Mrs RR and I tried to watch the new (2021?) West Side Story' yesterday evening.
We know the original film well, and have been to theatre productions. We couldn't get on with this version at all. Is it us oldies? I note it bombed in cinemas.
I think two reasons why it did not do well in cinema is that it came out just as the COVID pandemic was spreading world wide, . . . .
“West Side Story” premiered on November 29, 2021, and had its wider US theatrical release on December 10, 2021, so over 18 months after Covid spread worldwide. Its release was delayed because of Covid, and COVID restrictions had eased by the time it was released, in part because vaccinations were available.
@Pomona, I agree with all of your observations and opinions.
I love the original WSS but also loved the remake, and it improves on the original in many ways. Rita Moreno is superb and Ariana deBose (Anita) lights up the screen.
Cinema and theatre are now rare treats for us living in public transport hell, but we did make it to the cinema for this.
Thursday, I saw the live action version of How to Train Your Dragon. Even though I know the story well through seeing the original, it was very enjoyable! In my opinion, it was done well, and made for a nice outing to escape the rain.
BTW, I just love Toothless!
Is that the one with Kirstie Alley as the Tooth Fairy? I will confess to a soft spot for it too!
Thursday, I saw the live action version of How to Train Your Dragon. Even though I know the story well through seeing the original, it was very enjoyable! In my opinion, it was done well, and made for a nice outing to escape the rain.
BTW, I just love Toothless!
Is that the one with Kirstie Alley as the Tooth Fairy? I will confess to a soft spot for it too!
Ah, actually you are probably referring to a character in the dragon movie (blush)
Thursday, I saw the live action version of How to Train Your Dragon. Even though I know the story well through seeing the original, it was very enjoyable! In my opinion, it was done well, and made for a nice outing to escape the rain.
BTW, I just love Toothless!
Is that the one with Kirstie Alley as the Tooth Fairy? I will confess to a soft spot for it too!
Ah, actually you are probably referring to a character in the dragon movie (blush)
Mrs RR and I tried to watch the new (2021?) West Side Story' yesterday evening.
We know the original film well, and have been to theatre productions. We couldn't get on with this version at all. Is it us oldies? I note it bombed in cinemas.
Why didn't you like it, Roger?
I absolutely loved it, and I'm a middle aged person who also loved the original film. Well, I didn't so much like the guy playing Tony in the new version, as he seemed a bit insipid and unconvincing, but the other actors were fantastic, particularly the ones playing Riff and Anita.
Actually, now I remember that the actor playing Tony was the reason a lot of young people weren't interested in watching it, because of certain allegations against him. So that will have influenced cinema success, as well as the fact that it was very soon after lockdown and cinemas were pretty empty anyway. Still are to some extent, but these days when there is a film like Barbie or Wicked, it becomes an event where young people dress up in costume, or a certain colour, and of course there is 3D and 4D cinema now too.
I found the 2021 West Side Story felt more real and raw than the original, really showing the anger, the danger, the racism, the emptiness of the lives of the Jets, as poor white kids who feel they have nothing to live for, while the Sharks are fighting for a place to live and their right to exist. And both know they are seen as trash by the authorities.
I liked that the Puerto Rican characters were all played by Latinx actors. I loved that Rita Moreno (Anita in the original film) was also in the film, given a new part. In the original film, she was the only Puerto Rican actor, and they actually darkened her skin (as well as darkening the skin of the other actors playing Puerto Rican characters), but in the 2021 film, they of course don't darken anyone's skin.
I thought the parts where the Puerto Rican characters spoke Spanish, with no translation for the audience, was effective in the way intended, to give audience who don't know Spanish the feeling the of being an outsider, and so that English doesn't have power over Spanish.
I liked the decision to make Anybody's a trans guy. I thought it worked well with the story and made the role more significant. I think the old tomboy trope is less relevant in today's society, and it makes more sense for Anybody's to be trans, and makes the role more poignant and poweful.
To me, a new version of an old film needs to be saying new things, showing new perspectives, otherwise there's no point in it. The old film was of its time. The new one gives minority characters more of a voice, and is more gritty, less jolly! (I really loved Riff in the original, but he was like a teddy bear - not the most convincing gang leader!)
I'm really glad you liked it, and found great positives in the new film. I was bored. For me, as it's a musical, it's the songs that are paramount, and I just didn't think they were done with as much energy as the first film, yet alone with the panache and vibrancy of Bernstein's own (idiosyncratic) recording, which is my 'go to' version.
For me, as it's a musical, it's the songs that are paramount, and I just didn't think they were done with as much energy as the first film, yet alone with the panache and vibrancy of Bernstein's own (idiosyncratic) recording, which is my 'go to' version.
Are you talking about the recording with Bernstein conducting and with Kiri Te Kanawa as Maria, José Carreras as Tony and Tatiana Troyanos as Anita? That’s my go-to recording as well, though yes, it is very idiosyncratic. Carreras and that high b-flat in “Maria”! It’s heavenly!
As for the music in the original, it loses points for me because none of the leads did their own singing, except for Rita Moreno on “America” and Russ Tamblyn on “Gee, Officer Krupke.” The first rule of a musical, in my mind, is casting actors who can act and sing. (And I mean really sing, not just do okay if as long as there’s a mic, like Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in the movie of Sweeney Todd, or most of the cast of the movie version of Les Mis.)
I love the version with Kiri te Kanawa, José Carreras and Tatiana Troyanos too. I really like Russ Tamblyn's Gee, Officer Krupke - I didn't think that song worked so well in the operatic version.
I'm trying to think what the vocals were like in the 2021 version. I remember I didn't like that Maria sang 'pretty' as 'priddy,' in the American way. But that's pronunciation, not vocals. I think I remember the vocals being more acted, more personality and emotion in than the original. And that can make it less smooth to listen to if one is just listening to the soundtrack rather than watching it as a film.
I think I really liked 'America.' Though there are a couple of really good modern stage versions of that song that I've seen on YouTube, so I could be mixing up with them. I find these days, film musicals, like Les Misérables too, have more acted, intimate, emotional vocals, with more of a spoken voice in parts, where on stage it would be belted. Madonna versus Patti LuPone and Elaine Paige, for instance, in Evita.
I find these days, film musicals, like Les Misérables too, have more acted, intimate, emotional vocals, with more of a spoken voice in parts, where on stage it would be belted. Madonna versus Patti LuPone and Elaine Paige, for instance, in Evita.
I'm okay with it. I like to see the same songs done differently. You lose the subtleties in a stage version. Film lends itself to subtleties, so I figure why not make use of the different medium to do the song differently and emphasise different aspects. I wouldn't buy the soundtracks though.
This past weekend I was up in Rome, NY for the 22nd Capitolfest movie festival. As always, it was held at the historic Rome Capitol theater. As always, the festival features a mix of silent and early talkie films, and the silent films have live musical accompaniment on the theater’s grand organ. I learned a trivia point this year. The Capitol Theater (and organ) were planned in 1927 and opened in 1928. But, by that time, the sound revolution was under way so every film shown had a sound track--no need for the organ. The organ was just played as people entered and left the theater. Then they did a Saturday Matinee which would always feature one silent so that the organ could be played in all its glory, but by 1929 that had stopped too.
In short, the organ has been used to provide music for more silent films at the 22 Capitolfest festivals than it ever played for back in the 1920s!
The features stars this year were Laura La Plante and ZaSu Pitts.
The age range of the movies is a little harder than usual to relate. There were a few compilations of “rarities” with no years attached to them. I did see one that gave its year as 1912, so I am going to call that the earliest. As for the latest film....well, it was intended that the oldest would be “The Luckiest Girl in the World” (1936), but there was another film scheduled: “Love, Honor, and Oh, Baby” (1933), a comedy starring ZaSu Pitts. Except that when the film rolled it was “Love, Honor and Oh-Baby!” (1940) starring Donald Woods and Kathryn Adams. Universal sent the wrong film and nobody realized it until it started rolling! A similar thing happened once before at Capitolfest--and once again the culprit was Universal! I am beginning to think Universal’s quality control needs a little tightening.
By the way, the two films are unrelated despite having similar titles. The 1940 film is a light suspense film. A depressed man arranges for a mob boss to kill him. Why? He has an insurance policy and it won’t pay off if he commits suicide. So he pays the mobster $1,000 in advance and put another $3,000 in a locker at the bus terminal (or train station; I forget which). He is carrying a piece of paper with the location of the locker. The theory being that, after they kill him, they can get the paper from his body and get the rest of the money. Except that, after he has made this arrangement he gets clunked on the head and (of course) gets amnesia so that he has no idea why these mobsters are trying to kill him! Quite a fun little film.
“The Luckiest Girl...” (see above) also featured two of my favorite supporting actors: Eugene Pallette and Nat Pendleton. Gravel-voiced Pallette never gave a bad performance in his life. Pendleton, as usual, played a likable but dim-witted lug. But he plays it so well I never get tired of watching him!
One of the better features was “The Squealer” (1930). A crime boss arranges to have a “squealer” eliminated. He then saves one of his own men from a rival gang boss and kills that boss. He goes into hiding. His loyal wife refuses to crack under police pressure to say where he is--until she learns that the rival gang has discovered it (getting the info from her young son while she was at the police station). She decides the only way to save her husband is to tell the police where he is so they can catch him before the rival gang does. Which makes her a squealer--and her husband is determined to find out who turned him in! A drama but it unintentionally got a lot of laughs because the soundtrack for one of the reels got out of sync, leading to the classic situation of her voice appearing to come out of his mouth, and his voice apparently coming from her mouth. The glitch lasted for about 10 minutes.
“The Re-Creation of Brian Kent” (1925) was a good silent. ZaSu Pitts is known for comedies. She really wanted to appear in dramatic features, but she was so good at comedy that she got type-cast. However, in this silent she gets to do drama and she does it quite well. A man embezzles bank funds to support the high-living lifestyle of his wife. He decides to commit suicide in the unorthodox manner of getting in a small row boat and letting it drift downriver toward a waterfall while he gets drunk. But he passes out and the boat gets snagged on some willow trees in front of the home of a former school teacher (Auntie Sue). There is a title card bemoaning about how underpaid school teachers are. Sadly, 100 years later and there is no need to update the wording of that card. Anyway, our kindly former teacher rehabilitates the man, with the standard number of complications along the way. It is worth a viewing.
If you can find it. Capitolfest makes a point of showing films that you are not likely to have ever seen. Things that are not available on the open market or streaming services. This year, they outdid themselves with a comedy short: “Help Yourself” (1927). This silent comedy features El Brendel. What is interesting about it is that there is no record of the film ever before being shown in public! Not back in 1927 (they could not find a distributor for it), and at no time since then. They cannot be 100% certain, of course, but there is no clear record of it ever being shown in public until the 2025 Capitolfest!
I realize I have not mentioned Laura La Plante much. She was seen in her earliest still-surviving film: “Father’s Close Shave” (1920) (a comedy short), as well as in a couple of Westerns and “Butterfly” (1924) and “Finders Keepers” (1928). I found them pleasant watching but not memorable. The latter film was probably her best--and she is on record of declaring it as her personal favorite .
There were other films not involving either La Plante or Pitts. There was one silent, “The Gorilla” (1927), which has in a supporting role Walter Pidgeon. I confess it never occurred to me that Walter Pidgeon got his start in silent movies! Also "Menace" (1934), based on a Philip MacDonald mystery, is also worth watching.
Next year’s Capitolfest will have as the featured stars: “Skeets” Gallagher & Charles Ruggles.
Well, I finally made it to Superman tonight. I can’t say I loved it—I’d probably give it a 6 or 6.5 out of 10—but I did like some aspects of it better than I thought I might. And I’ll readily admit that a number of the things I didn’t like are matters of personal preferences and taste.
I re-watched Moonstruck yesterday - first time I watched it was around the time Olympia Dukakis died and we were remembering her in All Saints. I admit the basic improbability of the plot stood out this time more than the last time I watched it but still very well made.
Mrs RR and I watched 'The three faces of Eve (1957) last night. Enjoyed it a lot. Thought the actress playing Eve (Joanne Woodward) was remarkable in that she could, just by her expression and body language depict three disparate characters. The film was introduced by the young Alistair Cooke, and Mrs RR remarked I read out the lessons in church - slowly, clearly and with emphasis - just like him. A compliment, I think!
Mrs. Gramps and I watched The Friend. It is about grieving the lose of a friend who committed suicide. The Friend left a dog, a Geat Dane, behind. It shows how dogs also grieve the loss of their owners. I think the dog should get an academy award for its performance. It is on Paramount+ or rented through Amazon Prime.
Whilst watching 'The Red Turtle' with Mrs RR (which we both love) I discovered she has not seen 'Jaws'. Ever. A DVD (£3.98) duly ordered, which we can watch together. [this posting shd. perhaps be in 'Hurrah!'].
This thread has gone a bit quiet! But, fair warning, I just received a handful of DVDs of movies I have never seen, which means I will be posting about movies you likely never heard of--possibly with actors you have never heard of.
September 29 is considered "Silent Movie Day"--one day a year when fans of silent movies make a little extra effort to draw attention to them. It also serves as a convenient excuse for Critics Choice Video to offer a one-day sale of silent films. Not that CC Video needs an excuse: on any given day, the odds are very good that CC Video is offering a sale on one kind of film or another. It is almost like they are trying to push inventory.
Anyway, I ordered 4 discs and I watched one of them last night: Borderline (1930), with Paul Robeson. 1930 was very late for a silent. This is very much an arthouse film, made by the Pool Group, which was based in Switzerland and the film was shot there. It is shot in the avant garde style: Lots of fast cuts; an overabundance of close-ups; numerous odd camera angles. You know, "artistic" stuff. Some reviews on imdb complain that the movie needs more intertitles, but I think that is incorrect. This is a (very) late silent, and the later silents were very much interested in telling a story with as few intertitles as possible, preferring to let the images tell the story. If you concentrate on the images, the story is pretty clear. The title card usage in this film is very comparable to the usage in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), which won an Academy Award for "Unique and Artistic Picture."
Borderline is about an interracial love triangle: a black couple are staying in a Swiss guesthouse above a tavern. The wife is in an affair with a married white man. The white man is abusive, violent and a bit of a drunk. The black man (Robeson) is mild mannered and very self-controlled. Nevertheless, the town folk blame "the blacks" for the situation. Well, not all the town folk. The innkeeper and the barmaid are both very much on the side of the black couple and make that clear to everybody. Robeson is shown forgiving his wife and trying to save their marriage, while the white couple just gets increasingly bitter, setting up the finale.
It is not a great film by any means, but it is interesting. I am pretty sure you can view it on YouTube, if interested.
Is that Tron: Legacy? I only watched it because Michael Sheen is in it, having a ball playing the nightclub owner. The rest of the movie was very enjoyable too.
@Hedgehog I always enjoy reading your descriptions of silent movies, even if I've never seen them myself.
Dog Day Afternoon was released 50 years ago yesterday. It is streaming on HBO MAX or can be rented through Amazon. I remember going to the theatre to watch it. Will likely stream it this evening. Goes to show how technology has changed over the years.
One of the unique features of the movie is much of the dialogue is ad lib. The director wanted to make it as raw as possible.
Dog Day Afternoon was released 50 years ago yesterday. It is streaming on HBO MAX or can be rented through Amazon. I remember going to the theatre to watch it. Will likely stream it this evening. Goes to show how technology has changed over the years.
One of the unique features of the movie is much of the dialogue is ad lib. The director wanted to make it as raw as possible.
@Gramps49 your link went nowhere, so I've taken the liberty of posting this link.
Next up: Whispering Shadows (1921). Do not confuse this with the serial The Whispering Shadow (1933) with Bela Lugosi. Nor with Warning Shadows (1923). This is described as a "proto-horror" film, which strikes me as inaccurate. There is no horror in the film at all. There is a supernatural element, but that is all. It stars Lucy Cotton, who only appeared in about a dozen movies, and then she married a rich publisher and got out of films. A pity, really, because she was not a bad actress.
Lucy Cotton plays Helen. The movie starts with a seance, where Helen's departed mother tries to warn Helen that her fiancé is in danger. As it turns out, he is, as he is soon accused of embezzling funds from the business of Helen's father. He proclaims his innocence. Helen's father uncovers evidence that the fiancé is innocent, but he dies before telling anybody where the evidence is located. The rest of the film deals with the possibility that his spirit is guiding Helen to the evidence. Not at all a horror film and not even remotely scary.
The film was released in June of 1921, about 9 months prior to Nosferatu (1922) (a legit horror film), and a couple months after The Phantom Carriage (1921) and The Haunted Castle (1921) both of which are far spookier and frightening than this film. Come to think of it, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Golem: How He Came Into The World are both 1920 and are both more chilling than this film. So I am not quite sure why they made the effort to push the fairly anemic Whispering Shadows as a horror film, proto- or otherwise.
I admit my last two posts were fairly lukewarm about the DVDs I was watching. And I can understand if you thought to yourself: "Why does Hedgehog buy DVDs of films he does not know? Surely he must realize that some of them are going to disappoint?" Yes, I do. But there is the other side of the coin. Sometimes you find something wholly wonderful that you would never have seen if you limited yourself to "stuff you know." It is so easy to box yourself in to an echo chamber: "I enjoy the Marvel movies so I am only going to watch superhero films and TV shows"...yeah, and miss the rest of the world in the process.
Case in point, the third DVD of my recent purchase, The Dragon Painter (1919). This DVD (actually BluRay) was released by Milestone Films and distributed by Kino Lorber--and Kino Lorber almost always gives good value for the money. In this case, the disc actually contains 3 films! The Dragon Painter, plus, as extras, His Birthright (1918) and The Man Beneath (1919). All star Sessue Hayakawa.
Hayakawa was born and raised in Japan, but came to the U.S. and began a film career. Most notably, he was in Cecil B. De Mille's The Cheat (1915), where he plays a charming, seductive but despicable villain. And he became one of film's first sex symbols. American women loved to watch him and he became an in-demand actor. Think about that. The Conventional Wisdom is that Japanese actors were condemned to play valets and maids (while black actors were only cast as butlers and maids). But here is an honest-to-gosh sex symbol...and he is Japanese! But the Japanese community in the U.S. complained to him that he was not appearing in roles that fairly or accurately reflected Japanese culture, values or customs. (As a side note, when The Cheat was re-released a few years later, Hayakawa's character was changed from a Japanese merchant to a Burmese merchant. As one critic/cynic observed, presumably the studio decided that there would be less of an outcry because there were fewer Burmese in the country than Japanese!)
So Hayakawa, along with director William Worthington, formed Haworth Pictures Corporation, and all three films are from that corporation. The idea was to make films that more faithfully reflected Japanese culture and values. But Hayakawa also understood that he still had to make movies for an American audience! He had to put out films that they would watch. So he did a bit of a balancing act of inserting authentic Japanese culture/custom/attitudes into a film, but made sure the film was still very much to American taste. That sounds like it should have been a recipe for disaster--but Hayakawa made $2,000,000 off of the venture (roughly estimated at well over $30,000,000 in today's money). So, yeah, he was not stupid. It paid off well.
But what about the films themselves? Oh, they are a delight.
His Birthright: This is a fragment of a film. The original movie was 5 reels long, but we are missing reels 1 and 4. And those are from the Dutch print. Actually, all three movie involve Dutch prints. As I have mentioned before, one of the strengths of silent movies was that they could be distributed worldwide simply by removing the English intertitles and inserting intertitles in the chosen language--a flexibility that was lost when movies turned to sound. In this case, the English version of this film is lost, but the Dutch version survived.
In the movie, Hayakawa is the interracial product of a union between his Japanese mother and an American Admiral. He is raised to believe that his mother committed suicide because the Admiral abandoned him. Hayakawa vows vengeance: he will kill his father for abandoning his mother. As such, he comes to America. He runs into a group of spies (including a very seductive female spy) and, seduced, he agrees to steal military secrets from the Admiral. Having done so, his conscience bothers him: revenge for his dead mother is honorable, but becoming a thief is not! He decides he will recover the plans to redeem himself. This leads him to a final confrontation with both the spies and the Admiral. Even in this shortened form, it is an intriguing film.
The Man Beneath: In this one, Hayakawa plays an Indian (or, as they say, Hindu) doctor. Yeah, okay. So much for Japanese values. But let's ignore that. A dedicated scientist, he is college friends with James (a Brit). While visiting James and James' fiancée, Mary, our valiant doctor falls for Mary's sister, Kate. And the feeling is mutual. But when the doc mentions his love, Kate shoots him down. Later, in a letter, she explains that she does love him too, but "racial hatred and racial prejudice are real." She explains that if they were a couple they would have to face that hatred and they would be unhappy and persecuted--and any offspring that they had would be condemned to lives of misery. And, let's be honest: early 20th century? She ain't wrong. Hayakawa accepts and goes back to his "native" India. But later, James comes to him. James has fallen afoul of gangsters. Well, really, more of a secret society. The society has pledged his death. The valiant doctor intervenes to save his friend, which requires him to confront the representatives of the Secret Society---and he comes one again face to face with his beloved Kate.... Classic stuff!
The Dragon Painter: The headliner of the disk. This one exists in a Dutch print and a French print (again, the original English print is lost). Each has scenes that the other print lacks, so this restoration combines them. In Japan, Tatsu (Hayakawa) is a madman recluse. He lives in the wilderness and raves that his "princess" was changed into a dragon a thousand years ago, and he spends his life begging the Powers-That-Be to restore her to him. And he compulsively paints pictures of dragons (the image of his transformed beloved). Meanwhile, Kano Indara, who comes from a long line of painters, despairs that he has no son to come after him, nor has he any pupil with the talent to bear the Indara name. Then he sees the inspired paintings of Tatsu, the Dragon Painter, and sees the talent. He is motivated to make Tatsu his pupil and heir to the Indara name...but crazy Tatsu just wants his princess back...
Oh, did I mention that Indara has a lovely adult daughter? Do I really need to sketch out the rest of the plot?
Interestingly, although most of the actors in this Haworth film are Asian, the role of Kano Indara is played by a white man (Edward Peil, Sr.). There are no records to explain why. I mean, the film was made by Hayakawa's own production company--he could hire who he wanted.
The disc also has an intriguing extra. As I mentioned, The Dragon Painter exists in a Dutch print and a French print. The extra sets up a split screen and shows both version side-by-side to see which version had what, with commentary by two of the film restorers. The titles are obviously in Dutch and French respectively but, translated, while they each convey substantially the same info, they vary as to details. For example, in an early scene, a character refers to "Tatsu" in one version, and calls him "the Dragon Painter" in the other. Both are accurate---but which one reflects what was said in the original English version? Nobody knows. That is the sort of decision that film restorers need to decide. The split screen documentary discussing the challenges of film restoration is fascinating.
This is a great DVD/BluRay. If you are interested in silent films, buy it. If you are interested in interracial relations in movies, buy it. If you are intrigued by film restoration, buy it. This is clearly the treasure of my recent purchases (and I say that with one more disc that I have yet to watch!)
Comments
@Pomona, I agree with all of your observations and opinions.
I love the original WSS but also loved the remake, and it improves on the original in many ways. Rita Moreno is superb and Ariana deBose (Anita) lights up the screen.
Cinema and theatre are now rare treats for us living in public transport hell, but we did make it to the cinema for this.
I just saw that Ruth Buzzi, who played the field-hockey coach, passed away in May of this year. Not sure if that made it to the Ship's obits thread.
Is that the one with Kirstie Alley as the Tooth Fairy? I will confess to a soft spot for it too!
Ah, actually you are probably referring to a character in the dragon movie (blush)
The dragon in the movie is called Toothless.
No problem! I'm also a fan of Kirstie Alley and miss her.
I'm really glad you liked it, and found great positives in the new film. I was bored. For me, as it's a musical, it's the songs that are paramount, and I just didn't think they were done with as much energy as the first film, yet alone with the panache and vibrancy of Bernstein's own (idiosyncratic) recording, which is my 'go to' version.
As for the music in the original, it loses points for me because none of the leads did their own singing, except for Rita Moreno on “America” and Russ Tamblyn on “Gee, Officer Krupke.” The first rule of a musical, in my mind, is casting actors who can act and sing. (And I mean really sing, not just do okay if as long as there’s a mic, like Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in the movie of Sweeney Todd, or most of the cast of the movie version of Les Mis.)
I'm trying to think what the vocals were like in the 2021 version. I remember I didn't like that Maria sang 'pretty' as 'priddy,' in the American way. But that's pronunciation, not vocals. I think I remember the vocals being more acted, more personality and emotion in than the original. And that can make it less smooth to listen to if one is just listening to the soundtrack rather than watching it as a film.
I think I really liked 'America.' Though there are a couple of really good modern stage versions of that song that I've seen on YouTube, so I could be mixing up with them. I find these days, film musicals, like Les Misérables too, have more acted, intimate, emotional vocals, with more of a spoken voice in parts, where on stage it would be belted. Madonna versus Patti LuPone and Elaine Paige, for instance, in Evita.
In short, the organ has been used to provide music for more silent films at the 22 Capitolfest festivals than it ever played for back in the 1920s!
The features stars this year were Laura La Plante and ZaSu Pitts.
The age range of the movies is a little harder than usual to relate. There were a few compilations of “rarities” with no years attached to them. I did see one that gave its year as 1912, so I am going to call that the earliest. As for the latest film....well, it was intended that the oldest would be “The Luckiest Girl in the World” (1936), but there was another film scheduled: “Love, Honor, and Oh, Baby” (1933), a comedy starring ZaSu Pitts. Except that when the film rolled it was “Love, Honor and Oh-Baby!” (1940) starring Donald Woods and Kathryn Adams. Universal sent the wrong film and nobody realized it until it started rolling! A similar thing happened once before at Capitolfest--and once again the culprit was Universal! I am beginning to think Universal’s quality control needs a little tightening.
By the way, the two films are unrelated despite having similar titles. The 1940 film is a light suspense film. A depressed man arranges for a mob boss to kill him. Why? He has an insurance policy and it won’t pay off if he commits suicide. So he pays the mobster $1,000 in advance and put another $3,000 in a locker at the bus terminal (or train station; I forget which). He is carrying a piece of paper with the location of the locker. The theory being that, after they kill him, they can get the paper from his body and get the rest of the money. Except that, after he has made this arrangement he gets clunked on the head and (of course) gets amnesia so that he has no idea why these mobsters are trying to kill him! Quite a fun little film.
“The Luckiest Girl...” (see above) also featured two of my favorite supporting actors: Eugene Pallette and Nat Pendleton. Gravel-voiced Pallette never gave a bad performance in his life. Pendleton, as usual, played a likable but dim-witted lug. But he plays it so well I never get tired of watching him!
One of the better features was “The Squealer” (1930). A crime boss arranges to have a “squealer” eliminated. He then saves one of his own men from a rival gang boss and kills that boss. He goes into hiding. His loyal wife refuses to crack under police pressure to say where he is--until she learns that the rival gang has discovered it (getting the info from her young son while she was at the police station). She decides the only way to save her husband is to tell the police where he is so they can catch him before the rival gang does. Which makes her a squealer--and her husband is determined to find out who turned him in! A drama but it unintentionally got a lot of laughs because the soundtrack for one of the reels got out of sync, leading to the classic situation of her voice appearing to come out of his mouth, and his voice apparently coming from her mouth. The glitch lasted for about 10 minutes.
“The Re-Creation of Brian Kent” (1925) was a good silent. ZaSu Pitts is known for comedies. She really wanted to appear in dramatic features, but she was so good at comedy that she got type-cast. However, in this silent she gets to do drama and she does it quite well. A man embezzles bank funds to support the high-living lifestyle of his wife. He decides to commit suicide in the unorthodox manner of getting in a small row boat and letting it drift downriver toward a waterfall while he gets drunk. But he passes out and the boat gets snagged on some willow trees in front of the home of a former school teacher (Auntie Sue). There is a title card bemoaning about how underpaid school teachers are. Sadly, 100 years later and there is no need to update the wording of that card. Anyway, our kindly former teacher rehabilitates the man, with the standard number of complications along the way. It is worth a viewing.
If you can find it. Capitolfest makes a point of showing films that you are not likely to have ever seen. Things that are not available on the open market or streaming services. This year, they outdid themselves with a comedy short: “Help Yourself” (1927). This silent comedy features El Brendel. What is interesting about it is that there is no record of the film ever before being shown in public! Not back in 1927 (they could not find a distributor for it), and at no time since then. They cannot be 100% certain, of course, but there is no clear record of it ever being shown in public until the 2025 Capitolfest!
I realize I have not mentioned Laura La Plante much. She was seen in her earliest still-surviving film: “Father’s Close Shave” (1920) (a comedy short), as well as in a couple of Westerns and “Butterfly” (1924) and “Finders Keepers” (1928). I found them pleasant watching but not memorable. The latter film was probably her best--and she is on record of declaring it as her personal favorite .
There were other films not involving either La Plante or Pitts. There was one silent, “The Gorilla” (1927), which has in a supporting role Walter Pidgeon. I confess it never occurred to me that Walter Pidgeon got his start in silent movies! Also "Menace" (1934), based on a Philip MacDonald mystery, is also worth watching.
Next year’s Capitolfest will have as the featured stars: “Skeets” Gallagher & Charles Ruggles.
Plus the actress who played Janet from The Good Place.
You're in for a real treat!
Also Primitive War.
September 29 is considered "Silent Movie Day"--one day a year when fans of silent movies make a little extra effort to draw attention to them. It also serves as a convenient excuse for Critics Choice Video to offer a one-day sale of silent films. Not that CC Video needs an excuse: on any given day, the odds are very good that CC Video is offering a sale on one kind of film or another. It is almost like they are trying to push inventory.
Anyway, I ordered 4 discs and I watched one of them last night: Borderline (1930), with Paul Robeson. 1930 was very late for a silent. This is very much an arthouse film, made by the Pool Group, which was based in Switzerland and the film was shot there. It is shot in the avant garde style: Lots of fast cuts; an overabundance of close-ups; numerous odd camera angles. You know, "artistic" stuff. Some reviews on imdb complain that the movie needs more intertitles, but I think that is incorrect. This is a (very) late silent, and the later silents were very much interested in telling a story with as few intertitles as possible, preferring to let the images tell the story. If you concentrate on the images, the story is pretty clear. The title card usage in this film is very comparable to the usage in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), which won an Academy Award for "Unique and Artistic Picture."
Borderline is about an interracial love triangle: a black couple are staying in a Swiss guesthouse above a tavern. The wife is in an affair with a married white man. The white man is abusive, violent and a bit of a drunk. The black man (Robeson) is mild mannered and very self-controlled. Nevertheless, the town folk blame "the blacks" for the situation. Well, not all the town folk. The innkeeper and the barmaid are both very much on the side of the black couple and make that clear to everybody. Robeson is shown forgiving his wife and trying to save their marriage, while the white couple just gets increasingly bitter, setting up the finale.
It is not a great film by any means, but it is interesting. I am pretty sure you can view it on YouTube, if interested.
@Hedgehog I always enjoy reading your descriptions of silent movies, even if I've never seen them myself.
One of the unique features of the movie is much of the dialogue is ad lib. The director wanted to make it as raw as possible.
@Gramps49 your link went nowhere, so I've taken the liberty of posting this link.
Also, you may find Tiny Url helpful!
jedijudy
Helpful Heaven Host
Lucy Cotton plays Helen. The movie starts with a seance, where Helen's departed mother tries to warn Helen that her fiancé is in danger. As it turns out, he is, as he is soon accused of embezzling funds from the business of Helen's father. He proclaims his innocence. Helen's father uncovers evidence that the fiancé is innocent, but he dies before telling anybody where the evidence is located. The rest of the film deals with the possibility that his spirit is guiding Helen to the evidence. Not at all a horror film and not even remotely scary.
The film was released in June of 1921, about 9 months prior to Nosferatu (1922) (a legit horror film), and a couple months after The Phantom Carriage (1921) and The Haunted Castle (1921) both of which are far spookier and frightening than this film. Come to think of it, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Golem: How He Came Into The World are both 1920 and are both more chilling than this film. So I am not quite sure why they made the effort to push the fairly anemic Whispering Shadows as a horror film, proto- or otherwise.
Case in point, the third DVD of my recent purchase, The Dragon Painter (1919). This DVD (actually BluRay) was released by Milestone Films and distributed by Kino Lorber--and Kino Lorber almost always gives good value for the money. In this case, the disc actually contains 3 films! The Dragon Painter, plus, as extras, His Birthright (1918) and The Man Beneath (1919). All star Sessue Hayakawa.
Hayakawa was born and raised in Japan, but came to the U.S. and began a film career. Most notably, he was in Cecil B. De Mille's The Cheat (1915), where he plays a charming, seductive but despicable villain. And he became one of film's first sex symbols. American women loved to watch him and he became an in-demand actor. Think about that. The Conventional Wisdom is that Japanese actors were condemned to play valets and maids (while black actors were only cast as butlers and maids). But here is an honest-to-gosh sex symbol...and he is Japanese! But the Japanese community in the U.S. complained to him that he was not appearing in roles that fairly or accurately reflected Japanese culture, values or customs. (As a side note, when The Cheat was re-released a few years later, Hayakawa's character was changed from a Japanese merchant to a Burmese merchant. As one critic/cynic observed, presumably the studio decided that there would be less of an outcry because there were fewer Burmese in the country than Japanese!)
So Hayakawa, along with director William Worthington, formed Haworth Pictures Corporation, and all three films are from that corporation. The idea was to make films that more faithfully reflected Japanese culture and values. But Hayakawa also understood that he still had to make movies for an American audience! He had to put out films that they would watch. So he did a bit of a balancing act of inserting authentic Japanese culture/custom/attitudes into a film, but made sure the film was still very much to American taste. That sounds like it should have been a recipe for disaster--but Hayakawa made $2,000,000 off of the venture (roughly estimated at well over $30,000,000 in today's money). So, yeah, he was not stupid. It paid off well.
But what about the films themselves? Oh, they are a delight.
His Birthright: This is a fragment of a film. The original movie was 5 reels long, but we are missing reels 1 and 4. And those are from the Dutch print. Actually, all three movie involve Dutch prints. As I have mentioned before, one of the strengths of silent movies was that they could be distributed worldwide simply by removing the English intertitles and inserting intertitles in the chosen language--a flexibility that was lost when movies turned to sound. In this case, the English version of this film is lost, but the Dutch version survived.
In the movie, Hayakawa is the interracial product of a union between his Japanese mother and an American Admiral. He is raised to believe that his mother committed suicide because the Admiral abandoned him. Hayakawa vows vengeance: he will kill his father for abandoning his mother. As such, he comes to America. He runs into a group of spies (including a very seductive female spy) and, seduced, he agrees to steal military secrets from the Admiral. Having done so, his conscience bothers him: revenge for his dead mother is honorable, but becoming a thief is not! He decides he will recover the plans to redeem himself. This leads him to a final confrontation with both the spies and the Admiral. Even in this shortened form, it is an intriguing film.
The Man Beneath: In this one, Hayakawa plays an Indian (or, as they say, Hindu) doctor. Yeah, okay. So much for Japanese values. But let's ignore that. A dedicated scientist, he is college friends with James (a Brit). While visiting James and James' fiancée, Mary, our valiant doctor falls for Mary's sister, Kate. And the feeling is mutual. But when the doc mentions his love, Kate shoots him down. Later, in a letter, she explains that she does love him too, but "racial hatred and racial prejudice are real." She explains that if they were a couple they would have to face that hatred and they would be unhappy and persecuted--and any offspring that they had would be condemned to lives of misery. And, let's be honest: early 20th century? She ain't wrong. Hayakawa accepts and goes back to his "native" India. But later, James comes to him. James has fallen afoul of gangsters. Well, really, more of a secret society. The society has pledged his death. The valiant doctor intervenes to save his friend, which requires him to confront the representatives of the Secret Society---and he comes one again face to face with his beloved Kate.... Classic stuff!
The Dragon Painter: The headliner of the disk. This one exists in a Dutch print and a French print (again, the original English print is lost). Each has scenes that the other print lacks, so this restoration combines them. In Japan, Tatsu (Hayakawa) is a madman recluse. He lives in the wilderness and raves that his "princess" was changed into a dragon a thousand years ago, and he spends his life begging the Powers-That-Be to restore her to him. And he compulsively paints pictures of dragons (the image of his transformed beloved). Meanwhile, Kano Indara, who comes from a long line of painters, despairs that he has no son to come after him, nor has he any pupil with the talent to bear the Indara name. Then he sees the inspired paintings of Tatsu, the Dragon Painter, and sees the talent. He is motivated to make Tatsu his pupil and heir to the Indara name...but crazy Tatsu just wants his princess back...
Oh, did I mention that Indara has a lovely adult daughter? Do I really need to sketch out the rest of the plot?
Interestingly, although most of the actors in this Haworth film are Asian, the role of Kano Indara is played by a white man (Edward Peil, Sr.). There are no records to explain why. I mean, the film was made by Hayakawa's own production company--he could hire who he wanted.
The disc also has an intriguing extra. As I mentioned, The Dragon Painter exists in a Dutch print and a French print. The extra sets up a split screen and shows both version side-by-side to see which version had what, with commentary by two of the film restorers. The titles are obviously in Dutch and French respectively but, translated, while they each convey substantially the same info, they vary as to details. For example, in an early scene, a character refers to "Tatsu" in one version, and calls him "the Dragon Painter" in the other. Both are accurate---but which one reflects what was said in the original English version? Nobody knows. That is the sort of decision that film restorers need to decide. The split screen documentary discussing the challenges of film restoration is fascinating.
This is a great DVD/BluRay. If you are interested in silent films, buy it. If you are interested in interracial relations in movies, buy it. If you are intrigued by film restoration, buy it. This is clearly the treasure of my recent purchases (and I say that with one more disc that I have yet to watch!)