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The
Last Screening
Behind
the Door was one of the most praised films of the silent era—and
the only projectable print was just shown for the final time
By Shawn Stone
The
audience at the Capitol Theatre in Rome, N.Y., had just watched
a newsreel, comedy short and cartoon, and were listening attentively
to an introduction to the evening’s main event: a 1919 war
drama titled Behind the Door. Philip Carli, a well-known
composer and musician who has recorded numerous soundtracks
for silent-film TV screenings and home-video releases, was
likely the only person in attendance to have seen the feature
presentation before. He also would be accompanying the film
on the Capitol’s 1928 pipe organ, and gave a brief but detailed
history of the film, which The New York Times
(among other publications) had rated as one of the year’s
best—but which had long since been forgotten.
After explaining the film’s torturous preservation history,
he warned the crowd that it was strong stuff: Behind the
Door was “grim” and “elegiac,” Carli said. The audience
didn’t seem to be buying it.
Consider the evidence. This was a general audience, not a
collection of film buffs. When the picture started, there
were scattered laughs at some of star Hobart Bosworth’s acting
flourishes. Granted, Bosworth displayed some old-school actorly
tics, but they don’t get in the way of an otherwise fine performance.
Laughing at the edges of his work is a sign that the audience
is unwilling to engage the film on its own terms. (“ ‘Grim’
and ‘elegiac’? Yeah right.”) Some scenes suffered from distracting
nitrate decomposition: Cellulose nitrate film, used in all
commercially released films until 1950, eventually rots. Also,
hardly anyone expects to be shocked or awed watching any film
made in black & white, and especially not a flick from
the teens.
The story is pure war melodrama. A retired sea captain (Bosworth)
woos the most beautiful woman (Jane Novak) in a small Maine
town. War is declared, and he joins the Navy. Through a series
of plot twists, they end up on the same ship, which is torpedoed
by a German U-boat (submarine). They survive. The U-boat commander
(a dependably evil Wallace Beery) rescues the woman, but leaves
the captain to drown. The woman is raped by the entire crew;
the captain survives, and swears vengeance. When he gets his
opportunity, the captain—who, by the way, is also a taxidermist—skins
the U-boat commander alive, and leaves him hanging “behind
the door.”
What makes it so effective is not the outlandish plot, but
Irvin V. Willat’s atmospheric direction. Everything is presented
with utter seriousness. The story is structured as a complicated
series of flashbacks-within-flashbacks, but is never confusing.
The mood is a balance of brutality and romantic doom.
It was enlightening to experience the shift in reaction as
the drama lived up to its billing. First, there is a bloody
attack on a German-American, when war is declared, for being
the only German in a town. This is followed by unmerciful,
take-no-prisoners submarine warfare. The laughs ceased, and
the audience grew silent—the only sound was Carli’s inspired
playing. You could feel the mood change in the theater. The
film’s most brutal scenes followed: sexual assault and (offscreen)
gang rape. Finally, the sadistic act of revenge that explained
the film’s enigmatic title.
There was a rumble of applause, first for the film, and then
a second wave for Carli. The unsigned New York Times
review of Jan. 5, 1920, was still true 74 years later. Even
in its not-quite-complete form, Behind the Door really
was “one of the most grim and gruesome, and decidedly one
of the best-made, pictures produced since the beginning of
the war. . . .”
Unfortunately, the Saturday, May 8, screening at the Capitol
of Behind the Door was the last public showing for
a long, long time—that is, if it’s ever shown in public again.
The story of how Behind the Door survived at all is
not atypical of a silent film; after all, most silent films
are lost. Thomas Ince (whose death was wildly fictionalized
in the recent Kirsten Dunst picture The Cat’s Meow)
produced it for Paramount, who sold it to Columbia Pictures
(for issues related to the remake rights) in the 1930s. Columbia,
sensibly, had no interest in an unmarketable silent film,
and left it to rot—until they donated the surviving material
to the Library of Congress.
Film historian Robert S. Birchard explains: “What survived
was incomplete, and a hodge-podge, because it was in tinting
roll order, not in continuity order.” Tinting? “Silent films
were often tinted—blue for night, amber for day, and other
colors for other effects—so all the scenes that were intended
to be tinted blue for a given reel were together, and the
amber scenes were together . . . and so on.”
As if the fact that the scenes were all out of order wasn’t
enough of a problem, no cutting continuity—the blueprint for
reassembling the scenes—could be found. When Birchard wanted
to run the film at Cinecon, an annual classic film festival,
he remembers, “James Cozart at the Library of Congress offered
to put the film in order, in his free time, and shoot bridging
titles for the missing material so that the screening would
be more comprehensible.”
Cozart used the magazine story the film was based on for a
guide. This was no easy task, because Behind the Door has
that elaborate flashback structure. So it was a happy surprise
when Birchard found a complete cutting continuity in the estate
of actor Hobart Bosworth’s widow, and it turned out that Cozart
had reconstructed the film perfectly.
Birchard also found something else that was important: Footage
from the “skinning” scene, which he arranged to have sent
to the Library of Congress, and was incorporated into its
print of the film.
Unfortunately, this print is now damaged. According to Art
Pierce, who organizes the classic film series at the Capitol,
there were “no problems to speak of” during projection, but
“I’m told it got very loud [in the projection booth] toward
the end of the movie.” The reason, Pierce explains, is “the
clicking of the Mylar sprocket repairs.” The Library of Congress
has decided to withdraw it from circulation—and there are
no plans to make another.
The LOC, sensibly, would rather do a more complete restoration,
from all surviving film materials, than make another incomplete
print. The Gosfilmofond archive in Moscow has an incomplete
print; as Birchard notes, it contains “six out of the original
seven reels.” The hope is, he adds, “that the Russian material
would fill in all the gaps.” Unfortunately, no agreement has
yet been reached to obtain a copy of the Russian print. Until
such an agreement is reached—if ever—Behind the Door
will be out of circulation.
It’s a loss to the appreciation of American silent film. As
Birchard sums up, “I think everyone who has seen even the
incomplete version of Behind the Door that is in the
Library of Congress collection agrees that it is indeed a
remarkable film, and one that deserves to be better known
than it is.”
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