silent film

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Latest blogosphere posts tagged “silent film”

 

• Stars of Slapstick #115: Stan Laurel

  
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  Originally posted in 2010.  Laurel is many ways the anti- Chaplin . There is much speculation as to why, given their common background in the  Fred Karno  troup, there wasn’t more contact between the two former colleagues during their Hollywood years.  There was almost none. During a period of some forty ...
  3 days ago

• Stars of Slapstick # 116: Lupino Lane

  
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  Originally posted in 2010.  Lupino Lane was born on this day in 1892 into a multigenerational dynasty of English  circus  and  music hall  acrobats (Ida Lupino is also a relative). He made his music hall debut by age four. By 1913 he was a well known perfomer In London’s West End. In 1915, while still in ...
  3 days ago

• Stars of Vaudeville # 717: Lew Pollack

  
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  Today is the birthday of Lew Pollack (1895-1946). A New York native he started out as a boy singer with Walter Damrosch’s choral group. He sang and played vaudeville and composed music for silent films. He became an important Tin Pan Alley songwriter, collaborating with such big wheels as Erno Rapee, Ned ...
  3 days ago

• Downhill (1927)

  
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  WHO: Alfred Hitchcock directed this. WHAT: Though Hitchcock disparaged its dialogue and the naïveté of one of its most memorable sequences, and though some modern critics find fault with its thematic misogyny,  Downhill is a feast for admirers of the directors visual flourishes, second perhaps only to ...
  4 days ago

• Stars of Slapstick # 113: Poodles Hanneford

  
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  Poodles was the greatest comic trick rider of the century, and possibly of all time. He is credited with having done more to advance the art of trick riding than anyone since Philip Astley, the inventor of the  circus. Born in Barnsley, England in 1891, Poodles was the rare vaudevillian who was actually a member of ...
  5 days ago

• Silent version of Prix de Beauté with Louise Brooks screens July 18th

  
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  On Thursday, July 18th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen a new restoration of the silent version of Prix de Beauté (1930), with musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne. This special  screening opens this years annual festival, and, it is a very rare opportunity to see the least seen version of ...
  6 days ago

• Hall of Hams #45: Basil Rathbone

  
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  The Hall of Hams is my series on some of my favorite actors who have brought the art of melodramatic acting into the modern era. Today is the birthday of Basil Rathbone (1892-1967). His long association with the character of Sherlock Holmes in the 14 films he made as that character between 1939 and 1946 nowadays ...
  6 days ago

• “The Penalty” Opens Tomorrow

  
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  Here’s an extremely interesting project opening tomorrow night, written by Clay McCleod Chapman ; based on the Lon Chaney film and the novel on which that was based, and starring a cast that includes people with disabilities. Details are below. Special Preview Night! Thursday, June 13th at 7:30pm $10 (general ...
  1 week ago

• Stars of Slapstick # 112: Marcel Perez

  
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  One of the happy discoveries of Steve Massa’s new book  Lame Brains and Lunatics   is Marcel Perez (Manuel Fernandez Perez, 1884-1929). Well enough known in the silent era, Massa postulates that Perez’s present obscurity may stem from the fact that his screen name and identity changed so many times (he also ...
  1 week ago

• Accidentally Preserved

  
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  Ben Model has accomplished rather a neat magic trick by managing to become a Renaissance man without ever leaving the very narrow field of silent film: primarily known as a silent film accompanist, presenter, and lecturer, he is also a scholar and archivist (not just of silent film, but of the Ernie Kovacs ...
  1 week ago

• Stars of Slapstick #111: Wesley Ruggles

  
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    Today is the birthday of movie director Wesley Ruggles (1889-1972). The younger brother of actor Charlie Ruggles , Wesley too started out on the stage, acting in musical comedies, stock companies and minstrel shows before joining up with Keystone in 1914. He appears in seven Keystone comedy shorts, most of them ...
  1 week ago

• Stars of Vaudeville #714: Sessue Hayakawa

  
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  Today is the birthday of the remarkable trailblazer Sessue Hayakawa (1889-1973). A member of the Japanese nobility, he was thwarted in his ambition to serve in the military due to an ear injury in his youth. He studied for a couple of years at the University of Chicago, then began acting in Japanese-American theatres ...
  1 week ago

• Stars of Slapstick # 110: William A. Seiter

  
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  Today is the birthday of William S. Seiter (1910-1964). Staring out as a stuntman in 1913, by the following year he was playing bit parts for Mack Sennett at Keystone. By 1918 he was in demand as a director; through the 20s he helmed pictures starring Reginald Denny, Douglas Maclean, Marcel Perez, and C arter De ...
  1 week ago

• The Sounds of Silent Film Festival’s Gripping NYC Debut

  
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  The New York debut of Chicago’s Sounds of Silent Film Festival Friday night at Anthology Film Archives was close to sold out and would have been if not for the monsoon. It was sort of a Bang on a Can marathon of film music. The concept, said composer and Access Contemporary Music honcho Seth Boustead , was to ...
  1 week ago

• Stars of Slapstick #108: Hugh Fay

  
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  Today is the birthday of Hugh Fay (1882-1926). Son of Henry “Hugh” Fay of the Irish vaudeville comedy act  Barry and Fay , the younger Fay got his start (like his sister Elfie ) performing in his dad’s act before going on to support the likes of Lillian Russell and Raymond Hitchcock . For several years he ...
  1 week ago

• Stars of Slapstick #107: Charley Bowers

  
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  Today is the birthday of Charley Bowers (1877-1946). Bowers is rare among the silent comedians for possibly being more well known and appreciated NOW then he was during the silent era. This is because of a 2004 DVD release of most of his surviving films, which had somehow managed to remain preserved for close to 80 ...
  1 week ago

• Stars of Vaudeville #713: Shirley Mason

  
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  Today is the birthday of Shirley Mason (Leonie Flugrath, 1900-1979). The youngest of a trio of movie acting sisters (the others ere Viola Dana and Edna Flugrath ), her screen career coincided with the years of her own youth and the heyday of silent pictures (1910-1929). Though successful at the time, most of these ...
  1 week ago

• Crossword blog: The short film Crosswords

  
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  A short film depicts the sometimes solitary hell of solving. Alan Connor talks to writer/director Steve Simmons Steve Simmons has made a seven-minute film that puts the contents of a solvers brain on the screen, as played out by Keith Hill of ITV sitcom FM and Amanda Renberg of The Ketchup Effect . Reading this ...
  1 week ago

• The Chain of Fools Road Show Comes to Providence

  
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  Good news! (For me at least). On June 15 at 3pm, your correspondent will be appearing at What Cheer Antiques and Vintage , 180 Angell Street in Providence to talk silent films, and screen a couple of classic shorts:   Buster Keaton’s  The Balloonatic  and  Harold Lloyd’s Don’t Shove . And of course ...
  2 weeks ago

• On Tony Richardson

  
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  Today is the birthday of Tony Richardson (1928-1991). His relevance to the themes of this blog rests on three of my favorite movies, all directed by him: The Entertainer   (1960) stars Laurence Olivier in one of his most memorable roles as broken-down music hall hack Archie Rice. Funny I didn’t mention ...
  2 weeks ago

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