goldensilents
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Posts posted by goldensilents
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Jeffrey Hunter was too much of a pretty boy to play Jesus. Bible says Jesus was a plain man, acquainted with grief. Hunter must have been cast to attract the teenage girls to show up to watch a biblical epic.
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The most likely explanation is that the person who created the groups deleted them. Yahoo Groups get deleted all the time, that's why I never bother with them. They don't get good numbers of people posting and the people who start them quickly lose patience, say "the heck with it, why am I expending all this energy and time for just a few members", and they delete the accounts.
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I am starting a thread like this like I did for the Silents Category because there doesn't seem to be a separate thread to encourage people to write about all the different precodes they may be watching. These threads always turn out to be the most popular on any board and they are current and encourage new viewing.
I watched *A Modern Hero* (early 1934 precode) with Richard Barthelmess, Jean Muir, Marjorie Rambeau, and Verree Teasdale. TCM has played this before in the past but I have always managed to miss it. The film was directed by GW Pabst and apparently didn't do well at the box office, resulting in Pabst going back to Germany to work under the Nazis! Guess he felt working for the Nazis was preferable to working for Warner Brothers!
I still enjoyed the picture though, Richard was great in it. He ages almost 30 years in the role and gets to wear incredible costumes and dapper suits and he was quite handsome in the picture. He even wore circus tights for a circus scene and I was grinning from ear to ear, since he is one of my favorites. He had nice legs!
The story is about a circus performer who is the illegitimate love child of a female tiger trainer and one of the richest men in the state. He doesn't find out about his father until he is a grown man. Richard's character is quite the lady's man throughout the picture but the one woman he truly loves (Jean Muir) he loses. She marries someone more stable when she discovers she's pregnant out of wedlock with Richard's child.
Richard goes on to leave the circus and start a business with a friend. He builds it into a successful business and then starts to secretly send money to his old love to help out his son.
===== spoilers =====
All the time he is getting rich he plays around and toys with rich widows and rich men's daughters. He is quite the dandy, randy character! He marries one of them but the marriage is loveless and childless. He quietly pays for his own son's college when the time comes but the son is tragically killed in a car accident, so Richard, having lost everything that is meaningful to him, goes back to his mother (Marjorie Rambeau, an excellent performance). She admonishes him that he must not have self pity but he must continue to push on and create new dreams for himself. The End.
I thought this film a lot more entertaining than I was led to believe from other reviews and I'm glad I finally got around to watching it.
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Thanks. Frisco Jenny was enjoyable too but I still didn't warm to her. She was always a bit hard in a lot of her films but in Once A Lady she was completely sympathetic. She also got the Russian accent down pat. Her vocal coach must have been top rate.
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Oh, that's Geoffrey Kerr in the photo with her, not Ivor. Kerr played her husband -- who treats her rather poorly. Ivor plays the lover, who truly loves her, but she doesn't love him. Here is my review.
*Once A Lady* (1931) stars Ruth Chatterton, Ivor Novello, Jill Esmond, Geoffrey Kerr, Bramwell Fletcher, Lillian Rich and Theodore von Eltz. I think this is the first performance by Ruth where I really and truly warmed to her for the very first time. Before this film I recognized she was a good actress but she was never someone I sought out as a favorite.
Here she plays a Russian woman in exile in Paris who marries an aristocratic Englishman when she gets pregnant with his baby out of wedlock. He brings her home to England to his stuffy relatives and their relationship quickly deteriorates, with the husband siding with the relatives on important matters instead of his wife. He goes into politics and feels she will be a detriment to his career, so he sends her back to Paris, telling her he will spend a few days with her to restore the marriage when he has no intention of doing so. At the last minute he backs away from his promise and she goes on the train alone, grief stricken.
There she meets an old lover, played well by Ivor Novello, and stays with him for a few days in Paris, not knowing that after they left the train prematurely that it crashed down a mountain and everyone was killed. She is assumed dead by the press and the world and her family.
But Ruth suddenly decides to leave Ivor and comes back to England and reappears in front of the shocked family. They STILL try to get rid of her so that the husband can have his precious political career! She agrees to a divorce but the family never reveals to the press that she is still alive. The husband marries again and Ruth goes back to Paris, leaving the child with her husband because she feels her daughter will have a better and more stable life with him.
Years pass and the daughter falls in love with a struggling architect. The father disapproves of the relationship and so she runs off with her sweetheart in defiance. They go to Paris and of course run into Ruth. Ruth knows almost immediately that this is her grown up daughter and tries to steer her onto the straight and narrow path.
I won't reveal the ending but it's nothing too original. However Ruth's performance in this film is exceptional and lifts the script up from ho hum to interesting. I really enjoyed it.
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249 is a good start.
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Have you heard Susan sing Cry Me A River? Someone uploaded it but they uploaded a faulty version with gaps of silence in the recording that made it sound like it had "hiccups". Last night I fixed the audio with my software and uploaded a better copy than anyone else has on there. They all copied each other once it came out (figures) and so now there are 10 videos of Cry Me A River on YouTube, all with the same audio "hiccups". LOL! Mine is the only one without them.
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Oooh! thanks mdffyz! I just watched *Once A Lady* (1931) this past week, with Ruth Chatterton and Ivor Novello. I LOVED it! I love your photo too; do you have a still photo by any chance of Ruth and Ivor together?
Thanks for posting.
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Oooh, that will help take the sting out of the heat of summer.
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Oh, if this stuff is on the internet for free then post a link, like I did with the European Film Archive. Others might be interested too.
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>so of course it's not available on DVD
My sentiments exactly. Sigh.
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It's the recession. People are really hurting. A lot of people are cutting corners and one of the first things to go is entertainment dollars, including buying movies, paying for internet access, etc.
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I re-watched a couple of *Cinema Europe* segments last night after a couple of years. Now that I know more about foreign titles and have seen more foreign titles I could follow the documentary a whole lot better than I could in 2005. What struck me is that a lot of the clips, like from The Oyster Princess or La Roux or Napoleon, looked a lot worse in this documentary than the prints that are coming out on DVD today. That's probably why they are in no rush to put that documentary out again, the clips are substandard quality. Same goes for the Hollywood documentary. Not only would it be cost prohibitive to put these documentaries out again, according to David Shepard, but also they would need to remaster all the clips to be able to compete with today's improved digital standards.
A shame in a way because both Cinema Europe and Hollywood have a lot to teach about that era of filmmaking in Europe and America.
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You probably got my copy when I was clearing out all my old Grapevine tapes and selling them in groups on eBay awhile ago. They were just taking up too much closet space. I still have a bunch of tapes I'd love to put together in a big group and just get rid of them on eBay but the scanning involved is what keeps putting me off, that plus having to type up all the descriptions. Ugh. It is so exhausting for someone in poor health like me. So I procrastinate.
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I know. I've repeatedly requested more precodes from FMC, to no avail. I don't think anyone reads their emails.
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My Full Sail set is on the way, had to wait till this paycheck. I'll watch William Boyd in anything but my favorite performance of his isn't on a film with the greatest print in the world, it's from a Grapevine tape of a film he made with Leatrice Joy, *Eve's Leaves*, from 1926. It was a fun romp for him, nothing serious, but I liked his character in it.
I haven't watched *Two Arabian Knights* since it premiered in, what was it, 2005? I remember I found it hard to watch because there was so much nitrate deterioration. That plus Mary Astor, who I've never warmed to at all, as the female lead, left me a bit bored with that film.
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A friend loaned me his old Grapevine tape of *Daddies* (1924) and I watched that tonight. It was an old relic starring Mae Marsh and Harry Myers about men in a "Bachelors Club" who adopt WW One orphans and then one by one break their promises to the club not to get married because "a child needs a mother as well as a father."
Interesting to see what passed for entertainment back then. I could barely stay awake for this one, kept nodding off. As Grapevine tapes go this print was pretty darn good though and had a not terrible piano soundtrack stuck on there. Another Mae Marsh film under my belt, but she doesn't get much to do here. She plays one of the orphans and is perhaps too old for the role (though they dressed her down).
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I think she said something really important in that interview too, that her agent shouldn't have sued for "more money", but for "better parts". He did the former apparently without consulting her but she would have preferred to have pressed for the "better parts" instead of "more money." She said that's what Bette Davis did, she wanted to force the studio to give her better roles. It wasn't all about the money.
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http://goldensilents.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=10375&page=1
Wonderful, dear Aaron from my board posted a fantastic interview from 1993 with Anita Page. It's in three segments. There's even a nice clip from *While The City Sleeps* with Lon Chaney (which looks a whole lot better than my bootleg!)
Yet ANOTHER MGM silent TCM could do something with, but they don't. 
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*Call Her Savage* is a strange but delicious concoction. It has a super cast, it's got amazing precode moments that put other precodes to shame (films like this probably started the ball rolling in tightening up the Code eventually) and yet it has a believable ending that is like life itself. You see Clara's character change quite dramatically by the end, while still leaving you guessing, so it must have been an interesting and juicy part for her to play; she frankly had some duds in her career, both silents and sounds, but this film isn't one of them. It allowed her to be more than one dimensional.
I particularly enjoy her scenes with Monroe Owsley. I don't know what it is about him but he tickles my funny bone to no end. I always get a delightful grin on my face whenever he shows up in a precode film: I know I'm in for some laughs. Some people have the same reaction to Lee Tracy, and he's good, but Monroe is sleazier. It's like a guilty pleasure to watch him try to snooker the ladies and get his comeuppance.
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Yes I think it's Ladies Must Live (1921) too. Jack looks younger in that picture than he did in Twelve Miles Out. Betty is an actress who could sometimes look older than she was, depending on how they did her makeup and hair.
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It really is kind of freaky to think about. Bardelys beating out The Big Parade. And only because INDIVIDUALS and SMALL BUSINESS cared enough to push it forward, not big corporations.
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LOL! on the quote on that photo. Of course most people cannot look like they HAVE taste if they don't also have some money. It's hard to look classy in rags.
New Colleen Moore, And Renee Adoree groups on GAOH!
in Silent
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Are they really going after the posters of 80 year old still photos now? For heavens' sake, how ridiculous. Grrrrrr.......