves as un-self-consciously or bizarrely as Helm does on screen: she slinks, she slithers, she undulates, she struts, she poses, she wiggles, she writhes, she recoils, she gyrates—and her large hands are never still. In her best films, Helm is like a girl experimenting in front of a mirror in her parents’ bedroom, abandoning herself to the most outrageous fantasies of sexual license and display. Her sexiness is based on the way she offered her overactive body to the camera while also seeming to shy away from it.

This push-and-pull was at the root of her dilemma, for by most accounts Helm was pushed into an acting career by her stage mother, who sent photos of the young Brigitte to Fritz Lang when he was casting Metropolis (1927). There are stories that she told Lang she didn’t want to be an actress at all, but Lang himself remembered that Helm told him she wanted to play in Schiller’s Maria Stuart. However it happened, before she turned 20 Helm got to be Maria in Metropolis, and it was an arduous experience for her, to put it mildly. She was painfully immobilized for hours at a time in the famous scene where a robot Maria is fashioned in a laboratory (was this the cause for her acute physical restlessness in later films?) and almost burned to death when the robot Maria is sent to the stake. Lang was a hypnotic tyrant on set who made Helm do scenes over and over again, to the point of total defeat and exhaustion.

Yet it is Helm herself who seems to be in charge in one of the tour-de-force performances of the silent cinema. She’s convincing as the good Maria, her face a mixture of symmetry and discord with eyes that seem to stare inward, but her work as the bad robot Maria is what lifts Helm into cinematic immortality, especially when bad Maria winks at her creator, and at the audience, in close-up. Some writers have found this wink unaccountably strange, but its strangeness is due to the fact that Helm is playing a robot, someone not fully human. Her left eyelid flutters down in a slow, clumsy, hesitant way, and the wink is disturbingly mechanical yet somehow knowingly lascivious. Like Helm herself, it sends several different signals at once.

When bad Maria bumps and grinds for a group of aroused workers, Helm puts all of her physical and sexual peculiarity right on the screen with no fear of being judged. Though her performance stands and falls on the outré movements of her body (her hunched shoulders have a life of their own), what Helm seems to be offering us is something very private, something interior, a fantasy of herself as an androgynous temptress. Bad Maria is finally so lovable because her sexiness is so wonky, so eccentric, so out of step with conventional behavior. It’s truly sad when the mob kills her—she laughs uproariously while she burns at the stake, as if the whole thing has been a dirty joke. It’s easy to prefer the bad robot Maria to the good Maria we get in the end, and also easy to feel that something wonderful has been lost after her destruction.

Helm was cast as a farm girl in Am Rande der Welt (1927), where she does a lot of dancing around a kitchen, and she worked for the first time with G.W. Pabst as a victimized blind girl in The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), where she is only a second lead. But the weirdness of bad robot Maria rose to the surface again in Alraune (1928), where she plays the daughter of a prostitute who was impregnated with the semen of a hanged man. While stuck in a convent, Helm’s devilish Alraune puts a bug on a nun’s back and throws perfume on the other girls. “I want champagne!” she cries after running away, and thereafter Helm is the very image of kinky depravity, vamping in a turban like some sex shop experiment gone awry, clearly satirizing “correct” behavior before plunging back into Helming it up. This is her most extreme performance, and there are certain outlandish poses in Alraune where she achieves almost total physical ugliness. In one of the more lurid posters advertising the film, Helm is a topless grotesque, the rare cinema woman who actually leers at us like a dirty old man.

In Yacht of the Seven Seas (1928), Helm is a temperamental dancer who wears hoop earrings and skulks around on board ship from one angular pose to another. She worked again for Pabst in Abwege (1928), which was made the same year as his coup with Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box and which shares some of that film’s unsparing view of impersonal sexual hate. Helm plays a wife bored with her marriage to Gustav Diesel who feels even more boredom when she goes out on the town and tries to be a hedonist. Pabst is a real pessimist here, detailing the ennui that results from both security and freedom, and Helm dutifully fulfills her character’s guilt, inhibition and disappointment. In her last film from 1928, Helm found herself near the center of a second masterpiece, Marcel L’Herbier’s dynamic epic on the smoke and mirrors of capitalism, L’Argent, where she taunts men and slinks superbly through Art Deco sets, her torso wriggling like a bug pinned to a gold lamé gown.

Off-screen, Helm was starting to bridle against her career, taking the Ufa studio to court because she didn’t want to play any more “vamp” roles. After losing her case, she acted only to pay off her legal debts, but Ufa tried to make her happy with The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna (1929), where she got to play a sacrificial love drama with Francis Lederer. Miscast as a romantic heroine, Helm looks rather tired in that movie and seems to be trying to imitate Greta Garbo, as Marlene Dietrich did in several of her late silents. She then excelled with another hypnotically strange actor, the great Russian matinee idol Ivan Mozzhukhin, in Manolescu (1929). “It is its fleeting nature that makes a railway encounter so attractive!” Helm tells Mozzhukhin, after vamping her way into him on a train. They trade naughty looks with their matching demonic eyes, and Helm creates a palpably hot chemistry with the studly Mozzhukhin in a scene where he kisses her bosom and she stares him down defiantly.

Purely a creature of the late silent period, Helm seemed a bit ordinary in her run of sound films, as if talking made her merely mortal. In this period, only Pabst fully took advantage of her movement skills in L’Atlantide (1932), where she plays the Queen of Atlantis, an imposing goddess who rules a kingdom hidden beneath the Sahara desert. Helm was cast in one more sci-fi fantasy film, Gold (1934), but her mind seems elsewhere in that movie, as if she’s set on retirement. At this time, she was involved in an automobile accident and briefly sent to jail. According to Otto Dietrich’s book The Hitler I Knew it was Hitler himself, a big fan of Metropolis, who had manslaughter charges against Helm dropped.

In 1935, Helm married Dr. Hugo von Kuenheim, a Jewish industrialist, and the couple fled Nazi Germany to Switzerland, where she bore four sons, kept house, and refused all interview requests until her death in 1996 at age 90. When a journalist approached one of her sons about talking to Helm about her movies, the son replied, “If I arrange that, she will disinherit me.” And so one of the oddest of all screen presences drew the veil and retreated into the obscurity of a private life. It is to be hoped that when Helm was alone, or thought she was alone, she might have taken out a few old costumes and vamped around her Swiss home, if only for her own pleasure.

by Dan Callahan

There’s a lot of loose talk about how the long-running TV drama is the modern equivalent of the 19th century novel, with all the scope and sprawl, the ability to develop characters over time, to interweave complex plotlines and deliver startling pay-offs emotionally augmented by the sheer time spent with the dramatis personae.

This is a Golden Age for American TV. But I’d argue that a truer heir to the crown of Dickens, Eliot etc, is the movie serial, especially of the silent age. Unlike most long-form TV shows, these were written with finite story arcs, even if sometimes it seems like the authors were making the action up as they went along, which I’m sure to some extent they were. But the fact that everything is heading towards some at least partially predetermined conclusion, with at least some kind of rough road map to get there, makes them closer to Great Expectations than the extemporaneous space opera of Battlestar Galactica.

The big difference between The Master Mystery (1920), a fifteen-part (twelve hour) melodrama starring Harry Houdini, and the classics of Victorian literature, is one of quality. Serials are usually bad in just about every way imaginable, you see. Hoaky situations, flat characters, implausible character arcs, too much running around from one situation to the next without actually progressing anything, duff acting, prosaic filming. But not consistently or totally. By stringing together outrageous cliffhangers and convoluted mysteries, and setting up staunch heroes and dastardly villains (who keep winning until the final reel, however bravely the good guys struggle), the serials have a cunning way of keeping you hooked. But beyond that, they throw in regular moments of naïve genius.

I’d argue that every serial, in order to succeed, needs one bit of inspired casting, whether it be Eduardo Ciannelli as Dr Satan (The Mysterious Dr Satan) or Bela Lugosi as Dr Zorka (The Phantom Creeps). Usually the villain is the more important role to get right, some jut-jawed cipher being more than adequate to embody the hero, though the Flash Gordon serials had both Charles Middleton’s barnstorming faux-riental malevolence and Larry “Buster” Crabbe’s surprising sweetness as Flash to buoy them along.

The Master Mystery has Harry Houdini, and it has the Automaton.

Houdini was more famous for his escapology and stage magic than for his acting, but as his near-namesake and predecessor Robert Houdin said, “A magician is nothing but an actor playing the part of a magician.” Though his appearance, somewhat square and squat, with a wide face and a mass of frizzy hair which springs up in times of crisis, is not obviously heroic, Houdini makes a more than acceptable leading man, his performance natural and understated. The script assembles for him a complete catalogue of manly virtues, though his impeccable morals make him somewhat guileless and easy to trick. He acts at least as well as, say, Douglas Fairbanks. And the fight scenes in which he regularly becomes engaged (with the help of a cunningly inserted stunt double) are athletic, inventive and unusual.

As co-star and nemesis, we have the Automaton, purportedly the invention of the deranged Professor “Q”. It’s a delightful prototype of the kind of tin toy robot every schoolboy from the fifties to the seventies would covet. Although somehow in charge of a criminal gang, and constantly dreaming up evil schemes, it has a perky walk and cheerful manner that somehow makes it likable. 

The plot of The Master Mystery is convoluted and at times confusing, at least in part because chunks of it - almost whole episodes - have gone missing over the years. What survives is in variable condition, with one long decorative streak of nitrate decomposition adding an additional layer of abstraction.

What this fragmented plot does allow is plenty of opportunity for daring escapes. Some of these are a trifle uncinematic, it’s true: Harry’s escape from a cave-in, consisting of nothing more than emerging from under some fake boulders, doesn’t seem to have the requisite panache of a daring feat. But one or two stunts are genuinely fascinating. The escape from “the Great Torture” features convincingly painful-looking handcuff tricks, and a truly uncomfortable encounter with a mechanized garrotte. Another scene has Harry, bound by the wrists to a high coat rack, throttle an opponent with his thighs, then kick of his shoes and socks and pick the unconscious thug’s pockets with his bare feet, before unlocking a nearby door with his toes and climbing it, monkey-fashion, so as to take the weight off his wrists and allow him to chew through his bonds. It’s thrilling to watch, even though the action is slow and systematic rather than blurry and frantic in the modern manner. It uses props and space and physical prowess in a way that seems almost extinct in action cinema since Jackie Chan decided he wanted to make it to old age more or less in one piece.

Before the comic book aesthetic set in, serials drew more from pulp fiction (Fantomas, Tarzan, Belphegor) than the funnies, and therefore limited their fantastical elements to one or two. The Master Mystery has poisoned candles which induce the dreaded “Madagascar Madness,” an evil hypnotist, a Chinese god statue with laser beam eyes, and numerous other crazy shenanigans, all of which are presented as if they’re admittedly unusual but certainly extant features of real life as we know it, or as the newspapers present it. Only the Automaton is considered a step beyond, and Harry soon defuses its mystique by asserting that it contains a human being.

This is a shame, in a way, since it disqualifies on a technicality the Automaton from being the screen’s first robot. That honor must fall to The Mechanical Man, produced in Italy the following year. (That film’s hulking mechanoid outruns a jalopy, and fights to the death with its steel twin. Gripping stuff.)

So the Automaton is really a disguise, at best a mechanical exoskeleton, like Iron Man. I won’t tell you who’s in there, though. You’ll have to see for yourselves.

by David Cairns

His face was so large he appeared to be in close-up even when you could see his feet.

He played Moriarty, Captain Hook and Steamboat Bill Snr to Buster Keaton’s Jnr. 

Born in Edinburgh in 1878, Torrence and his brother traveled to America in 1911 and developed their acting careers. The Broadway experience they gathered marked Ernest: he could be subtle onscreen but he could never be small. His hands were great, long, fronds of meat, waving before him: he’d retract his arms to try to shrink the performance, and emphasize further his extraordinary digital reach.

He was a big man. The gigantic hands and face were all the more extraordinary for protruding from a figure already tall and broad. 

His nose and chin, thrusting forth in a pincer movement, like a Punchinello grown gargantuan, set him on the course to play bad guys, and in a role like Hook in the 1924 Peter Pan, he could release all his pantomimic tendencies. The film is shamelessly theatrical, with a dog played by a human in costume, and Peter played by a girl (Betty Bronson) in drag. Torrence seizes the chance to raise the rafters with a performance of such outsize, smirking villainy that one wonders how children of the era survived exposure to it. The solution is in the sheer magnitude: nothing so enormous could be wholly sincere, and by overplaying until each nuance rang like a cannon-blast, Torrence conveyed to his pleasurably cowering little fans that this was all make-believe.

It’s miraculous that they let Torrence play Clopin in the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame: Chaney must have been confident indeed to suppose that his makeup effects could trump the startling kisser nature had supplied to Torrence. In Steamboat Bill Jnr he’s terrific, as bewildered father of a foppish college boy Buster Keaton: we know Keaton thought the partnership so successful he tried to sort-of reprise it in a wagon train movie where Marie Dressler would play his mother. The bets outsize actors can scale down their performances, and Torrence needed to in order to enter Keaton’s world, where a narrowing of the eyes can register as thunderously as a collapsing house front. 

As Moriarty in 1932’s Sherlock Holmes, he scales back to thinner slices of ham, fixing co-stars with a glinting, unblinking gaze, like a serpent or a corpse. Everything is still colossal — stupendous! — but slowed down and focused more tightly. It’s always possible to be scared by Torrence, since his face threatens to burst through the screen and seize you between nose and chin, but here it’s also possible to believe, just about, that he’s playing a person. Bringing Chicago gangsterism to Holmes’ London (in the misshapen form of pre-code plug Stanley Fields, fresh from Little Caesar), Moriarty at times seems like a supernatural force, escaping from prison using nothing more than an expressionistic montage.

All the film’s highlights involve Torrence, threatening his accusers from the dock as a series of black veils lift mysteriously from the lens, or recruiting hired guns in a carnival shooting gallery. His presence seems to inspire director William K. Howard to heights of delirium, while Clive Brook as Holmes drags his scenes down with that grudging staunch quality he would dust his scenes with if not feeling inspired. Together, they generate some sparks, not least with their matching chin/nose arrangement: were they to touch profiles, the shape created between jaws and schnozzles would be a perfect rectangle, across which a screen might be stretched: upon which to project such marvelous images…

by David Cairns

One of her movie vehicles was called Born to Dance (1936), and if ever anyone was, surely it was Eleanor Powell, the queen of tap. Fred Astaire said that Powell laid down taps “like a man,” and that’s a clue to both her appeal and also her limitations. Powell made only 14 features, nine of them as a star or headliner, from 1930-1950. She did a lot of numbers in men’s suits, her eyes rolling with what seemed like pleasure and her mouth as wide open as possible in a smile, even when she was coming out of a series of turns that might have made Ann Miller feel like she needed to sit down. She would often do backbends, splits and acrobatic work in between her taps, all with that toothy grin on her face.

“I would rather dance than eat!” Powell said in a rare late interview. She claimed that she was so shy as a child that her mother sent her to dance school as a way to get over it. Powell looked down on tap at first, but then she was taught by Jack Donahue, who had partnered Marilyn Miller, and his technique intrigued her and defined her own later style. “He had a belt from the war-surplus store and he took two sandbags—the kind they use in theaters for curtains—and he put one on each side of the belt, which he fastened around my waist,” Powell said. “Honey, I was riveted to the ground. That’s why I dance so close to the ground. I just couldn’t move. That’s why I can tap without raising my foot even, because I was taught with this belt and these weights on me.” Her shapely legs seemed stuck to the floor always, and this gave her an extraordinary sense of balance; there was no way she was ever going to shift her weight or be in danger of falling over. She had a physical rootedness that was very similar, sometimes, to Gene Kelly’s own close-to-the-ground, masculine dancing.

Powell danced in nightclubs and on Broadway and made a screen debut in Queen High (1930), where at 17 she danced in her scanties on top of a table and wore a Louise Brooks bob. When you see and hear her tap (the camera cuts her head off for a bit), it’s clear that this isn’t just another hotcha girl; her taps on the table have a solidity that already seem formidable. They would still seem that way five years later at Fox, in George White’s 1935 Scandals, where she has a bit of a part and does a specialty number, the camera cutting to a close shot of her feet as they tapped and barely left the floor. Powell remembered that she was “almost a little prissy, if you want to know the truth,” and was unhappy about male cast members like James Dunn and Ned Sparks drinking on the set.

She had an ironclad kind of wholesomeness that marked her as suitable for MGM, where she was signed and starred in her own series of films, beginning with Broadway Melody of 1936 opposite Robert Taylor. Her singing voice was usually dubbed, but not always, and her acting was game but awkward (though she is pretty funny doing a Katharine Hepburn impersonation in that first MGM film). When she dances, and even in dialogue scenes, her face sends out signals that she can’t seem to control that look like brash sexual come-ons, yet everything else in her manner denied them.

Jimmy Stewart made for an ideal hayseed partner for her in Born to Dance, singing to her sweetly in his thin voice and then giving way to what would become a standard part of her films, a big finale where she would wear some kind of uniform and turn and turn. The settings and extras behind her grew larger and grander with each movie, until in Rosalie (1937) she spins down some large drums and winds up on a stage where all of Hollywood seems to be gathered behind her and the camera pulls back further and further, as far back as it will go. Her finales became overblown and overproduced in a willful way, as if MGM thought audiences were paying to see money spent as flagrantly as possible. Powell smiled through it all while her body worked its virtuosic wonders.

In Honolulu (1939) she does a kind of hula tap and a very cheerful number with Gracie Allen where she dances while jumping rope. The zenith of her career was her partnership with Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940, particularly the tap conclusion to “Begin the Beguine,” two minutes and 51 seconds of perfection. When she advances on him and does a light kick, it’s cute rather than Cyd Charisse-sexy; unlike Charisse or Ginger Rogers or Rita Hayworth, Powell scrupulously has no sexual charge whatever. (It’s a shame that she never got to dance with Gene Kelly, who was once scheduled to do a Broadway Melody film with her, for he might have given her a bit of sex from his own surplus.)

Astaire himself seems delighted to have such an equal partner, but they’re so similar that there’s no friction between them, and they almost cancel each other out. That “Beguine” tap is so rarified that it’s nearly cold, but Astaire and Powell have an awareness of just how far they’re going together that warms it just enough to make it a major, essential dance. Their tap side by side, trying to match and then outdo each other, is beyond words, and the most marvelous transition is when their taps get lighter and lighter momentarily, about two minutes in, and then suddenly come back strong and pound the floor decisively. This is her ticket to immortality, and it makes all of Powell’s gaucheries and solo gimmick dances not matter at all. A moment she has in another number in this movie epitomizes her overall character: after an extremely difficult set of acrobatics, she stands and salutes the camera and then quickly brushes an out-of-place hair behind her ear. Something like that indicates that nothing was going to be allowed to mar the picture she wanted to present, her superhuman image of control. Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, she said, would come and watch her dance for hours, presumably because her authority relaxed their very different anxieties.

There were a few more films and solos to come. She does a charming dance with a dog she had trained herself in Lady Be Good (1941) and a galvanizing routine with drummer Buddy Rich in Ship Ahoy (1942). “A tap dancer is nothing but a frustrated drummer,” she said. “You’re a percussion instrument with your feet.” In her last three films, she was back to being a specialty act, and that’s mainly because she couldn’t do romantic partner dancing or romantic anything; it’s no mistake that her last vehicles paired her with that woeful would-be laugh-getter Red Skelton.

She married Glenn Ford, had a child, and retired save for a religious program she did on TV for a bit. In the early 1960s, her son encouraged her to pursue nightclub work, but once Powell proved she could do it and still be successful she retired again, only to emerge one more time for the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony for Fred Astaire in 1981, where she received a standing ovation. In that brief footage at Astaire’s AFI tribute, Powell reveals herself as an old-time show business trouper socking it to the audience, like Sophie Tucker, who she had worked with as a girl. She proudly says that she and Astaire worked for two weeks on just their arm movements for “Begin the Beguine,” just so that they would be perfectly in synch. Powell seems hearty and proud here, ending her little speech with an arms-out physical tribute to Astaire as one “hoofer” to another.

Powell didn’t have the complexity of Ginger Rogers or the sexual dazzle of Cyd Charisse, or even the warmth of Ann Miller. She was just perfect, that’s all, and that could be too much, sometimes, but in “Begin the Beguine” with Astaire, she offers a privileged glimpse of something nearly otherworldly. As she might have said, she had been given a gift by God, and now she was offering her own gift in return, and in this partner dance with Astaire very few artists have ever made such an offering.

by Dan Callahan