Think of a montage in a classic movie.  Are you picturing falling calendar pages, or swirling newspaper headlines spinning toward the camera lens, stock market crashes, the outbreak of wars or the mounting hysteria of an anonymous crowd evolving into a mob?

Perhaps we’ve seen them so many times, we are no longer conscious that these sequences in familiar movies were often composed with such artistry by unseen hands. Yet, if you are an inveterate credit reader of classic films, one of the creative individuals who developed these artful transitions had what is still an unjustly unfamiliar name to many of us.

Even if the name of Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) fails to ring a bell, you definitely know his work, especially if you happened to catch Wednesday evening’s broadcast of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939-Frank Capra) on TCM. In a matter of moments, a lively montage unfolded in that film, telescoping the overwhelmingly heady experience of Jimmy Stewart‘s impressions of the nation’s capitol as he went on a whirlwind travelogue of the sights, ending at one of the most moving, the Lincoln Memorial. Bursting with movement and rapid visual imagery, the sequence conveys the naive Stewart‘s ebullience, awe and sense of freedom once he eludes his handlers, (led by the inimitable froggy-voiced Eugene Pallette).

That was just one example of Vorkapich‘s remarkable ability to goose the story of just about any film using a visual shorthand blending wipes, dissolves, flip-flops, and super-impositions to summarize and punctuate events during films, especially in the period from the 1920s to the 1940s.
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My eyes were misting over at the sight of Robert Donat, that most “beautiful loser” in the cut-throat world of moviemaking, as I watched the end of The Magic Box (1951) on TCM earlier this month. That actor could break this sap’s heart with a change in the inflection of his voice, but the somewhat romanticized portrayal of cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene in the all star John Boulting-directed film was very well done. Still, it made me think about another pioneer in British movie history, Cecil M. Hepworth (1875-1953).

In Kevin Brownlow and David Gill‘s documentary series on early film pioneers across the pond, Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1995), the film historians called their chapter on the British film industry, “Opportunity Lost”. Unlike the flourishing Swedish, Italian and French cinemas of the early years of the 20th century, English movies struggled from inception, with little government protection from foreign filmmakers, and constant copyright violations occurring  among the hardscrabble film companies. This outpost of the British cinema was little more than “a cottage industry”, based in the 8 room house of the of Cecil Hepworth in Walton-on-Thames. Hepworth‘s movies may have had their hand-crafted limitations, but they were also innovative, had charm, and definitely had an off-hand, singular British humor. And their creator was one of the most influential figures in movies internationally–if one of the most obscure today. Since many of this filmmaker’s few existing, brief movies are in the public domain, I hoped it might be interesting to gather many of them together here for readers who might enjoy these, as I have. None of the movies here are any more than a few minutes long.
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TCM is officially celebrating the work of the studio era’s great directors throughout this month, so I thought I might swim upstream a bit. As revered director John Ford once pointed out, “People are incorrect to compare a director to an author. If he’s a creator, he’s more like an architect.”

The more I keep learning about the shadowy figures in the background of great movies who actually wrote the story, chose the sets, edited the film and designed the look of a movie, the truth of Ford‘s comment becomes more concrete for me. The director as an architect whose vision unfolded thanks to many hands, not just his will, is particularly intriguing when you realize that, unconsciously, you “know” someone’s work, even when his or her name is unfamiliar.One of those background figures, whose work illuminated the films of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Julien Duvivier and more, much more than has been acknowledged, was cinematographer Joseph Walker (1892-1985).
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Amid our recent hectic news cycles, the quieter news that the month of March is Women’s History Month probably seems pretty unimportant. I know it passed me  by until a friend recently remarked that it seemed “quaint and irrelevant” to him. I must admit that I could see his point. Then I started to mull over the idea of the sometimes little known contributions of my foremothers to this world. Maybe some of the women who helped to make new pathways for all of their daughters, sisters and friends of the “female persuasion” deserve a bit of a nod.

So, during March I’ll be highlighting a few of the women in film history in front of and behind the camera who made a difference. The first of them is someone whose work you’re almost certain to have seen, though remarkably few people know her name or her story. She was Margaret Booth (1898-2002) and her influence as a pioneer film editor–for good and ill–on movies extends from her first formal credit of Orphans of the Storm (1921) to The Way We Were (1973) and beyond. In 1977, when she was in her ’70s, Film Comment magazine asked her fellow film editors (many of whom were half a century younger) to name the top editors in film history. She was Number Three and still playing an active role in the film world then. To help me place this pivotal figure’s career in some insider perspective, my friend Lynn Zook, who is a present day film editor and archivist has been of great help to me. Her comments will be laced throughout this brief look at Margaret Booth‘s career.

The year 1915 was before women had the vote, could own property in most states without their father or husband’s consent, and was a time when women’s choices were often the home, the sweatshop or the street. This is when Margaret Booth (seen in her prime, above left) began to work on silent pictures.  It wasn’t a career choice for her, it was a matter of her family’s survival. READ MORE

The simplest yet most revealing filmmaking technique is the close-up, and yet it is a technique taken for granted because it is so familiar that we don’t notice it. Still, the close-up influences our sympathies and sense of identification with a character, making it a powerful technique. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the impact of the close-up. 

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