Neil Young reports on the British Silent Cinema Festival, where the absence of sound did not mean any lack of talking points

“SILENT cinema” has always been something of a misleading misnomer – and seldom more so than during the screening of Frank Urson’s Chicago (1927) at Nottingham’s Broadway cinema this month. There was lively, suitably jazzy musical accompaniment from a pianist, a violinist and a drummer, while a large and appreciative audience made itself audible via regular bursts of laughter and a loud, long, energetic ovation at the end.

It all added up to a rather terrific, old-fashioned night out “at the pictures” – for me, the five-star highlight of the BFI’s 11th British Silent Cinema Festival (BSCF) – never mind that the main purpose of the event is “to showcase the vast collection of films produced in Britain before the advent of sound”.

Chicago is a story which, in various forms, has proved remarkably durable over the past eight decades. It started life as Chicago or Play Ball – a play by the former journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins, which she based on two actual murder cases from 1924. A respectable hit on Broadway in 1926, it tells how “jazz baby” Roxie Hart goes on trial for the murder of her lover and becomes a national celebrity in the process. Cecil B DeMille bought the film rights and hired Urson to direct, casting blue-eyed Mack Sennett protégée Phyllis Haver as Roxie.

Haver is very much the star of the show here – her vivacity very quickly obliterating memories of subsequent “Roxies” such as Ginger Rogers (from 1942’s Roxie Hart) and the vapid Renée Zellweger from Rob Marshall’s inexplicably Oscar-laden 2002 remake. Crucially, Haver’s Roxie makes little appeal to audience sympathies: she’s vain, stubborn, wilful, devious and childishly solipsistic. But she’s so shameless, so lively in her scheming, that it’s impossible to take against her for very long and it’s noticeable how much the picture’s appeal dips on those (thankfully rare) occasions where she’s absent from the screen.

This isn’t merely the Phyllis Haver show, however: Lenore Coffee’s screenplay is a masterclass in comedy construction, skilfully setting up the lengthy courtroom sequence which climaxes the picture and delivers one hilarious set-piece after another – including the priceless sequence in which Roxie’s shyster lawyer coaches her to simulate the required qualities of bravery, gentleness, sweetness, nobility and virtue.

And Chicago-native Urson (a relatively obscure name, even among the academics and experts who annually congregate at this festival-cum-conference) keeps things ticking merrily along on a wave of breezily cynical chutzpah. A long-time collaborator of Cecil B DeMille, he would surely have achieved much greater renown had his career not abruptly ended in 1927 with his accidental death by drowning at Michigan’s Indian Lake.

While this was the first British screening for Urson’s Chicago in its newly-restored two-hour version, with silent classics popping up nearly every week on DVD, it’s surely only a matter of time before the film regains the kind of prominence it so clearly deserves. The tale’s more recent incarnations have their fair share of admirers and detractors alike, but both parties – plus those totally unfamiliar with any retelling – should keep an eye out for it.

I saw four other feature-length films at this year’s crime-themed BSCF and, while none of them felt like an exciting rediscovery in the Chicago mode, each were of much more than merely historical-curio interest. Graham Cutts’ The Rat (1925), was one of the box-office smashes which made its star, Ivor Novello, such a sensation at the time. Although perhaps now best known as a songwriter, Novello also found much acclaim as a playwright (he co-wrote The Rat for the stage in 1924) and became a household name as an actor in films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger and Downhill.

The film of The Rat – an enjoyably silly and lurid romantic melodrama set in the Parisian underworld – was an overt attempt to turn Novello into a kind of British Valentino. And on those terms, it must be counted a great success. His smouldering dark orbs and lips offset by chalk-white make-up, Novello’s charisma remains impressive the best part of a century later.

Novello’s knife-throwing Apache crook is clearly intended to be a figure feared by men and adored by women, although the star is rather more convincing in the latter area than the former. Indeed, as one particularly amusing nightclub scene indicates – where an epicene male extra is clearly unable to take his eyes off the star – the Welshman (whose own homosexuality was something of an open secret within showbiz circles) wasn’t only a wow among the ladies.

Amorous entanglements of a different sort were provided by The Hill Park Mystery, a Danish comedy from 1923 whose larky tone is rather more aptly conveyed by its original title Nebrudte Nerver (“Shattered Nerves”). This is the condition suffered by a frazzled, overworked young journalist who (in a scene which eerily foreshadows Antonioni’s Blow Up) witnesses what appears to be a broad-daylight murder, only to find himself falling hopelessly in love with the glamorous “culprit”. Jaunty shenanigans duly ensue all the way to the suitably unlikely denouement. This is frothy fare providing wry smiles rather than belly-laughs, and somewhat overlong even at 70-odd minutes.

Similar longueurs plagued The Whip (1917), an American transplantation of a famed West End horse-racing melodrama. Various schemes and scams unfold involving the eponymous thoroughbred who, while highly talented, is “as ugly as sin” and has “a temper like the devil”. The Whip is sent to contest a valuable handicap at leafy Saratoga, but the villain of the piece – who does, at various stages, actually twirl his moustache – has other ideas, setting up an elaborate train-wreck as a desperate last resort. This sequence – which reportedly cost a then-astronomical $25,000 – is suitably slam-bang spectacular, almost making up for the ploddy pacelessness elsewhere.

Much better value was to be found in the accompanying short, Pimple in “The Whip”, a raucously ramshackle spoof of the stage-play starring music hall legend Fred “Pimple’” Evans and predating the likes of The Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races and George Formby’s Come On George by decades. Evidently shot very quickly to cash in on the megabucks American Whip, Pimple’s shoestring parody shows that there’s nothing new about the lampoon likes of Meet the Spartans.

It’s a deliriously daft, self-referential pastiche involving a dwarf jockey and pantomime-style horses (one of which more closely resembles an overgrown rabbit), culminating in a 2,000 Guineas (in reality, a flat race) that features not only a ditch but also a water “jump”. The latter is a grassy mound which provides It’s A Knockout-style complications for the race’s hapless participants.

Although disarmingly bizarre, Pimple in “The Whip” was by no means the only oddball spectacle on view in what was, by any standards, an admirably eclectic and varied line-up. On the final day of the four-day weekend, BSCF unveiled Trapped by the Mormons (1922), a ludicrous example of the anti-Mormon propaganda which flourished in Europe in the years after the Great War (when it was feared that war widows would be lured into polygamy by the Utah-based sect).

Watching the Dracula-like head Mormon stalk suburban Manchester in search of his prey – he mesmerises hapless young ladies with his dark, Novello-ish eyes – it’s hard to imagine that the picture was ever received as anything other than campy nonsense. Indeed, so elaborately absurd is its anti-Mormonism that it may well have proved self-defeating and inadvertently propelled certain viewers towards the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – on the basis that, with enemies as idiotic as these film-makers seem to have been, the organisation must have been doing something right.