Robert Wiene: Film History Series

Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, Silent Horror Film, Running Time 99 Minutes, Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin, Producer Pan-Film

Robert Wiene was born in April of 1873 in the German Empire city of Breslau, now the city of Wroclaw in Poland. He was a German film director, producer and screenwriter who worked in a variety of genres including the German Expressionist movement of the early twentieth-century. Wiene was the elder son of theatrical actor Karl Wiene and the brother of Conrad Wiene, who also entered the German film industry.

Wiene traveled during his formative years with his family throughout Central and Western Europe; he lived in Stuttgart, Vienna, Dresden and Prague. Wiene studied law at the University of Berlin and the University of Vienna where he earned his law degree. He practiced law in the central German city of Weimar until 1908. At which time, Wiene relocated to Vienna for a position as manager of a theatrical company; this position gave him the opportunity to perform in its stage productions.

Robert Wiene’s initial participation in the German film industry was writing the screenplay for director Friedrich Müller’s 1913 silent film “Die Waffen der Jugend (The Weapons of Youth)”. This film is now considered a lost film. In the following year, Wiene directed his first film, “Er Rechts, Sie Links (He This Way, She That Way)”, a marital short comedy for the Berlin-based Messter Film. Messter Film became the center of the German film industry and played a prominent role in the development of the longer-running feature film. Between 1914 and 1918, Wiene wrote the screenplays for fifteen movies he directed for Messter Film.

In 1919, Wiene and Austrian film director Heinz Hanus founded the “Association of Film Directors in Vienna”. This association was a member of what would become the Filmbund, a professional support group for the Austrian film industry which was on the verge of collapse. In 1920, Wiene directed what is probably his best known film, the 1920 silent horror film “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari”, considered the archetypal work of German Expressionist cinema. The script was written by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, both pacifists, and was inspired by their experiences with the military during World War I.

After the success of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, Robert Wiene became an independent director for the remainder of his career. In 1923 for Neumann-Film-Produktion GmbH, he directed and wrote the screenplay for the 1923 silent drama “Raskolnikow”, an adaption of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s epic 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment”. An avant-garde psychological drama, it starred Ukrainian-born actor Gregori Chmara and premiered in Berlin. This film also had a strong influence on the development of German cinema.

Wiene continued to direct and write screenplays for silent films until 1928. His final silent film was the 1928 “Unfug der Liebe (Folly of Love)” for Max Glass Film. Austrian director Max Glass wrote the screenplay and produced the film, which starred Maria Jacobini and the British actor Jack Trevor. Wiene directed his first sound film, the 1930 drama “Der Andere (The Other)”, at Berlin’s Terra Studios. He shot a French-language version entitled “The Prosecutor Hallers” immediately afterwards with different actors at the same studio. Wiene directed three more films in 1931: “Panik in Chicago”, “Der Liebesexpress (The Love Express)”, and in collaboration with French director Pierre Billon, “Nuits de Venise (Venetian Nights)”.

In 1933, Robert Wiene directed “Taifun (Typhoon)”, a drama film based on writer Melchior Lengyei’s 1911 play of the same name. This was Wiene’s last film in Germany. In May of 1933 four months after the National Socialist Party took power, the film was banned. The film was seen by the censors as portraying Asian characters as more noble than Europeans; the censors were also concerned the film’s portrayal of the French justice system as incompetent might undermine the audience’s faith in the German system. The film was heavily reshot with an altered plot under the title “Polizeiakte 909”; the Japanese were now portrayed as unsympathetic villains.

Wiene relocated to Budapest in 1933 and never returned to Germany. In September of that year, he started directing the 1934 “Eine Nacht in Venedig (One Night in Venice)” for Hunnia-Film, at that time the most significant sound film studio in Hungary. Two versions were shot simultaneously, a German language film and a Hungarian version with Hungarian actors. After finishing the film, Wiene traveled to London and finally to Paris where he attempted to make a sound remake of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” with artist Jean Cocteau.

Robert Wiene died in Paris from cancer on the seventeenth of July in 1938, ten days before the end of production on his spy thriller “Ultimatum”. The film was finished posthumously by his friend Robert Sildmak, a prominent film director at Universal Films in Hollywood. Robert Wiene was buried at Paris’s Bagneux Cemetery in a temporary concession plot that was later recycled. There is no trace of his grave today. Only twenty of the ninety films Wiene created are currently known to exist.

Note: Robert Wiene’s 1924 silent horror film “The Hands of Orlac” was based on French writer Maurice Renard’s novel “Les Mains d’Orlac”. It starred Russian Empire-born actress Alexandra Sorina and the prominent German-born British actor Conrad Veidt, who had played the murderous somnambulist in Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. The film was shot at the studios of Listo Film in Vienna and had its Berlin premiere in September of 1924.

Several reconstructed versions of the film exist today with new sound scores by such composers as Henning Lohner, Paul Mercer, and Donald Sosin. German-émigré film director Karl Freund, as a final assignment with Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, directed a 1935 adaption of Renard’s novel under the title “Mad Love”. This film starred Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol, Frances Drake as Yvonne Orlac, and Colin Clive, known for his 1931 role of Henry Frankenstein, as the somnambulist Stephen Orlac.

In 1960, French filmmaker Edmond T. Gréville directed both an English and French version of “The Hands of Orlac”, based on his screenplay of Renard’s novel, that starred Mel Ferrer, Dany Carrel, Lucile Saint-Simon and Christopher Lee. The film’s cinematography was done by Desmond Dickinson and featured a score by French pianist and jazz composer Claude Bolling.

Second Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, (Alexandra Sorina and Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin

Third Insert Images: Robert Wiene, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, 1930, (Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Willy Hameister

Fourth Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, (Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin

Bottom Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, 1930, (Werner Drauss and Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Willy Hameister

Mauritz Stiller: Film History Series

Mauritz Stiller, “Vingarne (The Wings)”, 1916, Silent Film Scenes, Screenwriters Axel Esbensen and Mauritz Stiller, Cinematography Julius Jaenzon, Original Running Time 69 Minutes, Distributor Svenska Biografteatem

Born in July of 1883 in Helsinki, Mauritz Stiller, birth name Moshe Stiller, was a Swedish film director of Finnish Jewish descent known for his pioneering work in the Swedish film industry. His family of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage originally lived in Russia and Poland before settling in Finland. At that time, these countries were autonomous regions of the Imperial Russia under Emperor Alexander III.

Mauritz Stiller was raised by family friends after the death of his father in 1887 and the subsequent suicide of his mother. Interested in acting from an early age, he was offered the opportunity to practice his acting skills in the city theaters of Åbo and Helsinki. In his twenties, Stiller received a draft notice to enter the army of Czar Nicholas II, who as the last Emperor of Russia had ascended to the throne in November of 1894. Instead of entering service, Stiller chose exile and settled in Sweden where he later became a citizen in 1921.

By 1912 at the age of twenty-nine, Stiller had become a member of Sweden’s developing silent film industry. He initially was a scriptwriter, actor and director for short silent films. Stiller appeared as an actor in four films in 1912, his first being the role of a passenger in the 1912 “Trädgårdsmästaren (The Gardener). After these four films, Stiller focused on his writing and directing; he acted in only two more of his films: the 1914 “När Svärmor Regerar (When the Mother-in-Law Reigns)” and the 1916 “Vingarne (The Wings)”.

As his skills developed, Mauritz Stiller began directing feature-length productions. His 1918 feature “Thomas Graals Bästa Bam (The First Child of Thomas Graal)” received critical acclaim. This comedy on the best way to raise children starred actor and director Victor Sjöström and the stage and film actress Karin Molander. By 1920, Stiller had directed more than forty films and was considered a leading figure in the Swedish film industry. Among these films was the 1919 sixteenth-century crime drama “Herr Arnes Pengar (Sir Arne’s Treasure)” based on author Selma Lagerlöf’s 1903 “The Treasure”. This silent film was the first to feature illustrator Alva Lundin’s handwritten artistic title cards.

Stiller met a young actress named Greta Gustafsson at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. He cast her in the secondary but important role of Elizabeth Dohna in his 1924 romantic drama film “Gösta Berlings Saga (The Atonement of Gosta Berling)”. In 1925, Stiller accepted an offer from Louis B. Mayer to direct for Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios. He relocated to the United States accompanied by Gustafsson, soon to be given her acting name Greta Garbo, and the actor Einer Hanson, who had appeared in Stiller’s films. Both actors became successful at MGM; although Hanson achieved greater success with his move to Paramount Pictures.

Mauritz Stiller was assigned to direct the 1926 “The Temptress”, Greta Garbo’s second film with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. After repeated arguments with the studio’s executives, he was replaced on the film by Fred Niblo, who had recently finished work as principal director on the 1925 silent epic “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ”, the third highest-grossing silent film in history. His contract terminated, Stiller was immediately signed by Paramount Pictures for whom he made three successful films in 1927. However because of continuing disagreements with Paramount’s executives, Stiller was terminated in the middle of his fourth film.

Mauritz Stiller returned to Sweden in 1927; he died in Stockholm from pleurisy, an infection in his lungs, at the age of forty-five in November of 1928. His body is interred at the Northern Cemetery in the Solna Municipality of Stockholm. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Stiller was given a star in 1960 on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A monument in Stiller’s honor was erected in the southern Swedish city of Kristianstad.

Notes: Mauritz Stiller’s 1916 silent film “Vingarne (The Wings)” was adapted from Danish author Herman Joachim Bang’s 1902 novel “Mikaël”, based on the life of sculptor Auguste Rodin. The novel would serve, eight years later, as the source for director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1924 silent film “Mikaël: The Story of the Third Sex”. Besides being an early homosexual-themed film, “Vingarne” is noted for its plot presented through flashbacks, as well as its use of a framing story, a main narrative that sets the stage for a set of shorter stories. The film is largely lost; only thirty minutes of its original seventy minute length still survives. There are several versions of the remaining film with added soundtracks on YouTube.

“Vingarne” tells the story of a devious countess (Danish actress Lili Bech) who comes between gay sculptor Claude Zoret (Norwegian actor Egil Eide) and his bisexual lover and model Mikaël (Swedish actor Lars Hanson). This leads to Zoert’s death at the base of a statue depicting Mikaël as the mythological winged Icarus. It should be noted that openly gay Swedish actor Nils Asther, later a Hollywood star, had his first film role, albeit uncredited, in Stiller’s “Vingarne”.

A biography of Nils Asther can be found in the Film History Series archive of this site.

Top Insert Image: Arnold Genthe, “Mauritz Stiller” Date Unknown, Photo Proof

Second Insert Image: Mauritz Stiller, “Hotel Imperial”, 1927, Film Poster, Cinematographer Bert Glennen, Production Famous Players-Lasky, Paramount Pictures

Third Insert Image: Roger Tillberg, “Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Mauritz Stiller, “The Street of Sin”, 1928, Film Poster, Cinematographer Bert Glennon, Harry Fischbeck and Victor Milner, Production Adolph Zucker and Jesse Lasky, Paramount Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Mauritz Stiller, Pola Negri, George Siegmann”, 1927, Film Set of “Hotel Imperial”, Gelatin Silver Print

James Searle Dawley: Film History Series

James Searle Dawley, “Snow White”, 1916, Silent Fantasy Film, Cinematographer and Producer H. Lyman Broening, Running Time 63 Minutes, Starring Marguerite Clark and Creighton Hale, Production Company Famous Players Film Company

Born at Del Norte, Colorado in October of 1877, James Searle Dawley was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, stage actor and playwright. During his career, he directed over three-hundred short films and fifty-six features with such actors as Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, and John Barrymore. Dawley also wrote several Broadway productions as well as plays for repertory companies.

The youngest of three sons born to James Andres Dawley and Angela Searle, James Dawley received his initial education in Denver and later attended the city’s Saxton College of Oratory. As a child, he permanently lost the vision in his right eye, an injury which challenged his later career as actor and film director. At the age of seventeen, Dawley had his first stage performance as François in the Lewis Morrison Company’s 1895 New York City production of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “Richelieu”. Three years later, now billed as J. Searle Dawley, he served both as performer and stage manager for the Morrison Company’s productions.

Dawley left the Morrison Company and performed on the vaudeville circuit from 1899 to 1902. He returned to the theatrical stage as a member of the Edna May Spooner Stock Company based in Brooklyn. Actress and playwright Edna May Spooner and her family were a fixture in Brooklyn’s theater life and operated its Bijou Theater for several years. Recognized for his past production experience, Dawley both performed on stage and managed the company’s productions. He also wrote and produced fifteen plays during his five years with the company.

In May of 1907, J. Searle Dawley made the decision to start a career in the rapidly expanding motion-picture industry. He was hired by Edwin Porter, the production head at Edison Studios, to serve as director for the company’s main film facilities in the Bronx, New York. His first project as director was the now-lost 1907 comedy “The Nine Lives of a Cat”. After experiencing some initial frustrations, Dawley quickly established himself as a reliable director who could produce a wide range of releases, often two or more films in a single week. Through his career with Edison Studios, he directed over two-hundred single-reel films. Among these were “Bluebeard”, adaptions of both “Michael Strogoff” and “Faust”, and “Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest”, noteworthy for its special effects and an early screen appearance by film director D. W. Griffith.

By 1910, Dawley was directing increasingly elaborate productions for the Edison Company. Although they were still one-reel films, they included the 1910 Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” and two presentations of historic naval battles: “The Stars and Stripes”, a depiction of John Paul Jones’s victory in 1779, and “The Battle of Trafalgar”, the story of British Admiral Lord Nelson’s 1805 triumph over the French and Spanish warships. In both of these productions, Dawley oversaw the creation of large maritime sets inside Edison’s Bronx studio, construction of the ships’ decks, and simulated views of the battles using small-scale models and silhouettes.

In 1910, J. Searle Dawley was screenwriter and director for the longer running (fourteen minute) silent horror “Frankenstein”, the earliest known screen adaption of Shelley’s novel. Staged and filmed in three days at the Bronx studio in mid-January, Dawley used special effects for the creation of the monster. A burning papier-mâché human figure was shot on red film, separately and in reverse, and then spliced into the master negative for the final print. This reverse action produced a creation scene in which the monster forms slowly as it rises from a cauldron of blazing chemicals.

In the same year, Dawley traveled to California and set up Edison Studios at Long Beach. This new arrangement required him to write more screenplays and direct film productions on both coasts. Dawley made several attempts to create films longer than the fifteen-minute one-reel film; however, Edison had little confidence in the attention span of the audience. In 1913, Edwin Porter hired Dawley to work with him at Adolph Zuckor’s new studio, Famous Players Film Company. Dawley directed its first thirteen releases, among which was the romantic comedy “An American Citizen”, the first feature film for actor John Barrymore.

After leaving Famous Players in May of 1914, James Searle Dawley, along with Frank L. Dyer and J. Parker Read Jr, established the film company Dyreda. In the fall of 1914, arrangements were made with World Film Corporation to distribute their releases; Dyreda would later merge with Metro Pictures, a forerunner of Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Dawley returned in 1916 to Famous Players, later Paramount Pictures, for two years. During this period, he directed over a dozen films, including “Mice and Men” and “Snow White”, both in 1916; two 1917 films “”Bab’s Diary” and “The Seven Swans”; and the 1918 “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, a five-reel film produced by Adolph Zucker and Jesse L. Lasky.

Dawley freelanced as a director for several years before joining Fox Films in 1921. The last feature film he directed was the 1923 drama “Broadway Broke”, produced by Murray W. Garsson and distributed by Lewis J. Selznick. Months later, Dawley made his final directorial works in collaboration with the inventor of the first practical electronic amplifier Lee de Forest. Their two experimental sound films, “Abraham Lincoln” and “Love’s Old Sweet Song”, were both released in 1924. Dawley worked through the late 1920s and 1930s in radio broadcasting, journalism, and sound-film technologies.

James Searle Dawley married Grace Owens Givens in June of 1918; the couple remained together over thirty years until Dawley’s death, at the age of seventy-one, in March of 1949. He died of undisclosed causes at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Dawley’s ashes were interned in the columbarium at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory. Silent film star Mary Pickford and director Walter Lang spoke at the service. Dawley’s personal papers, scrapbooks and several Edison production scripts are housed in the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California.

Note: Dawley’s 1916 “Snow White” was considered a lost-film destroyed in a vault fire. A substantially complete print with Dutch subtitles, albeit missing a few scenes, was located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1992. It was subsequently restored through the work of the George Eastman House, the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography.

Second Insert Image: James Searle Dawley, “The Harvest Moon”, 1920, Film Poster, Six-Reel Silent Film, Cinematographer Bert Dawley

Third Insert Image: James Searle Dawley, “Frankenstein”, 1910, Film Poster, One-Reel Silent Film, Cinematographer James White

Fourth Insert Image: James Searle Dawley, “A Virgin Paradise”, 1921, Film Poster, Eight-Reel Silent Film, Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg and Bert Dawley

Bottom Insert Image: “Marguerite Clark and Creighton Hale”, Silent Film Clip Photo, “Snow White”, 1916, Five-Reel Silent Film Director James Searle Dawley, Cinematographer H. Lyman Broening

Segundo de Chomón: Film History Series

Segundo de Chomón, “Hôtel Électrique”, 1908, Running Time 8 Minutes, Producer and Distributor Pathé Frères

Soundtrack Courtesy of Japan’s Euodia Chamber Ensemble

Born in the Aragon city of Teruel in October of 1871, Segundo Victor Aurelio Chomón y Ruiz was a cinematographer, film director and screenwriter. A pioneer in camera and optical techniques, he is regarded as the most significant Spanish silent film director in the international context. Known for his technical quality and creativity, Chomón worked with the most important film companies of the time, including Italia Films and Pathé Frères.

Segundo de Chomón was the son of Isaac Chomón Gil, a military doctor, and Luisa Ruiz Valero, born in the city of Calamocha located in the Teruel Province. It is believed he undertook engineering studies; however, there are no known records of graduation. Chomón resided in Paris between 1895 and 1897 where he discovered the cinematic works of Auguste and Louis Lumière, French pioneers best known for the films produced through their Cinématographe motion picture system. While in Paris, Chomón met French silent film actress Julienne Alexandrine Mathieu whom he would later marry. In addition to acting in Chomón’s films, Mathieu would collaborate with Chomón on scripts and special effects.

Between 1897 and 1898, Chomón fulfilled his military service in Cuba; upon his return to Paris, he became interested in film production. At Georges Méliès’s recently founded film company Star Films, Chomón worked alongside his wife in the workshop where they hand-colored film, frame by frame. He designed some celluloid templates that facilitated this work and achieved greater precision in color delimitation. With slight changes, this system was later patented by Pathé Frères under the name “Pathécolor”. At the turn of the century, Chomón relocated to Barcelona where, acting as an agent for Pathé Frères, he opened a workshop to publicize and distribute the company’s films.

In 1901, Segundo de Chomón began making films on an independent basis with distribution through Pathé. His first film was the 1901 silent short “Descente du Mont Serrat”. In the following year, Chomón produced a series of films which were inspired by the stories he found through the book publisher Editorial Calleja. He experimented in this period with double exposures and techniques to create gigantic effects which he used successfully in his 1903 “Gulliver en ie Pais de los Gigantes”. Due to the quality of his films, Chomón received financial support for his filmmaking from Charles Pathé who desired to compete with Georges Méliès’s company, Star Films.

Now a valuable asset to Pathé, Chomón relocated in 1905 back to Paris, where in addition to directing films, he was given charge of the color stenciling workshop. In 1907, he was selected to co-direct the remake of Pathé’s top director Ferdinand Zecca’s 1903 “Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ”. Chomón’s most productive years were between 1907 and 1912, a period in which he worked with Zecca and such talented directors as Gaston Velle and Émile Cohl. In 1912, Chomón accepted an invitation to make films in Italy. He worked on the special effects for other directors’ films, most notably Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 epic “Cabiria”. Pastrone recipocally collaborated on Chomón’s last directorial film, the 1916 “La Guerra e il Sogno di Momi”.

After his move to Italy, Segundo de Chomón’s own films became less frequent. In 1924, he worked in a collaboration with Swiss engineer Ernest Zellinger on a color cinema system for which they won the Gold Medal at the International Exhibition of Photography, Optics and Cinematography in Turin. Instead of directing his own films, Chomón primarily worked in visual effects for the films of others, including Italian actor and director Guido Brignone’s 1925 “Meciste in Hell” and French actor and director Abel Gance’s 1927 “Napoléon”. Both these directors were highly regarded: Guido Brignone was the first Italian director to win at the Venice Film Festival, and Gance’s epic “Napoléon” is widely considered one of the greatest and innovative films of the silent era, if not all time.

Chomón was a meticulous and perfectionist technician who would spend months to perfect a special effect, even if it would only last a few seconds on screen. In his films, he used a vast repertory of special effect techniques including colorization of film, the use of models, double exposures, overprints, schüfftan effects (covering part of the camera’s view with a mirror to create an image with multiple parts), pyrotechnics, camouflage and crank pitch, the removal of an object while the camera is turned off and then on to cause a disappearance.

Best remembered for his special effect films, Segundo de Chomón died in Paris on the second of May in 1929 at the age of fifty-seven. Over the course of his career, he received credits on one hundred forty-five films from 1901 to 1916.

Notes: The 1908 silent French comedy-fantasy film “Hôtel Électrique” was directed by Segundo de Chomón and produced by Pathé Frères. The film’s cast included just Segundo de Chomón as Betrand and his wife Julienne Mathieu as Laura. This eight-minute film is one of the earliest uses of stop motion animation in history, though it is not the first. Chomón used the technique in his 1906 film “Le Théâtre de Bob”, which animated puppets, and the American director J. Stuart Blackton used stop motion for his 1907 “The Haunted Hotel” produced by the American Vitagraph Company. However, the “Hôtel Électrique” is unique in its early use of pixilation, a technique using live actors as the frame-by-frame subjects.

From 1907 to 1909, Julienne Mathieu was credited in at least forty-two films, many of them shot by Chomón with her assistance on special effects. She also appeared in films by Ferdinard Zecca, Gaston Velle, Albert Capellani, and Lucien Nonguet. Mathieu ended her film career in 1909. From 1912 to 1925, she is reported to have been living with her family in Turin, Italy. On the first of December in 1943, Julienne Alexandrine Mathieu died at the Ospizio della Carità (Hospice of Charity) in Chieri while the city was under German occupation after the fall of Fascist Italy.

In the Ultrawolves Archive, there is a 2018 article on Segundo de Chomón’s French 1908 colorized short silent film “La Grenouille (The Frog)”. This rather unusual film for the era can be located at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2018/07/15/segundo-de-chomon-la-grenouille-the-frog/

Second Insert Image: Segundo de Chomón, “Les Roses Magiques (The Magic Roses)”, 1906, Pathé Frères

Third Insert Image: Segundo de Chomón, “La Voyage sur la Planète Jupiter”, 1909, Pathé Frères

Bottom Insert Image: Segundo de Chomón, “Les Oeufs de Paques (Easter Eggs), 1907, Pathé Frères

Wesley Barry: Film History Series

Born in Los Angeles, California in August of 1907, Wesley E. Barry was an American actor, director and producer. A child star in silent films from 1915 to 1924, he made a successful transition in his adult years to other activities in the film industry.

In 1914 at the age of seven, Wesley Barry was noticed by a director for his distinctive facial features and given a contract with Kalem Studios, a production and distribution film company founded by screenwriter Frank J. Marion, Biograph production manager Samuel Long, and wealthy film distributor George Kleine. With his freckles covered with greasepaint, Barry made his screen debut in the 1915 “The Phoney Cannibal”, a silent short starring the child-star duo Ham Hamilton and Bud Duncan. His first appearance in a feature film was the role of a freckled school boy in Marshall Neilan’s 1917 “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”, which starred Mary Pickford as Rebecca.

Noted now for his freckles, Barry soon became a much demanded child actor. In 1919, he was in Neilan’s comedy drama “Daddy Long Legs”, which starred Mary Pickford, and Cecil B. DeMille’s adventure film “Male and Female”. Barry appeared in four silent films in 1920; but it was the success of Neilan and John McDernott’s 1920 comedy drama “Dinty”, specifically written for Barry, that made him a star in his own right. Throughout the 1920s, he appeared in twenty-two screen productions, among which were the 1922 “Penrod” with Our Gang actor Ernest “Ernie’ Morrison; the 1924 comedy “George Washington Jr.” with actress Gertrude Olmstead; and the 1924 sports comedy “Battling Bunyan” with Frank Campeau, known for his roles in cowboy westerns.

Wesley Barry, grown out of his infancy, made minor film appearances in sound films throughout the 1930s. He appeared in director John Ford’s 1937 drama “The Plough and the Stars”, which starred Barbara Stanwyck and Preston Foster, and Hal Roach’s musical comedy “Pick a Star”, released through MGM in 1937 and, later, by Astor Pictures in 1954. Barry did play the lead role the 1938 western “The Mexicali Kid” in which he played under the direction of Wallace For and opposite Jack Randall. He stopped acting regularly after his appearance in the 1939 “Stunt Pilot”; his last role on the big screen was an uncredited appearance in the 1943 baseball comedy “Ladies’ Day”.

Beginning in the 1940s, Barry directed and produced films, a career which would extend thirty years. For about a decade, he directed B movies including some in the “Joe Palooka” and “Bowery Boys” series. Barry also worked in the field of television where he directed several episodes of “Lassie”, the police dramas “Mod Squad” and “The Rookies”, and the western series starring Guy Madison, “The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok”. In 1952, Barry both directed the drama film “The Steel Fist”, starring Roddy McDowell, and co-produced Frank McDonald’s action film “Sea Tiger”. Among the westerns he directed were “The Secret of Outlaw Flats”, starring Guy Madison and Andy Devine, and “Trail Blazers” with Alan Hale Jr, both films released in 1953.

Wesley Barry founded his own production company Genie Production in the beginning of the 1960s. His first film though his studio, now considered a sci-fi cult classic, was the 1962 “The Creation of the Humanoids”. The film, starring Don Megowan, was based on the story of robots, disparagingly referred to as ‘clickers’, who provided android bodies to the dying, radiation-affected human race. Barry’s studio produced two more films in his lifetime: the animated 1963 fantasy “The Jolly Genie” and a 1965 television documentary “The Market”.

Barry also had a prolific career as an assistant director on many major motion pictures, most notably director Roger Corman’s 1967 American gangster film “The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre”, one of the few Corman films backed by a major Hollywood studio, in this case 20th Century Fox. Barry’s last credit as assistant director in the film industry was a 1975 episode of “The Rookies”. Wesley Barry died on the 11th of April of 1994 at the age of eighty-six in Fresno, California.

Note: Wesley Barry’s “The Creation of the Humanoids”, based on an original story and screenplay by Jay Simms, was produced on a limited budget, apparent from the film’s rudimentary sets and costumes. At a time when black and white film stock was still being used for many major productions, Barry and co-producer Edward J. Kay opted for the added expense of color film. The cinematography was done by twice-Academy Award winner Hal Mohr who used all his experience to make the best of the sets. The makeup artist was Jack Pierce who created the iconic “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein” makeups for Universal Pictures.

“The Creation of the Humanoids” can be found on disc and many cable venues. It is also located at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/tcoth44546478

Top Insert Image: John J. Mescall, “Wesley Barry”, 1935, Film Shot from “Night Life of the Gods”, Director Lowell Sherman

Second Insert Image: Film Poster, “The County Fair”, 1920 Silent Film, Directors Edmund Mortimer and Maurice Tourneur, Cinematogaphers René Guissart and Charles Van Enger

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wesley Barry and Molly Malone”, 1924, Publicity Card for “Battling Bunyan”, Card Stock, Director Paul Hurst, Cinematographer Frank Cotner

Fourth Insert Image: Film Poster, “Creation of the Humanoids”, 1962, Director Wesley Barry, Cinematographer Hal Mohr

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wesley Barry”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Cecil Milton Hepworth: Film History Series

Cecil Hepworth and Percy Snow, “Alice in Wonderland”, 1903, Silent Blcak and White Film, Cinematographer Cecil Hepworth, Hepworth Studios, Film Gifs

Born in the London borough of Lambeth in March of 1874, Cecil Milton Hepworth was a British film director and producer, screen writer, and inventor. Among the founders of the British film industry, he continually made films at his Hepworth Studios from 1897 to 1923,

Born to the magic-lantern showman and author Thomas Cradock Hepworth, Cecil Hepworth began working in the early stages of filmmaking under film pioneer Birt Acres, the inventor of the Birtac, Britain’s first 35 mm moving picture camera. He also worked during this time under film producer and distributor Charles Urban, a pioneer of documentary and educational films, many of them produced through the Kinemacolor motion picture color system. With the knowledge he acquired from this experience, Hepworth wrote in 1897 the first British book on filmmaking.

Hepworth and his cousin Monty Wicks founded the Hepworth Film Manufacturing Company, later renamed Hepworth Picture Plays. In 1899, they established Hepworth Studios, a small film studio in Walton-on-Thames in northwest Surrey. In 1901, the British director Percy Stow entered into a partnership with Hepworth until 1904 when Snow founded his Clarendon Film Company, a movie camera equipment company which made short films. Snow specialized in film effects and became co-director on the 1903 “Alice in Wonderland”, his second film with Hepworth Studios.

Cecil Hepworth was the inventor of the Hepworth Vivaphone, a 1910 early sound on disc system developed and marketed by the Hepworth Film Manufacturing Company. It was not a true synchronized sound system for film. The performers appearing in the films would typically synch their singing and speech to prerecorded phonograph records. The device and the short films produced on this system were distributed in Britain and later, beginning in 1913, to Canada and the United States.

Despite Hepworth’s increasingly outdated film style, Hepworth Studio continued making popular films into the 1920s. The studio had several successful films, including the 1905 “Rescue by Rover”, whose collie is considered the first canine film star, and the internationally successful 1919 “Alf’s Button”, the story of a British soldier whose magic button produces a wish-fulfilling genie. Despite these successes, Hepworth failed to raise the necessary capital to fund studio development. After the box office failure of the 1923 “Coming Thro the Rye”, Hepworth declared bankruptcy, which put the studio in receivership and ended his career as a director and producer. All of the original films in Hepworth’s possession were melted down by the receiver to sell the silver. Though some originals and copies have survived, many of the studio’s films are considered lost to history.

Cecil Hepworth, proud of his place in history, toured in later life with a lecture program on the birth of cinema. Among the films he had produced were several Charles Dickens adaptions, including “Oliver Twist” and “David Copperfield”, and a version of “Hamlet” starring Sir Johnston Forbes-Robinson, an actor considered the finest Hamlet of the Victorian era. So popular were Hepworth’s films that actress Alma Taylor, who starred in fourteen films by his studio, became one of the major British stars of the 1910s and early 1920s. Cecil Hepworth died in February of 1953 in Greenford, Middlesex, England at the age of seventy-eight.

Hepworth Studio’s 1903 British silent fantasy film “Alice in Wonderland” was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Snow. Only one copy of the original twelve-minute film is known to exist. The British Film Institute partially restored the film and its original film tinting and, in 2010, released the restoration with a running time of nine minutes. Filmed mostly in Oxford’s Port Meadow, it is the first movie adaption of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Instead of a flowing narrative found in the book, the story is seen through several vignettes taken from the novel.

The 1903 “Alice in Wonderland” starred May Clark, already a Hepworth Studio veteran at age eighteen, as Alice; Cecil Hepworth as The Frog Footman; Cecil’s wife Margaret Hepworth as the White Rabbit and the Red Queen of Hearts; Norman Whitten as the Mad Hatter and The Fish; and the two Faithfull brothers, Geoffrey and Stanley, as Playing Cards. The Hepworth’s family cat made its appearance as the Cheshire Cat. The film is notable for the early special effects work by Percy Snow, among which are Alice’s shrinking in the Hall of Many Doors and the regrown Alice stuck inside the White Rabbit’s tiny home.

Note: The restored 1903 “Alice in Wonderland” was released as a bonus feature on a 1996 British Broadcasting Company disc. It is now available from several sources including online venues. A full-length restoration with a piano soundtrack, which is available as a download, can be found at the Internet Archive located at: https://archive.org/details/AliceInWonderland1903

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Cecil Milton Hepworth”, circa 1910-1920

Three Insert Images: Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, 1895, Book Cover with Two Illustrations by John Tenniel, Publisher McMillan & Company, New York

Edward Everett Horton Jr: Film History Series

James Hargis Connelly, “Edward Everett Horton Jr, circa 1930s, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in Brooklyn, New York in March of 1886, Edward Everett Horton Jr. was an American character actor. A veteran of the stage, he was one of the actors who made the transition to Hollywood at the advent of the sound era. The pretentiously mannered dictation and pompous disposition of Horton’s film character enabled him to succeed in the theatrical, dialogue-driven comedies and musicals of the 1930s. Slightly coded queer characters in these early films, played by such talented actors as Clifton Webb, Franklin Pangborn and Horton, acted as a juxtaposition to the romantic-male stereotypes of that era.

Edward Everett Horton attended Boys’ High School in Brooklyn and Baltimore’s City College, a liberal arts college-preparatory school in Maryland. He was a student at Oberlin College in Ohio until his expulsion for pretending to jump off one of the college’s buildings; he threw a dummy from the roof. Horton attended the art courses at Brooklyn’s Polytechnic Institute for one year and changed to courses at Columbia University. After his performance at the university’s “The Varsity Show of 1909”, Horton and Columbia University parted ways amicably.

Horton’s stage career began in 1906 during his college years. He sang, danced and played small roles in college productions, vaudeville and Broadway productions. Horton, as manager and lead actor, played shows with actor Franklin Pangborn at New York City’s Majestic Theater on Broadway. In 1908, he joined noted actor Louis Mann’s theater troupe and learned all the basics: props, sound effects, acting and stage management. In 1909, Horton played the hysterical husband in actress Theda Bara’s Broadway production of “A Fool There Was” to great reviews. This play later became the 1915 silent film of the same name with Belgian actor Edward José as the husband.

Edward Horton moved to Los Angeles, California in 1919 and joined the Thomas Wilkes theatrical company at Los Angeles’s Majestic Theater. He also received a contract for three films at Vitagraph Studios, one of the most prolific film producers at that time. Horton’s first starring film role was in the 1922 comedy “Too Much Business”. Lent to Paramount, he achieved his biggest success in silent film with the role of the very proper English butler in the 1923 “Ruggles of Red Gap”. Horton followed this success with the leading role of a young classical composer in the 1925 “Beggar on Horseback”. Between 1927 and 1929, he starred in eight two-reel silent comedies that were produced by Harold Lloyd for Paramount Pictures.

In 1925, Horton purchased the Encino neighborhood property in the San Fernando Valley that would be his residence until his death. The twenty-one acre property named Belleigh Acres contained his own house as well as houses for his brother and sister with their respective families. Desiring to produce his own theatrical plays, Horton leased the Vine Street Theater, later known as the Huntington Hartford, in February of 1928. Among the plays he performed at the theater was “The Nervous Wreck” which co-starred silent film actress Lois Wilson; Horton had played in the original 1923 production with the Thomas Wilkes company. Although he ceased his stage production in early 1930, Horton would appear in many local productions in his later years.

Edward Horton, through his silent-comedy work with Educational Pictures in the late 1920s, made an smooth transition to sound films. Stage-trained, he found film work easily and appeared in two films for Warner Brothers: director Roy Del Ruth’s 1928 horror film “Terror” and Archie Mayo’s live-action 1929 “Sonny Boy”. Horton appeared in many 1930s’ comedy features and became well known for his supporting-role characters. Among these film roles were the reporter in the 1931 “Front Page’; the husband in Ernest Lubitsch’s 1933 “Design for Living”; Fred Astaire’s friend Egbert in the 1934 “Gay Divorcee”; Horace Hardwick in the 1935 musical comedy “Top Hat” starring Astaire and Ginger Rogers; and the paleontologist Alexander Lovett in Frank Capra’s 1937 adventure-fantasy film “Lost Horizon”.

In the 1940s, Horton appeared in several notable films including the 1941 “Here Comes Mr. Jordan’, the 1944 “Arsenic and Old Lace” with Cary Grant and Raymond Massey, and the 1961 “Pocket Full of Miracles”, among others. He continued to appear in stage productions and, beginning in 1945, became the host for radio’s “Kraft Music Hall”. With a starting appearance on television’s “The Chevrolet Tele-Theater in December of 1948, Horton began a notable television career as a guest star on such shows as “I Love Lucy”, “Dennis the Menace” and “The Real McCoys”. However for many television viewers, he remains best known for his voice role as the wise narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales in the animated series “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” which aired from 1959 to 1964.

Edward Horton’s long-term companion was the actor Gavin Gordon, who had been an actor with Horton’s theater company. They had both appeared in the 1931 Broadway production of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives” and in the 1961 film “Pocket Full of Miracles”. Fifteen years younger than Horton, Gordon starred as Greta Garbo’s leading man in the 1930 “Romance” and later played the role of Lord Byron in James Whale’s 1935 “The Bride of Frankenstein”. His distinctive voice enabled him to also appear in numerous radio dramas. Gavin Gordon died on his eighty-second birthday, the seventh of April in 1983.

Holding over one-hundred eighty acting credits, Edward Everett Horton was an actor with solid and professional performances throughout his career as a character actor. He passed away, at the age of eighty-four, in Los Angeles on the twenty-ninth of September in 1970. Horton’s remains are interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. For his contributions to the motion picture industry, he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6427 Hollywood Boulevard.

Notes: For those interested in more information on Edward Everett Horton, I recommend two sites which have biographical information as well as film clips of Horton’s work:

Dare Daniel- Podcast and Movie Reviews found at: https://daredaniel.com/2014/04/30/great-character-actors-edward-everett-horton/

The WOW Report article by writer and actor Stephen Rutledge located at: https://worldofwonder.net/bornthisday-beloved-character-actor-edward-everett-horton/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edward Everett Horton Jr”, circa 1930s, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Cinematographer David Abel, “Fred Astaire and Edward Everett Horton Jr”, 1935, Film Shot from “Top Hat”, Director Mark Sandrich, RKO, Rko/Kobal/Shutterstock (5883758s)

Third Insert Image: Cinematographers David Abel and Joseph F Biroc, “Edward Everett Horton Jr and Eric Blore”, 1937, Film Shot from “Shall We Dance”, Director Mark Sandrich

Fourth Insert Image: Cinematographer Sol Polito, “Cary Grant, Josephine Hull, Edward Everett Horton Jr, Jean Adair and Peter Lorre”, 1944, Film Shot from “Arsenic and Old Lace”, Director Frank Capra

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edward Everett Horton Jr and Carmen Miranda”, 1937, Publicity Shot for “Springtime in the Rockies”, Director Irving Cummings, Cinematographer Ernest Palmer

James Sibley Watson Jr: Film History Series

James Sibley Watson Jr., “Lot in Sodom”, 1933, Black and White Film, Twenty-Seven Minutes, Co-Producer: Melville Weber, Musical Score: Alex Wilder, Starring Friedrich Haak, Hildegarde Watson, Dorothea Haus, Lewis Whitbeck

Born in Rochester, New York in August of 1894, James Sibley Watson Jr. was an American medical doctor, publisher, photographer and experimenter in motion pictures. As an heir to the Western Union telegraph fortune created by his grandfathers, Don Alonzo Watson and Hiram Sibley, he grew up in a wealthy family that cultivated appreciation for the arts and encouraged an active, generous engagement in the Rochester community.

In June of 1916, Watson graduated from Harvard where he made two lifelong friends: poet, art collector and future business partner Scofield Thayer and poet-playwright E. E. Cummings. After graduation, Watson married the singer and actress Hildegarde Lasell who shared Watson’s passion and generous support for all fields of the arts. Despite his shy personality, Watson had several successful careers during his life. He became not only a practicing medical doctor but also contributed in both the publishing and film industries.

James Sibley Watson was directly involved in the Modernist literary movement through his association with the modernist magazine “The Dial”. Originally an editorial reader, he and Scofield Thayer purchased the magazine in 1918 and produced their first issue in January of 1920. The magazine would feature works by friends of Thayer and Watson such as Cummings and the versatile sculptor Gaston Lachaise. After Thayer suffered a nervous breakdown in 1926, poet and critic Marianne Moore took his place as editor. These three figures developed “The Dial” into one of the most influential magazines of American Modernism.

In the waning years of “The Dial” before it ceased publication in 1929, Watson became increasingly interested in experimental short films. He was joined in his endeavors by fellow Harvard graduate Melville Folsom Webber, who would become his permanent partner in film. The first film produced was a 1928 seventeen-minute ethnographic film entitled “Nass River Indians” which was distributed solely in Canada. Later in 1928, they produced a short avant-garde film “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, this film achieved widespread success and was hailed as a major contribution to motion film. The third film of their collaboration was a lesser known work, the 1930 parody of sound-film melodrama “Tomatos Another Day”.

James Watson and Melville Webber’s next serious avant-garde film was the 1933 “Lot in Sodom” based on the Biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Directed by Watson and Webber, the twenty-seven minute film used multiple experimental techniques, avant-garde imagery and presented strong allusions to sexuality, particularly homosexuality. Composer Alec Wilder, a close friend of Watson, recruited the actors for the production, acted as assistant director and composed the original experimental soundtrack. The cast included Friedrich Haak as Lot, James’s wife Hildegarde as Lot’s wife, Dorothea Haus as Lot’s daughter and Lewis Whitbeck as the angel.

Watson and Webber also produce a 1931 industrial film in collaboration with optical company Bausch & Lomb entitled “The Eyes of Science”. Multiple exposures, lap dissolves, color and micro-cinematography, as well as a number of unusual photographic effects, gave this film a technical interest much above the average. In 1938, Watson, this time in collaboration with filmmaker Ken Edwards, was engaged by the Kodak Research Laboratories to produce an industrial film on its manufacturing process for film and cameras. In “Highlights and Shadows”, Watson used the multiple exposure imagery he had used in his previous films to make the tool and die drill presses, assembly lines of camera parts, and the film coating process every bit as expressive and interesting as an MGM historic drama. The film featured a score performed by the symphony orchestra of the Eastman School of Music directed by Dr. Howard Hanson.

After his work with “The Dial” and motion pictures, James Sibley Watson continued his medical career, with a specialization in gastrointestinal studies. The first color photographs of the stomach’s interior have been credited to him. Watson kept up his correspondence with E. E. Cummings, Alex Wilder and others from his days at “The Dial”. In the 1980s, he founded a private press, the Sigma Foundation, with writer and publisher Dale Davis. After Watson’s death in March of 1982, his second wife Nancy Watson Dean appointed Davis as executor and sold the Watson papers that Davis had compiled to the New York Public Library.

Note:The full-length 1933 “Lot and Sodom” by James Sibley Watson Jr. can be found at the Internet Archive located at: https://archive.org/details/Lot_in_Sodom_1933

An excellent 1975 article written by James Sibley Watson Jr. on his production of the films “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Lot in Sodom” was published in the University of Rochester Library Bulletin. The article can be found at: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/3507

The 1938 black and white film “Highlights and Shadows” and an article on its production can be found at the online Eastman Museum site located at: https://www.eastman.org/highlights-and-shadows

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “James Sibley Watson Jr.”, circa 1930-1940, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

Remaining Insert Images: James Sibley Watson Jr, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, 1928, Film Scene Gifs

Dziga Vertov: Film History Series

Dziga Vertov, “Man with a Movie Camera”, 1929, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, Silent Film, Running Time 68 Minutes, All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration/Dovzhenko Film Studios

“Man with a Movie Camera” is a 1929 experimental film which was written and directed by the Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director Dziga Vertov. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary film-making which combined improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth or hidden subjects. This style would sometimes involve stylized set-ups and interaction, at times provocative, between the filmmaker and the subject.

The cinematographer was Mikhail Kaufman, the younger brother of Vertov and the actor who played the man of the film. The film was edited by Vertov’s wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, who became known for her documentaries on World War II and for her work as co-director of the 1945 “The Fall of Berlin”, the 1946 Stalin Prize winner. The film is famous for its cinematic techniques which included multiple exposures, fast and slow motion, split screens, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, and jump cuts, in which footage from a scene is removed to render a jump in time.

“Man with a Movie Camera” presents urban life in Moscow, Kyiv, and Odesa during the late 1920s. Ordinary Soviet citizens are shown, from dawn to dusk at work and at play, in scenes where they interact with the structure of everyday life. Divided into six separate parts, one for each film reel printed, the film is done in an avant-garde style with varying subject matter. Mixed in with scenes of laborers at work and sporting scenes are scenes of Mikhail Kaufman traveling to locations and setting up his camera, as well as Svilova cutting and editing strips of film. Several staged situations are also on the film, including a spliced scene of falling chess pieces played backwards.

Dziga Vertov was a member of a movement of filmmakers know as the kinoks whose mission was to abolish all non-documentary styles of film making. Most of his films were controversial and despised by many filmmakers. Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” was a response to critics who rejected his previous film “A Sixth Part of the World”. Produced in 1926, it depicted through a travelogue format the multitude of Soviet people in remote areas and the wealth of the nation. Although well received by Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party, prominent critics gave it bad reviews.

“Man with a Movie Camera” was not always a highly regarded work; it was criticized for both its stark experimentation and for its staging. Vertov’s Soviet contemporaries criticized its focus on form rather than content. The pace of the film’s editing, four times faster than a typical film of the era, with about seventeen hundred individual shots, bothered many viewers and critics. Today it is regarded by many as one of the great films ever made; it ranked nine in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the world’s best films. Throughout the years, many notable composers have written soundtracks for the film.

Note: Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” in its entirety can be seen on YouTube and on the DailyMotion website located at: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x21992b

Teinosuke Kinugasa: Film History Series

Teinosuke Kinugasa, “Kurutta Ippeiji (Page of Madness)”, 1926/1975, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematogapher Kōhei Sugiyama, Seventy-one Minutes, Kinugasa Productions/New line Cinema

Born in January of 1896 in Kameyama located in the northern prefecture of Mie, Teinosuke Kinugasa was a Japanese film maker. He began his career as an onnagata, an actor who specialized in female roles, and performed in the silent films of the Nikkatsu Studio, Japan’s oldest major movie studio founded in 1912.

Kinugasa started directing in the early 1920s when Japanese cinema began using actresses in its films. He worked for various producers, including Shozo Makino considered one of the pioneering directors of Japanese film. Kinugasa became an independent director and producer to make what is considered his best known film “A Page of Madness”. Lost for forty five years, the film was discovered by Kinugasa in his storehouse in 1971 and re-released in 1975 with a new print and score.

Released in September of 1926, the silent film “A Page of Madness” is part of the work of the Shinkankakuha, an avant-garde group of Japanese modernist artists known as the School of New Perceptions which sought to produce direct, intuitive sensations to its subjects through dramatic and theatrical strategies. Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, is credited on the film with the original storyline and also worked on the film’s scenario with Banko Sawada and Minoru Inuzuka, who became well known for his later scripts on the Zatoichi film series.

The film takes place in a countryside asylum where a janitor interacts with various patients with mental illnesses. His daughter arrives to visit her mother who happens to be a inmate in the asylum, gone insane due to her husband, the janitor. Feeling guilty, her husband had taken a job at the asylum to care for her. After hearing from his daughter the plans of her marriage, the janitor becomes worried due to the belief that his wife’s mental illness might cause the marriage to be canceled. The stress of his wife’s condition and the impending marriage of his daughter causes the janitor to lose control of the difference between dreams and reality. He experiences fantasies of taking his wife from the asylum and his daughter marrying a bearded inmate. He finally returns to a sense of realtiy after his dreams of providing happy-faced masks to the inmates.

Teinosuk Kinugasa’s “A Page of Madness” and his later 1928 silent film “Jûjiro (Crossroads)”, the first Japanese film to be commercially released in Europe, are both praised for their inventive camera work, which has been compared to Germany’s Expressionist work of the same period. In “Crossroads”, Kinugasa dispensed with chronological construction and instead used flashbacks to stimulate the mind of the main character. He also used a drab gray setting and an experimental camera technique which focused attention on one significant detail at a time, such as a hand.

Following a period of silent films, Kinugasa directed jidaigeki, period dramas most often set in the Edo period of Japanese history, at the Shochiku Studios where he helped to establish the career of film and stage actor Chōjirō Hayashi, known by his professional name Kazuo Hasegawa. After the war, Kinugasa produced films for Daiei Studios, including lavish costume dramas and films such as the 1946 “Aru Yo No Tonosama (Lord for a Night)”, which won the first Mainichi Film Award for Best Film, and the 1952 “Daibutsu Kaigen (Dedication of the Great Buddha)” which was entered into the 1953 Cannes Film Festival.

In 1953, Kinugasa wrote and directed the 1953 jidaigeki film “Jigokumon (Gate of Hell)”. This film, one of the most internationally famous of all Japanese films, exemplified Kinugasa’s mastery of period film in its meticulous reproduction of a historical period. Produced during the golden age of Japanese cinema, the film was the first color work released by Daiei Film and also the first Japanese color film to be released outside of Japan. The film won the grand prize award at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, a 1055 Academy Honorary Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1954, and the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Color. Kinugasa’s film also won the Golden Leipard at the Locarno International Film Festival and the 1954 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The director of fifteen films, many of them award winners, Teinosuk Kinugasa died at the age of eighty-six from cerebral thrombosis on February 26th of 1982 in Kyoto, Japan. He was the first Japanese motion-picture director to present his story from the point of view of one of the characters and thus create a subjective world in a film. He also pioneered in the use of flashbacks and in the creation of a visual atmospheric effect.

Note: Teinosuk Kinugasa’s “Page of Madness” is available in its entirety on YouTube located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb6JEY3M_Ag

Second Insert Image: Film Scene, Teinosuke Kinugasa, “Dai Chushingura”, 1932, Starring Jusaburo Bando and Chojiro Hayashi, First Sound Version of the Classic Story, 139 Minutes

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Teinosuke Kinugasa”, circa 1912-1920, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Film Scene, Teinosuka Kinugasa, “Jujiro (Crossroads)”, 1928, Starring Akiko Chihaya, Toshinosuke Bando and Yukiko Ogawa, 88 Minutes

Nils Asther: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Nils Asther”, July of 1932, Publicity Shot for Cine-Mundial, A New York-based Spanish Magazine

Born in Copenhagen in January of 1897, Nils Anton Althild Asther was a Swedish gay actor who was active in Hollywood from 1926 until the mid-1950s. He was the son of Anton Andersson Asther and Hildegard Augusta Åkerlund, who had accepted his father’s proposal but was unwed at the time of Nils’s birth. Asther spent his first year as a foster child and rejoined his parents after their marriage on May 29th of 1898 in the city of Malmö. He grew up in a deeply religious Lutheran home, where homosexuality was considered a sin by the church and viewed as a disease by Swedish society.

Nils Asther, still a young man, moved to Stockholm where he studied acting under the tutelage of Swedish silent-film and stage actress Augusta Lindberg. Through the endorsement of his teacher, he received his first theatrical engagement at Lorensbergsteatern, the art performance theater in the city of Gothenburg. Asther performed in several productions in Stockholm which included two plays in 1923, “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “ The Admirable Crichton”, and the 1924 production of “Othello” at the Royal Dramatic Theater.

In 1916 at the age of nineteen, Asther was cast by the pioneer Swedish film director Mauritz Stiller for his silent film “Vingarne (The Wings)”. This production was based the novel “Mikaël” by the internationally recognized Danish author Herman Bang. It starred silent-film actors Egil Eide, Lars Hanson, and Lill Bech, with Nils Asther in a supporting role. Besides being an early gay-themed film, it is recognized for it innovative use of a framing story, a main narrative which is divided into a set of shorter stories, and for its use of flashbacks as the primary plot source. Although only thirty minutes of its seventy-minute length survived, a 1987 restoration used still photos and title cards to bridge the missing sections.

Now residing in Copenhagen, Nils Asther received support from actor Aage Hertel, a member of the Royal Danish Theater and a leading actor at Nordisk Film. Between 1918 and 1926, Asther appeared in a number of film roles in Denmark, Sweden and Germany. After being approached by a representative from United Artists, he traveled to Hollywood where he was given the role of George Shelby in director Delmer Lord’s “Topsy and Eva”, a 1927 silent drama produced by Feature Productions. By 1928 Asther’s suave appearance placed him in leading roles; he soon played opposite such stars as Marion Davies and Joan Crawford.

Asther appeared in director Harry Beaumont’s 1928 “Our Dancing Daughters”, a silent drama depicting the dangers of loose morals among the young. The film cast included John Mack Brown and Joan Crawford; it was this film role of Charleston-dancing, Prohibition-era drinking Diana Medford that launched Joan Crawford’s career. Asther was next given the leading role of handsome Prince de Gace, who played opposite Greta Garbo’s role of Lillie Sterling, in director Sidney Franklin’s 1929 drama “Wild Orchids”. Though often listed as a silent film, it was released as a non-talking film with orchestral score, sound effects, and title cards for dialogue. Asther had previously known Garbo in Sweden and would continue to be close friends; they appeared together in a second film of the same year, the MGM romantic drama “The Single Standard”.

With the arrival of sound in film, Nils Asther began voice and diction lessons to minimize his Nordic accent. Due to his accent, many of his early roles in sound films were characters of foreign origins. Asther appeared with Robert Montgomery and, once again, with Joan Crawford in Clarence Brown’s 1932 drama “Letty Lynton”, which recounts the historical murder allegedly committed by nineteenth-century Glasgow socialite madeleine Smith, played by Crawford. In 1933, he was given the role of General Yen in Frank Capra’s drama war film “The Bitter Tea of General Yen”, where he played opposite Barbara Stanwyck and, after its premiere, received good reviews for his portrayal.

After an alleged breach of contract led to a studio-based blacklist, Asther was forced to work in England between the years 1935 and 1940. He made six films in England before his return to Hollywood. Upon his return, Asther made nineteen more films before 1949; however, he was mostly given small supporting roles from which his career never returned to its former height. During the early 1950s, Asther attempted to revive his career with appearances on television which was becoming a rapidly growing phenomenon in the United States. Managing only to secure roles in a small number of minor television series, he decided in 1958 to return to Sweden. Asther had four film roles and an engagement with a local theater before 1963, at which time he retired from acting and devoted himself to painting.

Nils Asther passed away on the 13th of October in 1981, at the age of eighty-four, at the Farsta Hospital in Stockholm. He is buried in the village of Hotagen, located in Jämtland, Sweden. Asther was inducted in 1960 into the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the film industry; his star is located at 6705 Hollywood Boulevard.

Asther was a gay man in a time when it was both a personal and professional social stigma. Although the film industry in the 1920s accepted gay actors with little reservation, the actors had to remain discreet about their sexual orientation. In August of 1930, Asther entered into a lavender marriage with Vivian Duncan, one of the his costars from the 1927 “Topsy and Eva”. This turbulent marriage produced one daughter and resulted, after much media discussion, in a divorce in 1932.

Nils Asther’s memoir, “The Road of the Jester: Not a God’s Tale: A Memoir”, was published posthumously in 1988 in Stockholm. In this volume, he mentions relationships he had in the 1930s with director Mauritz Stiller and Swedish author Hjalmar Bergman. Asther also had a long-term relationship with actor and stuntman Ken DuMain, whom he met on Hollywood Boulevard in the early 1940s.

Top Insert Image: George Hurrell, “Nils Asther”, circa 1930s, MGM Publicity Still, 25.4 x 33 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Nils Asther and Greta Garbo”, 1929, MGM Publicity Shot

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Nils Asther”, French Postcard by Europe, No. 909, MGM Studio Publicity Shot, Date Unknown

Fourth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Nils Asther”, Date Unknown, Publicity Shot, John Kobal Foundation, Getty Images

Bottom Insert Image: George Hurrell, “Nils Asther and Joan Crawford”, 1932, MGM Publicity Shot

William Haines: Film History Series

Photographers Unknown, “William Haines”, Date Unknown, Studio Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in Staunton, Virginia in January of 1900, Charles William Haines was an American actor and interior designer. He was the third child of seven siblings, two of which died in infancy, born to George Adam Haines, a cigar maker, and Laura Virginia (Matthews) Haines. He became fascinated at an early age with motion pictures and stage performances.

At the age of fourteen, William Haines ran away from home accompanied by an unidentified young man. They both gained employment at the DuPont factory in Hopewell, Virginia, where they earned fifty dollars a week producing nitrocellulose which in its finished form is used for photography. Tracked by the police, Haines made an arrangement with his parents where he could remain in Hopewell and, with his earnings, send support to his family. The two boys remained in Hopewell until the 1915 fire which destroyed most of the city.

Haines relocated to New York City until 1917, when a family crisis caused him to move to his family’s new home in Richmond, Virginia, to lend financial and emotional support. With the family’s recovery in 1919, Haines returned to New York City and settled in the growing gay community of Greenwich Village. He worked at various odd jobs and eventually gained employment as a model. Haines entered the Goldwyn Pictures’s contest, “New Faces of 1922”, and was discovered by Bijou Fernandez, a silent film actress and theatrical agent. Signed to a forty dollar per week contract with Goldwyn Pictures, he traveled to Hollywood in March of 1922 along with fellow contestant Eleanor Boardman.

William Haines initially played uncredited roles; his first significant casting was a high-profile role in director King Vidor’s 1923 silent drama “Three Wise Fools”, for which he received positive notices in reviews. This was followed in the same year by another significant role in Fox Studios’s silent western “The Desert Outlaw”. In 1924, MGM lent Haines to Columbia Pictures for a five-picture deal. The first of these films, the 1924 crime film “The Midnight Express” received excellent reviews.

Haines had his first major personal success with the starring role in MGM’s 1926 silent drama “Brown of Harvard”. The character he played, a young arrogant man later humbled, was a role he would repeat for the next several years. On a publicity trip to New York City in 1926, Haines met James Shields. He convinced Shields to move to Los Angeles and promised to secure him work as an extra in films. Haines and Shields began living together and saw themselves as a committed couple. Although many actors in the film industry knew of their commitment, Haines never publicly affirmed his sexuality and there was no mention of their relationship in the press.

William Haines next appeared in two successful films, the 1925 comedy-drama “Little Annie Rooney”, co-starring with Mary Pickford, and the 1926 comedy “Show People”, co-starring with Marion Davies. He was one of the top five box-office stars from 1928 to 1932. With the advent of sound in film, Haines was able, with elocution lessons, to make the transition and maintain his star status. His first starring role in a full-sound film was the 1929 romance “Navy Blues” for MGM; this was followed by the 1930 western parody “Way Out West”. At this point in his career, Haines was listed as the top box-office attraction in the country.

Haines’s films began to drop at the box-office by the late 1930s. MGM canceled his contract in 1931 and, later, brought him back to the studio as a featured player with a reduced salary. Haines next starred in the film, “Just a Gigolo”; but that production failed to turn his slipping ratings. The MGM Studio finally terminated Haines’s contract with the studio in early 1933.

The termination of Haines was the result of multiple factors. With the depression, studios were very concerned about their films’ profit margins; Haines was aging and had not successfully completed his transition from his early “Brown of Harvard” persona; and Haines, despite not affirming his sexuality publicly, did not agree to a studio-supported lavender marriage as other gay actors had done. The impending Hays Production Code and the decreasing profits from Haines’s films put pressure on the studio and made it difficult for MGM to continue placing him in starring roles.

William Haines’s final two films were produced in 1934 by Mascot Pictures, a studio known for producing serials and B-movies. The first was the romantic comedy “Young and Beautiful”, which starred Haines opposite actress Judith Allen, and the second was a war-romance film “The Marines Are Coming”, in which Haines played opposite Conrad Nagel and Esther Ralston. Although Haines still received offers from minor studios, he made the decision to retire from acting and commit himself to his and Shield’s interior design business. Over his acting career, Haines had appeared appeared in fifty-four films, the majority of which were in starring roles.

In 1930, William Haines and James Shield had begun a successful dual career as interior designers and antique dealers. Hand-painted wallpaper, ottoman tables, and low to the ground sitting rooms became signature pieces of their work. Their antiques and artwork were loaned for film stage sets, including Haines’s personal paintings for Tara’s interior walls in “Gone With the Wind”. Among their clients were friends such as Gloria Swanson, George Cukor, Carole Lombard, and Joan Crawford. In 1937, Haines was hired to decorate the estate of studio executive Jack L. Warner. In the late 1930s through an introduction made by Joan Crawford, Haines and Shield decorated Villa Valentino, a secluded estate owned by Tom Lyle Williams, the founder of Maybelline Cosmetics, and his life-long partner Emery Shaver.

Haines and Shield settled in the Hollywood community of Brentwood and, except for a brief period of Haines’s service during World War II, they remained together and ran their prosperous business. By the time of their retirement in the early 1970s, their clients included socialite and philanthropist Betsy Bloomingdale and Governor Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan. Haines was also hired to redecorate London’s Winfield House, the official United States embassy residence, by the U.S. Ambassador Walter Annenberg.

William Haines and James Shield remained together in a relationship for forty-seven years. They enjoyed a high position in Hollywood for decades, supported by many loyal friends. On December 26th of 1973, William Haines died, at the age of seventy-three, from lung cancer in Santa Monica, California. Shortly afterward on March 6th of 1974, James Shield, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, dressed in Haines’s pajamas, wrote a note about his loneliness, and took an overdose of sleeping pills. They are interred side by side in Santa Monica’s Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery. For his contribution to the motion-picture industry, William Haines has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at number 7012.

Third Insert Image: Nick Grinde, Edward Sedgwick and Malcolm St. Clair, “Remote Contol”, 1930, Promotional Window Card, Cinematographer Merrit B. Gerstad, Metro Goldwyn Mayer

British Pathé, “RMS Titanic”: Film History Series

Artist Unknown, Titanic Moored at Dock, Gifs, British Pathé, 1912

These three colorized gifs were taken from the beginning of a film, jointly owned by British Pathé and Gaumont Newsreels, containing known footage of the RMSTitanic. Slightly different versions of this film are held by British Movietone and the National Film and Television Archive.

The three gifs depict the Titanic moored, probably on April 2nd of 1912, at the Thompson Graving Dock on Queen’s Island in Belfast, where the RMS Titanic was fitted out. In these shots, men can be seen walking beside the ship and smoke is seen issuing from the third funnel of the Titanic.

The British Pathé’s newsreel, just over six minutes in length, covers several episodes in the story of the RMS Titanic’s final days. The captain of the RMS Titanic, Edward J. Smith, who perished when the ship sank, is shown on board the RMS Olympic, before assuming duty on the Titanic. Newsreel footage of icebergs and ice floes are shown to portray the scene of the disaster. Scenes of the rescue ship, Carpathia, nearing New York City with survivors, and scenes of the departing search and rescue vessel, Mackay Bennet, also are included in this Pathé footage.

At the forefront of cinematic journalism, British Pathé was a producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in England. The company blended information with entertainment for movie theater attendees who came to watch the news. Over the course of its sixty years, it documented everything from major armed conflicts and international political crises to the curious hobbies and eccentric lives of ordinary people.

British Pathé’s roots lie in 1896 Paris, France, when Société Pathé Frères was founded by Charles Pathé and his brothers, who pioneered the development of the moving image. In 1908, the company invented the cinema newsreel with its introduction of the Pathé-Journal and opened a newsreel office on Wardour Street, London, in 1910. These early silent newsreels, issued every two weeks and running about four minutes in length, were shown in local theaters; sound was introduced beginning in 1928. The Pathé newsreels captured events such as suffragette Emily Danison’s fatal injury by a racehorse at the 1913 Epsom Derby and Franz Reichelt’s fatal descent by parachute from the Eiffel Tower in February of 1912.

Considered now to be the finest newsreel archive in the world, British Pathé is a treasure trove of eighty-five thousand films unmatched in their historical and cultural significance. The company also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than one hundred thirty-six thousand items from the following news agencies: Gaumont Graphic, active from 1910 to 1932; Empire News Bulletin, a film library from 1926 to 1930; British Paramount, a collection spanning from 1931 to 1957; and Gaumont British’s collection from 1934 to 1959. Included in Pathés vast library of film is the collected content from the Visnews service active from 1957 until the end of 1984.

The full footage of British Pathé’s Titanic black and white newsreel can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05o7sOAjtXE

All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website. https://www.britishpathe.com/

Magnus Hirschfeld: Film History Series

Magnus Hirschfeld, “Different from the Others”, 1919, Directed by Richard Oswald, Cinematography by Max Fassbender, Richard Oswald Film, Berlin

Video Soundtrack: “Meditation de Thais” by Joshua Bell

Born in May of 1868 in Kolberg, Prussia, Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist educated primarily in Germany, earning his doctoral degree in 1892. Observing the suicide rate of his gay patients, he became an outspoken advocate for sexual minorities. In May of 1897 Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, a campaign for social recognition of gay, bisexual, and transgender men and women, and against their legal persecution. Under Herschfeld’s leadership, the Committee gathered over five thousand signatures on a petition to overturn Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that criminalized homosexuality. It received little support in the Reichstag in 1898, made some progress later, until its demise with the Nazi Party took power.

With the rise of the national socialist party in Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld was badly beaten by a group of võlkisch activists who attacked him on the streeet. In 1933, his Institute for the Research of Sexuality was sacked, the staff beaten, and its contents of books and documents burned on the street. At the time of the book burning, Hirschfeld was on a world speaking tour. He never returned to Germany, eventually near the end of his life, settling in Nice, France. Magnus Hirschfeld died in Nice on May 14, 1935 and is buried in the Caucade Cemetery.

Enacted in 1871, the German penal code’s Paragraph 175 sentenced thousands of accused German homosexual men to jail terms for “unnatural vice between men.” In 1919, director Richard Oswald and psychologist Dr.Magnus Hirschfeld created a film intended to expose the unjust Paragraph 175 and help liberate the “third sex” from legal persecution and public scorn. It was the first movie to portray homosexual characters beyond the usual innuendo and ridicule.

“Different from the Others” casts Conrad Veidt as Paul Korner, a gay concert pianist blackmailed by a closeted crook named Bollek. When Korner’s budding romance with Kurt Sivers, a handsome young music student, played by Fritz Schulz, runs afoul of Bollek’s extortion, Korner goes to the German courts for protection. But the draconian Paragraph 175 makes criminals out of both accuser and accused, ultimately costing Korner his career, his freedom, and his life.

One of the first gay-themed films in the history of cinema, “Different from the Others” was banned at the time of its release, later burned by the Nazis and was believed lost for more than forty years. Using recently discovered film segments, still photos and censorship documents from different archives, Filmmuseum Muenchen has resurrected this truly groundbreaking silent film for DVD.

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Magnus Hirschfeld with his partner, Li Shiu Tong in Nice, France”. 1934-1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Image Insert: Magnus Hirschfeld, on the right, with his partner Tao Li, at the fourth conference of the World League for Sexual Reform in 1932. Tao Li’s father, Li Kam-tong, a wealthy Hong Kong business man, approved of his son’s relationship with Hirschfeld.

Film video reblogged with thanks to: https://www.kinolorber.com/film/view/id/732

Sergei Eisenstein: Film History Series

Sergei Eisenstein, “The Battleship Potemkin”, The Odessa Steps Scene, December 1925, Starring Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barksy, and Grigori Aleksandrov, Cinematography by Eduard Tisse and Vladimir Popov, Produced by Mosfilm

Born in January of 1898 in Riga, Latvia, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a film director, scriptwriter, film theorist, and a pioneer in the theory and development of montage. Using his technique of montage film editing, he portrayed the rapid developments of events on the screen, separating each scene into fragments and rearranging them into his preferred order.

Eisenstein studied engineering at the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, leaving in 1918 to join the Red Army in the revolution. Still a member of the Red Army after the Bolshevik seizure of power, he took part in many theater productions and was eventually assigned to organizing productions and ensembles. In 1920 Eisenstein returned to Moscow and worked with the Proletkult Theater, becoming co-director and later the most noteworthy theater director in the USSR.

While still a theater director, Eisenstein wrote a manifesto, “Montage of Attractions,” for the literary journal “Lef”, rejecting the idea that dialogue is the dominant element in theater and claiming that all the elements function on equal terms, forming a fusion or montage that made the entire work. Montage in film, as Eisenstein understood it, means that a film should be constructed not in narrative fashion but from brief segments that serve to reinforce and counterpoint one another. The meaning of the film arises from the interplay of these elements, leading the audience into new recognitions.

In the spring of 1924, Eisenstein proposed that Proletkult undertake a series of films portraying the Russian revolutionary movements before 1917. Working with cameraman Eduard Tisse, a Latvian newsreel photographer who would go on to be the cameraman on all his films, he took on the making of “Strike”, the fifth film in the series. In 1925, Eisenstein made his second and probably his greatest film “Battleship Potemkin”, examining the mutiny carried out by sailors of the Russian warship, Prince Potemkin, stationed in the Black Sea fleet near Odessa.

Sergei Eisenstein’s film “The General Line”was an experiment in presenting the feeling of ecstasy in film. Directed by both Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, the film, centering on a rural heroine instead of a group of characters, was a celebration of the collectivization of agriculture, a policy championed by Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. Eisenstein used his montage method with great success in the filming of the milk coop, its sequence conceived as a enthralling spectacle of raptured faces and the triumphant introduction of new farm machinery. After Trotsky’s fall from grace, the film was quickly re-edited and released in 1929 as “The Old and the New”.

Eisenstein’s vision of Communism brought him into conflict with officials in the ruling regime of Stalin. Frequent attacks on Eisenstein and then subsequent rehabilitation would be a repeated pattern throughout his life. His popularity and influence in his own land thus waxed and waned with the success of his films and the passage of time. In 1930, Eisenstein was approached with offers from Paramount Studios for several films; however, because of his artistic approach and disagreements with scripts, the contract was declared void by mutual agreement.

Eisenstein came back into prominence with the 1938 “Alexander Nevsky”, in which Eisenstein exchanged his montage style for one that focused and developed the individual characters to a greater extent. This was due to the rise of Socialist Realism in the arts which was becoming the cultural and artistic policy of the state. Well received, the film won Eisenstein the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize.

Eisenstein’s 1944 “Ivan the Terrible, Part One”, a film presenting Ivan IV as a national hero, also won the approval of Stalin and a Stalin Prize. However, the sequel “Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, although finished in 1945, was criticized by the government and not released until 1958. All footage from the unfinished Part Three was confiscated by the state and mostly destroyed, with only a few scenes still existing.

Sergei Eisenstein suffered a heart attack in February of 1946, recovered, but died from a second heart attack in February of 1948, at the age of fifty. His body laid in state in the Hall of the Cinema Workers, was cremated two days later, and his ashes buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

Second Insert Image: Sergei Eisenstein, “The Battleship Potemkin”, 1925, The Odessa Steps Sequence

Third Insert Image: Sergei Eisenstein, “Que Viva Mexico!”, 1932, Directed by Eisenstein and Gregory Aleksandrov

Bottom Insert Image: Sergei Eisenstein, “Strike”, 1925, Cinematography by Eduard Tisse, Vladmir Popov, Vasili Khvatov

Calendar

A Year: Day to Day Men: 27th of November

The Bare White Wall

November 27, 1920 marks the release of Douglas Fairbanks’s “The Mark of Zorro”.

“The Mark of Zorro” was a 1920 silent adventure romance film, starring Douglas Fairbanks and Noah Beery Senior’, based on Johnston McCulley’s 1919 “The Curse of Capistrano” which introduced the character of Zorro. The story was adapted into a screenplay by Fairbanks, under the name of Elton Thomas, and Eugene Miller. “The Mark of Zorro” was the first film released through United Artists, formed by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Fairbanks.

Douglas Fairbanks played Don Diego Vega, the effete son of a wealthy ranch owner, who has the secret identity of a masked Robin Hood- like rogue, known as Zorro, or The Fox. He is the champion of the people who appears out of nowhere to protect and right wrongs. He has a love interest, Lolita played by Marguerite De La Motte, and is pursued by the authorities, including Sergeant Pedro Gonzales played by Noah Beery Senior.

“The Mark of Zorro” is a landmark in the career of Douglas Fairbanks and in the development of the action adventure film. This was Fairbanks’s thirtieth motion picture; and he used it to transition from comedies to costume adventure films, which is how most people remember him. The audiences responded with enthusiasm to Fairbanks’s new persona, which allowed him to flaunt his considerable athleticism to its fullest advantage. Fairbanks’s stunts have lost none of their impact; no later cinematic superhero has ever been half so convincing as his Zorro leaping from rooftop to rooftop, and over the heads of his enemies.

This film helped popularize one of Americas’s most prominent creations of fiction; the enduring character of the superhero. It established the pattern for future caped crusaders with dual identities. “The Mark of Zorro” was remade twice: in 1940 starring Tyrone Power and in 1974 starring Frank Langella. The United States Library of Congress selected it in 2015 for preservation in the National Film Registry.

In DC Comics, it is established that “The Mark of Zorro” was the film that young Bruce Wayne saw just before the death of his parents outside the movie theater. Zorro is often portrayed as Bruce Wayne’s childhood hero and an influence upon his Batman persona. Bill Finger, co-creator with Bob Kane of the character Batman, was inspired by the Zorro played by Fairbanks, leading to similarities in costumes, the secret caves, and the unexpected secret identities.

Alfred Hitchcock, “The Lodger”: Film History Series

Alfred Hitchcock,“The Lodger”, 1927, Cinematography Gaetano di Ventimiglia, Woolf & Freedman Film Service

The Lodger, the silent film that Hitchcock directed in 1927, is generally acknowledged to be the one where he properly found his “voice”: that distinctive combination of death and fetishism, trick shots and music-hall humour, intense menace and elegant camerawork that assured his place among cinema’s giants.

The material, drawn from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, is rather obviously inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders; they were still within living memory. Hitchcock himself claimed later that producing studio Gainsborough, including Michael Balcon, ordered him to remove any ambiguity that the central character, the mysterious room-renter of the title, might be guilty of the crimes himself, instead of simply the innocent victim of false suspicion.

The Eyes!!!

Tod Browning, “Dracula”, 1931, (Bela Legosi), Cinematographer Karl Freund, Pre-Code Film Gif

A Halloween Warning: The Eyes! The Eyes!

Buster Keaton: “The Haunted House”: Film History Series

Buster Keaton, “The Haunted House”, 1921, Directors Buster Keaton and Edward F Cline, Cinematographer Elgin Lessley≠≠≠

Happy Halloween

Written and directed by Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline, the 1921 “The Haunted House”, an American two-reel silent comedy film, starred actor and comedian Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton. Keaton is best known for his silent film work with its physical comedy and his stoic, deadpan expression.

“The Haunted House” was shot in a time of simplistic comedic storytelling.The film used a generic, two-decades old story of haunted houses occupied by criminals, one which remained a favorite of theater audiences. Cinematography was done by special effects artist Elgin Lessley, a groundbreaking hand-cranked cameraman who had previously worked with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The film was produced by Joseph M. Schenck who became the second president of United Artists Studio, and later, co-founded Twentieth Century Pictures with Darryl F. Zanuck.

In the film, Buster Keaton plays a teller at a successful bank who, in the process of thwarting a robbery, is mistaken for one of the thieves. He takes refuge in an old house unaware that it is a rehearsal space for a theatrical troupe clad in scary costumes. Keaton and the robbers, also hiding there, have many encounters with the costumed actors and the house’s booby traps.

After it is revealed that the thieves’ leader is the bank’s manager, Keaton suffers a blow to the head which renders him unconscious. A dream sequence follows in which he is revived by angels and taken to Heaven. Denied entrance by Saint Peter, Keaton is sent to Hell instead. At the end of the twenty-one minute film, he regains consciousness to realize only a few seconds had passed.

Reblogged with thanks to http://catholicboysdetention.tumblr.com

Ramón Novarro

Ramón Novarro in “Across to Singapore”, 1928