Harlow in Hollywood

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I ended my last post with the shadow of Jean Harlow’s name on the directory outside the star dressing rooms at the MGM studios. It was a ghostly image; the haunting is considerably more tangible in another new book, Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937 by Darrell Rooney and Mark A. Vieira, published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Harlow’s birth (March 3, 1911). This sleekly sumptuous coffee-table volume does a great job of evoking both “H”s in the title. I can’t help comparing it to the late Ronald Haver’s David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, even at the risk of overpraising Harlow in Hollywood — at least in my own mind, since I consider Haver’s book just about the best single title ever published on Golden Age Hollywood. There never was such a visual and factual feast as that Selznick book, but Harlow in Hollywood is in the same league.

Rooney and Vieira’s text is essentially an artful paraphrase of David Stenn’s Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, which the authors acknowledge right up front as “the definitive biography” of the star. (By the way, now that I’ve checked out Bombshell‘s Amazon page and seen the prices it’s going for, I guess I’d better never let my 1993 first edition out of my sight!)

What really set the new book apart are its visuals — the cascade of pictures (there must be 400 or more) from the authors’ own collections and what they’ve garnered from other sources (duly thanked in the acknowledgments), all dazzlingly arranged by designer Hilary Lentini. The evocative beauty of Lentini’s design extends even to the whimsical endpapers, adapted from a 1937 Starland Map and dotted with “pins” marking locations that were significant in Harlow’s life and career. These endpapers go far to conjure up a cozy, sun-soaked little cluster of everybody-knows-everybody communities — Hollywood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Laurel Canyon — that’s a far cry from the cramped, smoggy, seedy melange of urban sprawl, faded glory and retro kitsch that greets visitors to the L.A. Basin today. (Of course, the map probably had more than a touch of gaga fantasy even then.)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

If Harlow in Hollywood doesn’t quite match the visual splash of David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, it’s probably because it doesn’t have the Haver book’s riot of eye-popping color. Which is only fitting: Selznick was an early champion of Technicolor and used it when others told him he was a fool to waste the money; but Selznick figured color would pay off in the long run by adding shelf life to his pictures (and he was right).

Not that there isn’t color in Harlow in Hollywood — like these striking Carbro color images taken by George Hurrell in late 1935 or early ’36. These pictures are from her “brownette” period late in her career (nobody knew how late), when MGM sought to placate the Breen Office by softening the erotic edge of her platinum blonde image. It’s not as if they had much choice. Harlow’s hair really had that white-blonde sheen in childhood and adolescence (and she was only 17 when she started in pictures), but every blonde’s hair color deepens and thickens with maturity, and Harlow was no exception. Stringent efforts to retain that platinum blonde look — peroxide, ammonia, Lux flakes — had ravaged her scalp and hair to the point where she was in real danger of going bald. I suspect part of the reason for the Hurrell portraits was to prepare Harlow’s fans for her new look.

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
But color portraits or no, Harlow was made for black and white. She was made by black and white, too, as this portrait on the set of Bombshell shows — she’s so much more alluring and accessible here, isn’t she? Harlow in Hollywood has picture after picture like this; the authors’ point is that Harlow was endlessly fascinating, and they prove it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There are pictures like this one too, more candid shots, away from the controlled atmosphere of the studio with its careful grooming and flattering lighting, its makeup artists and glamour photographers. Here she is in 1936 at the Cocoanut Grove with William Powell…
…and again in court in 1935, seeking a divorce from
her third husband, cinematographer Hal Rosson. Harlow
is still Harlow, still glamourous and photogenic — but
her eyes look sunken and baggy, at least to me. Is it just
the sad wisdom of hindsight, or does Harlow really look
 
like a woman in failing health? Did anybody notice it at
the time? Or did they just put it down to her late hours
and heavy drinking? There was plenty of both. (Sitting
with her in this picture is her mother, the real Jean Harlow
— that is, the one born with the name that 17-year-old
Harlean Carpenter adopted when she registered with
Central Casting. Was that Harlean’s awkward tribute
to the mother who had wanted to be a movie star
more than she ever did? Whatever it was, Harlean
was stuck with her mother’s maiden name
from then on.)
 
 
What would have happened to Harlow if she had lived? Might she have, as some suggest, transferred her comic talent to TV as she slipped into middle age, the way Lucille Ball (five months younger than Harlow) did? Maybe; youth enhanced Harlow’s comic charm but didn’t define it. But the fact is, it wasn’t to be, not because she died young, but because she was probably dying — or at least doomed — before she ever set foot in California. An attack of scarlet fever at 15, probably followed by an undiagnosed kidney infection, had started her on a protracted and undetected course of kidney failure that finished her off 11 years later. There were no transplants or dialysis machines in those days; when your kidneys gave out that was it, you were a goner. The pressure of work and pleasing her mother, three failed marriages (one terminated by her husband’s grisly suicide), two abortions, an appendectomy, oral surgery and alcoholism may have sapped her constitution and will to live and brought the end that much sooner, but odds are Jean Harlow was never going to make it to the Age of Television no matter what.
 
Harlow in Hollywood covers all that — you can scarcely ignore it — but it’s no scandal-wallow. If the book wallows in anything, it’s in the glamour of Harlow’s Hollywood — the movies, the premieres, the mansions, the restaurants and night clubs. With things like that it’s not wallowing, it’s luxuriance. And this is a luxuriant book, richly printed on fine glossy paper in sparkling tones of silvery black and white. But I’ll close with another color image, this one a 2009 recreation of Farewell to Earth, the portrait that Harlow’s grieving mother commissioned after her death. On her right hand you can glimpse her 85-carat star sapphire ring, a 1936 Christmas present from William Powell, the love of Harlow’s life who wouldn’t marry her. 
 
The painting embodies Mother Jean’s maudlin grief. Shunned by the industry that never liked her very much even as they adored her daughter, she made her homes a succession of shrines to her “Baby” and died in obscurity in 1958. Nobody knows what ever happened to the painting (this image was digitally colorized from a photo), or to that star sapphire ring. 
 
But the portrait also captures something of Harlow’s beauty, grace, charm and intelligence, as does the whole book. At the list price of $50 it would be a bargain. At the $31.50 Amazon is asking, no movie buff can afford to be without it.
 

A Time-Travel Studio Tour

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Hollywood backlots are endlessly fascinating, aren’t they? When I moved to Long Beach in 1977 I drove up to Burbank one day to check out the Walt Disney Studios on Buena Vista Street. I parked on residential South Lincoln Street behind the studio. Peeking through a knothole in the studio fence, I could just catch a glimpse of what I’m sure were the old sets for the Zorro TV series. I was never able to prove it, though, and I guess I never will now: the Disney backlot is gone — and for all I know, the fence, that section of Lincoln St., and the houses that faced it — subsumed into the Walt Disney Feature Animation building that went up in the 1990s.

In 1986 I attended a screening of Wisdom (in which I had a bit role) at the 20th Century Fox studios, and afterwards took a stroll around the grounds (that’s when I learned that once you manage to get inside a studio’s gates, people let you go more or less where you please, on the assumption that you must belong there). I saw the picturesque little Swiss-looking bungalow that had been built for Shirley Temple (later the writers’ building), and walked the stunted remains of the Fox backlot, all that was left after they sold off the 180 acres that became Century City.

 
 
 
I never got even a glimpse of the colossal MGM backlot, but now I can, and so can you, thanks to MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot by Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester and Michael Troyan. This book manages to be both satisfying in its thorough documenting of the physical nuts and bolts of MGM, and tantalizing in its constant reminder that most of this is (if you’ll pardon the expression) gone with the wind. Much as we might wish to step into one of this book’s hundreds of pictures and look around, we will never walk the streets we know so well from Andy Hardy movies, Tarzan pictures, Gene Kelly musicals and The Twilight Zone — and neither, now, will anybody else. (This picture, by the way, shows only the 81 acres of MGM Lots 1 [the complex of buildings off in the distance] and 2 [closer up]. At the studio’s peak there were five other lots sprinkled around that part of Culver City on another hundred acres; they’re out of the picture off to the right.)

 
The book does have its nits, and I might as well pick them. The authors garble somewhat the prehistory of the three studios — Metro, Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures — before they merged to form MGM. As I’ve recounted elsewhere, director Rex Ingram worked for Metro, not Goldwyn, and his production of Mare Nostrum was not among the financial headaches MGM inherited with the merger. Neither was “Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur” shooting in Rome (also discussed here); that would be June Mathis and Charles Brabin’s Ben-Hur. Niblo was the director Mayer and Irving Thalberg picked later to clean up Brabin’s mess — back in Hollywood where they could keep an eye on things.

 

Also, the book could have used a more thorough job of copy editing. There are far more than the usual number of misspellings (“Donald O’Conner,” “legers [ledgers]”) typographical errors (“The Barrett’s of Wimpole Street,” elsewhere called “Wimple Street”), malapropisms (“initialized” for “initiated,” “cache” for “cachet,” “skewered” for “skewed”), grammatical missteps (“…the sets fell in to disrepair…”) and other hard-to-classify errors that could be one or more of the above (“…the seeds of destruction…were sewn…”). You can hardly go five pages without one gaffe or another. (And by the way, was there really a “Red Square” set in Yolanda and the Thief [1945]? I don’t remember one in that picture, which took place in a mythical South American country, but the authors say there was one, and that Lot 2’s New York Street played the role.)

 

 

 

All quibbles notwithstanding, this book is a swell read, a step-by-step tour that takes us through each lot one by one, ushering us in the front gate and taking in every building (on Lot 1) and outdoor set (on the others) in turn. There are plenty of maps, starting with this one showing all MGM’s holdings at its peak. (The two lots on the left are the ones you can see in the picture above.) If you live in the L.A. area and have a passing familiarity with Culver City, it’s easy to get the lay of MGM’s land.

 
Here’s another one of the book’s maps, this one of Lot 2 — home to Andy Hardy’s hometown of Carvel, Tarzan’s jungle, Romeo and Juliet‘s (1936) Verona Square, the Lord family mansion in The Philadelphia Story, the complex of New York Streets, etc. I don’t have room to reproduce it full-size, but if you Ctrl-click it to open it in a new tab, then “+” it up, you can see it more clearly. The numbers in the columns on the left correspond to shaded areas on the map, and each gets its own mini-chapter with accompanying pictures and a rundown of how each area was used over the years. You’ll spend a lot of time thumbing back and forth between text and maps, but by the time you’re through you’d be able to roam freely around all seven lots without getting lost. 

If they still existed — which, except for Lot 1 (now Sony Studios), they don’t. The last section of the book, “Backlot Babylon,” is the hardest to read, and it just gets more and more heartbreaking by the paragraph. 
This is where the authors take us through the long sorry story of the disintegration of Louis B. Mayer’s mighty empire. The authors quote a retired publicist, speaking in 1974, as saying that the studio’s last really great year was 1948. The irony in that, which the book makes clear, is that even in ’74 things hadn’t hit bottom, although “the writing was now clearly on the false walls.”
 
These pages are dominated by pictures like the two here: On the top, the decrepit hulk from 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty cowers beyond the rubble that was once Lot 3’s Dutch Street and Rawhide Street; on the bottom, a bulldozer polishes off the last of Lot 2’s complex of New York Streets in 1980.
 

Changing the subject slightly, I just got a DVD on eBay comprised of Kodachrome home movies taken at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Seeing the place in color is a much more immediate experience than all those old black-and-white newsreels and photos, and what comes through most clearly to me in these 70-year-old home movies is that everything — from the Trylon and Perisphere all the way down to the Amusement Zone rides — looks so absolutely and completely permanent.

It’s like that too in the movies shot on the MGM backlot. I mean, I’ve lived on streets that I don’t remember as vividly as Kensington Avenue from Meet Me in St. Louis or Andy Hardy’s street — which was also Maple St. in the “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” episode of The Twilight Zone, and the street Bobby Van hopped down in Small Town Girl.

That’s just from seeing them in the movies. How much more solid and permanent they must have looked to the people who actually worked on them. Not that they would have looked or felt real, of course. An actor always knows when he’s on a set, and Mickey Rooney and Lewis Stone surely never had any illusions that the Hardys’ front door actually led anyplace — the company would have to adjourn to a set on one of Lot 1’s sound stages to continue that illusion.

But even so, there must have been a feeling that these sets would always be there, and it’s easy to imagine the wistful bewilderment people like Rooney and Debbie Reynolds and Ann Rutherford felt walking the backlot toward the end — after the carpenters and maintenance crews and greensmen had all been laid off, and there were weeds growing around the doorsteps and torn canvas walls flapping in the Santa Ana Winds. In fact, we don’t have to imagine it; we can see it in pictures like That’s Entertainment! and the documentary-cum-obituaries that date from the 1960s and ’70s. It’s there, too, in dozens of quotes in MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, from stars and “backstage” workers alike, and always the subtext is the same: Jeez, what happened?? With the studio humming along on all cylinders, thousands of employees keeping everything fresh and ready to use on a moment’s notice, and packing the commissary every day at lunch, the MGM lots surely seemed as permanent as the pyramids.

 
In the end they weren’t, and in fact they never had been. For me, one of the saddest pictures in MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot isn’t of great sets reduced to garbage or props and costumes auctioned off or used for landfill, it’s one of the simplest. And oddly enough, it’s not from the long miserable decline and fall; it’s from 1937, when the MGM lion was in full roar and the vigorous prime of life. And here it is, a sign on the outside wall of the star dressing room building — which, for the major stars, weren’t just rooms but full homes-away-from-home with bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and fireplaces. You can see here that Suite A is presently vacant, but that it once belonged to the recently deceased Jean Harlow. Her name has been removed, and her suite no doubt cleared out for its next occupant (in time it would go to Lana Turner),
but the letters of Jean’s name have left their shadow behind,
like the impression of a pen-press on the
second page of a note pad.
 
In the end, and for that matter all along, the entire
studio complex of mighty MGM turned out to be
no more permanent than that.

 

Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

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It seems wrong not to say something about
the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, but what is
there that hasn’t already been said? There
are only a handful of performers who
managed to move from childhood stardom
to adult careers and make it stick — Dean
Stockwell, Mickey Rooney, Jackie Cooper,
Roddy McDowall (there are also Jodie
Foster and Kurt Russell, but they were
only child actors, not stars). Even in
that small company, Taylor may be
unique: she rose to the top as a kid
and stayed there to the very end;
in fact, in a way, she even redefined
what “the top” actually was.

She didn’t make much of an impression
in her first picture, There’s One Born 
Every Minute. But then, neither did
the picture itself, a piddling little Hugh
Herbert programmer for Universal
that not even Variety, who covered
just about everything, bothered to
review. Elizabeth (she hated being
called Liz, so I won’t) was no more
than ten, and vying for attention with
Hugh Herbert in three roles (the
mind boggles!). Who know, maybe
she was hoping no one would notice
her. In later life, she always had a
pretty sensitive b.s.-meter; and it
might well have been on line even
as early as that.

In any case, her second picture was another
kettle of fish — or rather, another bowl of kibble:
Lassie Come Home. I wasn’t there at the time,
but I have it on good authority that people
came out of theaters asking two questions:
Wasn’t that dog amazing? and Who on earth
is that little girl? (“A pretty moppet,” beamed
Variety.) By that time (LCH was released in
 December ’43) Elizabeth was going on
twelve. So what was different?
Was it puberty?

I think it was Technicolor. Taylor’s creamy
complexion, raven hair and (most particularly)
violet eyes came across in color as they couldn’t
in black and white. Uncredited (and unnoticed)
bits in Jane Eyre and The White Cliffs of Dover
only go to reinforce the point. Then it was back
to Technicolor for…

…National Velvet. Pauline Kael once said that this was “the high point in Elizabeth Taylor’s acting career,” and I think she’s right. At any rate, beginning with this movie, Elizabeth would never go unnoticed again.

She grew up fast at MGM, and it wasn’t long before her beauty stood out even in black and white. She’s 16 in the Clarence Sinclair Bull portrait that leads off this post…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…15 here, touching up a water color (or pretending to)
in the Hollywood Hills. By 1949, at the ripe old age
of 17, she was playing the wife of 38-year-old
Robert Taylor in Conspirator.
 
None of these, of course, are what most people
think of when they hear Elizabeth Taylor’s name.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This is more like it, right? Suddenly, Last Summer may not be the hot seller on Amazon or in Netflix queues that it was in 1959 theaters, but this was one of the iconic movie images of the 1950s, right up there with Carroll Baker sucking her thumb in Baby Doll, or Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity. (The fact that Catherine Holly, Taylor’s character, told psychiatrist Montgomery Clift that the bathing suit made her look “almost nude” when it got wet no doubt stoked the fantasies of millions of red-blooded American men. Did any of them see the movie over and over, hoping that this time she would really go into the water?) Elizabeth is 27 here, on the way to the third of her five Oscar nominations (she won twice), and she’s been officially grown up since she and Clift (and director George Stevens’s camera) were more intimately involved in A Place in the Sun in 1951.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
For most people who remember those days, Elizabeth Taylor’s life and career tend to boil down to (1) everything before Cleopatra and (2) everything after. It’s impossible for people today, jaded by a nonstop parade of showbiz media circuses — from Madonna to Britney to Lindsay to Charlie — even to imagine what a riveting can’t-look-away spectacle that trainwreck of a production was. You just had to be there — and by “there” I mean anywhere on planet Earth from 1959 to 1963. You couldn’t get away from it. Elizabeth’s brush with death-by-pneumonia in a London hospital was only the beginning, shutting down production until the English weather, never exactly balmy, turned so crummy that everybody had to start all over from day (and dollar) one in Rome. It wasn’t hype or hysteria: Elizabeth nearly checked out then and there; her tracheotomy scar is clearly visible in this picture of her in costume and makeup, looking weary and numb waiting for director Joe Mankiewicz to call action.
 
“Everything before and after Cleopatra” really means everything before and after Richard Burton, and I’ll bet that’s how Taylor tended to think of it herself. Burton accounted for two of her eight marriages (and she for two of his five), ten years the first time and ten months the second. If Burton had lived past 1984, they might have had a third go-round (ten weeks?), and a fourth (ten days?); they were clearly the loves of each other’s lives, even if they couldn’t hold it together and often seemed to bring out the worst in each other. To people in the 1960s it looked like the love affair of the century. To me it still does, and I don’t think I’m alone.
 
 
 
Here’s another iconic picture, this one from real life, though it could almost be a scene from their movie The V.I.P.s. Judging from the faces and clothes, that year (1963) is probably about right, give or take a couple. They seem to be trying to inch their way toward some anonymous airport VIP lounge, jostled by a combination of entourage and paparazzi, a breed of “journalist” that their affair and marriage virtually (albeit unwillingly) created. She looks resigned, he looks harried. (And who’s that guy in the center background, and why is he the only one smiling?)
 
With all Taylor’s heartaches, sorrows and physical ailments (the latter beginning with a fall from a horse during National Velvet), it’s remarkable in a way that she made it to 79. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t do it, or Judy Garland. Elizabeth Taylor outlived them, and nearly all her leading men, from Roddy McDowall and Robert Taylor through Montgomery Clift and Van Johnson to Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. Did she thrive? I don’t know. But she survived, and prevailed.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I love this photo by Otto Dyar, and I want to close with it. It’s from the set of National Velvet, obviously. Elizabeth’s blissful love of horses permeates the picture, blesses and ennobles and exalts it. I believe that this 12-year-old child-woman looks more genuinely and serenely happy here than in any other picture I’ve ever seen of her, at any age. This is how I want to remember her.

Silents in Kansas 2011, Part 2

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Since the Kansas Silent Film Festival 
in Topeka coincided with Academy 
Award weekend this year, the theme 
of the festival was the first year of the 
Oscars (1927-28, the only year that 
silent pictures dominated the awards), 
and the three-day program was 
peppered with winners and 
nominees.  In fact, Oscar
himself put in an 
appearance…
 
 
 
 
 
 …in the form of Benjamin Glazer’s
award for the screen adaptation
of 7th Heaven, which was proudly
displayed in the lobby of the White
Concert Hall on the Washburn 
University campus. If you’ve ever
wondered what an 81-year-old 
Academy Award looks like — and
they don’t come any older — here 
he is, ensconced in his glass case
like Snow White (only standing up).
You can click on the picture and 
“+” him up to see that, classic
though he may be, he does
carry his share of age marks.
(By the way, do I need to specify 
that the Academy Award statuette
and the nickname “Oscar” are 
registered trademarks of the 
Academy of Motion Picture 
Arts and Sciences? 
Let’s not forget that!)
 
 
 
Speaking of 7th Heaven, I have to say Saturday night’s screening of this touching romance between a boastful Paris sewer worker (Charles Farrell) and a mistreated street waif (Janet Gaynor) was the highlight of the weekend for me. I’d seen it before, but this time was something above and beyond: the festival screened the personal print of film preservationist David Shepard (a special guest at the event, he also delivered a lecture to accompany screened samples from his new DVD collection Chaplin at Keystone). Shepard’s print, in turn, was carefully and lovingly copied from Janet Gaynor’s own personal print, and the exquisite tinting of the film was a revelation. 
 

Just so we’re clear, I don’t mean to suggest that the picture was tinted like this hand-colored lobby card. I mean stock-tinting, coloring the film stock a shade to match the mood of a scene — blue for nighttime, amber for candlelight, etc. Tinting was virtually universal in the silent era, and it’s the one facet of silent movies that now seems all but lost beyond recall. Modern digital tinting on video releases isn’t always pleasing to the eye — and in any case, so few tinted prints have survived that we can’t always know how authentic such efforts are. Gaynor’s print presumably dates from 1927, so here was an opportunity to see the real McCoy. I don’t know how many in the audience appreciated the rarity of what they were seeing, but they certainly appreciated the picture itself; when Gaynor’s timid little Diane finally turned on her physically abusive sister, the auditorium echoed with applause and cheers. (I guess film tinting is one of those lost arts, like hand-tinted photos in the manner of the lobby card here. But there must have been aesthetic rules and guidelines, and artisans who specialized in the process and were admired accordingly, just like editors and cinematographers. Has there ever been a full-length history of the art of tinting? There’s certainly a book in it. There’s a chapter on tinting in Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By that’s as excellent as the rest of the book, but other than that I don’t know.)

One more note about the title of 7th Heaven: I’ve always seen it referred to (and referred to it myself) as Seventh Heaven. But “7th” is what appears onscreen, so properly speaking, that should be the title.

 

Another special guest was Annette D’Agostino
Lloyd, who discovered the comedies of Harold
Lloyd when she was a teenager and has
grown up to write a number of books
on his work, as well as hosting
Hello, Harold Lloyd, her own Web site
devoted to him. (And by the way, she’s
no relation to the great comedian;
her married surname is just one
of those amazing karmic
coincidences.)

 
 
Ms. Lloyd addressed the audience Friday night to introduce Speedy (1928), Harold Lloyd’s last silent comedy and one of his most stylish, with Harold at his ingenious and sympathetic best. She warned us that the climax of the picture, with our hero driving a horse-drawn streetcar at a mad gallop through the streets of New York in a desperate race against time, was one of the greatest chase scenes of the silent era. And she was right. The sequence is nothing less than astonishing — it rivals the chariot race from either version of Ben-Hur, and it absolutely puts The French Connection to shame (43 years before the fact). And it’s funny to boot.
 
 
 
And one little detail that’s too
much fun not to share. Annette
Lloyd was also the after-dinner
speaker at the festival banquet
Saturday night, speaking (naturally)
on her favorite comedian. In keeping
with the subject of her talk, the 
KSFF chose an appropriate
design for the evening’s
dessert:
 
The festival culminated on Sunday afternoon with Wings, director William A. Wellman’s tribute to the airborne fighters of World War I (and the picture that put him on the map). To see Wings on the big screen is to understand at last why it won the Oscar for best picture; that’s one thing it has in common with both Lawrence of Arabia and Oliver! Clara Bow loves Charles “Buddy” Rogers, who loves Jobyna Ralston, who loves Richard Arlen — all while the Great War rages and Rogers and Arlen take to the sky in thrilling combat. The aerial action remains riveting, with no process photography and very little miniature work, and the action on the ground is handled well enough that you don’t grow impatient for the dogfights to resume. (There is, however, a basic flaw in the movie’s portrayal of Rogers’s character: any man who would pass up Clara Bow for that namby-pamby, two-timing Jobyna Ralston is obviously unfit for military service.)
 
Kudos all around for the class act that is the KSFF — to festival president Bill Shaffer, vice president Denise Morrison (who also provides chatty, informative intros to all of the screenings), and the festival’s board of directors. And a special nod to the festival’s musicians, keeping alive another not-quite-lost art: Marvin Faulwell (organ), Greg Foreman and Jeff Rapsis (piano), Bob Keckeisen (percussion), and special guests The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra of Boulder, CO. Like Cinevent in Columbus, OH, the Kansas Silent Film Festival now has a permanent place on my calendar. I’m already looking forward to next year.

The Kansas Silent Film Festival 2011

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“”Silent movies are the only art form to be discovered, embraced and discarded by a single generation.”

I wish I could claim credit for that keen insight, or failing that, could remember where I read it. (Was it in Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound? I’ll have to check.) Part of the keenness is the perception that what we now call “silent movies” (at the time nobody called them silent; they were just movies) are in fact a distinct art form. They’re not merely movies before they figured how to do the sound part, because for at least five years before The Jazz Singer, they knew how to do the sound. It’s just that nobody, including audiences, figured it was really needed — until the personality of Al Jolson showed them something ordinary movies couldn’t do. (And by the way, it wasn’t The Jazz Singer that nailed the coffin shut on the silent era, it was Jolson’s next part-talkie The Singing Fool. But that’s another story.)

I know some people are turned off by silent movies. I can’t say I have much respect for that attitude — to me it’s like refusing to watch Citizen Kane or Casablanca because they’re in black and white, or because all the sound comes out of one speaker — but I understand where it’s coming from. Silent movies demand your undivided attention; you can’t take your eyes from the screen for a nanosecond or you’ll lose the thread of a story that’s being conveyed in purely visual terms. King Vidor used to say that you couldn’t buy popcorn, soft drinks or candy at movie theaters before the coming of sound for that very reason.

The folks at the Kansas Silent Film Festival in Topeka understand and appreciate this, and they celebrate it — so I’m here to celebrate them.

In a way, the rediscovery of silent movies is a byproduct of home video. Historians like Kevin Brownlow and William K. Everson had been carrying the torch for years, with good results. But with home video, it was finally possible for anyone to watch a silent movie with an orchestral accompaniment, and without seeing it sped up from 16-18 frames per second to 24, which could make even the best silent look a little comical if you weren’t able to make allowances (and even if you were, it only added to the effort of watching). At last we could see The Big Parade or Greed or Ben-Hur exactly as audiences saw them in 1925; all that was missing was the experience of a 20- or 30-foot screen and a large audience in a 1,000-seat auditorium. Festivals like the KSFF supply that.

I’m ruefully surprised that it took me 14 years to learn about the KSFF, but now that I’ve found it I plan to be back. It’s free to the public (donations gratefully accepted), and the public responds. Not only in Topeka, but all over the country: at the banquet before Saturday night’s screening of 7th Heaven there were people who hailed from California (yours truly), Colorado, New Hampshire, New York — and those were just the ones who spoke up. Most heartening was the number of young people in the audience at all the screenings. I don’t mean just “younger than dirt,” I mean college, high school and elementary school age.

The screenings are a mix of 16mm and digital projection, 
nearly all with live accompaniment. (The sole exception 
this year is Chaplin’s The Circus, which followed the Chaplin 
family’s preference for the “new” score Chaplin composed
for it in 1967). There’s variety in the accompaniments: 
sometimes a piano, sometimes a theater pipe organ (both 
with and without percussion), and sometimes (a special treat) 
the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. I’ve always wanted 
to get to the famous silent film festival in Pordenone, Italy; 
until that day, the KSFF will keep me happy. Besides,
it’s free, and I can speak the language. 
 
I have more to say about this year’s festival, 
but it’s getting late and I have to get to bed. 
I want to be fresh for Wings 
tomorrow afternoon.