Artistry of the Credit Roll #5 - Auntie Mame

Auntie Mame

1958

(Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc.)

And the Oscar goes to......

Clifton Webb's Membership Card 1966

The Margaret Herrick Library is a mecca for all kinds of film reasearch and film studies.  One of the fun things recently added to the Academy website is a database of acceptance speeches for Academy Award winners.  My goodness how things have changed!  Back in the day, acceptance speeches were fairly brief and to the point.  Unlike todays litany of names being thanked from parents to babysitters as well as the caterer who served at your last party.  (Okay, call me jaded)

Not all years and all winners are represented.  I'm devastated that George Sanders did not give an acceptance speech for his award for his work in All About Eve as the delicious Addison deWitt.

In any case, this is one of many fun features on the Academy website.  A complete searchable database of past winners and nominees is useful and online. 

The Academy also has a youtube channel showing acceptance speeches and other favorite moments like the infamous streaker.

Here are a few samples from the database of acceptance speeches:

Year: 1947 (20th) Academy Awards

Category: Actor in a Supporting Role

Film Title: Miracle on 34th Street

Winner: Edmund Gwenn

Presenter: Anne Baxter

Date & Venue: March 20, 1948; Shrine Civic Auditorium

EDMUND GWENN:

Whoow! Now I know there's a Santa Claus. Oh, you may laugh, ladies and gentlemen. It's not so easy to be certain, you know. He's a most elusive little fellow. He turns up in all sorts of places under all sorts of names and disguises. First time I ever met him he told me his name was George Seaton. And wonderfully, George Seaton has his revenge by bringing him to life. About a year and a half ago he suddenly turned up in Culver City and told me his name was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. That was the day Metro agreed to loan me to Fox to make the picture. And now I think it's time Santa Claus added a word to his name. I think he ought to call himself Santa Claus, Incorporated. Santa Claus, Inc. Inc.! For then he would embrace all you wonderful, kind people who have done me the honor of making me stand here tonight. Thank you, all of you, for making the evening of my life such a happy one. Thank you.

© Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Year: 1947 (20th) Academy Awards

Category: Actor
Film Title: A Double Life
Winner: Ronald Colman
Presenter: Olivia de Havilland
Date & Venue: March 20, 1948; Shrine Civic Auditorium

RONALD COLMAN:

Ladies and gentlemen, I am very happy and very proud and very lucky. Lucky because I know I wouldn't be standing on this stage tonight without the grand contributions of so many others. A great script and a great part from Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. The wonderful help of George Cukor, Michael Kanin and Bill Goetz. And I'm not forgetting a splendid cast and all the departments that gave their skill and talents to making this picture. So, to all of them especially, my deepest gratitude. And to you, ladies and gentlemen, my warmest thanks.

© Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

***

Year: 1942 (15th) Academy Awards

Category: Directing
Film Title: Mrs. Miniver
Winner: William Wyler (not present; accepted by his wife, Margaret Tallichet Wyler)
Presenter: Frank Capra
Date & Venue: March 4, 1943; Ambassador Hotel, Cocoanut Grove (banquet)

MARGARET TALLICHET WYLER:

Thanks so much, everybody. It makes me very happy to accept the award for Willy. I wish he could be here. He's wanted an Oscar for a long time and I know it would thrill him an awful lot to be here. Probably as much as that fight over [unintelligible] did. Thank you so much.

© Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences



San Francisco Silent Film Festival - A Look Forward to Day 2

The second day of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival begins with Amazing Tales From the Archives I.  UCLA will be in the house to talk about restorations, fragments and show clips of projects in progress.  A free program, I always look forward to getting hints at what might be in the pipeline and seeing the little bits that are all that is left of films I'd dearly love to see.

Huckleberry Finn

Accompanied By: Donald Sosin
(USA, 1920, 85 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: William Desmond Taylor
Cast: Lewis Sargent, George Reed, Gordon Griffith, Edythe Chapman, Thelma Salter

Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is one of the most famous American novels of the 19th century. First published in 1884, the book has never been out of print. The character of Huck Finn has appeared in over 40 films starting with the 1917 version of TOM SAWYER, and was most notably played by Mickey Rooney and Eddie Hodges in THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1939 and 1960 respectively). But the first film version of HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1920), after its initial released, passed into film history and with the advent of talking pictures in the late 1920s would be forgotten and almost lost forever.

William Desmond Taylor (1872–1922) who was under contract to Famous Players-Lasky (which would later take the name of its distribution company of Paramount Pictures) had directed TOM SAWYER (1917) starring Jack Pickford and THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER (1918). So Taylor was the logical choice to direct HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Lewis Sargent as Huck started his film career only a few years before with Fox Films, in ALADDIN AND HIS WONDERFUL LAMP. An actor with a lot of presence and charm, Sargent was a perfect Huck Finn. Wanting to be as faithful to the novel as possible, Taylor went on location to Mississippi to shoot the film. Upon its release in February of 1920, HUCKLEBERRY FINN was both a critical and commercial hit.

Less than two years after finishing HUCKLEBERRY FINN, William Desmond Taylor was dead. His body was discovered lying on the floor of his living room by his butler on the morning of February 2, 1922 with a bullet wound in the back. A major investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department followed, but to this day the murder remains unsolved. Like most people who worked in silent film, his body of work is fragmentary at best. Taylor directed 64 films in the nine years he was working in Hollywood. As of this writing only 18 are known to exist.

Print courtesy of George Eastman House

***

I Was Born, But...

Accompanied By: Stephen Horne
(Japan, 1932, 90 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: Yasujiro Ozu
Cast: Tatsuo Saito, Tomio Aoki, Mitsuko Yoshikawa

There are a handful of silent, black-and-white old movies that have the power to make all the subsequent advances in the medium look redundant. When you watch, say, Charlie Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS or THE GENERAL by Buster Keaton, you are aware of such complete mastery of the emotional and narrative possibilities of cinema that color and sound seem like so much distraction and filigree. Everything you could possibly want is here, and indeed the addition of anything else would only subtract from the perfection of the art.

I WAS BORN, BUT...” a silent feature from 1932 directed by Yasujirô Ozu, is such a movie. Ozu, who died in 1963, is best known to American cinephiles for his post-World War II dramas like TOKYO STORY and EARLY SPRING, delicate and rigorous stories of family life and generational tension in a changing Japan. The exquisite precision of Ozu’s shooting style is certainly evident in I WAS BORN, BUT... The mood, however, is comic, at times boisterously so, and the setting is a world where relations—among classes, between parents and children—seem fixed rather than fluid.

Which is not to say that there is no conflict. There is both overt and implicit violence, only some of it cushioned by the giddy energy of slapstick. And beneath the “Our Gang” schoolboy antics that make up much of the action is a clear-eyed and humane critique of inequality and authority.

The children—in particular Aoki, who was a big star in Japan at the time thanks to his appearance in Ozu’s STRAIGHTFORWARD BOY are equally adept at using broad pantomime to unlock the complexities of group relations and individual psychology. Everything in this film is utterly believable, so much so that at times it seems almost anecdotal, a sweet little anthology of kids doing the darnedest things.

That it is more—a small masterpiece, perfect in design and execution—almost goes without saying, but the film’s profundity and its charm go hand in hand. —Excerpted from the New York Times article by A.O.Scott

Print courtesy of Janus Films

***

The Great White Silence

Accompanied By: Matti Bye Ensemble
(UK, 1924, 106 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: Herbert Ponting

A hundred years ago the British Antarctic Expedition led by Captain Scott set out on its ill-fated race to the South Pole. Joining Scott on board the Terra Nova was official photographer and cinematographer Herbert Ponting, and the images that he captured have fired imaginations ever since. Ponting filmed almost every aspect of the expedition: the scientific work, life in camp and the local wildlife—including the characterful Adélie penguins. Those things he was unable to film he boldly recreated back home. Most importantly, Ponting recorded the preparations for the assault on the Pole—from the trials of the caterpillar-track sledges to clothing and cooking equipment—giving us a real sense of the challenges faced by the expedition. Ponting used his footage in various forms over the years and in 1924 he re-edited it into this remarkable feature, complete with vivid tinting and toning. The BFI National Archive—custodian of the expedition negatives—has restored the film using the latest photochemical and digital techniques and reintroduced the film's sophisticated use of color. The alien beauty of the landscape is brought dramatically to life and shows the world of the expedition in brilliant detail. A happy scene of Scott and his team in a tent demonstrating how they would cook and sleep on their race to the Pole—the same tent that would be their tomb—is particularly poignant. —Bryony Dixon and Robin Baker, BFI National Archive

Print courtesy of the British Film Institute

***

Il Fuoco

Accompanied By: Stephen Horne
(Italy, 1915, 51 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: Giovanni Pastrone
Cast: Pina Menichelli, Febo Mario

Pina Menichelli’s diva in Giovanni Pastrone’s IL FUOCO is pure, unadulterated femme fatale. Like most dive of the Italian cinema of this era, she moves sinuously and elegantly, giving herself more to the camera than to the man she seduces. But unlike many of the other dive, in this role she is untouched by fatal disease, uncanny apparitions, or even by a blemished reputation. For once, the woman is as much an artist as the man. When writing a poem inspired by the sunset, she spies a young painter (Febo Mari) who seems to come close to capturing (with her help) the right tinge of red, and proceeds to initiate her seduction. She is a practiced predator. Her owl headgear, clenched teeth, and parted lips reveal an animalistic instinct to hunt but not to devour her prey. Rather, her pleasure is to pounce on her little field mouse of a painter, toy with him, and then toss him away. After she orchestrates his creation of a masterpiece with her as its subject—a daring and kitsch nude portrait modeled on Cabanel’s “The Birth of Venus”—she will have no further use for him.

Bypassing the familiar spectacle of female suffering, but not, as might be expected, by turning to any consequent pathos for the male, IL FUOCO offers the pleasurable spectacle of a diva whose only love is herself. Menichelli’s poet takes pleasure in her own taking of pleasure. Pleasing herself despite a pronounced disdain for her pleasure’s ostensible object, she performs a very pure kind of narcissism. All her seductive movements are activated by a counterforce that simultaneously pushes away what she must nevertheless attract–if only in order to be able to throw it away and exalt in herself alone. Italian silent dive are known for their convoluted, tortuous gestures, but to watch Menichelli quickly seduce her young field mouse and then just as quickly get rid of him is to truly understand the counterforces of attraction and repulsion. In a wonderful final touch of realism, the artist notices a mole on her breast and adds it to the painting. Displeased, Menichelli’s poet rubs it out, once again “correcting” his art, perhaps because it mars the ideal beauty of her nude but perhaps also because it would make her recognizable to the public. She seeks both recognition and anonymity. In the end, the only possible tinge of regret this diva will show will be yet another gesture of narcissism: to touch this mole on her breast in memory of a passion consumed by fire. —Linda Williams, Giornate del Cinema Muto

Print courtesy of Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Torino

Individual tickets and festival passes may be purchased online at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival website.



San Francisco Silent Film Festival - Upstream and Sunrise

Opening Night for the 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival promises to be a wonderful evening. 

The evening begins with the San Francisco Premiere of the recently re-patriated John Ford silent Upstream.

Upstream

Accompanied By: Sosin Ensemble

(U.S.A., 1927, 61 mins)

Directed By: John Ford

Cast: Nancy Nash, Earle Foxe, Grant Withers, Lydia Yeamans Titus, Raymond Hitchcock

Screening with the short WHY HUSBANDS FLIRT - new preservation premiere

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival opens on July 14 at the Castro Theatre with this spectacular restoration of a film directed by John Ford that was long believed lost.

UPSTREAM (1927) is one of 75 American films recently discovered in the New Zealand Film Archive. These “lost” films will be preserved over the next several years at five major American archives, including the Academy’s, in collaboration with the National Film Preservation Foundation. UPSTREAM is the first of the features to be preserved and screened for the public. The preservation work was carried out by Park Road Post Production in Wellington, New Zealand, under the direction of Twentieth Century Fox and the Academy Film Archive.

UPSTREAM focuses on a love triangle involving an egotistical actor (Earle Foxe) and a young couple (Nancy Nash, Grant Withers) who partner in a vaudeville knife-throwing act. The film is from an interesting chapter in the career of Ford, as he admitted that during this time he was strongly influenced by the work of German director F.W. Murnau, who had immigrated to the United States to make films for the Fox studios, enabling Ford to study his working methods first hand.

The Donald Sosin Ensemble (pianist/composer Sosin with featured players from the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra) will accompany UPSTREAM as well as another discovery from the New Zealand Archive—a short comedy by Al Christie with Dorothy Dane and Bobby Vernon, WHY HUSBANDS FLIRT(1918). The film has recently been restored thanks to Frank Buxton.

Print courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox

WHY HUSBANDS FLIRT preservation funded by Frank Buxton and Cynthia Sears

Print courtesy of George Eastman House

Following Upstream will be the beloved classic, Sunrise directed by F.W. Murnau.  Sunrise is arguably one of the greatest silent films ever made.  It is a film held in high esteem by many historians, archivists and film fans (myself included).

Sunrise

Accompanied By: Giovanni Spinelli

(U.S.A., 1927, 94 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: F.W. Murnau
Cast: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston
Accompanied by Giovanni Spinelli on electric guitar

Presentation in association with Paolo Cherchi Usai

Silent cinema is the art form that died too young: "Not ripe for replacement," aesthetician Rudolph Arnheim wrote in 1930, three years after THE JAZZ SINGER broke the sound barrier, silent film “had not lost its fruitfulness, but only its profitability.” Indeed, many of the most innovative silent movies were produced in the mode's last days: Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, Sjöström’s THE WIND, Vertov’s THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, Dovzhenko’s EARTH, and Murnau’s SUNRISE.

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931), a protégé of the great German theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt, was a formidable technician and arguably the supreme cine-aesthete of the 1920s: painter of light, choreographer of camera movement, and maestro of mise-en-scène. Murnau’s 1924 visual tour de force, known in the U.S. as THE LAST LAUGH, was one of the first (and few) silent features made without the benefit of intertitles. Following this international success and Murnau’s ambitious 1926 FAUST, movie mogul William Fox brought the “German genius” to Hollywood and gave him the key to the studio.

SUNRISE was shot silent, with very few titles, and released in late 1927, with a synchronized musical soundtrack. The early reviews were sensational; the grosses were not. Thirty years later, the ultimate cinephile magazine Cahiers du Cinéma declared Murnau’s first American movie “the single greatest masterwork in the history of cinema.” It's an assertion as reckless, romantic, and extravagant as the movie itself. —J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Print courtesy of Criterion Pictures USA

Individual tickets and festival passes may be purchased online at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival website.



On the Bedside Table - Colleen Moore

Okay, not on the bedside table just yet.  Publication is Spring 2012. 

Jeff Codori of The Colleen Moore Project has finished his biography of flapper star Colleen Moore.  Jeff chronicled the long process of writing and publishing this book and I'm thrilled for him to have just about reached the finish line.  I've been patiently watching his site and waiting for the completed book.

The book will be published by McFarland and you can pre-order it here.

From McFarland's wesbite:

Colleen Moore (1899-1988) was one of the most popular and beloved stars of the American silent screen. Remembered primarily as a comedienne in such films as Ella Cinders (1926) and Orchids and Ermine (1927), Moore’s career was also filled with dramatic roles which often reflected greater societal trends. A trailblazing performer, her legacy was overshadowed by the female stars that followed her, notably Louise Brooks and Clara Bow.

An in-depth examination of Moore’s early life and film career, the book focuses on the ways in which her family and the times in which she lived influenced the roles she chose. Included are forewords written by film historian Joseph Yranski, a friend of the actress, and by Moore’s stepdaughter, Judith Hargrave Coleman.

About the Author

Jeff Codori is the creator of the Colleen Moore Project, a website devoted to strengthening the actress’s place in cinematic history, and to finding new sources of information about her.

Rudolph Valentino Son of the Sheik Screening in San Francisco

Save the Date: July 10, 2011 at 2:00pm
The Place: San Francisco Public Library, Koret Auditorium (100 Larkin Street, San Francisco)

In conjunction with the Reading the Stars exhibit in the library (4th and 6th floors), the SFPL will screen Valentino's 1926 film The Son of the Sheik.  The full line up of Shhhhhh Silents exhibits can be found here.

The Son of the Sheik was Rudolph Valentino's final film and a delightful film it is.  Valentino is cast in a dual role of Ahmed the son and Ahmed Ben Hassan the elder sheik (originally portrayed by Valentino in the 1921 film, The Sheik).  Young Ahmed falls in love with a dancing girl Yasmin (Vilma Banky) and believes he has been betrayed by her once he has been captured and torutured by a band of thieves.  Young Ahmed takes his revenge and it takes a few rousing fights and miscommunications to set things straight before there is a happy ending.  Agnes Ayres makes an appearence reprising her role from The Sheik as Lady Diana.  Montague Love co-stars as the baddie Ghabah the Moor and Karl Dane as Ahmed's loyal friend Ramadan.  Directed by George Fitzmaurice and E.M. Hull's novel The Sons of the Sheik was adapted by Hans Kraly and Francis Marion.  This Arabian fantasy has plenty of action, romance and humor packed into roughly 60 minutes.

I will introduce the film and also present a slideshow utilizing images that did not make the cut in my book Rudolph Valentino the Silent Idol.  With the abundance of riches at my fingertips, space prevented some, some were images I wished I'd been able to find and others came into my hands after publication.  It's an enjoyable glimpse into Valentino's world.  I will also have copies of the book on hand for purchase and autographing.

Thomas Gladysz of the Louise Brooks Society and editor of  the Louise Brooks edition of Margaret Boehme's 1905 novel Diary of a Lost Girl will also be on hand to sign copies of his book.  Thomas has also curated the Reading the Stars exhibition. 

The Son of the Sheik is one of Valentino's most engaging films and hope to see you there!

San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2011 - Be There or Be Square

He Who Gets Slapped will close the 2011 Festival

The schedule for the 2011 San Francisco Silent Film Festival:

Opening Night, Thursday, July 14

7:00 pm Upstream

9:15 pm Sunrise

Friday, July 15
11:00 am Amazing Tales from the Archives I
2:00 pm Huckleberry Finn
4:15 pm I Was Born, But…
7:00 pm The Great White Silence
9:30 pm Il Fuoco

Saturday, July 16
10:00 am Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams  featuring J.B. Kaufaman
12:00 noon Variations on a Theme with silent film musicians and composers
2:00 pm The Blizzard
4:00 pm The Goose Woman
6:30 pm Mr. Fix-It
8:30 pm The Woman Men Yearn For

Sunday, July 17
10:00 am Amazing Tales from the Archives II  featuring Kevin Browlow on fifty years of Film Preservation.
12 noon Shoes
2:00 pm Wild and Weird featuring David Sheppard
4:30 pm The Nail in the Boot
7:30 pm He Who Gets Slapped

I'm very excited about the lineup this year and will be posting on the scheduled films and activities over the next couple of days.

Festival passes or single tickets may be purchased online from the SF Silent Film Festival Website.