I get comparisons here to "Citizen Kane" (1941), claims of "the greatest film ever" aside. Like that production, "Shooting Stars" was the debut of an acclaimed prodigy who brought the best techniques of the age (in this case, sparse intertitles, German lighting, Soviet montage and Hollywood glamour, basically) to bear within a controversially reflexive narrative construction. There's also deeper parallels between the two films if we dive deeper into the scandalous history of silent cinema.
As well known and often over-emphasized, the main basis for the character of Charles Foster Kane was yellow journalism media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Much muckraking was made of Hollywood in the 1920s and, perhaps, the most famous example was Hearst's newspapers libelously accusing slapstick comedian Fatty Arbuckle of rape and murder in the death of Virginia Rappe. It was this sort of dubious narrative construction, also including Hearst inventing the colonialist Spanish-American War, that underlies the multiple, non-linear perspectives of "Citizen Kane." If we look at another Hollywood rumor from the era, coincidentally also involving Hearst and a slapstick comedian, we might get an idea of where "Shooting Stars" is coming from.
Although equally unfounded, scurrilous hearsay has persisted, including in the movie "The Cat's Meow" (2001), regarding the death of Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince, one of the principal architects of the studio system, by the way, in which Hearst and his mistress, actress Marion Davies, worked. All of whom were on Hearst's yacht when Ince, reportedly and officially, became ill and died shortly thereafter. As an assuredly false and seemingly karmic narrative out of Hearst's control would have it, though, Hearst killed Ince when he missed his target of another passenger on the yacht and the man who supposedly was having an affair with Davies, Charlie Chaplin.
One last piece of Hollywood trivia fit for this puzzle is that the auteur behind "Shooting Stars," Anthony Asquith, stayed for three months in Hollywood as a guest of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and visited other stars, including Chaplin on the set of "The Circus" (1928), before setting out to make films in Britain.
What's my point? Asquith basically made a film about Charlie and Mary making a cuckold out of Doug. And, there's also Chekhov's gun, or at least bullet, to be accounted for in the yacht that is the film studio of this reflexively ravishing late-silent masterpiece. Making a dramatic (as opposed to comedies, as there were lots of those) movie about the business of making movies was a novel enough concept at the time to be considered controversial, if even daring. Talk about shooting for the stars when Asquith makes his debut by centering it around thinly veiled adulterous caricatures of Hollywood's three biggest stars. And, that's even before getting into the disillusioning pulling back of the curtain on filmmaking here. It's little wonder, then, that as reprinted in Tom Ryall's biography of Asquith, that some contemporary reviewers were outraged:
From "Kine Weekly," "The result appears to be an attempt to poke fun at production (at a time when we all trying to take it very seriously), and to present to our public the very aspect of our business which we desire should remain a mystery."
And, as more succinctly put by "Variety," "a disgrace to the film industry of any country."
Now, veteran director A. V. Bramble is the one who received screen credit as director, but since its release, it's generally considered to have been Asquith's picture, as he also wrote the scenario, with Bramble having served in some supervisory or technical capacity with the first-time director. Whether that's a fair or not assumption, Bramble's career seems largely unknown today--some of which is just lost, as with most silent films, such as his "Wuthering Heights" (1920) adaptation, and reportedly he left the studio after this film to continue to make others elsewhere that today also go largely ignored. Asquith, on the other hand, besides having an aristocratic and educated pedigree, the son of a prime minister, had a long and celebrated career, while his silent films have received renewed attention in recent years. His subsequent and solely-credited "A Cottage on Dartmoor" (1929), which features a talkie film within the silent film, is an especially outstanding reflexive follow-up to "Shooting Stars." The film-within-the-film in that one is "My Woman;" here, it's "My Man," and both films base their deconstruction around a simple love triangle.
Throughout, the debts here to European art cinema are readily apparent. I also especially like the mirror and window motifs--the neon movie sign outside one window and cutting between a tryst and a film screening are especially great. Ryall rightly points out, especially in the scenes of production accidents, the visual quotations of canonical masterpieces such as the impressionistic cutting of "Battleship Potemkin" and the unchained camera of "Variety" (both 1925). These allusions start with the opening revelatory sequence that begins like a romantic Western before the camera pulls back to divulge that it's one of the films-within-the-film in production in a studio set. Before we learn the cowboy is riding a toy horse pulled by crewmen and the camera smoothly tracks over the artifice of the rest of the set, the scene involves star Mae Feather (Annette Benson as perfect parody of "America's Sweetheart," curls an' all) throwing a tantrum over kissing a bird, which immediately reminds one of Lillian Gish in "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) or some such absurd depiction of femininity in a D. W. Griffith film.
Funny enough, there's an entire thread entitled "Bird Kissing. It's not just for Lillian Gish" on the Nitrateville message boards, where it's determined that Pickford both said, on her time working with Griffith, "I wasn't one of his simpering bird-kissing actresses," and kissed birds herself, both for Griffith and in her own production, "Stella Maris" (1918). Regardless, the last-minute-rescue sequence of "My Man" viewed at a movie theatre adds to the references to that fourth founding member of United Artists, Griffith.
Besides Mae's marriage to her co-star resembling the real-life, so-called "Pickfair" (oh, what, did you really think they invented portmanteaus for the likes of "Brangelina?") and Donald Calthrop giving a good impression of a second-rate Chaplin cutting between this Pickfair, "Shooting Stars" does rather well to demonstrate not only how scandalous silent cinema could be, but how dangerous were its productions. Forget shotguns, Harold Lloyd blew off part of his hand because what he thought was a prop was an actual bomb. Cecil B. DeMille intentionally had live ammunition fired during filming only for the inevitable mistake in switching back to blanks resulting in a fatal shooting to the head. The scandal of star Wallace Reid's drug-induced death is because he got hooked on morphine to dull the pain from an injury on set. Ditto others. Another actress burned to death in her inflammable costume. They literally drowned extras in "Noah's Ark" (1928). And, the list goes on.
The irony is that Asquith claimed a great deal of respect for his Hollywood friends and even genre pictures such as Westerns. Some of the reflexive themes in his work and the subtle direction of actors are especially striking in their debt to Chaplin, particularly, as with all dramatic satires, "A Woman of Paris" (1923). That's where Ernst Lubitsch learned about constructing scenes around looks, too. But, there's no holding back in "Shooting Stars." It's enough to make all but the best of the numerous versions of "A Star Is Born" (the best is obviously the 1954 film, by the way) look starry-eyed. As fantastic as the opening sequence is here, the ending may be even more apt, alone on a church set. Vapid movie fans and press aren't spared, either. The entirety is a brilliant blend of tones and genres, foreshadowing and style that not only reveals one layer of the film-within-film fantasy of making and watching movies, but layers of artifice beyond that in the persona that the stars present to the public and in their private lives. These actors break character only to fall into another and wrap for the day only to walk onto another set offstage.
