Classics of the silent screen (1959)

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Doug Fairbanks strikes a jaunty pose in his jauntiest movie. The girl entering so much into the right spirit of things is Kathleen Clifford. Till the Clouds Holl By, 1919 Made in late 1919, Till the Clouds Roll By was Doug Fairbanks' second film for United Artists, in which he was a partner with Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith, and Charles Chaplin. It was almost the last of the oldstyle Doug (only The Mollycoddle and The Nut lay ahead before a complete switch to swashbucklers ) and it was easily the best. Bursting with energy and good humor, it zipped along at a fantastic pace, with Doug hardly still for a minute, hanging by his feet as he proposes to his girl, clinging to the side of a door and swinging himself back and forth gleefully as she accepts, bounding out of windows, and clambering over an entire building to avoid having a black cat cross his path. The film was a neat satire on psychiatry too, with some incredibly elaborate dream sequences containing trick effects that are as baffling today as they were in 1919. It's typical of Doug that the psychiatrist who motivates the whole plot turns out to be an escaped lunatic. "To blazes with worrying about why things happen," was Doug's philosophy, "just make the best of everything, face life with a smile, and above all, don't take anything too seriously." It was a philosophy that Doug had propounded in all of his earlier pictures too, but it never seemed to make more sense than here. What a pity that Doug lost so much of this joyful spirit in his later swashbucklers. It's interesting that there's a moment in Till the Clouds Roll By when Doug's girl has walked out on him, and he's so depressed that he contemplates suicide. It takes him but a few minutes to snap out of it, and bound after her. Just four years later, there was an almost identical situation in The Thief of Bagdad. But there it took Doug almost four reels to recover his zest for living— and, incidentally, to put some life back into the picture. Doug's acrobatics really come to the fore in the closing reel of Till the Clouds Roll By as he performs some greased-lightning stunts aboard the Lackawanna Ferry, atop speeding railroad cars and in the deluge of a full-scale flood. The flood was brought about by a dam breaking— all very spectacular stuff, matched in with some expert miniatures—and all for the sake of good comedy! Kathleen Clifford was the girl, Frank Campeau the seedy villain, and Victor Fleming (of Gone With the Wind) directed, but it was Doug's show all the way, and no one else really mattered much! 2/