The Black Watch (Fox Film Corporation, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s film was The Black Watch, a 1929 production of the Fox Film Corporation, which I ran in a grey-label DVD taken from a print shown in France (most likely a telecast) since it had hard-encoded French subtitles, which I suspect annoyed my husband Charles more than it did me. It was labeled as “A John Ford Production” – Ford was actually the director, not the producer, though quite a few movies in the early days of sound credited their directors that way – and it was Ford’s first sound feature. It was based on a novel by one Talbot Mundy called King of the Khyber Rifles and was remade in 1953 under that title, and I suspect Fox green-lighted the production because Paramount was shooting a film of A. E. W. Mason’s novel The Four Feathers and Fox wanted something to compete – though the film as it stands is essentially The Four Feathers meets She. The film starts at the beginning of World War I, and the Black Watch Regiment from Scotland is preparing to set sail for France to fight on the Western Front. Only Captain Donald Gordon King (Victor McLaglen, a bit more restrained than usual for him – usually, especially when he worked for Ford, he got to do beaver imitations on the scenery) is called in by his commanding officer just before the regiment sets sail and told that he won’t be going to France with his buddies. Instead he’s being sent on a secret mission to India, to what are now called the Northwest Frontier Provinces on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan (which are as notoriously ungovernable now as they were when this movie is set).

His job is to neutralize the threat posed by a woman warlord named Yasmani (Myrna Loy, in one of those Asian-vamp roles she came to detest; I joked that she was going to wake up next to William Powell and say, “Nick, I had the craziest dream … ”), who’s amassed an army of Muslim fighters that are threatening British control over that part of the Raj. The film as it stands is a rah-rah celebration of British imperialism, though it would be possible to give it an alternative reading in which Yasmani is leading an army of freedom fighters trying to liberate her country from British imperialism, and there’s even a bit of dialogue comparing her to Joan of Arc – though we’re quickly told that, unlike Joan of Arc (or at least the popular perception of her), she’s not averse to the joys of the flesh and gets a kick out of seducing the British officers sent to take her down. She’s already given this treatment to King’s predecessor, McGregor (John Ford’s actor brother, Francis Ford), whom after she tired of him she had his eyes put out and turned him into a beast of burden along with the other British soldiers her men captured and consigned to turning her compound’s mill. (I wondered if Victor Halperin saw this film and copied the setup for one of the most chilling scenes in his 1932 horror classic, White Zombie.)

Yasmani’s second-in-command is a local named Rewa Ghunga (Roy D’Arcy), who predictably looks jealous of Captain King, and King’s own local sidekick is his old friend Muhammad Khan (Mitchell Lewis). Yasmani also has a local mullah in tow to quote the Koran to her troops and otherwise give them suitable inspiration. For several reels nothing much happens except that Captain King and Yasmani dally with each other; Yasmani tells him she’s really a white girl, a descendant of Alexander the Great (no kidding!), and she and King are destined to rule the area and start a new line of white kings for an independent India. Like us, he thinks this is hogwash, but he’s able to persuade Yasmani to announce to her followers that she wants to call off the holy war and declare peace – whereupon they turn on her and shoot her dead. Eventually they try to fight, but they don’t get anywhere because King has already discovered where the army was storing its munitions, and King and his local allies have blown them up.

The Black Watch is a weirdly schizoid movie, offering some of Ford’s trademarks – notably his obsession with military ritual and his love of old songs. Even in the silent days, Ford had wanted to reference sentimental songs in his movies even though the only way he could do so was to put their lyrics on a title card and hope whoever was providing the live musical accompaniment in the theatre caught the reference and supplied the tune. Here Ford goes hog-wild with his new toy and throws song after song after song into the film, from the bagpipes that herald the Black Watch Regiment in the opening scene to the sentimental ballads King’s brother Malcolm (David Rollilns) sings and the out-of-tune version of “Home, Sweet Home” with which two middle-aged ladies who look like they wandered in from a James Whale horror movie sing to the soldiers as they set off for France. There are more songs in this movie than in some that were actually marketed as musicals, and it seems altogether fitting and predictable that when the action cuts from Britain to the frontier town of Peshawar, the first thing we hear is a muezzin standing atop a minaret calling the Muslim faithful to prayer with a song.

I’d heard of The Black Watch before only in Alexander Walker’s book on the silent-to-sound transition, The Shattered Silents: How the Movies Learned to Talk, and he ridiculed the film. In particular he pointed out that moviegoers in 1929 thought the pronunciation of Myrna Loy’s character name, “Yasmani” (I had expected “Yaz-MAH-nee” but the actors actually say “Yaz-MEE-nee”) sounded like “Yes, Minnie.” The Black Watch has some marvelous compositions – many of them during the periodic cuts from India to France where the rest of the Black Watch Regiment is fighting on the Western Front, going into battle like they did in the old days – marching into battle standing straight up and with the bagpipers herald their arrival – and getting themselves picked off until they finally realize what sort of war they’re fighting and go to ground, diving into trenches for cover and crawling towards the enemy when they advance. There’s also a great shot that introduces Yasmani behind an elaborate decorative screen – one of the surprisingly Sternbergian shots Ford and his cinematographers (here it was Joseph August, and the print quality is surprisingly good and does full justice to his work) did in the 1930’s before he started shooting more simply and directly. And there’s a quite creative moment in the script by John Stone (continuity) and James Kevin McGuinness (dialogue) in which Yasmani uses a crystal ball (literally) to show Captain King what’s going on at the Western Front while he’s dallying with her in India: he sees his brother Malcolm (ya remember Malcolm?) get wounded in battle and, instead of making him more malleable and susceptible to her charms, the vision has the opposite effect on Captain King: like Parsifal in the second-act confrontation with Kundry in Wagner’s opera Parsifal, the scene reminds King of his actual duty and snaps him away from any interest in his would-be seducer.

But The Black Watch is also quite ponderous at times; despite the creativity of August’s compositions he doesn’t seem interested in moving the camera (as James Curtis documented in his biography of James Whale, there was actually a sort of cold war between directors and cinematographers in the early 1930’s over moving-camera shots; directors liked them and cinematographers didn’t because they were harder to execute and, in particular, to light), and some of the actors deliver their lines normally while others … engage in … the long … pauses between their cue lines and their own lines that plagued a lot of the early talkies. Myrna Loy is the worst offender in this regard (I wondered if it was her first talkie, too, but according to imdb.com she made at least two before this, Hardboiled Rose – for which the film survives but the Vitaphone sound discs are lost, except for the fourth reel – and the first version of The Desert Song). She speaks all her lines in a slow, monotonous drawl, and I wasn’t sure whether she was talking that way to make the character seem more sultry and seductive or she was simply being thrown by the unfamiliar task of having to act with her voice. And this was a Fox film, meaning that she and everyone else had the advantage of the sound being recorded on film rather than a separate disc – one would have thought that this would have made films with Fox’s Movietone system more flexible and naturalistic than Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, but anyone who’s seen Behind That Curtain (the deadly-dull 1929 Charlie Chan movie made at Fox by director Irving Cummings) would quickly be disabused of that notion. The Black Watch is a much better movie than Alexander Walker had led me to believe, and it’s obvious from the size and complexity of the sets that Fox gave Ford a pretty decent budget on it. But it’s also a movie stuck in a time warp, with its makers still caught up in the uncertainties of the transition and not always aware of the best way to use sound in a movie – as I’ve pointed out about other early talkies, once the movies learned to talk it took a while for filmmakers to realize when they should make them shut up again!