Battle Royale #9: Battle of the Silent Queens (The Results)

Well kiddies, here we are at the end of another Battle Royale.  This time you, my faithful readers and true believers, were asked to choose between those two great stars of silent cinema - Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish.  A choice between "America's Sweetheart" and "The First Lady of American Cinema."  And who did you pick?  Well, it was kind of a landslide.  Not quite as bad as our last Battle Royale, where The Marx Brothers trounced The Three Stooges by a score of 38 to 7, but still quite a mandate.  And who was the mandate for, you ask.  Well, it was for Miss Lillian Gish.  With a final score of 31 to 16, or 66% to 34% if you will, the First Lady beat out the Sweetheart.  From the beginning, I figured Gish would end up the winner (she did get my vote I know), but I expected it to be at least relatively close.  Certainly a lot closer than it ended up being.  Well, Mary does have an Oscar to lord over Gish, so there's at least that.  And yes, I know, if the Oscars had been around, Gish would probably have won one as well.  Then again, the year Pickford won hers, Gish gave one of her finest performances in The Wind.  But I am rambling, so I digress.

Usually, at this point in the festivities, I say that we will be back with a brand spankin' new Battle Royale in just a few days - but such is not the case this time around.   We are holding off the next one until after the new year.  This way, you can all enjoy your holidays without any of the added stress of trying to decide who deserves the crown as Battle Royale Champion.  Ya know, because there is so much stress in that.  Anyway, we will be returning with that aforementioned brand spankin' new Battle Royale after the holidays.  After back-to-back landslides, hopefully this new one will go back to biz as usual, and be a closer race - maybe even a photo finish.  Also hopefully, we can get the voter turnout to be a bit better this time around - something we can perhaps write home about, as they say.  Since the beginning, I have been trying to get as many voters involved as I can.  So far, this has been met with only slight success.  My wish is to get our little game into the triple digits on a regular basis.  As of now, our best turnout was a mere 66 votes (courtesy of Astaire and Kelly), and this time we had just 47 voters.  I send reminders to bunches of hopeful voters, but still nothing.  This time around I sent voter invites to over a thousand people on Facebook alone, not to mention regular tweets, but still only 47 decided to come aboard.   So basically, what I am saying is - c'mon people, let's get this thing going.  I have seen other online polls get hundreds, even thousands of votes, so why can't we!!?  Anyway, have a safe and happy holiday (whichever one you so choose to celebrate) and have pleasant and giddy dreams about our new Battle Royale.  We will be traveling to the Far East next time around.

Battle Royale #5: Battle of the Silent Clowns (The Results)

Always a rather hot button topic amongst those who call themselves cinephiles.  There are rabid Keatonites and veracious Chaplin disciples both.  In Bertolucci's 2003 film The Dreamers (one of the ten best films of the last decade incidentally) American Matthew, played by Michael Pitt, and Frenchman Théo, played by Louis Garrel, come to near blows over who was funnier, Chaplin or Keaton.  I tend to take Matthew's side in the argument and favour Chaplin over his so-called arch-rival.  True, Keaton was straight-out funnier - his gags were the best of the silent age - but Chaplin was the better overall filmmaker - able to make you laugh and cry simultaneously.  But then this is just my (not-so-humble) opinion on the subject.  What we are here to do is to announce who you, the adoring public, think the best, the greatest, the funniest, the koo-koo-kookiest of them all.  We are here to announce the winner of Battle Royale #5: Battle of then Silent Clowns - and with very little surprise it was the tightest of races from beginning to end.  But, as in all things competitive, there must be a victor, and that victor is Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin.  With a final tally of 20 to 18 (or 52% to 48% for the statistically-minded amongst us) The Little Tramp did sneak past The Great Stone Face.  There were, incidentally, a few side votes for Harold Lloyd and even good ole Fatty Arbuckle as well.  Anyway, that is it for this, the fifth round of our Battle Royale here at The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World.  Please be sure to check back in a few days for the announcement of our competitors in round six.  It is sure to be a sisterly, albeit the lifelong sibling rivalry version of said sisterdom, kind of event.  See ya soon.

Mary Pickford! America's Freakin' Sweetheart!!

The following look at the most classic of all classic Hollywood stars, the beautiful and talented icon of icons, is my humble contribution to the Mary Pickford Blogathon going on over at Classic Movies June 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

Let's just power right past the fact that the girl known as America's Sweetheart was Canadian-born.  In such a day and age without the constant, omnipotent media we know in these modern times, it was easy for the studio's publicists to control what we did know and what we did not know about the burgeoning community of celebrity that was rising in the latter nineteen teens.  Of course just because the adorable Miss Pickford was born in the Great White North most certainly does not mean that she is ineligible for the title of America's Sweetheart.  At the time of her height of popularity, between 1919 and 1927, she was not only one of the highest paid people in Hollywood (second probably only to good friend Charlie Chaplin) but very possibly, aside from royalty, the highest paid women in the world.  So what I am trying to say is, if America wanted to adopt this beautiful and talented Canuck as their very own sweetheart - so be it.  She actually became a US citizen upon her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in 1920, though she did die with dual citizenship.  The girl born Gladys Marie Smith in 1892 Toronto had every right to be America's Freakin' Sweetheart.  And she did it the old-fashioned way - she earned it.  Just take a look at these interesting tidbits.

• Going by the monicker of "Baby Gladys Smith", Mary began her stage career at the age of six.

• Reputedly, Mary was the subject of the very first close-up in film history in the 1912 film Friends.

• She and husband Douglas Fairbanks Sr, became the first stars to put their hand prints in the cement outside of the famed Grauman's Chinese Theater.

Pickford and second husband Fairbanks, along with Charlie Chaplin, were not only the biggest stars of their day, but their fame is what created the entire lore of Hollywood.  These were the first movie stars.  Before Mary and Doug and Charlie, there was no celebrity in Hollywood.  Actually there was really no Hollywood before them.  They ushered in the age of the movie star.  What was nothing more than a struggling new artistic and technical medium when Mary began her Hollywood career at Biograph in 1909 (cinema itself was barely pubescent itself just fourteen years after its debut) was a thriving top art form and beyond huge moneymaking, icon-creating, force to be reckoned with upon her early retirement just twenty-four years later.  Basically, Mary Pickford was one of, if not the most integral part in creating what would be known as the Golden Age of Hollywood.  But still, it was not always something Mary was happy about.

The thing that made Mary a star was playing little girls.  The girl with the curls, Mary found herself pigeon-holed in such roles for must of her career.  The actress, much to her own chagrin, was still playing barely pubescent girls well into her thirties.   She did play adult roles on occasion but her bread and butter was most certainly the teen and sub-teen roles.  In a slew of films from Pride of the Clan to Poor Little Rich Girl to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms to M'Liss to Daddy-Long-Legs to Heart o' the Hills to Pollyanna to Little Lord Fauntleroy to Tess of the Storm Country, Mary would make a super-successful career (some would even say one of the most successful careers in Hollywood history) out of playing girls fifteen to twenty to even twenty-five years younger than she.  Famously, in a long ago precursor to Keri Russell's own modern day surprise shorning, Mary cut all her famous curls off and, stemming from the quote, "I'm sick of Cinderella parts, of wearing rags and tatters. I want to wear smart clothes and play the lover," put herself in the role of an adult and a lover for her first sound film, Coquette.

The change shocked everyone but it won the actress her only competitive Oscar.  Granted, the Oscar was most likely an award much more to Pickford herself, and much less to the performance.  That and she was one of the founding members of the Academy the year before her victory.  But still, even the Oscar would not help things as her new found freedom of expression was not something her fans wanted.  As the 1930's came around, the fans wanted the now forty year old actress to keep playing eleven and twelve year olds.  They wanted the old, or should I say young, Mary back.   They wanted America's Sweetheart back.  Mary did not want to do this.  Mary Pickford was a strong, independent woman who took a back seat to no man, actor, director, husband, publicist or studio boss.  This being the case, the actress was not about to just go back to something that made her a star but also something that was now much decidedly so in her past.  Mary Pickford would officially retire from acting in 1933, just three films after her Oscar winning performance in Coquette. Although she would always love her fans, she would no longer play the game of being America's Freakin' Sweetheart.

• Mary is a member of both the Hollywood and Canadian Walks of Fame.

• In a possible comeback position, Mary turned down an offer to play Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd.

• She had intended to have all of her films destroyed after her death, fearing that no one would care about them. Lucky for all we film fans, she was convinced not to do such a thing.

But it wasn't just acting where Mary left her mark.  In 1919, Mary, along with soon-to-be hubby Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and friends Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, the latter of which gave Pickford her first job in Hollywood, formed United Artists, a distribution company that can be considered the first ever independent movie company.   United Artists was a successful movie distribution house until its eventual demise and sale to Transamerica (and eventually MGM) in 1967.  For Mary and her friends, it was a fun investment.  Mary said of the company, "We maniacs had fun and made good pictures and a lot of money. In the early years United Artists was a private golf club for the four of us."  In a more modern day piece of trivia, Georgian-born, Irish and English-raised singer/songwriter Katie Melua actually wrote a song on Mary Pickford and the formation of UA.  It is called "Mary Pickford Used to Eat Roses" and you can watch the video on YouTube.  Pickford and Fairbanks were once the epitome of what it meant to be a Hollywood star, a movie industry power couple.  Throwing lavish parties at their appropriately named Pickfair estate in the Hollywood Hills, they were th everything of stardom.  Eventually though, Mary would be mostly forgotten by her fans and would spend the rest of her life, from the mid 1930's until her death in 1979, as a recluse in her beloved Pickfair.  Just a little thing (5 feet and one half inch - the exact same height as my own lovely wifey) Pickford was a powerhouse in the land of Hollywood - both as an actress and as the shrewdest of businesswomen.  She will certainly not be forgotten by this admirer of classic Hollywood.  I will leave you with a few of my favourite Mary Pickford quotes, followed by, for no other reason than it's sheer unlikely adorability, a picture of Mary washing a baby bear (!?).

• "Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo."

• On her second husband: "In his private life Douglas always faced a situation in the only way he knew, by running away from it."

• In her old age: "I saw Hollywood born and I've seen it die."

Anomalous Material Weekly Feature: 10 Best Silent Films

Here we are again true believers, with my latest weekly 10 best feature for the fine folks over at Anomalous Material.  For those of you not in the know, those same said fine folks have given me a (possibly foolish on their behalf) regular gig as feature writer.  It is a series of top ten lists on various cinematic subjects - and anyone who knows me can attest to how perfectly suited I am to such an endeavor (yes I am a  list nerd).  This week's feature, my twenty-third such feature, is on the timely subject of silent movies.  Why are silent movies timely in this day and age of digital in your face mass media you may ask?  Well, it is because a silent film is just days away from taking home the Oscar for Best Picture (and probably Director, Actor, Score and Editing as well).  So with that in mind I composed a list of my personal favourite silent films of those (semi) lost woebegone days of yore.

Read my feature article, "10 Best Silent Films" at Anomalous Material.

As for the many silent films I had to leave out of this list, one of the most important is a little thing that debuted back on December 28, 1895 in Paris by the name of La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.  Directed by film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumere, it was the very first film shown at the very first public screening of a film anywhere in the known world.  It is just a mere 50 seconds long and really shows nothing but exactly what the title would have you believe it shows, but considering what it led to, aka, the birth of cinema, it probably should be mentioned somewhere here.

The Artist -- A Silent Film Up For Best Picture in 2011 !??

When I did my initial "Most Anticipated Films" list back in January, the Cannes favourite, silent film, The Artist was not even on my radar, but here we are coming up on September and what do ya know -- along with von Trier's Melancholia, it is one of my two most anticipated films for the last quarter of 2011.  Directed by Michael Hazanavicius (known, but not overly so, for his satiric nouveau Bond-like OSS 117 series across the pond) and winner of the Best Actor award at Cannes for French star Jean Dujardin, The Artist, the story of a silent film star afraid to face the coming of sound and forced to watch the woman he has started up an affair with rising to the top as he is falling (a la A Star is Born), is actually a true blue silent film.  Shot in glorious black and white and in a 1.33:1 aspect, the film is made to look and feel (and sound?) like a silent era motion picture.  Glenn Heath, Jr. at The House Next Door, said of the film, "Striking black-and-white cinematography and brilliant flourishes of sound amid an otherwise silent landscape give The Artist its stylistic identity, but this story of evolution and adaptation is all about the power of on-screen chemistry."

The film is being released in the U.S. in November (I plan on seeing it at the New York Film Festival before then though) and is actually getting some Oscar buzz.  The field of Best Pic nominees has widened to more than five these days, so it is a possibility that a silent film will be up for the top prize for the first time since 1929, or perhaps a Best Actor nod for Dujardin (last seen in the wonderful Little White Lies).  Anyway, here is the trailer for this terrific looking new film.  For some reason, the trailer refuses to be made full screen (little bugger!) but if you click on the "YouTube" tab on the video, you can watch it full screen - otherwise enjoy the tiny (but still quite striking) trailer here.

It Was 122 Years Ago Today

Happy Birthday Charlie.

Dragnet Girl (Ozu, 1933)

It was a rare foray into the gangster genre for the master so well-known for detailing the everyday rituals of the (then) modern Japanese family, but even in this oeuvre-oddity one can clearly see the early workings of many of the signature motifs that would later come to define the great Yasujiro Ozu.  Considered the most "Japanese" of Japanese filmmakers, Ozu was still, like his younger contemporary Akira Kurosawa, influenced by western filmmakers, and that influence is not more evident that in his 1933 silent gangster movie, Dragnet Girl.

Opening with Ozu's famous "pillow shots", there is no doubt this is an Ozu film.  Rows of hats hanging on hooks, businessmen hurrying through the streets, their shadows rushing along behind them in hopes of keeping up, pans of typewriters clicking away in an anonymous office.  These quite simple yet beautiful and strangely alluring shots open Ozu's picture, and the director will go back to these shots again and again throughout, creating a mood that is both formal and soothing but also arousing and potentially dangerous in its oft-disarming fashion.  Like I said, pure Ozu.

The difference here, as opposed to the grand auteur's later, more austere works such as Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story and Autumn Afternoon, is that potential danger that lingers in the quietude of those aforementioned "pillow shots", actually does explode in Dragnet Girl.  It explodes in quick bursts (sometimes off-screen entirely!?) in the way one would expect the familial catharsis to happen in the director's later works.  There it is emotional but here it is physical.  Different but the same in many ways.  With its Jazz Age exuberance and touches of classic Hollywood, Dragnet Girl is certainly much more westernized than most of Ozu, but still very much an Ozu motion picture from start to finish.

As far as a gangster film goes, though influenced by the early precode films of Hollywood (and probably the Poetic Realism of early French sound cinema) and with a look that reputedly mirrored von Sternberg, Dragnet Girl, the story of an up and coming mobster and his titular moll, and the tragedy that ensues in this world of petty crime and romantic larceny, is much more esoteric (aka, more Ozu-like) than any of these particular influences.  Ozu's use of quiet space (and since this is a silent film, I of course mean quiet in the physical sense of the word) and his methodical pacing (and those beloved pillow shots!) make for a gangster flick with the heart of a poetic dreamer.  Perhaps the influence of Poetic Realism is stronger than I first alluded to oh so parenthetically and offhandishly.

Whatever the case, Dragnet Girl ends up being one of the earliest works of Ozu, even in a genre he so rarely (only twice that I can be sure of) went to, that shows what the great auteur would one day become.  Influenced by Film Forum's current retrospective, "5 Japanese Divas" (info can be found here) this film helps to kick off my personal proclamation of Japanese Cinema Month (a deeper explanation can be read here) and I think this very modern work of said national cinema, and the way it leads to the whole breadth of what is to come in that very same cinema, may be the perfect intro to the rest of this month full of Mizoguchi and Naruse and Kurosawa and Ichikawa and, of course, Yasujiro Ozu.

My Quest To See the 1000 Greatest: Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)

Steamboat Bill Jr. is #579 in  

My Quest to watch the 1000 Greatest Films

Screened 11/17/10 on TCM

Ranked #392 on TSPDT

*this is one in a series of catch-up reviews in my aforementioned quest (which should explain the rather old screening date above).

The debate rages.  Chaplin vs. Keaton.  I have always been a steadfast Chaplin man myself, but in no way does that mean I dislike Keaton.  Chaplin has the pathos, the sentimentalism that makes his films work on a much deeper level than those of Keaton.  Keaton on the other hand is a better gag-writer and his films, though never as deep, are straight-up funnier than Chaplin's.  Still, the debate rages.

My favourite Keaton has always been my first Keaton, The General.  I would surely call it one of, if not the funniest movie I have ever seen.  Not a single word is spoken, but it annihilates me every time.  Keaton did not need the added words of the later screwball comedies of Hawks and Lubitsch, he did it all with his brilliant visual audacity.  If I were to compile a Top 5 Keaton List, after his Civil War-set Masterpiece (with a capital M), I would place the oft-forgotten Our Hospitality, followed by Sherlock Jr., The Navigator and then this movie, Steamboat Bill Jr. 

Mostly remembered for its famed falling house gag (where the facade of a house falls on top of Keaton as he stands precariously - and very strategically - in the perfect spot to be saved by an open window, the frame of which falling just around him) and the scary fact that this was no trick photography or body double, but Keaton himself, just inches away from being crushed to (most likely) death, the movie is full of great physical gags - just as Keaton had done in all his previous works, becoming an influence to many future comic actors, most notably Jackie Chan, who has cited Keaton as a big influence on numerous occasions.  

Unfortunately for the world, this was the last film Keaton would ever have control over, leading to eventual obscurity (though with bittersweet roles in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. and Chaplin's Limelight in the early fifties) until future critics would one day rediscover the great stone-faced clown of the silent era.

On Howard Hawks' Silent Proto-Screwball Comedy Fig Leaves and How It Was Way Ahead of It's Time

Made in 1926, and just the great auteur's second film (his first, Road to Glory is thought lost, though he did remake it a decade later), Fig Leaves is the story of Adam and Eve - or at least an Adam and Eve prototype couple - and already shows both the comic timing Hawks had as a director, and one of the defining forces of the Screwball Comedy, and the twisted chauvinism that would show both the male bonding of his characters and the against-the-grain feminism of the "weaker sex" trying to one-up their male counterparts, all of which would one day become synonymous with Hawks' directorial style.

The film opens in the supposed Garden of Eden ("the only fashionable part of town" a title card reads) where we meet the first happy couple, on the throes of the proverbial fall, played with quite a bit of cheeky charm and winking aplomb by muscle-rippled George O'Brien and cute flapper-esque Olive Borden, nicknamed The Joy Girl.  But these aren't your grandparent's Adam and Eve.  A sort of meta-Adam and Eve, this couple live in what appears to be the artistic guiding force behind the creation of the Flintstones some thirty-three or so years later.

Not exactly sticklers for either historical or biblical accuracy, Hawks has his Adam and Eve living alongside pet dinosaurs who nibble at the Tree of Knowledge, stone-carved newspapers with ads for the forbidden fruit and stories on the feud between Cain and Abel, and a series of modern machines made to act as prehistoric comedy relief, including a laughingly ingenious alarm clock, with an even more ingenious snooze alarm (Howard Hawks invented the snooze alarm!?) and a smoke-billowing triceratops-pulled mass transit system.  We are even given a snake who acts as the busybody neighbor across the street, all the while, Eve nibbles on her trouble-making apples.

At this point, we jump ahead "896 or 97 million years" (another title card reads ever so accurately) and find Adam and Eve Smith living in the modern world (well, modern for the Jazz Age), but still not much has changed.  Men are brutes (though O'Brien's Adam is a surprisingly sensitive brute) and women are second class citizens, looked upon as either maids for their husbands or sex objects for everyone else.  Of course, as the times dictate, Eve's main problem, in the Garden of Eden or in the roaring twenties, is that she has nothing to wear.  Hence her dalliance with the fashion industry via a lecherous clothing designer who hits the young bride with his car only to make her one of his models - and wouldbe trophies - and therefore allowing the story to become something more than the typical comedy of the day.  There is even a Technicolor scene that was filmed, though supposedly that is lost as well.

The whole story is quite funny in a screwball kinda way (even without the usually prerequisite dialogue that comes with the genre) and Hawks shows the abilities that will eventually turn him into the greatest and most versatile studio director Hollywood has ever seen.  I could add a rather bold statement and claim that Fig Leaves is the best silent comedy not made by either Chaplin or Keaton.  Perhaps that is quite the bold, perhaps even too bold (one cannot leave out Lubitsch) statement, but, going too far or not, Hawks' Fig Leaves is a solid work of comedic timing and both visual and storytelling prowess - the earliest extant example of Hawksian filmmaking.

Mary Pickford (Used to Eat Roses)

I must admit to never having heard of Katie Melua before, but after stumbling across her video on YouTube, while searching for some of Mary Pickford's early short works (not the best place to see them but when they are unavailable elsewhere...), I have become somewhat obsessed with her - or at least her one song, Mary Pickford (Used to Eat Roses) - watching it several dozen times over the past few days.  One must wonder why someone would write a pop song about the formation of United Artists, but hey, my love of film history, and my current passion about America's Sweetheart (and the fact that it is a surprisingly catchy ditty) makes me somewhat gaga over it (not to mention Melua isn't bad to look at either).

Watch the video HERE.

Le Voyage dans la lune

The following is my contribution to the great ongoing blog-a-thon over at Film Squish.

Considered the grandaddy of all science fiction films, Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, for all those non-Francophiles amongst you), released in 1902 by French magician-turned-director Georges Méliès, was in many ways a truly groundbreaking work of early cinema, yet it is also a film mired down in the primitive understanding of narrative film technique that was the norm in the infancy of the medium.  

Film historian Ken Dancyger says of Méliès' most famous work, "[The film is] no more than a series of amusing shots, each a scene unto itself. The shots tell a story, but not in the manner to which we are accustomed. It was not until the work of American Edwin S. Porter that editing became more purposeful."  And while this may very well be true, with Méliès' static camera (never moving, much like just filming a stage show in many ways) and his over-reliance on optical tricks over actual storytelling, it does not for one second, diminish the magical, somewhat surreal (in at least a basic surrealism 101 kind of way) quality of the early director's work.  

Perhaps it isn't up to the standard that Porter would establish just a year after this landmark film (with his own landmark film, The Great Train Robbery), and later such silent narrative artists as D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau or Charlie Chaplin, but the novice could weave a magic spell of sorts over an audience with his flash and flair and sometimes shocking images (at least for the primitive audiences of the time).  He was the first style-over-substance filmmaker, but he was damned good at it and he would hit his pinnacle, or reach for the moon one might say if one were so inclined, with Le Voyage dans la lune.  Narratively structured or merely primitive tricks to befuddle a paying crowd, Méliès could astonish many with his films - including this critic.

Loosely based on two popular books of the time (by two writers many consider the grandaddies of sci-fi themselves), "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne and "The First Men in the Moon" by H.G. Wells, Méliès tells the tale of a group of French astronomers who decide to travel to the moon and go about building a rocket (shaped more like a bullet than the modern real world rockets of our own atomic - and post-atomic - age) and launching it from a cannon (with the help of a rather perplexing  bevy of beautiful women dressed as sailors of some sort).

The next shot (the most famous of the movie and still an iconic shot a hundred plus years later) shows the rocketship landing in the eye of the "Man in the Moon".  Following are images of celestial bodies personified, a moonscape snowfall, giant mushrooms, strange effervescent moon creatures and an improbable fall back to Earth, with an astronaut and an alien in tow via a rope.  All of these images are stunning in their own right (Méliès has made unique images before this as well) but put together, they form a most fascinating motion picture experience - even at a mere sixteen minutes.

I remember, when one of those new Star Wars travesties were being released (I can't believe it matters which one in particular!) a local movie theater was showing Le Voyage dans la lune as an opening short with the blockbuster Lucas thingamajig.  Asking to be able to go in to see just the Méliès film and not the so-called main attraction elicited quite a few looks that would make one assume one had a monkey growing out of one's neck.  Anyway, to see this film on as large of a screen as this added even more magic to the already quite magical little motion picture.

Unfortunately for Méliès, the advent of a more sophisticated filmmaking style (the aforementioned Porter, Griffith et al) came into vogue and left the sleight-of-hand director out in the proverbial cold.  Eventually, Méliès went bankrupt (forced to sell his company in 1913 to Pathé Frères) and was reduced to making and selling toys in the Montparnasse train station in Paris.  The filmmaker, after many years of toiling in obscurity, would be "found" once again and his place of honour in film history would be reestablished (a retrospective of the magic man's work would be shown publicly shortly before his death).  Unfortunately, the vast majority of his 500+ films are now lost to the world.

But still, the apex of his life's work, Le Voyage dans la lune, lives on (today amongst many Top 100 Movie Lists - my own included!) and is a fascinating look at the so-called primitive style of filmmaking from the turn-of-the-century.  Yes, perhaps primitive indeed, but awe-inspiring at the very same time.

Film Poll #6: The Results

As expected, this two-way race was a nail-biter to the very end.  When it was all finally over, it was the genius pathos of Chaplin over the stoic genius of Keaton that was called the winner.....but barely. 

Charles Chaplin - 18 (51%)

Buster Keaton - 17 (48%)

What exactly happened to that other 1% I wonder.  Perhaps it went to Harold Lloyd, the Ralph Nader of our little poll.  Who knows?

A new poll will be popping up shortly, so keep your eyes peeled.

Film Poll #6: Chaplin vs. Keaton

It is an age old question that has been dividing cinephiles for decades and decades (and decades and decades) - who is greater, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.  Bertolucci went so far as to add this perennial debate to his 2003 movie The Dreamers (between American Michael Pitt and Frenchman Louis Garrel).  I know where my loyalties lie, what about you?  Go on over to the lefthanded sidebar and let your voice be heard by clicking on either Chaplin or Keaton.  Forget all about that election last week - this is the big one.

Show People (King Vidor, 1928)

"With me it was 5 per cent talent and 95 per cent publicity." 
-Marion Davies

If you have ever seen any of Marion Davies comedies, you know the above quote is total balderdash, and most likely, at least partly, quite tongue-in-cheek.  Yet that is the perception many have of Marion Davies.  Well, at least those who even remember the long forgotten actress.   For those few who do remember her, she is known mainly as the paramour of a wealthy mogul who had a film studio created just for her.  But there is more than just that.  Much more.

In one of those stories just dripping with irony, it was infamous newspaper tycoon (and later movie mogul) William Randolph Hearst who gave his young mistress, Marion Davies, her first big break in Hollywood, yet (and here is the irony dripping part of our story) it was his insistence on Davies starring in lavish period dramas (something she was not very good at) instead of the quick-witted comedies the actress was so adept at playing, that led to her eventual decline in popularity and even more eventual fading into obscurity - a mere scandalous footnote in film history.

Famously (or is that infamously?) thought of as the inspiration behind the ill-fated (and quite talentless) Susan Alexander character in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (just as Hearst was the model for the titular good ole Charlie Kane) Davies has indeed had her share of Hollywood Babylon-like tall tales told about her.  Welles, though obviously using Hearst as the model for Kane, has denied Susan Alexander was based on Davies (at least not completely on her) and has been quoted as saying "Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  Though there is the rumour that Hearst's nickname for Davies nether regions was Rosebud - that's neither here nor there I suppose.

Another tale has Davies having an affair with Charlie Chaplin right under Hearst's fat cat nose and being involved in the murder of Thomas Ince aboard Hearst's luxury yacht (a tale that is retold in Peter Bogdanovich's 2002 film The Cat's Meow, featuring Edward Herrmann as Hearst, Eddie Izzard as Chaplin, Cary Elwes as Ince and Kirsten Dunst as Davies).  The fact that Ince died on land, a day after leaving the yacht, of heart problems, is still not enough to put this urban legend to rest though.  But enough about Davies supposedly sordid lifestyle (mostly exaggerated of course), let us get on with why we are here.  To reuse part of Mr. Welles' quote from above, we are here to talk about Marion Davies being "one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  Namely, her work in King Vidor's 1928 silent comedy, Show People.

Though a loose interpretation of the early career of Gloria Swanson (that ill-fated young starlet who would one day play an almost mirror image of her forgotten self in the great and tragic Billy Wilder noir, Sunset Blvd.) could also have quite possibly been based on Davies herself.  The story of the wonderfully named Peggy Pepper, a young Southern girl (Davies of course) who comes to Hollywood, along with her father (the typical blow hard Southern Colonel type), to become a great star of gorgeous, flowing epics.  Yet, just like Davies, the girl finds herself the star of slapstick comedies (though Davies' comedies were far from slapstick, one gets the coincidental idea) and completely unhappy with what she perceives as a failure on her part to become the dramatic star she had always dreamt of being.  Though in actuality, Davies loved doing comedy (it was only Hearst, in his desire to see Davies at her most glamourous, who pushed her toward the dramatic) Show People can be construed as being similar to Davies own career problems in many ways.

In many ways, this is a feminine take on the classic Hollywood story of Merton of the Movies (eventually made into 3 movies, in 1924, 1932 and finally in 1947).  After being tricked into doing comedy (her screen tests, as they were, though meant to be dramatic, were hilarious enough to be cast in what she thinks is a dramatic motion picture) Peggy Pepper becomes unhappy with her slapstick stardom, even though she finds true love in comic co-star Billy Boone (played with the usual glee by star William Haines, whose own career would plummet only a few later, due mainly to his insistence on living life as an openly homosexual actor - an act that Louis B. Mayer would not stand for) and turns instead toward the dramatic films she so desired to make.  Of course this only made her unhappier as she loses (temporarily of course) Billy during this foray into the "more legitimate" kind of moviemaking. 

Yet through all this unhappiness we find (of course) quite a bit of laughter, and a lot of said laughter is brought on by Davies and her willingness to do anything for a laugh.  A beautiful woman (a sex symbol even!?), Davies was not afraid to contort that gorgeous face into something that would make even Buster Keaton bust a gut.  Show People was the second of three films she would do with King Vidor (The Patsy, a great comic film in its own right, where we get to see Davies impersonate Lillian Gish, Mae Murray and Pola Negri - all of whom she was famous for mimicking at her Hollywood parties - and Not So Dumb were the others) and it was he who seemed to bring out the best in Davies.  One thinks of melodrama when they think of Vidor but it was his gift at directing comedy (a sort of Chaplinesque comedy usually) that made Davies' own gift for comedy come out stronger than it had in other films.  We also get to peek Chaplin in a particularly hilarious cameo in Show People (was the rumour true?) and it is just another nod to Davies' gift that the great comic genius would do her film.

Davies was what one could call a born comedienne (much like Lucille Ball would be called years later - another beauty willing to play it for laughs) and it is a shame her career faded so quickly.  A tragic irony indeed.  To use Mr. Welles quote for my own purposes just one more time, it is a shame that more people do not know of Marion Davies and her being "one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  A shame indeed.