After the Great Fire of 1871, the city of Chicago was rebuilt as a modern metropolis that included theater and entertainment districts. By the turn of the century, Chicago had grown into a show business capital, peaking in the 1910s and 1920s as a mecca for every form of entertainment.

There were 19 major theaters in the Loop by the early 1920s that averaged 100 plays and musicals per year.  Because of its location in the center of the country, Chicago became a major stop on several vaudeville and burlesque circuits during the 1910s, with the Orpheum, Rialto, McVickers, and Bijou Dream Theatres hosting some of the biggest names in variety theater. Also during the 1910s, the Essanay and Selig movie studios produced hundreds of one-reelers , launching the careers of several major stars, including Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery. In 1917, Barney Balaban and Sam Katz opened the Central Park Theatre, the first movie palace in Chicago. Their chain of luxurious popcorn palaces at key locations around the city serviced more patrons than the movie theaters in any other city, including Manhattan.  Movies were not the only form of entertainment at Balaban and Katz’s theaters. Before the film was shown, live musical acts, dance troupes, and even classical musicians were featured. As a matter of fact, musicians of all genres flocked to the city to play in the nightclubs that began cropping up during World War I. Later, these clubs defined the city during the Jazz Age, because the biggest joints were owned by mobsters engaged in turf wars over the illegal liquor trade. Given the variety of entertainment that thrived in the city, dozens of actors, entertainers, and musicians arrived and departed the city on a weekly basis.

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In life you’ve just gotta take what it gives you.  Some people want to be doctors, some want to be actors.  Some of those people who want to be actors might not be just like everybody else.  Some are taller, some plumper, some more handsome and pretty — we usually only see that kind — and some are smaller.  Billy Curtis was one of the latter.  The 4’2″ Curtis wanted to be an actor, and we’re fortunate he pursued his dream.  The Massachusetts-born (on this date in 1909) Curtis left us with a legacy of over a hundred appearances in movies and TV, and that’s a rich bequest indeed.

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Every amateur detective has his own approach to crime solving but Mary Lee Ling consults the stars and birth dates to narrow down the list of suspects. WHEN WERE YOU BORN (1938) has a terrific premise for a detective thriller which was quite unusual in its day. And its offbeat approach to the genre is further enhanced by the casting of Anna May Wong in the central role of an astrologist whose connection to a murder victim implicates her in the police investigation.     READ MORE

I’ve lived long enough to see the end of the world (in whole or in part) many times over and there is enough of a selection of worst case scenarios floating around out there for me to be discriminating.  (I’m talking about movies, of course, not the real end of the world – you got that, right?)  Once upon a time, torrential floods, crumbling escarpments, the loss of a suspension bridge and some brisk, cost effective dialogue communicating an horrific but entirely unseen destruction of major cities was enough to call it a doomsday.  With the advent of computer generated imagery (CGI) over the past decade or so, it’s much easier to bring our capital cities tumbling visibly upon our heads.  We’ve  seen just about all of them go in the past few years:  New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, London, Paris, Rome and even the mighty Himalayans have fallen in such recent films as INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), ARMAGEDDON (1998), DEEP IMPACT (1998), THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004) and 2012 (2009).  I have seen the Capitol Records building collapse, the Golden Gate Bridge snap in two and the Vatican tip over like a tailgating drunkard.  You’d think these horrific events would be burned into my memory but the truth is they kind of mush together, prompting such thoughts as “What was the one where the White House blew up?” or “What was the one where the Hollywood sign got julienned by a twister?”  In their desperation to one-up all previous stabs at the end of days, these new disaster flicks remind me of the slasher movies post-1982 and their escalating creative kills, which became a blood-and-circuses spectacle apart from the essential drama, supplanting empathy with schadenfreude and in the exchange forfeiting something real in the mad rush to be memorable. READ MORE

During the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s glamor photography was all the rage in Hollywood. A good portrait could do wonders for an actor’s reputation and make them desirable to fans as well as directors and studio executives. Hundreds of talented photographers made a name for themselves by shooting beautiful portraits of Hollywood stars that fueled the imagination of the general public and helped sell lots of movie tickets.

One of the most interesting and prominent photographers from this period was the handsome and talented Paul Hesse. Hesse was born in New York in 1896 and experimented with photography while attending the Pratt Institute. After WWI Hesse became a professional poster illustrator and created covers for Collier’s Weekly. By 1918 he began to grow restless. Hesse was tired of the time-consuming aspects of illustration but he still wanted to pursue commercial art. He decided to purchase a secondhand camera and began focusing all of his attention on photography. Hesse immersed himself in the photographic process and read every photography book that he could get his hands on. By the mid-1920s he had opened up his own photography studio in New York City.

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If there’s a more deserving fellow to wish a very Happy Birthday to today, I can’t think of him.  Actor/director/producer/author Bruce Campbell, born 52 years ago today, is a real pro, a Hollywood survivor and one of the most delightful onscreen personalities around today.  I just finished watching his 2008 feature (as director and star) My Name is Bruce — really, just now, on Netflix streaming, it’s beautiful! — and his spoof on his own image, that of a cowardly, horn-dog, B-Movie actor, is hilarious.  Though I looked on Rotten Tomatoes and it only has a 38% rating, there are plenty of laughs and I highly recommend it.  Even better, there’s a lot of talk in the movie about it being Bruce Campbell’s birthday, so it’s perfect viewing material for today! 

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The Bat Whispers, Roland West’s sound version of his silent classic The Bat, is scheduled to air this Wednesday, June 23, on TCM. Despite the 2:30am airtime, those interested in visually stylish films, the influence of German Expressionism on Hollywood, or the connection between comic books and the movies will want to catch this old-school thriller.

I became a fan of Roland West’s films when I watched The Bat last year at the Silent Film Society’s annual Summer Film Festival in Chicago. The Bat is an old dark house tale about a murderous cat burglar who dresses in a bat costume. The old dark house storyline was enormously popular during the Jazz Age. The script for The Bat was adapted from a play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, which opened on Broadway in August 1920 and ran for 867 performances. The play was a reworking of Rinehart’s popular novel The Circular Staircase from 1907 combined with a bit of her short story “The Borrowed House.” What made The Bat stand out among the dozens of other old dark house tales was the Expressionist mise-en-scene adopted by West and his team. The thriller’s stark, high-contrast lighting, with little or no gray scale, and stunning set design elevated the material above the formulaic storyline, much like Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary. Arthur Edeson, one of Hollywood’s most influential cinematographers and a cofounder of the American Society of Cinematographers, worked out the lighting schemes and camera angles with West for The Bat, while William Cameron Menzies, who later served as art director on Gone With the Wind, did the set design.

Despite its 1926 release date—84 years ago—The Bat does have a connection to contemporary films, albeit an indirect one. Bob Kane, the originator of Batman, likely saw The Bat and/or The Bat Whispers, or perhaps a version of Rinehart and Hopwood’s play. Debate exists over which version of the material actually inspired Kane, but I lean toward the silent version because there is more bat imagery, including the silhouette of the Bat against a spotlight that looks very much the Batman signal. In addition, the Bat’s costume includes pointed ears, reminiscent of the pointed cowl that  is an essential ingredient to Batman’s look. However, both The Bat and The Bat Whispers use a stark, graphic Expressionist style later associated with comic books. Those contemporary graphic novelists and filmmakers influenced by Bob Kane and comic book art owe a nod to West’s thrillers, which in turn were influenced by German Expressionist films and the work of French filmmaker Louis Feuillade and his 10-part serial called Les Vampires about a group of master criminals who call themselves the Vampires. (For more on the origins and influence of The Bat, click here for my earlier post.)

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The first Patricia Highsmith novel to be adapted to film was the author’s first book, published in 1950,  STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie the next year. Yet, with the exception of U.S. television which adapted some of Highsmith’s stories for the small screen (The Talented Mr. Ripley for Studio One in Hollywood in 1956, The Perfect Alibi for Jane Wyman Presents The Fireside Theatre in 1957, Annabel for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962), no American film director would attempt another Highsmith screen adaptation for many years. European filmmakers, however, have returned again and again to her perversely fascinating thrillers which are marked by their disturbing psychological detail and macabre humor. Among these are René Clément’s visually stunning PURPLE NOON (1960), an adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Claude Autant-Lara’s Enough Rope (1963), based on the novel The Blunderer, Wim Wenders’ hallucinatory noir The American Friend (1977), adapted from Ripley’s Game, and This Sweet Sickness (1977) by French director Claude Miller. And, one of the least known – and uncredited – adaptations is LA VITTIMA DESIGNATA (1971, aka THE DESIGNATED VICTIM), which is a very loose, revisionist version of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN with colorful Italian location shooting in Venice, Milan and Lake Como.    READ MORE