A piece in the New York Times earlier this month asked this increasingly familiar question, focusing on the fate of future filmmakers growing up today without access to the audio commentaries, making-of featurettes, and assorted extra that my generation took for granted. “[H]ours of geeky, director-narrated analysis at a low cost is gone” laments Fabrice Robinet, who coaxes similar sentiments from the makers of Stranger Things and The Kindergarten Teacher, this year’s directorial prizewinner at Sundance.
It’s true that the supplements that once clogged DVDs and Blu-rays like barnacles on a schooner are increasingly absent from streaming platforms and digital download services, and even big studio releases that would’ve rated multi-disc collector’s editions a decade ago are hitting the marketplace in perfunctory plainwrap. The once-familiar “film school in a box” moniker attached to DVDs and Blu-rays feels increasingly archaic, not least because studios are betting that consumers will forgo the box in favor of the cloud.
If DVDs and Blu-rays are truly yesterday’s delivery system, I won’t miss all the audio commentaries and alternate angles and vfx featurettes. What I will miss are all the strange, unaccountable shorts hauled out of the vault and plopped onto discs to accompany the main feature, seemingly at random. Warner Bros. found a new home for its massive library of one- and two-reel mishegoss when it inaugurated the “Warner Night at the Movies” program on its 2003 DVDs of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), pairing a feature film with cartoons, travelogues, comedy shorts, and trailers, unrelated but for being released in the same year as the main attraction. I don’t think I’ll ever make it through Cimarron (1931), but I’ve watched its accompanying short, The Devil’s Cabaret (1931), five or six times already. This hellfire musical comedy has nothing to do with the feature, just an accident of historical proximity and corporate synergy. (Cimarron was released by RKO and The Devil’s Cabaret by M-G-M, but they’re now united under one intellectual property roof at Warner Bros.)
With silent films on DVD and Blu-ray, the addition of shorts often goes a long way towards conjuring a cultural context that is otherwise irretrievable. Of course, producers of silent film discs have fewer options for extras from the start. (How many silent film directors are still around to record a nuts and bolts, how-I-made-this-movie-and-you-can-too audio commentaries? Luckily, historians and archivists have capably taken their place in the recording studio.) Indeed, two recent releases highlight the genuine scholarly value that such shorts can provide.
Kino has seen fit to release James Cruze’s epic western The Covered Wagon (1923) on Blu-ray, a quantum leap for a canonical title that last saw a commercial home video release on VHS in 1995. The Blu-ray recycles an organ score by the late Gaylord Carter from that VHS, and its creaky ambiance suggests a seventh inning stretch more than it does the art of cinema. (You might think that’s a crack, but only partly: as film historian Toby Roan discusses on the accompanying audio commentary, Carter’s long musical career included a gig playing the organ at Dodger Stadium!)As The Covered Wagon was M.I.A. for the first twenty years of the DVD era, its reputation has been eclipsed somewhat by John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924). Fact is, The Covered Wagon has long been treated as a museum piece; indeed, it was one of the very first titles donated to the Museum of Modern Art and made available on 16mm through its Circulating Film Library. It pops up repeatedly on film society schedules in the 1940s and 1950s, less so as the years wear on.
That antique positioning was deliberate. As even its staunchest advocates will acknowledge, The Covered Wagon possesses a self-important air—it’s a B-picture script elevated by A-level production values and florid intertitles that inflate the central love triangle to a national epic about “the blood of pioneers – the blood of lion-hearted men and women who carved a splendid civilization out of an uncharted wilderness.” It’s a film that historicizes itself, not by quoting chapter and verse on research sources as Griffith did in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), but by foregrounding the typicality of its incidents, and freighting them with a force of mythic proportions. The Covered Wagon was an enormous box office success in 1923, but it feels calculated to play even better to the educators, curators, and amateur historians of 1943—or 2018.
That the characters in The Covered Wagon are strictly stock only enhances the folkloric undertow. Compared to the popular Western films of William S. Hart, whose heroes sought redemption from genuinely grim sins, The Covered Wagon can only muster J. Warren Karrigan, whose dark past is revealed to be an opportunistic misunderstanding, with the exoneration delivered by Abe Lincoln himself.
The video transfer on the Kino disc is unavoidably a mix bag, assembled as it is from film elements of widely varying quality. The encoding is top-notch and the Blu-ray capably conveys the photographic beauty of The Covered Wagon, a major feat from Karl Brown that is perhaps most impressive for how tossed-off and natural his careful compositions appear to be. The disc is further enhanced by an enthusiastic audio commentary from Toby Roan and insightful liner notes from my friend Matt Hauske. Neither say much about the remaining supplement included in the package: a short film called The Pie-Covered Wagon (1932) from Poverty Row producer Educational Film Exchanges, transferred from a latter-day print from Kit Parker Films.
As a spoof, The Pie-Covered Wagon—which features diaper-clad toddlers shooting arrows, hunting game, indulging in cringe-inducing racial stereotypes, and, yes, staging a pie fight—has almost no insight or interest in its target. Its inclusion suggests only a small fraction of The Covered Wagon’s cultural influence. One would learn more about The Covered Wagon by comparing Cruz’s epic to its feature successors like North of 36 (1924) or The Big Trail (1930).
Watching The Pie-Covered Wagon for ten agonizing minutes (relieved somewhat by truly crowd-pleasing dog stunts), one cannot help but wonder why this strange little film exists at all. It would be easy to assume that The Pie-Covered Wagon simply reflects the contempt reflexively heaped on silent cinema in the early sound era. If one of the era’s most successful films can be lampooned as nursery stuff, then nothing’s sacred. But no film is produced in a vacuum, even if we’d prefer it be sucked up by one. The Pie-Covered Wagon becomes more legible when placed alongside other shorts from the era that are also scattered as also-rans on various DVDs and Blu-rays.
To start, the fact that The Covered Wagon was a silent film did not make it an automatic target for ridicule. There are other contemporary shorts, such as M-G-M’s Dogville series, that parodied fresher, talkie product (c.f., The Dogway Melody, a canine take-off on the studio’s own Best Picture winner The Broadway Melody from the year before.) More pertinently, The Pie-Covered Wagon was actually part of a series, The Baby Burlesks (yes, really), that was so reviled that it had to switch distributors twice over the course of eight shorts. As the review of The Pie-Covered Wagon in the Hollywood Filmograph observed:
Director Charles Lamont had every opportunity to make the kids do something that would create legitimate laughs, and resorted to old hokum, making the children look like a lot of manikins ….The first of these fun-films was by far the best, and if Educational are not careful the School Boards of Education will ban these subjects, as it will make the children feel that they can get away with most anything.
On the positive side of the ledger, the Baby Burlesks offered Shirley Temple her first screen appearance. The series began at Universal in 1932 with The Runt Page, which answers the ever-ready question of how the hard-drinking, hard-living milieu of The Front Page (1931) would play if recast with juvenile journalists, once again swaddled in diapers. (Both Kino and Criterion have released different editions of The Front Page, but neither package includes this wince-inducing short; luckily, it’s unceremoniously included in Universal’s single-disc Shirley Temple Little Darling Pack, which collects the only two Temple features in the Universal library. This DVD once again highlights the superiority of miscellaneous vault dross to navel-gazing commentary tracks.)
Eagled-eyed collectors will recognize that The Runt Page is part of the Universal Brevities series, which also included a short film, Boo! (1932), which has been reflexively included on every DVD and Blu-ray edition of Frankenstein (1931) since the late 1990s. Boo! is another half-hearted ribbing of not-really-so-old movies, with a Borsht Belt spieler adding wise cracks and fart noises to scenes from Frankenstein, Nosferatu (1922), and the otherwise-lost The Cat Creeps (1930)—a proto-MST3K short on laughs but awash in irreverence.
The Universal Brevities mystery comes full circle with Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916), recently released in an exceptionally thoughtful Blu-ray Disc from Milestone Films. We’ve discussedWeber’s unusually hard-hitting and innovative social problem feature before (SFSFF’s Rob Byrne produced an earlier iteration of the restoration seen here), so I want to focus on the extras and Milestone’s commitment to contextualizing even the most head-scratching inclusions. Not only does the disc include The Unshod Maiden (1932), the first Universal Brevity, it also includes an overview of the ill-fated Brevities series from film historian Richard Koszarski that goes a long way towards dignifying the historical stature of this very undignified film.
Like Boo!, Unshod Maiden ransacks a title from the vault and treats it with all the care of a stock footage merchant, condensing the story of Shoes to ten minutes and turning Mary McLaren’s frown into an uncomfortable chuckle. To audiences of 1932, Unshod Maiden was an innovative repurposing of unsaleable studio assets. (Per Koszarski’s trade press clippings, audience and exhibitor enthusiasm was quickly won—and more quickly squandered.) New Universal product is slickly referenced: there’s an allusion to John M. Stahl’s Strictly Dishonorable (1931) and the title itself is a play on James Whale’s The Impatient Maiden (1932). If there’s any film that doesn’t merit this treatment, it’s Shoes, a film that was still very much an artistic credit to the Laemmle regime.
And yet this crude burlesque (burlesk?) on Weber’s socially engaged drama ultimately proved crucial in the restoration of Shoes, as Unshod Maiden included footage of select scenes from the original film not present in any other copy. (Similarly, even the lowly Boo! offers a brief glimpse of the otherwise-lost The Cat Creeps.) It would be perverse to suggest that watching The Unshod Maiden enhances one’s appreciation of Shoes, but its inclusion highlights all the weird and unfathomable stuff we would be leaving behind in a streaming world.
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