C.B. DeMille pastoral silent film with Louise Brooks

In November, 1927 a person named T.J.G. sent a note to Motion Picture Arts and Sciences magazine (their very first issue, it turns out) humorously suggesting that a film be made by C.B. Demille based on the names of film stars whose names evoke something pastoral. Among them is Louise Brooks.

"King of Jazz" kickstarter campaign

There is a new Kickstarter campaign I would encourage everyone to check out. It's for a new book about the production, release and restoration of the 1930 musical film King of Jazz starring Paul Whiteman.

King of Jazz: Paul Whiteman’s Technicolor Revue tells the untold story of the making, release and restoration of Universal’s 1930 Technicolor musical extravaganza King of Jazz. This special limited edition hardcover book needs your help to get published!

King of Jazz was one of the most ambitious films ever to emerge from Hollywood. Just as movie musicals were being invented in 1929, Universal Pictures brought together Paul Whiteman, leader of the country’s top dance orchestra; John Murray Anderson, director of spectacular Broadway revues; a top ensemble of dancers and singers; early Technicolor; and a near unlimited budget.

The film’s highlights include a dazzling interpretation of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Whiteman had introduced to the public in 1924; Walter Lantz’s “A Fable in Jazz,” the first cartoon in Technicolor; and Anderson’s grand finale “The Melting Pot of Music,” a visualization of popular music’s many influences and styles.

The film is not only a unique document of Anderson’s theatrical vision and Whiteman’s band at its peak, but also of many of America’s leading performers of the late 1920s, including Bing Crosby in his first screen appearance, and the Russell Markert Dancers, who would soon become Radio City Music Hall’s famous Rockettes.

And that's not all. The film also includes the first screen appearance by the one and only Bing Crosby!

Authors James Layton and David Pierce have uncovered original artwork, studio production files, behind-the-scenes photographs, personal papers, unpublished interviews, and a host of other previously unseen documentation. The book will offer a richly illustrated narrative of the film’s origins, production and release, with broader context on its diverse musical and theatrical influences. The story will conclude with an in-depth look at the challenges Universal has faced in restoring the film in 2016, as told by the experts doing the work.

The 256-page book will be illustrated with over 200 color and black & white images, many of which will showcase the never-before-published Academy Award winning designs of Herman Rosse. Intricate behind-the-scenes stills will give insight into the scale of the film’s ambitions, while other full-color reproductions of original music arrangements, storyboards, posters, magazine ads, programs and frame enlargements will appear throughout.

The future of film history is in your hands. Find out more, watch the video below and visit the Kickstarter campaign page for this worthy project.

Mae Murray Speaks on Heart Throbs of Yesterday, 1950

In one of her last screen appearances in 1950, silent film star Mae Murray discusses the famous "heart throbs" of yesterday, interviewed by Ralph Staub.

The Silent Film episode of Petticoat Junction (1968)

Back on November 9, 1968 the cornball American sitcom Petticoat Junction aired an episode that was something of a love letter to the silent era. The season 6, episode 6 program, titled "Wings," starred early Hollywood actors Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen. Here is that episode.

Along with the appearance of Rogers and Arlen and a story that centers around a screening of Wings (1927), there are a handful of "shout-outs" to other films and actors of the silent era. There are also mentions of silent era stars Ken Maynard, Charlie Chase, Chester Conklin, Monte Blue, Clive Brook, Rin Tin Tin, and Rex the Wonder Horse. Three early films mentioned in the show are Tess of the Storm Country (1922), Cardboard Lover (1928), Nanook of the North (1922), and The Green Archer (1940.

The story revolves around an effort to save the local theater, the Pixley Bijou, from closing. One of the residents of Hooterville contacts Richard Arlen and Charles 'Buddy' Rogers, who were supposed to come to the Bijou 40 years earlier for a showing of Wings, but decided instead to attend a premiere at the Roxy in New York City.

Curiously, even though the story centers on a screening of Wings, one of the big stars of that film, Clara Bow, is never mentioned. There is only mention of the local "It Girl," who looks like a flapper and sports bobbed hair. Near the end of the episode, during the showing of Wings, a few brief passages from the film are shown including the scene where a young Gary Cooper enters the flier's tent. "Hey, there's Coop, Gary Cooper" character Sam Drucker says. "Shut up, I can't hear anything," Uncle Joe Carson responds. "It's a silent movie you blockhead," Drucker says.

Interestingly, the owner of the Pixley Bijou is played by Benny Rubin, who got his start in films in 1928 in a short titled Daisies Won't Yell.

Would you believe, Louise Brooks seat covers

I thought I had seen everything until I saw these Louise Brooks seat covers for sale on eBay France. Who-da thunk?

When Knighthood Was In Flower - Marion Davies Kickstarter Campaign

You can help bring Marion Davies' breakout blockbuster hit movie WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER (1922) to DVD/Blu-Ray!

Be part of the 'somebody' in 'why doesn't somebody put that out on DVD?' and make a pledge to Ben Model's 5th silent film Kickstarter project. Pledge at http://kck.st/1UlnJZK

"When Knighthood Was in Flower" (1922) on DVD/Blu-Ray

This Kickstarter will fund a project that brings Marion Davies’ breakthrough feature film “When Knighthood Was In Flower” (1922) to home-video. The release will be made using a new transfer off the sole surviving 35mm nitrate print, with a brand new theatre organ score buy Ben Model. The 2K digital scan will be made for the project by video lab at the Library of Congress, the archive where the print is stored and has been preserved. The disc release will be a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack. The DVDs will be professionally authored, the box art will be created by professional graphic designer and silent era aficionado Marlene Weisman, and will be available for sale on Amazon.com. The Kickstarter covers all production costs for DVD release; BluRay disc portion of the project is made possible through Greenbriar Picture Shows.

The Louise Brooks Society has made a pledge. How about you? Pledge at http://kck.st/1UlnJZK

Masculine Women! Feminine Men!

As the other video I had planned to blog about was just recently removed, I am instead posting this one instead, as a follow-up to the previous LBS blog. Thanks to Tor Lier for pointing it out.

Six Jumping Jacks (Harry Reser's Band) voc. Tom Stacks - - Masculine Women! Feminine Men! (Edgar Leslie - James V. Monaco) Brunswick 1926

Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934

There is a fascinating new book from Rutgers University Press titled Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934, by Laura Horak.

It is a book which should appeal not only to fans of Louise Brooks, but as well the context of Brooks' career, namely the silent and early sound era. Readable and scholarly, Girls Will Be Boys is also revelatory; the appendix of early films featuring cross-dressed women is a veritable checklist of films to track down and watch. Happily, Horak provides information on where to find many of them.

In 2007, Horak, who is now an assistant professor of film studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, wrote a fine essay on Beggars of Life for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. That film is noted in the appendix. In her new book, Horak considers Pandora's Box, the 1929 Brooks film and its prominent lesbian character, Countess Geschwitz. In doing so, she cites the 2012 essay I wrote for the Silent Film Festival on the G.W. Pabst film which discusses the film's turbulent reception in the United States.

Horak's anthology, Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana University Press, 2014), co-edited with Jennifer Bean and Anupama Kapse, won the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Award for Best Edited Collection of 2014.

Horak's new book has received good reviews. Publishers Weekly said "Horak has produced a meticulously researched, astutely argued, and highly readable text … her use of archival materials is impeccable and her filmic and historical analyses clearly display a nuanced understanding of her topic." I agree.

Girls Will Be Boys considers "Cowboy Girls, Girl Spies, and the Homoerotic Frontier," "Cosmopolitanism, Trousers, and Lesbians in the 1920s," and "The Lesbian Vogue and Backlash against Cross-Dressed Women in the 1930s" and other topics.

Publicity still from lost film The Amazons (1917)

The publisher's description of Girls Will Be Boys: "Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men.

Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.

Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes."

Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930)

Here are a few more blurbs from early reviews:

"Drawing on the early archives of American cinema, Horak questions the assumption that cross-dressing actresses were inherently transgressive ... and provides a new lens through which to view gender, sexuality and film." (Autostraddle 15 Queer/Feminist Books To Read In Early 2016)

"Who knew how important were those girls who would be boys? Not only as signs of 'deviancy' but as ideals of red-blooded boyhood itself? This engaging, well-researched book tells more than we ever knew about the many and various reasons 'girls will be boys.'" (Linda Williams University of California, Berkeley)

"Laura Horak's Girls Will Be Boys is without peer as a historical contribution to queer scholarship on early film. It is a revisionist work that draws upon a wealth of historical research to completely overturn previous accounts." (Robert J. King, author of The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture).

Here are a few related images of Brooks not discussed in Horak's book which further support its thesis. These images not only range across gender, but also class.

Lulu in New York: Pandora's Box at Film Forum

Today, Pandora's Box is considered a classic, a masterpiece of the silent era and a landmark work in the history of world cinema. Its reputation is due largely to the riveting, red hot performance given by its star, Louise Brooks, in the role of Lulu.

Few can match Brooks' intensity and erotic allure. Pauline Kael called her Lulu "The archetype of the voracious destructive women." Brooks is that, and more. In fact, she's stunning--and those who see the film for the first time often say they can't take their eyes off the actress.

Pandora's Box and its star, however, have not always enjoyed the reputation they do today. When the film first showed in New York--back in December of 1929--it received mostly negative reviews. Just about everyone, including its star, thought it stunk.

On March 19th, New Yorkers will have a chance to judge for themselves when Film Forum screens a 35mm print of Pandora's Box as part of "It Girls, Flappers, Jazz Babies & Vamps." The series showcases some of the silver screen's provocative early sex symbols.

Pandora's Box, a German-made film directed by the highly regarded G.W. Pabst, premiered in Berlin in February of 1929; reviews were mixed, even dismissive. Some months later, when Pandora's Box opened at a single theater, the 55th Street Playhouse in New York, American newspaper and magazine critics were similarly ambivalent, and sometimes hostile.

Photoplay, one of the leading fan magazines of the time, wrote "When the censors got through with this German-made picture featuring Louise Brooks, there was little left but a faint, musty odor." Billboard had a similar take, "This feature spent several weeks in the censor board's cutting room: and the result of its stay is a badly contorted drama that from beginning to end reeks with sex and vice that have been so crudely handled as not even to be spicily entertaining. Louise Brooks and Fritz Kortner are starred, with Miss Brooks supposed to be a vampire who causes the ruin of everyone she meets. How anyone could fall for la belle Brooks with the clothes she wears in this vehicle is beyond imagination."

The New York Times went further, "Miss Brooks is attractive and she moves her head and eyes at the proper moment, but whether she is endeavoring to express joy, woe, anger or satisfaction it is often difficult to decide." The critic for the New York World echoed the Times, "It does occur to me that Miss Brooks, while one of the handsomest of all the screen girls I have seen, is still one of the most eloquently terrible actresses who ever looked a camera in the eye."

The critics, it seemed, were ganging up. The New Yorker dismissed the film. As did the New York Post, who described it as "a rather dull underworld offering which makes very little sense." Film Daily thought the film "too sophisticated for any but art theater audiences." And the New York Herald Tribune said "Louise Brooks acts vivaciously but with a seeming blindness as to what it is all about."
Variety put the nail in the coffin when its opined "Better for Louise Brooks had she contented exhibiting that supple form in two-reel comedies or Paramount features. Pandora's Box, a rambling thing that doesn't help her, nevertheless proves that Miss Brooks is not a dramatic lead."

Despite such poor reviews, the film managed to draw an audience, albeit a modest art-house crowd. After the New York Sun reported Pandora's Box "has smashed the Fifty-fifth Street Playhouse's box office records," the film was held over for another two weeks.

With its New York run ended, Pandora's Box fell into an obscurity from which it would take decades to overcome. By then, sound had come in and poorly reviewed silent films from abroad were little in demand. Though exhibition records are fragmentary, the film was seldom if ever shown in the United States.

In fact, in the decades that followed, only one other screening is known to have taken place--in 1931 in New Jersey at a second-run house not above showing sensational or exploitative fare. Newspaper ads for the Little Theater in Newark warned "Adults Only," and Pandora's Box, synchronized with "thrilling" sound effects and English titles, was promoted as "The German sensation that actually reveals most of the evils of the world" offering "Raw reality! A bitter exposé of things you know but never discuss."

With its reputation in ruins, the film was little seen and little regarded, even by film curators. In 1943, Iris Barry, head of the Museum of Modern Art's film department, met with Brooks, who was then living in New York. Barry's opinion carried considerable weight (and did so for decades to come) in the film world; she told Brooks the museum would not acquire a copy of Pandora's Box for its collection, because "it had no lasting value."

Times change, and so do reputations. In the mid-1950s, Pandora's Box was rediscovered by a handful of European archivists and historians. Their enthusiasm would cross the Atlantic, and in the United States, the film was almost single-handedly championed by James Card, the founding film curator at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester. Year by year, screening by screening, a new and positive critical consensus grew around the once much maligned film.

Cut to 2006, the year which marked the Brooks' centenary. New York's Film Forum marked the occasion by screening a 35mm print of the film; remarkably, during its short run, Pandora's Box was reported to be the second highest grossing independent film in the United States.

In his acclaimed 1989 biography of Brooks, Barry Paris wrote: "A case can be made that Pandora's Box was the last of the silent films--not literally, but aesthetically. On the threshold of its premature death, the medium in Pandora achieved near perfection in form and content."

It's that "near perfection"--dark and riveting, that draws audiences time and again. Pandora's Box will be shown at Film Forum in New York (209 West Houston St. west of 6th Ave.) on Saturday, March 19 at 7:20 p.m. Steve Sterneron will accompany the film on piano.