Out with the Old, in the with the New Year

Mildred and Harold Lloyd ring in the New Year circa 1930

2013 was a year of fitrs and starts with this blog.  I'm usually lousy at resolutions.  I will continue to watch films in 2014 and aim to post about them, like them or not.  Hopefully my commentary will be interesting, insightful and fun.  If not, forgive me. 

For those who have stuck by this blog and checked it out when I have posted, I thank you.  I wish all my online, behind the screen friends and happy and healthy 2014. 

See you in 2014 and make sure you watch lots of old classic movies, you will be happy you did!

Charles Chaplin Day - January 11, 2014

2014 marks the centenary of Charlie Chaplin's start in the filmaking business.  To kick things off, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is spending January 11, 2014 screening some Chaplin films to celebrate.  It's at the Castro and you can buy a pass for the day here.

Here's the program:

January 11, 2014 at 1:00 PM
Accompanied by Jon Mirsalis on piano

Three shorts Chaplin made at the Mutual Film Corporation his happpiest and most creative period.   The Vagabond (1916, with Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell) Charlie is a musician who rescues a girl from a band of gypsies.
The Cure (1917, with Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell, Henry Bergman) An inebriated Charlie checks into a sanitarium to take the cure, but brings a cabinet of liquor with him.
Easy Street (1917, with Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell) Chaplin blends comedy and social commentary in this film that sees his character go from tramp to police constable.

January 11, 2014 at 4:00 PM
Accompanied by San Francisco Chamber Orchestra with Timothy Brock conducting Chaplin’s score
The Kid
Cast Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Jackie Coogan, Carl Miller Written by Charles Chaplin
Chaplin’s Little Tramp becomes a surrogate father to an abandoned child—the wonderful child actor Jackie Coogan—in this eloquent marriage of comedy and sentiment. Probably his most personal film—Chaplin himself was placed in a home for destitute children at age seven—The Kid is considered by many to be his most perfect. Plus: We celebrate the centennial of Chaplin’s Little Tramp character with Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) The first appearance of Chaplin’s Tramp character set the stage for Charlie’s ascendency as a star! And Kid Auto Races is the very funniest of the Keystone films! Approximately 70 minutes total
The films will be introduced by Jeffrey Vance.

Preceding The Kid, there will be Charlie Chaplin Look-Alike contest. Come dressed as the Little Tramp and win a prize!
January 11, 2014 at 7:30 PM
Accompanied by San Francisco Chamber Orchestra with Timothy Brock conducting Chaplin’s score.
The Gold Rush 1925
Cast Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Henry Bergman, Malcolm Waite, Georgia Hale Written by Charles Chaplin
Inspired by images of the 1896 Klondike gold rush and the Donner Party disaster of 1846 (in which snowbound immigrants resorted to eating their shoes—and their dead companions—to survive), Chaplin manages to turn stories of cold, hunger, and loneliness into a sublime comedy. The Little Tramp becomes a prospector who sets out for the Klondike to strike it rich, battling starvation, bears, and other prospectors along the way. The Gold Rush contains some of the most iconic images in cinema, including the famous scene in which Charlie makes a gourmet feast of his boot! Georgia Hale plays the beautiful dance hall entertainer who steals Charlie’s heart.
Approximately 80 minutes
The film will be introduced by Jeffrey Vance.

I'll be there, hope you will be too!

Parker/Totter/O'Toole and Fontaine - The Passing of the Old Guard

This past week was a particularly harsh one for film buffs with the passing of Eleanor Parker, Audrey Totter, Peter O’Toole and Joan Fontaine. 

Eleanor Parker’s career is one I have not followed closely.  Her coolness on screen did not appeal to me, but I am told by several friends there are some good performances I really should seek out.  I always liked her as the Baroness in The Sound of Musicif for no other reason she was the counterpoint to the spunky sweetness of Julie Andrews.  I have a real fondness for her in Between Two Worlds which I find her to be very effective.  She also positively steals Scaramouche, MGM’s overblown Technicolor swashbuckler.  How Mel Ferrer and Stewart Grainger could have preferred Janet Leigh over Parker is beyond me.  Parker is utterly gorgeous in glorious Technicolor and clearly she relished the comedic aspects of the film.  I am told I must see Caged for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.  She loses points for the 1951 film Valentino, for obvious reasons.

Audrey Totter was noted mostly for nourish, B films.  I loved her in Lady in the Lake and The Set Up.  She remains a favorite simply for her role in one of my favorite of all films, The Unsuspected.  Everything you need to see about Totter on film can be seen in the below clip from The Unsuspected, it’s glorious as she was.  She married and retired early for what I presume was a happy life contrary to the tough dames she played on screen. 

 

Peter O’Toole was the last of the hell-raising, hard-drinking, hard-partying actors from his generation that included Richard Burton, Richard Harris and the delicious Oliver Reed.  His incredibly bright blue eyes shining against the baked desert in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia will remain an iconic image on film.  Even in dreck, I do not think he gave a bad performance, but once wonders with all the abuse it is a wonder he survived to 81.  He was much nominated by the Academy eight times and never won, excepting an Honorary Award in 2006.  A shame, that. 

Finally this weekend, on the same day as O’Toole, patrician Joan Fontaine also left at the age of 96.  It took me a long time to warm to Fontaine, I have to admit.  I was early on a fan of her sister Olivia de Havilland and found the coolness (much like Parker) a bit off putting.  That said, I have since warmed to her in many films, including Rebecca, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Jane Eyre (where I feel you can really see the underlying fire in Jane despite the reserved, guarded exterior), Tessa in The Constant Nymph and Born to be Bad (delightfully wicked, manipulative as Cristobel).  Pointing you to the Self-Styled Siren, her tribute to Fontaine is as elegant as Fontaine appeared to be.  I'd be lying if I did not think sister Olivia was waiting for Joan to die first so she could publish her long in progress autobiography.

My roommate asked me, how can you feel sad for the passing of someone who was 96 (or 81 for that matter) and someone you never knew?  I do not feel the keen loss that I felt when Cary Grant or Fred Astaire passed away, I can tell you where I was when I saw the news.  To me, this is more the passing of the old guard, the ever thinning ranks of a link to the old Hollywood.  I’ve been a film buff from an early age, the golden days before cable when local stations ran classic films constantly on rotation.  Where I cut my teeth, so to speak as an amateur film historian. 

In my lifetime, so many of the film stars I loved were still active, still working.  I’ve watched in my own time, perhaps to a lesser historically important degree than that of the WWI buffs, who saw the passing of the last witness to that awful spectacle a few years ago.  With so few real old greats remaining to bear witness to a time and people we will never see the like of again, I feel sad.  Hollywood, the film business has changed.  With the internet, twitter and the instant news cycle and without the dream factories, it also makes me sad that, with few exceptions, we will not see the likes of so many of these actors again. 

For better or worse, I still mourn the studio system that created, nurtured and protected them.  I miss the mystery, the mystique of an actor or star I admire.  With each that leaves us in due time, it is like the passing of an old friend.  Happily, each will live on, to be rediscovered anew by future generations so long as cinema endures in some fashion.  And as they pass, it also gives me the opportunity to revisit old favorites and find new ones thanks to suggestions from friends.  This is a sad time for their families, but for us who only knew them as flickering images on screen, it’s a way to say thank you for the delightful legacy left behind and treasure the art of cinema which we love. 

All in all, a very sad weekend for the Old Guard Hollywood and TCM needs to do a serious revision on their end the year clip reel.

On the Bedside Table - A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True by Victoria Wilson

I found myself wondering just how much life Barbara Stanwyck lived up to 1940 to have the first volume of a biography encompass so many pages.  In reading Victoria Wilson's first volume on the life of cinema great Barbara Stanwyck, I figured out why.  You not only get Stanwyck's life, but the History of the World Part I as well.  Lots of bang for your buck.

Let me say this, Ms. Wilson is an excellent writer.  It is my understanding she is also an editor of some renown and this might be the crux of the problem with this book.  It needed to be edited, it needed a machete.  I found myself getting lost in the book, there is so much context placing, so much detail of people who touched Stanwyck's life that you lose the subject at hand.  Then there are the plot rehashes of the films, hers, Frank Fay's and Robert Taylor's.  All of this should have been cut to the bone.  Unlike reading Gary Giddins' Bing Crosby: Pocketful of Dreams - The Early Years, reading True Steel I am *not* left wanting, panting, waiting for the second volume as I have been (and am) with the Crosby book.  I'm afraid of reliving the History of the World Part II along with the remaining 42 years of Stawyck's life in the next volume. 

Stanwyck was famously private and I think she really did succeed in keeping a good deal of her life private as she wished.  Wilson's research is impeccable, her writing is mostly engaging.  But I can't help feeling exhausted in reading it.  I am sure this was a labor of love, a volume of this heft had to have been.  But there is no warmth in it.

Stanwyck will always remain a bit of an enigma.  I think the one tiny thing that shows me a lot of what I need to see or know about Stanwyck can be seen in this video clip here. 

You can order the book here in kindle (which I did much easier to handle such a tome) as well as a true brick of a book.

Others might find this more engaging than I do, I adore Stanwyck and do not feel she was so much ill-served (she wasn't) but she was lost in the details.  ymmv.

CMBA Film Passion 101 Blogathon: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

Rudolph Valentino portrait by Nelson Evans as Julio

Accepted cinema history tells us that Rudolph Valentino’s star-making film was the 1921 blockbuster The Sheik.  While this is, in part, arguably true, the real landmark was a small film entitled The Eyes of Youth in which Valentino played a paid correspondent to help Milton Sills win a divorce from poor Clara Kimball Young.  This small landmark performance put Rudolph Valentino under the gaze of the powerful scenarist June Mathis who was in the process of writing the gigantic film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  It was Mathis who fought hard and pushed for Valentino to win the coveted part of Julio Desnoyers. 

My first exposure to Valentino was in another film, also based on a novel by Spanish author Vincente Blasco-Ibanez, Blood and Sand.  It was, however, my first viewing of the 1921 epic that really exposed me to Valentino’s terrific talent and ability as an actor of range.  A range far beyond the display of The Sheikwhich is commonly referred to as the star-making film.

Ibanez’ sprawling novel tells the tale of two branches of a family, split by cultural differences and values and, ultimately, by World War I.  Mathis expertly culled the massive tale down to a tightly told story that is as gripping today as it had to have been in late 1920 when the film was first released.

Valentino’s appearance comes relatively early in the film, dressed in his gaucho attire and with his doting grandfather (played by Pomeroy Cameron) in the seedy Boca district where Julio revels and dances the tango.  If ever there were a moment on screen that a star was truly born, the famed “Tango Sequence” is it for Valentino.  Once he has eyeballed Beatrice Domiguez on the dance floor with her lesser partner, it’s easy to see he absolutely will take what he wants and what that is, is her.  Once he has disposed of the pasty opponent, he slinks into the dance like a panther taking her with him.  As they circle the floor, the various miscreants and patrons nod and applaud their approval.  The dance progresses and ends with a slow, lingering kiss in profile.  It is said the women in the audience grew faint, in 2013, you can still have a great understanding why.  It is not only a star-making moment, it’s a terrific piece of filmmaking.

 

While I had an appreciation for Valentino long before I saw this film, I’d seen a few silent films (often on my bedroom wall in super 8 in the pre VHS and DVD days).  But seeing this film spoke to me of the power of silent film.  The epic story distilled down to the stories of the two families and, in particular, the story arc of Julio, was quite simply engrossing story telling.  This film was made at the mid-point of the silent era.  Itself only five years gone from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and technically a much more complex film.  It could have been 20 years ahead with the progress made in the art of telling the story.  Similarly, if you look at F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise of 1927, the leaps in technology and the changes in the visual story arc from Four Horsemen and Sunrise, they’re like night and day.  Sadly, Sunrise was very nearly the mark of the end of the silent era with the synchronized soundtrack.  What a film to exit on, however.

For this viewer, however, even without Valentino, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a film that still stands the true test of time.  It helped inspire a passion for early cinema and it is a film that still holds up with repeated viewings.  To me that is the key point, if you find a silent film you love, it will inspire you to seek out more of them.  Tragically, the Photoplay Productions restoration of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is not commercially available, at least not yet.  It is shown in semi-regular rotation on Turner Classic Movies.  Happily, if you have an interest in Valentino, loads of his films are available on DVD.

 

Six-Sheet poster from the original release

That said, lest you think I obsess too much over Valentino, here are ten silent films (most on DVD) that I think, in my humble opinion, will bring you pleasure and suck you into the vortex of early film. You won’t regret it.

In no particular order:
Stella Maris; Tol’able David; Sunrise; The Thief of Bagdad; The Son of the Sheik (I HAD to put a Valentino in there), The Wind (run on TCM); The Patsy; The Student Price of Old Heidelberg (run on TCM); Our Hospitality; and Ben-Hur (available as an extra on the later DeMille Ten Commandments set).

This post of part of the Classic Movie Blog Association's Film Passion 101 Blogathon. Click here for the full blogathon schedule and for links to other members' posts.

2014 Rudolph Valentino Calendar & 2014 Film Preservation Calendar

Just in time for the holidays!

 

Shamelessly promoting the annual Valentino Calendar here!  13 rare photos of Rudolph Valentino to brighten your 2014.  8x10 spiral bound a perfect gift for the Valentino fan in your life.  A full preview of the calendar and available for sale at $13.99 by clicking the button below.

 

If you care anything about film preservation, I urge you to send off for a copy of the annual Silent Movies Calendar produced by Rodney Sauer of the Mont-Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.  The proceeds from the calendar are used to benefit film preservation and it's a really worth cause.  The 2014 edition is the BEST one yet with fabulous hats!  You can order a copy here.