Finally after 40 years I got to see what Kevin Brownlow was talking about in his groundbreaking tome on silent cinema THE PARADE’S GONE BY. French director Abel Gance IS a genius! His greatest work however is not his 1927 film NAPOLEON on which his fame today is based, it is his 1923 epic LA ROUE which is finally making it to the United States 85 years after it premiered in France. While NAPOLEON is the silent cinema’s greatest technical achievement, it lacks the deep and profound emotional resonance to be found in LA ROUE. This simple story of a train engineer, his son, and the orphan girl he raises as his daughter while harboring secret desires for her becomes more than just a slice of life drama in Gance’s hands. He raises it to the level of high art. In all my years of silent viewing I have never seen anything quite like this. The emotional impact of Victor Sjostrom, the visual quality of F. W. Murnau, the technical mastery of Fritz Lang, the epic quality of D.W. Griffith, it’s all here and there’s more. Originally premiered at 7 1/2 hours (spread over three nights) Gance himself reduced the film to 168 minutes for foreign distribution but that version never made it to America. This reconstruction which clocks in at 4 1/2 hours captures the scope and power of the original presentation. Despite the length I was engrossed from first to last thanks to Gance’s amazing skills as a director and the tremendous performances from the three leads especially Severin-Mars (as the father) who died shortly after the filming was completed.
Special credit should be given to Robert Israel for his absolutely brilliant full scale symphonic score which complements and enhances the action perfectly. This release along with his 1919 anti-war epic J’ACCUSE show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Gance was the silent era’s greatest director and that his influence was even greater than that of D.W. Griffith. Although he made films in the sound era, Gance was like a penguin out of water, still worthy of our attention but much more awkward. Sound turned him from an artist of the highest caliber into a mere film director whose later efforts, though not without interest, are devoid of the poetry that make his earlier movies something special. Now thanks to Flicker Alley and the team of restorers who worked on LA ROUE and J’ACCUSE it is possible to see his 2 major silent efforts outside of NAPOLEON and see what Kevin Brownlow was talking about all those years ago. NAPOLEON may astonish but LA ROUE devastates. If you love silent movies then you MUST see LA ROUE in order to experience what the art of silent film was/is capable of. It just doesn’t get better than this.
The Capsule Critic 