Addio, Cinevent 42!

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It’s 1:15 in Columbus as I type this, and the 2010 edition of Cinevent has gone to bed. Monday’s program wrapped it all up with Dancing on a Dime, a pleasant 1940 B-musical from Paramount; 1924’s Lighthouse by the Sea, from the silent heyday of the original Rin Tin Tin; and Sarong Girl, one of striptease star Ann Corio’s Poverty Row efforts to follow her colleague Gypsy Rose Lee into a Hollywood career.

Saturday is usually the biggest and busiest day at Cinevent, when it’s hardest to find a seat in the screening room and the dealers’ rooms are most crowded. You snake your way through the aisles between the tables, catching odds and ends of conversations, gasps of surprise or pleasure, reminiscences, polite dickering and the occasional faintly vinegary whiff of acetate film. On Sunday the dealers and their customers have already begun to trickle out for the trip home. By Monday morning it’s down to a cadre of dedicated Cineventers unwilling to let the weekend come to a close without seeing the very last of it. There’s a valedictory air in the screening room and hallway on Monday, and everyone is already beginning to look forward to next year. Everyone, that is, except the organizers of Cinevent themselves, who no doubt won’t even give a thought to Cinevent 2011 until they’ve had a few months to unwind and decompress from this one.

So off we all go; have a safe trip home, everybody, and we’ll see you next year…

Cinevent, Day 4

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Sunday’s highlights:

(1) Chad Hanna (1940) Stable boy Henry Fonda runs away with a moth-eaten circus in 1841, in gorgeous Fox Technicolor* and with spot-on atmosphere courtesy of director Henry King. There’s also a pretty amazing scene of 16-year-old Linda Darnell training to be a bareback rider; it’s one long take of her horse cantering round and round the tiny circus ring, with Darnell bouncing in her training harness scrambling to hold on and her trainer barking instructions. The shot goes on for what seems like five minutes without a cut, and you can’t take your eyes off the screen; the plot goes nowhere during that time, but we learn a lot about 19th century circus life and the grit and determination of Darnell’s character. (And incidentally, we learn something about Darnell’s own grit — she was allergic to horses.)

(2) Roadhouse Nights (1930) Here’s another one of those synchronicity moments: this is one of the movies Richard Barrios talks about in A Song in the Dark, with Helen Morgan as a saloon singer embroiled in her gangster boyfriend’s crimes. Not a musical exactly, but with plenty of music — including several songs from Morgan (in her prime, before the booze really laid her low) and movie newcomer Jimmy Durante (it’s also Durante’s only movie appearance with his vaudeville partners Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson).

Plus an honorable mention for Woman on the Run (1950), a tight little noirish thriller set in San Francisco with Ann Sheridan as the estranged wife of a man on the run from the killer whose crime he witnessed. This one joins a select list of movies (Vertigo, The Lineup, Experiment in Terror) that give us a visual record of what San Francisco looked like before becoming crusted over with skyscrapers. (The amusement park climax isn’t San Francisco, however; it’s Carmel.)

*And speaking of Technicolor, here’s a good rule of thumb: If you want to see Golden Age Technicolor at its best, for the 1930s look to Selznick International (A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, Gone With the Wind); for the ’40s, 20th Century Fox (Hello, Frisco, Hello; Wilson; The Black Swan); and for the ’50s, Paramount (Shane, The War of the Worlds, White Christmas).

Cinevent, Day 3

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Saturday’s highlights in Columbus:

(1) Straight Shooting (1917) This was 23-year-old John Ford’s first directorial effort (“Jack Ford,” as he was billed at the time), and it’s a remarkable document as well as a good, solid archetypal western film. Here in a compact 60 minutes is the John Ford western fully formed, with some images and frame compositions as striking as anything Ford would do later on. Harry Carey, Ford’s favorite leading man, demonstrates the mold into which Ford would later pour young John Wayne, and which would remain Wayne’s forever after that (see the last shot of the Duke in The Searchers for his and Ford’s conscious tribute to Carey).

(2) The Fleet’s In (1942) This wartime musical combined Dorothy Lamour, new-minted leading man William Holden, and an excellent score by director Victor Schertzinger (music) and Johnny Mercer (words) that included the perennials “Tangerine” and “I Remember You.” There’s a touching story connected with the latter song, recounted in the Cinevent program notes. Schertzinger, a popular and respected man on the Paramount lot, died unexpectedly midway through production on the movie, and shooting was closed down for a time. When they resumed work, the first day’s shooting was devoted to Lamour’s rendition of “I Remember You.” The practice, of course, was for the performers to lip-synch to a playback of the soundtrack, recorded weeks earlier. As they reached the end of the first take and the sound man allowed the playback to continue past the end of the song, Schertzinger’s voice unexpectedly came over the loudspeakers, complimenting Lamour during the original recording session (as both director and composer) on her excellent performance of the song. The sound of his voice (combined, no doubt, with the sentiment of the song) was too much for Lamour, and she simply fell to pieces on the set.

Cinevent, Day 2

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Highlights of the first day at Cinevent here in Columbus were:

 

(1) Hired Wife (1940) Rosalind Russell plays a secretary in love with boss Brian Aherne, who doesn’t have the presence of mind to fully appreciate her. When he runs into tax trouble, she agrees to help out by marrying him — strictly on paper, you understand, just for business purposes. The inevitable comic complications ensue before the inevitable clinch at the fadeout. Writers Richard Connell and Gladys Lehman frost this cake with plenty of tasty dialogue, Brian Aherne never looked so lively and animated, and the actress was never born who could beat Rosalind Russell with a mouthful of good dialogue. And Roz, just coming off the breakthrough one-two punch of The Women and His Girl Friday, was sitting on top of the world, and you can see she knew it; and

(2) Chicago (1927) This was the first (and silent) film treatment of the Maurine Watkins play that would serve as the source for 1940’s Roxie Hart with Ginger Rogers, and (of course) the Tony-and-Oscar-sweeping musical. Long feared lost, this version surfaced some years ago, and it’s a lively two hours. Phyllis Haver makes a Roxie Hart who can stand beside Ginger Rogers, Gwen Verdon and Renee Zellweger without hanging her peroxided head. (And I couldn’t help reflecting what a nice meal Marion Davies could have made of the role — but of course, Hearst wouldn’t have let her anywhere near it. Not in a thousand years.)

Now it’s back to the program, so if you’ll excuse me…

Cinevent 42

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 I’m interrupting my posts on Henry Hathaway to post from Columbus, Ohio, where the 42nd Cinevent is about to begin. If you don’t know about Cinevent, you certainly should, especially if you live within convenient travel distance of Columbus (and after all, I come in all the way from Sacramento). It’s a “classic film convention” held every Memorial Day Weekend in Columbus; from Friday through Monday there are movies all day and deep into the night. The years of vintage range roughly from 1914 to 1950, with the program breaking down to about two-thirds talking pictures and one-third silents with live piano accompaniment, by either Dr. Philip Carli or David Drazin, two of the foremost silent film accompanists in America today. In addition to the movies, there are the dealers’ rooms, where any manner of memorabilia are available to collectors; you’ve already seen some of it here.

I’d been hearing about Cinevent for decades because my uncle — who lives in Muncie, Indiana, not too far from Columbus — has been coming here since the 1960s. Whenever he spoke of it, I’d think, “One of these years…” Well, one of those years finally came in 1998, and I haven’t missed a Cinevent since then; I have a standing commitment for Memorial Day from now on.

This year, there are some unusual — almost eerie — touches of synchronicity with this blog. One of the first features this afternoon is the 1924 silent Open All Night, on which none other than Henry Hathaway himself served as assistant under director Paul Bern (the great Howard Hawks also served as production manager). And Cinevent’s annual Saturday Morning Animation Festival will include a 1917 short by Willis O’Brien, the special effects pioneer who hired Marcel Delgado to build the models for The Lost World and King Kong. The title is certainly intriguing: Prehistoric Poultry.

For now, however, I have to free up the hotel’s computer. Stay tuned, and I’ll try to post more as the weekend progresses. No promises, though; the days are full and pass quickly here.