This past week a bright and charming grade-schooler interviewed me about Chicago’s place in film history. He was knee deep in producing a documentary for his school’s history fair, and I was one of the people he interviewed on camera. I am always thrilled when young people exhibit an interest in the cinema of the past, let alone an era that predates Hollywood as the hub of the industry. The experience was doubly enjoyable because not only was it fun to help out, but in prepping for the interview, I uncovered and re-discovered some fun facts about my adopted city and its place in the history of film.  As a matter of fact, I found so much that I am going to divide the information into two posts, continuing the saga next week. Much of this detail is omitted from standard film texts, which tend to travel the path of history as it threads through the industry centers of Hollywood and New York.

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Motherhood and the movies have often made for boffo box office returns. My glowing memories of those warm-hearted, endearingly fluttery, or nobly self-sacrificing mothers played by Spring Byington, Mary Astor, Fay Bainter and Barbara Stanwyck and others in classic movies may have fogged my vision of celluloid motherhood a bit.

The Silver Cord (1933), a 77 year old film made at RKO, broke that clichéd Mom mold with a disquieting crack, blending a domestic drama with strong elements of high camp. There were Bad Moms around in dramas before and after this exercise in theatrical Freudianism. Noel Coward enjoyed his first big success in the mid 1920s dramatizing the unhealthy relationship between a glamorous nymphomaniac socialite and her drug addicted son in The Vortex (1927), which was made into a silent movie in 1927. The same year as The Silver Cord (1933), director John Ford offered a surprisingly negative portrait of a mother played by Henrietta Crossman in Pilgrimage. Crossman’s dour character was so fixated on avoiding a marriage by her only son to “an unsuitable girl,” she sent him off to the trenches of World War I. And Gladys Cooper brought the Bad Mom to an artistic high point with her portrayals of lethally clinging matriarchs in Now, Voyager (1942) and Separate Tables (1958) in the ’40s and ’50s. The grandma of many of the later indictments of maternal love, however, might be this early talkie, which is statically staged but electrifying, thanks to the author, the actors and their under-appreciated director, John Cromwell.

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Last week I looked at six of the Best Picture nominees from 1943, the last year the Academy nominated ten films for Best Picture, until they expanded the category once more in 2010. Today I’ll look at the remaining four titles, with James Agee and Manny Farber again providing perspective with their reviews from the period. The idea is to approach these films with fresh eyes, outside of the reputations (or lack of) that have accrued over time.

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Last year, in part because of the celebrations surrounding the films of 1939, I had a chance to introduce Gone With the Wind to younger viewers in my family who had never seen the film. It’s not a favorite movie of mine, so I could understand their appalled reactions to the innate racism of the story that implied that a slave’s first loyalty was to the families that owned them, (even after the Civil War and emancipation). Seen at a glance in GWTW, maybe the antebellum South’s biggest problems may only seem to be uppity white trash like Victor Jory’s oily Jonas Wilkerson, or the need for rebellious girls like Scarlett to maintain their hypocritical poses in a rigid social structure, while secretly acting on their own half-understood impulses, and the upheaval caused by those damn Yankees. But look a bit closer and you can see the story of changing attitudes and a brave woman struggling to make her mark in a world that both rejected and accepted her.  I don’t mean Scarlett Katie O’Hara, either.

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The Movie Morlocks Oscar blog-a-thon continues today and goes through the end of the week. Suzi kicked things off yesterday with a look at actors who were nominated for historical roles. Today I look at the Best Picture race from 1944’s Academy Award ceremony (for the films of ‘43).

The big news at this year’s Oscar ceremony is the expansion of the Best Picture category from five nominees to ten. After the near shutout of THE DARK KNIGHT from major awards in 2009, it’s an effort by the Academy to shoehorn some money makers onto the show to goose ratings. And while the world-devouring AVATAR would have been nominated in a field of one, hits like DISTRICT 9 and THE BLIND SIDE certainly benefited from the change. This is no innovation however – there were ten best picture nominees from 1937 – 1944 (it varied between 3 – 12 before then). They cut it down to five nominations in ‘45 for the first national radio telecast on ABC, perhaps to trim a few seconds off the program. Over the next two weeks, I’ll watch all the nominees (except for the out-of-print HUMAN COMEDY), from immortal classics to forgotten curios. It’s an attempt to take the pulse of mainstream film-making of the era with fresh eyes. The list of nominees is after the break.

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Moonrise (1948), which has its TCM premiere this evening, Feb. 3rd, at 10pm EST, is a film that is as hard to categorize neatly as the rest of the movies in director Frank Borzage’s long career. Despite the fact that many movie buffs might associate Borzage with a gauzy, passé sentimentality in classic silent films such as Street Angel (1928), this movie begins with a dramatic sequence that tells the tragic background of the leading character Danny Hawkins (Dane Clark) in one of the most powerful opening sequences I’ve seen. I don’t normally tell people to watch something only from the beginning, but with this movie, you would be missing a dynamic part of the movie as well as an introduction to the compelling dreamlike atmosphere of this most modern of Frank Borzage’s movies.If spoilers are not something you want to know before seeing a movie, you may want to stop reading now.

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My dictionary gives the definition of a cri de coeur (krēt kër′) as “a cry from the heart, an impassioned protest, complaint, etc.” If you really want to see that term translated onto film, the Warner Brothers movie, Two Seconds (1932) could fill the bill.

Crude, raw and disturbing, Two Seconds (1932) is being broadcast on TCM on Thursday, Jan. 21st, at 11:45am. First released in the middle of 1932, audiences flocked to see this financially successful but dramatically grim tale about the thoughts and memories that flash through the mind of a man just as he is about to die in the electric chair. Perhaps some of them felt as though they were walking the last mile too. After Americans had witnessed 13 million jobs evaporating into thin air since 1929, watching nationwide unemployment rise to 23.6 %, wouldn’t logic tell us that most people might want to go to the movies to escape a reality they could not control? Apparently not, especially when Warner Brothers had the good fortune to have several talented individuals involved in this film. READ MORE

Let’s see if I can describe the disquieting effect of The Unfinished Dance adequately for those who haven’t been exposed to it. The formula for The Unfinished Dance (1947-Henry Koster), a rarely seen film that will be aired at 1:15pm on January 15th, is a heady brew, composed of mysterious elements blended from this:

When I realized that both Method Acting and the Shadows of Russia were being explored on Monday and Wednesday nights respectively for the next few weeks on TCM, all I could think was:

“Why, oh, why, isn’t character actor Vladimir Sokoloff around to sit down with Robert Osborne for a chin wag on these two fascinating topics?”

Such is our fate. As latter day observers of both cultural phenomena, we may ponder the origins of The Method as well as the sometimes wondrous (and just plain odd) movies that emerged from American perceptions of Russian history in the 20th century.

For Sokoloff, these topics were part of his life. He had trained at the Moscow Art Theater as a youth, seen the Russian Revolution sweep the world he’d grown up in aside,  become a prominent actor in German silents during the Weimar years, moved on to a career in France when the Nazis came to power, and finally landed on his agile feet in America.

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