Film-Cinema-Movies: Silent Movies

THE ADVENTURER.  1917.  (1,845ft.) approx. 17 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Charlie Chaplin.  Comedy.  Directed by Chaplin.  Chaplin is an escaped prisoner who rescues a  beautiful  and her mother from drowning.  He also rescues the blustery, bullying beau courting the girl who makes every effort to get the little hero out of his way especially after finding out that he’s and escaped con.  This 16mm print comes with added sound effects for some of the physical gags [Chaplin’s favorite matronly foil, Edna Purviance, whinnies like a horse when something]ng is dropped down her dress for example].  Chaplin was just beginning to fully develop his distinct persona with films like The Adventurer.  Cast includes:  Edna Purviance, Henry Bergman, Marta Golden, Albert Austin, Frank J. Coleman, James T. Kelley, Phyllis Allen, May White, Kono, John Rand, Janet Miller Sully, and Monta Bell.  Notes:  Story and screenplay by Chaplin.  Photographed by Roland Totheroh.  Also available in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume VI Chaplin at Mutual Studios (Pt. III)  on DVD.

The Age of Innocence. Directed by Martin Scorcese directs this adaptation of Edith Wharton’s great novel in a grand, classical style.  His camera moves as sinuously as Visconti’s does in his romantic epics.  The sets are magnificent, rich with the expensive clutter of wealth and privilege and the cast is superior.  Daniel Day Lewis plays Newland Archer as a man forced to repress his strongest emotions.  He is a perfect gentleman in a most Victorian sense.   Michelle Pfeiffer as Ellen Olenska gives one of her best and more underrated performances.  Winona Ryder plays May Welland as a beguilingly determined waif.  Richard E. Grant as Larry Leffetts, Alec McCowen as Sillerton Jackson, Geraldine Chaplin as Mrs. Welland, Mary Beth Hurt as Regina Beaufort, Stuart Wilson as Julius Beaufort, Miriam Margolyes as Mrs. Mingott, Sian Phillips as Mrs. Archer, Carolyn Farina as Janey Archer, Michael Gough as Henry van der Luyden, Alexis Smith as Louisa van der Luyden, Jonathan Pryce as Riviere, and Robert Sean Leonard as Ted Archer round out a first rate supporting cast.  Notes:  Screenplay by Jay Cocks and Martin Scorcese based on the novel by Edith Wharton.  Photography by Michael Ballhaus.  Music by Elmer Bernstein.  Academy Award nominations include best supporting actor (Ryder), art direction, original score, costume design and screenplay adaptation.  Thanks  to the film archives of Turner Classic Movies, we can also view an earlier version of The Age of Innocence from 1934 produced by RKO.  Irene Dunne plays Countess Olenska in a stately if slightly static fashion, but then the film is a rather standard and cautious production of great literature.  John Boles is Newland Archer, Lionel Atwill is Julius Beaufort, Helen Westley is Granny Mingott, Laura Hope Crews is Augusta Welland, and Julie Haydon is May Welland.    Margaret Ayer Barnes based this earlier movie version on Wharton’s novel and a play adaptation with the screenplay by Sarah Y Mason and Victor Heerman.  Music by Max Steiner.  Cinematography by James Van Trees.

 

AELITA, QUEEN OF MARS.  Silent.  1924.  113 minutes.  Soviet Union.  Science Fiction.  Directed Yakov Protazanov.  Young researchers in a Soviet scientific lab think they have picked up a transmission from outer-space.  Is it a message from Mars or a hoax?  One of the young man begins to have romanticized day dreams about Mars and imagines a beautiful queen of the planet, Aelita, who seems to be beckoning him to come to her rescue.  This charming, handsomely designed and photographed film is set against the back drop of the crowded days early in the Soviet state’s history.  The plot revolves around the romance of the hero and heroine threatened by a crude interloper; depictions of official corruption and greed; and of course the imaginative sequences of similar things happening on Mars.  What is most striking about the film, of course, will be its striking pictorial, narrative, and scenic resemblance to Fritz Lang’s fantastic masterpiece Metropolis.  With:  Yulia Solntseva, Valentina Kuinzhi, Nikolai Batalov, and Igor Illiksy. Notes:  Script by Fyoror Otsep and Alexei Faiko from the novel by Alexei Tolstoy.  Photographed by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky and E. Schoneman.

 

ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE.  1915.  65 minutes.  Silent.  Crime Melodrama.  Directed by Maurice Tourneur.  One of the earliest gangster films by a major filmmaker, this is the simple story of a bad guy who comes clean.  Jimmy Valentine is a smooth operator, a safecracker who’s known as a genteel kind of gang leader.  When a job goes bad, Jimmy is sing to Sing Sing.  He is released from jail after a heroic deed and the daughter (who was the victim he rescued from a masher) of the Lt. Governor falls in love with him.  Once released, Jimmy gets a job at a bank and becomes a changed man.  He influences his ex-mates to do the same.  A persistent cop, who wants to nail Jimmy for a previous heist, tries everything he can to put him back in jail.  It all ends well.  The film is a handsomely photographed, mature piece of cinema.  It moves gracefully and Tourneur (whose son Jacques would later direct the original Cat People, Berlin Express and the ’50s adventure The Flame and the Arrow) has a smooth, cool style.  With:  Robert Warwick as Lee Randall – Alias Jimmy Valentine, Robert Cummings as Doyle a detective, Ruth Shepley as Rose Fay, John Hines as Red, Alec B. Francis as Bill Avery, Fred Truesdale as Lt. Governor Fay.  Notes:  Based on the play of the same name by Paul Armstrong.  Set design by Ben Carre.

 

ALRAUNE.  1928.  108 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  German Cinema.  Science Fiction Melodrama.  Romantic Melodrama.  Directed by Henrik Galeen.  Brigitte Helm is Alraune, Ivan Petrovich is Neffe, and Paul Wegener is Prof. Jakob ten Briniken in this tale of scientific and moral cruelty.  Ten Briniken is a famous scientist who delves into the dark secrets of mandrake root for gain and the pure perverse pleasure of some God-like gesture.  He uses the magical, mystical source to create a perfect woman, one who will manipulate men with amoral abandon.  His creation, named Alraune, grows into a great seductive beauty with no known past.  But, as fate would have it, ten Briniken  despite everything, finds himself, fascinated by his Galatea.  Alraune herself, yearns for the depths of real human emotions and falls in love with the man who saves her from the distorted passions of her “creator.”  A fascinating film from the high period of German silent cinema.  With:  Valeska Gert, Georg John, John Loder, Mia Pankau, Louis Ralph, and Hans Trautner.  Notes:  Screenplay by Henrik Galeen from the novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers.  Cinematography by Franz Planer.  Original music by Willy Schmidt-Gentner.

 

AMARILLY OF CLOTHES-LINE ALLEY.  1918.  5 reels [70 minutes].  Silent Cinema.  Romantic Melodrama.  Mary Pickford.  Frances Marion.  Novel Into Film.  Directed by Marshall Neilan.  Mary Pickford plays the spunky cigarette girl Amarilly Jenkins in this story of the romance between a girl from ‘clothes-line-alley’ a working class part of San Francisco and the handsome Gordon Phillips, scion of a wealthy family.  When Amarilly rescues Phillips from an alley, after a brawl in the restaurant the girl works in, he invites her to come work for his proud society aunt and finds himself falling in love with the girl.  Amarilly, whose, bar tending beau, thinking she’s fallen for the rich guy, has split with her and she sadly returns his engagement ring.  The charming girl’s influence on the young man alarms his aunt who decides to invite all of Amarilly’s family to a society social, knowing that the mixing of the ‘haves’ and have nots, as intended and expected,  would fail.  Amarilly, proud of who and what she and her family are, returns to the alley to reunite with her beau.  Lovely romantic comedy, short and sweet.  Neilan does another excellent job of direction.  The best moments in the film involve the playful mockery Amarilly and her family make of the pretensions of the high society matrons.  In the end, Amarilly rejects Phillips with the neat aphorism –  “I don’t know if you really mix ice cream and . . . pickles.”  With:  William Scott as Terry McGowen, Norman Kerry as Gordon Phillips, Ida Waterman as Mrs. Stuyvesant Phillips, Margaret Landis as Colette King, Kate Price as Mrs. Jenkins, Tom Wilson as Boscoe McCarty, Fred Goodwins as Johnny Walker, and Herbert Standing as Father Riordan.  Notes:  Screenplay by Frances Marion from the novel by Belle K. Maniates.  Produced by Adolph Zukor,  Cinematography by Walter Stradling.  Also included on this video is a recently restored and re-discovered short film by Thomas Ince, The Dream.  1911.  Silent.  5 minutes.  The story is of a young newly wed couples mutual dream.  He dreams that he is a spendthrift who enjoys drink too much, he dreams that she is a fast and loose lady who drives him to suicide.  Each wakes when the dream goes that last step and revives their love.  Notes:  Directed by Thomas Ince and George Loane Tucker.  Also included is a preview of a documentary on the life and films of Mary Pickford written by Rita Mae Brown and hosted and narrated by Whoopi Goldberg.  With:  Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., Leonard Maltin, Jean Firstenberg [Director, American Film Institute], Janet Leigh.

 

AMERICA.  1924.  141 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  D. W. Griffith.  Historical Drama.  American Revolutionary Drama.  Directed by D. W. Griffith.  This late epic by D. W. Griffith is the master sentimentalist’s re-invention of the American Revolution.  Nathan Holden, an independent and ambitious young man from New England is sent by Boston leaders of the pending rebellion to offer the leadership of the American army to George Washington.  The gallant Holden travels to Virginia with his missive where he meets and befriends the beautiful daughter of the aristocratic Montagues.  Friction arises when Sir Ashley Montague, a friend of Washington’s (though a loyalist) thinks the young man has behaved badly.  Time passes and the Montagues find themselves moving from royalist camp to royalist camp until they fall into the hands of the degenerate renegade ‘royalist’ Capt. Walter Butler.  Only the heroic efforts of Holden and other true patriots saves them.  America is an entertaining historical epic filled with both the grace notes found in the best of Griffith’s  works but also with the historical liberties he so gladly took to make a point.  Good and evil, as usual in a Griffith story, were very black and white and he obviously identified with the elegantly aristocratic Montague family.  With:  Lionel Barrymore as Captain Walter Butler, Neil Hamilton as Nathan Holden, Charles Bennett as William Pitt, Carol Dempster as Miss Nancy Montague, Louis Wolheim as Captain Hare, Arthur Dewey as George Washington, Arthur Donaldson as King George III, Emil Hoch as Lord North, Sydney Deane as Sir Ashley Montague, John Dunton as John Hancock, Frank Walsh as Thomas Jefferson, W. Rising as Edmund Burke, Frank McGlynn, Sr. As Patrick Henry.  Notes:  W. W. Jones as General Gage, Hugh Baird as Major Pitcairn.  Notes:  Cinematography by G. W. Bitzer, Marcel Le Picard, Hendrik Sartov, Harold S. Sintzenich.  Musical arrangement by Joseph Carl Breil.

Another Part of the Forest. Directed by Michael Gordon. Screenplay by Vladimir Pozner adapted from the play and film by Hellman. Frederic March, Florence Eldridge, Dan Duryea, Edmond O’Brien, and Ann Blythe ate the Hubbard family in this fascinating prequel to The Little Foxes. March is the patriarch of the family uses his wealth, power and sense of his presume superiority to his family his town, his employees. Each of his children has adapted the part of their father’s willfulness and deceit that works best for them. Mrs. Hubbard learns that she has learned to hate each and everyone of them. Thoroughly convincing and entertaining social drama.

 

ANTOSHA RUINED BY A CORSET.  1916. “. . . is one of the 24 “Antosha” shorts made by the Czech-born comedian Anton Fertner for the Lucifer company between 1915-18.  As David Robinson has noted, these made him the most popular Russian comic, with title sin the series like Antosha Sherlock Holmes, Antosha Speculator, Antosha and the Black Hand — many of them topical, others satirical and, like the one seen here, risqué.  Robinson traces the influence of French comedy, which would have helped form Russian taste for over a decade.”  Notes:  Directed and written by Eduart Puchalskii.  With:  Anton Fertner as the fun loving man-about-town, Antosha.  The film is typical of the comedy genre of early silent films with lots of physical gags and visual puns.

 

THE ART OF BUSTER KEATON.  Kino On Video has produced for distribution on video an incredible collection of the films of the great silent clown, Buster Keaton.  The series, three volumes of collected titles,  includes all of his full length features and many of the best shorter works.  The titles included:

 

• The Saphead.  1920.  93 minutes / 7 reels.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Herbert Blaché.  Buster Keaton is Bertie “The Lamb” Van Alstyne, good natured, slightly spoiled and in love.  No matter what he does, Bertie seems to sail smoothly through life until he is falsely framed of an illicit love affair by his devious, ambitious brother-in-law.  This comedy, a great stage success for Douglas Fairbanks, was Keaton’s first major full-length feature.  It’s a charming film though Buster’s stoic persona doesn’t quite match this particular type as well as Douglas [though his later variations on the type would be very fine indeed] who had perfected this kind of naïve sophisticate before he became the star of adventure films in the ‘20s.  Keaton is much more in his element when the role requires him to defy the laws of nature and gravity with his physical comedy.  With:  William H. Crane as Nicholas Van Alstyne, Irving Cummings Sr. As Mark Turner, Carol Holloway as Rose Turner, Beulah booker as Agnes Gates, Edward Alexander as Watson Flint, Jeffrey Williams as Hutchins, Edward Jobson as Rev. Murray Hilton, Jack Livingston as Dr. George Wainright, Helen Holte as Henrietta Reynolds and Odette Taylor as Mrs. Cornelia Opdyke.  Notes:  Written by June Mathis from the play by Bronson Howard and the novel by Victor Mapes and Winchell Smith.  Cinematography by Harold Wenstrom.
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• The High Sign.  1921.  21 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline.  Quite by accident, Buster falls in with a group of murdering thugs and kidnappers known as the Blinking Buzzards.  Typically funny Keaton short where the physicals gags pile up on one another in rapid fire fashion.  Al St. John is another of those huge comic foils that are perfect counterpoint to the short but athletic Keaton.  There are some wonderful moments when the bad guys give chase to the hero through the mansion belonging the heroine’s father.  With:  Buster Keaton, Bertine Burkett Zane and Al St. John.  Notes:  Written by Cline and Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
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• One Week.  1921.  19 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline.  Buster and his new bride proudly set about business of building their dream house – a prefab job with wacky instructions.  The couple weather their own incompetence and the elements in getting the house in order.  By the end of the week, they have suffered every kind of accident and disaster possible trying to build and live in their ‘cozy’ little cottage.  Very funny short.  With:  Buster Keaton, Sybil Seely and Joe Roberts.  Notes:  Written by Keaton and Cline.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Edited by Keaton.  Produced by Joseph Schenck.

 

Volume I [Tape No. 2].

 

• The Three Ages.  1923.  65 minutes. / 6 reels.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  <V340>. Directed by Eddie Cline and Keaton.  Man and woman through the ages as seen through the eyes of Buster Keaton.  The film is Keaton’s first feature and is a irreverent satire of D.W. Griffith’s misguided masterpiece Intolerance.  In Keaton’s film, the hero tries to win the hand of the girl in different epochs of man — during the Roman Empire; in the age of Cave men, and in a the roaring ’20s.  A happy ending is had by film’s end in each segment.  A very auspicious beginning in full length features for the “great stone face.”  With:  Wallace Beery, Margaret Leahy, Joe Roberts, Lillian Lawrence, and Horace Morgan. Notes:  Screenplay by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph Mitchell.  Photographed by William McGann and Elgin Lessley.
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• The Goat.  1921.  23 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Mal St. Clair and Buster Keaton.  Buster is mistaken for a killer called Dead Shot Dan is chased all over town by the Chief of police.  When he meets his girl friend, she takes him home for dinner with the folks.  Guess who her dad is.  As usual, this Keaton effort is filled with marvelous examples of his physical prowess.  Joe Roberts (as the police chief], is an actor often used in Keaton’s pictures, is a huge man and a wonderful foil and counterpoint to the lithe, athletic Keaton.  They pair off very well together.  With:   Virginia Fox as the Chief’s daughter, Malcolm St. Clair as Dead Shot Dan, Edward F. Cline, and Jean C. Havez.  Notes:  Written by Keaton and St. Clair.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
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• My Wife’s Relations.  1922.  25 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Eddie Cline and Buster Keaton.  In this film, Buster is an amiable young man living in the ethnically mixed ghetto of a big city, who, when he tries to escape a little accident with a postman literally runs into trouble with a plumb matron at a street corner.  The lady takes him off to justice of the peace who, speaking only Polish, thinks the unlikely couple wants to marry.  Buster finds himself bullied by his spouse’s collection of brothers and her pa.  Typical Keaton entertainment with plenty of good physical gags.  With:  Joe Price, Joe Roberts, Wheezer Dell, Tom Wilson and Monte Collins.  Notes:  Written by Cline and Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.

 

Volume I [Tape No. 3].

 

• Sherlock Jr.  1924.  56 minutes. / 5 reels.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Satire.  Directed by Buster Keaton.  Buster Keaton is a motion picture operator, falsely accused by his girl’s father of having stolen a watch.  The actual thief, had stolen and pawned the watch and slipped it into Buster’s pocket when it was discovered missing.  Distraught, the hero, tries to find ways to fix the situation.  While working in the projection booth at his theater during the showing of a romantic drama with a plot line similar to his circumstances.   In a reverie, he becomes enmeshed in the film’s story, the lovers on the screen become his rival and his girl and the situations he faces become those of the film’s characters.  Keaton, more than any of the other great comic artists of the silent era played with the film medium itself but never in more glorious and masterful a fashion as in this film.  It is a marvel of ingenuity and artistry, comedy and wit, style and substance.  Not only is it the greatest of Keaton’s films, it is one of the greatest films ever made.  Absolutely magnificent.   With:  Kathryn McGuire as the girl, Joe Keaton as her father, Ward Crane as the sheik/villain, Erwin Connelly as the butler/handyman, Jane Connelly as the mother, Ford West as the theater manager/Gillette, George Davis, Horace Morgan and John as conspirators and Ruth Holly as the woman in the candy store.  Notes:  Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez, Joseph A. Mitchell.
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• Our Hospitality.  1923.    7reels/6,220ft.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  <V2395>.  Directed by Buster Keaton with John Blystone.  A funny satire of some Southern customs particularly feuding and southern hospitality.  The film opens with the deaths of two young men, caught up in a deadly feud whose cause has long been lost in the feuders’ collective memory.  The death of one of the men forces his father to rekindle the feud.  The other man leaves a widow and infant son.  That a film beginning this grimly would turn into one of Buster Keaton’s finest and funniest comedies is a tribute to the man’s genius.  The baby grows into a fine dandy from New York who comes back to the homestead to claim his father’s “estate”.  On the ‘train’ ride home he meets a pretty girl who invites him to dinner with her family.  That is where the fun begins.  Keaton’s physical gags were among the best in silent films.  He doesn’t milk his gags like Chaplin, Lloyd and the other great silent clowns  — he just let them happen.  With Natalie Talmadge, Joe Roberts, Ralph Bushman, Craig Ward, Joe Keaton, and Monte Collins.  Notes:  Story, screenplay and titles by Jean Havez, Joseph Mitchell and Clyde Bruckman.  Photographed by Elgin Lessley and Dev Jennings.

 

Volume II [Tape No. 1]

 

• The Navigator.  1924.  75 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton.  Just after shipping tycoon John O’Brien decides to sell his liner The Navigator, some spies try to insure that the boat never reaches its new owners.  They rig the ship so that is floats out to sea.  When O’Brien’s daughter Betsy stops by the boat to pick up some papers she finds herself marooned on a ship floating haplessly into oblivion.   Her one companion, wealthy playboy Rollo Treadway, who is delivered to the boat totally by mistake.  The two are faced with endless adventures a the only two denizens of the liner.  Charming comedy from Keaton.  With:  Buster Keaton as Rollo Treadway, Kathryn McGuire as Betsy O’Brien, Frederick Vroom as John O’Brien, Clarence Burton as a Spy, H. M. Clugston as a Spy and Noble Johnson as the Cannibal Chief.  Notes:  Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell.  Cinematography by Byron Houck and Elgin Lessley.  Edited by Keaton.
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• The Boat.  1921.  22 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton.  Buster Keaton, Sybil Seely and Edward F. Cline.   Buster and his family make every effort to lead as comfortable life as possible on his little  houseboat, the Damifino.  Needless to say, Buster and boat are constantly at odds.  Very funny short.  Damifino was a favorite nickname for boats in several Keaton features.  Notes:  Written by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.
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• The Love Nest.  1923.  24 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton.  The Love Nest is a boat skippered by rough and tough sailor who ‘executes’ his crew for the flimsiest of mistakes made aboard ship.  When the hapless Buster is lost at sea while making a boat mail run, he is commandeered into service by the tyrannical captain.  Little does the captain understand how resilient his new crew member is.   As usual, Keaton provides some great physical and sight gags.  With:  Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts and Virginia Fox.  Notes:  Written by Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph Schenck.

 

Volume II [Tape No. 2]

 

• Seven Chances.  1925.  56 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Buster Keaton.  Buster Keaton is Jimmie Shannon a young stock broker who stands to inherit $7,000,000 if he is married by 7 PM on the day of his 27^th birthday.  Jimmie, whose firm is in a real jam, is urged to marry to save he and his partner.  Jimmie’s problem is that he learns of this inheritance on said birthday and must find a bride quickly.  He wants nothing more than to marry Mary, the girl he loves but his proposal is handled so ineptly that she rejects.  His partner decides that he must try asking seven very eligible young socialites to be his wife.  They all refuse until they, and the whole town learn that he’s to inherit the fortune.  All ends well, but not before we are treated with a rich panoply of wonderful physical and visual gags.  One of Keaton’s best, beautifully directed and photographed.  Ruth Dwyer is Mary Brown, T. Roy Barnes is Billy Meekin, Snitz Edwards is an Attorney, Frances Raymond is Mrs. Brown, Jules Cowles is the hired hand, Erwin Connelly is a clergyman, and Jean Arthur is a receptionist.  Notes:  Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez and Joseph A. Mitchell from a play by Roi Cooper Megrue.  Cinematography by Byron Houck and Elgin Lessley.  Edited by Buster Keaton.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
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• Neighbors.  1920.  56 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Buster Keaton.  Buster Keaton and Virginia Fox are two young lovebirds kept apart by their feuding parents.  As often is the case, the stunts by Keaton and his comic cast are astonishing, fresh and hilarious.  A very, very funny little known Keaton feature. Joe Roberts, Joe Keaton, Edward F. Cline and James Duffy.  Notes:  Written by Cline and Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
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• The Balloonatic.  1923.  22 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Keaton.  Buster finds just about every athletic and outdoor endeavor he tries foiled.  When he is accidentally carried by an hot air balloon from town to a campsite and park he finds nature conspiring against him.  The canoe in this film is called Minnie-Tee-Hee, another naming gag.  The canoe also provides an opportunity for some of the best gags in the film.  June Haver is a delightful heroine in the piece.  Notes:  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Written by Edward F. cline and Buster Keaton.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.

 

Volume II [Tape No. 3]

 

• Go West.  1925.  69 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Keaton.  Buster Keaton is Friendless, a hapless young man from the Midwest who has ridden the rails westward after finding life back east less than challenging.  He finds himself ‘left’ abruptly in the wide open range at a ranch where he somehow finds work as a hired hand.  The tenderfoot is in over his head on the range.  This is one of the few Keaton films where his physical play and gags are minimized for more pathos.  It’s a wistful, lolling, lovely film, and the tone of the film is enhanced by having shot the film in the California desert – the film has a spaciousness not unlike a John Ford film.  Friendless is befriended by a cow from who’s paw he’d removed a pebble, maybe creating the most interesting ‘romance’ in movie history.  In the end, Friendless is the hero, saving the rancher from ruin, leading a 1000 head of cattle to the stock yards in L. A. !! Classic ending.  With:  Howard Truesdale as the Ranch Owner, Kathleen Myers as the rancher’s daughter, Ray Thompson as the ranch foreman, Buster Keaton as Friendless.  Notes:  Cameo appearances by Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, Joe Keaton and Babe London.  Written by Raymond Cannon from a story by Keaton and Lex Neal.  Cinematography by Bert Haines and Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
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• The Scarecrow.  1920.  18 minutes. Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Keaton.  Two roommates vie for everything, food, space, the same girl.  The film is filled with dozens of Rube Goldbergish gadgetry in the boys’ room.  The boys are two farm hands both of whom love the farmer’s daughter.  Every work day is a contest of wills over which of the two she’ll choose.  At one point, Keaton hides in the corn field and pretends to be a scarecrow with the expected results.  Fine and funny.  With:  Buster Keaton as the farmhand, Sybil Seely as the farmer’s daughter, Joe Roberts as the Farmhand, Joe Keaton as the farmer and Edward F. Cline as the preacher.  Notes:  Written by Cline and Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
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• The Paleface.  1921.  20 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Keaton.  Keaton goes from being lunch for wild Indians to being their hero when he foils the plot of unscrupulous speculators to rob the Indians of their rights to rich oil wells.  Buster saves the day and wins the Indian princess.  Nifty little comedy with the usual array of funny pratfalls and physical gags.  With:  Buster Keaton and Joe Roberts.  Notes:  Written by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.

 

Volume II [Tape No. 4]

 

• Battling Butler.  1926.  80 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Buster Keaton.  With:  Buster Keaton stars as Alfred Butler a pampered young millionaire whose father insists that he go off into the wild to gain more stature as a man – the boy is just to soft.  Off Alfred goes, with his devoted valet, and all the comforts of home to tough it in the mountains.  Haplessly but inevitably he meets and falls in love with a lovely mountain miss whose huge brother and father disdain the slight Alfred until his valet passes him off as a champion lightweight boxer with the same name. That’s when the real fun begins.   Keaton at his athletic and deadpan best.  A truly charming comedy romance in the vein of Douglas Fairbanks’ wonderful comedies about well-heeled young dandies who gain respect after comically physical ordeals.  Keaton played this type quite well too – his first full lengthed film, The Saphead, was a similar role, passed up by Fairbanks who readily recommended Keaton.  With:   Sally O’Neil as the mountain girl, Walter James as her father, Budd Fine as her brother, Francis McDonald as Alfred Battling Butler, Mary O’Brien as his wife, Tom Wilson as his trainer, Eddie Borden as his manager and Snitz Edwards as Alfred’s Valet.  Notes:  Written by Al Boasberg, Lex Neal, Charles Henry Smith and Paul Girard Smith.  Cinematography by Bert Haines an Devereaux Jennings.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
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• The Frozen North.  1922.  17 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Keaton.  A delightful film, of which only fragments exist in which Keaton joyfully deadpans his way through parts satirizing the westerns of William S. Hart and the film villains portrayed by  Erich von Stroheim.  None of the great silent clowns poked as much fun at, or toyed with the medium a often or with the kind of mastery of Keaton.  Episodic as this film is, the technical aspects combined with Keaton’s daringly physical comedy are impressive.  With:  Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts, Sybil Seely, Bonnie Hill, Freeman Wood, Edward F. Cline.  Notes:  Written by Keaton and Cline.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
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• The Haunted House.  1921.  20 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Buster Keaton.  Directed by Keaton and Edward F. Cline.  Buster Keaton plays a bank clerk who, by accident, helps put the bad guys out of business.  The chief clerk at the bank runs a counterfeiting ring and slowly is wiping out the little bank’s funds by trading the bad dollars for the good.  He and his gang are holed up in a big house in town that has been decidedly rigged to scare people off.  The ever resourceful Buster finds himself in the middle of things when the leader of the crooks tries to hang the crime on him.  As per usual, the physical gags are stunning in this trick and gag filled Keaton comedy.  With:  Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts and Edward F. Cline.  Notes:  Written by Edward F. Cline and Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.

 

Volume III [Tape No. 1]

 

•  The General.   1927.    82minutes.  /8 reels.  Silent.  <V308>.  Buster Keaton’s films have the look and feel of total Americana.  The handsome stoic “stone” face never changes regardless of the peril or absurdities surrounding him.  He is the penultimate clown as average Joe.  His greatest films reflect his stoic reserve as well as his enormous lack of fear.  He, as did most silent stars, performed all of his own stunts and he essentially designed and directed most of his work as well.  The General may be, after Sherlock Jr., his best.  The General in question is a train and Keaton is a Confederate engineer who helps save the day when he keeps the engine out of the hands of the federals.  The film is unreservedly funny.  A masterpiece.  With Glen Cavender, Jim Farley, Frederick Vroom and Marion Mack as the heroine.  Notes:  Directed by Keaton.  Photographed by J. Devereux Jennings and Bert Haines.  Also available on 16mm and as a single title.
•  
• The Playhouse.  1921.  23 minutes.  Silent.  Directed by Keaton and Edward F. Cline.  A lovely, tongue-in-cheek film in which Buster plays every role.  At an afternoon theatrical matinee Keaton plays most of the cast [all of the members of a vaudeville troupe, all of the musicians and, quite hilariously, a trained chimp!!!], every production and  technical crew member (all of which is corroborated by the playbill which has Buster Keaton’s name at every credit  The topper is that he’s also a number member of the audience in the house box seats, whether a prim and proper lady, a lollipop sucking juvenile or a teetering drunk.  Keaton’s skillful tendency to play with the medium is a joy to behold.  With:  Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, and Joe Roberts.  Notes:  Written by Keaton and Cline.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.
•  
• Cops.  1922.  18 minutes.  Silent.  Directed by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton.  Keaton is an earnest young man to whom things just seem to happen to.  After a series hilarious mishaps and misunderstandings, the young man finds himself in the midst of a big parade.  When a radical throws a bomb on the scene, the young man catches it (just as he’s about to light a cigarette).  The young man, in turn rids himself of the bomb, throwing it amongst a parading bunch of policemen.  A hilarious chase ensues.  In his great Life magazine piece on silent comedy, James Agee noted how the great silent clowns  built their comedies as if building an edifice of humor – one gag followed another, each meant to top the other until the filmgoer is becomes hapless with mirth.  Keaton was a master of this kind of comic architecture and Cops is an early embodiment of this theory.  Very, very funny.  With:  Buster Keaton as the Young Man, Joe Roberts as the Police Chief, Virginia Fox as the mayor’s daughter, and Edward F. Cline as a Hobo.  Notes:  Written by Cline and Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.
•  

Volume III [Tape No. 2]

 

• College.  1927. 66 minutes. [6 reels/5,916 ft.]  Silent.  Collegiate Sports Comedy.  <V345>.  Directed by James Horne.  Buster Keaton plays a college bound bookworm.  At his high school graduation the boy’s commencement address, The Curse of Athletics, he gives a tirade against his peers’ obsession with star athletes and athletic prowess, consequently alienating the girl of his dreams and his chief nemesis – the Saturday hero super jock.  At college he finds that his superior attitude is even less well received and discovers that the only way to win his sweetheart’s hand is to become a star athlete himself.  In the end the brainy klutz wins the girl, but not without many misadventures.  One of Keaton’s least known comedies it is just about as good as the best.  With Ann Cornwall as Mary Haynes the Girl, Flora Bramley as Her Friend, Harold Goodwin as Jeff Brown a Rival, Snitz Edwards as the Dean, Sam Crawford as the Baseball Coach, Florence Turner as A Mother.  Notes:  Screenplay by Carl Harbaugh and Bryan Foy.  Photographed by Dev Jennings and Bert Haines.
•  
• The Electric House.  1922.  23 minutes.  Silent.  Directed by Keaton and Cline.  Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts, Virginia Fox, Joe Keaton, Myra Keaton, and Louis Keaton star in this comedy about a totally electric home.  After graduating from school [trade? High school? College?] Buster’s given a job working in a house filled with electrical gadgets of all kinds.  Push a button and even the bathtub might come to you.  When the man, Keaton won the job over comes to seek revenge on our hero,  the house full of gadgets seem to want to take their revenge too.  Lots of clever gadgetry and gags but not necessarily among the very best of Keaton.  Notes:  Written by Cline and Keaton.  Produced by Schenck.  Photographed by Lessley.
•  
• Hard Luck.  1921.  22 minutes.  Silent.  Directed by Keaton and Cline.    With:  Keaton, Virginia Fox and Joe Roberts as Lizard Lip Luke.  This film was lost for more than 60 years, but it is one of Keaton’s own favorites of his shorts.  A young man, despondent for God-knows-what reason tries to commit suicide in a number of ways all of which end in comic failure.  Somehow he ends up among the society set at a country club where he participates in a fox hunt with the expected consequences.  There are some lovely stunts with the horse during the hunting sequences.  When a bandit, Lip Lizard Luke, and his minions arrive at the country club, Buster must provide some heroics.  The final scene, after the high dive into the pool, has not survived except for a still showing the film’s hero with his Chinese bride and children.  This Keaton has more of the traditional comic pratfalls common to silent film than most of later works would.  Note:  Written by Keaton and Kline.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Joseph M. Schenck.  Restored and re-titled by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill for Thames Silents in association with Raymond Rohauer.
•  
• The Blacksmith.  1922.  21 minutes.  Silent.  Directed by Keaton with Mal St. Clair.  Buster is a blacksmith’s disaster prone assistant in this film which also features Joe Roberts as the smithy and Virginia Fox is a pretty miss who happens by [when Buster finds that the lady’s horse needs shoes, he asks the opinion of the horse, who, of course nods its approval or disapproval.  The horse has fittings just like any stylish miss looking for something to meet  her eye.  It’s a wonderful gag, not in the least bit overdone].  The hapless hopeful apprentice is, ultimately chased by his boss and angry customers.  Some nice physical gags and ingenious editing propel this Keaton entry along.  Notes:  Written by Keaton and St. Clair.  Photographed by Elgin Lessley.  Produced by Raymond Rohauer and Joseph M. Schenck.

 

Volume III [Tape No. 3]

•  
• Steamboat Bill, Jr. 1928.  69 minutes. [7 reels/6,400ft.].  Silent.  Directed by Charles F. Reisner.  Buster Keaton’s films are glories of simplicity and humor.  A steamboat owner in River Junction is being pressured by the richest man in town to give up his boat, the Stonewall Jackson.  He’s almost forced into bankruptcy.  When he discovers that his college educated son is coming to visit he expects an ally to help him combat the town big shot.  He’s very disappointed to see a very Easternized Bostonian.  The boy is all thumbs with the boat.  Just when he is about to be shipped back to Boston a huge storm comes up — his father, his father’s enemy, and the enemy’s daughter are endangered.  Young Bill saves the day and ends the feud.  He also gets the girl.  From such simple material as this Keaton has fashioned a wonderful film with, as usual, some of his best stunts.  With Keaton, the physical nature of his humor are absolutely necessary.  They all somehow, no matter how fantastic, still seem in the realm of the possible — all because Keaton himself seems so calm and rational.  Steamboat Bill, Jr. is a major silent comedy.  Notes:  Screenplay by Carl Harboaugh.  Photographed by Dev Jennings, and Bert Haines.  With:  Ernest Torrence, Tom McGuire, Marion Byron, Tom Lewis, and Joe Keaton.  1928.
•  
• Convict 13.  1920.  20 minutes.  Silent.  Directed by Keaton and Cline.  Buster Keaton as the Golfer/Prisoner/Prison Guard, Sybil Sealey as Socialite and Warden’s Daughter, Joe Roberts as a Prisoner, Edward F. Cline as the Hangman, and Joe Keaton as the Warden.  Notes:  Written by Keaton and Cline.   Photographed by Elgin Lessley.
•  
• Daydreams.  1922.  22 minutes.  Silent.  Directed by Keaton and Cline.  With:  Keaton, Renée Adorée, Joe Keaton, Joe Roberts, and Edward F. Cline.  Notes:  Written by Cline and Keaton.  Cinematography by Elgin Lessley. 

 

THE BANK.  1915.  (1,985ft.) approximately 19 minutes.  Silent. A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection: Volume III Chaplin at Essanay Studios (Pt. 2) <V2893>.   Directed by Chaplin.  A daydreaming bank guard has delusions of rescuing the pretty secretary of the bank’s president from nefarious and various crimes and criminals.  He succeeds beyond his wildest dreams, and then he wakes up — fade to end.  Cast includes:  Edna Purviance, Charles Insley, Carl Stockdale, Billy Armstrong, Leo White, Fred Goodwin, Bud Jamison, Wesley Ruggles, Frank J. Coleman, Paddy McGuire, John Rand and Carrie Clarke Ward.   Notes:  Photographed by Totheroh and Ensign.  Screenplay by Chaplin.  Sets (scenic artist) by E.T. Mazy.

 

THE BATTLE OF ELDERBUSH GULCH.  1913.  24 minutes.  Silent.  Western.  Directed by D.W. Griffith.  Indian attacks, cavalry rescues, and hairsbreadth escapes on innocents from the clutches of bad guys.  In this early three reeler from Griffith one sees all the future stereotypes of action westerns that would follow.  Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish are young girls orphaned by Indian attacks.  When the Indians over run Elderbush Gulch the townspeople are saved, just in the nick-of-time.  With:  Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish, W. Chrystie Miller, Robert Harron, Charles H. Mailes and Kate Bruce.

 

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN.  1925.  75minutes.  Silent.  USSR.  <V56>.  Directed by Sergei Eisenstein.  This is a great film, a monument to the Bolshevik Revolution by a filmmaker whose early works were cinematic icons to Bolshevism.  Director, Sergei Eisenstein’s  stature as one of the greatest of all filmmakers is apotheosized in this film.  The story celebrates the courageous mutiny of the crew of the Imperial battleship S. S. Prince Potemkin and the public support it engendered during the Russian Revolution of 1905.  The film’s images, didactic and doctrinaire as they are, are among the most startling and unforgettable ever filmed.  Technically, Eisenstein’s film advanced film technology as much as any film since Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.  Almost every standard film and film editing technique used since developed from this film.  The film’s technical and emotional high point are the scenes on the Odessa steps — possibly the most famous and copied scenes in movie history (Woody Allen satirizes the scenes in Love and Death, and Brian De Palma saluted it in the train station sequence in The Untouchables).  Written and directed by Eisenstein, photographed by Edouard Tisse.  With A. Antonov, Vladimir Barski, Grigori Alexandrov, and M. Gomorov.

 

BEAU BRUMMEL 1924.  [10 reels].  Silent Cinema.  Historical Romance.  John Barrymore.  Romantic Melodrama.  Directed by Harry Beaumont.  John Barrymore, the Great Profile of silent cinema is Gordon Byron Brummel, known in late 18^th century British society as “Beau” Brummel.  When, as a poor officer in the royal army, he is rejected by the family of the woman he loves, Beau Brummel makes a vow to seek revenge on the ‘superior’ class by making maximum use of his charm, wit, style and (later) connections with the Prince of Wales (the future King George IV).  Brummel, through his influence and intimacy with the Prince of Wales would help set the standards of taste in dress and style during the Regency.  However, after a falling out with the Prince, he falls from favor.  Barrymore gives a witty performance as this consummate fop and trends setter.  Mary Astor [she was only 18 at the time and became engaged in a torrid affair with Barrymore] is lovely as Lady Margery Alvanley the woman’s whose marriage to a titled nobleman spurred Brummel’s own ambitions.  One should compare this stylish but melancholy silent version with the colorful 1950s version starring Stewart Granger as Brummel, Peter Ustinov [as the Prince] and Elizabeth Taylor.  With:  George Beranger as Lord Byron, Betty Brice as Mrs. Snodgrass, Michal Dark as Lord Manly, Claire De Lorez as Lady manly, Rose Dione as Madame Bergerer, Alec B. Francis as Mortimer, William Humphrey as Lord Alvanley, Kate Lester as Lady Miora, Carmel Myers as Lady Hester Stanhope, Irene Rich as Frederica Charlotte, Duchess of York, Roland Rushton as Mr. Abrahams, Templar Saxe as Desmond Wertham , Clarissa Selwynne as Mrs. Wertham and Richard Tucker as Lord Stanhope.  Notes:  Written by Dorothy Farnum from the play by Clyde Fitch.  Photographed by David Abel.

 

BED AND SOFA.   1927.  115minutes.  Silent.  Romantic Comedy/Drama.  USSR.  <V1589>.  Directed by Abram Room.  Russian title:  Tret’ya Meshchanskaya. This film’s story is simple — In Moscow in the years following the Revolution of 1918 housing shortages were enormous.  The idea of sharing rooms with friends and relatives became a part of daily life.  A construction worker recently married agrees to share his apartment with a printer friend just arrived in the city.  His sofa is available. The arrangement works perfectly until the inevitable happens — the wife and the printer fall in love.  A number of things will surprise viewers about this film — it’s gentle, good natured humor; the general lack of any doctrinaire messages; the technical excellence of the film making itself and; most significantly the pleasantly sensual quality of the film.  It is a very, very fine sexual comedy, well directed and acted.  The cast includes Nikolai Batalov and Ludmila Semenova as the couple and Vladimir Fogel as the friend.  Also with:  Yelena Sokolova and Leonid Yurenev.  Notes:  Written by Abram Room and Viktor Shklovsky.  Cinematography by Grigori Giber.

 

BEHIND THE SCREEN.  1916.  (1,796ft) approx. 19 minutes.  Silent.  Directed by Chaplin.  (Subtitled:  The Bewildered Stage Hand).    A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume IV Chaplin at Mutual Studios (Pt. I) <V2893>.  The Tramp is the assistant of a big, lazy stage prop man.  He does all the work while his supervisor sleeps.  While a new production is starting he meets and falls for a new ingenue.  They become boon companions and endure a riot of slapstick situations  before the last reel and their happily-ever-after smooch.  Also available in the collection entitled Charlie Chaplin Carnival <V457>.  Cast includes:  Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell.  Henry Bergman, Charlotte Mineua, Leota Bryan, Albert Austin, John Rand, Leo White, Wesley Ruggles, Tom Wood and Frank J. Coleman.  Notes:  Camera by Totheroh and William C. Foster.  Screenplay by Chaplin.  Story by Chaplin and Vincent Bryan.

 

BEHIND THE SCREEN.  1917.  These segments are all that remain of what was a major two part film A Life Destroyed by Pitiless Fate, the story of the fall of a famous film player Ivan Mozzhukhin playing himself, who has been replaced on the screen and in the life of by a younger star.  Nataliia Lisenka plays herself in the film as well.  With:  Nikolai Panov as the studio director and Lirksii as himself.  Also with Iona Talanov and Andrei Brei.  Notes:  This film represents in many ways, the end of Tsarist cinema.  According to film historians, many of the stars had already left Revolutionary Russia by the time the film was released in 1917.  Screenplay and direction by Georgii Azagarov and Aleksandr Vokkov.  Photography by Nikolai Toporkov.

 

THE BELOVED ROGUE.  1927.  110 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Romantic Melodrama.  John Barrymore.  Francois Villon.  Directed by Alan Crosland.  John Barrymore is French poet and romantic vagabond in this, one of his most popular silent films.  Villon, a bon vivant with style and audacity rules the streets of Paris in the late years of the reign of King Louis XI of France [he who owed his throne to Joan of Arc].  Villon, whose too ready wit lands him in trouble with the King is banished from Paris.  The film is about our hero’s efforts to restore himself to Paris, the realm he loves more than anything else.  When the Duke of Burgundy threatens to overthrow Louis, it is with the efforts of Villon and the people of the streets that the king is saved.  Ronald Colman would play this role in 1938’s If I Were King.  Barrymore gives a grandly broad performance in this film filled with derring-do and daring stunts.  With:  Lucy Beaumont as Mme. Villon, Lawson Butt as the Duke of Burgundy, Marceline Day as Charlotte de Vauxcelles, Nigel de Burlier as the astrologer, Slim Summerville as Jehon, Conrad Veidt as Louis XI, Rosie Dione as Margot, Mack Swain as Nicholas, and Henry Victor as Thibault d’Aussigny.  Notes:  Screenplay by Paul Bern.  Cinematography by Joseph H. August.  Art direction by William Cameron Menzies.  Tape quality is only fair.

 

BEN HUR. 125minutes.  (12 reels/11,693 feet.  Silent.  Biblical Epic.  Popular American Fiction.  General Lew Wallace.  Directed by Fred Niblo.  The 1959 film of General Lew Wallace’s best seller is epic film making of especially high quality, and was probably as deserving of all its awards and adulation as any film.  The silent version of Wallace’s story was, at the time of its release, the most expensive film ever made.  MGM gambled with this one, and almost abandoned the project at one point but persevered.  The final result was this massive, action packed film that was a huge popular and critical success.  The film’s most famous scene, the chariot race, was also the center piece for the Wyler version in 1959.  With: Ramon Novarro as Judah Ben-Hur, Francis X. Bushman as Messala, May McAvoy as Esther, Frank Currier as Quintus Arrius, Mitchell Lewis as Sheik Ilderim and Betty Bronson as Mary.  Notes:  Screenplay by Carey Wilson and Beth Meredyth based on June Mathis’ adaptation.  Photographed by Karl Strusse,

 

BERLIN:  SYMPHONY OF A CITY.  1927.  70minutes. <V735>. Germany.  Directed by Walter Ruttmann.  An exercise in style and techniques.  Using cameras hidden in suitcases, from the backs of moving vehicles and employing what approaches the earliest form of cinema verite, director Walter Ruttmann made this very impressionistic film about Berlin of the late 1920s.  There is no narrative, just images of the city edited smoothly and impressively. Screenplay by Karl Freund and Walter Ruttmann.  Photographed by Reimar Kuntze, Robert Baberske, and Laszlo Shaffer.  A jazz score for orchestra was to accompany the film but it is reported as lost.

 

THE BIG PARADE.  148minutes. (12 reels/11,591 ft.).  Silent.  <V2131>.  Director King Vidor’s films were often thoughtful, and thought provoking thematically.  This big-time MGM war movie was a vehicle for star John Gilbert but it also has strong pacifistic overtones.  The story deals with how the lives of three young men cross on their way to fight the Great War in 1918.  The film has fine moments of quiet and peace.  It gives a realistic and mature depiction of mutilation and death of young men at war while evoking the camaraderie and spirited relationships of men fighting the “good fight.”  The film’s critical and commercial success made Vidor a front line film director and Gilbert was celebrated as an actor, not just the screen’s current great lover.  With:  Renee Adoree, Hobart Bosworth, Tom O’Brien, Claire McDowell, and Claire Adams.  Notes:  Screenplay by Harry Behn.  Photographed by John Arnold.  Box-office gross:  $5,120,791.

 

BIRTH OF A NATION.  1915.  185minutes./ 12 reels/12,000 feet.  Silent Cinema.  American Civil War.  D.W. Griffith.  Thomas Dixon.  <V34>.  Quite possibly the most controversial American film ever made and the most influential.  Until Birth of a Nation was made few American films exceeded 6 reels or approximately one hour in length.  Director D.W. Griffith had been gradually building toward a full length feature with efforts such as Judith of Bethulia.  Griffith, a Tennessean, had learned of the Klan as gallant saviors and knights at his mother’s knee.  He used those romanticized memories and the virulent novels of Thomas Dixon The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman as the focal point of his film.  The result was a sweeping historical epic that created a sensation in theaters across the country.  It was like a glorious recruiting poster for the Klan (unintentionally), and provoked protests in cities across the country.  The story is that of the Cameron and Stoneman families and their triumphs and struggles during and after the Civil War.  There are many haunting and beautiful images in the film, but many others that are disturbing (and racist).  With:  Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Wathall, Miriam cooper, Mary Alden, Ralph Lewis, George Siegmann, Walter Long and Wallace Reed.  1915.  Directed by Griffith.  Photographed by G.W. “Billy” Bitzer.  Box-office gross:  $10,000,000.

 

THE BLACK PIRATE.  1926.  9 reels/8,490 feet.  Silent.  Action Adventure.  Douglas Fairbanks.  Directed by Albert Parker.  Michel, a young Spanish aristocrat, is, with his father, the only survivors of a vicious pirate’s raid.  When his father dies on the marooned island they’ve managed to escape to, Michel vows revenge.  He joins the crew of the pirate, after proving his mettle and begins his efforts to avenge the brutal murders of his friends and his family honor.  Stirring, exciting, marvelous.  One of the most enjoyable action films ever made, and like most of Douglas Fairbanks 1920s epics, technically faultless.  There are some justifiably famous feats and stunts [from the cast and the technicians] in this.  Douglas Fairbanks as Michel, The Black Pirate, Billie Dove as Princess Isobel, Anders Randolph as the Pirate Chieftain, Donald Crisp as MacTavish, Sam De Grasse as Lieutenant, Charles Stevens as Powder Man, and Charles Belcher as the Noble passenger.  Notes:  Cinematography by Henry Sharp.  Screenplay by Jack Cunningham based on a story by “Elton Thomas” [Fairbanks].  Titles by Robert Nicholls.

 

BLOOD AND SAND.  1922.  80 minutes.  <V2898>.  Silent.  Romantic Adventure.  Bull Fighting.  Directed by Fred Niblo.  After his role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had made him a star, this film, his next feature, signaled the romantic idealization of Rudolph Valentino as the quintessential romantic hero.  As a poor young Spanish youth who yearns to become a great bull fighter, Valentino gives a dashing, quick witted performance.  The story of the young bullfighters rise to fame, his love for his sweetheart, and the bad influences of a cynical beauty who finally destroys him was a cliché in the making.  But it worked then, and it still has sweep and pace today.  An enjoyable film for the whole family.  With:  Nita Naldi, Rose Rosanova, Leo White, Rosita Marstini, Fred Becker, George Field, Jack Winn, Harry Lamont, Gilbert Clayton.  Notes:  The bullfighter as hero always bore a striking resemblance to the boxer in films.  A poor boy wants to be a boxer (bullfighter) and works his way to the top exploited by hangers on and crooked managers, or ruined by love for the wrong kind of woman.  Blood And Sand and Golden Boy or Body and Soul (with John Garfield) as stories, are not separated by much.  For those who would like to see a definitely more modern and adult rendering of this seemingly timeless story of matador on the rise the French production of what seems to be exactly the same story as this Valentino film is available in Nonprint.  See Sand and Blood.  Blood and Sand is preceded by a short produced by David Selznick featuring a beauty contest that was judged by Valentino (with others).  In between films during a contract dispute with his studio, Valentino could not do a feature but producer Selznick found a way to exploit the actor’s name by producing a newsreel called Valentino’s American Beauties.

 

BODY AND SOUL.  1924.  52 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  African-American Filmmakers. Oscar Micheaux.  Melodrama.  Directed by Oscar Micheaux.  An escaped convict shows up in the town of Tatesville, Georgia as a preacher much admired by the elder women of his flock.  One woman, the mother of an attractive young daughter is especially interested in having the Reverend wed the girl.  The girl is no stranger to the preacher’s deceptions.  The mother and other older ladies of the church are unaware of his philandering nature and his drinking.  Under the pressure to marry the man, the girl runs away to Atlanta.  When her worried mother finds her living in a hovel she asks why, thinking that she had left home with their savings.  The girl with her dying breath finally convinces the woman of the preacher’s duplicity.  The bereaved mother returns home to face the minister and publicly rebuke him.  The congregation turns on the villain and drives him from town and the pulpit.  The mother’s grief is compounded by her dreams of a much happier life.  This is a fascinating film for many reasons not the least of which is the presence of the charismatic Paul Robeson.  Robeson plays the bad minister, and in a smaller part, the man that the girl loves.  There are some fascinating things in this film.  Micheaux, the most significant black filmmaker in the first half of the century had an excellent eye for detail and a good sense of the melodramatic.  His film is no better or worse than mainstream melodramas of the same stripe.  Body and Soul is like a passion play within a social melodrama.  Robeson who seems to be playing the same character he had just made famous on Broadway — The Emperor Jones — is an impressive presence.  Micheaux’s style is almost expressionistic at times and highly skilled.  Some of the films titles make intriguing use of racial terms.  There are also some subtle shots photographs that hang on the home of the mother and daughter — photographs of Booker T. Washington and of Abraham Lincoln hang in a place of honor like those of JFK and Dr. King that can be found in many African-American homes today.  It is a fascinating little sociological sign-post.  With:  Laurence Chenault as Yellow Curly Hinds, Chester M. Alexander as Deacon Simpkins, Walter Cornick as Brother Amos, Marshall Rodgers as the Club owner (the title card refers to him as a “Negro” businessman) and with Lillian Johns and Madame Robinson as churchwomen.  Curiously, the mother and daughter, so central to the film do not have a credit on the screen but they are played by Theresea Russell and Mercedes Gilbert.  Notes:  The print we have of the film is in excellent condition.

 

THE BRIGAND BROTHERS.  1912.  Directed by Vasilii Gonchorov.  With:  Arsenii Bibikov, and Ivan Mozzhukhin as the brothers, Vasillii Stepanov as the landlord, Dolinina as the daughter, and Aleksandra Gonchorova as the captive.  Notes:  Screenplay by Gonchorov based on Pushkin’s poem.  Photography by Louis Forestier.

 

BROKEN BLOSSOMS.  1919.  105minutes. /7 reels/6,013ft.    Silent.  Romantic Melodrama.  D.W. Griffith.  Lillian Gish.  Directed by D.W. Griffith.  In late 19th century London a beautiful young girl is abused and terrorized by her degenerate father.  In the rough Limehouse district of London such things are so common that the girl has little hope of a protector.  One unlikely candidate emerges however, a lovesick young Chinese shopkeeper falls desperately in love with the girl.  Even though he realizes his love must be unrequited his desire to protect her from brutality is persistent.  Elemental, effective melodrama from the master of the genre.  Lillian Gish plays the doomed young girl, Donald Crisp is Battling Burrows her father, and Richard Barthelmess the Chinese youth Cheng Huan.  Also with:  Edward Pell, Andre Beranger, and Norman “Kid McCoy” Selby.  D. W. Griffith.  Screenplay by Griffith based on a story by Thomas Burke “The Chink and the Child.”

 

THE BURGLAR’S DILEMMA.  1912.  15 minutes.  Crime Melodrama.  In this story, Lionel Barrymore is the well heeled older brother much envied by his younger sibling.  In a fight over money, the younger man strikes the older leaving him unconscious.  Thinking he has killed his brother, the man tries to fix the blame on a young burglar who has entered the house.  A striking little parable about fear and guilt leading to deadly consequences.  With:  Harry Carey.

 

BY THE SEA.  1915.  (971ft.) approx. 9 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection: Volume III Chaplin at Essanay Studios (Pt. 2) <V2893>.  Directed by Chaplin.  A boat, a girl, a boy.  What else is there.  Cast includes:  Billy Armstrong, Margie Reiger, Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Carl Stockdale, and Billy Armstrong, Margie Reiger, Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, and Carl Stockdale.  Notes:  Photographed by Rollie Tolheroh and Harry Ensign.  Screenplay by Chaplin.

 

CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI.  1920.  90minutes./ 6 reels/5,600ft.  Silent.  German Cinema.  Melodrama.  Madness.  Directed by Robert Wiene.  Germany’s silent cinema may have been the most daring and influential between the years 1920 and 1930.  UFA, Decla-Bioscop and the other major studios produced works of imagination and talent.  The expressionistic sets and stage design added an eerie backdrops to the film sets and none more so than in this film.  The story deals with the uncertainties men have dealing with madness.  The film opens with a young man telling a macabre tale to a casual acquaintance on what seems to be a park bench.  He regales his companion (and us, the audience) with a horrific tale about a mountebank who makes use of a somnambulist to commit “perfect” murders.  Is the story being told by a madman or is it truth.  With:  Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Hans Heinz von Twardowski, Lil Dagover, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge.

 

CABIRIA.  1914.  123 minutes.  Italy.   Silent.  Directed by Giovanni Pastrone.  In the Rome of the 3rd B.C., in the age of the Punic Wars, a wealthy merchant, his wife and daughter live a wonderfully happy life.  There is always danger in this paradise, present in the majestic Mount Etna which could erupt at a moment’s notice.  When it does, it causes the towns people to scatter and the daughter, called Cabiria, is rescued by her nurse Croessa.  The nurse and Cabiria are both captured and enslaved by Phoenician pirates who sell them as slaves to Carthaginians.  When the god Moloch wants sacrifices, Cabiria is chosen as want of the innocents but Croessa manages to get her protectors in Fulvius Axialla, a Roman knight in Carthage and his massive slave Maciste.  When the heroes try to escape they too are captured, and Maciste hands the child over to a beautiful Carthaginian princess as he tries to hide in her garden.  Years past, and the Punic Wars are in full force.  Fulvius returns to Carthage and helps in the defeat of the great city state.  There he is reunited with Maciste, who has been held in chains in a millstone and the now beautiful young woman Cabiria who was a chosen handmaiden of the princess.  This film is probably the prototype of the massive screen epic.  D.W. Griffith was so taken with the film that it clearly inspired some of the scenes he would create for his mad masterpiece Intolerance.  This film was the most expensive of its day, and the Italian film industry, in the wake of its none too glorious forays into Libya in 1912, celebrated the new Roman empire with many huge, expensive film epics like Cabiria.  The film is a true marvel.  It is quite enjoyable and technically and photographically astonishing.  The quality of our print is almost faultless.  With:  Gina Marangoni as Croessa the Nurse, Dante Testa as Kartholo the evil priest, Umberto Mozzato as Fulvius Axilla, Bartolomeo Pagano as Maciste his slave, Raffale Di Napoli as Bodastoret, Emilio Vardannes as Hannibal, Edoardo Davesnes as Hasdrubal, and Italia Manzini as the beautiful princess Sophonisba.  The role of Cabiria is played by Little Catena as a child and Letezia Quaranta as a young woman.  Notes:  The film does accurately depict some of the history of the Punic Wars — the defense of Syracuse using methods and devices designed by Archimedes; the fantastic generalship of Hannibal crossing the Alps; and General Scipio’s tremendous defeats of the forces of Hannibal and his brother the king Hasdrubal.  Screenplay and text by Gabriele D’Annuzio.  Music by Manlio Mazza.  Music performed by Jacques Gauthier.  Box-office gross:  $2,000,000.

 

THE CAMERAMAN.  1928.  70 minutes.  Silent Comedy. Buster Keaton.  Directed by Edward Sedgwick.  Buster Keaton plays an independent camera operator who falls head over heels in love with a beauty (Marceline Day) who works for a big newsreel operation.  The girl, charmed by the shy goose, gets him a scoop on a riot in Chinatown and he goes and gets it on film – or so he thinks.  When it seems that he hasn’t he loses any chance of getting a job with the company or getting the girl.  The smooth talking, big-time camera operator who is seeing the girl is Buster’s competition and seems to be winning the girl over until Buster gets a chance to redeem himself.  In the end, his talent, and his love conquers all.  This is a very charming comedy, full of the funny and clever grace notes of Keaton’s inimitable style.  It is one of many silent films that dealt with the making of films — with the camera as part of the story.  Very clearly shot on the streets of New York and environs its a handsomely designed and produced film.  For all Keaton fans and lovers of great silent comedy.  Notes:  Adaptation by Lew Lipton and Clyde Bruckman.  Continuity by Richard Schayer.  Titles by Joe Farnham.

 

CARMEN.  1915.  59 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Romantic Melodrama.  Cecil B. De Mille.  Prosper Merimee.  Directed by Cecil B. De Mille.  The famous story and opera about the straight-laced soldier who ruins himself for the love of the wild gypsy beauty Carmen.  When Carmen abandons him for the toreador Escamillo the story comes to its romantic peak.  Geraldine Farrar, a notable operatic star in the early years of the century, starred in several Paramount pictures directed by Cecil B. De Mille.  In this remarkably photographed silent version of Bizet’s Carmen she gives a much more animated and appealing performance than she does in De Mille’s Joan of Arc film Joan the Woman.  Undoubtedly Carmen was a role La Farrar had performed before.  The works of De Mille, whether of the silent era or the later epics, are masterful entertainments regardless of their artistic or intellectual merits.  This Carmen is no exception to that general rule.  An extremely entertaining, and remarkably well re-stored early silent film by a legendary filmmaker.  Wallace Reid who plays the jilted lover Jose, was a great popular star of the period and generally regarded as a gifted actor and fledgling director, would die at 32 after a long bout with physical and emotional problems after his part in a train crash.  With:  Pedro de Cordoba as Escamillo, William Elmer as Morales, Horace B. Carpenter as Pastia, Jeanie Macpherson as Fraquita, Anita King as Mercedes and Milton Brown as Brown.    Notes:  Music arranged and compiled in 1915 by Hugo Riesenfeld.  Performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra and conducted by Timothy Brock.  Photographed by Alvin Wyckoff.  Art direction by Wilfred Buckland.  Scenario by William C. DeMille. 

CASINO.  1995.  179 minutes.  Crime Melodrama.  Las Vegas.  Gambling.  Mafia.  Directed by Martin Scorcese.  Ace Rothstein is a professional gambler whose record for making money makes him a perfect man to head the Mafia’s gambling concerns in a big time Las Vegas Casino in the early ’60s.  The bosses trust him because he’s like a money making machine and his success with the Vegas racket brings them rich loot skimmed from the Casino’s take.  When they send hit man and enforcer Nicky Santoro to Vegas as insurance a wild, volatile element enters this money making paradise.  Rothstein, a lifetime buddy of Santoro has his hands full with Nicky but also with a beautiful hustler named Ginger McKenna, with whom he falls madly and tragically in love.  Scorcese’s Las Vegas is a variation on a theme about Vegas as a Mafia hell-and-heaven.  The film is told in flash back by the protagonist — Rothstein and Santoro [one is a dead man].  The imagery at the film’s beginning — Saul Bass’ credits intimating a fiery explosion in neon and fire sets the tone for the film.  It is, like Goodfellas about comradeship among dangerous men, dangerous men with ambitions and greed pressuring them.  Like the earlier film it is also about violence as an awesome, brutal, natural force and the sort of frenzy this violent kind of world generates.  The film has moments of raw power, but most of it seems too familiar.  The only surprise in the film is the determined and gritty performance of Sharon Stone as Ginger — a smart, good time broad with a weakness for a two bit hustler that ultimately helps to wreak havoc on Nicky and Ace’s paradise.  With:  Robert DeNiro is Sam “Ace” Rothstein, Sharon Stone is Ginger McKenna, Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro, James Woods as Lester Diamond, Don Rickles as Billy Sherbert, Alan King as Alan Stone, Kevin Pollak as Philip Green, L. Q. Jones as Pat Webb, Dick Smothers as Senator, Frank Vincent as Frank Martino.  Notes:  Photographed by Robert Richardson.  Screenplay by Scorcese and Nicholas Pileggi from the book by Pileggi.  Box-office gross:  $42,438,278.

CASINO ROYALE.  1967.  130 minutes.  Comedy.  James Bond Pastiche.  007.  <V1119>.  Directed by John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, and Joseph McGrath.  Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Woody Allen, Joanna Pettet, Orson Welles, Daliah Lavi, Deborah Kerr, Charles Boyer, William Holden, and Jean-Paul Belmondo are among the famous stars who took part in this send-off to the popular James Bond spy series.  Very loosely based on the novel of the name by Ian Fleming.  The film is mostly a jumble, and those looking for a Bond film in the more familiar sense will be really disappointed.  The jokes in the film most die on the screen, and all those famous and talented people before and behind the cameras can’t do a damn thing to make this case of overkill stay afloat.  Two hours is a long time to wait for the few good moments.  Notes:  Screenplay by wolf Mankowitz, John Law and Michael Sayers (Billy Wilder, Joseph Heller, Ben Hecht and Terry Southern are all alleged to have had a part in writing some of the film).  Photographed by John Wilcox, Jack Hildyard, and Nicholas Roeg.  Music by Burt Bacharach.  “The Look of Love” by Bacharach and Hal David received an Oscar nomination.  Box-office gross:  $10,200,000.  Cost:  approximately $25,000,000.

CASUALTIES OF WAR.  1989.  98 minutes.  Vietnamese War Drama.  Novel Into Film.  <V2434>.  Directed by Brian De Palma.  Story:  While on a back country patrol in Vietnam a young Army sergeant leads his men to a village where they kidnap and rape a girl.  One of the soldiers refuses to participate in the crime.  The girl is killed and the soldier reports the incident to the authorities.  Casualties Of War is one of the most under rated of the Vietnam war films.  The critical reaction to the film seems to have been more anti-De Palma backlash than realistic assessment of the film.  The story is told simply and honestly.  The usual cinematic tricks in a De Palma film are absent.  The story is everything and for once, the director’s script seems to be cogent (though the film’s final scenes — about the courts martial– seem too perfunctory).  The film’s flaws are those of every war film, there is no way to tell the story of soldiers in war without the cliches that have become second nature to the genre.  The actors can not do much to overcome the odds imposed by the type except play their roles honestly and Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox succeed at this completely.  Only Hamburger Hill and Go Tell The Spartans are better Vietnam film.  Box-office gross:  $7,375,144.

THE CAT AND THE FIDDLE.  1934.  68 minutes.  Musical Comedy.  Jeanette MacDonald. Directed by William K. Howard.  This was Jeanette MacDonald’s first film for MGM.  It’s very light fluff about a composing soubrette (MacDonald) and her egotistical and talented composer lover.  She becomes a success first, he can’t handle it.  There’s a wealthy suitor, a kindly professor, lots of musical friends and an endless amount of cuteness.  The film looks more like MacDonald’s Paramount work with the great Ernst Lubistch than the typical early Metro musical.  Her leading man, Ramon Novarro, a great romantic star of the silent era may surprise many with his music.  With: Frank Morgan, Charles Butterworth, Jean Hersholt, Vivienne Segal.  Notes:  Musical direction by Herbert Stothart.  Music and play by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach.  Photographed by Harold Rosson.  Screenplay by Bella and Samuel Spewack.  Songs include The Night Was Made For Love, She Didn’t Say Yes.

CAT BALLOU.  1965.  96 minutes.  Western Parody.  Jane Fonda.  Lee Marvin.  <V2299>.  Directed by Eliot Silverstein.  Before Blazing Saddles there was this film about Catherine Ballou, the prim and proper daughter of a nutty but nice rancher, who becomes an outlaw after her father is gunned down by a hired killer.  Catherine or Cat (her alias) leads, or is led by, a gang of none too brave young hustlers.  The story is of how Cat and her friends get revenge and of how they restore the legend of a broken down old gunslinger.  Jane Fonda is Cat in the period when Americans saw her as a cuddly comedienne.  With:  Michael Callan, Dwayne Hickman, Tom Nardini, John Marley, Reginald Denny, and Jay C. Flippen.  Nat “King” Cole and Stubby Kaye are the amiable chorus for the film — they are the balladeers singing the story.  An enjoyable parody of westerns and legend making in the west.  The film is dominated by the comic turn by movie bad guy Lee Marvin, as twins — a drunken ex-gunslinger and his black-clothed rival with a silver nose (bitten off in a fight).  The role turned Marvin into a frontline movie star.  There is a tendency towards cuteness that may grate on some.    Notes:  Academy Award for best actor (Marvin).  Nominations for screen adaptation (Walter Newman and Frank R. Pierson), song “Ballad of Cat Ballou” (Jerry Livingston and Mack David), scoring DeVol, and editing.  Box-office gross: $9,300,000.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF.  1958.  108 minutes.  Theatrical Drama.  Tennessee Williams.  American Theater.  Elizabeth Taylor.  Paul Newman.  <V53>.  Film of Tennessee Williams’ Southern gothic play about greed and love among the family of a Mississippi land baron.  Burl Ives plays Big Daddy Pollitt, a domineering man who is dying of cancer.  Paul Newman is his son Brick — an ex- football star with some curiously unspecified doubts driving him to drink and away from his beautiful, sexy wife Maggie, played by Elizabeth Taylor.  Big Daddy’s long suffering wife is played by Judith Anderson.  His hard working grind of a son Gooper (always overlooked for the favorite Brick) is played by Jack Carson.  Mrs. Gooper is Madeleine Sherwood.  The story takes place immediately after Big Daddy has just returned from a clinic.  Tennessee Williams’ stage production did not hide the fact that the thing bothering Brick was his the homosexuality of his best friend Skip (who never appears on screen).  The film skirts this issue in some wild ways, but it does not detract from the fact that this is a tremendously enjoyable show.  Newman was beginning to get his stride as an actor by the time he did this film.  He and Taylor are a stunning pair.  Taylor’s Maggie is  a cat with fine claws and Burl Ives makes Big Daddy a memorable caricature.  The rest of the cast is more than able.  Notes:  Screenplay by Brooks and James Poe.  Photographed by William Daniels.  Academy Award nominations for best picture, actor (Newman), actress (Taylor), direction, screenplay, and cinematography.  Box-office gross:  $8,785,162.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF.  1984.  122 minutes. Theatrical Drama.  Tennessee Williams.  American Theater.  <V1438>.  Directed by Jack Hofsiss.   Jessica Lange as Maggie, Tommy Lee Jones as Brick, and Rip Torn as Big Daddy. It is not nearly as entertaining as one might have expected.  Lange plays Maggie as a coy, and kittenish.  Tommy Lee Jones’ Brick is sullen.  Rip Torn, however,  is fun to watch as Big Daddy — even though he chews scenes prettily heavily.  Also with:  Penny Fuller, David Dukes and Kim Stanley as Big Mama.   Notes:  Available on laser disc and vhs video.

CAT PEOPLE.  1944.  73 minutes.  Horror.  Val Lewton.  <V211>.  Directed by Jacques Tourneur.  The famous “B” movie classic about a girl who turns into a panther.  Cat People is a delicate little horror film, with nice subtle touches and an even subtler wit.  Val Lewton, the film’s producer, specialized in turning his under budgeted films into stylish, small entertainments like this.  With:  Simone Simon, Kent Smith, tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Jack Holt, Alan Napier Elizabeth Dunne and Elizabeth Russell.  Notes:  Written by Dewitt Bodeen.  Photographed by Nicholas Muscura.  Music by Roy Webb.  Edited by Mark Robson.

CAT PEOPLE.  1982.   Horror.  Sexual Melodrama.  118 minutes. <V313>). Directed by Paul Schrader.  Nastasia Kinski, John Heard, Malcolm McDowell, Ruby Dee, and Glynis O’Connor.  Director and screenwriter Paul Schrader aims for something sensual and stylish, but it is more often gratuitously violent and lurid.  Kinski plays a virginal girl in New Orleans who discovers from a visiting brother (McDowell) about her family’s sordid past and their connection to the race of cat people who are energized and guided by their sexual lusts.  She conveniently works in a zoo.  There are some horrific moments in the film but at bottom it leaves one with a nasty, voyeuristic feeling.  Notes:  Screenplay by Alan Ormsby based on the original story and screenplay by Dewitt Bodeen.  Photographed by John Bailey.  Music by Giorgio Moroder with the theme by David Bowie.  Box-office gross:  $5,027,603.

THE CATERED AFFAIR.  1956.  95 minutes.  Domestic Drama.  Bette Davis.  <V2835>.  Directed by Richard Brooks.  Jane Hurley is getting married.  She and her fiancé Ralph, a school teacher only want a simple ceremony, nothing fancy.  Jane’s mother feels differently.  She missed the pleasure of seeing her wedding as a special day, and pushes for a wedding that would take nearly all the savings her husband has put together for 12 years to buy a New York hack.  The family, in a matter of days nearly self-destructs over this “catered affair.”  This film, based on a Chayefsky play, is one of those small films with a social conscience (like Marty and Come Back Little Sheba or Middle of the Night) that the studios put out for prestige and awards and critical attention.  Many of them were, like this film, little melodramas about working folk trying to make ends meet.  Invariably an aging, glamorous film actress played a role in it, as Davis does here.  She’s quite good, but the film, competent and well meaning, doesn’t rise above the run-of-the-mill dramaturgy of so many “little” films like it. With:  Bette Davis as Agnes Hurley, Ernest Borgnine as Tom Hurley, Debbie Reynolds as Jane, Barry Fitzgerald as Uncle Jack Conlan, Rod Taylor as Ralph Halloran, Robert Simon as Mr. Halloran, Madge Kennedy as Mrs. Halloran, Dorothy Stickney as Mrs. Rafferty, Carol Veazey as Mrs. Casey, Joan Camden as Alice and Ray Stricklyn as Eddie.  Notes:  Screenplay by Gore Vidal from a play by Paddy Chayefsky.  Photographed by John Alonzo.  Music by Andre Previn.

CATCH-22.  1970.   121 minutes.  Satire, World War II.  Novel Into Film.  Joseph Heller.  <V9>.  Directed by Mike Nichols.  Film version of the famous anti-war novel.  Mike Nichols’ aim was not as sure as one would have hoped for in this film.  It has a great deal of sweep — the opening scenes of the B52s taking off for flight in the dust is eerie but grand.  The actors are an impressive collection of eccentric, gifted talents — as an ensemble they offer us the only surprises the film has to offer — a look, a double take some odd sort of phrasing of a line or word.  There are a lot of little things that matter in this film, but collectively they still don’t save the empty feeling it leaves you with.  Very much worth seeing, but one mustn’t expect too much of it, especially if you have read the book.  With:  Alan Arkin, Richard Benjamin, Buck Henry, Orson Welles, Paula Prentiss, Jon Voight, Bob Balaban, Art Garfunkel, Anthony Perkins, Charles Grodin, Jack Gilford, Peter Bonerz, Marcel Dalio and Martin Sheen.  Notes:  Screenplay by Buck Henry.  Cinematography by David Watkins.  Box-office gross:  $12,500,000.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF.  1984.  122 minutes. Theatrical Drama.  Tennessee Williams.  American Theater.  Directed by Jack Hofsiss.   Jessica Lange as Maggie, Tommy Lee Jones as Brick, and Rip Torn as Big Daddy. It is not nearly as entertaining as one might have expected.  Lange plays Maggie as a coy, and kittenish.  Tommy Lee Jones’ Brick is sullen.  Rip Torn, however,  is fun to watch as Big Daddy — even though he chews scenes prettily heavily.  Also with:  Penny Fuller, David Dukes and Kim Stanley as Big Mama.   Notes:  Available on laser disc and vhs video.

CAUGHT IN A CABARET.  1914.  (2,053 ft) approx. 21 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume I Chaplin at Keystone Studios Directed by Chaplin and co-star Mabel Normand.  Some of the same themes of Making a Living are tried again.  The hilarious Mabel Normand is the femme in this one though, and Chaplin does not dominate the screen when she’s on it at the same time.  Chaplin is a barman/waiter who impersonates a Greek Ambassador.  Normand is a rich society miss, who is dissatisfied with her the “no (bank) account” nobleman she’s about to marry.  She and the fake ambassador strike up a happy courtship until the count takes Mabel and her high tone friends slumming in a low bar where none other than the harried Charlie works.  Then everything gives way to the usual Sennett chase.  Cast includes:  Harry McCoy, Alice Davenport, Joseph Swickard, Edgar Kennedy, Minta Durfee, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, Gordon Griffith, Alice Howell, and Wallace MacDonald.  Notes:  Photographed by Frank D. Williams.  Screenplay by Chaplin. 

 

THE CHAMPION.  1915.  (1,939ft.) Approx 19 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume II Chaplin at Essay Studios <V2893>.  Directed by Chaplin.  This film’s story is simple.  The irrepressible Chaplin figure happens onto the scene where a championship boxer is looking for sparring partners.  When he gets the job, he sits and waits his turn to be mauled by the big brute.  Before he goes in he loads up his glove with something that will give him a lethal punch.  Of course, he becomes the boxer and the tale goes on hilariously from there.  Cast includes:  Bud Jamison, Lloyd Bacon, Edna Purviance, Leo White, Carl Stockdale, Billy Armstrong, paddy McGuire, Ben Turin, and ‘Bronco’ Billy Anderson.  Notes:  Photographed by Rollie Totheroh and Harry Ensign.  Screenplay by Chaplin.

 

CHANG.  1927.  70 minutes. Silent.  Ecological Adventure.  Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack.  The story of Kur a Lao tribesman and his family in the Trans-Asian jungle [what is now Laos, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam].  With:  Kru, Chantui, Nah, Ladah, Bimbo, 500 Native Hunters, 400 Elephants, Tigers, Leopards & Other Denizens of the Wild.  Notes:  Music by Bruce Gaston, performed by Fong Naam.  Academic Award nominee for “artistic quality of production.

 

THE CHEAT.  1915.  59 minutes.  Melodrama.  Inter-racial melodrama.  Marital drama.  Smart Set.  Cecil B. De Mille.  Silent Cinema.  Directed by Cecil B. De Mille.  Sessue Hayakawa is Tori Arakau a wealthy Asian merchant who preys on the foibles of the flirtatious, and silly wife of a rich and powerful politician.  When Edith Hardy gambles the money for a fund raising campaign way on a risky stock investment she’s at a loss for how to recoup the money without wrecking her marriage and reputation.  She visits the charming, but rapacious Tori Arakau who gives her a loan for which the woman does not completely realize the price she must pay if she defaults.  When Arakau tries to redeem his loan it is in the form of an unwanted sexual advance on the naive woman — he marks her with a brand denoting his ownership.  Controversial and sensational at the time of its release, this film was also one of the most popular box-office successes of its time.  Hayakawa [whose most famous later role was that of the complex Japanese concentration camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai], became, for a while, a romantic sensation on American screens.  The film of course stereotypes the “hero” as decadently clever and cunning — alien in every since of the word to American values.  Interestingly, though the heroine’s foolishness is punished in many ways, the cavalier behavior of the man with whom she has placed her stock market gamble [a social and personal friend of her husband’s] is all but shrugged off.  When Fannie, to save herself, shoots Arakau in self defense and another man in Arakau’s employ is killed], her husband heroically and assumes the blame.  At the sensational trial, the evidence against him forces her to confess.  This confession, and her display of the awful mark placed on her by the Asian, reveals to an already hostile courtroom, a vile trait of the villain they abhor.  One of the most remarkable scenes in films occurs at this point — the genteel courtroom crowd turns into an frightening, howling lynch mob.  With:  Fannie Ward is Edith Hardy, and Jack Dean is Richard Hardy.  Notes:  Photographed by Alvin Wyckoff.  Scenario by Hector Turnbull and Jeanie Macpherson.  Art Direction by Wilfred Buckland.

 

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (ANDULASIAN DOG).  1928.  Silent (With musical track).  Directed by Luis Bunuel.  The famous experimental short film co-directed and designed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.  A great film that explores and toys with the medium in a fashion that belies the fact that it is now nearly 80 years since it was made.  The film is as shocking today as it was when it was released.  It also creates the same poles of opinion for and against it as art or obscenity. 

 

A CHILD OF THE BIG CITY.  1914.  “The story “traces the heroine Manechka/Mary’s evolution from a poor innocent seamstress to a monster of depravity and egotism.  Her ‘rise’ is paralleled by the fall of her idealistic admirer, Viktor, who finally commits suicide in face of her callous disregard.”   Atypical of the romantic melodramas of the period, Bauer’s heroine is the lover whose eyes stray, the one who pursues, while the hero is victimized.  Its a sophisticated notion in an early Russian film that chronicles the dramas and comedies of sexuality later popularized in American films by DeMille and Swanson.  With:  Elena Smirnova as Manechka/Mary, Nina Koxlianinova as Man’ka as a child, Mikhail Salarov as Viktor Kratsov, Arsenii Bibikov as Kramsaki, Lonid Lost as Kratsov’s lackey, Lidiia Tridenskaia ass Masha, the laundress, and Emma Bauer as a dancer.   Notes:  Directed by Evgenii Bauer.  Photographed by Boris Zavelev.  Alternate title A Girl from the Street.

 

CHRISTMAS EVE.  1913.  Directed by Wladlyslaw Starewicz.  A lovely animated parable about shenanigans by the devil to disrupt Christmas.  With Ivan Mozzhukhin as the Devil, Olga Obolenskaia as Oksana, Lidiia Tridenskaia as Solokha, P. Lophuhkin as Vakula, A. Kheruvimov as Golova, and Pavel Knorr as Chubb.  Notes:  Screenplay and photography by Starewicz.  Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol.

 

THE CIGARETTE GIRL OF MOSSELPROM.  1924.  78 minutes.  Silent.  Comedy.  Soviet Union.  Directed by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky.  A lovely cigarette girl draws the attentions of a crew of film makers.  She’s asked to be the leading lady in a film project.  One of the young crew members falls in love with her as have a shy clerk, and a corrupt government official.  After moments of doubt about who really loves her and some confusion about who she loves (the young cameraman) all ends happily.  This is one the least doctrinaire and most enjoyable films of the peak Soviet filmmaking era between mid ’20s and 30s.  Director Zhelyabuzhsky had a fluid camera sense and there are some nice and amusing camera tricks.    With:  Yulia Solntseva, Igor Ilinksy, Anna Dmokhovskya and L. Baratov.  Notes:  Scenario by Alexei Faiko and Fyodor Otsep.

 

CIVILIZATION.  1916.  86 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Pacifist Allegory.  Anti-War Film.  Directed by Thomas Ince.  This film is a parable or an allegory about the horrors of war, and the fatuous  men who lead nations into war.  Set in a mythical land called Wredpryd, the story revolves around the efforts of pacifists to keep the country for going into a needless war.  The desire for war by the populous and the leaders rules the day, until, the king of the country receives a revelation about the evils and disaster he has wrought on his on people.  This film is said to have been one of the reasons that inspired Woodrow Wilson to keep America out of World War I.  It is a very sentimental work, full of startlingly cogent if somewhat pedestrian (to present day viewers) symbolism, but it is a major early American epic.  The film does not have the reputation of later anti-war films like All Quiet on the Western Front, but it very clearly influenced writers and filmmakers of the next generation.  Effective and influential when initially released, within months of that release, however, America was fully engaged in the “war to end all wars.”  Featuring:  Howard Hickman as Count Ferdinand, Enid Markey as Katheryn Haldemann, Herschel Mayall as the King of Wredpyrd, Lola May as Queen Eugenie, George Fisher as The Christus, J. Frank Burek as Luther Rolf.  Notes:  Screenplay by C. Gardner Sullivan.  Original 1916 score by Victor Schertzinger.  Assistant directors — Reginald Barker, Walter Edwards, David Hartford, Jay Hunt and J. Parker Read.  Photographed by Irvin Willat, Joseph August and Clyde de Vinna.

 

COLLEGE.  1927./6 reels/5,916 ft.  Silent.  Comedy.  Directed by James Horne.  Buster Keaton plays a college bound bookworm.  At his high school graduation the boy’s commencement address he gives a tirade against his peers’ obsession with star athletes and athletic prowess, consequently alienating the girl of his dreams and his chief nemesis – the Saturday hero super jock.  At college he finds that his superior attitude is even less well received and discovers that the only way to win his sweetheart’s hand is to become a star athlete himself.  In the end the brainy klutz wins the girl, but not without many misadventures.  One of Keaton’s least known comedies it is just about as good as the best.  With Ann Cornwall, Harold Goodwin, Snitz Edwards, and Florence Turner.  Notes:  Screenplay by Carl Harbaugh and Bryan Foy.  Photographed by Dev Jennings and Bert Haines. 

 

CORNER IN WHEAT.  The title of a collection of D. W. Griffith’s early short films that includes:  Those Awful Hats [1909]; The Sealed Room [1909]; Corner in Wheat [1909]; The Unchanging Sea [1910]; His Trust [1911]; The New York Hat [1912]; An Unseen Enemy [1912]; and The Mothering Heart [1913].  Total running time:  118 minutes.  see under individual titles for description and credits.

 

CORNER IN WHEAT.  1909.  Melodrama.  Wheat Speculation.  Directed by D.W. Griffith.  A solemn but impressive melodrama that indicts the cornering of the wheat market by a wealthy speculator.  Griffith forcefully depicts the difference between the life styles and habits of the speculator and his associates and those of the poor farmers and workers who suffer when his speculation proves quite successful.  The ironic ending, with the rich wheat pirate meeting his end in a sea of wheat, personifies the melodramatic genius of Griffith.

 

THE COUNT.  1916.  (2,017ft.) approx. 20 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume IV Chaplin at Mutual Studios (Pt. I) Very early Chaplin short.  The Tramp is a tailor’s apprentice who can’t keep from fowling up things in the shop.  The tailor, who has social pretensions, finds only one use for the Tramp — when a visiting count turns down an invitation to the tailor’s dinner he asks him to pose as the nobleman.  All goes well, especially for the Charlie, until the real count shows up.  This film is also available in the collection called CHARLIE CHAPLIN CARNIVAL (V457) as well as in this collection.  Directed by Chaplin.  Cast includes:  Eric Campbell, Edna Purviance, Charlotte Mineau, Leo White, James T. Kelley, Frank J. Coleman, Eva Thatcher, Albert Austin, John Rand, Stanley Sanford, Leota Bryan, and Loyal Underwood.

 

CRAZY RAY see under ENTR’ACTE

 

THE CROWD.  1928.  104minutes. /9 reels/8,538 ft.  Silent.  Social Melodrama.  Directed by King Vidor.  At the height of the Roaring ’20s director King Vidor had a strong desire to produce a film about the average working man in a huge, impersonal big city.  A confident young man, a clerk in a huge firm, feels sure of himself and his future.  He goes on a blind date with a friend and falls in love with his date.  They marry, but after five years he still has not improved his position at work.  After winning a prize in an advertising slogan campaign, he feels his luck has changed.  It has, but only for the worst.  Vidor’s tale is that of the harsh realities that beset the average man, the failure and humiliations of the mediocre.  The film does end on an optimistic and hopeful note but the stark realism and the films excellent film technique give it a special berth among great silent American films.  With:  James Murray, Eleanor Boardman, Bert Roach, and Estelle Clark.  Notes:  Written by Vidor.  Photographed by Henry Sharp.

 

THE CURE. 1917.  (1,834ft.) approx. 17 minutes.  Silent.    A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume VI Chaplin at Mutual Studios (Pt. III) . Directed by Chaplin.  Cast includes:  Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell, Henry Bergman, John Rand, Albert Austin, James T. Kelley, Frank J. Coleman, Leota Bryan, Tom Wood, Janet Miller sully, and Loyal Underwood.  Notes:  Photography by Totheroh and Foster.  Story and screenplay by Chaplin.

 

DADDY LONG LEGS.  1919.  7 reels [90 minutes].  Silent Cinema.  Romantic Melodrama.  Mary Pickford.  Novel Into Film.  Directed by Marshall Neilan.  Mary Pickford is the pugnacious, but lovely orphan Judy Abbott who, thanks to the largess of a mysterious benefactor is, rescued from the drudgery of her orphanage life and sent to a school and college where she becomes a proper young lady and a writer.  Not long after graduating from college she meets, among the elite friends of  her school companions, a gentleman with whom she falls in love, not realizing that he is, in fact, the man she has so good-humoredly nick named Daddy Long Legs.  Pickford grows from a twelve year old gamin into a charming young woman in this entertaining film, one of her best.  Marshal Neilan’s direction is clever and stylish and the camera work, by Charles Rosher, is equal to the director’s demands.  Charming.  With:  Milla Davenport as Mrs. Lippett, Percy Haswell as Miss Pritchard, Fay Lemport as Angelina Wykoff, Mahlon Hamilton as Jarvis Pendleton, Lillian Langdon as Mrs. Pendleton, Betty Bouton as Julia Pendleton, Audrey Chapman as Sallie McBride, Marshall Neilan as Jimmie McBride, Carrie Clark Ward as Mrs. Semple and Wesley Barry as Judy’s orphan pal.  Notes:  Screenplay by Agnes Christine Johnston from the novel and play as Jean Webster.  Cinematography by Henry Cronjager and Charles Rosher.

 

DAYDREAMS.  1915.  Silent.  Early Russian Cinema.  Romantic Melodrama.  Alternative title Deceived.  A young widower mourns the loss of his beautiful wife.  The woman’s image is everywhere — on strangers in the street or on an opera singer at the theater.  He allows himself to be deceived by a woman he thinks looks like hid dead wife.  She, in turn, becomes increasingly angered by his obsession.  This film is the most cinematically ambitious of the Bauer works in this collection of early Russian films.  It’s strikingly photographed and directed though it is at times extremely morbid in presenting the protagonist’s mania about his dead wife.  With:  Aleksandr Vyrubov as Sergei Nikolaevich Nedelin, N. Chernabaeva as Tina Viarskaia, and Viktor Aresn as Sol’skii an artist.  Notes:  Directed by Evgenii Bauer.  Screenplay by M. Basov and Valentin Turkin based on the Burges la Marte by Georges Rodanbach.  Photography by Boris Zavelev.

 

DEATH’S MARATHON.  1912. 15 minutes.  Romantic Melodrama.  D.W. Griffith.  Two successful young business partners are drawn to the same woman.  The girl decides to marry the more ardent of the two.  At first the marriage is idyllic but slowly the husband becomes obsessed with gambling to the point of embezzling his company’s cash reserves.  The film is shocking in its depiction of suicide, surely one of the earliest such scenes in film history.  The film ends with a hopeful note about the revival of love between the widow and the partner left behind.  A fascinating early Griffith effort.

 

THE DEPARTURE OF A GREAT OLD MAN.  1912.  Early Russian Cinema.  Leo Tolstoi.  Documentary.  “Nothing in Protazanov’s career before this 1912 Tolstoi film would have hinted at its provocative originally.  For this dramatized account of the great writer’s last days, despite its interpolation of documentary footage of the real locations and considerable efforts at authenticity, did not cast his widow in a flattering light.  As a result, the Tolstoi family took successful legal action to have it banned.  Nothing daunted the producers decided to add an even more controversial ‘apotheosis’ for the export market which shows the heretic Tolstoi being received into heaven.”  With:  Vladimir Shaternikov as Lev Tolstoi, O Petrova as Sof’ia Andreevna, Mikhail Tamarov as Vladimir Chertkov, and Elizaveta Thiemann as Alkesandra L’vovna.  Notes:  Directed by Iakov Protazanov and Elizaveta Thiemann.  Screenplay by Isaak Teneromo.  Photographed by George Meyer and Aleksandr Levitskii.

 

DIARY OF A LOST GIRL.  1929.  100 minutes.  Silent.  Germany. Drama.  Directed by G.W. Pabst.  Louise Brooks is Thymiane, the daughter of a widowed druggist who has re-married to a younger woman.  The druggist’s caddish assistant seduces and impregnates the girl and she, to escape shame, is forced to give up the child and go to a “school for lost girls.”  While their a friend from home, a penniless baron, go on an escapade which ultimately leads them to a brothel where Thymiane, becomes a house favorite.  This elegant, erotic masterpiece one of two works by the German master Pabst (the other was  Pandora’s Box) to exploit the sensuality and the great American beauty Louise Brooks.  Like many European works of the time, this film’s has mature and uncensored themes and actions.  Pabst constructs a stylishly cynical world.  A stunning work of cinema art.  With:  Fritz Rasp, Valeska Gert, Joseph Rovensky, Vera Palolova, Franciska Kinz, Andre Roanne, and Andrews Engelman.  Notes:  Script by Rudolph Leon based on the novel by Margarethe Boehme.  Photographed by Sepp Allgeier.  Musical direction by Francois Chevassu.  Original Music by Robert Viger (Quartet), Alain Bernaud (Solo Piano) Selections for “Sonata for Arpegionne” and the “Quintette in C” by Franz Schubert.

 

DOCKS OF NEW YORK.  1928.  95minutes./8 reels/ 7,202ft.  Silent.  A simple story is enveloped in a very sophisticated cinematic package.  The great  Josef von Sternberg (who was to direct the great popular pastiches starring Marlene Dietrich in the early ’30s) displays his considerable technical and directorial skills in this story of love and redemption on the docks of New York.  A stevedore rescues a girl who tries suicide.  They fall in love against a backdrop of seamy sailors’ bars and bad relationships.  With George Bancroft, Betty Compton, Olga Baclanova, Clyde cook, Mitchell Lewis, and Gustav von Seyferritz. Screenplay by Jules Furthman from a story by John Monk Saunders called Dockwalloper.  Photographed by Harold Rosson.

 

A DOG’S LIFE. 1917.  1809ft.  Silent Comedy.  Charlie Chaplin.  A literal title if ever there was one.  The Tramp is a true vagrant.  He rescues and young pub from a pack of dogs and consequently endears himself to the animal.  They have a pretty good relationship and quite a few trials.  The story includes a variety of run ins with some immigrants and of course a young girl is among them.  Chaplin slapstick from his days with Mutual films.  With:  Edna Purviance, Kitty Bradbury, Albert Austin, Henry Bergman, Loyal Underwood, and Eric Campbell.  A segment of a series called Charlie Chaplin Carnival. 

 

DON JUAN.  1926.  113 minutes.  Silent.  Romantic Drama.  John Barrymore.  Directed by Alan Crosland.  “Mr.” John Barrymore is the star of this late silent film about the amorous Spanish grandee.  In a prologue the audience is introduced to Don Juan as a child.  We see his mother, Dona Isobel, and her lover caught by his angry, shocked father, Don Jose.  The lover is imprisoned alive in the walls of the castle — Dona Isobel cast out into the streets.  As time pasts Don Jose’s home is filled with women he has seduced and then abandons — the young Don Juan a willing apprentice to this genteel debauchery.  When one of the spurned women fatally stabs Don Jose, his dying words to his son are to distrust the love of women.  Years past.  We next meet Don Juan in his luxurious palace in the Rome of the Borgias.  There he has many beautiful women at his beck and call and his reputation attracts the attention of the Borgia court, especially the beautiful Lucrezia. He, however, is interested in Adriana della Varnese, the lovely and innocent daughter of an opposition count.  This film is an account of the intrigue that surrounds this love story.  As Don Juan, Barrymore, “the Great Profile”, plays him as a good-humored rake.  Barrymore seems to be playing Don Juan as an ironic hero (much in the same vein as Douglas Fairbanks would in his last sound film (The Private Life of Don Juan) — its a witty, stylish performance.  The film is handsome, wonderfully photographed and filled with romance.  As Adriana, Mary Astor is lovely, and Myrna Loy plays one of the exotic young women she seemed doomed to be typecast as, early in her career, especially in silents.  With:  Jane Winto as Dona Isobel, John Roche, as Leandro, Warner Oland as Cesare Borgia, Estelle Taylor as Lucrezia, Mantagu Love as Count Giano Donati, Willard Louis as Pedrillo, Joseph Swickart as Duke della Varnese.  Notes: Screenplay by Bess Meredyth, “inspired by the Legend of the Greatest Lover of all Ages.”  The score is performed by the New York Philharmonic.  Titles by Walter Anthony and Maude Fulton.  Photography by Byron Haskins.  Art Direction by Ben Carré.

 

DON Q. SON OF ZORRO.  1925.  110 minutes.  Silent Films.  Action Adventure.  Douglas Fairbanks.  Directed by Donald Crisp.  Douglas Fairbanks stars as the cavalier Don Diego de Vega or Don Q, son of the famous masked hero, Zorro.  Don Diego is in Spain, just as his father had been, for his education and to gain admission at the court of the Queen of Spain.  Much beloved and respected at court, he is chosen to escort a notable visitor from the Hapsburg court in Madrid.  This makes him powerful enemies including his rival for the attentions of the beautiful Dolores de Muro.  When the visiting Archduke is assassinated, Don Q is dishonored, but vows to clear his and his family name.  Like his other action epics of the late ’20s, Don Q is feathery light, full of wit and humor, and the boyish exuberance.  Not as exciting or epic as Robin Hood or The Three Musketeers or The Black Pirate but quite enjoyable none-the-less.  Donald Crisp [who would win an supporting acting Oscar as the father in Ford How Green Was My Valley almost 20 years later] directed this film and appears as Don Q’s ambitious and jealous rival, Don Sebastian.  The lovely Mary Astor [all of 19 when this film was made] is the heroine, Dolores de Muro.  With:  Jack McDonald as General de Muro, Jean Hersholt as Don Fabrique, Stella De Lanti as The Queen, Warner Oland as The Matsado, Lottie Pickford Forrest as Lola, Albert MacQuarrie as Colonel Matsado.  Notes:  Screenplay by Jack Cunningham.  Photographed by Henry Sharp.

 

DRAMA IN A GYPSY CAMP NEAR MOSCOW.  1908. Directed, written, and photographed by Vladimir Siversen.  With a cast of gypsies.  Kidnapping and other miscellaneous chicanery are what binds this very naturalistic filmic tale.  The film is almost documentary in style.  The gypsy bands in the film are not actors but real gypsies acting out scenes for the filmmaker.

 

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.  There have been numerous attempts at presenting this melodrama about science, faith, and scientific principle from the pen of Robert Louis Stevenson.  It has been one of the most serviceable horror stories for films and its appeal is obvious, though the story has changed.  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Part of the Early Silent Film Collection.  <V2405>.  The first film based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story is still an impressive display of film pyrotechnics.  It was produced by James Cruze who would serve time in Hollywood as actor, director, and studio head throughout the 1920s and 1930s.  This film was done in 1911.  Time approx. 16minutes.

 

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.  1920.  63 minutes.  [7 reels].  Silent Cinema.  Horror.  Romantic Melodrama.  John Barrymore.  Robert Lewis Stevenson.  Directed by John S. Robertson.  John Barrymore plays the tormented double personality Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in this 1920 adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s classic parable of science and morality.  The adaptation varies significantly from the details of the later film versions.  The script seems to have been designed to   With:  Martha Mansfield as Millicent Carew, Brandon Hurst as Sir George Crew, Charles Lane as Dr. Richard Lanyon, George Stevens as Poole, Nita Naldi as Gina, Louis Wolheim as the Music Hall Owner, Cecil Clovelly as Edward Enfield, and J. Malcolm Dunn as John Utterson.  Notes:  Produced by Adolph Zukor.  Written by Clara Beranger from Stevenson’s novel.  Cinematography by Roy F. Overbaugh.

 

DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER.  1922.  180 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Espionage Thriller.  German Cinema.  Fritz Lang.  Directed by Fritz Lang.  Rudolf Klein-Rogge is the master villain Dr. Mabuse, a character not unlike Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Dr. Moriarity, but one whose psychological and emotional antecedents are with the forbidding Dr. Caligari of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Mabuse, like Holmes is a master of disguises, but he also has the ability, like Caligari, to use almost supernatural like powers of persuasion, including hypnosis, to achieve his ends.  The strongest of men and women often can not resist coming under his sway.  Those ends, are often to deceive and make him the most dangerous criminal mine in Europe.  He is often pursued by the stolid detective Wenk, who must develop the ability to fight off his powers.  Mabuse, a character to whom Lang would return twice more in his career, is one of the creations Kracauer refers to as “cruel tyrants” in From Caligari to Hitler.  He is a man capable of driving nemesis and minion to the brink of madness if not complete delirium.  Set in world of powerful men and the café society, the story operates under an aura of intrigue and elegance.  Though Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is attributed with great social significance by the director, the film, like his earlier classic Spies and many of his later psychological melodramas are works steeped in pop intrigue fiction and pulp action fantasies – stylistically the film resembles the popular serials of the day.  Lang’s second wife, Thea von Harbou who would be his collaborator as screenwriter throughout his career in Germany was the screenwriter for this film.  As collaborative artist they were apparently on the same wave length.  There marriage, however, began and ended under conditions they could have scripted themselves.  With:  Rudolf Klein-Rogge is Dr. Mabuse.  Aud Egede Nissen is Cara Carozza, Gertrude Welcker is Graefin Told, Alfred Abel is Graf Told, Anita Berber is Taenzerin im Frack, Grete Berger is Fine, Paul Biensfeldt as Mann, der die Pistole becommt, Julius Falkenstein as Karsten, Bernhard Goetzke as Detective Wenk, Lil Dagover, Max Adalbert and Dernst Pabst.  Notes:  Produced by Erich Pommer.  Written by Lang with Thea von Harbou from the novel by Norbert Jacques.  Cinematography by Carl Hoffmann.

 

THE DRAGONFLY AND THE ANT.  1913.  Directed by Wladlyslaw Starewicz.  A variation of the Ant and the Grasshopper fable this live animation, is a work of pure imagination and genius.  It’s really fascinating to see this level of sophistication in so early a Russian film.  Notes:  Screenplay, editing, photography, and art direction are by Starewicz.  Story based on the Krylov fable.

 

THE EAGLE.. 1925.  7 reels/6,755ft.  Silent.  Romantic Melodrama.  Rudolph Valentino.  Directed by Clarence Brown.  Rudolph Valentino had not done a film in two years when he was persuaded by the Schenck organization to do this film.  It was clearly an opportunity to create a popular hero like Douglas Fairbanks’ Zorro, released just the previous year.  The Story is that of a dashing Russian nobleman who turns down the advances of Catherine the Great and is branded by her a traitor and deserter.  Meanwhile, his father has just had the family’s estates stolen from him by a villainous neighbor, who has a beautiful daughter the hero has rescued from danger while in Petersburg.  And so on and so on—–.  In this film Valentino would give probably his best performance.  It was to be his next to last film.  The film has action, dash and some very sophisticated cinematic tricks.  Very enjoyable entertainment.  With:  Vilma Banky, Louise Dresser, Albert Conti, and James Marcus.  Directed by Clarence Brown.  Titles:  George Marion.  Screenplay by Hans Kraly based on the novel Dubrovsky by Alexander Pushkin.  Photography by Dev Jennings and George Barnes.

 

…. Directed by

The Earrings of Madame de. Directed by Max Ophuls. In French with English subtitles. The earrings of Madame de… is the perfect cinematic romance. It’s trio of lovers work at their peak as actors and movie stars. Charles Boyer as General Andre de, Danille Darrieux as Countess de and Vittorio de Sica play lovers whose fate is ruled by a careless lie and a beautiful pair of diamond earrings. With Jean Debuucourt, Jean Galland, and Mireille Perray as an excellent supporting cast.

• Charles Boyer as General André de…
• Danielle Darrieux as Countess Louise de…
• Vittorio De Sica as Baron Fabrizio Donati, an Italian diplomat
• Jean Debucourt as Rémy, a jeweler
• Jean Galland as Bernac, an acquaintance of André
• Mireille Perrey as Nounou, Louise’s maid
• Lia Di Leo as Lola, André’s mistress
• Serge Lecointe as Jérome Rémy, Rémy’s son (uncredited)

EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA.  1992.  Varying lengths.  See under individual titles for complete contents.  Restoration project led by Yuri Tsivian in partnership with the Central Film Museum, Moscow.  English translation by Julian Graffy, with subtitling by John Minchinton.  Accompanying music improvised and performed by Neil Brand.  Re-distributed by the British Film Institute [BFI].  The films are available under the collection of ten video volumes that include:  Volume I Beginnings — Total running time of titles in this volume is approximately 38 minutes.  Volume  II.  Folklore and Legend.  Total running time approximately 55 minutes.  Volume III Starewicz’s Fantasies –Volume IV Provincial Variations — Approximate running time for the following titles is 55 minutes. — Volume V Chardynin’s Pushkin.  Approximated running time for the following titles is 45 minutes. — Volume VI Class Distinctions.  Volume VII Evgenii Bauer.  Volume VIII Iakov Protazanov.  Volume IX High Society.  Total Running time of 100 minutes.  X The End of An Era.  Total Running time of 72 minutes.

 

EARLY SILENT FILM COLLECTION.  Various titles listed below.  <V2405>.    This is a collection of early motion pictures that were transferred from 8mm film to video.  The quality is surprisingly good though some adjustments will have to made to read the titles in several of the filmed sequences.  (Using contrast/brightness controls).  Included are:  The Great Train Robbery.  When this film was first show in nickelodeons and on vaudeville stage screens it so shocked audiences by its novelty that many people left the theaters in fear.  The shot of the train heading straight for the camera was the most visceral image people had ever seen.  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  The first film based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story is still an impressive display of film pyrotechnics.  It was produced by James Cruze who would serve time in Hollywood as actor, director, and studio head throughout the 1920s and 1930s.  This film was done in 1911.  Time approx. 16minutes.  Melies Tales of Terror is a collection of magical illusions by French magician and early film practitioner George Melies.  Melies work is still often a wonder even though you can see through the tricks.  Lumieres First Picture Show.  Another French film pioneer used the camera to explore the medium early in the 1900s.  Most of his shots are of roving, pictorial images and not an attempt at stories.  Compiled in 1990.  Approximately 42minutes. total running time.

 

EARTH.  1930.  69 minutes.  In Ukrainian with English subtitles.  Soviet-Union (Ukrainian).  Drama.  Directed by Alexander Dovzhenko.  A work as elemental in its presentation as it’s title.  Doctrinaire as it seems sometimes it is a remarkably, emotional work most of the time.  At others, it love affair with the common man is trying.  Still, its a major work by a great Soviet film maker.  With:  Stephan Shkurat as Opanas, Semen Svashenko as Basil the activist, Julia Solntseva as Opana’s daughter, Ellen Maximova as Basil’s fiancée, V. Krasenko as Old Peter and with:  Nicholas Nademski and I. Franko.  Notes:  Photographed by Danylo Demutsky.  Named one of the 10 greatest films of all time at the International Film Critics Symposium.

 

EASY STREET.  1917.  (1,757ft.).  approx. 18 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume VI Chaplin at Mutual Studios (Pt. III) Directed by Chaplin.  Cast includes:  Edna Purviance, Henry Campbell, Albert Austin, Henry Bergman, Lloyd Underwood, Leota Bryan, Tom Wood, Frank J. Coleman, Leo White, Lloyd Bacon, Charlotte Mineau, James T. Kelley, Janet Miller Sully, and John Rand.

 

THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG.  1927.  89 minutes.  Silent.  Soviet Union.  St. Petersburg, Russia — Russian Revolution of 1917 — Workers.  Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin.  After the birth of one more child, another mouth to feed, the father of a peasant youth sends the young man and a daughter to St. Petersburg to find work.  When he arrives it is in the midst of a workers’ strike.  He finds himself among a number of other peasants hired to take the place of the strikers.  Because he knows one of the ring-leaders, he is tricked into betraying the man.  When he discovers this outrage he attacks the capitalist owners of the factory only to be subdued and arrested.  He is freed only to go to war in 1917.  The horrors of war, the exploitation of the army and the ruling elites leads him to join forces with the Communist where they bring about the fall of St. Petersburg.  With:  Alexander Chiliakov, Vera Baronovskaia, Ivan Chevelev, V. Oblenski, A. Gromov, Sergei Kororov, and V. Chuvelev.  Notes:  This is one of several titles from Kino Video in a series called Red Silents:  Visions of a Worker’s State.  The quality of this tape is astonishingly clear and viewable.  It was one of many Soviet silents restored by Mosfilm in 1969.  Pudovkin makes an appearance in this film as a German general.  Photographed by Anatoli Golovnya.  Script by Nathan Zarkhi.  Russian inter-titles with English subtitles by Professor Steven P. Hill.

 

ENTR’ACTE  and CRAZY RAY.  1924.  10 mins and 20 minutes. (approximate).  Silent.  Directed by Rene Clair.  These two short surrealistic classics are pure celebrations of the cinematic medium.  Clair does nothing more than make almost magical experimentation with the camera.  The technique is that of a balletic montage of images, editing, free roaming camera movement and odd angles.  We are either on a funeral cortege out of control ENTR’ACTE or we, like the actors in CRAZY RAY wake up a Paris that is suddenly void of all activity  — only a few people seem to have fallen through a time warp — everything and everybody else is frozen in time and space.  A few adventurers explore all of the city during this phase.  Both short films’ imagery can be interchangeable — time, motion, speed, light, and magic are all explored randomly and joyfully.  Many will find these wonderful short experimental works far less intimidating and unsettling than they would Bunuel’s great UN CHIEN ANDALOU.  Notes:  The scenario for ENTR’ACTE is by Francis Picabia.  Picabia, Mlle. Friss of the Ballet Suedois, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray appear in the film.  It ends with a hilarious moment of edited magic.  Both films can be defined as surrealistic slapstick.

 

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR. WEST IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSHEVIK.  Silent.  1924.  78 minutes.  Soviet Union.  Satire.  <V3281>.   Directed by Lev Kuleshov.  Kuleshov’s broad satire of American naiveté about communist and communism is only fitfully amusing.  It seems longer than it is.  Mr. West is a YMCA official who comes to visit the “new” Soviet Union with only the most stereotypical notions of what the Soviets are like.  When he arrives he becomes the ploy of a group of unscrupulous underworld types.  His saviors turn out to be true Soviets.  Kuleshov and the other artists who worked on this film appear to be enjoying their efforts.  With:  Porfiri Podobed, Boris Barnet, and Vsevolod Pudovkin.  Notes:  Sets by Pudovkin.  Photographed by Alexander Levitsky.

 

THE FALL OF THE ROMANOV DYNASTY.  1927.  90 minutes.  In Russian with English subtitles.  Documentary — Soviet Union–History — Russian History — Romanov Dynasty.  Directed by Esther Shub.  Rare footage of the last years of the Czarist regime are shown in this film.  Some of it is amazing, some very familiar.  Shub’s political instincts are of course designed to show the venal nature of the aristocrats and the monarchy.  As propaganda for the new Soviet state it was masterly work — images, not words are used majestically.  With:  Tsar Nicholas II, Pavel Miliukov, Alexander Kerensky, and V. I. Lenin.

 

FAUST.  1926.  116 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  German Cinema.  F. W. Murnau.  German Literature.  Johann Wolfgang Goethe.  British Literature.  Christopher Marlowe.  Directed by F. W. Murnau.   Kino video has restored this Murnau adaptation of the Faust parable with a script that borrows from both Goethe and Marlowe.  The film is pictorially splendid, with beautiful black and white photography by Carl Hoffmann, and marvelous visual imagery.  This is the famous story of the righteous, generous Dr. Faustus who becomes the pawn in a wager between Mephistopheles and the Archangel Michael.    The evil Mephisto bets that Faust, the most virtuous man on earth, can be seduced into evil.  If he can, man will be left at the mercy of the forces of Hell.  When he first approaches Faust, Mephisto is repulsed.  On seeing, Faust’s anguish over the horrors and perfidy created by the Black Death, Mephisto sees an opportunity at tricking the honorable man.  He offers him, for a day, powers to heal the suffering from which he hopes to lure a contract to eternal damnation.  In order to attain his end, Mephisto returns Faust to his youth in an effort to lead him into a life of sin and perfidy, but the young man is instead drawn irretrievably to the beauty and purity of the virtuous Marguerite whom he also must tempt.  Murnau’s imagination has produced a work of beauty and style.  Rich in period detail, the film has a power only possible in the greatest of silent films.  This Faust is an endlessly intriguing work by a great film artist.  Emil Jannings, as Mephisto, gives a wickedly clever performance, the kind of performance one does not associate with the stolid, powerful star of the classics The Last Man and The Blue Angel.  With:  Eric Barclay as the duke of Parma, Hans Brausewetter as the Farmboy, William Dieterle as Valentin, Gösta Ekman as Faust, Werner Fuetterer as Archangel, Yvette Guilbert as Marthe, Camilla Horn as Marguerite, Emil Jannings as Mephisto, Lothar Muethel as the Friar, Hanna Ralph as the Duchess of Parma, and Frieda Richard as the Mother.  Notes:  Produced by Erich Pommer.  Screenplay by Hans Kyser adapted from Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Christopher Marlowe.  Cinematography by Carl Hoffmann.  Music by Timothy Brock and Werner R. Heymann.

 

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES and other films by D. W. Griffith.  1909-1913.  Total Running time.  90 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  D. W. Griffith.  Social Dramas.  Subtitled Social Commentary in the Biograph 1901-1913.  Kino Video compilation produced for video by David Shepard.  Music for The Female of the Species was composed by Zoran Borisavljevic.  Sydney Jill Lehman composed the remaining scores.  All titles photographed by Billy Bitzer.  Though no credits are listed actors [some of whom will be recognizable by those with a discerning eye] included Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Robert Harron, Donald Crisp, and Lionel Barrymore.  The titles included:

• The Redman’s View. 1909.  9 minutes [approximately].  Native Americans.  Romance.  Scenic, simple story of the forced evacuation of a small Indian village by a gang of white vigilantes.  Griffith’s images evoke the arbitrary nature in which Native Americans were forced to leave their land and how it brought suffering, pain, and shame.  A rare early film that presented a positive depiction of American Indians.   There is also a love story between a young brave of the tribe and the daughter of the exiled old chieftain.  The print is of excellent quality.
• In the Border States.  1910.  20 minutes [approximately].  The Civil War.  A story depicting the Civil War begins with the departure of a soldier from his wife and children and home.  The soldiers are sent off with tears and celebration to fight the war.  The images are crisply shot and stunningly photographed.  Sharp melodramatic images are used – a Union soldier’s departure from his home.  A scene of Confederate soldiers foraging for food.  The daughter of a Union soldier aids a Confederate soldier caught behind enemy lines, even though she disdains him as the enemy.  A Union soldier assigned to an important but perilous duty, must then escape a Confederate man hunt that leads him back to his own home, where the Confederate soldier once protected by the man’s daughter returns the favor.  Neatly melodramatic, this film would be a sub-theme [the essential brotherhood and humanity bonding the warring sides] exploited much more magnificently, and controversially in The Birth of a Nation.
• What Shall We Do With Our Old.  1911.  15 minutes [approximately.  Aging.  Poverty.  A title card reads “Founded upon an actual occurrence in New York City.”   A melancholy drama about the cruel fate of the aging in a time of change.  Shortly after learning that his wife is deathly ill, an old carpenter is one of a number of old hands, fired from his job to be replaced by a younger men.  Finding it impossible at his advanced age to et a new job he returns home where he and his loving wife must face certain starvation after their savings are exhausted.  The old man, fearful of his wife’s demise, takes desperate measure to get food, but he is caught and tried.  Sympathetically filmed and portrayed early social melodrama.  [The one recognizable face among the actors is that of Donald Crisp as one of the young courtroom officers [Crisp’s most famous role was that of the coal miner in Ford’s film of How Green Was My Valley].  Bittersweet tragedy.
• For His Son.  1912 [January].  15 minutes [approximately].  Drug Addiction.  Cocaine.  Industrial Greed. An introductory title card for this cautionary tale reads:  “ The Awful result of criminal selfishness.”  A businessman who dotes on his son, concocts a plan to create a fountain drink called Dopokoke, a drink spiked with cocaine.  It proves a tremendous success.  This success does not come without a price and eventually many become victim’s of the perfidious concoction.  When the son discovers the secret ingredient, he becomes truly addicted.  All changes when his fiancé discovers his addiction and rejects the youth.  This rejection draws the wayward youth to his father’s secretary, also smitten by the same addiction.  Simplistic, but startling cinema muckraking.  The decline of the once handsome couple is total, and horrifically depicted.  The ending credit tells the stories end, “He did not care whom he victimized, until he found the result of his dishonor at his door.”
• The Female of the Species.  1912 [April 13].  20 minutes [approximately].  Envy.  Greed, Murder.  Relations between women. Subtitled A Psychological Tragedy.  In a western mining camp a miner and several women set-out on a on a trek from the mines across harsh desert territory.  The man’s attempt at forcing himself on one of the women ends with his death.  The jealousy among the women is not abated by that tragedy or the harshness of their environment.  Two of the women intrigue constantly against the third woman.  Stark, realistic film that evokes some of the powerful images later used by von Stroheim in Greed and Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Greed, murder, hatred and finally, redemption [in the shape of an Indian child orphaned by parents who have died of thirst] shapes the sojourn of the women. 
• The House of Darkness.  1913 [May 13].  22 minutes [approximately].  Insanity.  Madness.  Music as healer.  Insane Asylums.  The opening credit reads:  How the mind of an unfortunate was brought to reason by music.  The death of her child drives a mother to distraction, an accountant is much harried by work and family,   Amidst these portents of madness a doctor in the institution [Lionel Barrymore] falls in love with one of his nurses.   When one of the nurses at the institution [Lillian Gish] is heard play the piano, a man on the verge of violent break down is calmed.  This leads to music being used as a tool to helping cure the mental excitations of the asylum’s inmates.  Episodic images are used to depict madness, healing, mental anguish.

 

THE FIREMAN.  1916.  (1,921ft.)  approx. 19 minutes.  Silent.  (Subtitled:  The Hook and Ladder Man).    A film in the CHARLIE CHAPLIN CLASSIC COLLECTION:  Volume IV Chaplin at Mutual Studios (Pt. I) <V2893>.  The Tramp is the chief cook, and bottle washer for a fire brigade, headed by a burly, surly fire chief.  The chief and Charlie are always at odds.  One day, an unsavory businessman visits the fire house — his plan — setting fire to his house and having the chief make sure the fire trucks don’t get there on time.   Why?  To collect the insurance.  Why would the chief do it?  The businessman offers his daughter as the chief’s bride.  What happens?  Charlie and the girl have an eye for one another.  The result — evil plans foiled and a happy ending.  More early Chaplin slapstick from the a collection entitled Charlie Chaplin Carnival, a collection of four early shorts.  This title is also available in the collection entitled Charlie Chaplin Carnival (V457).  Directed by Chaplin.  Cast includes:  Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell, Leo White, John Rand, Albert Austin, James T. Kelley, Frank J. Coleman, Charlotte Mineau.  Notes:  Sets by E.T. Mazy.  Camera by Totheroh and William C. Foster.

 

A FISH FACTORY IN ASTRAKHAN.  1908.   A Pathe Freres series Picturesque Russia.  Notes:  Restored by A. Khakimov, 1957.  This film is a travelogue of an Astrakhan fish factory.  It is remarkably well-preserved and restored footage of a film shot almost 90 years old.  The film is very simply photographed and edited.  We see cinematic snapshots of a long bygone era,  of working life in one place in pre-revolution Russia.

 

FLESH AND THE DEVIL.  1926.    103minutes. /9 reels.  Silent.  Romantic Melodrama.  Clarence Brown.  Greta Garbo.  <V2064>.  Directed by Clarence Brown.  Silent films produced the most glamorous stars in the history of Hollywood.  Stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford were all larger than life.  Creations of the studios they became what Hollywood meant.  Romance played a large part in the making of silent films too, and the stars of romantic melodramas were idolized.  The most idolized and popular love duets were Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.  The films they made for MGM were all hugely popular and the fact that they were romantically linked in real life added much to their films almost mythical stature making them even more alluring.  It is the story of the wiles of a beautiful woman and her almost demonic hold over a young officer.  Romance of an especially high order.  Notes:  Photographed by William Daniels.  Titles by Marian Ainslee.  Screenplay by Benjamin F. Glazer.  Sets by Cedric Gibbons and Frederic Hope.

 

FLIRTING WITH FATE see under THE MOLLYCODDLE

 

THE FLOORWALKER 1916 (1,734ft) approx. 18 minutes.  Silent.    A film in the CHARLIE CHAPLIN CLASSIC COLLECTION: Volume V Chaplin at Mutual Studios (Pt. II) <V2893>.  Directed by Chaplin.  The floorwalker is the man in a department store who is the overseeing manager – the guy always looking over employees’ shoulders.  In this film Chaplin is a janitor, in his little fellow guise of course, who switches place with the crooked floorwalker.  Much mayhem occurs on the floor of the store before order is finally restored.  A funny entry the ever maturing comedy of Chaplin.  Cast includes: Eric Campbell, Lloyd Bacon, Edna Purviance, Albert Austin, Lee White, Charlotte Mineau, Tom Nelson, Harry Bergman, and James T. Kelley.  Notes:  One of the best gags in this film occurs when Chaplin’s tramp and the floorwalker first meet.  They look so much a like (though the floorwalker is a taller man) that they pantomime with one another as if in a mirror — a marvelous gag that the Marx Brothers would perfect in DUCK SOUP.  Sets by E.T. Mazy.  Screenplay by Chaplin.  Photographed by Totheroh and William C. Foster.

 

FOOLISH WIVES.  1922.  14 reels/14,120ft.  Silent Cinema.  Romantic Melodrama.  Erich von Stroheim.  Directed by Erich von Stroheim.  Von Stroheim was a worldly, sophisticatedman, things clearly reflected in his films.  Von Stroheim also had an eye for depicting debauchery and depravity with subtlety and wit.  In his world of aristocrats and royalty licentiousness and amorality were to be expected.  None of his films may have shown this more than Foolish Wives.  In Monte Carlo a dissolute Russian count and his two “cousins” are looking for means to scam the society set in Monte Carlo.  They get a skilled artisan to produce counterfeit franc notes.  Just as there plans develop, a rich American diplomat and his wife’s arrival in the city give their plans a boost.  A new scheme is hatched to entrap the wife and embarrass the couple into blackmail.  Plans work even better than expected but go awry when the jilted maid of the Russians’ household sets the place ablaze during a festive night of gambling.  There is also a subplot involving the counterfeiter’s daughter and the count.  Foolish Wives is remarkable in its depiction of a sinister and amoral world beneath the glitter of life on the Cote D’Azure.  Von Stroheim depicts this way of life without flinching.  We see human nature in his films without excuses.  As with all of his films, the director was extravagant with his budget and his imagination.  He did not go to Monte Carlo, he practically rebuilt the place in Hollywood.  The film created a storm of controversy, as most of his films did.  Von Stroheim cast himself as Count Sergius Karamzin.  With:  Maude George, Mae Busch, Dale fuller, Rudolph Christians/Robert Edeson (as Andrew J. Hughes), Miss Dupont, Cesare Gravina, Malvina Polo, and C. J. Allen. as Prince Albert.  Notes:  Screenplay by Von Stroheim.  Titles by Von Stroheim and Marian Ainslee.  Photography by Ben Reynolds and William Daniels.  Art direction by Richard Day and Von Stroheim.  Music by Sigmund Romberg.

 

A FLORIDA ENCHANTMENT.  1914.  63 minutes.  Romantic Fantasy.  Comedy.  Battle of the sexes.  Role reversal.  A film in the Library of Congress Video Collection Volume IV — Origins of the Fantasy Feature.  Directed by Sidney Drew.  With:  Sidney Drew as Dr. Fred Cassadene, Edith Storey as Lillian Travers, Charles Kent as Major Horton, Jane Morrow as Bessie Horton, Ada Gifford as Stell Lovejoy, Ethel Lloyd Jane, Grace Stevens as Constancia Olglethorpe, Lillian Burns as Malvina, Allan Campbell as Stockton Remington,  Cortland Van Duesen as Charley Wileks, and Frank O’Neil as Gustavus Duncan.  Notes:  Written by Eugene Jullen and Marguerite Bertsch from the 1891 novel and 1896 play of the same title by Archibald Tunter and Fergus Redmond.  Photographed by Robert A Stuart.

 

FOR LUCK.  1917.  A wealthy widow has kept her beloved at bay for 10 years after her husband’s death in order to smooth the transition for her young daughter.  Neither of them, so happy in love realized that the girl was madly in love with the man.  After returning from a trip to a Crimean resort, the woman asks the man to marry the girl in order to spare her.  When he refuses, the girl suffers a shock that leaves her blind.  A trenchantly melodramatic romance, very well acted and directed.  It is not a sentimental film, but, in the tradition of Griffith, a classic early, silent, melodrama.  Tasisiia Borman as Li, the daughter, had some of the same qualities as the Gish sisters and the young Mary Pickman.  With:  Nikolai Radin as Dmitrii Gzhatskii, a lawyer; Lidiia Kareneva as Zaia Verenskaia, a rich widow;  Lev Kuleshov as Enrico, an artist, N. Dennitsyna as Lee’s governess; Emmochka Bauer as a girl, and Aleksandr Kheruvimov as the doctor. Notes:  Screenplay by N. Dennitsyna.  Photography by Boris Zavlev.  Art direction by Lev Kuleshov.

 THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE.  1921.  Silent Cinema.  Rudolph Valentino.  Spanish Literature.  Novel Into Film.  Directed by Rex Ingram.  This, the first adaptation of Ibanez’s popular novel, was the film that made Rudolph Valentino an international star of the silent cinema.  The story of the family of a great Argentine land magnet whose daughters each marries a foreigner, one a Frenchman, the other German, and the emotional and psychological conflict that evolves between the two sides of the family.  When the earthy old man dies, leaving his vast wealth and estates equally between the two sides, they leave Argentina for Paris and Germany.  The lives of the families are contrasted a

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE.  1921.  Silent Cinema.  Rudolph Valentino.  Spanish Literature.  Novel Into Film.  Directed by Rex Ingram.  This, the first adaptation of Ibanez’s popular novel, was the film that made Rudolph Valentino an international star of the silent cinema.  The story of the family of a great Argentine land magnet whose daughters each marries a foreigner, one a Frenchman, the other German, and the emotional and psychological conflict that evolves between the two sides of the family.  When the earthy old man dies, leaving his vast wealth and estates equally between the two sides, they leave Argentina for Paris and Germany.  The lives of the families are contrasted and brought together again with the turmoil of World War I.  This 1921 version of the film is a fairly masterful epic, full of the romantic flourishes, shocking images of war in the trenches, ghostly apparitions of the dreaded four horsemen of the title.  Ingram’s film is more effective than the portentous, badly written 1960 version with Glenn Ford.  With:  Pomeroy Cannon as Madariaga, Josef Swickland as Marcelo Denoyers, Brigetta Clark as Dona Luisa, Rudolph Valentino as Julio Denoyers, Virginia Warwick as Chichi, Alan Hale as Karl von Hartrott, Stuart Holmes, John St. Polis as Etienne, Mabel Van Buren as Elena, Alice Terry as Marguerite Laurier, Mark Fenton as Senator Lacour, Derek Ghent as Rene Lacour, Nigel De Brulier as Tchernoff, Jean Hersholt as Prof. Von Hartrott, Henry Klaus as Heinrich von Hartroff, and Wallace Beery as Lt. Col. von Richthoffen.  Notes:  The 1960 version was set in the period between the Great Wars and makes full use of the German side of the family’s advocacy of Nazism.  Screenplay by June Mathis from the novel Los Cuatros Jinetes Del Apocalipsis by Vincenté Blasco Ibánez.  Original music by Louis F. Gottschalk.  Cinematography by John F. Seitz.

 

FROM THE MANGER TO THE CROSS.  1912.  71 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Religious Epic.  Directed by Sidney Olcott.  “Since the earliest days of the medium, religious themes have maintained a position of considerable significance in world cinema.  Biblically-themed efforts were often undertaken as an attempt by film manufacturers to enable what was perceived as a rather tawdry entertainment form.  Usually these films — such as The Horitz Passion Play (1897), Gaumont’s La Vie du Christ (1907), and The Kiss of Judas (1909) — were even more stagy and artificial than the routine cinematic output of the day.”  Olcutt’s film was one of the first major effects of moving the genre into more cinematic terrain.  Actually filmed in the Holy Land, it is a film full of strong images and was extremely well received on its release.  The movie came into existence because of the efforts of Olcutt and his co-scenarist, actress Gene Gauntier (who plays the Virgin Mary in the film).  With:  R. Henderson Bland as Jesus the Man, Gene Gauntier as Mary, Alice Hollister as Mary Magdalene, Robert Vignola, Percy Dyer as Jesus as a Youth, Samuel Morgan as Pilate, and James D. Ainsley as John the Baptist.  Notes:  Produced by the Kalem Company.  Music composed and performed by Timothy Howard.  Photography by George K. Hollister.  Screenplay by Gene Gauntier.

 

THE FUNERAL OF VERA KHOLODNAIA.  1919.  “Of all of Russian cinema’s stars, Kholodnaia was probably the most adulated.  During the four short years of her career, the image of ‘Verchka’ with gray eyes’ appeared on countless postcards and created an image of Russian femininity which remained potent long after her films had disappeared from Soviet screens (there is a reference to a battered copy of one still being show around 1921-2 in Pil’niaks novel The Naked Years).  She had studied at ballet school and was married to a lawyer when she came to Bauer’s attention and appeared in many of most popular films.  After his death in 1917, she continued working in Odessa . . . before she died at only 26 in a Spanish flu epidemic and was mourned throughout Russia.”  Notes:  Newsreel coverage of the funeral which took place in Odessa in 1919.  The public’s adoration of film stars in the early years of world cinema was immense as witnessed by the coverage of this Russian film star’s funeral.  The same intensity would express itself after the death Valentino in America just a few years later.”

 

GAUCHO.  1927.  10 reels/9,256 feet.  Silent.  Swashbuckler Adventure.  Douglas Fairbanks.  Directed by F. Richard Jones.  Douglas Fairbanks as The Gaucho, Lupe Velez as the Mountain Girl, Eve Southern as Girl of the Shrine, Gustav von Seyffertiz as Ruiz, Charles Stevens as the Gaucho’s first lieutenant, Nigel de Brulier as the Padre, Albert MacQuarrie as Victim of the black doom, and Mary Pickford as Our Lady of the Shrine.  Notes:  Cinematography by Tony Gaudio.  Screenplay by Lotta Woods from a story by “Elton Thomas” [Fairbanks].

 

THE GENERAL.   1927.    82minutes.  /8 reels.  Silent.  <V308>.  Buster Keaton’s films have the look and feel of total Americana.  The handsome stoic “stone” face never changes regardless of the peril or absurdities surrounding him.  He is the penultimate clown as average Joe.  His greatest films reflect his stoic reserve as well as his enormous lack of fear.  He, as did most silent stars, performed all of his own stunts and he essentially designed and directed most of his work as well.  The General may be, after Sherlock Jr., his best.  The General in question is a train and Keaton is a Confederate engineer who helps save the day when he keeps the engine out of the hands of the federals.  The film is unreservedly funny.  A masterpiece.  With Glen Cavender, Jim Farley, Frederick Vroom and Marion Mack as the heroine.  Notes:  Directed by Keaton.  Photographed by J. Devereux Jennings and Bert Haines.  Also available on 16mm

 

THE GIRL WITH THE HAT BOX.  1927.  67 minutes.  Russian inter-titles with English subtitles.  Directed by Boris Barnet.  With: Anna Sten, Vladimir Fogel, Pavel Pol, Ivan Koval-Samborsky, and Serafima Birman.  Notes:  Screenplay by Valentin Turkin and V. Shershnevich.  Photographed by Boris Frantisson and B. Filshin.

 

A GIRL’S FOLLY.  1917.  30 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Moviemaking.  Silent Moviemaking Satire.  Directed by Maurice Tourneur.  One of the earliest and most enjoyable movies about making movies.  Robert Warwick stars as Kenneth Driscoll, a big time screen idol working on a new western.  He and the cast are engaged in trying to satisfy the efforts of their demanding director and to help a newcomer work her way into the movies.  There are some lovely bits of comedy about filmmaking in this movie and some interesting and unexpected little sight gags.  [Driscoll has a black valet with whom he has an apparently casual, friendly relationship.  In one scene we see the valet signing the star’s signature of autographed copies.  In another, a black crew member sits and watches the action with a pretty ingenue and the camera never blinks at this casual integration.  Both are astonishing occurrences in a film released in the wake of The Birth of a Nation.  With:  June Elvideg as Vivian Carleton, Doris Kenyon as the ingenue, and Johnny Hines.  Notes:  Photographed by John Van Den Broek.

 

THE GOLD RUSH.   1925    91minutes.  /9 reels.  Silent.  Alaska Gold Rush.  Charlie Chaplin.  <V473>.  The Tramp [the Lone Prospector] goes prospecting for gold in Alaska.  He meets and becomes partners with Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain) and falls in love with a chanteuse (Georgia Hale as The Girl).  The boys overcome competitors for their rich claim. [largely in the form of the heinous villain Black Larsen] and survive the fantastic perils of the wild, frigid north to, in the end getting richly rewarded from their gold claim.  Faultless.  The film is deliriously funny and easily the greatest film comedy ever made.  With:  Malcolm Waite as Jack Cameron, Betty Morrissey as the Girl’s friend.  Notes:  Photographed by Roland Totheroh.  Camera by Jack Wilson.  Written and produced by Chaplin.  There are video versions of this great film that are almost spoiled by voice overs and sound tracks later added by Chaplin himself.  If a sound track is on the tape you might want to turn down the volume — why Chaplin chose to tamper with perfection is perverse beyond belief.

 

THE GOLEM.  1920.  75 mins/ 6 reels 5,200 feet.  Germany.  <V547>.  Directed by Paul Wegener.   A story out of German-Jewish folklore.  In this film the Golem is a creature, made of clay who, becomes the protector and avenging angel for the Hebrewcommunity.  Expressionism had taken firm hold of German cinema after the release of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Paul Wegener, the director of this film, is generally credited with being the first of the German filmmakers to completely understand how to exploit the medium.  Wegener’s work in the theater and his keen interest in the mythic qualities of the Golem led him to producing an impressive tale of hope, revenge and destruction.  In this story the Golem, created to protect, becomes all too human.  He develops emotions that make it necessary for him to be destroyed he had first protected.  Wegener plays the creature himself.  The cast includes Albert Steinruck, Lyda Salmonova, Hans Strum, Ernest Deutsch, Fritz Feld, and Lathar Menthel.  Notes: The film was co-directed by Wegener and Carl Boese.  Photographed byKarl Freund.

 

THE GREAT DICTATOR.  1940.  129 minutes.  <V287>.Directed by Charlie Chaplin.  Story:  A Jewish barber shares one thing with the dictator of Tomania, he could be his twin.  This works temporarily when the forces for democracy try to replace the abominable Adenoid Hynkel with the barber.  The effort fails but not without some small measure of success.  This is the first fully sound film by Chaplin.  He plays the double role of the barber and Hynkel.  The film is effective and funny early on but it takes itself to seriously later.  The famous speech at the film at the end of the picture has often been give a little more stature than it deserves.  Jack Oakey as Napolini gives a roaring imitation of Mussolini.  With: Paulette Goddard, Henry Danielle, and Billy Gilbert.  Notes:  There is an excellent scene with a balloon — Hynkel with the world in his hands.  Chaplin wrote the screenplay.  The film’s music is by Meredith Willson.  It is reputed that Hitler copied his mustache from that worn by Chaplin’s Tramp character. It’s possible…

 

GREED.  1925/10 reels.  Silent.  <V2065>.  Directed by Erich von Stroheim.  Frank Norris’ McTeague is a classic muckraking novel from the early 20th century.  His depiction of the depths of depravity and greed to which gold reduces men is graphic and frightening.  In the hands of the eccentric and tremendously gifted film director Erich von Stroheim that material was turned into one of the greatest films of all time.  Von Stroheim, the original Enfant terrible of cinema was extravagant and totally egocentric in his film making.  Cost was no object to him — he was an artist who paid little heed to the need to monitor his budget.  As a result, his projects always brought him into conflict with the producing studios.  MGM finally pulled this film away from him.  Regardless of the difficulties, the film produced has a relentless, lacerating power.  One of the truly great achievements of world cinema.  The performances of Gibson Gowland as McTeague, Zasu Pitts as Trina, and Jean Hersholt as Marcus Shouler are as impressive as any in silent movies.  With:  Chester Conklin as Mr. Sieppe, Sylvia Ashton as Mrs. Seippe, Dale Fuller as Maria, Joan Standing a Selina, Austin Jewel s August Sieppe, Oscar Gottell and Otto Gottel ass the Sieppe Twins.  Note:  Written by von Stroheim and June Mathis.  Photographed by William Daniels, Ben Reynolds and Ernest B. Schoedsack..  Titles by June Mathis. 

 

HANDS UP.  1925.  70 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Raymond Griffith.  Civil War Satire.  Directed by Clarence C. Badger.  Raymond Griffith is a Confederate spy sent by Robert E. Lee to foil plans to send a shipment of badly needed gold from Nevada to Washington.  The dapper comic star Raymond Griffith was an early favorite of filmgoers throughout the late teens and early ‘20s.  In this pleasant satire, he mixes and matches key events in history to poke a little fun at lots of things.  There are some very lovely moments, one of the funniest when he teaches the Sitting Bull and his warriors how to black bottom and Charleston.  Our erstwhile hero falls in love with both of the daughters of the rich miner and is secretly wed to each of them.  They meet Brigham Young in the last reel.  Guess what?  With:  George A. Billings as Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Lee Corbin as Alice Woodstock, Charles K. French as Brigham young.  Noble Johnson as Sitting Bull, Montague Love as Capt. Logan, Marian Nixon as the Girl He Loves, and Mack Swain as Silas Woodstock.  Notes:  Written by Monte Brice, Lloyd Corrigan and Reginald Morris.  Cinematography by H. Kinley Martin.

 

HEARTS OF THE WORLD.  1918.  123 minutes.  World War I melodrama.  D. W. Griffiths. Directed by D. W. Griffiths.  Two American families in France are caught up in the horrors of World War I when the village they live in is occupied by a troop of brutish Germans.  This film is largely a polemic against the horrors visited on Europe by the dastardly Hun.  It is a film about how war and cruelty can not dampen the spirit of love, sacrifice, and heroism.  Though not one of his great films, it has moments of raw power and emotion.  It also has some of Griffith’s signature sentimentality.  With:  Adolphe Lestina as the Grandfather, Lillian Gish as Marie Stephenson, Josephine Crowell as the Mother, Robert Harron as Douglas Gordon Hamilton, Jack Cosgrave as Mr. Hamilton, Kate Bruce as Mrs. Hamilton, Dorothy Gish as the Little Disturber, Robert Anderson as Monsieur Cuckoo, and George Siegmann as Von Strohm.  Erich von Stroheim as a Hun, and Noel Coward as the man with the wheelbarrow appear in cameos.  Also in the cast are Mlle. Yvette Duvoisin, Herbert Stuch, George Nicholls, Mrs. Mary Gish, and Mary Hay. Notes:  The film is preceded by footage of Griffith at the front lines near Cambrin, France just prior to shooting this film.  We also see him meeting with Lloyd George at No. 10 Downing.  Scenario by M. Gaston de Tolignac, translated into English by Capt. Victor Marier with Griffith.  Photographed by Billy Bitzer.

 

HIS NEW JOB.  1915.  (1,996ft.) approx. 20 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the CHARLIE CHAPLIN CLASSIC COLLECTION:  Volume II Chaplin at Essay Studios <V2893>.  Directed by Chaplin.  The Chaplin personality really began to develop at Essanay.  In this film Charlie plays a little guy who happens to find a job as a movie handyman/prop man.  Needless to say he begins to wreak havoc on the place, and to intice the heroine.  This inside look at the making of movies was to be used in several of these early works.  Cast includes:  Ben Turpin, Charlotte Mineau, Charles Insley, Leo White, Frank J. Coleman, Bud Jamison, Billy Armstrong, Agnes Ayres, and Gloria Swanson.  Notes:  Photographed by Rollie Totheroh.  Screenplay by Chaplin.

 

HOLLYWOOD:  A CELEBRATION OF THE AMERICAN SILENT FILM.  <V2055>.  An excellent, wholly enjoyable, video history of the Silent Film in America in thirteen (13) segments.   Narrated by James Mason, and written, produced and directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill.  1980.    52minutes.  The Pioneers.  Vol. I.  What started as a flickering curiosity shown in penny arcades soon grew into an art form.  In just a few short years, Hollywood began turning out spectacular films, with original musical scores–often performed by a live symphony orchestra, and shown in glittering picture palaces.  In 1903, The Great Train Robbery, drew wildly enthusiastic audiences who cheered and called for more.  Twelve years later, D.W. Griffith produced The Birth of a Nation — one of the greatest films ever made, and the first to prove the power of the medium.  It provoked riots and demonstrations, brought audiences flocking, and gave birth to the financial fortunes of Hollywood.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Wings, (1927), The Wind (1928), Noah’s Ark (1928), and, in early Technicolor, The Black Pirate (1926) interviews with Lillian Gish, Dolores Costello, Blanche Sweet, Jackie Coogan, King Vidor, and much more!  In The Beginning.  Vol II.  In 1900, Hollywood was a peaceful village with sheep, goats and pigs wandering along its dusty streets.  Then filmmakers arrived in search of permanent sunshine, and changed the town forever.  Cecil B. DeMille directed Hollywood’s first feature-length film, The Squaw Man, in an old stable on Vine Street.  Residents watched with disapproval and amazement as the sets for D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance reared above their bungalows.  The silent films produced by Hollywood transcended national boundaries and languages to become the most powerful medium of mass entertainment the world had ever known.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from The Squaw Man (1914), Intolerance (1916), and Joan the woman (1916);  interviews include Henry King, Allan Dwan, Agnes de Mille, Lillian Gish, Anita Loos.  Single Beds and Double Standards.  Vol III.  Hollywood had become a fairy-tale city of fabulous wealth and dizzying success, when a series of scandals shattered the dream.  Details of the Fatty Arbuckle case so shocked America that producers appointed Will Hays to clean up the industry before the public’s moral outrage put them all out of work.  Hays encouraged “human, heartwarming pictures” and issued a production code designed to keep films wholesome.  The code was strictly enforced, yet directors still managed to get their message across.  Hollywood had found its savior.  But his price was self-imposed censorship which would rule Hollywood for forty years.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Coney Island (1917), The Ten Commandments (1923), and A Woman of Affairs (1928); interviews include Colleen Moore, Gloria Swanson, Henry Hathaway, and King Vidor.  Hollywood Goes To War.  Vol. IV.  The outbreak of World War I provided Hollywood with one of its greatest sources of plots–and profits.  As the American mood shifted away from neutrality, Hollywood followed, abandoning films with pacifistic themes for stories of war at the front.  With the arrival of peace, war films vanished until King Vidor made The Big Parade in 1925.  Acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, it made a fortune for MGM.  What Price Glory, directed by Raoul Walsh, quickly followed.  Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front showed the German side of the conflict, and became the most powerful statement on the war by the generation that fought it.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Hearts of the World (1918), The Big Parade (1925), What Price Glory (1926),  and Wings (1927); interviews include Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., King Vidor, Lillian Gish, Blanche Sweet.  Hazard of the Game.  Vol V.  Silent films are often remembered for their physical gags–always good for a laugh, over in a second.  But behind these gags lay planning, courage and skill.  Stunt men took the risks while the stars took the credit–and it was firm rule that no stuntman could reveal the tricks of his trade.  they have kept silent–until now.  Here at last, legendary stunt men Yakima Canutt, Harvey Parry, bob Rose and Paul Malvern tell the hair-raising stories behind their greatest stunts.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Play Safe (1923), The Black Pirate (1926) and Lilac Time (1928); interviews are Colleen Moore, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Leatrice Joy. Swanson and Valentino.  Vol. VI.  Two great stars personified Hollywood: Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino.  She sacrificed everything for stardom.  He did nothing to seek the adoration which ultimately engulfed him.  Swanson recalls her meteoric rise–and fall–with remarkable candor.  Valentino’s brother helps tell the story of the young Italian who became the silver screen’s Great Lover–but whose private life failed to match his public image.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Sadie Thompson (1928), Queen Kelly (1928), The Sheik (1928), and The Eagle (1925); interviews include Gloria Swanson, Alberto Valentino, Ben Lyon, Colleen Moore, Adela Rogers T. Johns.  The Autocrats.  Vol. VII.  Two of Hollywood’s greatest directors were Cecil B. DeMille and Erich Von Stroheim.  but what they shared in achieved in achievement, they never shared in success.  DeMille worked within the studio system; von Stroheim, against it.  And while De Mille’s lavish productions reaped huge profits for the studios despite the millions they cost, von Stroheim’s films were doomed to be brutally edited by the studio, if even released.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Male and Female (1919), The Ten Commandments, Foolish Wives (1922), Greed (1925), and Queen Kelly (1928); interviews with Gloria Swanson, Agnes de Mille, Henry King, and Paul Ivano.  Comedy–A Serious Business.  Vol. VIII.  One of the first things filmmakers learned in Hollywood was how to make people laugh.  Comedy was king, and battling for the throne were four box office rivals–Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Charlie Chaplin.  In an era brimming with the visual, their comedy was the work of genius.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Making a Living (1913), The Pawnshop (1916), Luke’s Movie Muddle (1916), THE GENERAL (1926); interviews with Hal Roach, Jackie Coogan, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd.  Out West.  Vol.  IX.  The Old West was still there when the movies arrived.  Cowboys and outlaws saw a heaven-sent chance to relive their youth–and get paid for it–by working in films.  The man who really started the “Western Craze” was the Wild West showman William Cody, who made The Life of Buffalo Bill in 1913.  Tom Mix was the next western screen hero, followed by William S. Hart, who dignified the genre with films like Narrow, Trail  and Tumbleweeds.  These films were a celebration of the West, establishing a tradition that continues to this day.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from The Massacre (1912), The Return of Draw Egan (1916), and Hell’s Hinges (1916); interviews with “Iron Eyes” Cody, Colonel Tim McCoy, Yakima Canutt, Harvey Parry, John Wayne.  The Man With the Megaphone.  Vol. X.  Silent films directors were a flamboyant breed-pioneers who invented the art of film direction as they went along.  Working conditions were chaotic.  Open sets were built side by side and back to back and live “mood” music was provided according to each star’s taste.  Despite deafening noise and constant distraction, directors talked their cast through every move and emotion, and from this confusion came great films–including F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise and King Vidor’s The Crowd.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Mare Nostrum (1926), Sunrise (1927) and The Crowd (1928); interviews include Bessie Love, Janet Gaynor, Blanche Sweet, King Vidor, Allan Dwan, and Henry King.  Trick of the Light.  Vol. XI.  In the early days of Hollywood, directors relied heavily on their cameramen.  While their cameras may have looked primitive, when handled by a skilled craftsman, a pretty girl was transformed into a “screen goddess.”  Individual cameramen were invaluable to both studios and stars.  With the help of art directors, they achieved the most amazing and dangerous sequences ever filmed.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from Way Down East (1920), Intolerance (1916), The Birth of A Nation (1915), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1926) interviews with Colleen Moore, Lillian Gish, Bessie Love, Allan Dwan and William Wyler.  Star Treatment.  Vol. XII.  Producers discovered that if they didn’t have a star, they didn’t have a hit.  Creating stars became a business in itself, and soon, the Hollywood Star System was born.  From it came such greats as Clara Bow, Lillian Gish and John Gilbert, who inherited the title “Great Lover” from Valentino.  The career of John Gilbert vividly illustrates how producers could make or break a star.  When he fell in love with Greta Garbo, shrewd studio heads capitalized on their romance and teamed them in a number of successful films.  but when Gilbert punched Louis B. Mayer after Mayer passed a remark about Garbo, Mayer vowed to ruin Gilbert’s career–and made good on his threat.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from The Merry Widow (1925), The Big Parade (1925), Flesh and the Devil (1926), and Love (1927); interviews with Louise Brooks, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman.  End of an Era.  Vol. XIII.  Sound films did not arrive overnight.  Throughout the early to mid-twenties, more and more films were made with synchronized sound and music, but it wasn’t until 1927 that Warner Brothers gambled on talking pictures with The Jazz Singer. From that moment on, all that had shaped and created Hollywood was utterly transformed.  Talking pictures were here to stay, and the art of silent filmmaking–along with many of the stars, directors and producers devoted to it–were sacrificed to technology.  Includes rare footage and excerpts from The Jazz Singer (1927), Lilac Time (1928), Lights of New York (1928), and Anna Christie (1930); interviews with Lillian Gish, Mary Astor, Janet Gaynor, Colleen Moore, Frank Capra, and George Cukor.

 

A HOUSE DIVIDED.  1913.  13 minutes.  Silent.  Marriage Comedy.  Directed by Alice Guy-Blache.  With:  Marian Swayne (wife), Fraunie Fraunholz (husband).  Notes:  Produced by Guy-Blache.  A film in the Library of Congress Video Collection — America’s First Women Filmmakers:  Alice Guy-Blache and Lois Weber.

 

THE HOUSE IN KOKOMNA.  1913.  A comic tale from a story by Pushkin about a beautiful young girl, her mother, her young lover.  The young people concoct a trick to be together by having the young man pose as the family’s new cook.  Needless to say, many missteps and mishaps occur.  With:  Prasko’ai Maksimova as a widow, Sof’ia Goslavskaia as her daughter Parasha, and Ivan Mozzhukhin as the guards officer and Mavrusha.  Notes:  Based on the verse story by Pushkin from a screenplay by Petr Chardynin.  Directed by Chardynin.  Photographed by Wladyslaw Starewicz.  Art direction by Starewicz and Boris Mikhin.

 

HOW MEN PROPOSE.  1913.  6 minutes.  Silent.  Social Satire.  Produced by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley.  Directed by Weber?  With:  Margarita Fischer (the researcher), Chester Barnett (a suitor).  Notes:  A film in the Library of Congress Video Collection, Volume VI — America’s First Women Filmmakers:  Alice Guy-Blache and Lois Weber.

 

HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME.  1923.  100 minutes.  <V3048>.  Silent.  Romantic Melodrama — Romantic Horror — Hugo, Victor.  Directed by Wallace Worsley.  Lon Chaney is Quasimodo the hunchback, and Patsy Ruth Miller in this classic silent version of the romance by Victor Hugo.  The film has a majestic kind of sweep, magnificent sets, and Chaney [the man of a 1000 faces] gives one of his most memorable performances.  There may be more romanticism in the later sound version with Charles Laughton as the deformed Quasimodo.  With: Norman Kerry as Phoebus of Chateaupers, Kate Leser as Mme de Gondolaurier, Ernest Torrance as Clopin King of the Beggars, Tully Marshall as Louis XI, Raymond Hatton as Gringoire, Eulalie Jensen as Marie, Harry Van Meter as Neufchatel, and Brandon Hurst as Johan.  Notes:  Script by Perley Sheehan, Edward Lowe, Jr.  Photographed by Robert S. Newhard.  Art direction by E.E. Sheely, and S. Uliman.

 

THE IMMIGRANT.  1917.  (1,809ft.) approx.  18 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume VI Chaplin at Mutual Studios (Pt. III) <V2893>.  Directed by Chaplin.  Cast includes:  Edna Purviance, Kitty Bradbury, Albert Austin, Henry Bergman, Eric Campbell, Stanley Sanford, James T. Kelley, John Rand, Frank J. Coleman, and Loyal Underwood.  Notes:  Story and screenplay by Chaplin.  Photographed by Totheroh and Foster.

 

INTOLERANCE.  1916.  11 reels.  <V54>.  Directed by D. W. Griffith.  D. W. Griffith was genuinely startled by some of the criticism that his great, rabble rousing film The Birth of a Nation created.  His romantic notions of the Klan and its purposes were at odds with the reality for many Americans.  With his next film Intolerance he set out to make a film deploring hatred and bigotry.  The result is this endlessly fascinating madness.  There is more reliance on imagery and on plot and narrative.  The film consists of depictions of the fall of Babylon, the Passion of Christ, and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and a modern sequence called The Mother and The Law.  These sequences were all connected with an image from Whitman a mother gently rocking a child with the words “out of the cradle endlessly rocking.  United of here and hereafter” etched on the screen.   Man’s inhumanity to man was the theme he aimed at driving home.  At any rate, what resulted was a hodgepodge filled with the best and worst of Griffith’s film vocabulary.  With:  Bessie Love, George Walsh, Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Mote Blue, Tod Browning, Edward Dillon, Gunter von Ritzau, Erich von Stroheim, Constance Talmadge, Elmo Lincoln, Tully Marshall and countless others.  The film was a failure at the box office and ultimately caused the dissolution of Griffith’s production company.  He no longer had the independence he held before INTOLERANCE.

 

THE IRON MASK.  1929.  72 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Romantic Adventure.  Alexandre Dumas.  Douglas Fairbanks.  Directed by Allan Dwan.  Douglas Fairbanks once again plays D’Artagnan, a role he called a personal favorite in this last silent Fairbanks epic.  The Iron Mask is almost valedictory in nature.  It is 20 years past the glory days of fighting for the Queen against Cardinal Richelieu’s guards.  The Musketeers are older and in retirement when D’Artagnan is awakened to a pernicious plot against the true King Louis XIV by his twin brother, who is in the hands of the devious De Rochefort.  The aging cavaliers come gallantly again to the rescue of the crown.  Excellent entertainment.  This particular Kino version of the filmed does not use inter-titles but rather uses an energetic narration of the story’s action by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.  The effort is a tad annoying to a purist at first, but Fairbanks’ obvious love of the film and the genre and his smooth delivery ultimately are agreeable.  With:  Marguerite De La Motte as Constance, Dorothy Revier as Milady de Winter, Vera Lewis as Madame Peronne, Rolfe Seban as Louis XIII, William Bakewell as Louis XIV & his twin, Gordon Thorpe as the young prince and twin, Nigel De Brulier Notes:  Narrated by Douglas Fairbanks Jr.   Narration written by Richard Llewellyn.  Music by Allan Gray.  Screenplay by Elton Thomas [Fairbanks] and based on Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and The Iron Mask.

 

ISN’T LIFE WONDERFUL.  1924.  115 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Social Drama.  Post World War I Germany.  Refugees.  D. W. Griffith. Directed by D. W. Griffith.  A pacifist drama about Post War Germany from the legendary filmmaker D. W. Griffith.  The story revolves around the efforts of a family of Polish immigrants trying to succeed in Germany in the wake of World War I.  Griffith depicts the hardships of the working people trying to survive against the greatest possible odds With:  Carol Dempster as Inga, Neil Hamilton as Paul, Erville Alderson as the Professor, Helen Lowell as the Grandmother, Marcia Harris as the Aunt, Frank Puglia as Theodor, Lupino Lane as Rudolph, Hans von Schlettow  as the leader of the laborers, Paul Rehkopf and Robert Scholz as laborers.  Notes:  Written and produced by Griffith from a story by Geoffrey Moss.  Photographed by Hendrik Sartov and Hal Sintzenich.  Score composed and compiled by Cesare Sodero and Louis Silvers with arrangement and performance by Robert Israel on piano and Galina Golovin on violin.

 

THE ITALIAN STRAW HAT.    FRANCE.  Silent.  1927.  24 minutes.  <V1826>.  Directed by Rene Clair.Perfect hilarity.  A young man, on the way to his wedding sees that his horse has eaten the hat of a married woman committing an indiscretion with someone not her husband.  She insists, to cover herself, that the hat must be replaced with an exact duplicate.  This complicates the man’s morning and leads to a series of marvelous visual gags climaxing in the weddingscene, which is a beauty.  About the most perfect film comedy ever made.  Truly funny.  With Albert Prejean, Olga Tschechowa, Marise Maia, Alice Tissot, and Yvonneck. 

 

THE JAZZ SINGER.  1927.  88 minutes.  Drama with Music.  Silent with music and speaking.  Film History.  Al Jolson.  Directed by Alan Crosland.  Al Jolson is Jakie Rabinowitz, a talented young Jewish singer who yearns for success in the theater.  This desire conflicts with his father, who wants Jakie to become a rabbi and cantor like himself.  The younger man does pursue a musical career with great success, but on the eve of his biggest debut he must delay the start of the show so that he can sing the Kol Nidre for his dying father.   This flimsy, sentimental story is basically the plot for one of the most epochal films in the history of movies. Donald Crafton, in volume 5 of the excellent film history series The History of the American Cinema Entitled The Talkies :  American Cinema’s Transition To Sound, 1926-1931 gives a much needed analysis of the film’s real significance.  The legends and myths surrounding the film and its effects on Hollywood are demythologized.  However, the role of Jazz Singer in American film history is not belittled, but rather given a context that makes sense of how talking pictures evolved and the particular role of this singular film in that evolution.  Those points aside, the film, when viewed with the most objective state of mind possible, has some astonishing moments, mostly provided by Al Jolson’s charismatic presence.  Probably the biggest star in vaudeville at the time, and a great recording star as well, Jolson’s singing of such popular songs as Blue Skies, My Gal Sal, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, Toot, Toot Tootsie Goodbye [all signature songs for him] clearly must have been a jolting revelation to the hundreds of thousands first time viewers of the sound film phenomenon.  The Jazz Singer, 70 years later, still has sentimental and emotional heat.  With:  May McAvoy as Mary Dale, Warner Oland as Cantor Rabinowitz, Eugenie Besserer as Sara Rabinowitz, bobby Gordon as Jakie at 13, Otto Lederer Mishe Yudelson and Cantor Josef Rosenblatt as himself.  Notes:  Written by Alfred Cohn and Jack Jarmuth from the play Day of atonement by Samson Raphaelson.  Cinematography by Hal Mohr.  Edited by Harold McCord.  Music composed by Louis Silvers with songs by Gus Kahn, Irving Berlin, Wolfe Gilbert & Lewis E. Muir and others.  Academy Award nominations for best screen adaptation [Cohn] and best engineering effects.  It also won a special award.

 

JOYLESS STREET.  1925.  64 minutes.  <V3009>.  Silent.  Germany.  Directed by G.W. Pabst.  Greta Garbo’s film career began in her native Sweden.  In this film, by the great German expressionist Pabst, Garbo plays the daughter of a bureaucrat who loses every penny of his pension on the stock market.  The loss forces them to, at first, take in borders.  Their first tenant is the son of a wealthy American in Germany to study.  The elder of the two daughters and the young man fall in love at once.  The affair is doomed, however, because the girl seeing the harm the lessened social status causes the father and her sister, is forced into becoming a chanteuse in a brothel.  She is saved from the fate of many of the other girls at the last minute.  A somber, mature, and fascinating work, and, one of the films that got the attention of Louis B. Mayer, who would bring Garbo to America and MGM.  With:  Asta Nielsen, Werner Krauss, Jaro Furth, Einak Hanson, and Veleska. Gert.  Notes:  Script by Willy Haas from a book by Hugo Bettauer.

 

JUDITH OF BETHULIA.  1913.  63 minutes.  Silent.  Biblical Melodrama.  D. W. Griffith.  Directed by D. W. Griffith.  D. W. Griffith was the first American filmmaker to experiment with the length of films.  With films like Judith Of Bethulia he first expanded the medium, introducing full length narratives and adaptations of popular or classical works to tell story longer than the common two reelers.  Influence by the epic films of early Italian filmmakers, especially after seeing Giovanni Pastore’ Cabiria he first emulated the epic form and then, of course with Birth of A Nation and Intolerance defined it emphatically.  Judith is typical of Griffith’s fascination with the sentiments of biblical drama, stories on which he could overlay his morality and his limited view of good versus evil.  This is, however, a pivotal film in the history of American filmmaking.  With:  Blanche Sweet as Judith, Henry Walthall as Holofernee, Mae Marsh as Naomi, Robert Harron as Nathan, Lillian Gish as the young mother, Dorothy Gish as the crippled beggar, Kate Bruce as Judith’s maid.  Notes:  Adapted from the Apocrypha and the poetical tragedy Judith of Bethulia by Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

 

JUVE CONTRE FANTOMAS.  1913.  75 minutes.  Silent.  France.  <V2328>.  Directed by Louis Feuillade.  Fantomas is the arch-criminal and a master of disguise.  Inspector Juve and an Ace reporter, Fandor, and this serial like film is a film that makes use of the magic of cinema as well as any feature made during this early stage of world cinema.  There are some amazing effects achieved in this early classic.  Movies, as a medium, made magicians like Feuillade effective filmmakers.  With:  Rene Navarre, Breon, Georges Melchior, Renee Carl, and Jane Faber.  Notes:  Screenplay by Feuillade.  Photographed by Guerin.  The story is actually the retelling of several serial melodramas, based on the detection novels of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain.  The film makes use of the standard action of the genre then and now — killings, kidnapping, and wild chases.

 

KING OF KINGS.  1927.  112 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Religious Epic.  Biblical Epic. Jesus Christ.  Cecil B. DeMille.  Produced and directed by C. B. DeMille.  This biblical epic on the life of Christ is set up along the lines of tableaux.  Images of Christ on Gethsemane, before Pilate, and at the last supper clearly evoke famous religious paintings on these events.  De Mille’s interpretation of Mary Magdalene is not that of a woman of the streets but of a powerful courtesan, who is in love with an ambitious young Judas.  It is an entertaining film and like the other major epics by De Mille in the silent era, is a prototype for the genre.  H.B. Warner is the first of a long list of blond, Anglo Saxon actors to portray Christ.  With:  Dorothy Cumming, Ernest Torrence, Joseph Schildkraut, Jacqueline Logan, Sam De Grasse and Montagu Love.  Notes:  Synchronization by RCA Photophone of music by Hugo Reisenfeld.  Musical direction by Josiah Zuro.  Story and Screenplay by Jeanie Macpherson.  Photography by Peverell Marley.  Art direction by Mitchell Leisen and Anton Grot.

 

KRIEMHILDS RACHE [KRIEMHILD’S REVENGE] see DIE NIEBELUNGEN

 

LADIES OF LEISURE.  1930.  98 minutes.  Romantic Melodrama.  Silent Cinema.  Barbara Stanwyck.  Frank Capra.  Directed by Frank Capra.  Barbara Stanwyck is a reformed good-time girl and gold digger named Kay Arnold in this last silent film by both she and Frank Capra.  Stanwyck is an artist’s model who falls for the aristocratic painter, Jerry Strange.  Fairly average given the quality and stature of the artists involved in the film.  With:  Julie Compton as Claire Collins, George Fawcett as Mr. Strange, Ralph Graves as Jerry Strange, Nancy O’Neil as Mrs. Strange, Marie Prevost as Dot Lamar, Lowell Sherman as Bill Standish, John Walker as Charlie.  Notes:  Screenplay by Jo Swerling from a play by Milton Herbert Gropper entitled Ladies of the Evening.  Cinematography Joseph Walker.  Produced by Harry Cohn.

 

THE LAST COMMAND.  1928.  100 minutes.  Silent.  <V1456>.  A Russian general displaced by the Revolution of 1918 finds himself an $7.50 extra in Hollywood in the late ’20s.  On the set of a film about the Revolution he portrays a role not unlike his own life.  He dies on the set believing that he has died on the battlefield for his beloved Czar and country.  The great German silent actor Emil Jannings won the first best actor Academy Award for his performance in this fine, well directed drama.  The film also starred William Powell as a film director.  With:  Evelyn Brent, Nicholas Soussanin, Michael Visaroff, and Jack Raymond.  1928./9 reels/8,154 feet.

 

THE LAST LAUGH.  1924.  74 minutes. /8reels/6,500ft. Silent.  Germany.  Melodrama.  <V655>.  Directed by F.W. Murnau.  One of the strongest films of the silent era.  In Berlin the doorman at a premier hotel is lord of all he surveys.  He is arrogant and proud of his role as the head doorman at the luxury hotel.  His bearing on the job brings instills fear in his underlings and prestige among his neighbors.  His uniform, like that of a great military officer is what impresses him and those around him.  When the hotel manager realizes that the aging doorman can no longer handle heavy baggage he demotes to lavatory attendant.  His humiliation is made more complete because it means the loss of his uniform.  He steals the coat to avoid the added humiliation  the loss of his job would bring him among his neighbors.  The film is a superior exercise in the cinematic style perfected by the Germans in the silent era.  German films were among the most advanced of the period.  This film has been duly honored as one the very best.  It’s happy ending has always been criticized, but it’s stature among film buffs and scholars has not diminished. Screenplay by Carl Mayer.  Photography by Karl Freund.

 

A LIFE FOR A LIFE.  1916.  “Khanzhonkov explained in a 1937 interview what he wanted to achieve with this film.  “I wanted to stagger the cinema world with a production of great artistic worth. . .”  Notes:  Directed by Evgenii Bauer.  Screenplay by Bauer from the novel Serge Panine by Georges Ohnet.  Photography by Boris Zavelev.  Cast includes:  Olga Rakhomanova as Khromova, a millionairess; Lidiia Koreneva as Musia, her daughter; Vera Kholodnaia as Nata her daughter; Vitol’d Polonskii as Prince Bartinskii, and Ivan Perestiani as Zhurov, a merchant.

 

LIGHT OF FAITH.  1922.  30 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Lon Chaney.  Romantic Melodrama.  Directed by Clarence Brown.  Lon Chaney stars petty thief Tony Pantelli, who falls in love with pretty Elaine MacGregor when the girl’s misfortunes drive her to living in the run-down hotel Pantelli dwells in.  The girl’s past is mysterious – has she run away from a love affair or has she been cast-aside by her lover.  When J. Warburton Ashe, a wealthy young traveler finds a priceless chalice during an English hunting trip, it’s believed by many to be a talisman like the Holy Grail.  Ashe, who is also trying to recover from a troubled love affair returns to America with the cup with much ballyhoo in the press.  Are the two star-crossed lovers separated destined to meet again? When Elaine on reading of Ashe’s return relates the myth to Pantelli he becomes obsessed with retrieving the cup to restore the deathly ill Elaine’s health.  Clarence Brown was a fine silent director who would become a master craftsman romantic dramas of the sound era [a specialist in women’s pictures, headlined by the great lady stars at MGM] and later of social dramas of the ‘40s.  This Lon Chaney film is not among the great eccentric roles he was most famous for – it’s short and sentimental.  With:  E. K. Lincoln as J. Warburton Ashe, Theresa Maxwell Conover as Mrs. Templeton Orrin, Dorothy Walters as Mrs. Callerty, Charles Mussett as Detective Braenders, Edgar Norton as Peters, Dore Davidson as Jerusalem Mike, and Mr. McClune as Socrates Stickles.  Notes:  Scenario by Brown and William Dudley Pelley from a story by Pelley.  Photographed by Alfred Ortlieb and Ben Carre.  Music arranged and directed by Robert Israel. 

 

THE LILY OF BELGIUM.  1915.  Directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz.  Amazing live animation by the gifted Starewicz.  This is truly modern work, work of imagination and great talent.  This film is a Belgian fairy tale brought to life by Starewicz’ impressive skills. With:  Irina Starewicz as the grand daughter in the parable.  Notes:  Screenplay, art direction, and photography by Starewicz.

 

THE LODGER.  1928.  65 minutes./8reels/7,500ft.  Silent.   <V791>.  Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  This is one of the earliest film versions of the Jack-the-Ripper story.  It’s also the film Alfred Hitchcock calls his “real” first film.  A quiet, secretive young man becomes the border in a rooming house at the same time that a Jack the Ripper like killer known as the “Avenger” is terrorizing the streets of London.  When he falls in love with the daughter of the house, her jealous boyfriend (a detective) begins to suspect he is the Avenger, an idea that he cultivates among the girls parents and acquaintances.  All of the filmic tricks that would become Hitchcock staples began with this film — suspicion placed on an innocent because of his independent actions or tendency towards solitude; the omnipresent feeling that he might be the villain; an abundance of “red herring” all over the place.  The film’s climax is it’s high point — the innocent man is chased by a vicious, blood-thirsty.  He is saved by the merest whisper of a plot mechanism.  Not quite up to the best later Hitchcock, but a more than interesting entry for Hitchcock fans.  With:  Ivor Novello, June, Lady Inverclyde, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesny, and Malcolm Keen.  Notes:  Screenplay by Hitchcock and Eliot Stannard.  Photographed by Baron Ventimiglia.

 

LONG PANTS.  1927.  58 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Comedy.  Frank Capra.  Harry Langdon.  Directed by Frank Capra.  Harry Langdon is Harry Shelby a naïve young small town boy who gets into all kinds of trouble on the day he puts on his first long pants.  This bizarre comedy, by the most uniquely curious of the major clowns of  silent films is full of amazingly astute sexual and even literary allusions.  But at the center is the weirdly asexual Harry, as a young man just awakening to the idea of love.   When a beautiful young woman named Bebe arrives on the scene he is smitten.  On his wedding day, Harry finds that Bebe, with whom he’d had a chance encounter, is on trial as a dope smuggler ?!? [of which she’s guilty] he plots her rescue.  He plans to abandon his lovely betrothed Priscilla [to the point of attempting her murder].  Harry plans a jailbreak and that’s when all hell breaks loose.  There are some hilarious scenes in this film but there are also some harrowing ones.  Alma Bennett is riveting as the bad girl – she’s hard as nails, a sexual predator with a will of steel.  When the naïve Harry finally sees what she’s really like his innocent response is classic.  Chastened our hero returns home.  With:  Gladys Brockwell as His Mother, Alan Roscoe as His Father, Priscilla Bonner as His Bride, Alma Bennett as His Downfall, and Betty Francisco as His Finish.  Notes:  Story by Arthur Ripley and adapted by Robert Eddy.  Photographed by Elgin Lesley and Glenn Kershner.  Also included on this program:  Saturday Afternoon.  1925.  29 minutes.  Comedy.  Harry Langdon.  Directed by Harry Edwards.  Harry Langdon and Alice Ward star in this funny little short about a young husband  — “a crumb from the sponge cake of life” — who tries to escape the drudgery of life as a henpecked husband with a little weekend with a flapper.  With:  Ruth Hiatt as Pearl and Peggy Montgomery as Ruby.  Notes:  Photographed by William Williams.  Special photography by Ernie Crockett.  Story by Arthur Ripley and Frank Capra.

 

THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY.  1927.  123 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Romantic Melodrama.  G. W. Pabst.  Revolutionary Russia.  Post-War Europe.  German Cinema.  Directed by G. W. Pabst.  One of the excellent works by the great German filmmaker G. W. Pabst.  The story is set among a world of international thieves and incendiary politics.  The daughter of a French diplomat in Russia during the early days of the Revolution is not aware of her father’s role as a broker of information for spies.  When he is killed by a young man she has fallen in love with, the girl struggles to find a way to forgive the man she loves.  She is spirited from harm’s way as the daughter of a reactionary by her lover and a friend and finds her way back to Paris and the offices of her uncle, a detective.  The uncle, who is consumed with solving a spectacular diamond theft is also a moral hypocrite, he is willing to wed his  blind daughter to the same degenerate spy his brother new in Russia.  The girl is totally aware of the deceit that her father engages in, nor is she aware of his attempts to seduce the niece. Rich in detail, intelligent, and filled with stark, shocking imagery, this film is an impressive showcase for Pabst’s style.  It is one of the films that Kracauer studies in his classic From Caligari to Hitler.  A very impressive film by a great filmmaker.  Notes:  Screenplay by Ilya Ehrenberg and Ladislaus Vayda based on the novel by Ehrenberg.  Photographed by Fritz Arno.  With:  Edith Jehanne, Brigitte Helm, Fritz Rasp.  Music composed and conducted by Timothy Brock and performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra.

 

THE LUMIERE BROTHERS’ FIRST FILMS.  A Kino on Video collection of the films of Auguste and Louis Lumiere, the first great filmmakers of France.  This collection is available both on Video tape and DVD.  The DVD collection is includes 85 complete works made between 1895 and 1897, all digitally re-mastered and organized as follows:

Notes:  A lively narration, in English, by French film director Bertrand Tavernier introduces this astonishing collection on DVD.  The intro is accompanied by selections of the included works with a piano score written and performed by Stuart Oderman.  Commentary in French by Thierry Fremaux, Director of the Institut Lumiere. 

•  
• Lumiere, the First Films:
•  
• Sortie d’usine [Leaving the Lumiere Factory.  Photographed by Louis Lumiere, July 1895.  Workers leaving the Lumiere factory in Lyons.  This film is one of several that subtly promoted the Lumiere enterprise.  American reviewers were impressed that French workers could afford a bicycle.  The subject of employees leaving a factory was often redone by American producers (Winchester Arms Factory at Noon, Biograph, 1896; Clark’s Thread Mill, Edison 1896).  Repas de BeBe [The Baby’s Meal].  Photographed by Louis Lumiere; Spring 1895.  A moving snapshot of Auguste Lumiere and family at the breakfast table.  The subtle fluttering of leaves impressed audiences as being amazingly true to life.  Demolition d’un Mur [Destruction of a Wall].  Photographed by Louis Lumiere; early 1896.  Auguste Lumiere directs the demolition of a wall on the factory grounds.  Exhibitors often showed this film twice, the second time backwards (as shown on this tape).  L’Arroseur arose [The Sprinkler Sprinkled].  Photographed by Louis Lumiere; Spring 1895.  This simple comedy helped to launch the popular bad boy genre of film comedy, which was extremely popular in the pre-nickelodeon era (and found its ultimate expression in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid [1920]).  the picture was remade numerous times, both by the Lumieres and their competitors.

Arrivee des Congressistes a Neuville-sur-Saone [Arrival of Congress Members at Neuville-sur-Saone].  Photographed by Louis Lumiere; June 1895.  Taken at the Congress of Photographic Societies in Lyons, as participants (including Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen) disembark from an excursion vessel.  As a way of impressing those present, the film was shown the following day.  Arrivee d’un train en gare a La Ciotat [The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat].  Photographed by Louis Lumiere; c. 1895.  News of this film’s success in European theaters reached the U.S. in March 1896, as preparations for the opening of the Vitascope were far advanced.  It convinced the Edison group of the need for outdoor scenes and so for a portable camera.  the railroad became a powerful symbol of modern technology in turn-of-the-century cinema and the train pulling into a station or rushing by the camera had a strong impact on early film audiences.  Partie d’ecarte [Card Party].  Photographed by Louis Lumiere; 1895.  With Antoine Lumiere (father of Auguste and Louis), Felicien Trewey, and M. Winckler.  A card party ends with a drink among the participants.  Barque sortant du port [Boat Leaving the port].  Photographed by Louis Lumiere; 1895.  Some of the members of the Lumiere family watch a small boat move out to sea at the harbor in La Ciotat.  Leaving Jerusalem by Railway, 1896.  Lumiere camera operators were quickly touring the globe, taking films of distant lands.  In many cases, the cameramen put their cinematographe on board a transportation vehicle to shoot their pictures.  This picture was shot from the rear platform of a train pulling out of a station in Jerusalem.  Bataille de Boules de Neige [Snowball Fight], 1896.  A winter scene.  Throwing snowballs on the streets.  Sortie de la pompe (Lyon) [A Fire Run (Lyons), 1896.  A staged scene of firefighters racing to the scene of a conflagration in Lyons.  One of several fire fighting films shot at this time.  Similar films of the fire runs were taken on innumerable occasions during the next ten years, increasingly for local consumption.  Niagara, les chutes [Niagara Falls].  Photographed by Alexandre Promio; September 1896.  Several different American producers had filmed Niagara Falls by the time Lumiere cameraman Promo arrived on the scene.  This negative was brought back to Lyons where it was developed, with resulting prints sent to Lumiere showmen throughout the world.  Course de taureaux [Espagne], [Spanish Bullfight].  circa 1897.  Shot from the stands, this film shows a bullfight in its later stages.

 

LYRICAL NITRATE.  1992.  50 minutes.  Documentary.  Dutch Film History.  Silent Cinema, 1905-1920.  Film Compilation.  Directed by Peter Delpeut.  This film is a compilation of films in the catalog of Dutch filmmaker Peter Delpeut.  Delpeut, a key pioneer in Europe’s cinema in the first part of the cinema, filmed and distributed most of his own work.  There is fascinating footage in this film about cinema and cinema making.  Most of the works shown in this film is lost forever.  Key among the titles on this restored film is a romantic melodrama about a couple shipwrecked on a desert island (titled of course The Shipwreck) and a French production of The Life of Christ.  Notes:  Written by Peter Delpeut

 

LYRISCH NITRAAT see LYRICAL NITRATE

 

MABEL’S BUSY DAY.  1914.  (998 ft.) approx. 9 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the CHARLIE CHAPLIN CLASSIC COLLECTION:  Volume I Chaplin at Keystone Studios <V2893>.  Directed by Mabel Normand and Chaplin.  Mabel Normand plays a hot dog vendor who bribes her way into a sporty race track to sell her ware.  Charlie is again a penniless, properly dressed vagrant who swipes her wares and creates a riotous situation for all.  Cast includes:  Chester Conklin, Edgar Kennedy, ‘Slim’ Summerville, Billie Bennett, Harry McCoy, Al St. John, Charley Chase, and Wallace MacDonald.  Notes:  Photographed by Frank D. Williams.

 

MACK SENNETT COMEDIES.  1915-1927.  169 minutes. <V1106>.  (Total length of all programs on two cassettes).  A collection of some of the more famous Mack Sennett slapstick comedies from the Silent Comedy heyday from 1915-1927.  Included in this two volume set:  The Eyes Have It (1928), with Ben Turpin, Georgia O’Dell, Helen Gilmore and Jack Lipson.  Eyes Have It, The.  “The hero (Ben Turpin) rescues a young lady and she invites him to her apartment.  As luck would have it, his suspicious wife and her mother happen on the scene, and guess who they catch up to his eyeballs in a compromising situation?  With:  Georgia O’Dell, Helen Gilmore, and Jack Lipson.  Produced and directed by Mack Sennett.  1928.  A segment of the Blackhawk Collectors Series Mack Sennett Comedies.  The Cannonball (1916), with Chester Conklin.  Cannonball, The.  “It’s pandemonium in the boom Powder factory when an explosives expert (Chester Conklin) arrives to inspect operations.  His methods are most unusual, but you must admit the wily little codger knows his powder and his women!  Organ score by Robert Israel.   1916.  The Desperate Scoundrel (1916), with Ford Sterling, Minta Durfee, and The Keystone Kops.  Desperate Scoundrel.  “Crazy happenings occur in the laundry room as a villain tries to run the heroine through a laundry press.  The Keystone Kops rush in to save the damsel in distress, with the usual result — chaos.”  With:  Ford Sterling, Minta Durfee, and the Keystone Kops.  Produced and directed by Mack Sennett.  1916.  A segment of The Blackhawk Collection Mack Sennett Comedies.  Pride of Pikeville.  (1927), with Ben Turpin, Andy Clyde and Vernon Dent.  Pride of Pikeville, The.  “Ben Turpin can’t help but split your sides with laughter.  Improbably cast as a handsome lover, he can hardly sort out the ladies he desires form the many that fall at his feet.”  With Ben Turpin, Andy Clyde, and Vernon Dent.  Produced and directed by Mack Sennett.  1927.  A segment of The Blackhawk Collectors Series Mack Sennett Comedies.  Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916), With Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and Teddy The Dog.  Fatty and Mabel Adrift.  “The family farm hand, proposes marriage to the bosses’ daughter.  On their wedding day the jealous neighbor vows revenge, and the happy couple awake to find their beds floating in a flood of water!  The ubiquitous Keystone Kops rush to the rescue.  With:  Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Teddy the Dog.  1916.  Produced and directed by Mack Sennett.  A segment of the Blackhawk Collectors Mack Sennett Comedies.  Mabel, Fatty and the Law (1915), with Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, Harry Gribbon and Minta Durtee.  Mabel, Fatty, and the Law.  “A young man flirts with a pretty girl in a park filled with “No Spooning” signs, while the girl’s husband whoops it up at home with the maid (the young man’s wife).  The Keystone Kops go bananas trying to keep some law and order.”  With:  Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Harry Gribbon, and Minta Durtee.  Produced and directed by Mack Sennett.  Piano score by John Mirsalis.  1915.  A segment of the Blackhawk Collectors Series Mack Sennett Comedies.  Fatty’s Tin-type Tangle (1915), with Fatty Arbuckle, Louise Fazenda, Edgar Kennedy, and Frank Hayes.  Fatty’s Tin-Type Tangle.  Two lovers are snapped by a traveling tintyper in the park, and everybody gets into the act, including the Keystone Kops.  With:  Fatty Arbuckle, Louise Fazenda, Edgar Kennedy, and Frank Hayes.  1915.  Produced and directed by Mack Sennett.  A segment of the Blackhawk Collectors Series Mack Sennett Comedies.  Our Congressman (1924), with Will Rogers, Madge Hunt and Jimmy Finlayson.  Our Congressman.  “Our Congressman was produced by Hal Roach Studios and not by Mack Sennett.  In this hilarious “expose of political life in the twenties, beloved with and raconteur Will Rogers shows the folks back home how their elected official really earns his keep!” With:  Will Rogers, Madge Hunt, and Jimmy Finlayson.  Piano score by Robert Israel.  1924.

 

MAKING A LIVING.  1914.  (1,030 ft) approx. 11 minutes.  Silent.  A film in the Charlie Chaplin Classic Collection:  Volume I Chaplin at Keystone Studios <V2893>.  Directed by Henry Lehrman.  This is Chaplin’s first film.  He plays a scamp who’s competing for the hand of a rich young girl.  He hasn’t a cent to his name, and lives by his wits.  It is really nothing more than a Sennett slapstick chaser, but Chaplin does make a noticeable debut on film.  He hadn’t much further to go to create, the “little fellow” persona that would become the Tramp.  The humor of this film, as were most of the Sennett comedies, was both physically and playfully low or suggestive.  Cast includes:  Henry Lehrman, Virginia Kirtley, Alice Davenport, Chester Conklin, and Minta Durfee. Notes:  Photographed by E.J. Vallejo.  Screenplay by Reed Heustis.

 

MAKING AN AMERICAN CITIZEN.  released:  30 October 1912.  Directed by Alice Guy Blache.  With:  Lee Beggs (Ivan) and Blanche Cornwall (his wife);    In the land of freedom, a Russian peasant learns he must work and not treat his wife like a slave.  With the Statue of Liberty in the background, he is told he cannot abuse his wife anymore:  a real American forces him to take the luggage from her and carry it to their new home.  After several incidents in which Ivan continues to abuse her, he is finally sentenced to six months of penal servitude by a jury of American men–with a male judge and male witnesses. Ivan finally learns how to behave as a proper American on a chain gang.  By the time he leaves the care of the state he has been “completely Americanized” and tenderly embraces his wife.  Now he works on the farm while she cooks the meals.  Ivan is depicted using a melodramatic acting style, and unlike the other character, he openly looks at the camera.  By the time he is Americanized, his gestures are more restrained and he ceases to acknowledge the camera.  Ivan has thus been “socialized” on a number of levels, in terms of cinematic conventions as well as marital behavior.  In key respects, this is not a feminist film:  men teach Ivan the American way, while the wife’s proper place is shown to be in the home, in her proper domestic sphere.  Long takes and a relatively static camera are used.  In comparison to Griffiths’ films of this same period, the differences in cinematic style are remarkable.

 

MALE AND FEMALE.  1919.  117 minutes.  Silent Cinema.  Social Satire.  Sir James M. Barrie.  Gloria Swanson.  Cecil B. De Mille.   Directed by Cecil B. De Mille.  Gloria Swanson is the spoiled English heiress Lady Mary Lasenby in this adaptation of Sir James Barrie’s often filmed and staged play The Admirable Chrichton.  James M. Barrie’s story of a well educated, dignified butler named Chrichton, employed by an English barrister and his spoiled children has been filmed in a number of variations.  This first film version was given the full treatment by Cecil B. De Mille.  It was one of his social comedy/melodramas [like The Cheat] which simultaneously celebrated and deplored the excesses of the rich, famous, and fatuous.  In this film, Gloria Swanson plays the aristocratic lady who falls in love with the family’s butler after they are stranded on a desert island after the family yacht wrecks.  All the survivors must learn to live off the land and nature, but of course only the stalwart Chrichton can.  After several years on the island, the roles of the servant and masters are reversed.  Of course, they are rescued, and though Chrichton and Mary’s love is still strong, they both come realize it can not be so.  The film’s very enjoyable social farce for the most part.  Only in the last reel does the social moralizing emerge with its pat resolution to social inter-marriage between classes decidedly favoring the status quo.  With:  Thomas Meighan  as Chrichton, a butler, Theodore Roberts as Lord Loam, Raymond Hatton as Hon. Ernest Wooley, Robert Cain as Lord Brocklehurst, Lila Lee as Tweeny, Bebe Daniels as the King’s Favorite [Babylon sequence], Julia Faye as Susan, Rhy Darby as Lady Eileen Dun Craigie, Milded Reardon as Agatha Lasenby.  Notes:  Written by Jeanie Macpherson from the play by Sir James Barrie.  Costumes by Mitchell Leisen.  Art direction by Wilfred Buckland.  De Mille had a penchant for using

 

THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA.  1929.  [6 reels].  Documentary.  Experimental Cinema.  Silent Cinema.  Dziga Vertov.  Russian Cinema.  Directed by Dziga Vertov.  Described by titles on the film as “An excerpt from the diary of a cameraman for viewers’ attention, this film presents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events without the aid of intertitles, without the aid of a scenario without the aid of theater (a film without sets, actors, etc.).  This experiment work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature.”  A stunning technical an cinematic achievement.  Vertov’s camera is purely an objective observer of  places, people, things, events.  The camera is “the filmmaker and star of this fine work.  Notes:  Music and Film Research and Annotation by Yuri Tsivian.  Photographed by Mikhail Kaufman.  Edited by Vertov and Yelizaveta Svilova.  Musical Accompaniment composed and performed by Alloy Orchestra [Terry Donahue, Caleb Sampson and Ken Winokur].  Video produced by David Shepard of Film Preservation Associates.  Restored version premiered in Pordenone, Teatro, Verdi, October 14, 1995. Original premier in Moscow April 9, 1929.  Vertov’s real name was Kaufman, he is the older brother of this film’s cameraman Mikhail and the great cinematographer Boris Kaufman.

 

THE MANXMAN.  1929.  86 minutes.  Silent.  Alfred Hitchcock.  British Cinema. <V796>.  Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  A silent film with a musical track.  the story is about the love of two men, one a poor fisherman – the other a wealthy lawyer, for the same young woman. The story of desperate love on the Isle of Man.  Grim, humorless film interesting mostly as Hitchcock’s last silent film. With:  Carl Brisson, Malcolm Keen, Anny Ondra, and Randal Ayrton.  Notes:  Based on a novel by Sir Hall Caine.  Screenplay by Elliott Stannard.  Photographed by Jack Cox.

 

THE MARK OF ZORRO.  1920.  7 reels.  Silent.  Action Adventure.  Douglas Fairbanks.  Directed by Fred Niblo.  Douglas Fairbanks is Zorro/Don Diego Vega in this, one of his most popular and beloved films.  Fairbanks’ wit, style and athleticism were remarkable and he veritably created the model for romantic action heroes in the movies.  As the gallant hero, who poses as an effete, ineffectual milksop to hide his identity as the mythical hero of Old California, Fairbanks is droll and sublimely appealing.  A truly wonderful film.  With:  Marguerite De La Motte as Lolita, Robert McKim as Captain Juan Ramon, Noah Beery as Sergeant Pedro Garcia, Charles Hill Mailes as Don Carlos Pulido, Claire McDowell as Dona Catalina, George Periolat as Governor Alvarado, Walt Whitman as Fra Felipe, Sidney de Grey as Don Alejandro Pulido, and Tote du Crow as Bernardo.  Notes:  Screenplay by “Elton Thomas” [Fairbanks].  Cinematography by William C. McGann and Harry Thorpe.