HINT

In her most famous role her hair was very prominent.

Who Is She?

Brother Waldo with his sister who
would become popular. Who is she?

Well obviously I figured it out. Where are those blushing smileys when you need them??

Just call me "Wilson"! I floated in just now, and I'm SO glad to be here. I've been in severe withdrawal this week, wondering how everyone is. Not sure how this place operates, but I guess I'll catch up in a hurry.

This landed on the western page, how do I get to the main page? I don't seem to have a post button on that page??? Geez, I love technology!

Nancy

Another Castaway Makes Landfall

Hello, all, it's me, Judith.

I'm so glad we've found another refuge, and I'm especially happy to see some of our SSO members. How is everyone?

Many, many thanks to Moira for giving us a place to land. I'm looking forward to our usual spirited, informative, and ever-friendly discussions.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

IRIS ADRIAN (1912 - 1994)


BOB HOPE (1903 - 2003)

I'M HERE

I finally made it onto Silver Screen Outcasts and it is a pleasure to arrive. Now I have to get into the groove and learn the fundementals.
I like what I see thus far. It should be fun to be with you guys.

MongoIII

Happy Land (1943) with Don Ameche & Frances Dee

Happy Land (1943) was a movie that I recorded awhile ago, but thanks to the mention of this movie by CineMaven and friends on the TCM board, I finally watched it yesterday. I was terribly moved by this story of a father, who is a pharmacist in a small town trying to cope with his grief over the loss of his son. Yes, it is sentimental, but not in a cheap way. Filmed on location in real settings in the then small town of Santa Rosa, California (where Hitchcock made the very different, much better known Shadow of a Doubt that same year), it is centered around the life of one family who are pharmacists (holy Mr. Gower coincidence!) in a community with an older man's spirit returning to guide his son through an examination of his grief, his life and his son's life. Sure, there are touches of It's a Wonderful Life, but because Happy Land is new to me, perhaps it was more effective in its atmosphere and storytelling due to its relative freshness and the likability of the leading actors, Don Ameche, Frances Dee and Harry Carey, Sr.

I thought Don Ameche gave one of his better dramatic performances in this one, and thought that his bitterness and grief were very moving, (though I usually prefer him as the hiliarious Mr. Bickerson and in the films he made when he was much older, such as Things Change, which I loved). The best parts for me were the beginning with the narrator describing the community life, and Ameche and Dee bantering tenderly and the arrival of the telegram. I saw some echoes of the author MacKinlay Kantor's later poetic touch in The Best Years of Our Lives in this movie too, (though of course, Robert E. Sherwood refined that story beautifully in the Wyler film). I loved seeing Harry Carey as Gramps' spirit in Happy Land, with his wry comments about the not always likable townfolk.

Did anyone spot Natalie Wood's first time in front of a camera? She was the little girl whose ice cream cone fell in a very brief scene. The director of H.L., former actor and sometime director Irving Pichel spotted her in a crowd with her mother (who seems to have been the stage mother of all time), was enchanted by the child, and later asked that she be cast in Tomorrow Is Forever as Orson's war orphan. Btw, any movie with the great Mary Wickes in the cast is better for it, don't you think? Btw, the narrator was Reed Hadley, though at first I thought it might be Pichel himself, who had a beautiful speaking voice, and was the narrator of How Green Was My Valley (1941).

Btw, Happy Land (1943) can be seen in its entirety on Hulu, starting below. I hope that you'll let me know what you think of the movie.

Why I Love Doug!

Doug, how do I love you?

Let me ponder the ways.

I love you for your sheer enjoyment of making movies. Whether early silents like Mystery of the Leaping Fish or The Modern Musketeer or your later ones, when you really hit your stride, I've said it before and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll say it again, no one seemed to love making movies as much as Doug.

He starts to really hit his stride with The Mark of Zorro. Last night's print on TCM was beautifull

y restored and tinted by David Shepard and Flicker Alley with a tremendous score by Mont Alto Orchestra. But here we see the furthering of the Fairbanks hero started in Modern Musketeer. Devilish and most of all, acrobatic to the nth degree, in Zorro, he runs rings around his adversaries. I saw this years ago on the big screen (but not in nearly as grand print as last night) at the Silent Movie Theater here in the City of Angels.

His next adventure film would be again with Fred Niblo, The Three Musketeers which, sadly, I haven't seen. It is on my wish list of films to see on the big screen and I have only heard wonderful things about the film and especially Fairbanks' swashbuckling.

He followed that with Robin Hood working with director Allan Dwan. Dwan was an engineer at heart and made possible many of Doug's famous stunts in this film. The set was constructed on the United Artist lot in what was then considered west Hollywood (Santa Monica and La Brea). At that time, it was the largest set constructed in Hollywood. The lot changed hands over the years becoming among others, the Goldwyn Lot and the Warner Hollywood lot. Today, it is a large shopping mall with the Formosa Cafe all that really remains of its classic era roots.

Fairbanks seems to have had an affinity with larger than life directors. Dwan, as I said was an engineer at heart, who shared Doug's joy in pushing the outside of the envelop in terms of dare-devil stunts. His next director was Raoul Walsh. Walsh had started as an actor in silent films with D.W. Griffith. He had gotten bored with acting and had a series of adventures (as well as being a hard drinking kind of guy) that ultimately took him south of the border with Pancho Villa.

He managed to funnel all of that into his directing. His turn with Doug brought forth the magical The Thief of Bagdad.

He next teamed with Albert Parker for The Black Pirate. Parts of Pirate were shot in 2-stripe Techincolor and are beautiful to behold. Most of the stunts, however, are reproductions of what Dwan and Fairbanks did in Robin Hood.

He closes out the silent era with the wonderful The Iron Mask working again with Allan Dwan, perhaps the director that best understood how to use his athletic prowess.

I saw this two months ago at a screening at the Academy, intro'd by Kevin Brownlow. Watching the film, I was reminded of Fairbank's comment in Brownlow's wonderful documentary Hollywood that "the romance of film making ends here."

And for Fairbanks, by then in his forties, it really truly seems to have. He made a few talkie films but they never had the verve and just plain joie de vivre that his silents did.

He wrote the stories to many of his best films but at heart, he seems to have loved playing the hero that wows us with his athleticism.

Errol Flynn may have come close with his swordmanship but he lacked Doug's physical grace in big stunts.

We would not really see his like again in film until Burt Lancaster made a series of pirate films in the 1950s.

I continue to hope that TCM will obtain the rights to air Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers and The Iron Mask along with their line-up of Thief and Zorro

I love Doug.

Three Godfathers (1936): A Little Known Favorite for Moira

The John Ford color version of Three Godfathers (1948) is far better known, but the 1936 version of Three Godfathers is my favorite version of this story. Chester Morris is at his brash best here--it's a shame that he languished in the highly entertaining yet dramatically limited Boston Blackie during what should've been some of his most productive years. Having sought out his films whenever I could over the years and seen some of his best work on film, such as Red-Headed Woman (1932), The Divorcee (1930), and The Big House (1930), I'd say that Three Godfathers was his last, best work on film.

Why so few good films from a good actor? Unfortunately, from what I've read about his career, he may have been his own worst enemy at times. Whenever he was under contract to a major studio, he seems to have had a habit of insisting, loudly and repeatedly, that he should be a great leading man. He only seems to have succeeded in alienating his employers repeatedly. Though always working, he was one of those actors who never quite grasped the brass ring. In the Three Godfathers he's dynamic, funny, attractive and he shows more subtlety than usual.

I also think that Lewis Stone was really splendid in his part in this version of the tale. He's not too sentimental as an educated man who's thrown his life away but, as he gradually realizes that he's not going to survive, seems to be doing a mostly silent philosophical review of that ruined life. He has his stentorian moments, but it's a relief and a delight to see him play a thoughtful yet livelier character than ol' Judge Hardy.

Comparing the '36 version of Three Godfathers with the John Ford version, there are some interesting differences. Both give their lead actors good parts and Morris and John Wayne in the latter film are both very good. Wayne is actually better than good--he's a real actor here, especially in his delirious moments in the desert. It's interesting to me that this performance comes in the same year as Red River from gave Wayne an excellent character role. Ford is reported to have said after seeing Red River that "I never knew the big fellow could act."

The Ford version also differs in the fact that it is visual poetry from beginning to end. Ford, with his cinematographer Winton Hoch, captures the harsh beauty of the desert in every frame. The '30s version, directed by Richard Boleslawski & photographed by one of the masters, Joseph Ruttenberg, communicates the bleakness of the setting in a straight forward manner with few frills.

The problem that I have with the Ford version, however, is with the sentimentality that is just poured on during some--not all--of the segments. I also think that the ending of Ford's version is much less satisfying and geared more toward fulfilling that happy-ending impulse. It really annoyed me when I first saw it. Then, after finding the '36 version, I found that its Depression era economy of detail, snappy dialogue and implied, rather than explicit sentiment, made this a much better film for me.

Btw, director Boleslawski was one of the original Moscow Art Theatre actors and a founder of NYC's American Laboratory Theatre, (a forerunner to the Group Theater which he operated with Maria Ouspenskaya). He made some good and some pretentious movies after washing up on the shores of the West Coast as a director in the early thirties following the collapse of financing for theatre work in NY. This movie definitely falls in the good category. Too bad that Boleslawski died a year after this movie. It's possible that he had hit his stride with this one.

Sorry to have gone on so long about this film, but it's a favorite.

The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933) directed by James Whale, was an attempt to persuade the public and his employers at Universal that he was capable of much more than horror, (though The Old Dark House was probably not the way to go if that was his point). Today, of course, he is now most closely identified with Frankenstein (1931) despite the fact that the majority of Whale's 23 movies do not belong to this genre.

Having previously seen the 1938 version of this story in the pretty dreary Wives Under Suspicion starring Warren William and Gail Patrick, (also directed by Whale when his career was fading), I was not expecting to see this same Ladislas Fodor play told so vividly (if at times melodramatically) with Frank Morgan (seen at left in the early 1930s sweating for the camera at his Beverly Hills mansion) and Nancy Carroll as the central figures. While there are some scenes that are a trifle overwrought, and it always seems odd to me when Frank Morgan is cast in one of these romantic leads early in his film career (wasn't that his brother Ralph's gig?), I was quite impressed with Morgan as the attorney trying to defend his friend Paul Lukas from a murder rap after Paul had learned that his wife was unfaithful. I still have mixed feelings about the movie, but loved the rocketing pace, and Jean Dixon (in one of her non-comedic roles as a career gal lawyer). Nancy Carroll, whose work in Child of Manhattan (1933) was very effective, irked me for reasons that I can't accurately describe. If anyone else saw this movie and has an opinion, I hope that you'll tell me why this movie makes me cringe inwardly, (other than the usual chauvinism toward one half of the human race without any acknowledgment of the society that helps to breed these vain, shallow creatures).

The opening sequence of The Kiss Before the Mirror shows a very briefly glimpsed Gloria Stuart and an impossibly young day player, newly arrived in Hollywood with hopes to carve out a singing career, one Walter Pidgeon, who appeared as a smooth adulterer for about 45 seconds. This first part of the movie was beautifully shot and displayed Whale's gifts for adroit, economical storytelling at his best. The rest of the film, not so well, I'm afraid. What's your opinion?

In Response to "I Love Doug"

I've never seen Robin Hood (1922), which from what I've read in Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By and in Lynn's piece here, may be Douglas Fairbanks' masterpiece in terms of adventure and technique. I'm still hoping that someday TCM will find a way to feature him as the Star of the Month, (even if that means trotting out his less than satisfying sound films or making him and Junior a tag team for SOTM). I could live with that if that would mean we'd get a chance to see the utterly delightful The Mollycoddle (1920) again along with the wonderful Thief of Bagdad, The Iron Mask and other films that show the optimistic smilin' Doug. It would be interesting to program a week just documenting the influence that Fairbanks, Sr.'s films had on storytelling, remakes, color, art direction, and other performers, by contrasting his work with that of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Burt Lancaster and Gene Kelly as movie stars, and such creative people behind the camera as Michael Powell, William Cameron Menzies and Rouben Mamoulian.

I've read that Doug even influenced Bob Kane when creating the comic book character of Batman! For anyone who'd like to see more about Douglas Fairbanks Sr., there is a marvelous online museum found here and the real thing is in Austin, Texas. The clip below offers a glimpse of Fairbanks' legendary Robin Hood (1922):

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