Beyond the Rocks
by Sam Wood
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DVD details
Actor: Alec B. Francis, Edythe Chapman, Gloria Swanson, Robert Bolder, Rudolph ValentinoDirector: Sam Wood
Brand: Oscilloscope Laboratories
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: DVD, NTSC, Silent
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 85 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-07-11
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: Mile00102
Studio: Oscilloscope Laboratories/Milestone Films
Product features:
- BEYOND THE ROCKS (DVD MOVIE)
DVD Reviews of Beyond the Rocks
DVD Review: From Out of the Past
Summary: 5 Stars
This film was featured at last year's silent film festival here at the Castro Theater in San Francisco following its discovery in 2002 in a Dutch film archive. What a treat! The restoration has been painstaking and beautifully done, and the new orchestral score is a work of art all by itself.
Paramount rarely paired its biggest stars, figuring each of them could tentpole a major feature all by themselves, and so usually a star like Valentino or Swanson would play opposite an up and comer, often of markedly inferior star status. Here is the glorious exception and yes, each of them brings out the very best in the other, though due to a curious trick of plot construction a third actor, Robert Bolder, gets to play the most affecting scenes. Theodora FitzGerald, a lovely, poor English lass, has lost her heart to the nobleman who rescues her from drowning one afternoon--he is Lord Hector Bracondale, who at first seems to go away and never think of her again, while she pines for him. Her two hectoring sisters urge her to marry a fat older man of the lower classes who has gone all nouveau riche and become a multi-millionaire, one of the richest principals in England. The two sisters say she owes it to her father--and the subtitles tell us that for Theodora, love of her father "is her religion." Swanson plays Theodora not so much as an English girl but as any girl who finds herself drawn to a man she must not have--Lord Hector, played by Valentino. No, he doesn't seem especially English either, but his exquisite dancer's bearing and his suave, kind manners give him a radiant, fresh beauty that tingles with hers. Swanson is absolutely gorgeous in the part, though she's saddled with heavy makeup like Alice Cooper, and a series of haute couture costumes that sometimes make her tiny figure look a bit on the waddling side--so unfair, when she probably weighed about, what, eighty-five pounds?
When Hector and Theodora are together the sparks fairly jump from the screen, and during some reels the ruined film stock looks as though the scenes are literally burning up from frame to frame--I suppose restoration can only go so far. Valentino's performance here is ungodly. I thought he was a figure of fun, the male vamp, but BEYOND THE ROCKS reveals a skilled actor who will remind you forcibly of someone like Gary Cooper. Odd that Sam Wood, the great US director who made BEYOND THE ROCKS, later worked with Cooper repeatedly (CASANOVA BROWN, PRIDE OF THE YANKEES, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, SARATOGA TRUNK) as though reinforcing his patent on this type, the quiet charmer with the steadfast heart and matching courage.
Josiah Brown, the vulgar millionaire whom Swanson marries, repels us at first with his louche displays of crassness, but the picture becomes ever so much more interesting when he develops into a three dimensional character as he finds out his wife has fallen for another man.
The lovers go to Versailles and fancy themselves in flashback as playing lovers of the era of Marie Antoinette. Has Sofia Coppola seen this picture? There are also flashbacks to ancient Egypt, just to add to the sense of madness about this movie. It's as though passion weren't enough--you have to have time travel, too.
As Josiah Brown decides to go on a Sahara expedition, the makeup people really do a number on him. He's fat anyhow, and in his desert costume he really looks exactly like the late Leigh Bowery, the Australian performance artist who starred in WIGSTOCK and posed for Lucian Freud. His balding scalp glows in the sun, the mascara on his hooded eyelids runs, his obese stomach shakes with remorse. It's like Divine playing Camille, and yet, somehow it all works and the movie will have you dissolved into its own recipe for melancholy. It seems that love always hurts, and to their astonishment, Swanson and Valentino must learn from the one they thought least likely to show them honest emotion.
PS, I love the one intertitle: "Ann not only calls on the Browns, she carries them off to Beachleigh, her country place, for Whitsuntide." Whitsuntide? Talk about ultra-British! It could be a new holiday for anglophile Madonna!
Description of Beyond the Rocks
BEYOND THE ROCKS stars film legends Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino at the height of their careers and sexual appeal. This outstanding silent romance was long considered one of the great "lost" films from the Hollywood golden age. Its amazing rediscovery by the Nederlands Filmmuseum made headlines around the world.Sam Wood (GOODBYE MR. CHIPS, PRIDE OF THE YANKEES) directs this delirious Elinor Glyn melodrama/roller-coaster ride through the English countryside, the Swiss Alps, Paris, London and the Sahara Desert! Brilliantly restored with a wonderful new orchestral score, BEYOND THE ROCKS is ready for its close-up.
The rediscovery and restoration of any film long believed lost is good news. Beyond the Rocks inspired still more excitement at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival because it was the only movie ever to costar two of the silent era's highest-wattage luminaries: Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino.
Cultural cliché holds that Swanson's acting was as garish as her makeup, and the legend of Valentino is awash in camp. Yet in this picture--however preposterously plotted by Elinor (It) Glyn--both deliver very natural performances of behavioral subtlety and discretion. Swanson, as the loving daughter of a retired officer (Alec B. Francis), is willing to do anything to ensure that Papa's twilight years be comfortable. That includes marrying a much older, vulgar businessman (Robert Bolder) as wealthy as he is unappealing. It's inconvenient that she's just fallen for a dashing nobleman (Valentino) who's saved her from (1) drowning and (2) falling off an Alp. Both these beautiful people struggle to behave honorably, right up through a final reel in which the unsympathetic husband takes them--and the audience--by surprise.
Now, we mustn't make overmuch of a good thing: Beyond the Rocks, ably but unexcitingly directed by Sam Wood, isn't a lost Murnau or the uncut Greed. But it's a very respectable movie, free of the excesses (except Swanson's increasingly florid costumes!) carelessly attributed to silent films in general; and as a long-delayed footnote to two legendary careers, its historical importance is considerable. The Nederlands Filmmuseum restoration is gloriously sharp (apart from a few spasms of almost impenetrable nitrate deterioration), and the new score by Henny Vrienten sounds more like Mark Isham than the organ-and-calliope accompaniment too many silents have suffered from. --Richard T. Jameson
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