BROKEN BLOSSOMS

By 1919 Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith had been working together as director and muse for nearly a decade. Don't let the date turn you away from this movie: it is one of the most poetic, tenderest love stories ever put on film. A tragic romance. Gish plays an abused girl of the London ghetto taken in by a kindly, young "Yellow Man" played by Richard Barthelmess. Unfortunately his love and care is not enough to save her from her sadistic father played by Donald Crisp. Despite being ill with Spanish influenza right before rehearsals were underway for the movie's production, Lillian Gish gives one of her iconic performances as a frail, virginal waif who is almost too pure and good for this world. Gish was reticent about assaying the role but Griffith forbid her to say no; he was a powerful influence on Gish's professional life. In her later years, when speaking of Griffith, she always referred to him as "Mr.Griffith, the Father of film."

Broken Blossoms is the reason it's hard to label Griffith racist. The movie is an interracial love story, and the Chinese man is the only decent man in the movie.

STAGECOACH

John Ford's Stagecoach is the quintessential western and one of the best ever made in the genre. After years of apprenticeship in undistinguished westerns, John Wayne broke out with his performance in this movie. He never forgot John Ford gave him his major break and the pair worked together on a number of movies, mostly westerns, despite their political differences. 

From an original short story that was published in Colliers, Ben Hecht and Dudley Nichols wrote a screenplay for Ford who had bought the rights to "Stage to Lordsburg." It had been years since Ford had made a western, even though today his westerns are what he is best known for. Producing it wasn't easy because westerns were thought of as B or even C pictures made on poverty row - Monogram and Republic studios - and John Wayne wasn't an established actor at this point. So Ford set up financing with independent producer Walter Wanger. The picture was released through United Artists. Stagecoach was an immediate hit upon release with critics and audiences and revived western moviemaking in Hollywood.

Screenwriter Dudley Nichols wrote many classics during the Golden Era of Hollywood: The Informer, Bringing Up Baby, For Whom the Bell Tolls and several John Ford directed. He won an Academy Award for The Informer but refused the award because the Writer's Guild was on strike at the time; the first award recipient to turn the golden bald little Oscar down. Despite this, Nichols was nominated three more times by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Everyone one in the cast is perfect, especially Thomas Mitchell playing an alcoholic doctor named "Doc." The Academy thought so too and awarded him an Best Supporting Acting award. In the same year Stagecoach was released he played Scarlett O'Hara's pa in Gone With the Wind. Claire Trevor plays the good hearted whore, Dallas,with a certain tough weariness that I guess most whores have. Trevor received top billing.When Ford was in talks with David O. Selznick to produce Stagecoach Selznick wanted Marlene Dietrich for the part of Dallas.  

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

D.W. Griffith's landmark movie epic The Birth of a Nation  from 1915 legitimized the movie industry in the United States. Birth was one of the first what we now call "feature" length movies. It ran a little over three hours and was shown as a roadshow engagement instead of the penny arcades where many watched movies in those days. The movie was the first to be shown in the White House - occupied at that time by Woodrow Wilson. Griffith earned the title "Father of film" due to the success and technical achievements of the movie. But the subject matter is seen today as racist and many historians have ambivalent feelings about the movie's huge success. Yes, on one hand Griffith set the standard for innovative film-making in his day; however, one cannot forget the awful caricatures of the African-Americans in the film, played by whites with obvious black face and what we now know and have - or should - a deep shame about: thousands of lynchings against African-Americans for sport during the early 1900's. There is a lynching in the movie. To watch Birth is to admire Griffith laying the ground work in editing, story structure, camera movements, and lighting for future movie makers; conversely it is also a time capsule of an era when the portrayal of the Klu Klux Klan so captured the imagination of certain moviegoers that not long after the terrorist group, for that is what they were, was revitalized, not only in the south but the midwest as well. Birth was a powerful recruiting tool: it fed the imagination of a glorified past when after the civil war southerners had to fight back against the carpetbaggers and Yankees who let African-Americans run wild, i.e., basically let them be the equal of whites. The thought of being molested by a African-American man sends one white woman over the cliff literally in the movie. Of course sexual assault was more prevalent the other way around: white men attacking African-American women. So one has to watch Birth for the art and not the message.

This quote from James Agee: "The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in 'The Birth of a Nation.' I have heard it praised for its realism, but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like..."

Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980)

Hollywood is eminent movie historian Kevin Brownlow's blockbuster miniseries about the American silent movie era. It is one the finest and most informative documentaries about silent Hollywood or any period in Hollywood in terms of the scope and history it covers. The documentary is a movie lover's dream and essential viewing. Over the course of four years in the mid-to-late 1970's Brownlow interviewed hundreds of silent movie stars, directors, producers, technicians, journalists and writers who were employed in Hollywood during the first fifteen to twenty years of the movie business  British produced, shamefully this documentary never received proper distribution in the U.S., but now can viewed on Youtube. Here is the link.

The genesis of Hollywood started with the publication of Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By.. in 1968. The book is considered a classic among movie buffs, and with Hollywood being the standard bearer of movie documentaries, Parade is the definitive book about silent era Hollywood. Thames television produced the series Hollywood and according to Brownlow spent about $1 million making it, big money back then especially for British television. Though reluctant at first to work in television, Brownlow was also a filmmaker, he decided to do it after being impressed by the company. In some instances Brownlow had to pay film stars like Gish and Swanson, and a few stars like Alice Terry were interviewed but didn't want to appear on camera after 50 odd years. Most, however, were open with Brownlow, sharing their memories of this early golden era in movies.

In an interview with UPI in 1980 when Hollywood aired Brownlow stated: "Hollywood is not a history of the silent screen era. It is a homage - but clear eyed and realistic - of the 15 dramatic years in the life of an industry whose films are the closest we will get to H.G. Wells' Time Machine."

The movie has 13 episodes:

PIONEERS
IN THE BEGINNING
SINGLE BEDS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS
HOLLYWOOD GOES TO WAR
HAZARD OF THE GAME
SWANSON AND VALENTINO
THE AUTOCRATS
COMEDY - A SERIOUS BUSINESS
OUT WEST
THE MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE
TRICK OF THE LIGHT
STAR TREATMENT
END OF AN ERA

The Pink Panther Strikes Again [1976]

In 1976 this was the newest, though not the pinkest Pink Panther movie. The fourth movie in the Pink Panther series is mainly a showcase for Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom. They're both like a middle aged Laurel and Hardy without the physical dissimilarities. It's generally funny in parts: Sellers dressed up as Quasimodo then floating out a window while on the phone, going to a gay bar and being sung to and hit on by a drag queen, but the gags and slapstick get old and the movie lags after an hour and it becomes apparent the slapstick routines make up for the lack of any story; no point of the movie being made besides a repeated formula had made hit movies before. Omar Sharif makes a brief cameo as an assassin, he had the lead alongside director Blake Edwards's wife Julie Andrews in "The Tamarind Seed" [1974], and Lesley Anne-Down shows up as a Russian defector trying to seduce Clouseau, which is weird and icky because she looks like teenager.  Two years later Peter Sellers would play Clouseau for a fifth and final time in "Revenge of the Pink Panther" [1978] which is on my list of movies to watch mainly because Dyan Cannon is in it.

TVM: The Third Girl from the Left [1973]

DIRECTOR: Peter Medak
WRITER:     Dory Previn


In 1973 Kim Novak had been off the big screen for four years having retreated from Hollywood to her home on a hilltop in Carmel, Ca. with a menagerie of animals. Her last two movies, The Legend of Lylah Clare and The Great Bank Robbery, had been duds, and she was approaching an important milestone for many actresses: her fortieth birthday.

Unfortunately, without the distinction of The Third Girl from the Left being Novak and Tony Curtis's television movie debuts and the first and only movie written by legendary songwriter and performer Dory Previn, Third Girl would've vanished after it aired in 1973. It's hardly a memorable piece of work from either actors'careers, although Curtis is first-rate, or of the director Peter Medak.

Television is often a writer's medium and when the writing stinks it shows in the actor's performances because of the tight camerawork: mostly medium shots and close-ups. Dory Previn was a famed Oscar nominated songwriter but her narrative writing here misses the park. It's a promising premise: an over-the-hill showgirl begins a relationship with a younger man while everything else falls around her, including her relationship with Tony Curtis whom she's been trying to get to marry her for thirteen years.

 In an Earl Wilson column interview Dory Previn , a former chorus girl, stated she wrote Third Girl because she wanted to write about what happens to chorus girls as they grow older. "The girls never have names," she told Wilson, "The choreographer says, 'Third girl from the left, you're out of step.' Some try suicide." Given that Previn was a talented songwriter it's no surprise that the most memorable thing about the movie is her haunting song she wrote and sang: "Gloria."

Director Peter Medak was a director from England and had just helmed The Ruling Class [1972] with Peter O'Toole. Third Girl was Medak's American produced movie debut, an inauspicious one. The directing here seems routine - like I said television is mostly a writer's medium.  He would go on to work primarily in television except with some notable theatrical movies like Let Him Have It [1991] and Romeo is Bleeding [1993].

The cast includes Michael Brandon as Novak's lover, George Furth, Barbi Benton, Louis Guss, Michael Conrad, Larry Bishop, and Anne Ramsey.

Third Girl was produced by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Production company and aired on ABC as part of their Tuesday night "Movie-of-the-Week" series.

BRITISH NEW WAVE: Billy Liar (1963)

DIRECTOR: JOHN SCHLESINGER
WRITERS:    KEITH WATERHOUSE & WILLIS HALL

Billy Liar is a deeply personal favorite of mine for so many reasons. The director, John Schlesinger, was one of the first openly gay movie directors. This was his second movie. The character of Billy Fisher is similar to me in more than one way, but, most importantly, we're both dreamers. Billy is played brilliantly by Tom Courtenay - it's one of his finest movie roles. Every actor in this movie is sublime and perfectly cast. The movie was also lovely Julie Christie's big break, one of the most luminous and talented of screen actresses.

Billy is a perpetual liar and day dreamer who probably today would be diagnosed with ADD. I think Billy is one the zaniest characters in movie history even counting all the ones Chaplin and Keaton played. In fact, I believe Courtenay's performance belongs in the pantheon of great comic performances on film; he'd played Billy in the original stage production replacing Albert Finney. Courtenay, unfortunately, wouldn't play a great screen character again until The Dresser 20 years later. He is completely charming here and vulnerable and bursting with youthful energy. This is a movie about being young and hopeful and dreamy and irresponsible: adjectives that describe Billy.

Billy Liar was the great gay British director John Schlesinger's second full length movie. Like other British New Wave directors Schlesinger had a documentary background. His first narrative movie, A Kind of Loving, starred Alan Bates, and like Billy both are considered part of the British New Wave. Schlesinger would go on to direct movies in Hollywood like Midnight Cowboy, The Day of the Locust and Marathon Man, earning a Best Director Oscar in 1970 for Cowboy. A former actor, like Robert Altman Schlesinger worked with many of the same actors over his career, and he launched the careers of Julie Christie and Jon Voight among others.

The actress who played Courtenay's girlfriend in his previous movie, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Topsy Jane, was cast as Liz, Billy's free-spirited beatnik former girlfriend. She became ill or had a nervous breakdown during shooting or before production, depending on the source, and was replaced with Julie Christie who had been screen tested twice but was turned down. In an interview years after the making of Billy Liar Christie stated, "It was incredible because I was terribly, terribly, terribly well-received, I mean, ridiculously well-recieved in that part. And really I didn't do... I see it now, and it's not very good, but still, something happened." Schlesinger was impressed with Christie enough to cast her in his next movie, Darling,which along with Dr. Zhivago made her an international star, albeit briefly.

BRITISH NEW WAVE: This Sporting Life (1963)

DIRECTOR: LINDSAY ANDERSON
WRITER:    DAVID STOREY


I think this entry into my New Wave series is one of the most gritty, harsh, moving, honest, and realistic movies ever. It rocked me to my core. 

The relationship between Richard Harris's character and Rachel Roberts was unlike any other I've seen in movies. Richard Harris plays a working-class Northern Englishman who plays rugby soccer as a way to reach a certain strata in society he couldn't have working in a coal mine, his previous job. It seemed to me he sought the money he earned for playing football(British term for soccer) in order to take care of and impress Rachel Roberts's character, a single and widowed mother with two children whom he wants very much to love him. He boards a room in her modest house and tries to win her over by giving her children gifts and showing them attention, but the lady's closed off emotionally. 

Harris doesn't win her over, although they do eventually have sex together. Guilt then plagues her because they aren't married(among other reasons). The movie doesn't spell it out but she is a religious, puritanical woman who even calls herself dirty at one point for being with Harris and not married: a kept woman. They fight and argue. He slaps her in the face at one point while they stand outside a church. No happy ending for them. Not even a bittersweet one.

Like other British New Wave movies, in This Sporting Life the male character's ascent from the working class leads him into corruption and vice. The filmmakers's of these movies seem to be conveying through the medium that aspiration to the top of the ladder in society can only lead to unhappiness and disillusion.

I think Harris played caricatures of himself later in his career, I've seen a few later movies, but he's all tough and rough and jumpy here in what is probably his great screen performance.

Rachel Roberts gives what must be one of her finest screen performances as well. She disappears into her role. The scene between she and Harris sitting by the fireplace in the kitchen where she briefly smiles while reminiscing about her days working in a WWII bomb factory with her deceased husband is the most beautiful few seconds of screen acting I have ever seen. Roberts deserved that Oscar nomination and the Bafta award she won for Best British Actress. She lost the Oscar to Patricia Neal who won for for Hud.

BRITISH NEW WAVE: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)

DIRECTED BY: TONY RICHARDSON
WRITTEN BY:  ALAN SILLITOE

I watched this British New Wave film last night thanks to my public library down the street. Tom Courtenay(so handsome) plays a working-class youth of northern England who ends up in a reform school for boys where he begins to run "long distance" to escape the oppression of growing up poor with no future really besides working at some grimy mill like his father who dies at the beginning of the film. Directed by Tony Richardson, who at the time was married to Vanessa Redgrave, it was adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his short story. Michael Redgrave, Vanessa's father, plays the stern head of the reform school. "Long Distance Runner" was one of several key movies of the New Wave in British cinema, which sought to portray the British working class with dignity. The press dubbed them "kitchen sink" dramas. These movies were also critical of the rigid British class system which existed at the time. Not sure if it still does.

"To Be or Not to Be" (1942)

Sadly, Carole Lombard's last movie before being killed in a tragic airplane crash in 1942. A great, great loss. HUGE. 

The movie is an interesting satire of the Nazi's and wasn't appreciated in its day, understandably; U.S. had just entered the war, Lombard was dead, and the "Greatest Generation" were being drafted to fight the Japanese and Germans and Italians. WWII era audiences didn't want to see a comedy about Nazi's. The director is the sublime Ernst Lubtisch at the peak of his career. The movie is considered one of his best. With Jack Benny, a famous comedian of the day, and Robert Stack, later the host of "Unsolved Mysteries" in the nineties, that scary ass mystery show that used to come on Lifetime at midnight. Miriam Hopkins was first offered Lombard's part, but turned it down because she thought Benny got all the laughs. Streaming free via the Criterion Collection on hulu.com.http://www.hulu.com/watch/249579

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: The Skin Game

neighbor drama.

Boring and lackluster early talkie from Hitchcock. From John Galsworthy's play, The Skin Game concerns two feuding families, one old money the other new money. The concern is over land, as always. Only interesting part is the fast paced auction scene; the rest of the movie sags. Stage plays are most of the time not great source material for movies. With Leo Genn in his first Hitchcock picture; John Longden, a Hitchcock regular during his BIP period; Jill Esmond, Laurence Olivier's wife; Phyllis Konstam, and Helen Haye. Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, collaborated on the script.

She (1935)

Merian C. Cooper, the man behind King Kong, produced this campy adventure yarn about a female ruler in a Lost Kingdom for RKO Radio Pictures in 1935. Helen Gahagan Douglas portrays She/Ayesha, who "must be obeyed." The story is from a series of novels written by H. Rider Haggard that were popular in the very late 19th century.

Randolph Scott, Cary Grant's "roommate" and future western star, is the male lead and Helen Mack plays a young woman vying for his heart with She. Unfortunately, for She, she takes one too many flame baths and her eternal youthfulness doesn't last: she becomes a hag and dies. Spielberg must have watched this movie, along with other Cooper productions, because there are many similarities between She and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Also, She's quest for eternal youth reminded me of the outrageous Death Becomes Her. So someone involved with that movie watched this too because Meryl and Goldie look like She at the end of She.

Gahagan Douglas later became a Democratic Representative for California in 1940's. She was her only movie part. Before Douglas had been a Broadway actress and married Melvyn Douglas whom she met while performing in a play. In 1950, Richard M. Nixon took her seat in a tough campaign in which he accused her of being a Pinko/Communist. His smear campaign effectively put an end to her political career; this was during the witch hunt days. Because of his smear tactics Douglas was the first to call the future U.S. President "tricky Dick."

The behind the camera team is first rate. The art director/production design is by Van Nest Polglase who did all the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals and other major RKO productions during this period. She's court does look like it was before or later used for a musical.

There were two versions of She before this version and a later one in 1965 with Ursula Andress.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: Juno and the Paycock (1930)

Alfred Hitchcock's screen adaptation of Sean O'Casey's play, Juno and the Paycock is about Irish tenement dwellers in the twenties, namely Juno the matriarch who tries to keep her family together when things start to fall apart. The role of Juno is a strong part for an actress and is played with much gusto and passion by Irish stage actress Sara Allgood. She had appeared in the stage version of Juno and also in Hitchcock's Blackmail as Anny Ondra's mother. The movie is a bit stage-y and Hitchcock remarked years later Juno and the Paycock was just a filmed stage play. He told Truffaut: "It was an entity of its own, written by Sean O'Casey, and all I could do about it was cast it and direct the players."

Sean O'Casey was a distinguished Irish dramatist. O'Casey spent most of his years living in exile in England, however. I'm not sure if he's as well remembered today, but his plays, which all deal with Irish identity and politics but can be viewed across nationalities, are relevant today as they were in the 1920's, especially in these sour economic times. At an opening performance of one play in Dublin at famed Abbey Theatre during the twenties, a riot broke out.

Hitchcock claimed he based the bum in The Birds declaring the end of the world on O'Casey!

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: Blackmail (1929)

Hitchcock scored a triumph with his gripping talking picture debut in 1929. Adapted by Charles Bennett from his own play, Blackmail had been performed on the stage by Tallulah Bankhead, who was a London stage actress at the time. The female character in the picture kills a suitor of hers who tried to rape her; but, is it self defense or murder? Should she have gone to the gentlemen's flat by herself after only just meeting him? Was he expecting a tryst? Should she have expected that? These are not easy questions to answer while watching Blackmail. The characters in Blackmail are not black and white and there is no happy ending for any of the principal performers. While all of his movies up to this were well made and enjoyable, this is the first Hitchcock thriller since The Lodger, and it is much more darker about humanity.

Hitchcock opens the movie with the police working the beat: arresting and booking a criminal. Once the female character, played by Anny Ondra, commits murder she stumbles around the streets of 1929 London shocked and disoriented. Will she be taken in like the criminal in the opening scenes? Is that  why Hitchock showed us the policeman's routine? There's a catch: the murderess also has a detective boyfriend. And, of course, he is assigned to the case of the murdered suitor, who was an artist. Will he turn Anny Ondra in? Finally, someone else knows Ondra was at the scene of the crime, hence the movie's title, Blackmail.

Hitchcock shot Blackmail as a silent except for the last reel. He was encouraged to make it all sound, but he wanted the film to be shown in cinemas that weren't equipped for sound technology which were a good bit as this was the early years of talking movies. Eventually, he reshot scenes with sound, but, unfortunately, his leading lady, Anny Ondra, who appeared in Hitchcock's The Manxman, was Czech and not fluent in the English language. Her line readings were provided by actress Joan Barry who read the lines off camera into a microphone while Ondra mouthed the words. It's not as awkward onscreen as one would think, but Barry's voice doesn't exactly fit Ondra. Barry would later work with Hitchcock again on Rich and Strange.

Anny Ondra has the distinction of being played by Britt Ekland in a 1978 telefilm, Ring of Passion. Besides being an actress Ondra was married to boxer Max Schemling who fought Joe Louis in a 1938 boxing match that was labeled "the most important sporting event in history." It was on the eve of WWII and the match become symbolic in terms of race and history. It became sociopolitical. Joe Louis won. A black man beating a white man, German one, in 1938. However, Schemling wasn't political and didn't consider himself a Nazi, and though he was in the German army, after the war he was cleared of any Nazism.

Cyril Ritchard, who plays the horny suitor was known for appearing in musical comedies and had a  distinguished stage career spanning England, America, and Australia. He appeared most famously alongside Mary Martin in Peter Pan in which he played Captain Hook. He won a Tony for the role.

Pollyanna (1920)

Mary Pickford plays the title role in the first adaptation of Eleanor H. Porter's book which Pickford produced herself through her production company. It's about an optimistic orphan who goes and lives with her wealthy spinster aunt after her father passes away. Everyone remembers the 1960 version with Hayley Mills as Pollyanna and Jane Wyman as the aunt, but this version has much to recommend it, foremost being Pickford's adorable performance as a twelve year old girl. She was twenty-seven at the time! This movie was one of her major hits, and Pollyanna is the type of character Pickford often played in movies: adolescent girls. At barely five feet, it was easy for audiences to accept Pickford as a little girl.

This movie is a lean 57 minutes; not unusual for a feature film in that day and age. The scenario is credited to pioneering female screenwriter Frances Marion, who collaborated with Pickford on several of her key films. Pickford helped Marion become established in the movie industry - for she wielded great power during this period. Hollywood was just becoming established and she, along with Griffith, Chaplin, Fairbanks, contributed a great deal to it's foundation. Eventually, perversely, sadly, shockingly, the business they all gave so much to would, with each in a different way, come to neglect them.

You can watch Pollyanna here via Internet Archive http://archive.org/details/Pollyanna

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: The Farmer's Wife (1928)

This Hitchcock was a little bit twee for my tastes. It took three days to finish watching it. The movie opens with the death of the farmer's wife then four minutes later the farmer's daughter is getting married and after the wedding the farmer decides he wants to take a wife. He has three ladies in mind, but the perfect wife is right in front of him: his housekeeper.

Frankly, it's hard to see how the farmer doesn't grasp this from the get go; the housekeeper, Minta, is so much more attractive than the four women he proposes marriage to. Played by Lilian Hall-Davis, who was the female lead in The Ring, Hitchcock's previous release, the character has very little to do until the last ten minutes of the movie. But throughout Davis gives a calm, gentle and assured performance. Sadly, Davis suffered from severe depression in real life and like many successful silent screen actors the transition to sound hurt her career; she committed suicide in 1933.

Jameson Thomas plays the role of the Farmer; he's okay. Handsome, his idea of being a farmer seems to be poking his chest out and pointing his finger alot. There are flashes of dandy ism, a sly smile, and the following year these traits were put to great effect in the classic Piccadilly, where Thomas played a nightclub impresario. The movie was notable for featuring beautiful Chinese American star Anna May Wong, one of the very few Asian stars in that era and even today. She's best known today for playing opposite Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express.

The Farmer's Wife began on the London stage as a play from Eden Philpotts. He was also an author and poet and a friend of Agatha Christie. His play was a huge hit; none other than Laurence Olivier went on tour with it in 1926.

Hitchcock later told Francois Truffaut in their famous interview he had little recollection of The Farmer's Wife.

A Fool There Was (1915)

A silent movie from the WWI era, A Fool There Was marks the debut appearance of the movies' first sex symbol character played by Theda Bara. With her long, dark hair and huge eyes lined with kohl, Bara destroys a successful married man's life in this not particularly distinctive silent. If anything, the footage of 1914 New York City is the most fascinating part of the movie; there are several outdoor scenes with the public observing filming. 

The story is pure Victorian melodrama: woman is the downfall of man. A Fool There Was began in 1909 as a Broadway play starring Virginia Pearson and written by Porter Emerson Brown. Pearson was almost cast in this movie version after Valeska Suratt and Madlaine Traverse were considered.

Shot like many silent movies during this period in Ft. Lee, New Jersey, A Fool There Was is one of only a handful of Theda Bara movies in existence. Like a good many silent movies, they were either destroyed or simply eroded in storage. In Bara's case, a huge fire in 1937 at the old Fox Film Studios in Ft. Lee, where she shot most of her movies, burned down making an ash heap of the original film negatives. 

Known as a "vamp", short for vampire, Bara's career, like many sex-symbols after her, lasted just a decade, ending around 1925. Before starring in A Fool There Was, she had appeared in several bit parts on the stage and movies. Bara blamed over-zealous press agents and studio publicity for creating a false, negative persona as a man-eater who was an "Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor who spent her early years in the Sahara Desert under the shadow of the sphinx, then moved to France to become a  actress" (IMDb).

She was actually born as Theodosia Goodman in 1885 to parents of Jewish heritage in Cincinnati. 

In the early years of movies, many moviegoers at the nickelodeon believed the actors were the characters they played, and Bara was accosted or heckled at when she was in public; according to her, she was even refused service in restaurants.

In 1949, a planned movie version of her life was announced to star Betty Hutton(!!) by Paramount Pictures; those plans never materialized. 

In reality Bara was married from 1921 until her death from abdominal cancer in 1955 to former silent movie director Charles Brabin. Like Greta Garbo, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe, Theda Bara's screen persona will remain forever young, frozen in time on celluloid.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: Easy Virtue (1927)

A filmed adaptation of a Noel Coward play, Easy Virtue is rendered bland without his witty, crisp dialogue. Less visually impressive than Hitchcock's other early silent works, the movie does feature a lovely performance from stylish leading lady Isabel Jeans as Larita.

The movie opens with a close-up of a judge's monocle which the audience views a courtroom through. Isabel Jeans is being sued for divorce by her husband and stands in front of the courtroom swathed in a black and white ensemble accentuated with several long strands of pearls; and a cloche hat on top of her wavy blonde bob.

Her old husband is granted his divorce; she didn't actually cheat on him per se, just got caught in an embrace with an artist painting her portrait. Her reputation is ruined!

Fleeing to the south of France, she meets up with a younger, boyish pretty-boy and they hastily marry. However, pretty-boy's snobby, repressed grey-haired big-boned Victorian mama doesn't like his new wife and snubs her crushing Larita's serendipity. Larita is eventually "discovered" as a scandalous divorced woman with no virtue; oh, my!

Her husband's mother demands an annulment of their marriage which the pretty-boy acquiesces to. But Larita isn't going down so easily; she decides to attend a big party the family is having dressed to the nines in a slinky, beaded dress, a beaded choker along with strands of long pearls, hoop earrings, feather boa, and an ostrich fan! GIRL WAS GOING OUT LOOKING GOOD!! The party-goers stare and gasp at her languid beauty as she slowly descends the staircase, stopping at her soon to be ex-husband, who is sitting at the bottom of the stairs with his former girlfriend, tapping him on the shoulder so he can look up and behold what he's giving up because of his tacky snobby bitch mother.

She makes her peace telling his ex-girlfriend, who is sweet and feels sorry for Larita, she can marry pretty-boy; their marriage was a "cowardly" act, anyways, Larita explains.

We see Larita again in divorce court clutching a fur stole. The press find out she's there, her first divorce had made the papers, and as Larita stands at the courthouse house entrance, photographers ready to snap her picture for the evening issues, she tells the shutterbugs, "Shoot. There's nothing left to kill."

The Honey Pot (1967)

This is a mess of a movie! One of several expensive bombs Rex Harrison made after My Fair Lady, The Honey Pot is an incoherent mess. This dud was produced, uncredited, by flamboyant Charles K. Feldman and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

I'm not sure what happened to the screenplay which Mankiewicz [All About Eve] adapted from a play by Frederick Knott [Dial M for Murder]. Rex Harrison is an eccentric millionaire in Venice who pretends he is dying inviting three former lovers so he can choose which one he wants to inherit his fortune. It's all I could decipher from the plot; the least I ask of a movie is that it makes sense. This one does not. Mackiewicz's last movie had been an incoherent overproduced expensive dud, Cleopatra, so his career wasn't exactly at its peak, and afterwards he turned to making documentaries; the Martin Luther King feature, King: A Filmed Record.. Montgomery to Memphis in 1970.

It's a shame given the caliber of the cast assembled. Besides Cliff Robertson, all give good performances in a bad movie. Rex Harrison is debonair and it's great fun watching him dance around like a ballerina. Susan Hayward is a hoot playing a spitfire character named Mrs. Lone Star Crockett Sheridan. Feldman's protege Capucine is by turns icy and droll playing a broke Princess. Edie Adams gives a bouncy, sly performance as a movie star; she looks like a synthesis of Stella Stevens and Jayne Mansfield, albeit a worn out one. According to IMDb, Anne Bancroft was originally cast in the part before, perhaps sensing disaster, dropping out.

Maggie Smith, as always, is superb. Giving a playful performance, she alone is worth watching this shit for.

The Honey Pot was cut before release in the U.S. by about 30 minutes so I'm not sure if that's why the movie is such an unmitigated disaster or not.

You can stream The Honey Pot courtesy of Hulu here.

The Story on Page One (1959)

A courtroom drama from the pen of Clifford Odets, produced by Jerry Wald and released through 20th Century-Fox, Story on Page One was the second and last movie that Odets, famed playwright of Golden Boy and Clash by Night, directed. The first had been None but the Lonely Heart in 1944 with Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore. Rita Hayworth gives a restrained, simple and unadorned performance as a bourgeois housewife married to a detective who is accused of plotting his murder with lover accountant Gig Young; her part was offered to Marilyn Monroe who did Some Like it Hot instead. It's a welcome departure from the usual glamorous roles Hayworth was given to play throughout her career.

After the first act, the leading man and several supporting players take over while Hayworth sits on the sidelines; all whom were connected to the New York theater. Anthony Franciosa plays Hayworth's lawyer astonishingly well with great force; he was at the height of his career coming off an Oscar nomination for A Hatful of Rain. Mildred Dunnock is Gig Young's Violet Venable -ish mother; her performance should have netted an Oscar nomination. She originated the role of Linda Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman on Broadway and film.  Famed gay acting teacher Sandford Meisner is a terrorizing prosecutor on hunt. Man, was Meisner a powerful actor! Sexy too. He also should have been nominated by the Academy. However, this was his first movie role and the only other movie appearances he made were in the 1962 flop adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Elaine May's Mickey and Nicky. New York based, he had no ties to the industry - which could explain his snub- besides having been an acting teacher for many well known actors.

At the time of The Story on Page One, Gig Young was married to future Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery, daughter of 1930's-40's film star Robert Montgomery. Reportedly, he abused Montgomery during their marriage. Young later won an Academy Award for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? playing a boozed-up emcee. He had a serious alcohol problem in real life too and later took his own life, and his fourth wife's, in 1978.

The great James Wong Howe is the cinematographer.

You can watch The Story on Page One via Hulu by clicking here.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: Downhill (1927)

Retitled When Boys Leave Home upon release in the U.S., Downhill was the second and last teaming of star Ivor Novello and director Alfred Hitchcock. Credited with a nom de plume, Ivor Novello co-wrote the script with actress Constance Collier; she would later appear in Hitchcock's Rope in 1948. It's a misogynistic tale of a wealthy young man led by unscrupulous women to his downfall, hence the title. First he is kicked out of school because a young tart accuses him of either raping or impregnating her; second a young actress he works with on the stage takes him to the cleaner; lastly, a predatory older woman uses him as a gigolo.

Star Novello is ravishing to look at - so handsome! He is shown with his shirt off in one scene! He was gay in real life! Best known for writing and acting  in musicals on the London stage, he penned the WWI classic "Keep the Home Fires Burning", and "hung" out with Noel Coward and Laurence Olivier. His film career lasted until the mid-1930's and he passed away at age fifty-eight in 1951; coronary thrombosis.

The gold-digging stage actress is played with vivaciousness by a Carey Mulliganesque Isabel Jeans. Hitchcock was evidently impressed with her for they worked together after Downhill on Easy Virtue. She appeared in Suspicion fifteen years later in a supporting role.

Along with the performances, Hitchcock's inventive camera work raises Downhill above the mediocre level. The last reel features an effective hallucination scene with characters fading in-and-out of focus from the POV of Novello's character.

The movie can be streamed here via Internet Archive.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: Champagne (1928)

Socialite party-girl Betty Balfour gets her comeuppance in this light comedy from Hitchcock; one of his rare out-and-out comedies. The Roaring 1920's atmosphere is the main attraction here and there's plenty of champagne corks popping and flappers kickin' up their heels. The leading lady's airplane entrance into the movie is a hoot and so flamboyant!

Hitchcock and his crew spend most of their creativity on technical feats such as the opening with a champagne bottle bursting open. According to biographer Patrick McGilligan, a lens was attached to a large bottle of champagne, so one could see from the bottom to the opening what was going on on the other side of the room as the champagne burst out. It is one of Hitchcock's most celebrated effects.

While he toyed with technical innovations, the actual story of the movie bored him, and he was not happy on the set. However, during filming he did meet and befriend a young still photographer named Michael Powell - the future director of The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom.

Hitchcock would later tell Francois Truffaut in their famous published interviews in the late sixties that Champagne "was probably the lowest ebb in my output."

You can read more about leading lady Betty Balfour here.

Champagne is included in a collection of 20 early Hitchcock titles released by Mill Creek Entertainment that I own.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: The Ring (1927)

Excellent silent from director Hitchcock who came up with the scenario: a melodrama set in the boxing world of London. Gritty fairground scenes are staged with real glimpses of ordinary working-class people shown among the crowds. The fun comes from watching actual people, not just the performers, circa 1927; their manners and clothes and hairstyles.

The leads are played by Carl Brisson, Lilian Hall-Davies, and Ian Hunter.

Leading lady Lilian Hall-Davies is the standout: she has a hard edged Joan Crawford look. A child of the working-class like Crawford, her father was a cab driver. Lilian was a popular performer in silent movies but with the advent of talkies her career tapered off; sadly, she committed suicide in 1935. But in The Ring she's alive as ever - she and Brisson have a sexual energy onscreen and one doesn't believe she would actually see Ian Hunter on the side. Brisson is so much more sexier and alive! Her affair doesn't ring true; it comes across as a plot contrivance.

The story is basic melodrama through and through, but with Hitchcock's technical flourishes the viewer becomes involved in the movie and doesn't realize the blandness of the story until afterwards. Expertly shot, there are several stand out scenes including a 1920's roaring house party with a Louise Brooks look-alike kickin' up her heels. The party is cut with scenes of Brisson meeting his handlers in the next room - edited together to contrast the stuffiness of his office with the party going on in the living room whilst his wife chats up rival Ian Hunter.

Hitchcock alone is credited with the script and story. Perhaps this explains the less than original plot: Hitch always worked better with writers brainstorming ideas than completing a shooting script himself. By and large, the technical aspects of film-making were his forte. It would be the last movie he directed where he received sole screenwriting credit.

"The Ring" is part of a DVD collection of 20 Hitchcock British era films I own. 

Dark Waters (1944)

Dark Waters is a very minor suspense thriller from 1944 starring Merle Oberon and Franchot Tone. There are so many plot holes in this movie! The script is credited to five writers, including Joan Harrison and John Huston. Not sure if either of their work made it into Dark Waters. Harrison started out as a secretary to Alfred Hitchcock and worked her way up to being a script supervisor then co-writer. She came to the U.S. with the Hitchcock's in 1939 and eventually became one of the few women producers working in Hollywood during the forties and fifties; she produced Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Huston is known for directing many, many film classics and as the father of Anjelica and Danny Huston.

This is basically a B-movie with an A-list cast - it's fun to watch. One knows why and how Merle is being terrorized ; this is basically Gaslight set in the Louisiana bayous. Still there's pleasure watching Thomas Mitchell [Gone with the Wind] and Fay Bainter [Jezebel] and Elisha Cook Jr. Not Franchot Tone. He phones in his dull performance - he evidently doesn't take this movie too seriously; he was a stage trained actor aligned with the Group Theater who went to Hollywood, got married to Joan Crawford, and was best known for being Mr. Joan Crawford throughout his career afterwards. Merle Oberon is ravishing - definitely a creature of the studio system. Throughout Dark Waters Oberon just has to walk in a scene with a worried look on her face. Along with Hedy Lamarr she was one of the most exotic dark-haired movie stars of the WWII era.

First-rate collaborators are behind-the scenes and give the movie luster: composer Miklos Rozsa, winner of two Academy Awards, cinematographers John Mescall [The Bride of Frankenstein] and Archie Stout [Fort Apache], shoot some scenes from great angles :  In one, Merle Oberon is on the phone and the camera looks down on her from high in the balcony of the antebellum mansion she is staying in; the intended effect being she is being closely watched by others in the house. Costume Designer Rene Hubert, who designed costumes for Oberon, would receive two Academy Award nominations in his prolific career and work with Oberon again in Desiree for which he received one of his two nominations.

Hungarian born Andre de Toth, the director, was married to peek-a-boo star Veronica Lake during the 1940's, and would later direct the first 3-D movie in 1953: House of Wax. One scene in Dark Waters involves quick sand and foreshadows the director's 3-D venture into horror. Is there quick sand in the Louisiana bayous?

Free for streaming via Hulu.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: The Manxman (1929)

The Manxman would be Alfred Hitchcock's last silent picture, although at the time he didn't realize his next planned project would have to be converted to sound. Shot in Cornwall, standing in for the Isle of Man, Hitchcock continues his use of ordinary people, the proletariat working class, as characters for his early movies. Beautifully photographed, it's a basic love story turned sour, but the visual trickery and expertly staged scenes elevates the material into a movie some consider his finest silent picture.

The leads are played by actors Hitchcock works with again or will in the future: Carl Brisson, Anny Ondra and Malcolm Keen. Ondra and Brisson were Polish and Danish, respectfully, acting in an English movie. This occurred frequently because one of the advantages of silent movies was their universality: no language barriers.

Two exquisitely shot scenes stand out: Anny looking out over a bluff at Keen standing on the beach in front of the waves; she runs gaily, gaily down to meet him only to learn bad news when she gets there. Second shot is a master with Anny and Keen standing in front looking glum contrasted with Brisson's joyousness behind them. One does not need dialogue to know what's going on. The images tell the story and let's the audience see rather than hear the characters' emotions.

Hitchcock and the distributor were not happy with The Manxman and dismissed it. Yet - according to screenonline.co.uk, the picture was a commercial success.

The movie is adaptation of a novel by Victorian-Edwardian novelist Hall Caine who often wrote love triangle melodramas set on the Isle of Man. Though popular in his day he is forgotten like fellow Brit Somerset Maugham.

Also noteworthy: The court scene where Anny Ondra is covered in a black blanket against her blonde locks facing the judge, her former lover, noble and suffering like Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

"The Manxman" is included in a DVD package I own with 20 of Hitchcock's early British movies.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK: The Lodger (1927)

Film-making in England in the nineteen-twenties was a distant third in terms of craftsmanship in the world; behind the U.S. and Germany and, yes,Sweden. Alfred Hitchcock's artistry lent the fledgling Brit movie business luster and cred and he made his first true suspense thriller as a director with this acclaimed silent produced in 1926. The suspense in this movie comes from what is implied rather than shown. The audience never sees the actual murderer just the calling cards he places on his victims. Ultimately The Lodger  is about mistaken identity. Not murder. The Jack the Ripper murderer never shown is just Hitchcock's McGuffin: a plot point to move the story along.

With silent pictures the directors had to tell a story with images and that's why silent movies are so much more expressive and poetic than talking movies. That poetry was lost when sound came in 1927 with The Jazz Singer; the exact year this movie was released. Not surprisingly visuals are amazing in this movie; it opens with a murder, not shown but implied by a woman screaming, then a montage of police, spectators, print presses running, and then newsboys screaming the headlines. All expertly edited by Ivor Montagu. The technical tricks are what give the move weight; alas, this story has been done innumerable times.

And, of course, being a Hitchcock movie it's all about the women. Hitchcock agreed with Sardou that the women in their work "should suffer." In this particular movie the leading lady, June, doesn't suffer much, but she does have her own title cards and any scene she's in the camera highlights her; it's like there's a halo around her. June's costumes: the b&w ensemble at the end ensures she sticks out among st the brown and grays the other characters are wearing during the lynching scene. Evidence that Hitchcock wanted all eyes on   her character whenever she's in a scene.

 Hitchcock made June wear a blonde wig for the shoot, so his obsession with blondes was there in the beginning. He favored the fair-haired women as his work from here on out details; it wasn't something he developed over time, even though he wasn't always allowed to use these hair color types he desired. Even the murderer in the movie prefers fair haired curly-haired females.

Billed just as June, the actress June Howard-Tripp was mainly a performer in light musical comedies and revues on the stage. She only made a handful of movies; the best known of which is The Lodger. A picture of her becoming a U.S. citizen can be seen here.

The charismatic leading man, songwriter/performer Ivor Novello, was gay in real life. Originally, Hitchcock wanted the character of the Lodger  to be more sinister, leading the audience to suspect that he actually was the murderer, but the studio producing the movie, Gainsborough Pictures, were worried that Novello's huge female fan base would be upset. Famously, Novello is introduced in the picture by having his shadow shown on the door of the boarding house as he approaches. In a master shot, the lady of the house opens the door and he is shown, eerily, shrouded in shadow and fog. It's the best shot in the movie.

Novello starred in a remake of The Lodger in 1932.

Also noteworthy: the mob scene at the end when Novello, hanging by a pair handcuffs, becomes entangled on an iron fence while women and men beat him. And I love the loose, frilly twenties dresses June wears.

"The Lodger" is included in a DVD package I own with 20 of Hitchcock's early British movies. 

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most successful movie directors in terms of quality and longevity. I'm going to try and watch every movie he directed! Not sure when I will finish! But will blog with my thoughts and some background info on each movie as I watch them.

Hitchcock directed his first movie in 1925 and his last in 1975. A fifty-year movie veteran. He is up there with Spielberg in terms of being a household name, even thirty-three years after his death. Everyone has heard of Psycho whether they've actually seen it or not.

Old Movies

Because of my love for movies and Classic Hollywood in general I'm going to start a blog sharing with cyberspace my love and respect and opinions on this twentieth century art form. For the most part, the movies will be free via Hulu or Crackle or Internet Archive.

I've been watching old movies since I was about 14 mainly on Turner Classic Movies then later with free ones online or through bootleg Youtube. By old I mean any movie made from 1900-1990, but I mostly will be watching and writing about flicks from the Classic Hollywood period. I hope to be able to keep up with my posts here because it seems on my older blogs I would lose interest! So if you come across this site don't be afraid of watching the  old movies I link to because - paraphrasing the great Peter Bogdanovich - there is no such thing as "old" movies, they're just ones you haven't seen yet.