Posted on 04/29/2015 7:05:08 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Film buffs could make a case that the art of film has deteriorated with the prevalence of film school grads working in it. After all, , the men, and they were mostly men, who made the 70- and 80year old movies we still watch managed to avoid it.
Case in point: director Frank Capra, whose It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas staple while, for the remainder of the year, TV viewers still devour his other classics: Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Meet John Doe, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Today, Capra’s outlook would not get him past the front gate of most major studios.
For example, when he made It’s A Wonderful Life, he said. “There are just two things that are important. One is to strengthen the individual’s belief in himself, and the other, even more important, is to combat a modern trend toward atheism.” And he said that in 1946!
In a lecture at Hillsdale last month, John Marini, a political science professor at the University of Nevada at Reno, recounted other Capra broadsides, Arguably, the great man was well ahead of his time when he complained, in 1971, that “practically all the Hollywood filmmaking of today is stooping to cheap salacious pornography in a crazy bastardization of a great art to compete for the ‘patronage’ of deviates.”
We have ended up with formulaic, simple, cheesy, sex-infused CGI-flooded schlock because that's what the average unwashed dimwit out there is buying. Heck, look what they have done with almost every movie to come out these last several years.
When we buy junk, we get more junk.
Any time the academy takes over a specific artistic form, that form starts to die a little death. Every wonder why acting is often so bad? Look at those stupid Master’s Degrees in Theater Arts.
This week I’m going to see a Louise Brooks/William Wellman silent film at Film Forum in NYC - neither of whom had any academic training outside of Louise’s dance classes. Wellman was a World War I vet.
A sort of a problem that has affected movies to comic books to all sorts of things in the whole post-modern era of the past few decades. People who grow up as ultra-fans and whose influences only come from the medium itself, all jump into their favored field, and it leads to a sort of culturally distilled product.
Instead of drawing on real life experiences, like earlier creators, who lived on farms, fought in wars, struggled through economic Depression, and such, you have swaths of modern folks whose motivating influences arise from childhood viewings of tv-reruns and comic-themed movies. It eats on itself. It compounds the geeky, self-conscious artiface of the medium’s language.
Real weird people were depicted as being brave people who rebelled against the strict conformity of the regular American family and values. The children/young adults in the new movies were drug-taking, sexually promiscuous "rebels" who showed their straitlaced brethren how out of touch they were. Weird was good, normal was bad. Average Americans, especially whites, were mostly racist, mysogynistic types who needed to be shown the errors of their ways. Republicans and conservatives were regularly bashed.
A few years ago my wife and I were looking for a movie to watch on the weekend. We decided to watch some flick on HBO with Leonard DiCrapio. He was some sort of business exec. One of the opening scenes had him working late one night. At one point he goes outside his office and runs into some other worker he'd never met before also taking a break. They introduce themselves, and then one or the other pulls out a joint and they start toking.
I thought to myself how often does someone offer a complete stranger a toke of marijuana inside the office building? Am I that far out of it that complete strangers share pot with each other like chewing gum? I just didn't ring true, and we turned that movie off.
“Beggars of Life” (1928), I assume?
Yes, I can’t wait. Brooks’ American films are not shown too often and many of them were lost.
Wellman’s son has written a book about the old man - I think he’ll be there the night of the screening.
A few years ago, I used a movie encyclopedia to make a list of my favorite movies and directors. I found that all of my favorite directors had started their craft in the silent era, when you had to tell a story without dialog.
Should be nice to see “Beggars” on the big screen. I envy you. I’ve long had a dupey VHS bootleg of the film, which I got nearly thirty years ago. And the print had no musical accompaniment whatsoever. Not exactly an ideal presentation.
True, not too many Brooks films still existing. The track record of survival for those mid-to-late-1920s Paramount films isn’t very good. Just as bad for Bebe Daniels’ films, from the same studio and same era as Brooks. One of the most unfortunate losses is Paramount’s “The Case of Lena Smith” from 1929, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Not to mention some of the WC Fields’ silents that they released.
Yeah, Brooks made a Fields’ movie directed by her husband Eddie Sutherland. Totally lost.
She also made a movie with John Wayne in the 30s - very low budget and she looks totally different.
The problem is it’s very hard to get people who are not into film history to enjoy silent film, black and white film or anything that was made ten years prior. If people just opened their minds more, they would see that there are so many great films - from all over the world - they’d never have to see a modern Hollywood again and still have a lifetime of movie viewing.
Well, “It’s the Old Army Game” with Fields and Brooks does exist. I’ve seen it. But I seem to recall Brooks’ role isn’t very big. My memory is pretty cloudy of it, though. The only other Fields’ Paramount silent I know definately exists is “Running Wild,” which Paramount even officially released on video in the 1980s. That one had Mary Brian in it as the ingenue. She was still around at the time, occasionally giving interviews and attending a few screenings/festivals.
The John Wayne “Three Mesquiteers” film with Brooks has been beautifully restored and available on a dvd from Olive Films. I was stunned at the sharpness of the print. I didn’t realize there were such pristine original elements available of such old Republic Pictures product.
DVD Beaver reviews remastered film DVDs. It takes a few minutes to figure out how to find things, but it is a good source.
It’s a site I frequently check.
Always a fascination of mine, the status of certain old films that are either lost, exist only via a collector’s print, or the quality of elements that exists in the archives. One film long thought lost, but just recently rescued and even released on dvd, is “Why Be Good?” (1929), with Colleen Moore. A print was found in an Italian archive, and domestic collectors had copies of the original Vitaphone music discs that accompanied it, and the two were reunited by Warner Bros., making the film available to be seen for the first time practically since it was new. It’s a typical ‘flapper’ comedy-drama.
Another film thought lost just came out this past month via the cheapie Alpha dvd line, which releases public-domain miscellanea... a rock-bottom, ultra-low budget b-western starring Jack Perrin, entitled “The Sheriff’s Secret” (1931). It was a Robert J. Horner production, and he was something like a fly-by-night Ed Wood level producer, making western films on a shoestring, and having them distributed via the states’ rights market. Anyway, it was thought to be lost, but apparently some collector had a copy of it, and now it’s available to be seen. It’s a fairly ragged print, but at least it’s now around.
No, if that were so they wouldn't have kept cranking out antiwar boxoffice poison like "Lions for Lambs", "In the Garden of Elah" and "Buffalo Soldiers" and instead put out movies like "American Sniper" which, while not "pro war" was certainly not hostile to the troops. The same can be said about films with a religious theme like "Passion of the Christ" which made a mint and yet absolutely nobody in hollywood tried to copy.
But it's not about making money. They'd rather lose money but get pats on the back from their peers than make money and be called "jingoistic" and a naive bitter clinger by them.
So many fine old movies have not been appreciated because people watched them as an old print on late night TV, or a VCR tape, and couldn’t capture the magic, and assume that people are mistaken about it, or overly nostalgic about it.
One that I mention to people because it is more recent, and a horror film, is ‘Carnival of Souls’, most movie fans have seen it (or tried to watch it), but if they haven’t seen a quality version of it, then they may have missed just how good it really is.
A bad print is no way to sample what one has heard is a great silent, or early classic, that is highly respected by the world of film buffs.
Agree that the Passion of the Christ was an outstanding movie but less enthusiastic about American Sniper: heart in the right place but a lousy movie. Horrible acting, script, direction, military advisement. Gotta find better talent for making "our" movies.
Regarding the point that good movies don't seem to come from people who got degrees in film-making, it's also true that great novelists didn't get degrees in literature.
Taking courses in the mechanics of film-making, or of writing, may help someone who already has talent, but they'll do nothing for someone who lacks talent.
I’ll have to try and get the John Wayne movie. I had a miserable video back in the 80s.
I thought the Old Army Game was lost - I probably read that somewhere - it’s possible Louise said that - she often got things wrong although she certainly had genius in evaluating film and people in the industry. You may notice I’m a Louise fanatic - I am. I’ve adored her for 30 years. A couple of years ago I saw one of her American silents with Gregory Kelly. I can’t remember the name of it - The Show Off? It was Kelly’s great stage hit.
Will freepers take up silent film? I truly doubt it.
And yet, my generation - the baby boomer generation - watched scratchy prints of movies from the first part of the 20th century on little black and white tv’s with rabbit ears to control the static. But we adored all those films! Whatever the faults of that generation, it went into the film industry in very wonderful areas - film preservation, for one. A friend of mine runs the last rep theater in NYC - a baby boomer for sure who grew up with Hollywood movies from the 40s on WPIX and WOR.
Today, people have no patience with an imperfect print and a leisurely but purposely done pace.
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