To Save and Project: The 16th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation

Greetings, O friends of the Siren. For those of you residing in the New York area, rejoice: To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s film-preservation festival, is once more upon us and runs through Jan. 31. This year’s edition is full of things to tantalize a classic-film fan, and the Siren herewith provides a list of titles she is eager to see. For a full rundown on the festival, as well as dates and times of screenings, go here. The Siren is including MoMA’s descriptions of the restorations.

Forbidden Paradise 1924. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Agnes Christine Johnson, Hans Kräl. With Pola Negri, Rod La Rocque, Adolphe Menjou, Pauline Starke. New digital restoration by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation and the Franco-American Cultural Fund. Screening Friday, January 11, 7:00 pm; Tuesday, January 15, 7:00 pm.

Pola Negri arrived in Hollywood just after her old friend, mentor, and sparring partner from Ufa, Ernst Lubitsch. He was soon lent out to make Rosita with Mary Pickford (another film which MoMA has recently restored to its full glory) while Negri, to her tremendous chagrin, wound up working on The Spanish Dancer, a similar story. (“Mary,” sniffed Pola in her Memoirs of a Star, “was hardly a Latin type.”) Negri’s film did better at the box office than Rosita, something she notes with some relish, but she knew Herbert Brenon was no Lubitsch, and she yearned to work again with her old mentor. The result was Forbidden Paradise, the fulfillment of Pola’s longstanding desire to play Catherine the Great of Russia (or something close). MoMA says the film has been restored to 100 minutes and hasn’t been seen in this close to a complete form since its original release. The Siren, who’s never seen it, will be eager to view a scene in which Negri must run through the long corridors of the lavish set representing the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, then down a winding stairway, while wearing a “heavily brocaded negligee with a long sable-trimmed train.” When Lubitsch described the scene to her, Negri made the reasonable point that in such a get-up she was liable to trip and break her neck. Lubitsch reminded her that “we did much more dangerous stunts in Berlin.” “I was younger then.” “Three years younger,” he replied. Negri said her neck had gotten much more valuable in those three years. Lubitsch decided to make his point another way. He snatched the negligee, stepped into it and, his ever-present cigar clutched in his teeth, made the run himself. Negri, once she quit laughing, had to admit she had lost the argument. “And,” she told him, “the cigar is a brilliant ‘Lubitsch touch.’ So right for Catherine.”

The Private Life of Henry VIII 1933. Great Britain. Directed by Alexander Korda. Screenplay by Lajos Biró, Arthur Wimperis. With Charles Laughton, Merle Oberon, Robert Donat, Elsa Lanchester. New 4K digital restoration by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation, in association with ITV and Park Circus, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. 97 min. Screening Saturday, January 12, 7:00 pm (introduced by Bryony Dixon, BFI) and
Tuesday, January 22, 1:00 pm.

Seen many times by the Siren, and she isn’t tired of it yet. Historians sigh and roll their eyes, but Charles Laughton’s carnivorous oversexed mountain of a man remains what critic Michael Koresky calls the “culturally definitive” portrait of Henry VIII. Laughton was just 34 and turns in a raucous, brawling performance that’s one of the best things this great actor ever did. Watch, too, for his moment of heartbreak after Catherine Howard’s execution. In Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, Simon Callow quotes Laughton as saying “I suppose I must have read a good deal about [Henry VIII], but for the rest I spent a lot of my time walking around the old Tudor Palace at Hampton Court, getting my mind accustomed to the square, squat architecture of the rooms and the cloisters. I think it was from the architecture of the houses and the rooms that I got my idea of Henry.” So vivid is Laughton’s monarch that many down the years have assumed the performance had a great deal of Laughton himself in it, which is far from the truth. “Few people would, on meeting, have thought the tubby diffident slightly obstinate young man they might have met at supper the same person as the massive, centred titan exploding in Jovan laughter that hits the screen,” remarks Callow.

Oblomok Imperii (Fragment of an Empire). 1929. USSR. Directed by Fridrikh Ermler. Screenplay by Ermler, Ekaterina Vinogradskaya. With Fiodor Nikitin, Yakov Gudkin, Liudmila Semionova, Valerii Solovtsov. New digital restoration courtesy the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and EYE Filmmuseum in partnership with Gosfilmofond of Russia. Silent; with piano accompaniment. With English intertitles. 109 min. Screening Sunday, January 13, 4:00 pm (introduced by Peter Bagrov, George Eastman Museum) and Tuesday, January 15, 4:00 pm.

This “little-known masterpiece,” as Imogen Sara Smith calls it, made quite a stir at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival last June. It looks like a must.

Crime Wave 1954. USA. Directed by André de Toth. Screenplay by Crane Wilbur. With Sterling Hayden, Gene Nelson, Timothy Carey, Ted de Corsia, Charles Buchinsky (Bronson).

Fair warning from MoMA: “This may be the last chance you’ll ever get to see André de Toth’s Crime Wave, one of the most thrilling B noirs of 1950s American cinema, in a pristine 35mm print struck from the original camera negative. Famed for Bert Glennon’s nighttime location photography throughout Los Angeles, Crime Wave stars Sterling Hayden as a cynical, brutal police sergeant who puts the screws on a newlywed ex-con (Gene Nelson) in order to nab a trio of jailbreak thugs.” MoMA is running Crime Wave on January 19, alongside two movies that Hayden made in Germany toward the end of his life: Pharos of Chaos (1983) and Der Havarist (1984), both screening on January 19 and 27. Wolf-Eckart Bühler, who directed Der Havarist (The Shipwrecker) and co-directed Pharos of Chaos with Manfred Blank, will introduce the two films. Both are biographical in nature, focusing on Hayden’s acting, his heroic war record, and the not-so-heroic act he never forgave himself for: appearing as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. Hayden, who had greatly admired the Yugoslav partisans who fought during the war, had indeed joined the Communist Party briefly in 1946. Despite that vulnerability to HUAC’s probe he signed up with the 1948 Committee for the First Amendment, the famed group that went to Washington to support the Hollywood Ten. But when Congress turned its sights on Hayden, fear of going to jail and losing custody of his children led him to name names, including screenwriter Robert Lees, screenwriter-director Abraham Polonsky, and actress Karen Morley. Years later some name-namers adopted a defensive, even truculent attitude about their decision (Elia Kazan comes to mind); not Hayden. He expressed his remorse publicly many times, and for the rest of his life. Despite his low regard for acting ("I spent a lifetime selling out. I always hated acting but I kept on acting...a commuter on a tinsel train") Hayden brought his intelligence and introspection to some of the most remarkable performances in noir, including The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, and the noir-inflected western Terror in a Texas Town. In the blacklist interview book Tender Comrades, Karen Morley cited Hayden as the only friendly witness she could “maybe” forgive. John Huston, writing in his 1980 autobiography, said, “I always felt great sympathy with [Hayden] for this failure to live up to his own idea of himself. But even from this experience he learned and grew. There is a kingliness about Sterling now.”

Finishing School. 1934. USA. Directed by Wanda Tuchock, George Nicholls Jr. Screenplay by Tuchock, Laird Doyle. With Frances Dee, Billie Burke, Ginger Rogers, Bruce Cabot. New 35mm preservation courtesy The Library of Congress. 73 min.
Screening Sunday, January 13, 6:45 pm; Monday, January 14, 4:30 pm.

Dorothy Arzner wasn’t quite the only female director in 1930s Hollywood: Wanda Tuchock also had a directing co-credit on this (barely) Pre-Code tale of fresh young Frances Dee corrupted by Ginger Rogers (which sounds like fun). This film was a hit with the TCM Film Festival crowd last year, and a restored version is most welcome. “Bring on your women— that’s all we can say, if this is a sample of a woman director can do with a story about a woman’s troubles,” wrote the Hollywood Filmograph at the time. Tuchock went to on to rack up many screenwriting credits, but directing was not to be, save a 1950s short.

Among the rest of the screenings, the Siren is also highly intrigued by Nude on the Moon (who isn’t, with that title), written and directed by Doris Wishman in 1961; a new digital preservation of F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926); the New York premiere of Cane River (1982), written and directed by Horace Jenkins, which MoMA calls “a racially themed love story shot in Natchitoches Parish, a ‘free community of color’ in Louisiana; El fantasma del convento (The Phantom of the Monastery), directed by Fernando de Fuentes, and La mujer del porto (Woman of the Port), directed by Arcady Boytler, both made in Mexico in 1934.

Finally, Ida Lupino’s Never Fear (The Young Lovers) from 1949 gets a week-long run from January 25–31. This was one of the Lupino-directed films that the Siren admitted not having seen when she and Sheila O’Malley did a Film Comment podcast on Lupino. Given Lupino’s personal connection to the material — it concerns a dancer struggling to overcome the effects of polio, a disease that had also struck Lupino years before — this one is also a must.

The "Paradine" Letters, Part 4

These are the Siren's final thoughts on The Paradine Case, at least for these purposes. If you haven't already, please go to Some Came Running to read the Mighty Glenn Kenny's Part 3.

David O. Selznick's foreign discoveries stick together.

Dear Glenn,
Since you’ve covered the formal beauties of this movie so well, I thought I’d use my last go-round to talk about Hitchcock's second- or third-choice actors and their performances. I adore her, as longtime readers know, so I’ll start with Alida Valli.

Here, as in The Third Man and Senso, she’s madly in love with a man who doesn’t love her back. (You could also make a case for Eyes Without a Face in that vein.) It’s an odd pattern for such a beautiful actress. Interesting, too, that after Alida Valli herself suffered greatly during the war in Italy, she often played women scarred by the past, although it’s also pretty plain that Mrs. Paradine was bad news from the start. Valli was still learning English during filming, but her voice and intonations are beautiful; I love to hear the consonants roll off her tongue when she looks at Gregory Peck and says, speaking of Louis Jourdan as Latour, “You are not to destroy him. If you do, I shall hate you as I have never hated a man.”

A bit overdressed for the occasion

The Siren once expressed reservations about Valli in this movie, but the last viewing erased them. She is, as Charles Coburn’s solicitor Sir Simon Flaquer remarks, “Fascinating, fascinating.” The caressing way she leans in slightly when she wants something from Peck, the near-dominatrix tone she adopts when she realizes he may go after Jourdan despite her warnings, and the queenly bearing she has at all times, add up to someone who merits all the constant chatter about her. (Don’t you love the moment when Latour, in so many words, tells Keane, “She’s bad, bad to the bone”?)

In the very beginning, when the Scotland Yard men arrest Mrs. Paradine in a deferential way that suggests they're escorting her to the theater, she asks the butler to bring her “black lamb." That turns out to be a coat so lavish it could keep all of Mayfair warm. Once it’s fastened, she turns and checks herself in the mirror: Even on her way to prison, Mrs. Paradine is, at all times and in all ways, conscious of the effect she is having. That little mirror-check may be her one moment of true human weakness. Her love for Latour is not weakness, but a Wagnerian fire.

This is pretty much the same look he trains on Coburn.

Tony Keane, the supposedly legendary barrister played by Peck, doesn’t have a chance with her. Whatever Mrs. Paradine wants, we know instinctively it isn’t this walking mass of rhetoric and (formerly) high principles. We hear quite a bit about "Tony's brilliance" but on screen — and this is a problem with the script, along with its admitted talkiness — there are almost no scenes to show he’s anything of the sort. He loses his head early on, and it stays lost. Too, Peck lacks the requisite passion in his scenes with Valli. No torch fires up behind his eyes when he looks at her. Maybe maintaining all that lava-hot lust for Jennifer Jones in the earlier Duel in the Sun had exhausted him. Maybe he (or Selznick) was unwilling to have his character’s betrayal of sweet Ann Todd be that blatantly sinful. Whatever the cause, Peck is the weakest link, and as he is the main character, that is a non-trivial problem. But one thing he nails in great style is his final speech, where he says, with stunning obviousness at that point, “Everything I have done seems to have gone against my client," yet he still makes you feel the magnitude of the man’s failure. Peck was pretty much born to address a jury.

Sexual harrassment, 1947-style.

Ah, Ann Todd as Gay — lovely, charming, initially clueless: “Nice people don’t go about murdering other nice people.” Peck does has some chemistry with Todd; their early scenes are playful and teasing, with much affection and a kiss that tells you this married couple still has sex. (They have no kids.) Todd manages to convince me that a woman would push her husband to keep representing Mrs. Paradine, Gay’s reasoning being that if Tony walks away, part of him will always yearn for the maybe-murderess. The scene that establishes Gay as a woman with the strength to do such a thing is the one you describe so well, at the dinner party. After he fixates on her bare shoulder, Laughton as the well-named Lord Horfield settles his bulk way too close to Gay on the sofa. Then he grabs her hand, ostensibly to look at her ring, with such force that she has trouble yanking it away. She tells him off in a very British fashion — by complimenting his wife — and moves to the other side of the room, where Keane is talking to the hostess. Gay's adored Tony hasn’t noticed a thing, or gone to check on her; it’s an early scene, but we already see the selfishness lurking behind Keane’s upright facade.

Just out of frame is Tetzel's cigarette holder, with which she prevents Coburn's monocle from upstaging her.

Joan Tetzel as Judy Flaquer sees it too; she tells her father, “Men who’ve been good too long get a longing for the mire and want to wallow in it.” For that reason, I don’t think she is going to have her own Paradine. She’s far too clearsighted, an audience surrogate who says what everyone else is thinking. I like her confidence and her chic, the fact that she’s still living with her father, doesn't seem to resent him a bit, and wipes him out at chess. Charles Coburn as her father is Charles Coburn, monocle twinkling away, sage and amusing, amusing and sage, but that is no bad thing, at least in my book. He gets a wonderful line about photographs: "The social footsteps of time."

Jourdan's first American close-up was a honey.

When Hitchcock’s path crosses Selznick’s in the canteen of the afterlife, he probably still fumes about Jourdan’s casting, but Jourdan is excellent. I don’t think his beauty ruins the material at all. (It’s odd that in interviews Hitchcock always referred to the character as a groom, when he’s a valet in both the book and the movie.) Of course it helps immensely that Colonel Paradine was blind, because otherwise, if you don’t want your wife to sleep with the valet, you hire Eric Blore.

I like Robin Wood’s brief musings:

Jourdan worked in only two other distinguished films in the 1940s, both quite central to their respective directors' work, and both underrated by most critics: Minnelli's Madame Bovary and Hitchcock's The Paradine Case. The former inflects Jourdan's persona in the direction of aristocratic decadence, while retaining the sense of vulnerability. The latter, far more remarkably (especially in the 1950s), eliminates the decadence altogether yet defines the character, at least by implication, as gay. We are informed that Jourdan as the valet has no interest in women, has totally resisted the advances of Mrs. Paradine (Alida Valli, no less), and has been completely dedicated to his master, Colonel Paradine. The valet's dedication is the moral center of this remarkable film, and is combined very disturbingly with Valli's erotic dedication to Jourdan — although Hitchcock later felt Jourdan's character should have been rougher and more "manly" to account for the frustrated Valli's fixation upon him.

Now that I think about it, Wood may well be right that Jourdan, whose character's end is by far the most tragic, is the moral center here, and not Todd. The evidence that Latour is gay leaped out very strongly at me during the last couple of viewings, and was reinforced by another line, spoken to Alida Valli by Leo G. Carroll, playing the prosecutor: “As soon as you learned of his indifference to women, you determined to overcome that indifference.”

Fun couple

I’ll close by noting the excellence of the penultimate scene, in which we learn Mrs. Paradine’s fate. It’s dinner time chez Lord and Lady Horfield, where the table is the length of a subway car and husband and wife deliver their lines through candelabra that would not disgrace the Hall of Mirrors. Laughton (who, remember, disliked “toffs”) throughout the trial scenes plays Horfield as an Olympian autocrat, amusing himself with bon mots while pushing the jury to a foreordained conclusion. Ethel Barrymore reportedly had her best scene cut, but she is very touching here, even if her Oscar nomination remains something of a mystery. (Stephen Whitty points out that the longer version seen by Academy voters that year may have had that scene.)

Here, Laughton delivers possibly the most macabre line in all Hitchcock: “It’s surprising how closely the convolutions of a walnut resemble those of the human brain.” As he inspects a walnut he just cracked, even though it is not a close shot, we see that indeed it does, horrifyingly, resemble what a brain would look like if you sawed open someone’s skull. Ethel Barrymore timidly tries to get a bit of feeling out of him (“Doesn’t life punish us enough, Tommy?”) And he snaps back, “Must I listen to more of your silly pity for every scoundrel, man or woman?” Thus is raised the question of whether the worst sociopath in the entire movie has been the one on the bench.

I want to be clear that I don’t consider The Paradine Case top-flight Hitchcock, but I’d place it solidly in the middle tier, as one of the best examples of what he could do outside his comfort zone. There is no way The Paradine Case deserves to be ranked dead last and dissed as hard as it was in a recent Indiewire rundown of Top 25 Hitch. I hope that at least we may persuade some people to take another look.

The sum of the Paradine parts:

Glenn, Part 1

The Siren, Part 2

Glenn, Part 3

The "Paradine" Letters, Part 2

(The Siren is having a dialog with her Close Personal Friend Glenn Kenny about the much-maligned The Paradine Case. Part 1 was published yesterday at Some Came Running and should be read before the Siren's post. This is her reply.)

Screen cap from Glenn: "Two Profiles"

I believe you’re right: Hitchcock definitely contributed to his film’s low reputation. I’ve written before about cases of actors who dislike their own work, and it can be true of directors as well, especially directors who were working in a commercial vein and who cared about audience reaction and box office. Hitchcock was an artist who wanted to make hits, and The Paradine Case was a flop. Plus, Hitchcock didn’t get his way on some big decisions, and he never liked the original novel (by Robert Hichens) much to begin with.

Hitchcock wrote a draft script with wife Alma Reville, but Selznick was unsatisfied. At this point in his career, Selznick was always unsatisfied. He’d become Hollywood’s Tinkerer Supreme. So Hitchcock suggested that Selznick bring in Scottish playwright James Bridie, who later worked on Under Capricorn and Stage Fright, to do a rewrite. But Bridie hated the States, and so he sailed back to England and mailed in his pages as he went along. This didn’t work, and I can’t imagine why anyone thought it would, given the vagaries of transatlantic mail in 1946.

Ben Hecht was brought in briefly for additional dialogue. The canny Hecht quickly saw that the project was snakebit. He agreed to help on the fly, for $10,000 and a promise that his name would not be put on whatever resulted. Reportedly the only part of Hecht’s dialogue that survives is Peck’s courtroom meltdown. Head censor Joseph Breen of the Hays Office sent along his usual artistic enhancements, including a warning not to show a prison toilet or to film anything that suggested Todd and Peck were in their bathroom at the same time.

The Happy Hitchcock Gang

Meanwhile Selznick was consumed with finishing Duel in the Sun, and The Paradine Case had to take a number. By the time shooting began, there was still no finalized script, and Selznick was rewriting. Hitchcock was frequently working from pages that Selznick had sent down that very morning. “This, of course, drove Hitchcock to distraction,” was Peck’s understated recollection.

Hitchcock’s filming ideally had an express-train rhythm. The Paradine Case was more like a Greyhound bus making unscheduled stops. And then there was the cast, made up almost entirely of actors he didn’t want. Hitchcock requested Robert “Long John Silver” Newton for Latour the valet, got Louis Jourdan, and sulked about that apparently until the day he died. Hitchcock’s prior experience with Charles Laughton had been sheer misery, although Laughton turned out to be the least of his worries. Hitchcock didn’t see the point of Selznick's ballyhooed "Valli" (as she was billed), and as you mention, he told Selznick that Gregory Peck was no one’s idea of a barrister (and he wasn’t wrong). Not to mention that this was Hitchcock’s last film under his seven-year Selznick contract, and he was itching to go independent. Filming took four months. That’s not including retakes.

The final product was about three hours long. Selznick cut it down to just over two, while still finding room to insert close-ups in the middle of Hitchcock’s treasured long takes. It sat on the shelf for months while Selznick worked to convince everybody to go see Duel in the Sun.

Publicity time. I guess Laughton didn't smoke Chesterfields.

The Paradine Case finally wound up with a big December 1947 premiere at two separate cinemas in Westwood, reviews that amounted to “it’s OK I guess,” and box-office receipts totaling about half what it had cost.

No wonder that years later, once he got a nice young man like François Truffaut to confide in, Hitchcock’s retrospective assessment of The Paradine Case was essentially, “Oh god, not that one.”

But the Siren, perverse mortal that she is, long ago adopted this pain-in-the-neck film as her very own pet Hitchcock orphan (along with Lifeboat and Rope). It is slow, yes, but it whispers along like silk, until that courtroom climax fells the audience right along with Anthony Keane. And it is exquisite to behold. When you made a movie for David O. Selznick, in exchange for putting up with all those damn memos, you got big-time production values. Franz Waxman composed a wonderful score, one of my favorites, both romantic and sinister. Travis Banton designed the gowns, which was no bit of trivia but rather an area that mattered to both Selznick and Hitchcock. Banton's contributions are simple but effective; in early scenes, Ann Todd wears stainless white, while Alida Valli is a column of black.

Over a million 1947 dollars' worth of set.

And Thomas Morahan was the art director. When I saw this as a girl I couldn’t get enough of the interiors: the way Maddalena Paradine glides proudly through a convent-like prison; the luxurious London house where Anthony and Gay Keane retreat to live their perfect upper-crust lives; the firelit room where Judge Lord Thomas Horfield (Charles Laughton) makes his spidery attempts to put his hands on Mrs. Keane, while Lady Horfield (Ethel Barrymore) watches helplessly. And then there's that Old Bailey courtroom set, so meticulously accurate that building it is said to have eaten up one-third of the budget.

Glenn calls this screen cap "Garmes Glory"

Everything significant seems to take place indoors, or at night. The cinematography is velvet noir, shadows menacing the rich and pampered instead of the grubby and low-rent. (DP Lee Garmes was in the prime of his career, his next film being Nightmare Alley.) Valli and Todd never looked more beautiful, and for that matter, neither did Peck, with his noble profile and silvered temples. (Hitchcock wanted him to have a mustache, and even that got nixed, on the grounds that British barristers aren’t permitted facial hair.)

It is, as you say, a melodrama — a women’s picture — filtered through Hitchcock’s feverish preoccupations, full of thwarted loves and twisted seductions. Keane begins by admiring Mrs. Paradine’s beauty, determines to save her, and then gradually descends into life-shattering obsession.

When someone does praise The Paradine Case, they often want to discuss it as a dry run for Vertigo. But I see Ann Todd's character as the moral center. This is Vertigo with an extra helping of Barbara Bel Geddes’ point of view, and more sympathy going to the woman cast aside so a man can recklessly pursue his sexual doom.

(The next installment in the "The 'Paradine' Letters" will be at Glenn's place on Monday, May 4th.)

Charles Laughton: Actor as Artist

The folks at New York City’s Film Forum have just started a three-week, 35-film tribute to Charles Laughton. Obviously, they love the Siren and want her to be happy. That’s her working theory, anyway. April of this year will mark a full decade since the Siren began spinning in her corner of the Web. And Laughton was one of the first people she chose to write about.

What makes you adopt an actor? How do you decide that here’s a performer you will seek out, regardless of the vehicle? The Siren is always drawn to an actor who takes a 20-foot-high screen and gives you a focused, intelligent performance that fills out every square inch. That’s Laughton. His kind of acting is, sadly, not very fashionable anymore. Even Simon Callow, who wrote a fantastic biography that focuses almost entirely on the acting, admits Laughton’s fame these days is tied to The Night of the Hunter, his one-off directorial masterpiece. Laughton’s acting is “virtually unknown by anyone under 40,” Callow wrote recently.

Or, in some cases, worse than forgotten. “Laughton's mannered performances are liable to elicit laughter today,” sniffs one writer reviewing Callow’s book. This prompts the Siren to a rare display of temper. Mannered? What could be more mannered than some contemporary actors who wait for the camera to discover each tiny effect as they overact their underacting? (That is, if indeed they are actors; of late the Siren has endured too many nonprofessionals cast by wannabe Bressons.) You can keep that kind of pallid realism, where the goal is to be the closest thing to real life. Sure, it’s close. And real life is being on hold with the airline, or flossing your teeth, or staring into the middle distance while trying to recall whether you took your vitamins. The Siren doesn’t require tedium to be all that accurate.

Give her someone like Charles Laughton, who aimed big, even if from time to time he failed big. Give her the existential truth he dredges up, say, at the climax of Mutiny on the Bounty. God no, it’s not “realistic,” but for all time and no matter who else plays him, there’s Captain Bligh, standing in a rowboat, bellowing: “Casting me adrift 3,500 miles from a port of call! You're sending me to my doom, eh? Well, you're wrong, Christian! I'll take this boat as she floats, to England, if I must! I'll live to see you — all of you — hanging from the highest yardarm in the British Fleet!”

Now if you were an actor in class, assigned the unenviable task of recreating that speech, your action might be something like “placing a curse.” Captain Bligh is, in this MGM production of 80 years ago, a villain, a man who cares more about breadfruit than the human beings under his command. But as an actor, Laughton knows obsessiveness can bring about disaster, or it can keep a person alive. Bligh is transferring all his passion to the task of survival, so he can have his revenge. And Laughton points his hand as though he could reach up and tie the rope around Clark Gable’s neck himself. He’s not merely shouting, he layers hatred and determination under every syllable, pronouncing “ChrisCHUHN” so that the very name carries the wrath of the Almighty.

In other words, this is an actor who performed with ferocious totality. That’s what it takes to etch a character in the public mind. When people joke about Henry VIII picking up half a chicken and tearing the meat off with his teeth, they’re not remembering Holbein. They’re evoking Charles Laughton. Lon Chaney created a good Quasimodo, in the 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one that was quite close to the 19th-century illustrations of Victor Hugo’s book. But when Disney cleaned up the tale of the hunchback and the gypsy, to puzzling effect, they were, quite openly, doing a prettified version of Laughton. That’s because it was his Quasimodo, falling in love with Maureen O’Hara’s Esmeralda in the course of a single shot, who broke hearts. These images are there because Laughton’s performances put them there.

He achieved his effects through subtle methods as well as grand ones. For Rembrandt, a biopic directed by Alexander Korda, Laughton immersed himself in the artist’s work for weeks on end. It’s a somber movie, focused on Rembrandt’s tragic private life, and also on how his paintings gradually lost favor, even as Rembrandt was at the peak of his genius. Aided by the sensitive lighting of cinematographer Georges Perinal, Laughton approaches a canvas as though acceding to its demands. “Every man has a destined path,” says Laughton’s Rembrandt. “It leads him into the wilderness but he must follow it with head high and a smile on his lips.” It is no surprise to learn that Mike Leigh, in interviews, cites Rembrandt as a key influence on Mr. Turner.

Charles Laughton was born in 1899, the son of hoteliers. He worked until his early 20s in his parents’ hotel, starting at the lowest rung of the trade at the insistence of his formidable mother. His upbringing was prosperous, and he went to private schools such as Stonyhurst. He didn’t begin his acting career until his early 20s, after overcoming the strenuous disapproval of his family.

But Laughton, somehow, never identified much with privilege. Off-screen he pulled away from “toffs” all his life. When he played a bank clerk, a servant, a schoolteacher, he brought a rare and deep understanding of what it means to work hard for meager pay and nonexistent rank. And Laughton also reveled in showing what’s behind the petty exercise of power, say by a Victorian toff with his invalid poet-daughter in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or a bootmaker of a similar era in Hobson's Choice, or, in The Big Clock, a CEO who finds a single light burning in a broom closet at his corporate headquarters.

He served in World War I as a private, saw time in the trenches, and was exposed to mustard gas in the last vicious weeks before peace. It damaged his throat and left him with painful, recurring hives for the rest of his life. The emotional effects of his service are harder to discover, because Laughton preferred not to speak of them. Still, Callow points to a possible connection between the ignoble terror of certain moments in This Land Is Mine, and the memories of war, and that feels right. In Jean Renoir’s superb movie about the occupation of a small (obviously French) town, there is a scene where Laughton’s Alfred Lory, a schoolteacher, looks out the window of his cell and sees his headmaster being marched to a firing squad. Lory was supposed to call to him: “Professor Sorel! Professor Sorel!” On the first take, Laughton gripped the bars on the window so hard they broke off.

Laughton had a stormy, complicated marriage to Elsa Lanchester that lasted from 1927 until his death in 1962. He was gay, and Laughton’s era was not, of course, hospitable to same-sex relationships, although the older he got, the more affairs he had, and the more frequently he would confide in people. (As he took a drive with Robert Mitchum during the filming of Night of the Hunter, Laughton confessed to his star that “there is a strong streak of homosexuality in me.” Mitchum’s priceless response: “No shit! Stop the car!”) Most good actors can suggest sexual undercurrents driving their characters, but Laughton treated desire, even in murderers like those in The Big Clock and Jamaica Inn, as an outgrowth of the mind, not merely a physical urge.

Seeing a big portion of Laughton’s work at Film Forum should dispel the notion that he was always massively overweight; he’s in pretty good shape in Mutiny on the Bounty, for example. He was an aesthete who prized the best and highest in music, in literature and in art. (One bond he had with Jean Renoir: Laughton had bought Renoir pere’s The Judgment of Paris for $35,000 in the 1930s.) But this man who loved beauty saw none in himself, no matter if Marilyn Monroe said he was “the sexiest thing she’d ever seen,” no matter if Marlene Dietrich told him before they started Witness for the Prosecution that she’d always yearned to play opposite him. “I look like a departing pachyderm,” he once said. The Siren never reads that joke without a wince. His looks did mean he would never be a leading man, but that is our good fortune; how many Hollywood idols could have created just one of Laughton’s monsters?

The Film Forum series shows that Laughton was also exceptional at more ordinary specimens of humanity. In The Suspect, directed by Robert Siodmak, Laughton is cast as a version of Dr. Crippen, a rare sympathetic figure in the annals of true crime — not least because Crippen may not have actually murdered his wife, a possibility the film toys with, but basically rejects. Philip Marshall (Laughton) is chained in marriage to a vicious shrew (Rosalind Ivan, rehearsing her character in Scarlet Street, but doing it well); inevitably, he falls in love with a gentle young woman (Ella Raines, who seemingly spent much of the 1940s cast as the foil to murderers). Made on an obviously low budget, it is still a fine movie, and Laughton and Elsa Lanchester considered Marshall to be one of his best creations. The tension comes from the question of which will win out, Marshall the murderer, or Marshall, the man who says, with infinite sadness, “I like people and I’ve never wanted to hurt them.” At a key late moment, Marshall is afraid that his secret is about to be discovered during a quiet social evening at home. As his own son fumbles around the spot that could reveal all, Marshall keeps smiling; you can watch the gradual transition, as Laughton’s smile turns into a ghastly mask of dread.

To a director, Laughton on set meant there would always be more than one temperament around, and Siodmak said later that The Suspect forced him into an unusual approach. When Laughton one day barged in declaring that every take had been wrong, all wrong, and would have to be redone, Siodmak responded by reeling around declaiming the actor's lines himself. Laughton became convinced he’d finally encountered a director who actually was a lunatic, as opposed to merely behaving like one. And after that, claimed Siodmak, his star was as gentle as the rain.

Jean Renoir was patient and kind, as he seemed to be with everyone, and mentioned Laughton fondly in interviews. During Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick had his hands full, what with the glory that was Rome and the grandeur that was Kirk Douglas, and let Laughton and Peter Ustinov rewrite most of their scenes together. Billy Wilder, who helped Robert Stephens to a breakdown and James Cagney to leaving the business, described making Witness for the Prosecution as delightful. (The Siren has watched that movie over and over again — it’s Laughton’s funniest, most wholly endearing performance. His scenes with Lanchester are perfection.) Otto Preminger (rather surprising, this one) treated Laughton with the utmost courtesy during Advise and Consent. He probably realized the actor was dying of cancer and that Senator Seb Cooley would be Laughton's last role. Laughton's physical condition caused him to play Cooley (obviously written as a portrait of Strom Thurmond) with spidery stillness. But Preminger also said Laughton asked for direction and was eager to take it.

Other times it was a different story. Even Laughton’s friends and admirers said he was hard to work with. Those directors who emerged with good memories tended to be ones who recognized that Laughton’s extreme seriousness was no act. Garson Kanin, who directed They Knew What They Wanted (long out of sight, not Laughton’s best work, and not part of the series), claimed to have respected Laughton, at least before shooting began. Laughton told Kanin that to play an Italian-American farmer, he would immerse himself in Vivaldi, Dante and Michelangelo. In his book Hollywood, Kanin all but calls this a sham.

But the fact is, that was absolutely Laughton’s approach, as it had been with Rembrandt. Alfred Hitchcock could have testified to that as well. When Laughton was unable to get his walk right as the sinister squire of Jamaica Inn, he refused to continue. He came back the next day saying he’d discovered how to do it, by listening to Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance.

Hitchcock, however, responded to this sort of thing about as well as Kanin did. Hitch liked his actors to be either consummate pros, who got the job done without fuss, or malleable, tentative souls he could push around as he liked. Laughton was the worst of both worlds: a headstrong talent who needed as much time and patience as any neophyte. Laughton's malevolent judge in The Paradine Case (poor Paradine Case, the Siren loves you even if no one else does) was a somewhat better experience. But Hitchcock told Pia Lindstrom years later, with placid malice, “The hardest things to photograph are dogs, babies, motor boats and Charles Laughton.”

Mind you, the Siren understands Hitchcock’s point of view. To see the way Laughton struggled, and directors struggled with him, you need only look at one 70-minute documentary: The Epic That Never Was, which Film Forum is showing on Feb. 22. Made in 1965 for the BBC, it pieces together what’s left of an effort to film Robert Graves’ I, Claudius in 1937. Laughton, who’d already been a memorably depraved Nero in The Sign of the Cross, was obvious casting as the stammering Roman who feigns stupidity in order to stay alive, and ends up as emperor. Josef von Sternberg, who’d just ended his string of sumptuously erotic films with Marlene Dietrich, was likewise a natural to film the dissipation of the ancients.

As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Instead it was a disaster that ended with Merle Oberon (cast as Messalina) wrecking her car and her producer husband Alex Korda deciding that a nice tidy insurance settlement beat the heck out of making this movie.

More than anything, Laughton was ill-matched with Von Sternberg, who wrote, “An actor is rewarded with attention out of all proportion to his services. An actor is turned on and off like a spigot, and like the spigot, is not the source of the liquid that flows through him.” Laughton admired Von Sternberg greatly, but this was not a director who was going to understand why his spigot was studying the exact way a Roman would address the gods. There are many outtakes of Laughton stopping mid-scene, or up and leaving the set. You could say Von Sternberg lacked sympathy. “Acting is nothing remarkable,” he wrote, and meant every word. And in fairness, more often than not, when Laughton stops, it’s difficult at first to figure out why. He sounds fine. Sometimes he sounds great. Imagine you’re Von Sternberg, or, if you prefer, Hitchcock, with the crew seething and the hot breath of the studio executives steaming up the set, and all that’s between you and the film you can already watch in your head is this ACTOR and his insistence on forging things in the smithy of his soul.

“Jesus Christ, Charles, just hit your mark and say the line.”

And then, Laughton addresses the Senate … and soars. In one scene he becomes every belittled, misjudged man who ever stood up and said, this is not who I am. At last it is possible to understand why Laughton placed such significance on the interior. He was acting the other takes, and they were good; in this one, he is being, and it is art.

Those who talk only of the single film Laughton directed, and shrug off the rest, are making a grave mistake. Laughton the director could never have made the shimmering, perfect thing that is Night of the Hunter, if it hadn’t been for Laughton the actor.

Links:

The schedule for Film Forum's Charles Laughton series can be found here. A restored Spartacus is screening this spring after the series concludes. Several rarities are being shown, including Forever and a Day and Arch of Triumph, neither of which the Siren has seen (yet). Also, though Laughton's part amounts to a glimpse, the dazzling Piccadilly is worth your time and includes one of Anna May Wong's best roles.

The Siren has in the past written about Ruggles of Red Gap, The Big Clock, Jamaica Inn and the charming Deanna Durbin vehicle It Started With Eve. She prefers David Cairns on The Man on the Eiffel Tower to her own post, which was written in a state of extreme irritation from the lousy DVD she watched.

In Memoriam: Deanna Durbin, 1921-2013

(This, the Siren's tribute to the admirable Deanna Durbin, combines, updates and elaborates on several previous pieces.)

A curly-haired teen stands on a set, surrounded by adoring middle-aged men. She clasps her hands, and the bright eyes look upward as though asking an archangel to give her the downbeat. She opens her mouth, and out comes a soprano you'd associate with a woman twice her age and size.

This is the image of Deanna Durbin, who has died at age 91: winsome, wholesome, able to hit high C without creasing a single dress ruffle. That hasn't exactly kept her name evergreen with modern critics, who react to wholesome as Frankenstein did to fire.

“She was boring, and therefore bored, in movies,” once wrote Richard Brody of Durbin, Universal’s great star for a span that lasted from Three Smart Girls in 1936 through For the Love of Mary in 1949. But really, this will not do. You can accuse her of being tricksy, of lacking truthful emotion on screen. Like many child stars she developed a highly technical mode of acting; Jean Renoir, when he walked off the Durbin vehicle The Amazing Mrs Holliday, said she “was unable to escape from the style that made her famous.” That style, however, included excellent comic timing, an ability to seem fresh no matter how contrived the plot, and striking charisma.

Boring she was not.

Today, the best-known Durbin fact concerns not her films, but her fate. Charles David, who directed her in Lady on a Train in 1945, became her third husband in 1950, after Durbin made him promise to give her what she wanted: "the life of nobody."

Like that other immortal Hollywood walkout, Greta Garbo, Durbin's motivations may have included an ability to read the handwriting on the wall. Before 1949's For the Love of Mary was released, Universal, the studio that Deanna Durbin films once saved from bankruptcy, announced they were ending her contract due to "increasing public apathy." One imagines Durbin snapping, "Likewise, buddy."

She was the highest-paid woman star in Hollywood in 1945 and 1947; she made good investments, and her retirement was comfortable. It needed to be, as it lasted 64 years. When Durbin said goodbye to the movies, it was forever.

David, having kept his promise to his wife, died in 1999. In the early 1970s it was reported that Durbin was living in France, and that she still enjoyed singing. In 1980, tired of reading rumors that she had grown enormously fat in retirement, Durbin released a picture of herself, looking trim and polished, holding up a current issue of Life. She gave an interview to film historian David Shipman in 1983. Otherwise, Durbin refused to talk publicly to the press or anyone else about her Hollywood career, although she's said to have sent pictures to fans. John McElwee of Greenbriar Picture Shows, who calls Durbin his favorite actress along with Norma Shearer, writes that he received a "friendly" note from her dated 1/30/86. That's more than almost anybody ever got from Garbo. Durbin wasn't a hermit, it seems. She wasn't bitter. She was just through.

Three Smart Girls (Henry Koster, 1936) was Durbin’s first starring role for Universal, after MGM signed her for a brief period but failed to exploit her. (The probably apocryphal legend goes that Louis B. Mayer saw a musical short subject Durbin made with Judy Garland and told his staff, "Drop the fat one"--meaning Garland. Durbin was cut instead, and wound up at Universal.) Three Smart Girls is a good-natured precursor to The Parent Trap. It's another movie that tells children of divorce, "You can get Mommy and Daddy back together! All you gotta do is reveal Daddy's girlfriend for the gold-digging tramp she is."

Durbin is the youngest of the three daughters engaged in these shenanigans, and by far the most interesting. She is occasionally too cute, too overemphatic, but when she’s onscreen, everything else recedes. And when Durbin’s gone, and she’s offscreen more than you’d expect, you miss her, despite Ray Milland’s best efforts as the heir to an Australian banking fortune. She has only three songs, the first sung in a boat sailing on a Swiss lake, the second to her father (Charles Winninger) as she’s being tucked into bed. Her voice is lovely, but neither number is a standout.

The third is. Durbin is in a police station, trying to convince the police officer in charge that she’s a Metropolitan Opera star. (If you’re the sort who insists on knowing the plot machinations that got her into that predicament, this movie probably isn’t for you.) She sings Luigi Arditi’s “Il Bacio” to the captain and two cops, and gradually the room fills with other uniformed men, all listening. By the time a man being hauled to the drunk tank tries to stop and get a listen, too, Durbin has become more than the main reason to watch the movie. She’s a star.

She was about 15 when Three Smart Girls came out, and though she's often described as a child star, her little-girl years were already numbered. She made the transition to adult roles--admittedly dulcet, charming adult roles--without much trouble, receiving her first screen kiss from Robert Stack in First Love in 1939. Stack remembered her as "completely self-contained, courteous, private, almost aloof off-camera."  On camera, her rendition of "One Fine Day" from Madame Butterfly brought both him and the crew to tears. But even in 1939, Durbin wasn't eager to stick around the studio. Stack recalled that "Deanna's penchant for leaving the set after her close-ups led to my first love scene with a blackboard."

Durbin's IMDB profile claims she was Winston Churchill's favorite actress, and that he screened One Hundred Men and a Girl after World War II victories by way of celebration. (Maybe. I have also read that Madeleine Carroll was his favorite actress, and elsewhere I was informed That Hamilton Woman was his favorite movie.) In the early 1940s, though, with or without Winston Churchill's approval, Durbin movies continued to rake it in.

The first Durbin movie the Siren ever saw was from the star's peak years: It Started With Eve. This spun-sugar, silly, irresistible 1941 comedy, directed again by Henry Koster, made the Siren a fan ever after. Charles Laughton plays Jonathan Reynolds, some sort of tycoon who's on his deathbed as the film opens. Robert Cummings, Reynolds' devoted but somewhat feckless son, wants to bring his fiancee to meet the old man, but the fiancee is out shopping and can't be found.

Since Laughton could cross the great divide at any moment, Cummings grabs a hat-check girl (Durbin) and drags her to the family mansion to pose as the absent betrothed. Well, one dose of Durbin is all the old man needed, and he recovers. The charade continues due to the fear that Laughton won't survive the shock of realizing his future daughter-in-law is really skinny Margaret Tallichet, who probably couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. Durbin, on the other hand, can sing up a storm and dreams of performing at the Met. Will she get a chance to sing for Leopold Stokowski and marry the rich son? Or is it back to the hat-check counter for her? (Take a wild guess.)

The great Laughton's scenes with Durbin are the funniest ones, and they obviously enjoyed each other. (This fan site says they stayed friends until Laughton's death in 1962.) The chief flaw is that Durbin's rapport with Laughton is much greater than with her supposed love interest. It isn't even that she and Robert Cummings lack chemistry, it's that they barely have enough screen time to get acquainted.

Still, the script was by Norman Krasna and Leo Townsend, and it has the same verve Krasna showed in Wife vs. Secretary and Bachelor Mother. When the doctor finds a forbidden cigar in Laughton's room, Durbin says "Don't look at me, I smoke a pipe." Cummings visits Durbin in her cluttered walk-up and remarks, with no conviction whatever, that it's a nice place. She responds, "Uh-huh. On a clear day you can see right across it."

It Started With Eve, and Durbin herself, always make the Siren wistful for the golden age of American middlebrow culture. Exact dates for this vanished era depend upon which old fogey you're reading, but Durbin singing a pop version of the waltz from Sleeping Beauty is a perfect example. She belonged to a time when educated people were expected to cultivate a taste for classical music, and that music permeates films from the 1930s all the way through the 1940s. Leopold Stokowski and Jascha Heifetz are name-checked in Eve, and the audience would have recognized the names, even the faces, as quickly as they'd have spotted Benny Goodman.

As that era receded, the sight of a pretty young woman singing opera's greatest hits became quaint, and so did Durbin's films. The voice, which made her a star, later made her a relic.

The restlessness set in. By the time she made Lady on a Train, in 1945, she had already tried, and failed, to alter her typecasting with Robert Siodmak’s fervidly sexed-up noir, Christmas Holiday (1944).

Nowadays this is the Durbin movie to cite approvingly, if you are a hip cinephile type, and it is easy to see why. Aside from the kind of auteurist cred that you just don't get from Henry Koster, Christmas Holiday is impeccably twisted. Siodmak and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz take every last one of the fans' expectations, and back over them with a Mack truck. Erstwhile maiden Durbin shows up about 15 minutes in, wearing a black halter gown cut from here to eternity in her role as a barely disguised prostitute. Gene Kelly plays a psychopath, "mother-fixated" which, as David Ehrenstein points out, once was code for homosexual--as if all the delicate talk of Kelly's problems and his mother's hopes that marriage will "fix" him weren't tipoff enough.

The "holiday" of the title is soldier Charlie's (Dean Harens) last leave before heading for the battlefield. Charlie is on his way home, quite possibly with plans to kill the fiancee who's married another guy. Christmas comes into play at a gleaming, moving midnight mass where Deanna breaks down into sobs at the intonation of "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." Durbin also sings Irving Berlin's exquisitely romantic "Always" like a death march.

The narrative structure swerves around even more than Mankiewicz's screenplay for Citizen Kane. The first flashback shows the wreck of Durbin's marriage and the next shows its beginnings, then we leap back again to show the consequences. The Siren's favorite moments are the sequences on the staircase of the New Orleans mansion Durbin is sharing with Gene Kelly and dear old mom, Gale Sondergaard. As Durbin cleans house in whistle-while-you-work style, chirping up and down the stairs and peering in the window, she gradually realizes that Sondergaard is concealing a murder for Kelly.

It's a real poisoned candy-cane of a movie, and therefore wonderful, but the Siren eventually began to wonder if the whole thing was a deliberate attempt to alienate everyone, it is that perverse. It's never been on video and--go figure--it never became a holiday TV staple alongside The Littlest Angel and Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, to name two that bring the Siren to what Ehrenstein calls the true holiday spirit of "suicidal despair."

Durbin must have had some despair herself. Against all expectations, audiences dug the new her. Christmas Holiday made money. Ticket buyers were fine with a slutty-but-repentant Durbin; critics, not so much. ("Imagine a sweet school girl performing the role of Sadie Thompson in Rain!" protested Bosley Crowther.) Sometimes Hollywood's adherence to the tried and true defies not only logic, but its own box-office results. Universal scurried back to the old formulas. By most accounts, it was at this point that Durbin lost whatever interest she'd had in "that asshole business."

Despite Durbin's increasing distaste for her persona and her career, Lady on a Train is delightful. Usually described as a whodunit, it’s more of a farce, the presence of Edward Everett Horton being a huge tipoff. Durbin plays Nikki Collins, a San Francisco heiress who witnesses a murder as her train pulls into Grand Central. With the kind of logic common to Durbin plots, Nikki drafts her favorite mystery author (David Bruce) to help her track down the killer. This is a movie where a single conk on the head can knock a man out cold, only to have him revive minutes later, perfectly able to say something funny. Dan Duryea gets to be menacing and Ralph Bellamy shows up to fail at getting the girl. (Bellamy also has a line toward the end that’s as clear an incest implication as I’ve heard in any movie from that era, and that was, I must say, unexpected.)

Charles David’s direction is able, at times even surprising. The best visual moments include a noirish take on Durbin’s singing of "Night and Day," where’s she shot through a net, and an equally noir-looking scene where Duryea chases Durbin through a shipyard’s storage area, the hills of grain looking even more dangerous than Duryea.

Also interesting, and deeply strange, is the scene where Durbin sings “Silent Night” on the telephone (this is another Christmas-set movie). She lays down on the bed, her hair fanning out on the covers, and sings into the telephone, her expression and the lighting and framing no less romantic than Alice Faye singing “You’ll Never Know” on the phone in Hello, Frisco, Hello. The weird part isn't that the character is crooning a hymn; it’s that her father's on the other end of the line.

Elsewhere Durbin plays with wit and spontaneity, whether she’s shushing a pair of mastiffs, posing as a nightclub singer or handing Horton a ice bucket for a black eye he got while trying to keep her in line. She never looked prettier, either; her future husband shoots her like a man who knew what kind of a jackpot he'd hit.

Deanna Durbin once said her screen persona "never had any similarity to me, not even coincidentally." Perhaps. Post-retirement, no writer ever got close enough to her to find out. The Shipman interview does suggest that the serene self-confidence of Durbin’s characters was consistent with her personality off-screen. The Siren would love to believe that the poised, vivacious woman in Lady on a Train was some part of Durbin herself, the part that decided life away from Hollywood would, after all, be a happier ending.





(The pictures of Durbin in pajamas with future husband Charles David, on the set of Christmas Holiday with Robert See-odd-mack and the final shot are all from Deanna Durbin Devotees. There are many who will always love her.)

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

For the quite marvelous film site MUBI, home of my friend David Cairns' fabulous column The Forgotten, the Siren has written up the far-from-forgotten Ruggles of Red Gap. Because it's starting a one-week run at Manhattan's Film Forum, and because she loves it dearly. An excerpt:

The film assembles the kind of sterling character actors that we cinecrophiles grieve over on long winter evenings. McCarey, directing the legendarily difficult [Charles] Laughton, doesn't stint on the supporting players to favor his star; the film includes a lot of master shots that keep everybody in frame and in mind. Roland Young, so starchy at first that his shirts could walk off under their own power, may take the prize, as he learns the joys of egalitarianism via luscious blonde Leila Hyams. Mary Boland's Effie Floud, while clearly a climber, can still make you sympathize with what she has to cope with, such as an argument over her husband's hideous taste that ends with her calling him a "striped bass." And Charles Ruggles has some of his best moments gussied up in a morning coat and trying to get his valet drunk: "Come on over here, I want ya to meet somebody," he bellows down a Paris sidewalk, oblivious to snooty French stares and the fact that his own servant is trying to pretend he doesn't know him.

Ah yes, that Laughton drunk scene. Here's a foolproof way to judge an actor's fundamental competence: If he emphasizes the drunkenness, he's hopeless. A person who's truly lit, no matter whether the scene is tragic or comic, is fighting his state every step of the way. Laughton, of course, was far more than competent, and what makes his drunk act paralyzingly funny is that Ruggles isn't even admitting to himself that he's plastered. As he refuses to precede Floud into a carriage, Ruggles has the same old ramrod stance—but the face shows a hint of toddler-like glee, perhaps some inner mockery he could never show when sober. Yet the valet still tries to bring some dignity to each stage of the binge, finally posing on a carousel horse like an overdressed Cupid.

Read the whole thing here.

Nomadic Existence: The Big Clock and The Reluctant Debutante

From the July 20 edition of Nomad Wide Screen, my appreciation of Kay Kendall in Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante. For the record, I adore Les Girls , and Kendall is a joy in that one as well.

When certain killjoys decide to amuse themselves by asserting that MGM, the most widely known and successful of the major Golden Age studios, wasn't really a great studio at all, I try several methods to silence them. I start with George Cukor, move on through The Wizard of Oz, wave the flag for the Freed unit. If the conversation really gets irksome, however, I play my trump: Vincente Minnelli.

It's a curious thing, then, at least for auteurists, that the spirit that dominates Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante isn't that of the director, but of the star, Kay Kendall. The plot hews to every convention possible; you could take it and graft it onto a mass-market romance paperback with scarcely a single change. The charm of the film is tied closely to Minnelli’s eye for beauty, but even more than that it’s in the playing, and the players are led by Kendall. It was her penultimate movie, and when she made it she was already gravely ill with the leukemia that would kill her two years later. But it's a bright, vivacious performance, the only hint of her health coming from how thin she is.

Kendall had an exceptionally lovely speaking voice, pitched right mid-range with the merest hint of huskiness and an occasional crack in it that is oddly redolent of a British Jean Arthur. She was a tall woman with limbs that seemed to go everywhere at once, but her control of her body was impeccable. Nobody stumbled quite like Kay Kendall--up go the arms, the legs bend and curve, then glide back. It's a bit like watching a Mobius strip try to straighten itself. She had huge eyes, a flawless complexion and a long, strong-boned face; "Careful how you photograph my Cyrano nose, darling," she told Vincente Minnelli before filming. Nose or no nose, the overall effect was gorgeous. Kendall belongs to that rare sorority of beautiful women who are also great clowns.

From the Aug. 2 Nomad Wide Screen, a considerably rewritten and spruced-up version of a post I once did on The Big Clock:

Not all film noir takes place in a seedy underworld; sometimes noir arrives on the commuter train wearing a custom-made suit. So it goes with John Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948), which sets its dark doings and flashback narrative in a top-flight New York corporation that occupies a swank (if somberly lit) Midtown office tower.

The hero (or if you prefer, since this is film noir, the primary sap) is family man George Stroud (Ray Milland), an executive in the massive publishing empire of Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton). One night Stroud gets himself into a terrible pickle by getting drunk with Pauline York, played by Rita Johnson as a trampy soul with a chic exterior. Unfortunately for Stroud, Pauline is also Janoth’s mistress, and Stroud must exit her couch the next morning when their boss drops by unexpectedly. Mistress and magnate fight, and fifty years before anyone ever saw a Viagra ad, Pauline’s tirade shows off some choice euphemisms for “impotent”: “You think you could make any woman happy?...You flabby, flabby...” And that last word is one of the last Pauline utters, as Janoth bludgeons her to death with a sundial.

Well, what’s a self-respecting titan to do in such a situation, except use every last bit of his power to pin the blame on someone else? And the someone else just happens to be Stroud. The main twist in Jonathan Latimer’s highly twisty script (based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing) is that Janoth doesn’t know who he’s after, and Stroud must extricate himself without Janoth’s finding out...

it is Laughton who rules over The Big Clock. In Hollywood movies, most tyrannical managers are openly and loudly abusive. Laughton as Janoth keeps his voice low, forcing subordinates to lean close, which they wouldn't do otherwise. That’s because getting close means they have to look at Janoth’s weedy little moustache and the way he strokes it with one finger, in a gesture as suggestive as it is repulsive. He won't make eye contact, emphasizing his employees' wormlike status. And Laughton speaks every word in an affected, maddeningly casual drawl, underlining that he doesn't give a hoot if he just screwed up someone's life.

Finally, yesterday was the 100th birthday of the fabulous Lucille Ball, and there was a blogathon ball which the Siren, dearly though she loves all of Lucy's incarnations, could not attend, alas, as her opera gloves were at the cleaners. However, the roundup post is right here at True Classics, and the Siren strongly suggests that all Lucy fans click and start reading. The Siren has been working her way through all of them, and is in heaven. Some highlights (so far): Caftan Woman on Lucy's four films with Bob Hope; Clara at Villa Margutta 51 on the use of Spanish dialogue in I Love Lucy; old friend Ivan G. Shreve at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear on I Love Lucy's radio antecedents; R.D. Finch of The Movie Projector on fifteen character actors who appeared on the television show (jaw-dropping, the amount of talent it attracted); a post about Lucy's memoirs at Erin's Silver Screen Scribblings; Ivan again at Edward Copeland's wonderful blog with a 360-degree tour of Lucy's career; and Vince of Carole & Co. on the friendship between Lombard and Ball.

(The wonderful image of Lucille Ball in Stage Door, a movie that is high on the Siren's list of the best of the 1930s, is from the terrific tumblr blog Classic Film Heroines, which is full of such goodies.)

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon Master List

The Siren is exhausted, but very, very happy.

It's the last day of the blogathon, and donations and posts are still coming in. Let's make this the best day yet. Keep reading, and if you have not done so already, toss something in the hat.

As Marilyn has posted on our Facebook page, the troops have answered the rallying cry: "We've raised enough to preserve a 1,200-foot black-and-white nitrate silent film in fair condition, starting with lab inspection, cleaning, minor repair, and then moving on to make a new negative and print."

And what's more, "If we keep the donations coming, we might even be able to save a two-reeler or three-reeler."

The Siren has been delighted with the number of bloggers participating, and the very high quality of their posts. We are raising awareness in a big way, and creating an archive on this topic that will be a great resource on the Net.

But of course, the point is to raise money. And while donations have been present, and steady, and the good folks at the National Film Preservation Foundation are grateful for every dime, the Siren thinks we can do better.

First person truth time here: I've been running this blog for five years, and never asked anyone for a dime, until now. Please consider throwing a donation into the hat for the NFPF, no matter how small.

DONATE NOW!

This week, the film blogosphere is demonstrating vast knowledge and love of film history. Let's also show our generosity.

More in store today here and at Ferdy on Films. I have a new post up, an interview with Lee Tsiantis, the man who played a key role in bringing the RKO Six back onto our screens a couple of years ago. Lee is a film lover working a dream job as Corporate Legal Manager at Turner Broadcasting. His work entails sifting through the vast paperwork associated with the film library there, and he has much to say about the ins and outs of film rights.



Welcome! Here is where the Siren will be keeping track of posts as they come from bloggers. You can drop her a line in comments or via email (campaspe101@yahoo.com) to say your post is up. And please do the same at Marilyn's place, Ferdy on Films; as co-hosts we will be both be keeping lists.

Over at Cinema Styles, Greg has a beautiful new commercial for the Blogathon, suitable for embedding.

And remember to include the all-important

CONTRIBUTION LINK

to the National Film Preservation Foundation. Feel free to include the following boilerplate, for your readers' convenience:

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Do follow the links to the posts. The Siren is mighty impressed with the lineup and can't wait to read the contributions herself. Remember too that comments are a blogger's joy.

As the week goes on, this post will be continue to be top o' the Siren's blog; her own preservation posts will be immediately below.

Sunday, February 21st

The mighty James Wolcott sets a good example with his own donation and notes with pleasure that he's helping to save, among others, a Norman Mailer film called [untitled].

C. Jerry Kutner of Bright Lights After Dark has a lovely screen-cap essay on Maurice Tourneur's Victory. Stunning images, complete with the original tinting.

Mary Hess of Eastman House pays tribute to her mentor, James Card, who is a hero to all those who care about preservation. Includes a clip from the restoration of Melies' Peter Pan, which Card supervised; at Mary's new blog, Laughing Willow.

Toby Roan, of 50 Westerns from the 50s, a great blog that's new to the Siren, posts about the near-miss involving Jacques Tourneur's Stranger on Horseback, starring the beloved Joel McCrea.

Noel Vera, a familiar name to the Siren's readers, brings a preservation bulletin from the Philippines (the news ain't good) and a brilliant write-up of a sharp and prescient film that is almost entirely lost--and it was made in 1986.

Arthur S. discusses Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow, arguing passionately for the film's greatness and lamenting its lack of availability. (And by special request of the Siren, he includes a link to a piece on The Cobweb, a film we would both like to see resurrected.)

David Cairns devotes his Sunday Intertitle to our blogathon. The Siren won't tell you the one word of the intertitle, but she will tell you the post focuses on a name that makes her happy just to hear or look at: Lubitsch. And there is more Lubitsch here, in the splendid "Trailers for Lost Films."

MovieMan0283, at his Dancing Image blog, has an absolutely not-to-be-missed roundup of images , many from movies that are either unavailable, or damn close to it. The good news: In the year since he compiled the list, a number have been released from non-DVD purgatory (I see you, African Queen.)

Tinky Weisblatt returns to give props to three more heros of preservation, as well as to the bienniel Orphan Film Symposium. All this, and an easy recipe for peach jam. Yum!

DeeDee of Noirish City wraps up her blogathon posting with another reminder of what is at stake for film lovers. Thanks so much for your week-long support, DeeDee!

Sarah Baker, who wrote so movingly about Olive Thomas, has another must-read post, Reputations Restored: Lost and Found Movies of 1929.

Donna Hill closes out her blogathon posting with a series of marvelous clips from the silent era.

Joshua Ranger argues for preserving the lesser lights of filmdom, including the unloved biopic: "we also have to maintain the insignificant because it, too, is a piece of the picture of the past."

Jaime Grijalba posts, in Spanish, on Exodus 8:2 about one of the most keenly lamented of all lost films, London After Midnight.

Finally, my pal Glenn Kenny of Some Came Running gives us another plug, and fulfills a previously unrecognized but nonetheless urgent need: The blogathon's own haiku.

Saturday, February 20th

Buckey Grimm sums up his series with a post in praise of those who have been doing the hard work of preservation for decades now.

Dennis Nyback is back with a post about a 1940 movie, which Dennis transfered himself, of singer Ronnie Mansfield--which he screened for Mansfield's granddaughter and her children.

Stephen Morgan at Screen Addict writes about original intent--not constitutional, but cinematic.

Sara Freeman of Today's Chicago Woman has a tribute to women of the cinema, with special mention of the radiant Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter.

Hind Mezaina returns with clips of women having fun with swimming, cycling and sending Valentines in the early days of the century.

Tom at Motion Picture Gems posts about a film the Siren believes to be seriously underrated, Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon, and the preservation message it carries.

Ryan Kelly of Medfly Quarantine signs in with a piece about that screwy, ballyhooey, phoney, super Coney, one and only...Fort Lee, New Jersey! What, you were expecting someplace else?

J.C. Loophole of The Shelf outs himself as an academic, an historian to be precise, and explains with great eloquence the historical case for film preservation: "The images we have of our nation, of our entertainment, or our highs and lows, of how we interpret those highs and lows are as important as the self-same written documents and government papers that we spend so much time and effort to preserve."

Andreas at Pussy Goes Grrr ponders the tragedy of lost films, including janitors both shamed and redeemed.

They tell me there's an Olympics going on; well, David Cairns has a clip depicting (ahem) amazing athleticism at Shadowplay.

Paula has more stills, this time from The Shamrock Handicap.

Friday, February 19th

Marilyn is looking deep into the eyes of Theda Bara in A Fool There Was.

At Gareth's Movie Diary, the proprietor uses the beguiling Bar Harbor Movie Queen, among others, to talk about the urge not only to preserve, but to present.

Jenny the Nipper of Cinema OCD has an excellent and provocative post: Bootleggers or Preservationists?

From the University of Vermont comes Adrian J. Ivakhiv at his blog Immanence, talking about the ways in which Decasia "comments on its own materiality."

Joe Thompson ends his series on the history of nitrate with a bang: the 1909 Pittsburgh film exchange explosion. Many photos.

Marilyn and I are very pleased to be joined by students, including Trish Lendo, Sadie Menchen and Charles Edward Rogers, in the moving-picture archive program at UCLA--they are the the future of preservation. (I'm also very taken with "Let Us Now Praise Scratchy Prints.")

Hind Mezaina, who writes The Culturist blog from her home in Dubai, brings in an international flavor with a series of posts that include some marvelous clips from the BFI Archive.

Justin Muschong returns with A Trip to the Acme Film Preservation Emporium.

Donna Hill also returns with stills and posters from lost films.

Thursday, February 18th

At the Phil Nugent Experience, the host gives props to several heroes of film preservation, including the inimitable Henri Langlois.

Shahn runs Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, that pictorial temple to the art of black and white; but in this photo series, she shows the ravages of decay.

Before the blogathon began, a man of the Siren's acquaintance demanded, "If this is about saving all film, what about porn, huh?" Well then, here is Doug Bonner, with a post about the perfect film stock for the Golden Age of Porn and which film from that era he would most like to see preserved.

Movie Man at The Sun's Not Yellow warms up with a post on Rossellini's Stromboli, ahead of another promised post on Sunday.

Tinky Weisblat of Our Grandmother's Kitchen posts some reminiscences about Britain's Iris Barry, who used her influence as a critic to support preservation early on. And there's also a swell recipe for tea sandwiches.

Kendra at Viv & Larry has another entry in her series tribute to the fine folks at Criterion, this one on Nights of Cabiria.

Tim Brayton at Antagony & Ecstasy finds three different faces of film preservation in those once and future media darlings, vampires.

DeeDee of Noirish City returns with a post about George Melies' The Impossible Voyage.

Buckey Grimm continues his Brief History of Nitrate with a brief post about nitrate testing, and a link to remarkable photos from some tests.

Catherine Grant at the invaluable Film Studies for Free contributes a plug and clips from "some entertaining and informative online videos about film preservation," as well as links to "openly accessible, scholarly material about this essential but expensive art and science."

Ed Howard of Only the Cinema writes about two avant-garde shorts, by Bruce Baillie and Storm de Hirsch, that have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives and included on the Treasures IV set from the NFPF.

The Siren adores Greenbriar Picture Shows, and thoughtful, funny, well-versed John McElwee, who runs it. You owe it to yourself to click on this one: "We Are All Preservationists."

The name James Card should be as familiar to film lovers as Henri Langlois. Jon Marquis, of Thoughts of Stream, shows why as he examines Pandora's Box, the resurrection of which was one of Card's finest accomplishments.

Joe Thompson is back with part II of a Brief History of Nitrate, including the perils of moviegoing at the turn of the century.

Mark Edward Heuck, who does freelance work rescuing genre and exploitation films from limbo and coaxing them onto DVD, has a touching story about how one such film brought back a small piece of a wife and mother for her famous widower and son. At the delightfully named blog The Projector Has Been Drinking.

Peter Nelhaus returns with a post about the 1934 Chinese film The Goddess, saved through the efforts of a single person, Professor Richard J. Meyer.

What this blogathon really needed was more Conrad Veidt; Paula's Movie Page has a boatload of pictures from Different From the Others.

Wednesday, February 17th

Lou Lumenick, New York Post head film critic and the Siren's TCM comrade, has a fantastic piece of writing and research at his place, about the Public Domain Purgatory of Henry Hathaway's To the Last Man--"a tight, surprisingly dark and impressive little movie."

Adam Zanzie at Icebox Movies examines Fear and Desire, the hard-to-see Stanley Kubrick film that for years has garnered "a frown, a groan, a snicker, or a goofy grin" from fans.

Brent Walker, at his blog devoted to Mack Sennett, uses that director's career to explain why the best fate for a silent movie was to be made for a company that went out of business.

Brian Herrera of Stinky Lulu signs in with a post on the sui generis Who Killed Teddy Bear, analyzing it as artifact of its era ("like a nudist magazine, Teddy Bear lets it all hang out without really ever showing anything") and as a "queer" film.

Buckey Grimm of Mindless Meanderings explains the origins and preservation methods of the Library of Congress Paper Print collection.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson lend their highly respected voices in support of our efforts; the plug is part of an essay about the intricacies of preserving experimental films, when the "flaws" are deliberate.

David Cairns is back with a look at the avant-garde film Decasia, so brief and impeccable the Siren will spoil it no further.

Dennis Nyback returns with an elegiac tribute to two theatres that were once grand temples of nitrate, the Michigan Theater and the Grand Riviera, both in Detroit.

Greg Ferrara, having done so much with promoting the blogathon, chips in even more at his blog Cinema Styles, with a post about C.B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, a recently restored silent sent to him by the NFPF: "The restoration of The Godless Girl allows cinephiles everywhere to witness the last great gasp of a director in the silent era before sound slowed him down."

Director Jeffrey Goodman joins in with memories of screening films with the ghost of Henri Langlois, at The Last Lullaby (and) Peril.

Justin Muschong, at Brilliant in Context, meditates on which film is worth saving ("all of it") in a witty essay that ranges from Welles to Army boots.

Karie Bible of Film Radar takes us through the lost films of Clara Bow, as well as hope in the form of some that have been restored.

Kendra at Viv & Larry is back with a loving tribute to the immortal romance of Brief Encounter.

Leo Lo, whose blog is 365 Films a Year: A Librarian's Film Journal, tackles the question of what academic librarians can do to preserve films.

At Paula's Movie Page, she has posted more stills, from Where Are My Children? and Lady Windemere's Fan. paulasmoviepage.shutterfly.com.

Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder checks in with a review of the recently restored 1922 Sherlock Holmes, and finds not only a subdued performance from John Barrymore, but also a supporting cast that includes a future ghost magnet, a future columnist and a future martini-drinking icon.

Tuesday, February 16th

Roger Ebert is once again rallying the troop for the blogathon, with more tweets about our fundraising and praise for the contributors. His devotion to preserving cinema has been an example to everyone for more than forty years, and his support gladdens our hearts.

James Wolcott gives us more reason to rejoice, with a rousing plug for the blogathon, full of links, praise and the all-important donation link to the NFPF.

Gloria Porta, lover of film in general and Charles Laughton in particular, has an amazing treat for all fans of the actor and Spartacus: an in-depth look at the movie's convoluted filming, from screenwriting to editing, and extensive discussion of Laughton's preparation and interactions on set, and a huge, invaluable list of references and links.

Gordon Dymoski of Blog This, Pal writes about the intersection of film preservation and pop culture with a piece about VCI Entertainment's reissue of the first Green Hornet serial.

Joe Thompson at The Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion offers a history of nitrate, via newspaper articles and clippings from as early as 1889--for example, a letter to the editor, in 1897, from a fire warden worried about the dangers of the movie projector setup.

Kendra of Viv & Larry continues her appreciation of all things Criterion with a post about Days of Heaven, surely on everyone's list of the most beautiful movies ever made.

Peter Nelhaus of Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee, who is rumored to have seen everything, makes his first contribution: a look at Lon Chaney's first starring role in The Penalty, detailing Chaney's amazing preparations for the role of a legless crime lord.

Sarah Baker at Flapper Jane continues her contributions with three simple, but eloquent, reasons to support film preservation.

Monday, February 15th

Catherine Krummey at Speaking of Cinema pays tribute to Martin Scorsese, a hero to preservationists everywhere, and gives a link to his acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes.

Christopher Snowden of The Silent Movie Blog has a beautiful set of rare stills from lost movies, and some witty suggestions as to where to find the missing films--far off the beaten track.

Dennis Nyback, having wowed everyone in his interview with Anne Richardson, is going even further to help out, via a post at his own site. The irresistible title: "Nitrate Film – More Feared Than Frankenstein – Less Understood Than Eraser Head – More Dangerous than repeated viewing of Sleepless in Seattle."

Erik Loomis of alterdestiny is a historian with a specialty in the late 19th and early 20th century. Here he talks about the importance of the NFPF archives in his teaching work, using the example of a chilling 1912 movie about slum life, The Land Beyond the Sunset.

Greg offers a concentrated dose of gorgeous in a teaser post at his pictures-only blog Unexplained Cinema: 10 Frames: The Godless Girl.

Jacqueline T. Lynch at Another Old Movie Blog delves into Vertigo, reminding us that it took years for the movie's stature to grow. Although Vertigo was made in 1958, restorers stil found film stock of Hitchcock's masterpiece that was rotting in the can.

Kendra at Viv & Larry continues her blogathon contributions with a loving writeup of That Hamilton Woman, in which she pays careful attention to the design and cinematography of the film as well as the two glorious leads.

Maggie at Silver Screen Dream bemoans the state of Love Affair's print; and fearlessly tackles the question of whether some films are "worth saving."

Paula will be promoting us by posting movie pictures at her Shutterfly page all week; view the first batches here.

Rob at Rob's Movie Vault dubs The Race to Save 100 Years "Preservation 101," and unearths many salient facts among the paeans to Ted Turner. (We forgive him for that fling with colorization now, don't we?)

Sunday, February 14th

Anne Richardson of Oregon Movies A to Z has an interview with Dennis Nyback, a collector, curator and projectionist with much experience of nitrate--and film booth stories to scare the hell out of Quentin Tarantino.

Arthur S. brings his unerring eye and deep sense of film history to bear on the great Raoul Walsh and two early sound pre-Code films, The Bowery and Me and My Gal.

Betty Jo Tucker of Reel Talk Movie Reviews looks at Martin Scorsese's invaluable role as a high-profile, tireless advocate for film preservation.

Bob Fergusson, the Operator 99 of Allure, takes a single issue of Photoplay magazine from 1931 and analyzes the survival status of all 186 movies listed in it, in a riveting exercise he calls "Now You See It, Now You Don't." A must for Pre-Code hounds.

Buckey, back at his blog Mindless Meanderings, writes about the early days of film preservation, while silent movies still reigned. Among many things the Siren learned from this piece: "Productions such as D.W.Griffith’s ‘The Avenging Conscience’ were totally unusable in as little as 10 years after its release."

Buttermilk Sky, long a treasured commenter at the Siren's place, has a post on her favorite Marx Brothers film, Monkey Business, and why it deserves restoration. You had me at "Marx Brothers," though!

David Cairns, whose Shadowplay is simply one of the best classic-movie blogs anywhere on the Interwebz, ponders why Rin Tin Tin is more like Burt Lancaster than Montgomery Clift.

David Ehrenstein of FaBlog has a clip-studded tour through the highly flammable, but oh-so fabuloso history of nitrate, with Max Reinhardt's gleaming, glorious A Midsummer Night's Dream as the centerpiece.

DeeDee at Noirish City has links to the blogathon, her thoughts on and her own pledges for film preservation--and plans for her own giveaway. Check it out!

Donna at Strictly Vintage Hollywood furthers her love of all things Rudolph Valentino with a look at the great lover's three lost films. Two of these, A Sainted Devil and The Young Rajah, have fragments surviving; but Donna gives a complete storyline and numerous production stills for Uncharted Seas, not one frame of which is still with us.

Dwight Swanson of Home & Amateur writes about the poignant history of Think of Me First as a Person, a documentary put together from home-movie footage that was shot in the 1960s and 1970s by the father of a child with Down Syndrome.

Eddie Muller, president of the Film Noir Foundation, guest blogs at Marilyn's Ferdy on Films. He describes the making of Cry Danger, praises the film's excellence, and offers a heartening example of how his foundation worked with studios to get a decent print circulating once more. Lucky San Franciscans will be able to see it at the Noir City festival this year.

Ivan G. Shreve untangles the Very Meta Mystery of the two versions of It's in the Bag! (1945), one of only six movies made by radio legend Fred Allen. Ivan has even included a transcript, so you can play along at home.

Kendra of the smart, well-written Leigh & Olivier fan blog, Viv & Larry, pays tribute to everyone's favorite DVD house, Criterion.

Lou Lumenick, chief film critic of the New York Post, links arms with the blogosphere and plugs the blogathon. His teaser post has a cameo from a sad Kay Francis and a high-profile villain: Joseph P. Kennedy.

At her blog Or Maybe Eisenstein Should Just Relax, Meredith chooses the restored version of The Red Shoes to be her valentine, after seeing it at the British Film Institute--along with memorabilia from the movie, lent by Martin Scorsese.

Ray Young of Flickhead, one of the most original film writers around, reviews all six pounds of the apparently definitive work of research and love, This Film Is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film. Amazon, anyone?

Sarah Jane Baker, the film historian and writer who maintains the Flapper Jane blog, has a lovely piece about that iconic figure of Hollywood tragedy, Olive Thomas. In Sarah's quest to blow the cobwebs off the legend, she was able to locate and preserve some films that reacquaint us with Olive, the talented actress.

Vince is the proprietor of Carole & Co., a fan blog cherished by all who appreciate painstaking research and excellent writing, as well as the great Carole Lombard. His post delves into the mystery of what Lombard looked like before her facial injuries in a 1926 car accident, and describes the fate of two early Lombard sound films.