March, 2007
WINTER FUN—INDOORS
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Why would any sane person leave southern California to go to upstate New York in the dead of winter — voluntarily? I can’t say, but I know why my wife and I are among the diehards who make the trek to Syracuse every March: Cinefest! Four days of nonstop screenings of rare silent and early-talkie films, in the company of like-minded old-movie buffs...what could be better? We even have three rotating (and equally talented) pianists to play for our silent films: Jon Mirsalis, Phil Carli, and Gabrielle Thibaudeau.
The 27th annual event, held March 15-18 was a treat, as always, and it was especially heartening to see many old friends returning to the fold; attendance was up by more than two hundred registrants this year, and the dealer’s rooms were solidly booked. The snow outside didn’t bother us at all, and the folks at the Holiday Inn in Liverpool couldn’t be more hospitable.
Because Alice and I travel from the West Coast, we’re always fighting the time-change, but carefully-timed cat naps usually do the trick. I can’t pretend to give you a comprehensive rundown of every film that was shown, but I can cite some of my favorites.
The biggest discovery for me was the early-talkie version of Rex Beach’s Yukon saga The Spoilers (1930), which was shown in 35mm at the Palace Theater (nicely renovated since our last visit some years ago). Like The Big Trail, this film was largely shot outdoors (on a mile-long mining-camp set built in Big Tujunga Canyon) and refutes every cliché we read about immobile cameras in the early days of sound. There are tracking shots with dialogue and ambient sound throughout the picture. Gary Cooper is perfectly cast as rugged Roy Glenister, and Kay Johnson is likable as the visitor who doesn’t understand his stubborn ideas. (Johnson is one of my favorite unsung actresses of the era, and her understated, naturalistic approach to dialogue makes her performance here seem modern.) Cooper’s mining pals are played by James Kirkwood and Slim Summerville, and what would an early-talkie mining camp be without Jewish dialect comedian Harry Green as the local merchant?
Every version of The Spoilers leads up to a climactic bare-knuckle fight between the hero and the villain (a crooked government agent), and here the combatants are Cooper and William “Stage” Boyd, which may be stacking the deck somewhat. It may not be the stuff of legend (as the 1914 and 1923 versions apparently were, if you believe old-movie lore) but it’s well staged, making expert use of shadows and darkness to mask the use of stuntmen—but also resulting in some striking visuals.
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We saw two enjoyable Gloria Swanson vehicles in which she suffered mightily. In Shifting Sands (1918) she plays an impoverished young woman, alone in the world, who is molested by a smarmy landlord but sent to prison because the police take his word against hers. After her release she finds redemption and marries well. Then her whole happy existence is threatened by the same unscrupulous man (Harvey Clark), who threatens to tell her husband about her “sordid” past. In Her Husband’s Brand (1922) she plays a trophy wife to opportunistic Stuart Holmes, and refuses to believe that her husband is simply using her to maintain good business relationships—until her ex-boyfriend becomes hubby’s latest prospect. Neither of these films could be called a classic but they’re engaging and fun to watch.
Two rarely-seen silents gave me my first opportunity to see stage stars of the teens before they reinvented themselves as character actresses in the 1930s—often playing interchangeable roles as ditzy dowagers—Billie Burke and Alice Brady. The New York Idea (1920) refers to that sophisticated notion known as divorce. It’s a likable piece of fluff about “a dangerous contrivance of nature called Cynthia” (Brady) who marries Lowell Sherman in haste and leaves him just as quickly, only to find that she still has feelings for him. The “other woman” who has designs on Sherman is played by Hedda Hopper. Arms and the Girl (1917) stars Burke as a naïve American who’s caught in France after the outbreak of World War I. She’s forced to marry Thomas Meighan in order to satisfy a German officer who might otherwise discover she has somehow lost her passport. Talk about contrivances!
Both women project the same sweetness they did years later when they specialized in playing birdbrains. (To see vintage advertisements of Burke and Brady in their prime, go to the Photos page.)
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I had never seen John Barrymore in Beau Brummel (1923), an elaborate costume picture that introduces its star in profile, as he was best known. Although the sets are handsome and the story takes place on a grand stage, it’s a surprisingly intimate drama and actually quite moving, as a socially slighted man exacts revenge on the Prince of Wales. Cinefest presented the longest known print, although rumor has it that Warner Bros. is undergoing a full-length restoration.
The same year Erich von Stroheim chose ZaSu Pitts to star in Greed, MGM had her play the starring role in Pretty Ladies (1925), a slick adaptation of Adela Rogers St. Johns’ female Pagliacci story about the star comedienne in the Follies (not named after Ziegfeld, but you get the idea) who leads a lonely life while all the beautiful girls around her—including the tempestuous Lilyan Tashman—get plenty of action. Then she falls in love with drummer and would-be songwriter Tom Moore, only to have her heart broken again. The existing print is missing two production numbers that were filmed in two-color Technicolor, but the on-stage moments that remain are pretty wild: in “House Fly Blues” ZaSu dangles over the stage as a furry spider, only to get stuck in flypaper.
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Madeleine Carroll plays a real-life figure from World War I in Victor Saville’s I Was a Spy (1933)—in fact, the Belgian heroine, Martha Cnockhaert, is hailed by Winston Churchill in a written foreword. This is a surprisingly adult, pre-Code espionage film that doesn’t traffic in stereotypes; even the Kommandant of the invading German Army, played by Conrad Veidt, is a human being, not a caricature. What’s more, the staging of scenes is first-rate, with Charles van Enger’s the camera in constant movement. (I didn’t recognize a woman who appears early in the proceedings, a spy who passes on her tasks to a reluctant Carroll. It was a young Martita Hunt, whom we all know as Miss Havisham in David Lean’s Great Expectations.)
Jon Mirsalis outdid himself accompanying the romantic drama The Night of Love (1927), set in 17 th century Spain, in which Ronald Colman plays a gypsy king whose bride is stolen from him on his wedding night by lascivious Montagu Love, citing droit de seigneur. He turns the tables on the swaggering—but cowardly—Duke by stealing his intended bride, but then of course he falls in love with her, and vice versa. The climax is way over the top, but either you accept the conventions of a florid melodrama like this or you don’t.
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Normally the Cinefest is a no-frills affair: no guests, no banquet, no jacket, no tie. But this year Jack Roth arranged for Jerry Schatz and his wife Myra to attend and present their entertaining slide show, in which Jerry recounts his experiences as a child actor in the 1930s. He was a bona fide member of Our Gang (credited then as Jerry Tucker), and worked with a wide variety of stars from Carole Lombard to Ralph Byrd (in Dick Tracy Returns). Fortunately, his mother saved several hundred photos which are wonderful to see, from staged publicity shots to scenes from films like Prosperity with Marie Dressler and Polly Moran and Anything Goes with Bing Crosby. When asked what Byrd was like in real life, Jerry answers honestly that they were both working actors—one a child, the other a grownup—and didn’t have much to do with one another off the set. His candor is refreshing, and disarming.
My old friend Richard W. Bann spiced up the weekend by bringing an array of Hal Roach rarities, including the Spanish-language versions of Harry Langdon’s The Big Kick and the French-language version of Charley Chase’s All Teed Up. The latter was especially intriguing because it was expanded to five reels, not with songs or specialty performers (like some of Roach’s padded short subjects for the foreign market) but with three extra reels of slapstick comedy on the golf links! What’s more, it’s clear that Chase didn’t simply walk through this mini-feature—he gave it 100% and (phonetically) read his French dialogue with great gusto. Alas, Thelma Todd, his leading lady in the American original, was replaced by a French-speaking actress... but Edgar Kennedy still turned up as her father in the closing scene because he had just a few words of dialogue to memorize. Thanks to the actor’s equally brief appearance in the Langdon short, I had the thrill of hearing Edgar K. say Bueno! in Spanish and Enchanté in French!
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I also had my first opportunity to screen the very first Hal Roach talkie short, Hurdy Gurdy. All of the studio’s initial forays into sound had self-referential titles: Laurel and Hardy’s was Unaccustomed As We Are (“...to public speaking,” as the saying used to go), Charley Chase’s was The Big Squawk, and Our Gang’s was Small Talk. This one was an amiable slice of life about an eventful summer afternoon on the Lower East Side where a multitude of nationalities are represented: Irish, Jewish, German, and Italian. It’s amazing how well Edgar Kennedy, Max Davidson and Thelma Todd come off in their first attempt at delivering dialogue.
As I say, this is just a sampling of the films shown from Thursday to Sunday at the Cinefest; I skipped some I’d seen before, and reluctantly napped through others. But socializing is also a big part of the weekend, catching up with old friends from all corners of the map, browsing the memorabilia for sale, and comparing notes about the films.
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It’s hard for non-film buffs to understand what’s so appealing about Cinefest, and even more difficult for some of them to conceive that my wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary there... but that just goes to show that I married the right woman!
