As I said in my recent post, I’ve been laggard in keeping up to date on this website. The following Blu-ray releases are no longer fresh, but they warrant your attention nonetheless.
If you want to know why Louise Brooks has such a fervent following, make it a point to see G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Focus on Louise Brooks from Flicker Alley is aimed at the diehards who want to see every frame of footage in which she appeared, including the first silent films she made under contract to Paramount. She already had “the look” that still enchants us, but the small and/or supporting roles she landed are inconsequential at best. The San Francisco Film Preserve has combed the archives of the world to present fragments of others that haven’t succumbed to nitrate deterioration. Not one of them is fully intact, but Brooks completists won’t mind. The Street of Forgotten Men (1925) is an absorbing yarn directed by Herbert Brenon (who made the silentPeter Pan andBeau Geste, among others) featuring youngish character actor Percy Marmont in a role one would expect to find Lon Chaney inhabiting—a phony beggar who raises a female child as his own. The recreation of the missing second reel is the best of its kind I’ve ever seen, using still photos and the text of the original title cards. Just Another Blonde is a lighthearted tale of youthful romance starring Dorothy Mackaill, Jack Mulhall, and William Collier Jr. Now We’re in the Air is a World War I slapstick comedy featuring the somewhat crude but then-popular team of Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton. But the surviving footage gives us plenty of time to ogle Louise at her prettiest. Brooks expert Thomas Gladysz speaks about all of this on the audio track and a booklet reveals all the painstaking work that went into the restorations.
Jumping ahead several decades, I was fascinated by the Arrow Video’s 4K presentation of a film I haven’t seen since it was new, Michael Crichton’s Westworld. Larry Karaszewski interviews its star, Richard Benjamin, and there are excellent conversations with costar James Brolin and executive producer Paul N. Lazarus III, who have much to share about making this bold futuristic film. Daniel Kremer conducted those interviews off-camera and provides a full-length commentary track as well. If you have fond or distant memories of the picture it is well worth revisiting, especially in such a lavish a presentation.
Comedy aficionados have been frustrated that so few Laurel and Hardy silent shorts were readily available. Now we can show friends and family Stan and Ollie at their very best, in the Flicker Alley releases Laurel and Hardy: Year One (1927), Year Two (1928) and, most recently,Year Three (1929). 1929 saw the demise of silent filmmaking in Hollywood and the birth of talkies. Stan and Ollie made some of their most memorable comedy shorts during that year, like Big Business, in which they try to sell a Christmas tree to pop-eyed James Finlayson, andDouble Whoopee, which features a scantily clad young Jean Harlow. There’s even a unique, experimental version of that film in which the late Chuck McCann and friends attempted to turn the silent comedy into a talkie by post-dubbing all the dialogue! I was honored to be asked to contribute an essay about L&H which appears in the fact-filled booklet that accompanies the dual-disc release. And if you’re ready to go deep in the weeds, listen to the overwhelming cascade of information in the commentary tracks by Richard W. Bann and Randy Skretvedt. Other bonus features include promotional shorts and foreign-language releases that I had never seen before!
I first saw the silent Beau Geste when I was an adolescent and fell in love with it. But because it was not easily accessible no one would believe me when I told them it was far superior to the 1939 remake, despite the best efforts of director William Wellman and a cast led by Gary Cooper. A transcendent evening show of the original silent picture at last year’s TCM Classic Film Festival—held at the majestic Egyptian Theatre—proved to skeptics that I wasn’t wrong. The 1926 adaptation of P.C. Wren’s popular novel about brotherly love, honor and a French Foreign Legion creates a mystique that is missing from all the remakes and imitations. What’s more, the handsomely packaged disc from Film Preserve includes an informative talk by silent film accompanist Rodney Sauer, whose Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra is heard on the soundtrack, an eye-opening before-and-after demonstration of the film’s restoration, and best of all, a feature-length commentary by my good friend Frank Thompson, the world’s foremost authority on Beau Geste. Robert A. Harris oversaw the rebirth of this film, with the participation of Paramount Pictures and a handful of archival institutions. Bravo, one and all.
