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.”
Actually, I think “It’s the Old Army Game” WAS considered a lost film for a while, before a print did turn up. MGM apparently got control of Paramount’s “The Show-Off” when they remade it in the late-1940s as a Red Skelton vehicle. Same way they also got control of Paramount’s 1932 “Make Me a Star,” when they also turned it into a Skelton film (Merton of the Movies).
The Louise Brooks film I’d probably most like to see is “Rolled Stockings.” But I tend to think it’s one of the lost ones, unless it has been discovered in some of those foreign archives in recent years.
As if Paramount’s track record of lost films isn’t bad enough, equally lamentable is Universal’s. Especially since I’ve always been partial to their top female star, Laura La Plante. “Skinner’s Dress Suit” from 1926 is particularly nice, but the only print I’ve seen is pretty beat-up. Universal also has all those breezy and consistently entertaining b-westerns of Hoot Gibson, Jack Hoxie, Art Acord, and others. Very, very few survive.
Silents have particularly suffered in this regard, with people often seeing only grainy 8mm printdowns, edited clips, and films very often run at the wrong projection speed, giving them an unnatural and unintentionally comic hurky-jerky appearance.
Oh, and “Carnival of Souls” is an all-time favorite of mine. I never got the Criterion dvd release, but the copy via Image, which was super-sharp. Love the crisp, on-location filming. I always tend to like the product of quirky non-Hollywood filmmakers who made a go at horror/sci-fi films for the drive-in market in the 1950s/60s, even though most aren’t up to the standards of “Carnival.” Rather, often more akin to those grade-z Larry Buchanan type films shot in Texas for American-International tv syndication in the mid-1960s. Wretched quality films, but I still love them.
You disappoint.
It’s very cool talking with you - as always. Merton of the Movies was originally a play by Marc Connelly. Buster Keaton toured with the play in the 1950s - doing many of his film stunts including the house falling in on him from Steamboat Bill. I guess when they made it in’32, they changed the title and changed it back again for the Skelton movie.
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