Some of my favorite people have birthdays in early August. There are my friends Albert (who braved the Hammer Museum screening of Check and Double Check with me last year) and my friend John (who recently became a neighbor). Then there are the people I've never met, but who I wish I could have known, like Sylvia Sidney. Today is a day to celebrate her centennial.


Despite her decades of work in film and television, my first encounter with Sylvia Sidney came as it did for most of my generation, via Tim Burton, who cast her in Beetle Juice and Mars Attacks, the latter of which was her last role (if you don't count her stint on Fantasy Island). What a great one, too!

My first taste of classic Sylvia came in the form of Fritz Lang's thriller Fury, the American debut of German director Fritz Lang, in which she plays the fiancee of the victim of a lynch mod (Spencer Tracy). I caught this movie, a great one, on TV a couple of weeks ago, and was newly-mesmerized by Sidney, with her feline eyes and endearing screen presence.


Above: Sylvia watches as flames engulf her man in Fury. Below: Sylvia and John Loder compare appetizer preferences in Sabotage.


Lang cast Sylvia in his next film, You Only Live Once, in which she plays a thinly-veiled Bonnie Parker character to Henry Fonda's Clyde. Had things worked out a few years earlier, she might have also been directed by Sergei Eisenstein in An American Tragedy. Going back even further, she might have appeared in The Godless Girl, one of Cecil B. deMille's best movies.


Sylvia Sidney's career spanned more than one hundred feature films and television shows and lasted seven decades. Glancing over both her body of work and the information about her private life that's out there, one gets the sense that she lived very much the way she wanted. She could relax in her antique farmhouse in Connecticut, indulge in needlepoint, tell it like it is about the business (her comment about working with Alfred Hitchcock is golden) and make some refreshingly left-field acting choices every year or so (the Omen sequal, for instance).

Tortured divas like Crawford, Garbo and even Clara Bow get lots of coverage from celebrity biographers. Sylvia Sidney seems to have lived a life that was happy, creatively fulfilling and an inspiration to all of us who want to follow our bliss, do good work and spice up life with a little variety now and then.


Could this glamorous creature, with lilies down her back, imagine that, one day, she would save humanity from annihilation simply by listening to Indian Love Call?

As an aside, here's a photo of me from yesterday, waiting to see All About Eve (for the first time) at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Taken by the above-mentioned Alberto. (Shout out to Michael, who insisted I come with.) I don't think I've ever posted a photo of my on here, so enjoy!



To indulge your Sylvia-love a little more, check out Dr. Macro's Annex (the source for the above photos), ShillPages and Starlet Showcase.

Flying Aces and Lost Girls

I was really excited for day-two of the festival, perhaps more than any other day, because it would afford the rare opportunity for me to see The Flying Ace, a 1926 independent feature film with an all-black cast. I was initially intending only to see this film, but was able to persuade a friend to join me for another film. More on that later.

First thing first, I met up with a local friend and had lunch at Baghdad Cafe, which is always a good way to start the day. After catching up with him for about an hour, we went our separate ways and I got in line. The audience was almost entirely white; in fact, I can recall spotting only two African American audience members. It would be nice to see the film reach more members of the black community at some point, but the fact that this movie survives at all is miraculous enough on its own.



This screening was my first exposure a very-cool feature of the festival: beautifully curated slide shows themed after each film to break up the monotony of sponsor advertisements. In this case, we were treated to cards with facts about race films, and each one was followed by a poster or still from a particular film mentioned there. Titles included Within Our Gates, The Colored American Winning His Suit, The Love Bug, The Bull-Dogger and The Trooper of Troop K.

(Side Note: Every one of these slide shows had at least one typo. In this case, Trooper of Troop K was identified as Trooper of Company K. When I point this out, I don't mean any disrespect to the creator of the slide show, Meghan Pugh, who did a terrific job. I have made that exact same mistake . Blame it on that amateurish indie movie with a similar title)

As with all the other screenings, this one got started late. We were treated to a short by Georges Méliès with an English title that went something like Professor Crazybrain and His Flying Machines (if you want to try finding it on the IMDBs, get on there and pack a lunch). I never seek out Méliès movies necessarily, since they all rely on the same gimmicks (painted sets, double exposure, acrobats, roman candles - sounds like New York's hottest new club). Still, they can be fun and manage to be surprising, and this one was cute enough.



Before The Flying Ace could roll, it needed an introduction (of course). Starting things off, a fellow named Mike Mecham or Mechan (I can't read my hand-writing) took the stage to talk about the restoration of the film. It was preserved by the Library of Congress in 1980, but the print we would be watching was brand new, and completely re-timed. In fact, it had just been struck that Wednesday (this was a Saturday) after his colleague Ken Guban (again, guessing on the names) made more than 2000 timing changes. Everyone applauded.

Two women from the Norman Film Museum, Annw Byrd and Carolyn Williams, took the stage next to tell us about the film. First, Ms. Byrd (an adorable little old white lady) explained how Jacksonville had once almost become the film center of North America because of its year round sunshine and diversity of locations. Problem was, film companies kept doing annoying things to cut costs like, say, pulling fire alarms to draw free crowds or starting riots when they needed riot scenes. The results of the 1917 mayoral elections in Jacksonville, coupled with the still-prevalent notion that the movie business was less-than-respectable, ensured that most companies were run out of town. By then, Edendale and Universal City were film centers anyway, and had milder weather and even more locations like, say, mountains?

Allowed Ms. Byrd: "We're real sorry about that today."

Independent productions, including many black films, were still made in Florida, and Carolyn Williams spoke to us about that. In particular, we were told that the buildings where the film were shot still exist (as part of the Norman Film Museum) and that the character played by Kathryn Boyd was based on a real aviatrix, Bessie Coleman. She also advised us to pay attention to the 'colorism' in the film, with light-skinned heroes and dark-skinned villains and buffoons.

The lights were dimmed and the picture began. Right away, there were some glaringly amateurish features to it. Five main characters are introduced right after each other in the first scene, without much in the way of setting them up or making us care about them. There are lots of redundant dialogue titles. The intertitles make use of very mannered language, giving us dialogue such as "Just keep mum and no-one will molest me." True to Dr. Williams' , the darker-skinned actors play the villains; one of them plays a bumbling, corrupt police officer (film history's only black Keystone Cop?) who speaks in an... interesting form of slang. Let's just say that his intertitles use lots of apostrophes.

Here's the basic plot. A railroad paymaster comes to town and lets everybody know that he has the entire payroll in him. He is kidnapped, along with the money, and everyone thinks the cute little old station master, Mr. Sawtelle, is responsible. On a side note, the local man with mysterious income has his eye on Ruth, Sawtelle's beautiful and... young-looking daughter. The feeling is not mutual, even after a long scene where he shows her his plane and points out all the controls and steering mechanisms; by the end of this interlude, any of us in the audience could have operated that plane.

A local boy-turned-railroad detective-turned-World War I fighter pilot comes back into town at that moment, keeping his uniform on the entire time, lest we forget how noble he is. He's played by somebody named Laurence Criner. Picture, if you can, Francis X. Bushman from his Essannay days, and then turn him slightly black, and you hopefully will have some kind of mental picture of Laurence Criner. Needless to say, Ruth likes him A LOT more, and very soon he sorts out the plot by the local bootleggers (sorry, I'm spoiling it) to steal the money and frame Sawtelle. There is a climactic chase by air and a plane to plane transfer that was all filmed on the ground, but is still relatively effective.

The Flying Ace of a silent talkie, but it's still a solid piece of storytelling. The cast is a mixed group. Laurence Criner seems to come from the Milton Sills School of Acting, and Kathryn Boyd has a limited range of expression, but all the other serious parts are played in a restrained manner, and the comedic interludes between Peg and the cop are played well, and not intrusive to the larger story. The writer/filmmaker Bret Wood summed up the appeal of a film like The Flying Ace when he wrote about, and did a great DVD commentary for, the Dwain Esper masterpiece Maniac: Like a work of folk art, it has beauty and dignity in its rough simplicity, and to behold it, with all its flaws, can be much more rewarding than a glossy studio film of the same era.



Later that day, I met up with another friend and we saw Diary of a Lost Girl with Louise Brooks. That phenomenal experience deserves a blog post of its own. For now, in the words of Annette Hanshaw, That's All.

Images from The Flying Ace were found here.

"Amazing Tales" from Amazing People, in the Amazing Castro Theater

This weekend, I am up in Northern California. Though the respite from the recent (and sudden) Los Angeles heatwave of 2010 is welcome, I have returned to the geopolitical region of my birth for something much more important: the 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival. It's my first time, and I'm constantly kicking myself that I didn't start coming to it years ago. I'll certainly be back again.

My first day at the festival, Friday, was pretty brief. (I didn't go to the opening film on Thursday night, John Ford's The Iron Horse, though it would have been fun.) After trying to plan an elaborate Caltrain/Muni route from my parents' house to the Castro District, I was relieved to get a ride from old mom and dad, who were going to be passing through there (they went out of town for the weekend). I'm not complain, but it feels really weird being dropped off in a gay ghetto by your parents.

I was there (at the Castro Theater) for a presentation called Amazing Tales from the Archives, in which several people spoke about preservation issues and showed clips from things that had been recently preserved. I started things off with a coffee from Cafe Flore and a stroll around the block after making sure I didn't need a ticket for the event (I didn't). I also texted a friend to say "i'm in sf bitch!"

The first feeling upon walking into the Castro Theater was that feeling I always get when I walk in there: pure elation that I'm standing in/sitting in/moving through such a stunningly beautiful space, crowded in with tons of other geeks just like me. The turnout for this event was much bigger than I expected. I took a seat in the middle-back of the auditorium, and (this always seems to happen) two heavy breathers settled into seats on either side of me. I don't want to judge them, but the gods of age and metabolism had not been kind to either of these cinephiles. A gaggle of attractive, well adjusted-looking guys sat in front of me, giving me hope for what I might look like in five or ten years (provide I grow five inches, drop fifteen pounds and achieve significant facial hair growth).

On screen flashed a slideshow of glass slide movie advertisements. Titles, which I now really want to see, included Padlocked (with positively fierce graphic design), Trent's Last Case, All of a Sudden Peggy, The Land of Jazz (with a cartoon halo of musical notes around Eileen Percy), Thirty Days, His Secretary and the short comedy One Spooky Night. In their hand-colored, low-fi, sometimes outright tacky way, glass slide movie ads are invariably gorgeous, and sometimes they are the only available visual record of a particular film. I had to call a friend to sort some schedule stuff out and, in a moment of total conceitedness, I sighed "You don't know what you're missing."

Among the other slides was this one, which I loved:



The show got started, and somebody who's name I don't remember (but should) spoke to us about the preservation efforts of the L. Jeffrey Selznik School of Film Preservation, which I'm embarrassed to say I need to look into now, and introduced a few of their scholarship students who were in the audience (to well-deserved applause). The 2010 scholar, who's name I will find and fill in later, will be restoring Mr. Fix-It this year, and their hope is that it will be on the screen at the Castro next year.

Kyle Westphal, the school's 2008 scholar, then took the stage and talked us through a project he worked on, two 1926 Kodachrome shorts, Parisian Creations in Colour with Hope Hampton, and Parisian Inspirations in Colour with Hope Hampton. He talked through them (there was musical accompaniment as well) and it was a little hard to focus on both, but his explanation of the films, the technology, and Ms. Hampton were all very interesting. Fun tidbits include:

1. These Fashion Newsreels were created by McCall's Magazine and distributed by some entity with a name like Educational Pictures Inc. They were not a very good distributor, so the films didn't get far. More people probably watched the film at that screening than had in 1926.
2. The Kodachrome stock and processing used in the film was an early version, very different from the Kodachrome stock for home movies that modern audiences are familiar with. Still in its infancy, it required lots of printing and reprinting in order to achieve the correct print exposure. Around this same time, Technicolor had already streamlined their process. Technicolor prints were cheaper, too ($0.08 a foot vs. $2.00 a foot for Kodachrome).
3. These films were just two of several similarly-titled shorts that were filmed by McCalls at the Long Island mansion of Hampton and her husband, Jules Brulatour. The list in the "Herself" portion of Hampton's IMDb page looks close to the titles Westphal rattled off. He asided that they do tend to run together.
4. Hope Hampton and Jules Brulatour didn't like the fashions that McCalls supplied for the film series. Fortunately for them, they had considerable funds of their own to go on what must have been a redonkulously expensive shopping spree.



For my part, I thought that A) it was cool to see footage of Hampton for the first time, and B) she looked a lot like Billie Burke. (The Photo of her above does not represent anything from the film I just described.) Also, C) the fashions were fantastic. Mr. Westphal kept apologizing for the length of the two movies ("It always goes on longer than I remember"). I for one could watch days of 1920's color fashion footage, so I wasn't complaining.

Once we finished with The Lady Hampton, we watched reel two from a King Baggot movie (I don't recall the name), in which he plays a dual role as a wealthy man and a double. All that survives of the film is this second of three reels; all the special effect footage, where Baggot faces off against himself, was in reel one (you're cruel jokes are not lost on us, Universe). There was a trailer reel for The Last Warning, On Trial and White Shadows in the South Seas, and, before I get too far ahead of myself, there was a snippet of A Chili Romance, which we were told was found rolled in with the King Baggot footage. (For a relatively generic slapstick comedy, it was very funny.)

Finally came the pièce de résistance: Paula Felix-Didier and Fernando Peña took the stage to talk about the restoration of the "new" version of Metropolis which was announced to exist in Argentina in 2008. The film screened to a packed house that night (I was not there, sorry) but it was interesting to hear them talk about the film's discovery, which wasn't nearly as instantaneous as it sounds in the press reports. Peña recalled how he had heard about the long-lost longer version of the film: Colleague Salvador Sammaritano described a film society screening during which the print was not running through the projector correctly. To correct it, Sammaritano had to run to the projection booth and hold his finger on the shutter to keep it from shaking. He held it there for two-and-a-half hours; when Peña said he had never heard of a version that ran so long, Sammaritano replied "Trust me, if it was your finger pressing on the gate for two-and-a-half hours, you would remember."

Felix-Didier and Peña had brought with them some clips of Argentine films, which they screened for the audience off of an ok-quality DVD. The first, a dramatic film called La cuena de la muerte (almost literally The Flute of Death), a story about a white man and a white woman who go on vacation in rural Cordova and have affairs with native people there. The quality was not exceptional, but the fact that such footage survives is miraculous. They also told us that this might have been the first "Gaucho" film, and the only silent Gaucho film, as most Argentine films made afterward were usually concerned with the middle class and were almost always shot in Buenos Aires.

There was also a documentary about the health hazards of flies (with microphotography that made me look away a few times). Finally, they presented ("cheating" as Sra. Felix-Didier confessed) the first sound film produced in Argentina. It consisted of four musical vignettes which would have been synchronized to a record. In both content and presentation they were similar to a Vitaphone short or even an Alice Guy-Blache song-film, but still I couldn't take my eyes (or ears) off the screen. The numbers consist of a singer in an unflattering gingham dress singing along with a three-piece band. Two mestizo Gauchos do some heel-stomp-dancing while . A musician plays something on . Finally, a different singer from the one before (and in a better outfit) does an entrancing rendition of a Tango song "Preciosa." This was the first Tango recorded on film, and thus puts the film under UNESCO's umbrella of World Heritage preservation (UNESCO has designated Tango to be an item of shared cultural significance, and with good reason).

The entire time, a sign-language interpreter worked tirelessly at the left of the stage. He was very expressive and, to my untrained eyes, an excellent interpreter. And handsome. He's probably not single.

And so concluded day one. I wasn't especially interested in A Spray of Plum Blossoms, which was up next, and I headed home, very sated indeed, and ready for the adventures to continue the following day.

See also:
Silent Film Festival's Blog Unlike me, they actually have photos from the event, along with insider information, show times, better writing, etc.

Another Dead Gay Guy, Part Two: Hollywood Murder Triangle

Eighty years ago this past week, death stalked through Hollywood, taking three lives. It’s not a famous murder case, but one that captured my attention while I was researching the Mary McElroy case last weekend. Perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning:

Once upon a time, in 1927, a young man named Paul Vare was brought out to Hollywood from Billings, Montana, by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Some time after that, he was adopted by one Ada E. Wharton, a bedridden widow. By the mid-thirties, Paul Wharton’s talents were in demand from several prominent Los Angeles residents. Under the name Paul Ivar, he dressed famous clotheshorses like Jean Harlow, Aileen Pringle, Carmen Consedine (daughter of Alexander Pantages) and Constance Bennett (he designed the bridesmaid gowns for Bennett’s marriage to Henri de la Falaise, a Gloria Swanson ex).

Then, on the evening of April 25, 1935, Paul Ivar had a little dinner party with his chauffeur and secretary, thirty-five-year-old William Howard, and one (or possibly two) other men. He was still sharing a fashionable apartment with his foster mother. At some point in the evening, Paul brought Ada some dinner and then returned to his guests. Eventually, Ada heard somebody leave the main room outside, then three or four shots rang out, followed by the sound of her foster son groaning and slumping on the floor. Frantically, she crawled out of bed into the front hallway of the apartment, where she found Paul bleeding and clutching a telephone. As he expired in her arms, a man she had never seen before rushed in and stopped dead in his tracks. He was tall and blond, probably dressed in a gray suit and gray hat. Mrs. Wharton pleaded for help but the man disappeared into the kitchen and was never seen again. William Howard had also vanished.

Across town, a thirty-nine-year-old UCLA law professor named Henry E. Bolte was coming home from a dinner for his law class, noticed a stranger near the entrance to his apartment but paid no attention to him. Bolte walked to his apartment and practically had his key in the door when the stranger pulled a gun and shot at him three times, wounding him twice. Bolte’s wife, Virginia, opened the door to find her husband lying in a pool of his own blood, still alive but in critical condition. Investigators hurried from the sight of Paul Ivar’s death to Bolte’s apartment. William Howard was found nearby; he had shot himself in the head.

Two seemingly unconnected murders were now linked, and the connections that emerged over the next few days came out in the press in code words and suggestive phrasing. The news stories on April 26 described the tall blond “Mystery Man” sought by police for questioning.

Two men and two women, one reportedly dressed like a man, were questioned by the police. Meanwhile more facts about Paul Ivar emerged. He had struggled with an addiction to narcotics (but had been cured by Aimee Semple McPherson). At the time of his death, he was on probation for the theft of an $800 diamond ring belonging to a Mrs. Ray Wolfe of Bevely Hills. He and his crowd were described in coded terms by the newspapers: "pale," "strange," "exotic." Quothe Captain William Bright, head of the LA Sheriff's homicide division, in the Palm Beach Post: "They were strange men who led strange lives." Social politeness of the day meant that he and other law enforcement officials wouldn't comment on the possible motive, once financial disputes had been ruled out; readers who were "in the know" would have guessed in half a second that something lavender was afoot.

Actress and notorious clotheshorse Aileen Pringle, in an "exclusive" interview with the same publication, elaborated on her professional relationship with the designer: “He was exceptionally talented, and his designs were simply lovely. They were a little – well, a little bizarre. But good. Before he finished them, he told me he needed some new clothes for himself, and asked if he could use my charge account at a store. He said he could check off our bills to each other in that way. When my statement came back from the store, I found he had bought, not clothes, but several hundred dollars worth of perfumes, atomizers, cosmetics and similar things. I asked him about them, and he told me, ‘well, I use them.’”

Pringle went on to explain that “he had had a fight with Constance Bennett when she discovered he was Chinese.” I have not found any other information articles that suggest he was Chinese, and the one photo I did find didn’t hint that he was anything other than Caucasian. She allows one last revelation: “He occasionally appeared at my home… with curious, feminine-looking men.”

Aileen Pringle ought to have known something about 'bizarre - but good' fashions. Nine years earlier, she was being dressed by Erte. I'll leave the story there for now. Next month, the conclusion, more fun facts, and the identity of the big blond Mystery Man.

Another Dead Gay Guy, Part One: I Feel Like an Asshole

I want to warn you in advance: This post is going to have a rather long set-up.

Whenever I have a big assignment or a midterm or, in the case of this past weekend, both looming ahead of me, I tend to do a LOT of procrastinating. Things get done one way or another, but not before lots of time has been spent checking email, checking social networking sights, footnoting articles on Wikipedia, and so on. This particular story actually starts with me reading IMDB trivia for the movie Kansas City. That in tern lead me to do a number of searches on Mary McElroy, the young woman on whos kidnapping the movie was based. (The kabillion-footnote Wikipedia article Mary McElroy (kidnapping victim) was written in the next few hours by yours truly.)

While reading scanned, highlight-sensitive newspaper articles from 1935, I found (I believe it was in the Miami Daily News) a somewhat scattered, confusing article about a Hollywood dress designer’s murder, one of three connected deaths. A bed-ridden spinster, a tall blond mystery man and Jean Harlow were all connected to the case.

Obviously, this was too good to be ignored. I went ahead and probably lost a good couple hours scanning for articles and coming up with a surprising amount of info that still seemed to have some missing pieces. What I found was tantalizing; I ate it up like the true crime vampire that I’ve always been. (I hope to follow up this post – hence the ‘Part One’ in the title – soon.) Then I checked facebook.

And I was stopped cold. Checking in on a few people from high school (they rarely come up in my news feed – something I don’t know how to change) I happened to search an acquaintance, not a close friend, but somebody from my past who I knew for a brief period and was friendly with. When I found him again on the site a year or so ago I was totally envious of him: he had a great job as a designer, lots of time and money to spend on trips to exotic places where Spanish is the primary language, a shockingly handsome boyfriend, a six pack you could bounce quarters on.

He was dead. His wall was covered with “we love you,” “RIP,” “we’ll miss you,” etc. I was shocked. It seemed so unreal. I’ve lost classmates before but this moment proved that each loss is just as sad and unnerving. There was no word as to the circumstances of his death on his page, so I did a quick google search: His death was everywhere. I don’t want to go into the details, and I only have what’s been printed and posted and forwarded and editorialized. I don’t really feel that I have the right to either. The absolutely appalling comments on NY Daily News’ site are bad enough.

It struck me, as I went from one page to the other, trying to get more details about Ale’s death that there must be somebody else out there doing the same thing, but not for the same reason. Just a few minutes before I had been devouring the details of a seventy-five year old murder case without feeling any sympathy for the victims in the case. There had to be another me out there, at the same moment, doing the same thing with this case. I felt like an asshole. Serves me right.

I want to close with my memories of Ale. He was two years ahead of me at Paly. He was closeted at the time, and I don’t begrudge him for that, knowing his circle. He still seemed to be himself, very intelligent and witty, with an appreciation for the finer things (Peter Greenaway comes to mind first). We knew each other briefly outside of high school, when he came to a couple of youth group support meetings. We had a mutual friend, my neighbor Katie, who had some classes with him and graduated the same year. I’m sure I still have his business card in a drawer somewhere. As much as he would have hated growing old, we clearly lost him too soon.

(12.3.1983 - 4.13.2010)

End of the Month Round-Up

So, here are a couple of fun experiences I had this past (couple of months).

First of all, I actually got to meet somebody who has my dream job. I got to meet Andrea Kalas for thirty minutes at Paramount. She was very cordial and had a lot of helpful, encouraging advice. After all, one of her first major projects. I'm forever indebted to Tom, who spurred the Bessie Love post from last month, for putting me in touch with her.

Secondly, I've had a few production gigs, some of which actually paid, but all of them were good experiences. I've had some shitty, shitty PA jobs before, so I ought to know. There are some in the future, unpaid for the most part, but it makes school bearable.

Right now, I am on Spring Break, and last night I went to see Ran at the Stanford Theater with my dad and my brother. Now, I'm one of those people who needs to see a Kurosawa movie in the theater, and not only because that's the only way to see them. I'm have a bad case of that very modern disease, the ADD, and it makes watching anything on DVD a bit difficult. With nobody to watch you (and judge you), you find yourself folding laundry, checking your email or rushing back and forth from the kitchen to microwave a burrito while the movie plays. If the movie has subtitled, its even more of a problem; half the plot goes missing, characters become indistinguishable, you get the drift. So I always welcome to opportunity to see anything in the theater that I know isn't going to completely captivate me.

(That's not to say that Ran isn't a captivating, powerful film. It is. It's a strong story (you know, King Lear) and beautifully told. The lush greens and brilliant reds really make you appreciate the look of projected film. I'd never seen Ran before, and I'm glad that this was my introduction to it.)

The Stanford Theater and me go way back. I saw my first silent movie, Safety Last, there when I was seven (that's a story for another day). I saw many of my favorites there for the first time: Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, the silent Ben Hur, These Three, The Man Who Laughs. In high school I went all the time, sometimes with a friend but usually alone; I liked to do things by myself at the time anyway.

Flash forward five or six years to now, and I am very much a changed man. I strongly dislike going to movies alone. I haven't gone to see a conventional movie on my own since 2007 (Aranofsky's The Fountain - which I liked). This past month, however, I've had a bit of regression to my past life as a chubby, virginal, be-acned seventeen-year-old in the form of screenings at the Silent Theater down on Santa Monica and Melrose in Hollywood. I was most excited to find out that they were screening a Tod Browning silent from 1926, The Mystic with Aileen Pringle, because, as it just so happens, me and The Mystic go way back.

Flashback to 1996. I'm 11, I'm in sixth grade, and I'm going through a phase where I want to be a fashion designer. After haunting every fashion section of the local library for at least a week, I come away with an awareness of the artist Erte, and his amazing body of work that spanned over fifty years. I was enthralled by his extravagance, his use of detail, his willingness to show bare breasts and, most notably, his time spent in the mid-1920's as a couturier-in-residence at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He designed sets and costumes for the likes of Marion Davies, Carmel Myers (his favorite), Norma Shearer and the exquisite above-mentioned Miss Pringle. Among the illustrations in the two books of his that the Palo Alto Library System holds are both costume sketches and tantalizing set stills from The Mystic. I remember staring at those photos and wondering if I would ever actually see the movie itself. It seems so long ago and so far away.

Well, I got my chance. I want to actually write a review, but that can be done another time. The issue at hand is regressing back to high school. I say this only because I went alone and wished that I hadn't. I made a sheepish attempt to invite a couple of people at the last minute. I didn't expect any sort of big crowd to show up, but when I got there, there was a line out the door. I was worried that I wouldn't get in. Nobody resembled the crowd I expected. Almost everyone in attendance was young, slim, clearly well adjusted and not at all crotchety. They all had dates.

At first I felt encroached-upon. All I wanted to do was slink into a quiet screening of some obscure movie, have my box of candy all to myself, and then slink back out. It was exactly the kind of experience I could have at the Stanford way back then, with the cavernous auditorium barely an eighth full. For some inexplicable reason I felt angry at everyone there. Then I caught myself; I was being stupid. I should have rejoyced, as I do now, that so many people had an interest in this movie. I should have been happy for The Mystic that I almost had to fight my in to see it.

Then there was the fact that I was alone. I felt so weird and naked there, being one of the few people with no date, no entourage. I look back on the situation and I realize that, generally, I don't often expect my friends to have any interest in these events. This is silly, of course. Case in point, I met up with some friends right after (a last minute thing) and they said "Oh, that sounds like so much fun. You should have told us." I don't doubt that I have cool friends, but I forget that we have as much in common as we do.

My resolution for April: Do a better job of inviting people to stuff.

Special Shout Out: To Bessie with Love

This blog is sort of an eleventh-hour act on my part. I have been entrusted, by another silent film enthusiast, with the education of a mutual friend. What education, you ask? Well, those of us in the silent film geek ghost army (we have meetings and everything) love nothing more than to quiz each other on the vaguest and least relevant silent film-related topics we can think of. Then we silently judge that person when they get dates of birth wrong, when they forget that Colleen Moore’s real name was Kathleen Morrison, or when they can’t name the ugly Talmadge sister (it was Natalie, loosers!).

In this case, however, the topic is might be vague, but she is certainly not irrelevant. Even now, she has a following, though she is one of many who, it’s safe to say, are woefully neglected. I am speaking, of course, about the actress Miss Bessie Love. I’ll try to do justice to this talented beauty, because I’m a true friend. And friends don’t let friends go through life without teaching them, in blog post form, about Bessie Love. This one is for you, Kev.


To start of, Bessie was not her real name; she was born Juanita Horton in 1896, the daughter of a rancher in Midland, Texas. A daughter of the west, she started working as an actress in 1916 out of necessity. She appeared in several movies at the Fine Arts studio in Los Angeles, including the 1916 epic Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through the Ages (the movie with the elephant pillars). D.W. Griffith, the director of Intolerance, is usually thought of as the person who came up with Bessie's stage name.

Breakthrough roles came very quickly; she was cast opposite William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks in 1916 films. One year later, she was playing lead roles in feature films for Vitagraph and Pathé. In 1922, the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers selected Bessie and twelve other young actresses as the WAMPAS Baby Stars. She was still a major player all through the twenties, playing a bootlegger’s girlfriend in Those Who Dance (1924) and Broadway diva in The Matinee Idol (1928, an early Frank Capra endeavor).

The coming of sound derailed a lot of careers, but it earned Bessie Love an Oscar nomination in 1929. The movie was The Broadway Melody, which is still widely thought of as the first true movie musical. She worked steadily in sound films from 1929 to 1932-ish. (at left: Bessie and Anita Page in The Broadway Melody)

Perhaps because of marriage, her career dropped off after the early 1930’s, but for the next several decades of her life, Bessie continued to take the occasional role in film or on television, mostly in England, where she lived for most of her 'post-Hollywood' life. Her notable roles at the end of her career were in Warren Beatty’s epic Reds (1981), as well as Ragtime (also 1981) and the sexy vampire movie The Hunger (1983). She died in London in April of 1986.

Bessie was a Virgo. She was once married to Howard Hawkes’ brother William, which also made her a cousin in law of Carole Lombard. had terrific face, with big expressive eyes and a long nose. Standing approximately five feet, she was petit and doll-like even into her later years.

One more fun fact about Bessie: She wrote a play in 1958 called The Homecoming.

Below is a clip from Hollywood Revue of 1929. To say she's the best part of the movie is an understatement, as you can probably tell. I like this clip because I feel like it shows off her personality and her abundant talent. Thank you dudfilmscorporation for the clip.

Three Great Ladies, One Great Movie

One of the best recent broadcasts on TCM the other night was a gem called Comet Over Broadway, a drama about a woman who's dream of being an actress breaks her life, then catapults her to success, then holds her to some hasty words from years before that she knows she can't go back on. The reason for the broadcast has to do with its leading lady, Kay Francis, who is no longer with us but who turned 105 this past Wednesday.

Watching this movie, I was moved by its story, which was involving and well told. Perhaps the biggest treat in a viewing of the film is the discovery (for me) of three wonderful, woefully-neglected actresses: Francis, Minna Gombell and Sybil Jason. It's also a great showcase for the talents of a man best known for his dance arrangements: Busby Berkeley. Even some die-hard 42nd Street fans don't remember that Berkeley directed several non-musicals between 1933 and 1951. Few of his non-musical ventures were A Pictures. This one clearly falls into the "programmer" category. Yet it's so much better than that. Spoilers ahead.

Kay plays a small-town shopkeeper named Even, married and with a baby, who has vague dreams about acting and a side gig in community theater. When a famous Broadway actor (Ian Keith) comes to town, Eve attracts his attention and she goes to meet him at his hotel room for 'acting lessons.' Her husband (John Litel, nobody famous, but a great actor) gets wind of this and, in the brawl that ensues from confronting the illicit pair, the actor is knocked down a slope and into a ravine (spoiler coming), and fatally hits his head. Eve's husband is brought to trial for the accident and charged with manslaughter. Eve is racked with guilt, particularly when her lawyer explains to her that it was her own foolish ambition that brought this tragedy upon her. As her husband goes into the big house, she pledges to do everything she can to get him out, and once he is out, she'll be there waiting for him.

Snagging a burlesque gig, Eve goes on the road with her baby daughter, Jackie. On the train, the troupe's leading lady Tim (Gombell) takes Kay and the child under her wing. Eve gets pressured by various men to leave the kid with somebody else and focus on her career, and after holding out for a long time, she decides it would be best to leave Jackie under Tim's care. Tim, who had years ago lost her only child to what sounds like SIDS, is elated; she's become very attached to the child herself. Eve travels to country and makes it to New York city, where she meets a handsome British producer, Bert (Ian Hunter), who casts her right away in a production. She is driven away, however, by the show's jealous leading lady (Leona Miracle). Despondent, Eve sales to England on a whim.

Several years pass, and Eve has become the most talked about stage actress in Britain. She sends for Tim and Jackie, now 8 or 9 and being played by the fantastic, utterly adorable Jason. Initially happy to see them, Eve is crestfallen when she realizes that Jackie has grown up under the impression that Tim is her mother, a misunderstanding Tim failed to correct. Reluctantly, Eve goes along with it.

When they return to New York, Eve reconnects with Bert; there is still the same sexual chemistry between them and, now that Eve is a big name, he can be the one to mount her American debut. At the same time, she finds out that her husband's case can be overturned, but only for several thousand dollars that she doesn't have. She agrees to work with Bert if he can loan her the money, which he does.

The play is a huge success, and Eve is forced to accept the fact that she is in love with Bert. In a long and tearful conversation, she tells him the whole story, and why they can never be together. Bert is reluctant to accept this; surely, her husband will understand that, after all this time... Eve agrees. She goes to meet her husband at the prison. He is so happy to see her, she can't bring herself to tell him that she loves someone else. In the final scene, we see Eve walking with Jackie back to the prison, to her fate, with nonetheless a bright and prosperous future ahead, and with her dreams of success achieved. It is then that Jackie calls her "Mommy." The circle of Eve's trials is complete.

Like its three stunning leading ladies, Comet Over Broadway is long overdue for rediscovery.

More Letty Fashion Madness

Here is a still from Letty Lynton, that obscure, celestial beauty that is the highly suppressed Joan Crawford multi-national-extramarital-affair-a-thon from 1932.


I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this get up, but it looks like Miss Le Sueur wasn't having much fun. When you consider how hot those sets could get under all those Kleig light (not to mention how heavy fur coats are), it's no wonder. Still, it's the kind of bold statement a 1930's would make (or die from heat exhaustion trying). (Need to retrace my steps and find the link. Will post when I locate it.)

Here's another picture of Joan in the same outfit. This time she isn't being Little Miss Mopey Face.


And just for kicks, here's another Adrian creation Joan wore in this film. If the beatnik vultures from The Jungle Book needed to be sexy, they could probably use this picture as a reference.

I feel greatly remiss for not having discovered this sooner, but there is a fantastic Joan Crawford website where you can find out just about everything you could want to know about even her most obscure movies. There's a great Letty Lynton page too.

The Toy Wife

Last Tuesday, Austrian-born actress Luise Rainer turned 100. To celebrate, TCM spent that day airing a selection of her films, and I recorded most of them. I still need to watch The Great Zeigfeld and The Good Earth, but last night, I snuggled under the covers and took a gander at a film about which I knew nothing. The title alone intrigued me: The Toy Wife.

Luise, with her Austrian accent, plays the daughter of a Louisiana plantation owner; the fact that she has spent all of her cognisant life in a French boarding school excuses the difference between her accent and the polished Hollywood accents of her father, her older sister and all the other white people in the movie. At the opening of the story, the Brigard family returns to New Orleans, still under French rule, and settle back into their gorgeous plantation house, slaves and all (more on that in a minute). We learn quickly that Luise is not only the baby in the family, she's the most annoying and least likable. The character's name is technically Gilberte, already a bad sign, but everyone calls her by her nickname, 'Frou Frou.'

The naive Luise falls for a handsome lawyer named Georges, and they marry. Since Georges is played by Melvyn Douglas, the attraction is understandable. Georges still carries a bit of a torch for the older Brigard sister, Louise (Barbara O'Neil) and Frou Frou still feels some attraction for a younger bad-boy, Andre (Robert Young). Louise movies in with Georges and Frou Frou to help her sister become a better wife and mother, but finds herself doing all the work. Georges finds that his attraction to the other adult in the house more easily justified, and even more so when his flighty wife elopes with Andre. And so follows all the backstabbing and fighting over children that one would expect from a movie like this.

Between the gleaming foyers and glittering gowns you'd expect characters named Alexis or Krystle to show up randomly and pull on each others' hair pieces, but the real shocking element that sets The Toy Wife apart from other films, even Gone with the Wind, is the treatment of the slave characters. This HAS to be the reason that so few people have seen this film, the reason it's not on DVD. This movie has more speaking parts for black actors than any other film of 1938 as far as I can tell (except maybe for Gods Step Children). Most of them have names and at least basic differentiated personality traits, but they still have bad grammar and names like Brutus and Pompey.

The character played by Theresa Harris presents the most brain-exploding example. She smilingly introduces herself as 'Pick;' because she has no given name, everyone just calls her an abbreviated version of the pejorative 'Pickaninny.' This occurs when Frou Frou is getting acquainted will all the female slaves in the house, and Harris goes down on her knee to say "I wishes I could be your own pa'ticular darkie."

"You do, do you?" answers the benevolent Frou Frou. "Well then you shall be. But if you're going to belong to me you'll have to wear shoes and stockings."

Theresa Harris is an actress that I truly love. I've probably seen her in a dozen movies, and she always plays a maid, but she never lets the absurd dialog get the better of her. Every 'you is' gets treated with perfect diction, and it highlights just how beneath her such characters were. It's as if she's winking to the African American members of the audience, assuring them "It's ok, I know this sucks, but we'll get through it."

Allegedly, this was one of several projects given to Rainer as punishment for her difficult behavior. A reviewer on the IMDb calls it a B-Movie. With its amazing costumes (by the incomparable Orry-Kelly) and detailed set decoration, this period piece doesn't look at all like a B-movie. The direction by Richard Thorpe is too mannered for an already slow screenplay, which has neither economic passage of time or witty dialogue. A long movie, with an irritating lead character, equals a disappointment in my book. Rainer comes off as a capable actress who's doing the best she can with a problematic role. By all accounts she hated this movie.

One consolation remains: One can live through racism, hoop-skirts and winning two consecutive Oscars, and still live to be 100. Happy belated birthday, Luise Rainer. I'm sure I'll like you better as Anna Held.