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Morose Delectation

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Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties

Certain stylistic differences separate us from our ancestors; but every once in a while, we can see people from eighty or a hundred years ago as if they were alive today. That was brought home to me at Cinecon today, when I saw a rare reel of Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties outtakes shot at nearby Venice Beach.

The scene was that the director had the girls run into the ocean. Evidently, the water was too cold for them, and they pleaded with the director off-screen to let them get used to the cold. Suddenly, the outlandish bathing costumes of a century ago and the stupid ringlets that the girls curled their hair into didn’t matter any more. In every other way, the scene could have been shot yesterday; and the girls were cute and rather appealing.

On Saturday morning, I saw a 1930 Fox Movietone newsreel of a stage rehearsal of a troupe of chorus girls entitled Backstage on Broadway. Again, once you looked past the inevitable blonde ringlets, the girls were incredibly beautiful, with gams that most of today’s women would kill for.

It is sad to think that virtually all of these girls are now dead. We snicker at minor details that divide their time from ours, and which place a spurious distance between us and them. No doubt their slang was outrageously different; and their everyday beliefs were probably more puritanical (though that’s hard to know for sure). In the Mack Sennett film, the bathing beauties were probably seen as brazen women, and the very large and appreciative male crowd along the Boardwalk lent credence to that that guess.

One of the poster dealers at the Cinecon show had a nude frontal body shot of the lovely Louise Brooks, whose dark bangs make her sexy even today. But, alas, she was found dead in her house from a heart attack after years of suffering from emphysema and arthritis. Mabel Normand, the most famous of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties, died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in 1930.

I suppose it’s dangerous to fall in love with ghosts. And yet the Lloyd E. Rigler Theater of the Egyptian Theater was filled with aging film fans, some of them in wheelchairs, whose eyes lit up at memories of their youth and of the women who made their lives seem worthwhile. Now they themselves are slowly vanishing into the past. New generations will take their place with dreams of tattooed and pierced young women in the outlandish costumes of Hollywood nightclubs.

Just remember: The outlandishness doesn’t count. They’re just people like us.

To Be a Philosopher …

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.—Henry David Thoreau

Silents, Golden and Not So Golden

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Nancy Nash and Earle Foxe in John Ford’s Upstream (1927)

Silent movies are not for everyone. Because of the times in which most of them were produced, the results can be off-putting because of hokiness or a tendency toward melodrama. This week at Cinecon, I have seen silents that were great, some that were merely interesting, and some that were just plain bad.

The best of the lot was John Ford’s backstage drama, Upstream (1927), a film which was thought to have been lost. In 2009, however, a print was discovered by the New Zealand Film Archive. Although many scenes were spoiled by rotting of the nitrate stock, enough came through to make this one of Ford’s best silents, better even than the more famous The Iron Horse (1924).

The story was about a down at heels Shakespearean actor named Eric Brasingham (Foxe), who is courting Gertie Ryan (Nash), the partner of vaudeville knife-thrower Juan Rodriguez (Grant Withers). He gets his chance for the big time because a London theater is willing to take a chance on him because the Brasinghams are a famous acting family (even though Eric himself is a nonentity). His fellow denizens in a theatrical New York boardinghouse give him a big send-off, but he leaves Gertie in the lurch.

In London, he manages to succeed. He becomes conceited and supercilious, and omits writing to Gertie. She, tired of waiting, marries the knife-thrower. Then, suddenly, Brasingham descends on the boardinghouse as a publicity stunt and finds his reception is not what he had hoped.

Director John Ford does here what he specialized in: Characters who are well developed and interesting. Even the vaudevillian song-and-dance Callahan Brothers are unforgettable, as is the  “star boarder,” played by actual Broadway star Raymond Hitchcock. Even though the theatrical subject matter is not typical Ford—better known for his Westerns and Irish films—the director is at home regardless what he does. And certain stylistic touches link it with films as different as the Hamlet scene in My Darling Clementine (1946), in which Grant Withers is one of the Clanton boys.

More typical of the silents I saw was the excellent The Goose Woman (1925), directed by Clarence Brown and starring Louise Dresser. Graphically, it was a gorgeous film, but the melodramatic plot comes across as risible today: A famed Italian opera star has to make a choice between having a child and continuing to sing at La Scala. She has a child, and her voice goes kaput. What kind of illness is this? Was the baby delivered via the vocal chords? In any case, the singer becomes a goose woman on a farm and a full time lush, until she must make a Sophie’s Choice type of decision regarding her son, who is accused of murder.

To Love Is To Be Vulnerable

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.—C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

On the Boulevard

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On Hollywood Boulevard Near Grauman’s Chinese Theater

I have spent two days at the Cinecon show in Hollywood so far this week. Because the films playing tonight don’t interest me, and because tomorrow, we’ll be here for fourteen hours, we decided to leave early today and on Sunday. I had to do that to retain Martine’s good will so that we could see a rare print of John Ford’s Upstream (1927) ending around 10:30 pm.

In the meantime, the short walk (two and a half blocks) between the Egyptian Theater and the Loew’s Hollywood Hotel where the film memorabilia vendors (and Martine) are working and where our car is parked, is as wild and woolly as ever. Tattooed monkeys and brainless girls wearing next to nothing seem to predominate. There are endless tours of Hollywood surrounded by teams of touts who try to funnel tourists into the buses. everal times a day, I have to tell them I’m not interested because “I live in this sh*thole.”

The scene above is of Zoo Central in front of the Hollywood & Highland Center next to Grauman’s Chinese Theater. You see one girl at the left being photographed by one of the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Behind her is one of the tour buses, accompanied by someone dressed as Johnny Depp in some recent movie whose title slips my mind.

I have been seeing some great films at the Egyptian, however, especially today. I sat through Robert Florey’s Dangerous to Know (1938) with the lovely Anna May Wong and Akim Tamiroff; Madge Kennedy in Dollars and Sense (1920); W. S. Hart in Wild Bill Hickock (1923); and John Blystone’s Gentle Julia (1936) with Marsha Hunt and Jane Withers, both of whom were in the audience as guests.

Last night, Martine and I saw Erle C. Kenton’s Always a Bridesmaid (1943) with the Andrews Sisters. A special treat was a film clip of the famed Nicholas Brothers dance duo, with two granddaughters of Fayard Nicholas tap dancing in synch with what was on the screen.

So, on the whole, it’s a mixed blessing: Great films in a particularly nutty place.

“The Business of Somebody Else”

Some legislators only wish to wreak vengeance against a particular enemy. Others only look out for themselves. They devote very little time on the consideration of any public issue. They think that no harm will come from their neglect. They act as if it is always the business of somebody else to look after this or that. When this selfish notion is entertained by all, the commonwealth slowly begins to decay.—Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

Hollyweird Again

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On the Boulevard in Hollywood

I will be taking a break from posting to this weblog over the next few days. Every year during Labor Day Weekend, Martine and I have been attending the Cinecon show in Hollywood. While Martine helps my an old friend of mine sell movie memorabilia at Loew’s Hotel at Hollywood and Highland, I will be spending most of my time at the Egyptian Theater watching somewhere between fifteen and twenty old movies that, for the most part, have not been available to the public since they were first released.

Many of the titles will be silent with organ accompaniment, with most of the others dating from the early sound era. Typically, there are a few outliers whose originals were on nitrate film stock that has been transferred to safety film and cleaned up in the process. Nitrate stock is a fire hazard, and virtually all films before 1948 or so were shot on it. (I recall seeing the studio version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 production of Rope go up in flames at a USC screening years ago.) Some more recent films had serious problems with fading color which film technicians have been able to restore to their almost original color quality.

For more information about Cinecon 48, visit their website for background information, a summary of films being screened, and the screening schedule.

As much as I like old films,spending time in Hollywood will be a drag. Labor Day Weekend almost always brings with it a heat wave.Add to that the problem of finding a decent restaurant on the Boulevard, where most of the eateries are oriented to downmarket tourists who come to stare at the stars’ names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Or to the even more downmarket residents of Hollywood, consisting in teenage runaways, low-rent hipsters, prostitutes of multiple genders, and the homeless.

It has always amused me that tourists who have failed to do their research come to Hollywood expecting to see celebrities in what has evolved over the decades into a rather ugly slum. The only hope I see for Hollywood is that public transportation improvements, especially with the Red Line, have made it profitable for developers to try to do something to gentrify the place a bit.

Half Empty … Half Full

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: “This glass is half full.” And then there are those who say: “This glass is half empty.” The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: “What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer?”  And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.—Terry Pratchett

Road Kill

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Everyone wants to be rich, but does everyone want to be like the rich? As one who has spent twenty years working with wealthy clients in an accounting firm that caters to them, I would have to say that, for the most part, the wealthy are not nice people. Superficially, for short periods of time, they can appear to be charming. But when they feel their interests are at stake, there are only two classes of Americans: the wealthy and road kill.

We are living at a time when many who are not wealthy idolize those who are. I must ask those people whether they think a Donald Trump would look after their best interests. Now Mitt Romney is passing himself off as a job creator, despite his reputation as an outsourcer of American jobs for Bain Capital.

Look back over American history: Why do you suppose American voters did not push for the likes of Commodore Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, Jay Gould, Andrew W. Mellon, and John D. Rockefeller to run for president? Perhaps voters were too smart then to vote for thieves. Now they are less smart, and they believe the lies peddled by false radio pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who themselves are in the pay of wealthy corporations and individuals.

The whole theory of trickle down economics is still making the rounds after more than thirty years. In its essentials, what trickle down economics presupposes is that if you feed the horse enough oats, he will leave something in the middle of the road for the poor. That part is true; but where money is involved, give the rich more money, and—instead of creating jobs—they will salt their cash away in offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands.

Am I stupid or something? How do the voters who support wealthy candidates like Romney think they are going to share in their candidate’s wealth? Will Romney create jobs? No. Will Romney and his friends get even more obscenely wealthy? Yes. That is a dead certain guarantee.

Speaking as one classified in the 99% (a.k.a. road kill), I tend to vote for candidates who have my best interests at heart. Candidates who will do something for America, and not merely for their own capacious pocketbooks.

Wonderment …

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.—St. Augustine