Shooting Stars

I can't answer for the rest of the audience; but I went into the screening anticipating a silent comedy that was a satire on contemporary Hollywood formula drama, 1920s cinema laughing wryly at itself. And at the start of the film, that was just what we got. Ripple after ripple of laughter rolled around the auditorium, from the opening moments as the languishing heroine of the film-within-a-film attempted to kiss a dove, got roundly pecked, and swore like a trooper. (One suspects lip-readers would have a treat at this point...)

It's hard to put a finger on when the audience stopped laughing. The change is very subtle; and if, as I was, you are not expecting it, the effect is gradually almost overwhelming.

The basic plot is the stuff of comedy, or of broad melodrama -- cuckolded husband, vain and silly wife, mistaken identity, unexpected return, and a gag involving a lipstick and, of all things, a shotgun cartridge. If it were a film -- which is to say, in one of the ridiculously bad films-within-the-film -- it would be played for laughs, inadvertent or otherwise. It is, I think, a very great tribute to both the actors playing actors, and to the director of "Shooting Stars" itself, that it comes across instead as contrasting real life with celluloid performance.

What starts off as slapstick becomes, by the end, desperately unfunny. Humour and double meanings have turned to the bitterest irony. Lines that once would have raised a laugh -- "I never knew Mae had it in her," says the director admiringly as his lead actress collapses on set in guilt and horror that are all too real for the scene -- now come closer to wrenching out a twisted sob. There are two different allusions even in the black wordplay of the title.

The film walks a very fine line between comedy and tragedy. Perhaps this, above all, is what I admire most -- Julian's cheerful ignorance as Mae faints, the empty, swinging chandelier, the alluring professional smile that drains from Mae's face as she turns to wave to her celluloid lover and witnesses her real lover's approach... By the end, comedy is now longer used for laughs. It is used to point up the sting of the tragedy by robbing it of melodrama.

I think the last actual laugh among the audience came when Mae runs to forestall the owner of the approaching footsteps, only to encounter an elderly an innocent clergyman. After that, there was nothing but gasps and silence until the last frame of the film. Judging by the outbreak of coughing and seat-backs that followed -- not to mention applause -- I wasn't the only one to have been sitting frozen, holding my breath. You could have heard a pin drop.



I felt particular credit should have gone to Brian Aherne, giving a wonderful performance as matinee idol Julian in what could have proved an utterly thankless part. Julian is essentially playing straight-man to his two co-stars, as open-hearted and naive as the stereotyped cowboy hero he is being asked to act, but without audience sympathy for him his wife's antics would be little more than a harmless bedroom farce.

Aherne makes us care about Julian -- makes us genuinely like him, and wince to see him hurt. The young man finds excuses for Mae's behaviour on-set, and for her sake laughs off being trailed like luggage in his wife's wake to Hollywood; and when he wishes that Mae's tenderness when they star together could correspond more closely to their off-screen married life, it is not farcical but poignant. When we smile at his childish vanity as he cheers himself on while watching his own film, just like the two schoolboys in the neighbouring seats, it is with amused affection.

Yet Aherne can also use his height and classic good looks to startling threatening effect, as we discover in the scenes where Julian learns the truth. By the end of the film, the character has grown; and Aherne gives him well-deserved authority to hold the role.(

I get comparisons here to "Citizen Kane" (1941), claims of "the greatest film ever" aside. Like that production, "Shooting Stars" was the debut of an acclaimed prodigy who brought the best techniques of the age (in this case, sparse intertitles, German lighting, Soviet montage and Hollywood glamour, basically) to bear within a controversially reflexive narrative construction. There's also deeper parallels between the two films if we dive deeper into the scandalous history of silent cinema.

As well known and often over-emphasized, the main basis for the character of Charles Foster Kane was yellow journalism media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Much muckraking was made of Hollywood in the 1920s and, perhaps, the most famous example was Hearst's newspapers libelously accusing slapstick comedian Fatty Arbuckle of rape and murder in the death of Virginia Rappe. It was this sort of dubious narrative construction, also including Hearst inventing the colonialist Spanish-American War, that underlies the multiple, non-linear perspectives of "Citizen Kane." If we look at another Hollywood rumor from the era, coincidentally also involving Hearst and a slapstick comedian, we might get an idea of where "Shooting Stars" is coming from.

Although equally unfounded, scurrilous hearsay has persisted, including in the movie "The Cat's Meow" (2001), regarding the death of Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince, one of the principal architects of the studio system, by the way, in which Hearst and his mistress, actress Marion Davies, worked. All of whom were on Hearst's yacht when Ince, reportedly and officially, became ill and died shortly thereafter. As an assuredly false and seemingly karmic narrative out of Hearst's control would have it, though, Hearst killed Ince when he missed his target of another passenger on the yacht and the man who supposedly was having an affair with Davies, Charlie Chaplin.

One last piece of Hollywood trivia fit for this puzzle is that the auteur behind "Shooting Stars," Anthony Asquith, stayed for three months in Hollywood as a guest of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and visited other stars, including Chaplin on the set of "The Circus" (1928), before setting out to make films in Britain.

What's my point? Asquith basically made a film about Charlie and Mary making a cuckold out of Doug. And, there's also Chekhov's gun, or at least bullet, to be accounted for in the yacht that is the film studio of this reflexively ravishing late-silent masterpiece. Making a dramatic (as opposed to comedies, as there were lots of those) movie about the business of making movies was a novel enough concept at the time to be considered controversial, if even daring. Talk about shooting for the stars when Asquith makes his debut by centering it around thinly veiled adulterous caricatures of Hollywood's three biggest stars. And, that's even before getting into the disillusioning pulling back of the curtain on filmmaking here. It's little wonder, then, that as reprinted in Tom Ryall's biography of Asquith, that some contemporary reviewers were outraged:

From "Kine Weekly," "The result appears to be an attempt to poke fun at production (at a time when we all trying to take it very seriously), and to present to our public the very aspect of our business which we desire should remain a mystery."

And, as more succinctly put by "Variety," "a disgrace to the film industry of any country."

Now, veteran director A. V. Bramble is the one who received screen credit as director, but since its release, it's generally considered to have been Asquith's picture, as he also wrote the scenario, with Bramble having served in some supervisory or technical capacity with the first-time director. Whether that's a fair or not assumption, Bramble's career seems largely unknown today--some of which is just lost, as with most silent films, such as his "Wuthering Heights" (1920) adaptation, and reportedly he left the studio after this film to continue to make others elsewhere that today also go largely ignored. Asquith, on the other hand, besides having an aristocratic and educated pedigree, the son of a prime minister, had a long and celebrated career, while his silent films have received renewed attention in recent years. His subsequent and solely-credited "A Cottage on Dartmoor" (1929), which features a talkie film within the silent film, is an especially outstanding reflexive follow-up to "Shooting Stars." The film-within-the-film in that one is "My Woman;" here, it's "My Man," and both films base their deconstruction around a simple love triangle.

Throughout, the debts here to European art cinema are readily apparent. I also especially like the mirror and window motifs--the neon movie sign outside one window and cutting between a tryst and a film screening are especially great. Ryall rightly points out, especially in the scenes of production accidents, the visual quotations of canonical masterpieces such as the impressionistic cutting of "Battleship Potemkin" and the unchained camera of "Variety" (both 1925). These allusions start with the opening revelatory sequence that begins like a romantic Western before the camera pulls back to divulge that it's one of the films-within-the-film in production in a studio set. Before we learn the cowboy is riding a toy horse pulled by crewmen and the camera smoothly tracks over the artifice of the rest of the set, the scene involves star Mae Feather (Annette Benson as perfect parody of "America's Sweetheart," curls an' all) throwing a tantrum over kissing a bird, which immediately reminds one of Lillian Gish in "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) or some such absurd depiction of femininity in a D. W. Griffith film.

Funny enough, there's an entire thread entitled "Bird Kissing. It's not just for Lillian Gish" on the Nitrateville message boards, where it's determined that Pickford both said, on her time working with Griffith, "I wasn't one of his simpering bird-kissing actresses," and kissed birds herself, both for Griffith and in her own production, "Stella Maris" (1918). Regardless, the last-minute-rescue sequence of "My Man" viewed at a movie theatre adds to the references to that fourth founding member of United Artists, Griffith.

Besides Mae's marriage to her co-star resembling the real-life, so-called "Pickfair" (oh, what, did you really think they invented portmanteaus for the likes of "Brangelina?") and Donald Calthrop giving a good impression of a second-rate Chaplin cutting between this Pickfair, "Shooting Stars" does rather well to demonstrate not only how scandalous silent cinema could be, but how dangerous were its productions. Forget shotguns, Harold Lloyd blew off part of his hand because what he thought was a prop was an actual bomb. Cecil B. DeMille intentionally had live ammunition fired during filming only for the inevitable mistake in switching back to blanks resulting in a fatal shooting to the head. The scandal of star Wallace Reid's drug-induced death is because he got hooked on morphine to dull the pain from an injury on set. Ditto others. Another actress burned to death in her inflammable costume. They literally drowned extras in "Noah's Ark" (1928). And, the list goes on.

The irony is that Asquith claimed a great deal of respect for his Hollywood friends and even genre pictures such as Westerns. Some of the reflexive themes in his work and the subtle direction of actors are especially striking in their debt to Chaplin, particularly, as with all dramatic satires, "A Woman of Paris" (1923). That's where Ernst Lubitsch learned about constructing scenes around looks, too. But, there's no holding back in "Shooting Stars." It's enough to make all but the best of the numerous versions of "A Star Is Born" (the best is obviously the 1954 film, by the way) look starry-eyed. As fantastic as the opening sequence is here, the ending may be even more apt, alone on a church set. Vapid movie fans and press aren't spared, either. The entirety is a brilliant blend of tones and genres, foreshadowing and style that not only reveals one layer of the film-within-film fantasy of making and watching movies, but layers of artifice beyond that in the persona that the stars present to the public and in their private lives. These actors break character only to fall into another and wrap for the day only to walk onto another set offstage.

I had the good fortune of seeing this film the other day in the Brussels film museum. The only names I had heard of were those of Anthony Asquith and Brian Aherne. What a discovery this unique look behind the scenes of British film-making of the twenties was!

At heart Shooting Stars is a melodrama, but what makes it special is the fact that it is set in a British film studio (plus some location work at the seaside). If you're just interested in film history, you can sit back and marvel at the scenes where several silent movies are made a the same time in one studio. While two main characters are filming a western, the third lead is filming slapstick on the neighboring set. During the location scenes it is shown how bystanders are watching scenes being shot, sometimes just feet away from the actors. That was possible in the silent days. The character of Andy Wilkes clearly references Charlie Chaplin, and - as he is anything but a happy clown or even a nice man off the set - you may wonder whether some criticism of Chaplin is meant here.

Yet, there is more. Annette Benson, Brian Aherne and Donald Calthrop create believable characters, even for viewers used to the modern acting style. There is still a bit of that slight overacting typical of the silent movies, but especially Donald Calthrop uses as little movement as possible to convey emotion. The fact that you can also see the three leads in their sightly more hysterical movie character roles helps you to appreciate the naturalistic style of the more intimate scenes. Memorable moments are Brian Aherne's enjoyment of his own film (he gets caught up, like the audience in the cinema, in the excitement of a film he made) and Annette Benson's character realizing her horrible mistake.

A third reason to watch this film is its technical quality. There's a moment where the camera follows Benson's character leave the set, walk up some stairs and visit another set. To get that focus and the lighting right, must have entailed painstaking preparations. At other times important pieces of information are framed beautifully, sometimes in the corner of the screen, in such a way that your eye is drawn to them.

Two final remarks. The film ends with a jump ahead in time, with one of the characters now a film director. Apparently Asquith didn't believe in talkies yet, because the fictional director is still making silent films in the future. And then there's Annette Benson. Her character disappears at the end of the film. When you look up Miss Benson's bio, you discover that there is no information about her after the early thirties...

An early silent from Anthony Asquith, who displays enormous creativity in the way he sets shots up. The story might take a while to get going, but it builds to a thrilling crescendo before calming down for a poignant ending. Only the casting of the two male leads is a little off.

British films set in film studios are as rare as hens teeth.I can only recall about 5 in all.So this film probably represents our only ever opportunity to view Elstree as a silent era.studio.What makes this film quite Erie is the fact that like her character in the film Annette Benson literally disappeared from films after two 1931talking pictures.In fact there is virtually no biographical information about her whatsoever.Brian Aherne her leading man went on to a fine Hollywood career.Donald Calthrop was a fine actor but alas became an alcoholic and died young.Anthony Asquith went on to a distinguished directorial career.certainly one of the most interesting of the British silent films still extant.