A massive, invaluable resource has just dropped from the internet heavens. The historian and curator David Pierce (once head of the BFI’s National Film and Television Archive) is spearheading the Media History Digital Library project. It is a privately funded effort to digitize 300,000 journal pages, including volumes of Moving Picture World and Photoplay, all to be made available for free. These scans are slowly being uploaded to the Internet Archive, where multiple volumes are available for perusal and download. There are revelations, curiosities, and surprises on every page of these glossies and trade journals, currently ranging from 1916 – 1930. I’ve been delving into their pages for a few days now, and below are some of the more intriguing nuggets I dug up.

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In 1930, a vivacious ingenue sauntered onscreen as a Jazz Age flapper in Young Man of Manhattan and quipped, “Cigarette me, big boy,” launching a successful and popular movie career. If I were to ask you whose feature-film career began with this sassy come-on, you might guess Mae West. But, it was actually Ginger Rogers, TCM’s Star of the Month for March.

I have always enjoyed Rogers onscreen, but, like many classic movie lovers, I tended to think of her in relation to Fred Astaire and their ten musicals together. The iconic stature of these musicals makes it difficult not to. Even biographers and feature writers who declare their intention to discuss only Rogers’s career often end up devoting considerable space to the Astaire-Roger’ pairing. And, truth be told, for years I dismissed Rogers because of her mother Lela’s testimony before the House on Unamerican Activities Committee in which Mama Rogers was a friendly witness denouncing the Communist influence in Hollwood, including her daughter’s  Tender Comrades (1944), a melodrama about WWII on the home front. According to Lela, Ginger was “duped” into making the film, which was full of “Communist propaganda.” This bit of Hollywood lore has always left a bad taste in my mouth.

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Young New York filmmaker Zachary Levy’s debut feature, Strongman, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival and is now finally hopping around to select cities. The documentary follows a modern-day hulk by the name of Stanley “Stanless Steel” Pleskun. For his day job, Stanley hauls around scrap metal. But his every waking moment seems consumed by a dream of being the best in a small field of metal-bending and strong-man athletic performers. Strongman is a compelling documentary full of heart, humor, and pathos that recalls the achievements of Chris Smith’s American Movie. Its carnivelesque quality and eccentric characters would not be out of place in a film by Federico Fellini, but the more immediate and inevitable comparison reviewers are apt to mention is Darren Aronofosky’s The Wrestler. After all, both films “feature longhaired, seemingly past their prime fringe athletes living in a dilapidated New Jersey who are chasing a dwindling dream as the outside world relentlessly presses down upon them.” (Michael Tully) Last week while visiting Austin’s SXSW Film Festival I met Zachary and we had a chance to talk about his film. READ MORE

Somehow this one slipped by me. Originally released in 1995, Gary Walkow’s indie production of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella was released on DVD in 2004 but I only recently came across it through a screener, courtesy of Olive Films. Anchored by a riveting performance by Henry Czerny as Underground Man, this is not only an inspired re-staging of the original story for 21^st century audiences but proof that Dostoyevsky’s writing and ideas are as relevant now as they were in 1864 when he wrote it.   READ MORE

Just last month I had a chance to see at long last the French vampire movie LE SADIQUE AUX DENTS ROUGE (SADIST WITH RED TEETH, 1971).  I had first read about this film in Barrie Pattison’s 1975 study of the vampire subgenre The Seal of Dracula (Bounty Books, New York).  SADIQUE was not discussed at any length in the book, meriting but three sentences in the chapter titled “Sex-Vampires.”  There was an accompanying illustration, a black-and-white reproduction of the film’s theatrical poster, whose copy claimed it as “un film de sex-horreur.”  That’s all I had to go on.  The poster grabbed my attention because it seemed the film’s vampire sported a set of novelty store hillbilly teeth.  Even at the tender age of 14 or 15, that seemed to me a novel approach.  I’ll admit a part of me doubted the movie was real, suspecting that the poster was some kind of snooty French joke.  I won’t say I was obsessed but the specter of SADIQUE sat at the back of my mind as I went about my life.  Assuming I got The Seal of Dracula at some point in the year of its publication (a reasonable assumption), that means it took me 35 years to scratch this itch.  READ MORE

My husband and I recently purchased our first home and it’s a cute 1954 suburban California ranch house that needs a lot of work. We’re trying to restore our home’s original vintage charm and in the process we’ve been watching some older films that make use of suburban locations and highlight mid-century design. One of my favorite examples of this is the 1961 comedy Bachelor in Paradise. The movie was directed by Jack Arnold who is best known for the classic horror and science fiction films he made including Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Tarantula (1955) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) but in the ’60s Arnold’s interests seemed to shift a bit. He started making comedies like The Mouse That Roared (1959) with Peter Sellers as well as Bachelor in Paradise and A Global Affair (1964) that both featured Bob Hope.

The comedies that Bob Hope appeared in during the ’60s are often dismissed by critics and for good reason. Hope’s combination of slapstick humor and snappy comebacks had somewhat run its course. His style of humor was seen as slightly outdated at a time when younger funny men like Jack Lemmon, Jerry Lewis and Peter Sellers were making their mark in Hollywood. But I personally enjoy some of the movies Bob Hope appeared in during the ’60s such as the adulterous comedy The Facts of Life (1960) as well as this silly suburban sex farce.

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Normally, blogs that commemorate a “deathiversary” of a person are anathema to me.  Still, when I stumbled across the fact earlier this month that March 10th marked the day that actress Helen Walker died in 1968 at age 47, my attention was drawn to her story. I’ve always been beguiled by the indelible impressions she left on screen in only a handful of performances I’ve seen. Best remembered today for her work in film noirs such as Nightmare Alley (1946-Edmund Goulding), Call Northside 777 (1948-Henry Hathaway), Impact (1949-Arthur Lubin), and The Big Combo (1955-Joseph Lewis), the actress remains a relatively obscure figure, in part because several of her forties’ movies have languished in archives for years, unseen by current classic film fans for some time. Maybe she was just one of hundreds of young women who became a limited-run product off the studio assembly line, but behind those dancing eyes of hers, a person seemed to be at home, projecting a blend of self-mocking bemusement, a kittenish warmth, and later, a chill of knowing recognition in her unsettling, unblinking gaze.

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The Prowler was made by disillusioned men. Director Joseph Losey, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and visual consultant John Hubley were all eventually blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo was already tarred, so his writing credit was given solely to Hugo Butler – while Losey and Hubley were pushed out of Hollywood soon afterward (Losey made one more film, The Big Night, before moving to Europe, while Hubley turned to uncredited work in commercials). Every major American institution is treated with a disdainful eye in The Prowler, a despairing document reflecting the state of the political Left in 1951, making it one of the bleakest film noirs ever made. James Naremore quotes Losey in describing the Hollywood liberal that year:

The Left in Hollywood was utterly demoralized by Truman, the atomic bomb, and the HUAC investigations, and it was beginning to recognize “the complete unreality of the American dream”. READ MORE

In my research and readings over the past month, the name Cecil B. DeMille has popped up several times. DeMille was an important part of the film industry from the early Hollywood era until the 1950s when he died. DeMille’s type of conventionally crafted, star-studded filmmaking with a pinch of melodrama seems ill-suited to the tastes of contemporary viewers who equate his name with “old-fashioned” moviemaking—if they know his name at all. But, contemporary audiences are quite different than they were in DeMille’s day. Few movies today please that mainstream audience C.B. was such an expert at courting; instead, the major Hollywood studios chase after adolescent boys with explosions and bad editing, or they target children with the latest entry in a lucrative franchise, hoping that 3-D will cover up a dumbed-down script. Older audiences who prefer indie films– with their unhappy endings, nonlinear structures, provocative content, and performances by actors instead of stars–are probably uninterested in DeMille’s glossy, glamorous spectacles.

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