For the Love of Film IV: Did the Talkies Doom Norma Talmadge?

This post is my contribution to this year’s blogathon, For the Love of Film. This year the beneficiary of the blogosphere’s largess is Cupid in Quarantine (1918), which Marilyn Ferdinand calls “a one-reel Strand Comedy that tells the story of a young couple conspiring to stay together by staging a smallpox outbreak.” This may be the most eye-poppingly oddball comedy premise the Siren has ever encountered. Surely this film deserves to be saved for its daring alone.

Together with Roderick Heath of This Island Rod and today's host, Sam Juliano of Wonders in the Dark, we’re trying to raise $10,000 to go to the National Film Preservation Foundation to cover laboratory costs for the film’s preservation as well as a new score for the film’s web premiere. The streaming film will be available free at the NFPF website.

Today is the last day. Help the Siren help Marilyn, Rod and Sam to bring it home for the folks at the NFPF! A random drawing of donor names will determine eligibility for some nice prizes including (ahem) a signed copy of the Siren's novel, Missing Reels.

Please read, and donate! The Siren is too ladylike to name names, but she has seen crowdfunding for some mighty dubious stuff this year. THIS is a good cause, and one that will yield you tangible results: preserving a piece of film history. Traditionally, it's the small donations that add up for us. So don't be shy!

DONATE HERE, DARLINGS

The silent film the Siren watched most recently was Kiki, an absolutely delightful comedy from 1926 that starred Norma Talmadge as an inept wannabe showgirl (she can sing, but after that, the party’s over). A relaxed, funny Ronald Colman plays the showbiz impresario who's the object of her affection; Gertrude Astor is the snooty star who stands in plucky, orphaned, dead-broke Kiki's way.

It was directed by Clarence Brown, who later told Kevin Brownlow, “Norma Talmadge was the greatest pantomimist that ever drew breath. She was a natural-born comic; you could turn on a scene with her and she’d go on for five minutes without stopping or repeating herself.”

Norma Talmadge puts one over on the landlady in Kiki.

Brown knew whereof he spoke. Norma Talmadge is really, truly wonderful; fresh, natural, unaffected.

But Talmadge is the second-most famous casualty of sound, after John Gilbert. We know now that the history of Gilbert’s “white voice” (a late-1920s euphemism for effeminate) is, as Henry Ford would put it, bunk. What about Norma? Is that bunk, too?

She looks miserable, doesn't she.

The story of Norma Talmadge, and the Brooklyn patois that supposedly sank her overnight, might in fact be more famous than Gilbert -- but pseudonymously. Nowadays not that many people know that the immortal Lina Lamont is a direct parody of Talmadge’s fall. Singin’ in the Rain even goes so far as to set the character’s disastrous first try at a talking picture in 18th-century France. In 1952, there were still people around who remembered the 1930 picture, DuBarry, Woman of Passion. It was Talmadge’s last film.

The Siren adores Singin' in the Rain, but its influence on the view of silent-film history has been, let's just say, not good. It's probably just as well that the Talmadge connection has been forgotten by the general public. Lina is a superb comic creation, talentless, avaricious, with the brains of a sequin. Norma was intelligent, talented, and held in much affection by people like Anita Loos, as the Siren once wrote before.

And let’s not dwell on the great Sunset Boulevard, often claimed to be based in part on the long, reclusive retirement of Norma, during which she apparently became dependent on painkillers for crippling arthritis. Billy Wilder was always cagey about whether art had ungallantly imitated life, but sadly, the bare outline fits. (Although, as Mae Murray is reported to have said on seeing the film, “None of us floozies was that nuts.”)

Legend has it that Norma’s sister, Constance, a star in her own right, sent a telegram advising Norma to get out. There are different versions around, so the Siren will reproduce the one she likes best:

QUIT PUSHING YOUR LUCK BABY STOP
THE CRITICS CAN’T KNOCK THOSE TRUST FUNDS MAMA SET UP FOR US STOP



True or not, to this day precisely why Norma Talmadge didn’t take as a talkie star is a matter of some debate. If you want to hear her voice, you have a chance with New York Nights above. It’s an extremely interesting early talkie, with a nice turn by Lilyan Tashman. Gilbert Roland was not at the top of his acting game, but lord, he always looks good. It's a bit static, but there are gritty moments that seem to herald the Depression-oriented pre-Codes to come, and other scenes that are rooted in pure melodrama.

As for the Talmadge voice, it is pleasant, hardly a Lamontesque assault on the eardrums, and perfectly appropriate for her showgirl character. On the other hand, if you go to the 15:30 mark, and listen to Talmadge deliver the line, “Some birthday party” in an accent that sounds straight outta Flatbush, it is easy to understand why her voice came as a shock.

Gilbert Roland, Talmadge, and Arnold Kent in Woman Disputed (1927) directed by Henry King and Sam Taylor. A silent movie, it came with a much-mocked Movietone score that included a song: "Although you're refuted / Woman Disputed / I love you." For better or worse, Library of Congress print is missing the score.

Greta de Groat, a scholar whose Norma Talmadge site is absolutely splendid — a place to read about the whole of this great star’s career, and lose hours doing so — says simply that “the world was moving on, and in the excitement of discovering new favorites, the public was letting go of the old stars.” De Groat has seen DuBarry (the Siren has not) and claims that the accent so apparent in New York Nights is nowhere in evidence. Alexander Walker, in The Shattered Silents, buys into the idea that Norma’s voice doomed her, but maintains that she was nearly unique in that regard (the only other name he cites as vocally doomed is William Haines). He’s worth quoting at some length:

Just looking at the best examples of silent screen acting show how much of value was irrecoverably lost. Sound made acting more naturalistic, but also lazier. Words did the work. They diminished the mobile, finely nuanced quality of the screen mime and began the process in which the sense of people playing parts in a dexterously visible way is lost sight of a in a stylised naturalism that requires a dominant personality to make it bearable from film to film...Once they had dialogue on their lips, the silent idols suffered a grievous loss of divinity. They became more like the audiences watching them. This helps explain why the talkies altered star values so radically. What they did not do — and this needs stressing — was ruin the silent stars.

Talmadge had been planning to star in The Greeks Had a Word for Them for Samuel Goldwyn, but walked away. It was another showgirl character. Kiki, it should be noted, didn’t take with a public that loved their Norma as a dramatic heroine. Perhaps that was in the back of her mind. Her looks and talent had established her as one kind of star, and once that was the case, the fact that she might have been good in another type of role wasn’t enough to save her career. She’d been one of the most celebrated beauties in movies, but she was nearing 40, that age that knocked even Margo Channing sideways. Norma took little sis’ advice.

Norma, holding the baby, in The Lady (1925), directed by Frank Borzage. De Groat says the second reel is missing and there is deterioration on the surviving print, but it still impressed a California audience some years back.

As for why she is so little remembered today, well, she has that in common with a number of other silent stars. But Norma was especially unlucky. Norma’s films were acquired by the mysterious, litigious Raymond Rohauer, the man who controlled Buster Keaton’s legacy. (Buster, of course, was married to Norma’s sister Natalie.) Rohauer left the films to the Library of Congress, but in de Groat’s words, they had been “sorely neglected.” Some of the prints were only partially salvageable; some were all there, but damaged; still others were simply gone. It’s a story that stuck in my mind as I was writing Missing Reels.

The good news is that of her 51 films, de Groat says “31 are thought to be complete, and 11 more are preserved in part.” There are a few out on home video now, and the Siren plans to chase them down. But for Norma Talmadge ever to be a name on a level with better-known silent stars like Clara Bow, the films have to get back in circulation. And perhaps they will. De Groat also points out that since she began the site, several films, including Kiki, have come out on DVD.

As I say more than once in Missing Reels, I’m basically an optimist. When it comes to film preservation, it’s the only attitude that can keep me sane.

Here’s looking at you, Miss Talmadge. Your movies deserve a better fate.

Onward! The Novel, the Screening, the DVD, the Celebration of Preservation

The Siren could start by looking at the date of her last post and fluttering, “Did y’all miss me?” but that would be coy. She’s missed you.

It has been, as you may gather, an alarmingly busy time for the Siren. She’s been writing, but alas, not much for the blog. Meanwhile the world continues to scoot along, and we have some catching up to do. So here’s

Part One: The Novel

Missing Reels is still scheduled for publication on Nov. 12, which is just around the corner. You can pre-order at the bookseller of your choice, which would make the Siren very happy.

It’s at Amazon.

It’s at Barnes & Noble.

You can find a copy at your local bookstore via Indiebound.


And if you are saying, “Hm, well Siren, I like you and all, but I don’t know what this book is about. Perhaps it is Not My Sort of Thing,” then you can look at the latest review, at Publishers Weekly, where they said nice stuff.

The Screening

For the folks in the New York metro area, the Siren can reveal that she will be introducing a screening of The Awful Truth (which plays a part in the plot of Missing Reels) at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, on Sunday Nov. 23 at 2 pm. It is not on their site yet, but the Siren will link you up as soon as possible. She’ll be signing copies of Missing Reels in the museum store afterward. Come one, come all!

And OH BY THE WAY — the screening will be in 35 millimeter, as God and Eastman Kodak intended. So take note, all you “grain monks,” as a certain blogger has been known to describe those of us who love celluloid.

The DVD

The British company Masters of Cinema for years has been putting out beautiful Blu-Rays and DVDs of great films, packaged with wonderful extras. The Siren has their edition of Douglas Sirk’s Tarnished Angels, to name just one that’s particularly stunning, and she recorded a podcast at Masters of Cinema Cast for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Assassin Habite au 21.

For the Siren’s readers who have multi-region Blu-Ray players (and you should, even the techno-shaky Siren has one) Masters of Cinema have released The Gang’s All Here, directed by Busby Berkeley. This Technicolor movie begged for a good Blu, because it’s ravishing. Made during World War II, it is, as you probably remember, a backstage musical that depicts with unflinching zeal the brutal reality of American homefront life.

Just kidding. There’s some Army uniforms milling about, otherwise this movie is as glorious a piece of loony escapism as exists. Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic imagination runs riot. Talented, butterscotch-voiced Alice Faye was at her zenith; Carmen Miranda stops the show with “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat;” Charlotte Greenwood could still kick high enough to knock out an overhead light; Edward Everett Horton was still playing an improbably lustful stuffed-shirt. All this, plus The Disembodied Head of Eugene Pallette.

The Siren, together with Close Personal Friend Glenn Kenny and author, film historian and certified Alice Faye worshipper Ed Hulse, recorded a commentary track for this release, which has gotten some kind words. Please consider buying a copy.

The Celebration of Preservation

Because preservation is never far from our thoughts chez Siren, it’s time for some good news on that front. On Friday, the Museum of Modern Art’s 12th Annual “To Save and Project” series starts. The Siren will have more on the festival anon, but you can look at the schedule here. Highlights include a public screening of an edited version of once-lost footage from Orson Welles' Too Much Johnson, which our friends at the National Film Preservation Foundation put online in August. (It is still there, if you want to watch ahead of time, or download a copy for your personal library.) But several of the Siren’s friends have said they were holding out for projection. If you live in the New York area, here’s your chance.

But there is an even closer connection to the Sirenistas. Back when we did the first blogathon to raise money for the NFPF, the topic was all matters related to general preservation. And Comrade Lou Lumenick, chief film critic at the New York Post, wrote up To the Last Man and the "public-domain hell" in which it was languishing. At the time, Lou said: "One of the more interesting examples of these sadly orphaned films is “To The Last Man,” a 1933 Paramount production that is not only well-made with an excellent cast, but occupies an key place in the filmographies of Randolph Scott, Shirley Temple and director Henry Hathaway."

Lou's post should be read in full, because it explains a lot about public domain and how films fall through the cracks. But guess what: Sometimes people in a position to do something read about a neglected movie and decide to rescue it.

And that’s what happened: One of our kindred spirits at MOMA read Lou’s piece and became so intrigued that he tracked down and restored To the Last Man. And lo and behold, it will be screened at MOMA on Sunday Nov. 2 at 3:30 pm, and introduced by none other than Comrade Lumenick, the man who gave this movie some love. There's another screening Oct. 28 at 6:30.

The blogathon is the gift that keeps on giving.

Good News for Silent Film Fans

Mickey Rooney is one of the last surviving silent-film actors. He turns 94 years old on Sept. 23, and he just got an early birthday present: His first starring role, Mickey’s Circus, a comedy short from 1927, has been rediscovered in Amsterdam. Our old friends at the National Film Preservation Foundation are working to repatriate that film, and many others. The Los Angeles Times has the story this morning:

Long-missing comedy shorts such as 1927’s “Mickey’s Circus,” featuring a 6-year-old Mickey Rooney in his first starring role, 1917's "Neptune's Naughty Daughter"; 1925’s “Fifty Million Years Ago,” an animated introduction to the theory of evolution; and a 1924 industrial short, “The Last Word in Chickens,” are among the American silent films recently found at the EYE Filmmusem in Amsterdam.

The Siren points out that the 1925 “animated introduction to the theory of evolution” was made the year of the Scopes Monkey Trial, no less.

Another film the NFPF is looking to bring home: 1924’s “The Reckless Age,” a full-length comedy with Reginald Denny. The Spokane Daily Chronicle promises, “This picture is just packed with it” — do tell — “auto thrills, love thrills, and real fighting thrills.” Wait, fighting thrills? With Reginald Denny, so very tweedy in Rebecca?

Well, yes. Reginald Denny used to look like this. He has his own entry at an online boxing encyclopedia, and the Siren’s eyes bugged out when she saw who he was fighting (on the vaudeville stage, admittedly) in 1922.

Also in 1922 appeared the melodrama “For the Defense,” with ZaSu Pitts, which IMDB says is based on a play by Elmer Rice (who also wrote the play Counsellor-at-Law), but otherwise had been not only gone, but forgotten. It’s part of the Amsterdam trove. In preparation, you can watch the darling Thelma Todd demonstrate the proper pronunciation of ZaSu.





When all the hard word of preservation is done, the NFPF is once again looking to stream these films on their site, where we'll all be able to see them. If you want to celebrate this happy occasion by contributing to their continuing good work, the donation link is right here.

Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive

Wednesday morning, the Library of Congress released a report by David Pierce, representing five years of research and writing, on the state of American studio silent-film preservation. Abridged version: It ain’t good.

The Siren, whose love for melodrama does occasionally spill over into real life, wrote a 500-word jeremiad on this topic, complete with quotes from Louise Brooks, Kevin Brownlow, William K. Everson, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard and (no kidding) King Lear, plus a pungent aside about an actress who recently thought it was cute to boast about how she’s not going to watch a “black-and-white, freaking boring fucking silent movie.”

But the Siren realized that she was repeating herself, and like the outlets that reported on this study, the Siren was partially burying the lead. We already knew that a lot has been lost, and Pierce has done a heroic job of mapping precise figures.

But Pierce's report concludes with a plan for the future: an all-out trawl through the world’s archives for what’s left. (Please do read the entire thing here.)

Isn’t that goal better, and more productive, than drawing the shades, putting an ice pack on your forehead, and wondering if the afterlife will have a screening of Four Devils and The Queen of Sheba?

To that end, and because it’s early December still, the Siren requests with all the sweetness at her disposal that you consider putting Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive on your holiday-shopping list. Better yet, get a free copy by making a tax-deductible donation of $200 more to the NFPF.

What are Mr. Pierce and his colleagues hoping to find when they encourage archives and collectors to examine their film holdings? THIS kind of stuff.

Back in 2010 we heard about the cache of silent films discovered in New Zealand. Our film-preservation blogathon raised money to restore The Better Man and The Sergeant. The third blogathon we did raised money both to stream online and record the music for The White Shadow, the British silent that had Alfred Hitchcock as its assistant director and general meddler-in-chief. Three reels of this previously long-lost film were in the New Zealand stash that has been repatriated.

There were, in the final analysis, 176 films recovered through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s collaboration with the New Zealand Film Archive. Of those, 70% had been previously thought lost forever. The NFPF's Treasures series has focused on putting previously not-on-home-video films before the public.

This approximately three-hour DVD ups the ante; it offers films that until four years ago were thought to be gone for good. It’s a lovely thing, with a long and detailed booklet that includes essays on the historical context and background of each film, as well suggestions for further viewing. They are also presented with new music by Michael Mortilla and Donald Sosa. Let’s take a look at what’s there.

The White Shadow (1924; director Graham Cutts; Assistant Director/Screenwriter/Editor/Set Designer: Alfred Hitchcock) This turns out to be, at least in the three reels we have, a melodrama involving the good twin/bad twin dichotomy that movies have always gotten so much mileage out of. Nancy Brent (Betty Compson) returns from abroad to her family home, after winning the heart of Robin (Clive Brook) who’s also on the ship. Nancy’s sweet twin Georgina (also Compson) is waiting at the family manse, along with their alcoholic martinet of a father. Nancy runs away out of what’s billed in the intertitles as boredom and poor impulse control, although dear old Dad is no one the Siren would stick around with, either. Georgina pursues her sister. In Paris, Georgina encounters Robin and pretends to be Nancy, thus instantly becoming more interesting, and she falls in love with Robin. The film ends as Nancy appears in a Paris club (called The Cat Who Laughs) where Georgina and Robin are having a drink. The surviving notes indicate that the plot, which was none too lucid already, veers into what Marilyn of Ferdy on Films calls “Victorian mysticism with the supernatural restoration of Nancy’s soul.” The Siren though Nancy already had plenty of soul, and surely Hitchcock must have favored the bad twin too, whatever the plot conventions he was observing. Best scene: the club, definitely, from the close-up of that cat statue to the wide-spaced tables, all of them full of people sipping questionable drinks and eyeing unsuitable partners. It’s a wonderful peek at Graham Cutts, an important figure in the early British film world, and of course, it’s a vital bit of Hitchcock juvenilia, allowing us to see how he was learning on the job.

Upstream (1927, director John Ford)
This was, even more than The White Shadow, the discovery that had filmdom buzzing--a lost film from John Ford, with only a bit of footage missing. It has no real stars and is not part of Ford’s pantheon, but it’s a lovely film all the same, a gentle study of the community found in a theatrical boarding house. The group’s ties to one another transcend all sorts of artificial barriers; for example, the vaudeville duo of Callahan and Callahan is very obviously made up of one Irishman and one Jew. In the end, the good people of the boarding house even overcome their greatest barrier: The actor’s natural antipathy toward other actors.

Lyman H. Howe’s Famous Ride on a Runaway Train (1921)
Can the Siren confess that this is her personal favorite? Howe would tour with this and screen it like an amusement-park ride. The Siren isn’t comparing this short to John Ford, but goodness it’s fun, six minutes of a train ride up and down mountains and over tall impressive bridges. The beginning is leisurely, then a card announces that the train is “RUNNING AWAY” and everything speeds up to a pitch so intense you need Bernard Herrmann to score it. One of the first title cards accompanies a little boy and it reads, “My daddy is the engineer.” If Daddy is the engineer, then Daddy needs to be fired, assuming he’s not dead. This short subject’s discovery meant it could be shown with its soundtrack disc, which was already in the Library of Congress.

Happy-Go-Luckies (1923; animator Paul Terry, and according to the DVD notes, “with Frank M. Grosser, Hugh M. “Jerry” Shields, and probably Milt Gross, all uncredited”)
The animated tale of a dog and a cat, homeless and riding the rails, who enter a snooty dog show for the prize money. Describing animation is not the Siren’s forte, but this one’s adorable, and of the shorts, her fondness for it is second only to the certifiably crazy Runaway Train.

Birth of a Hat (ca. 1920)
An industrial film from the Stetson company, this opens with the history of hats and moves on to the initial stages of making a fur-felt hat at its enormous factory in Philadelphia. Hint: there are no pelts at all used in a fedora. Probably not a great choice for the animal-lovers, but readers who love fashion history, or fedoras, will be agog.

The Love Charm (1928, director Howard Mitchell)
All of us can name an actor we secretly know can’t act worth a hoot, but is so damn beautiful we not-so-secretly don’t care. This color one-reeler is exactly like that for the Siren. It’s utter tosh about the South Sea Islands (and the Siren has written before about being allergic to island idylls) complete with a remarkably silly tacked-on racist bit of exposition about how it’s OK for the Great White Captain to fall in love with the maiden because she’s half-white. But the Siren would watch again in a heartbeat, because the color is beyond breathtaking, and the state of the recovered footage must have been near-pristine. You never saw such lovely Technicolor tosh in your life.

Andy’s Stump Speech (1924, director Norman Taurog)
Yes, that Norman Taurog, who moved on to an Oscar and movies like Boys Town with Spencer Tracy in the 1930s, to Martin and Lewis in the 1950s, to Elvis Presley in the 1960s. The Siren had never seen Joe Murphy, the utterly chinless, rail-thin actor playing Andy Gump, but he’s a fine physical comedian, never more so than when he wins a dance contest due to bumblebees in his underwear. Other highlights include a really surreal shot of Andy, suddenly giant and striding across buildings.

Won in a Cupboard (1914, director Mabel Normand)
Another important find in the New Zealand stash: this, the earliest surviving film written and directed by Mabel Normand. It is typical Keystone fare, the story of a rural lass whose courtship with a local milksop is interrupted first by bullies, and then by the fact that their parents get stuck together in a closet. No, the Siren can’t explain that second bit much better than that. It’s very simply shot, mostly focused on keeping all parts of a gag in frame, but there is (out of nowhere, and it’s never repeated) a sudden shot of the lovers walking toward one another in split-screen, until they meet in the middle. Normand was 21 when this was made. If the world were kinder to women artists, it’s easy to imagine that she might have moved behind the camera when scandal limited her value in front of it.

The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies: Episode 5, "The Chinese Fan" (1914, director Walter Edwin)
Speaking of women and their careers, this is an episode of a serial about an intrepid girl reporter. Dolly is played by the highly appealing Mary Fuller, who looks like an everyday sort of woman until she starts busting up white-slavery rings. What’s particularly fun about this from a feminist point of view is that it’s Dolly who performs all the derring-do. The guys just follow her around and congratulate her for saving the day.

There are also a number of newsreels and previews, including one for Strong Boy, a Ford silent that remains lost. Of the newsreels, the Siren was bowled over by the two-minute fragment Virginia Types: Blue Ridge Mountaineers, a hand-tinted glimpsed of a long-gone rural community.

Buying this DVD for yourself or the film-history connoisseur on your list naturally also supports the National Film Preservation Foundation. And supporting good causes is a good feeling, at this or any other time of year.

(The photo up top is a still from Ladies of the Mob (1928) with Clara Bow and Richard Arlen. None of the four movies made by Bow in 1928 are known to survive.)

Get Thee to MOMA's To Save and Project Festival

It’s that time of year again, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York offers a unique opportunity to see rare old movies, restored to their former luster and projected on film, the way the Goddess and Eastman Kodak intended.

Yes, it’s To Save and Project, what MOMA calls “an annual festival of newly preserved and restored films from archives, studios, distributors, and independent filmmakers around the world, from October 9 through November 12.” You may glance at the calendar and notice the Siren is a wee bit fashionably late, but don’t let that deter you. There are screenings left for many of the most choice selections.

First and foremost, for all those who worked so hard on the second For the Love of Film blogathon, there is Try and Get Me! (aka The Sound of Fury), newly restored and ready to shine. The Siren has a screener for this one which she is stubbornly refusing to watch, because she wants to see it in the shiny new version for which we bloggers and readers and donors raised all that lolly. Instead, the Siren plans to attend on Nov. 2, when Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation will be presenting this noir along with Crashout (co-written by the blacklisted Cy Endfield, Try and Get Me’s director, and also so far unseen by the Siren) and Alias Nick Beal. (If you want to read up on Try and Get Me!, check out blogathon partner Marilyn Ferdinand’s take.) The screenings start at 2 pm; anyone in the New York City area who can make it definitely should.

Here are some other entries that the Siren finds of particular interest, and hopes her patient readers will, as well.

First up, this Saturday at 7 pm, is the deliriously insane I Am Suzanne!, directed by Rowland V. Lee in 1933. The Siren has a son who is turning seven this weekend and has expressed a desire for Mommy’s presence at his festivities, so she won’t be at MOMA, but if you can make this one, you absolutely should. William McKinley on Twitter described this as “The Red Shoes with puppets,” which is surprisingly accurate; the Siren would call it “Coppelia plus guns,” but feel free to take your pick. Both Will and I, as well as Lou Lumenick, urge you to see for yourself. The title role is filled by gorgeous Lilian Harvey, who had a thrillingly varied career but whose Stateside stardom never took off. Judging by this, the camera was, if not Harvey’s lover, then a very good friend. She’s a pensive, delicate presence with a killer body that the movie gives you ample time to ogle. That’s partly because puppeteer Gene Raymond (whose callowness is just right here) is making a marionette based not on her face, but her figure. There’s also Leslie Banks (about to do The Man Who Knew Too Much for Hitchcock the very next year) stealing everything but the dressing-room door in a very Boris Lermontov role. It soon becomes clear, though, that Banks’ character is much more about padding his pockets than art. What makes the movie so deliciously oddball, apart from little touches like an anthropomorphic dancing snowman, is the way I Am Suzanne! melds childish glee and way-out-there perversion. Watch Harvey’s expression when she’s in the hospital with Raymond adjusting her traction, and maybe you’ll see what the Siren means.  

Stark Love (1927) is a Karl Brown silent screening this Sunday, Oct. 20, at 5:30 pm; the Siren has been unable to see it so far, although she plans to at a later date. Richard Brody, the Siren’s friendly sometime Twitter-debater and a man of highly discerning tastes, was hugely impressed with this unusual silent, filmed in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina with nonprofessionals in the cast. Another silent-film aficionado wrote the Siren saying it’s “astonishing and beautiful,” so clearly this is a must for all the fans of the era. The film also gets a brief, delightful mention in John McElwee’s Showmen, Sell It Hot!. (The Siren plans to write up this book later, but the spoiler version is, just buy it, it’s wonderful.) In his discussion of Jesse James (1939), shot partly near Pineville, Missouri, John writes:

Pineville residents since may have forgotten Ty Power and Henry Fonda, but what fun to have had a major feature shot in your backyard, even if it’s one folks way back thrilled to. The closest my locality came was Thunder Road, several counties away, but it seemed like home, and a silent called Stark Love, directed by Griffith disciple Karl Brown and shot amidst North Carolina hills in 1927. I attended a screening at Appalachian State University in the early 1990s, where many in the audience yelled out  names of locals they recognized upon that flickering, voiceless screen. Good thing Stark Love was run mute, for any mood accompaniment would surely have been drowned by who’s who-ing from the audience along the lines of, “There’s Great-Grandma!”

Hitler’s Reign of Terror and I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany pretty much had the field of explicit anti-Nazi filmmaking to themselves when they were released. On Saturday, Oct. 26 at 7 pm, both films will be introduced by Prof. Thomas Doherty of Brandeis University, who discusses them extensively in Hitler and Hollywood: 1933-1939.

Hitler’s Reign was made by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., who didn’t think much of his gilded relations (“dull, uninteresting, hopelessly mediocre people,” was his unfilial summary). Still, once Vanderbilt opted for the life of an intrepid filmmaker-cum-journalist, Doherty says that background came in handy in two ways. Vanderbilt could afford Bell & Howell’s expensive, handheld 35-mm Eyemo camera (although getting real financing and distribution proved hard). And he could use his celebrated name to gain access to people like Pope Pius XI and the Hohenzollerns of Germany who would ordinarily avoid grubby reporter types. In 1933 came the biggest “get” of all, an interview with Adolf Hitler in which Vanderbilt had the courage to ask point-blank about the Jews.

Watching Hitler’s Reign now, there’s a sense that Vanderbilt’s aristocratic background may have been part of what gave him the nerve to ambush-interview a dictator. It’s a terrible loss that there were no cameras turning on the moment, but this film does contain a re-enactment of the encounter, and it still gives a shudder. Vanderbilt himself is a soigne chap with an East Coast lockjaw accent, and he sits in his chair with the air of a man who expects to be listened to. He wasn’t, though; his film played well in a few places, but what few bookings Hitler’s Reign could get were often shut down by state and local censors even though it was (just barely) pre-Code.

Nor were critics especially kind, laudable message or no laudable message. The film is in fact a jarring collection of on-the-scene footage (some of which Vanderbilt claimed to have smuggled out of Germany by strapping the reels to the underside of his car) and obvious re-enactments by actors whom one hopes never quit their day jobs. But the street moments that Vanderbilt captured are chilling, and as an early example of polemical documentary, it absolutely should not be missed. The version that the Siren saw is clearly one that was revised at a later date. Dave Kehr has the scoop on how we have a copy of this movie; the Siren hopes Doherty can shed further light on the revisions, only lightly discussed in the book.

Screening as a highly appropriate double feature with Hitler’s Reign is I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany, an independent feature released in 1936 (with a PCA seal, to the annoyance of Nazi consul Georg Gyssling). Isobel Lillian Steele was a Canadian-born, naturalized American citizen who had lived in Germany since 1931, writing daintily apolitical magazine features and enjoying the last gasps of Weimar nightlife. According to Doherty, Steele got caught up in a liaison with one Baron Ulrich von Sosnosky, a Polish military officer and ladykiller-about-town. Steele later said she had no idea (she would say that, wouldn’t she?) that Sosnosky was enjoying the favors of two beautiful secretaries in Germany’s military bureaucracy, much less that those ladies were passing documents to the Baron. When the situation was uncovered, Steele was caught up in the arrests, and sent to prison for several months. She was eventually released through the intervention of Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, the “lion of the Senate,” and Sosnosky’s neck was eventually saved by an exchange of spies (though his later fate is a mystery; Wikipedia, for what it's worth, lists no fewer than four possible ends for the Baron). The two secretaries met a horrible fate.

It’s a thrilling, ultimately tragic story with a strong undercurrent of heedless sex, and the Siren wishes she could tell you it makes for a movie with those qualities. It doesn’t, only partly because it insists, rather implausibly, that Isobel is a simple American girl who went to the wrong parties. More importantly, Kehr is right when he calls I Was a Captive “rhetorically crude and stylistically nonexistent.” (Although there are a few rather haunting shots inside the prison, possibly illustrating Ivan G. Shreve’s Blind Squirrel Theory of Cinema.) And yet the film is undeniably mesmerizing, with its portrait of Germany on the brink, the occasional bits of interpolated documentary footage (including the 1933 book-burning shown in Hitler’s Reign), narration that refers bluntly to concentration camps, and characters such as a brownshirt suitor, tired of persecuting Jews and Communists and looking forward to his promotion--to informer.

Watch out for Steele's “out of character” appearance at the start, wearing an impeccably chic ensemble and toying with what’s either a pom-pom trimming or a powder puff, although on a DVD screener at first it suggested a poodle scalp. Steele says, with a flat delivery that’s pretty characteristic of the whole movie, “The prison scenes depressed me. Hollywood has a way of making things realistic.” That line will probably get a laugh at MOMA, but in a strange way she’s right. The movie may think it’s about an innocent abroad whose heart was always in the right place. But what this movie actually shows is a woman who didn’t want to know about what was swirling around her, until the knock came at her own door. In that sense, Steele was indeed very American.

The movies are also screening Monday, Oct. 28 at 3 pm.

On Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 7 pm, we have Death of a Salesman, the 1951 version directed by Lazslo Benedek and starring Fredric March. The Siren plans to be there, but she can’t tell you a thing about this one. That’s because it’s been hard to see for decades. MOMA says this version has been fully restored. Bone up on your Fredric March fandom by checking out director Guy Maddin’s essay on the Criterion edition of I Married a Witch.

The only Nov. 2 noir offering that the Siren has previewed is the long-unavailable Alias Nick Beal, and it’s a pip, a retelling of the Faust legend with Thomas Mitchell’s well-meaning district attorney standing in for Goethe’s scholar, and Ray Milland as Nick Beal--probably a play on Beelzebub, though few screen demons are handsome as this one. The Siren has long been an admirer of Milland, and this is one of his best. Milland is not simply seductive--something he could accomplish by standing in good light and breathing--he’s genuinely frightening, slowly revealing the vicious amorality under his smooth-talking exterior. Mitchell is excellent at keeping his character’s cluelessness plausible; he’s insisting the devil doesn’t come to life far past the point when everyone else has caught on. With George Macready, on the side of the angels for once; and Audrey Totter, playing her pop-eyed, high-strung sex appeal for all it’s worth as Satan’s reluctant handmaiden. She has a late-movie scene that must be one of the best she ever did; no description of any kind, believe me, it will be obvious when it happens. Directed by John Farrow, with fog-shrouded cinematography by Lionel Lindon, Alias Nick Beal will be screening in a fresh archival print. It’s also showing Thursday, Nov. 7 at 4 pm.

Try and Get Me!, in addition to the Nov. 2 screening, also plays Wednesday, Nov. 6 at 4 pm.

The final movie the Siren wants to squeeze in: Caravan, a romance with Charles Boyer and Loretta Young and a screenplay co-written by Samson Raphaelson. The Siren has seen this one mocked from time to time for casting Boyer as a gypsy etc. That doesn’t much matter to her when Kehr calls Caravan a “genuinely great movie,” an endorsement that should make everyone pull out the calendars. Friday, Nov. 8 at 4:30 pm; and Sunday, Nov. 10 at 1 pm.

Please, take a look at the schedule and figure out what else you want to see; the Siren hasn’t come close to listing it all. This is a rich festival, and MOMA deserves every bit of support we can give.

What I Watched With My Mother: The Also-Ran Edition

After a long hard slog of a December, the Siren has emerged, ready for updates. And she has excellent news: Our hard work to put The White Shadow online for viewing has been recognized by the Online Film Critics' Society, with a special award to the "For the Love of Film" blogathon, Fandor and the National Film Preservation Foundation for our fundraising efforts. This is a wonderful accolade that is shared by everyone who contributed to the blogathon.

And our work has benefited many, many people. The online streaming of The White Shadow has proven so popular (almost 40,000 viewers and counting) that the NFPF has decided to keep it available for viewing on their site through Jan. 31. So watch, and watch again; we worked hard and we earned it.

Meanwhile, back chez Siren, your sometime blog hostess was entertaining her mother over the holidays, and after long days of decking the halls etc., we'd unwind by watching a number of old movies. Re-capping that viewing seemed like a good way to start 2013, so here are brief impressions of What I Watched With My Mother. The next post will feature the ones we liked best; this is the Also-Ran Edition. The Siren will get the one true dud out of the way first, since Mom always told her the meal goes better if you start with the food you like the least.

Susan Slept Here (Christmas Eve movie)

Ugh.

Not "ugh" because it's a romantic comedy about a 17-year-old (Debbie Reynolds) and a 50-year-old (Dick Powell). (Yeah yeah, Powell's character claims he's 35. So do a lot of people.) The Siren's been happy with May-December story lines before, including Love in the Afternoon, The Constant Nymph, and To Catch a Thief. No, it's "ugh" because whatever it takes to make this couple remotely plausible, let alone palatable, neither the stars, nor screenwriter Alex Gottlieb, nor director Frank Tashlin have it. Maybe a more obviously appealing, crush-able male lead might have helped (one friend suggested Robert Mitchum). Maybe, although the Siren (who's 0-6 with Tashlin now) finds that this director's interest in Eros goes no deeper than the first wolf-whistle. Powell looks more interested in what's in his highball glass than anything else. And if you don't buy what the script is selling, then this movie is tedious and crude, just a bunch of labored jailbait gags about whether or not Susan, whose mental age seems to hover around 12, will Sleep Here.

What Mom said: "I think you would have to see this when you're a kid and fall in love with it. Otherwise it's hard to overlook how icky it is."

Background to Danger
World War II spy caper that we watched for Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, and those gentlemen were the best things in it, naturally. Good stuff includes Lorre, as an agent of Our Soviet Allies, sitting cross-legged on a desk and demanding a better class of vodka. There's also a striking shot of Greenstreet walking away from the camera--his coat drapes off his incredibly wide shoulders like a set of curtains, and he looks like a medicine-show wagon trundling down a street. The Siren liked the Turkish setting and the trains and the way that all the romance and stranger-danger of compartments is put to great use. The director was Raoul Walsh, the cinematographer was Tony Gaudio, William Faulkner did uncredited work on the script--why, you might well ask, is this such a mix of good, bad and meh? It isn't nearly as consistent and accomplished as Jean Negulesco's The Mask of Dimitrios one year later. One reason is that Dimitrios wisely foregrounded Lorre and Greenstreet and used an Eric Ambler plot to much better effect; Background to Danger is baggily constructed, with more than its fair share of convenient double agents and talking killers. The major problem, however, was nailed by Mom: "This needed Humphrey Bogart." Instead you get George Raft at his most humorless and mechanical. Also includes Brenda Marshall looking marvelous in Soviet Chic, all high-necked sweaters and astrakan-collared coats. Unfortunately, all she does is hand Lorre vodka (although that's an important task, goodness knows).

What Mom said: See above.

They Came to Blow Up America
Alfred Hitchcock supposedly based Saboteur on a true story of German agents sent to sabotage the American war machine; but by the time he got through with the story, almost no trace of the real incident was left. This 20th-Century Fox programmer, in its flag-waving Hollywood way, sticks much closer to the facts of "Operation Pastorius," with details like the German submarine landing right off Amagansett (even enemy agents want a taste of the Hamptons). The film begins with a disclaimer noting that for the sake of national security, the true story of the saboteurs can't be told yet. Which is good. We wouldn't want John and Jane Q. leaving the Rialto convinced that one of the saboteurs was only play-acting for the good of the country, because FBI Agent Ward Bond asked him to. That heroic non-saboteur is George Sanders, wearing his "B-movie heartthrob" hat. He's so handsome and drily funny that the creaky theatrics go down easy. The best part, though, concerns Anna Sten as Sanders' disgruntled not-ex-wife (it's complicated), whom Sanders denounces as crazy to a Nazi commandant ("she throws things, you know"). Sten steals the movie with her two big scenes, further confirmation that whatever folly was associated with her years in Hollywood, it had nothing to do with her acting.

What Mom said: "It would be nice if FBI agents really did show up to tell you that your kids are OK." (At one point Ward Bond visits Sanders' worried Papa (Ludwig Stossel) to reassure him that his son doesn't really wanna blow up America.)

Stolen Holiday
A 1937 Michael Curtiz film about the Stavisky Affair, a topic that has so much potential that it's frustrating to see how off-handedly it's treated here. Kay Francis plays Nicole Picot, a couturier's model who's recruited by Stavisky--oops I mean Stefan Orloff (Claude Rains) as arm candy while he pitches his financial schemes to wealthy businessmen. And here's the first problem; she knows Orloff is crooked, and Rains is (god knows) playing him crooked, and yet the script wants us to believe that Nicole nevertheless does not understand that Orloff is fleecing most of the French upper crust. The Siren loves Francis, but this is a damn-near-unplayable part that nicely illustrates the kind of tosh the actress was starting to get from Warner Brothers as her career waned. And as if there weren't enough for the woman to cope with, she doesn't take that "stolen holiday" with Rains, who's mighty alluring even if he was a half-foot shorter than Francis. No, she runs off with Ian Hunter, who one year later would distinguish himself as the fifth-sexiest man in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Pleasures do include Rains intimidating his nervous Ponzi-schemers; but while there's a little crash course in French bond-issuing rules, it's a waste not to show more of Rains reeling in the suckers. Nicole becomes a dress designer herself, so Kay's Orry-Kelly wardrobe is breathtaking, particularly the spangled dress above, which has what may well be the lowest neckline in 1930s cinema. And there's the airplane Kay and Claude take to Switzerland, a British-made eye-popper that looks as though they decided to bring the double-decker bus concept to air travel.

What Mom said: "It would have been more interesting if she fell in love with Rains."