I don’t know that I’ve ever watched an entire episode of HOARDERS, the A&E reality TV series about people who obsessively collect things and wind up entrapped by their possessions, but I’ve seen enough and I get the point.  As such, I’ve been spending a little time lately wading through my collection of film magazines with a mind toward, you might say, thinning the herd.  I have a tendency to hold onto things but it’s not for reasons of security or the need to control my environment or any of the myriad whacko reasons people wind up with 137 kitty kat clocks, 52 eight track head cleaner cassettes and a gross of D’ag bags.  As a freelance writer, I never know what I’m going to be writing about from month to month, so I’ve been characteristically slow to part with old issues of Film Comment or Sight & Sound or Cineaste because, hey, it could happen that I’m asked to write about Joris Ivens or Maurice Pialat or Marco Bellocchio and if it does then I’ll really need that 13, 15 or even 3o-year issue of that august film journal.  But chances are I won’t.  So let’s take out the trash, shall we… or at least ask some hard questions about what stays and what goes. READ MORE

John Barry loved movies and the movies loved him. The British born composer passed away on Sunday, January 31st at age 77 following a heart attack but he left a rich legacy of musical accomplishments behind. Barry was a giant in the industry and the obituaries and tributes that have followed his death have reflected his importance as an Oscar winning film composer who worked on award winning films like Born Free (1966), The Lion in Winter (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Out of Africa (1986), Dances with Wolves (1990) and Chaplin (1992) as well as his contribution to the classic James Bond theme, which happens to be one of the most recognizable pieces of music ever recorded. John Barry’s work touched people and many of the heartfelt remembrances that I’ve read express a real connection to the man and his music. His soundtracks were often some of the first film scores that movie fans purchased and when a film was easily forgettable it was John Barry’s music that often stayed with viewers long after the credits rolled. Barry didn’t just make music, he made movie magic. The searing melodies, guitar driven rhythms, punchy horn sections and lush orchestration found in his scores have the ability to transport audiences to another place and time. Few artists can claim to have that kind of power but Barry’s musical wizardry is renowned. I thought it would be fun to take a look back at Barry’s impressive career and see how he progressed from a film projectionist’s son into an Oscar winning composer.

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My fellow Morlock, R. Emmet Sweeney has written an excellent appreciation of the restoration of the long-lost John Ford film Upstream (1927)  that was recently screened at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. Like Rob, I saw this delightful movie for the first time as well–though I was in a relatively small audience at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York with Philip P. Carli providing live musical accompaniment on the piano. The Dryden Theatre at Eastman House rang with laughter and applause last weekend in response to Upstream, though the audience was also held rapt by another movie on the program created by a member of the same family. Francis Ford (1881-1953), a man who acted in around 400 movies and wrote, directed and produced close to 200 films, preceded his baby brother, the four time Oscar winning director, John Ford, into the burgeoning movie industry by several years. Frank Ford is primarily remembered now as a fairly obscure and often silent member of the John Ford Stock Company in the background of numerous films, including Upstream, where he appears as a medicine show salesman who likes to guzzle his own wares.  On rare occasions in his long years as an obscure character actor, Francis had a few moments of glory: his brave (if thirsty) Revolutionary soldier Joe Boleo in Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), the frightened victim of a lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), the old codger who rises from his death bed to witness the battle royal in The Quiet Man (1952) or his silent but animated coonskin-wearing Civil War veteran in The Sun Shines Bright (1953). While Francis was often a sad, peripheral figure after he gave up directing for acting in the late ’20s, filmmaker Francis Ford’s  When Lincoln Paid (1913), has only recently been restored after almost 98 years in obscurity, and highlighting a nearly unknown talent.

The film was a thirty minute, two-reeler, made for distribution by Kay-Bee pictures, (Kay-Bee was a subsidiary of Universal and was also known as Bison). The Civil War story may have been directed by and starred John Ford‘s elder brother and unsung pathfinder, Francis Ford a year before John Feeney’s arrival in California, but the seeds of the “Fordian” storytelling that recur so often in justly celebrated films such as The Searchers, Young Mr. Lincoln, and How Green Was My Valley can be discerned in When Lincoln Paid in less polished form, as characters cope with private pain and loss, the longing for revenge, the development of empathy and public action for a greater good. Long forgotten and assumed lost, this movie was unearthed by contractor Peter Massie, who came across a 35mm Monarch projector and seven reels of nitrate film tucked away and forgotten in the summer of 2006 as he prepared to demolish a barn in Nelson, N.H. It was eventually determined that this movie was the only surviving copy of one of the eight silent films starring Francis Ford as Lincoln; there are no known surviving copies of the others.

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“If life in general is a play, then a theatrical boarding house is a burlesque show.” -the epigraph to Upstream

This past Sunday, the Museum of the Moving Image presented a screening of John Ford’s Upstream in NYC for the first time since the film’s debut over 80 years ago. Long thought lost, a nitrate print was discovered in the New Zealand Film Archive in early 2009, part of a cache of 75 titles now being preserved by the National Film Preservation Foundation, in partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The restoration work on Upstream was performed by Park Road Post Production in Wellington, New Zealand, under the direction of Twentieth Century Fox and the Academy Film Archive. The U.S. re-premiere occurred last September 1st at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, and has been slowly touring the country since.

Upstream is an effortlessly delightful comedy set at a rooming house for struggling show people. It’s as if Ford populated an entire film with Alan Mowbray’s Shakespearean hams from My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master. The main blowhards are Eric Brasingham (Earle Foxe), described as “the last and least of a theatrical family” (the beginning of the John Barrymore gibes), and the Castilian knife-thrower Juan Rodriguez (Grant Withers), although the inter-titles wryly note he was born in the midwest as Jack. These two-bit entertainers stumblingly woo Gertie (Nancy Nash) to be their partners in acts and in the bedroom. Ford fills in the edges of this triangle with even more colorful types: the “star boarder” played by Raymond Hitchcock as a flirtatious monocled dandy; the aging, earnest dramatist Campbell Mandare (Emile Chautard); the permanently tipsy tap-dancing duo Callahan and Callahan; and the pushover landlady/fading Southern Belle Miss Hattie Breckenbridge Peyton (Lydia Yeamans Titus).

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