Remembering the Movies, Mar. 18 - 24

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

After acknowledging Stallone's remake last fall, this week we return to the roots of Get Carter (I missed the actual release date a few months ago, but seek to make amends with the anniversary of the U.S. premiere). Another first-timer pops up too: the first adaptation of a classic play, eventually gender-bent into His Girl Friday (and then remade again under its original title). Meanwhile, Italian comedians spoof Fellini and Mastroianni, while Jeff Bridges and John Heard team up with an exiled Czech New Waver. All in all, this week sees a number of cult favorites, solid classics, and intriguing oddities. Nonetheless, a ridiculous film, striking a nostalgic chord, steals the top spot. So scroll down to view Edward G. Robinson at sea, Fred Astaire on the ceiling, and yes, Vanilla Ice kicking it on stage...

Remembering the Movies, Feb. 11 - 17

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

Concerning the above picture, a trend continues and another resumes today. Firstly, we have the second 1931 film in a row. I like to change the highlighted year week to week, just to spice things up. But this week, as with last week, a pick from the Great Depression seems inevitable (and this particular image seems oddly appropriate for Valentine's Day). Meanwhile, after the lovable Little Tramp topped last week's entry, we return to the villainous focus which has characterized 2011 up to now: as with every other week of the year so far, a fascinating bad guy steals the top spot.  It's also nice to bring things full circle, because back in November I used Bela Lugosi's hypnotic image to solicit blog links for a year-end round-up. This Monday, after many delays, that round-up will finally be unveiled. In the mean time...

Remembering the Movies, Jan. 14 - 20

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

This entry was completed on January 12, but was inadvertently saved as a "draft" by Blogger, even after I scheduled it for Friday morning. So much for getting a head start...

This week, the macabre takes the screen, with exploding heads, serial killers, disfigured psychopaths, and abominable snowmen. I also have a little more input than usual here, including a personal recollection of the 1991 film and an excerpt from an earlier review of the 1911 pick. Warning to the faint-hearted: the eighties entry features a graphic, and memorable, screen-cap.

Remembering the Movies, Jan. 7 - 13

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past

Sorry for the delay; as of this weekend, I'm making certain that "Remembering the Movies" will appear promptly every Friday at 8am. This week, we've got Edward G. helping to invent the gangster film, two Looney Tunes, and multiple responses to the controversial Not Without My Daughter, released on the eve of the Gulf War.

Remembering the Movies, Nov. 5 - 11

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Halloween's over (with one exception), time for...Christmas? Shopping malls aren't the only ones to receive their holiday spirit a little early; this week Remembering the Movies features two Yuletide films right up front, plus a film set in wintry Alaska, just to get you yearning for those chestnuts round an open fire. Several great directors make an appearance below - Luis Bunuel, Tex Avery, David Lean, the ever ubiquitous D.W. Griffith, among others. Yet amongst the classic contenders I chose to highlight Home Alone above. And why not? Though I can't say it "holds up" (based on the reputation established when I was 7) it still fuels my nostalgia for a time when I was just starting to juice my now-defunct moviegoing jones. For more on that era, visit "They Once Were Coming Attractions...", my tribute to childhood cinematic excursions. For the rest, pack up your sleigh, and push it over the precipice (jump) below...

Remembering the Movies, Oct. 8 - 14

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

(visit Remembering the Movies to further peruse the past)

Today we see an odd confluence of the soft and the tough. Among characters, a boxer isolated in his wounded pride, a couple cons with hearts of gold, and a brittle actress whose throwaway lines betray tenderness and vulnerability. Among films? Superficially sappy stories imbued with a sense of death or despair, wartime dramas with a streak of sentimentality, sharp movies subjected to even sharper criticism, and the odd picture that's all one thing - a fluffy feel-good 80s/90s American parable on the one hand, and a severe 50s/60s Japanese social critique on the other. And we haven't even mentioned an unsuspectingly jovial comedian, on the cusp of becoming one of Hollywood's most tragic figures.

Share your thoughts below, and fasten your seatbelts...

Remembering the Movies, Sep. 24 - 30

Every Friday, we look back at movies released 10-100 years ago this week.

Gangsters, witches, and quite a few romantic roundelays are the featured attractions this week. As always, share your own thoughts below: have you seen any of these films? What did you think? What are your memories if you caught them in their original run? Any anecdotes about them you'd like to share? The floor is yours.

Remembering the Movies: Sep. 17 - 23

Due to the enthusiastic response last week, "Remembering the Movies" will become a permanent fixture at The Dancing Image. Each Friday, I will briefly revisit ten films released 10 - 100 years ago this week. I'll offer pictures, describe the movie, quote a critic, and link up to a video clip (either a trailer, a scene, or sometimes the whole movie). Then it's all yours - what did you think of the films in question? Do you remember seeing any of them when they first came out? Any anecdotes you have about them or their making, which I didn't mention and you'd like to share? Respond below with any of the above.

Today, we've got gangsters, gorillas, and revolutionary rabbits whizzing past the window on our ride back through time...

THE AUTEURS - D.W. Griffith

Was D.W. Griffith a surprisingly modern auteur at times, even a proto-neorealist in the end? Was his true stroke of genius a powerful control of the intimate, rather than majestic command of spectacle? Did his career effectively end in the teens; what do his later works have to say to us? I'm concluding my first Auteurs series with links to my other entries, my own analysis of Griffith's career and aesthetic development, and several clips to illustrate the master at work.

D.W. Griffith (1875-1948)
Biograph shorts, Part One & Part Two (1908-1913)
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Intolerance (1916)
Broken Blossoms (1919)
True Heart Susie (1919)
Way Down East (1920)
Orphans of the Storm (1921)
America (1924)
Sally of the Sawdust (1925)
The Battle of the Sexes (1928)
Abraham Lincoln (1930)
The Struggle (1931)

Proceed through the jump for more...

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - The Struggle

The Struggle (1931) was D.W. Griffith's last feature film. He was fifty-six years old when it was released and it had only been sixteen years since he stood astride the film world with the breakthrough Birth of a Nation. Griffith would live another seventeen years, occasionally working on the margins of the industry, under pseudonyms, but that proud opening title, "personally directed by D.W. Griffith" was never to be seen again. And by reputation, The Struggle seems an ignominious end to an illustrious career. The film flopped so badly that some newspaper accounts have it disappearing from theaters within a week. Critics savaged it, and the movie was simultaneously decried as too old-fashioned and too "Soviet" (the latter argument, apparently based on the title yet unfathomable given the film's content, only offers further proof that no one went to see it). The Struggle ended Griffith's career not with a bang, but a whimper.

So imagine my surprise upon discovering the film today. Tacked onto the Abraham Lincoln disc as an addendum (and together, these films were only released two weeks ago), it arrived unheralded and I wasn't expecting much. But The Struggle is not only Griffith's best available film since Way Down East, it's one of his best, period. The movie has its flaws, but is far superior to the more widely acknowledged Abraham Lincoln, which was Griffith's first talkie. Lincoln feels like a silent film with dialogue superimposed, whereas The Struggle is surprisingly modern - in everything from its use of sound to its performances to its photography. This is an astonishing and impressive work of art, all the more so for being unusual in Griffith's canon.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is certainly an interesting film, but unfortunately most of the interest lies in its historical and auteurist connotations rather than in the film itself. It's a curiosity rather than a success. Still, it shows D.W. Griffith grappling with a fundamentally altered medium - this is his first sound film - and if it's often creaky and dated, it's really not all that bad for an early talkie. Actually its problems lie not so much in the technique - though it's a bit stilted, Griffith seems to have taken to sound rather easily - but in structure. Its problems haven't changed much in 80 years: the biopic is still a risky and haphazard genre. By relaying a pile-on of incidents in Lincoln's life and career, this movie (like many which followed in its wake) feels less like a cohesive album than a Greatest Hits collection, and one in which the recordings are often muddy and indistinct. Still, Walter Huston offers one of the best Lincolns ever to grace the screen and Griffith crafts some effective sequences in his penultimate feature.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - The Battle of the Sexes

Just this morning I read "Echoes of the Jazz Age," F. Scott Fitzgerald's marvelous elegy for the Roaring Twenties. In it he writes, "Contrary to popular opinion, the movies of the Jazz Age had no effect upon its morals. The social attitude of the producers was timid, behind the times and banal - for example, no picture mirrored even faintly the younger generation until 1923, when magazines had already been started to celebrate it and it had long ceased to be news." The Battle of the Sexes, which appeared in 1928 (five years after the date Fitzgerald set, a year before the Crash) is the first Griffith film I've seen that makes any attempt to capture the zeitgeist. It would be unfair to call it Griffith's first Jazz Age film - there were too many of his 20s films unavailable on Netflix for me to make that judgement, and at least one of them (The Sorrows of Satan) seems to have a contemporary setting. However, it's safe to say this is a departure for Griffith and in some ways a welcome one, though I would not call The Battle of the Sexes a rousing success.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Sally of the Sawdust

When I looked up this film I was surprised to see who it starred. Oh, I thought, a Griffith movie with W.C. Fields! Not long into viewing, I realized that the reverse was probably true: this was a W.C. Fields movie that happened to be directed by D.W. Griffith. Now I don't really think this is the case - Sally was Fields' debut so it's hard to say there was any such thing as a Fields movie at this point - and I would hardly be the one to determine such a thing. A shameful admission: until now, I'd never seen a W.C. Fields movie. That sordid detail aside, this is not exactly typical Griffith. True, it is sentimental and melodramatic (though also by and large a comedy), with some subpar Victorian plot developments, and what J. Hoberman astutely calls Griffith's "opposition to Americans even more puritanical than he." But its flavor is largely determined by Fields' brusque, buffoonish, yet charming rogue, a carnival con man who has adopted young Sally (Caroline Dempster) and is now taking her to the town where her rich grandparents - whom she's never met - reside.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - America

America was one of D.W. Griffith's most massive undertakings, on par with The Birth of a Nation almost a decade earlier. Like that film, America - with its grand, all-encompassing title - is an attempt to view a grand historical event (in this case the American Revolution) through individual and family melodrama. Griffith shows a continued talent for staging battle scenes, and the cinematography in America is excellent, whether dotting distant landscapes with puffs of cannon smoke, staging massacres amidst sun-dappled trees, or zipping along country roads alongside Paul Revere in blue-tinted tracking shots. Yet somehow America didn't quite work with 1924 audiences; it was a flop for Griffith and (ironically) meant the end of his own independence. (You can read a good summary of America's history at Greenbriar Picture Shows, along with a more favorable perspective on the film.) Individual moments are strong, there was obviously a good deal of care put into the production, and yet somehow America seems to be striving after past glories and its debt to Griffith's earlier masterpiece hamstrings it in fundamental ways.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Orphans of the Storm

With Orphans of the Storm, D.W. Griffith returns to the epic form he revolutionized with The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Does he still "have it"? Well, unfortunately, not quite. The earlier works showed an incredible ability to balance exciting spectacle, multiple storylines, and intimate personal detail. Orphans proves itself unable to achieve this balancing act. At times it appears sluggish, at other jerky. As it cuts between different people and places it is initially confusing - a sense of rhythm is not established - and eventually distracting. The movie is at its best when it settles on telling the story of two sisters. Henriette (Dorothy Gish) is an abandoned aristocrat adopted into an impoverished family and then blinded during an illness; she becomes a beggar tormented by an evil old hag. Louise (Lillian Gish), Henriette's resilient but constantly besieged protector, is kidnapped and separated from her sister; she develops bonds with a revolutionary and an aristocrat which will serve her well in her struggles. The French Revolution and the subsequent Terror serve as a backdrop for the melodrama.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Way Down East

Around 1920, D.W. Griffith was at the top of his game. He had founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, giving them complete control over their own work. Along with Cecil B. DeMille he was perhaps the most celebrated and popular director of the era. And when he released Way Down East, an adaptation of a popular 19th century play about a poor girl who is tricked by a slick man and must endure all sorts of hardships for her naivete, the film became one of his biggest hits. But it's interesting to take a look at Griffith's career, attitude, and style from the perspective of this time. That Way Down East was a hit probably represents, in part, a nostalgia for the pre-World War I era in the dawning years of the Roaring Twenties. That ambivalence would remain throughout the Jazz Age because (images of flappers, bootleggers, and sultans of swat aside) the United States was still a largely rural and conservative country, suspicious of the massive social changes that were seizing the big cities. Nonetheless, many hit movies of the twenties capitalized on the sparkling, glistening sense of a new world, and mass audiences ate it up. Griffith was to fall increasingly behind the times in this regard.

Indeed, Griffith's relevance probably peaked immediately before America joined World War I. With The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, he was the prophet of film form, leading the way adventurously into new territory. But increasingly, in 1919 and 1920, Griffith's work takes on a more aesthetically conservative tone. Gone are the ambitious structures and experiments in form, replaced by a simpler, if completely confident, style. I noted that True Heart Susie seemed even more basic than Broken Blossoms, which in turn was far more basic than the Griffith epics. Way Down East doesn't entirely continue that trend (the ice-floe climax is a quite stunning set piece) but emotionally, it continues to zero in rather than expand. And that is a good thing; despite some flaws, this is one of Griffith's most powerful works, in large part because its focus is so narrow and Griffith's immense compassion - redeemed from outright sentimentality by his sensitivity - imbues the film with a sense of elegiac grace.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - True Heart Susie

By no intention of my own, but through the malfeasance of Netflix delays and mishaps and the distraction of a new DVR, the Auteurs series was put on hold for almost a month. Now I'm back - with the first Griffith feature in the series that I had not seen before. In 1919, close on the heels of Broken Blossoms, Griffith released another melodrama starring Lillian Gish. However, this one is much simpler - and in fact comes as a bit of a surprise after Griffith's epic earlier work.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Broken Blossoms

After the grand folly of Intolerance, D.W. Griffith turned out a number of features in succession, many about the Great War that America had just joined. His most notable picture was Hearts of the World, a very pro-French testament to German barbarism, albeit with some of Griffith's antiwar sentiments stirred into the mix. Supposedly, that is. Hearts of the World is not available on Netflix, nor are the half-dozen other films that followed Intolerance. Since I'm using the online service as my guide, that brings us to 1919, three years later, and to the great director's most acclaimed work, following Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation.

Broken Blossoms couldn't be much more different from those lavish, ambitious epics. It is a quiet, poetic film, focusing on the plight of two individuals. It's about half the length of those earlier features, and does not contain an ambitious structure or massive themes or dozens of innovations. Broken Blossoms presents a director firmly in control of his craft, yet unwilling to show off. Much of the movie, especially the first half, unfolds in rather long shots, taking in the grimy surroundings of its two protagonists as they drift within its bounds (the film's one ambitious touch is its detailed sets, recreating London's poverty-stricken Limehouse district). The crosscutting is toned down here; it's used to heighten suspense but we're seldom as conscious of its effects as in Birth or Intolerance. If the latter film was the explosive work of a precocious but childlike sensibility, full of broad strokes and massive scale, Broken Blossoms exhibits a melancholy maturity.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Intolerance

As I noted last week, D.W. Griffith professed astonishment at the controversy surrounding Birth of a Nation, his 1915 epic. He followed it with another epic, even more lavish, this one devoted to the theme of intolerance in order to prove what a swell ol' guy D.W. was. This film had enormous sets, a cast of hundreds (thousands?), and a ludicrously ambitious structure and concept - the telling of four separate stories, in four different historical periods, cutting between them all so that they unfolded simultaneously. The movie came out in 1916. Think about that. This Herculean follow-up to his masterpiece was executed and delivered a mere year later; that should tell you something. Griffith directs Intolerance with the bravado of a drunken genius, as if he couldn't take the time to sort everything out neatly and just tackled the material on the wit of his whim. Consequently, his sheer enthusiasm makes the unwieldly, potentially overstuffed picture work. As someone who often has several books sitting by my bedside because I can't settle on just one, I have to say I dig the ambition.

Dark Knights for Different Eras

Our hero, a masked vigilante, concocts a disguise which will instill a sense of primal fear in the perceived enemies of his community. Opposed by a garishly made-up villain, fueled by anger at the death of a beloved woman, the hero strikes blows in the name of order. But the hero's crusade for extralegal justice is instigated by outside forces, as they introduce an element of chaos and anarchy into the community, and the hero must break the law in order to uphold it. "Welcome to a world without rules," indeed.

I of course don't mean to suggest that The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith's epic 1915 ode to the Ku Klux Klan, and The Dark Knight, this summer's critically-acclaimed, crowd-pleasing blockbuster hit, are somehow identical. There are numerous differences, large and small (most importantly, the Batman movie isn't virulently, or even nominally, racist). Yet the other night I wrote about the Batman film's mythological overtones, and re-watching The Birth of a Nation for my D.W. Griffith series, I was taken aback by how Griffith's film also works on the level of myth, and in much the same fashion (both generally and specifically) as The Dark Knight.