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.

2018: The Year in Old Movies

Being another alphabetical list of the best old movies the Siren saw for the first time this year, with 11 entries, because round numbers are boring.

Ashes and Diamonds (1958, Andrzej Wajda; viewed on FilmStruck (RIP))
In many ways a gangster film, with Poland’s future on the line instead of loot. Zbigniew Cybulski as Maciek, the cynical assassin, is so fiercely present he drags the movie out of its ostensible setting and even the time period in which it was made. Everything in the film lends itself to allegory, like Maciek and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) lighting fire to glasses of vodka, each symbolizing a fallen comrade, as a bunch of drunks bellow-sing in the next room. But few allegories feel this vivid and searing.

Barbed Wire (1927, Rowland V. Lee; kindness of a Siren commenter)
Film history has been unjust to Pola Negri, usually remembered either as the most flamboyant mourner at Valentino’s funeral, or as the leopard-clad cameo player in a Hayley Mills film. The Siren knew better, as she’s read Negri’s delightful autobiography, but the proof is in the acting. And this tender World War I romance, about a French farmer’s daughter and the German POW (Clive Brook) she falls in love with, shows what a versatile and talented actress she was.

Devi (1960, Satyajit Ray; viewed on Filmstruck)
Powerful statement about how religion devolves into superstition, and how superstition destroys. Sharmila Tagore’s performance as Dayamoyee, the trapped and suffering “goddess” of the title, is riveting. For the record, though some disagree, the Siren most definitely thought there was a villain in Devi (and how) but then the Siren never has been keen on religious fanatics. Track down this masterpiece and decide for yourself.

Douce (1943, Claude Autant-Lara; viewed as part of the Eclipse box set “Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France”)
La Ronde in miniature, with an exquisite and moving Odette Joyeux, then 28, as the reckless upper-crust teenager of the title. Douce is enamored of her widowed father’s (Jean Debucourt) estate manager, Fabien (Robert Pigaut). Fabien wants Douce’s governess Irène (Madeleine Robinson) to run away with him; Douce’s father is also in love with Irène. Douce’s grandmother, Madame de Bonafe (Marguerite Moreno), wants everyone to stop all this nonsense and remember their place. A Christmas film as melancholy as it is witty; alert TCM.

Gabrielle (1954, Hasse Ekman; kindness of a friend)
There’s “personal” filmmaking, and then there’s this movie by Siren favorite (since 2015) Hasse Ekman. The director casts Eva Henning, whom Ekman had only recently divorced, as the title character, married to a man whose memories entwine with jealous fantasies of betrayal to form the bulk of the film. Like another pitch-black Ekman film the Siren loves, Banquet from 1948, Gabrielle is both bitterly funny and suspenseful, with one sequence in particular that brings Hitchcock to mind. It’s also a savage indictment of how a man can drive away love. In another twisted touch, Ekman casts himself not as the husband (played by Birger Malmsten) but rather as the ex-boyfriend who figures as Gabrielle’s lover in the husband’s imaginings (that's Henning and Ekman above). Your best source on the Web for all things Ekman remains Fredrik Gustafsson, whose Ekman study The Man From the Third Row was published in 2016.

Goupi Mains Rouges (aka It Happened at the Inn, 1943, Jacques Becker; viewed on Filmstruck)
The Siren has seen umpteen movies about deranged rural families living in the South, where she grew up. That undoubtedly added to her pleasure in viewing this hilarious mystery set deep in the French countryside. The Goupi clan, who could show the Snopes a thing or two, dominate every local business from poaching to innkeeping. But when the city-mouse nephew (Georges Rollin) comes to visit, murder enters the mix. An immensely satisfying film that the Siren may well venture out to see again when it plays FIAF on Jan. 29. (Bonus: A haunting performance by the infamous Robert Le Vigan, with whom the Siren has become slightly obsessed.)

Salón México (1948, Emilio Fernández; viewed as part of MoMA’s retrospective on the director)
The Siren wrote about this for the Village Voice (another film-supporting institution she greatly misses).

No Name on the Bullet (1959, Jack Arnold; the Siren bought the DVD, and BOY is it on sale at the moment)
What a joy to discover that a movie’s cult reputation is entirely deserved. The Siren loves Audie Murphy anyway, and she hopes one day to write a ringing defense of his acting in Westerns. Murphy plays John Gant, an uncommonly intelligent villain: He arrives in town trailing a violent reputation, and waits for the residents to unravel as they try to figure out who this gunfighter aims to kill. As the citizens turn on one another, right on schedule, Gant begins to seem as much like an evilly insightful philosopher as a killer. This was recommended to the Siren by Laura G., whose write-up the Siren recommends.

That Brennan Girl (1946, Alfred Santell; viewed as part of MoMA’s Republic Pictures series)
Brilliant women’s picture that was subsequently shown on TCM. The Siren mentioned it in an article for the Voice.

The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924, Mauritz Stiller; viewed on a screener as the Siren prepared to write about it for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival)
Mauritz Stiller is underrated.

The Sea Wolf (1941, Michael Curtiz; viewed on Warner Archive Blu-Ray, also a deal at the moment)
A disguised concentration-camp movie set on the high seas. Bleak as all-get-out, startlingly vicious and violent. Whatever the Siren was expecting from this newly reconstructed version of Curtiz’s film, it was not Barry Fitzgerald leering at Ida Lupino and threatening her with gang rape. The Siren had seen the butchered version and promptly forgot it, and as far as she’s concerned, this counts as an entirely different film. (Here is Leonard Maltin on the story of its resurrection. ) The Sea Wolf is an intense anti-Fascist allegory (via then-Communist screenwriter Robert Rossen), and like other such films from its era, feels newly and agonizingly relevant. Stellar work from all concerned, including John Garfield, Edward G. Robinson, and (a pleasant surprise) Alexander Knox. Do read this assessment at the New York Times by J. Hoberman (where has he been?). And the Siren assumes you've all read or are reading Alan K. Rode's Curtiz biography?

Honorable Mention:

Hellfire, Hell’s Half Acre, A Lawless Street, Three Daughters, Transatlantic, Young Desire, Ghost of Yotsuya (1959), Come Next Spring, Ride Clear of Diablo, Contraband, After Tomorrow, Victimas del Pecado, The Late Edwina Black, Love From a Stranger (1937).



Bonus: Not Exactly Good, But Boy Did I Have a Good Time

Love Has Many Faces (1965, Alexander Singer; viewed on Amazon Prime)
Or, as the Siren can't stop calling it, Love Has Many Suntans. (Followed, one hopes, by the sequel, Love Has Many Mole Checks.) Two hours of Hugh O’Brian and Cliff Robertson in Speedos and Lana Turner in $1 million of Edith Head costumes that shouldn’t be viewed without ISO-certified eclipse glasses. Virginia Grey and Ruth Roman have supporting roles, the plot is an ostensible murder mystery with the biggest wet-rag of a denouement you ever saw, and the Siren enjoyed every blessed minute.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948, St. John Legh Clowes; viewed on Filmstruck)
It’s an S&M love story, it’s a gangster movie, it’s proof that British actors are not better at American accents than vice versa, and strangest of all, it's a musical. Or wants to be, what with a bunch of nightclub numbers shown at length and sometimes even in full; one character's reluctance to stop watching the floor show becomes a key plot driver. To the Siren, the high point (if that is the term she wants) was Zoe Gail singing "When He Got It, Did He Want It?". Verse after verse about how boring women get once you've (ahem) had them, winding up with the big finish about how Cellini had the right idea because he poisoned his lays once he was done. The Siren still isn’t sure what hit her.


OK, OK, sorry about that last. The Siren will see herself out, along with 2018 while she's at it. Happy New Year, dear friends and patient readers!

Film Series at the Czech Center Includes Erotikon and Other Early Gems

The Czech Center, proprietor of the landmark Bohemian National Hall on East 73rd St. in New York City, has inaugurated a “Rooftop Ciné-Concert Series” every Tuesday through August 25th. They are showing silent films, both Czech and American, accompanied by live music.

The selection for tomorrow night, July 21, is intriguing enough to draw the Siren from her lair: Erotikon, a Czech film from 1929 directed by Gustav Machatý. Made four years before his glorious Ecstase (Ecstasy), which introduced Hedy Lamarr to a panting world, the movie is also said to focus on a woman’s sexuality. Which the Siren, as you know, is all for. There is a good discussion of the film here from when it was screened six years ago at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

At the piano on Tuesday will be the wonderful Ben Model, well known to silent film lovers in New York, and an asset to any screening. You can read more about Ben here.

The Siren will be there tomorrow night; if you go too, say hello. There are a lot of outdoor screenings around New York during the summer, all of them fun. But she’s very happy to see the Czech Center doing something different, and working to draw attention to Czech film artists who blazed a trail well before the famous films of the Czech New Wave. The last two films of the series (May Fairy Tale on Aug. 18 and the fantastically titled An Old Gangster's Molls on Aug. 25) look like genuine rarities.

Plus, the building is seriously beautiful.

Here’s the information and the schedule for the remaining films in the series.

Rooftop Ciné-Concert Series:
Location: Czech Center, 321 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

DATE: Every Tuesday, through Aug. 25, 2015
7 pm - Rooftop opens for a welcome drink (cash bar for additional drinks & appetizers)
8 pm – Live music followed by screenings upon sunset
All the silent films are also accompanied by live music.

Please note: In the event of rain, the screenings will be in the elegant ballroom on the 4th floor.


SCHEDULE

JULY 21
Eroticon | Erotikon
Dir. Gustav Machatý, 1929, 85 min., silent film
Live music: Ben Model, piano

JULY 28
Madame X
Dir. Sam Wood (with Gustav Machatý contributing), 1937, 72 min., (early talkie)
Music overture: Joseph Morag, violinist

(JOHN GILBERT ALERT!)

AUGUST 4
A Woman of Affairs
The most complete version of this American silent was discovered at the Czech film archive in Prague.
Dir. By Clarence Brown, 1928, 98 min., silent film
Live music: Henry Grimes, upright bass and Brandon Ross, banjo

AUGUST 11
Blonde Venus
Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1932, 93 min., (early talkie)
Live music: Overture by Pavlína Horáková, singer, accompanied by pianist Drew Spradlin.

AUGUST 18
May Fairy Tale | Pohádka máje
Dir. Karel Anton, 1926, silent
Live music: Nancy Jo Snider, cello

AUGUST 25
WRAP PARTY! Bring back your 1920s and 30s fashion to close out the series!
Film: An Old Gangster's Molls (aka Loves of an Old Criminal) | Milenky starého kriminálníka
Dir. Svatopluk Innemann, 1927, 106 minutes, silent film
Live music: Audrey Vardanega and Sara Barone, piano 4 hands

(Additional information about the series is available here.)

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.

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.

King Vidor, The Crowd, and the Dragon

(This is a disgracefully belated entry for the Film History Blogathon. The Siren's post, on 1928, would have been part of the 1927-1938 section, hosted by Ruth at Silver Screenings. For the years 1915-1926, your hostess is Fritzi at Movies, Silently; and 1939-1950 can be found at Aurora's place, Once Upon a Screen. Please click through to those host blogs to find a plethora of wonderful, and prompt, blog entries on many aspects of film history.)

Death is a good career move, goes an old movie joke that the Siren has never found funny. It was never less true than it was for silent film, which died after a brief illness. Probably it was younger than Marilyn Monroe, although like many another cinema great, the birth date’s hard to pin down.

Some early deaths do enshrine a legend; some even elevate a talent that might have burned out. Silent film died and stayed buried. If you were still around, and your name wasn’t Charlie Chaplin, you didn’t get much time to mourn. Pull up your socks and deal, that was the only way to survive. Who knows how many faceless names in the credits were walking around, not with mike fright, but mike shock.

As is common when talking about a life cut off in its prime, the Siren starts with the wake. King Vidor, in his 1953 autobiography A Tree Is a Tree, paints a scene that’s both gallows-funny and tragic.

We had no movieola in the first days of sound, and during the editing of Hallelujah [1929] I saw a cutter literally go beserk at his inability to get the job done properly. The walls of his cutting room were lined with multitudes of shiny film cans containing the mass of sound and picture tracks. Returning from a projection room after many hours of labor he discovered that the scene was still out of synchronization and let fly with a reel against the solid wall of cans. This precipitated an avalanche of thousands of feet of loose film that engulfed the two of us. The hysterical cutter fell on the floor sobbing helplessly. I unwound him from the tangled maze and drove him home to the care of his wife. He remained in bed a week before he could again undertake the task of editing the film.

Vidor was a spiritual, contemplative person, infrequently given to flashes of temperament. But he was also worn out and, probably, worried to death. “I felt that by this mechanical advance the movies were losing a beautiful impressionistic quality that would be hard to replace in the technique of the new medium,” he wrote about having to add dialogue to a craps-game scene in Hallelujah. “In the light of experience,” he adds hastily, “I have since changed my mind, but the forced transition saddened me for quite some time.”

Who can blame him. One year before, even as sound invaded, the silents were still at their peak. That’s a fact endlessly repeated, and yet it’s one of those things that always give the Siren a jolt, like Orson Welles’ age when he made Citizen Kane, or Gone With the Wind’s inflation-adjusted gross. Look at the silents that opened in 1928. Contemplate their technical bravado, their thematic originality, their vivid acting: Street Angel. The Cameraman. The Circus. The Italian Straw Hat. Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Underground. The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Wind.

One of those 1928 films, The Crowd, is not only the Siren’s favorite silent, but one of her favorite films, period. A Tree Is a Tree goes into this film’s conception, the casting, the camerawork. Vidor quotes the rave reviews with poignant pride. The Crowd tells the story of John Sims, who’s raised to believe great things await him, and then they never arrive. John moves to Manhattan (where else for a striver?) but he never strikes it rich, never climbs the ladder at work or anywhere else. He meets a nice girl, they marry and have a family. Their joys become fewer, and the hardships harder, until a blow lands that many couldn’t recover from. John’s one act of heroism is simply deciding to carry on, a moment that only the small boy who shares it with him will ever truly appreciate.

“Daring” means a number of different things these days. Sometimes it’s used as a synonym for “impenetrable,” but in American film it’s often something to do with taste. Is it cynical, is it dark, will it make Grandma stomp out to ask the theater manager if his mother knows he’s showing this filth.

The Crowd is its own kind of daring, due mostly to King Vidor, but in some measure also to Irving Thalberg. Some people say Thalberg was only and always a middlebrow purveyor of quality Oscar-bait. Vidor — who can’t be said to have idealized his producer — would not have agreed.

His movie The Big Parade was still packing cinemas, and one day the director found himself buttonholed by Thalberg and asked what his next project would be.

I really hadn’t an idea ready, but one came to me in the emergency. “Well, I suppose the average fellow walks through life and see quite a lot of drama taking place around him. Objectively life is like a battle, isn’t it?” While I groped, Thalberg was smiling.

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” he asked.

“Never thought of it before,” I confessed.

“Have you got a title.”

“Perhaps One of the Mob.”

Thalberg showed immediate enthusiasm. “That a wonderful title, One of the Mob. How long will it take you to write it?”

“Two or three days.”

“If you need any help, let me know.”

“Thanks,” I said, and we parted.

Now this is the way I believe a film should begin.

“MGM,” Thalberg once told Vidor about an idea that wasn't The Crowd, “can certainly afford a few experimental projects,” although as Erich von Stroheim would have pointed out, Thalberg’s indulgence of artists did have its limits. Accordingly Thalberg soon rejected the title One of the Mob as too suggestive of a proletarian tract, and The Crowd emerged. Vidor and Thalberg wanted a “documentary flavor,” and an unknown actor as John seemed the ideal way to get it. The search was fruitless until one day a man brushed by Vidor, a man with a face that looked familiar not because the director had seen it before, but because it was a face you could never pick out of a crowd, or a mob, or (in this case) a lot full of extras. Vidor gave the man his card and told him to call for a chance at a part. The man never called, and Vidor couldn’t remember the name. Finally the director went to the rosters of extras and lit on the words that wouldn’t stick in his brain: James Murray. The extra hadn’t called Vidor because he thought the director wasn’t serious about the job.

Vidor cast Eleanor Boardman, his wife at the time, as Mary Sims, and put her in plain clothes and minimal makeup that diminished her considerable beauty. Murray turned out to be a difficult person, fated to meet a bad end due to alcoholism and sheer cussedness. The cinematographer was Henry Sharp, who also did Duck Soup, It’s a Gift and was active through the 1930s; but this was his peak.

Fired up by what he called “directors of vision” from Europe — he names Murnau, du Pont, Lang, and Lubitsch — Vidor put everything into filming. He describes the movie’s most famous shot, where the camera scales a vast office building, sweeps through a window, and swoops over hundreds of desks, until at last it discovers John Sims, bored out of his mind.

A scene was made in New York City at the entrance of the Equitable Life Insurance building at lunch hour. The camera started its upward swing and when the screen was filled with nothing but windows, we managed an imperceptible dissolve to a scale model in the studio. The miniature was placed flat on the floor with the camera rolling horizontally over it. In the selected window was placed an enlargement of a single frame of the previously photographed interior view. As the camera moved close to the window another smooth dissolve was made to the interior scene of the immense office. The desks occupied a complete, bare stage and the illusion was accomplished by using the stage walls and floor, without constructing a special set. To move the camera down to Murray, an overhead wire trolley was rigged with a moving camera platform slung beneath it. The counterbalanced camera crane or boom had not yet been designed and built, but the results we achieved were identical with those of today.

So breathtaking is this scene that 13 years later, when Orson Welles and Gregg Toland moved a camera up a building, seemingly passed it through a skylight, and then sank it down to Dorothy Comingore drunk in a deserted club, the effect was still thrilling. It was thrilling almost 20 years after that, when Billy Wilder’s camera in The Apartment crawled up another tower to find Jack Lemmon at his desk at Consolidated Life of New York. Wilder never hesitated to credit Vidor.

Vidor, in 1953, still loved to talk about the technique behind The Crowd.

In a scene where the nervous husband paces the floor of the hospital corridor during the delivery of his first child, we wanted to give the impression that many husbands were also going through the same suspense and agony. We wanted a tremendously long hospital corridor stretching, as it seemed, to infinity. Cedric Gibbons, head of the art department at MGM, designed and constructed a corridor in forced perspective, with each receding door becoming smaller and smaller. We even considered putting midget husbands outside these miniature doors, finally decided to keep the mob of anxious husbands in the foreground of the shot.

“Midget husbands.” That’s ridiculous, but it’s also symbolic, isn’t it, of how passionate these artists were about getting every part of the movie right.

For scenes of the sidewalks of New York, we designed a pushcart perambulator carrying what appeared to be inoffensive packing boxes. Inside the hollowed-out boxes there was room for one small sized cameraman and one silent camera. We pushed this contraption from the Bowery to Times Square and no one ever detected our subterfuge.

This was precisely the kind of shot that would suddenly become problematic a short time later. The obstacles of shooting with sound were swiftly dealt with, but imagine going from a camera in a glorified baby carriage, to a camera enclosed in a soundproof booth.

John and Mary take a first date to Coney Island, that Cote d’Azur for the working stiff, happily mingling with the teeming, entertain-me masses. (Whatever happened to that spinning-plate thing, where people sit, link arms and try not to get hurled off? The world lost a great metaphor when that ride went away.) Later, when his daughter is critically injured, John stumbles out of his apartment building and into the street, pleading with the masses not to make so much noise. As the people keep streaming past him, John is admonished by a cop, in an intertitle of perfect callousness and truth: “Get inside! The world can’t stop because your baby is sick!”

But much of the film takes place in their small apartment, through the frustrations of daily life. John plays his ukelele and dreams up slogans; it is evident early on that he’s a dreamer, not an achiever. He buys his wife an umbrella (an umbrella!) as a token of affection, then can’t seem to keep himself from yelling at her when she opens it in the house. Everything in the apartment breaks, and there’s a squabble to go with each mishap. Boardman’s best moment is when she’s staring at the door after her heedless, cranky husband has slammed out, and she remembers (with zero intertitles) that she had, somehow, forgotten to tell him she’s pregnant.

And there’s the end, the unforgettable end, where John goes with his family to see a clown in a theater, and as Vidor says, “the camera moved back and up to lose him in the crowd as it had found him. In the course of the narrative he had not made a million dollars, nor committed a heinous crime, but he had managed to find joy in the face of adversity.”

King Vidor made two other films in 1928, The Patsy and the dazzling Show People, both with Marion Davies. Once Show People was done he decided that since he’d made three films set in France (The Big Parade, Bardelys the Magnificent, and La Boheme) it was time to see the country in real life. He and Eleanor Boardman met F. Scott Fitzgerald on the boat going over, and in Paris they all hung out at Fitzgerald’s apartment, watching Zelda demonstrate the steps she was learning in ballet class. Vidor met James Joyce, who refused to make eye contact in order to conceal his failing vision, and Ernest Hemingway, as that writer strode out of a bookstore with his baby son tucked under one arm.

Then, abruptly, it was time to come home.

One day as I sat alone near the Place de L’Opera, a copy of Variety arrested my attention. Emblazoned across the front page in bold type was the headline: PIX INDUSTRY GOES 100% FOR SOUND. I had been away for only two months, but during that brief period a major transition had taken place in the motion-picture industry...I knew I could no longer sit complacently at sidewalk cafes. The dragon of sound must be met head-on, and conquered.

Vidor went on to make many more good movies, some of them great. Memoirs are tricky as memories are tricky. The Siren believes the anecdote she started with, the one about trying to synchronize the sound for Hallelujah. And she has zero factual backup for what’s she about to say, so take this as the fantasy it almost certainly is. But every time she reads that story, the Siren wonders if perhaps — just perhaps — the nameless cutter was a polite fiction, and the man who threw that reel against a wall of film was King Vidor himself.