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A Maritime Tradition
For the entire series:
$40 Adult
$20 Child
Recently Restored Films
January 21, 2010
GILBERT AND GARBO IN LOVE
FLESH & THE DEVIL - 1927, starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert
Hollywood's fabulous lovers entwined in a romantic story of fatal attraction set in 19th century Austria. According to Pauline Kael: "Greta Garbo, with pencil-line eyebrows above sex-drugged lids, plays a bored, sensual, wicked woman in a story about sacred and profane love . . . Garbo was a blissfully beautiful twenty-one at the time, and no other actress went at the bodies of her leading men the way she did. This time John Gilbert and Lars Hanson each go a round with her." Greta Garbo is the siren whose insatiable sexuality threatens to tear apart blood brothers John Gilbert and Lars Hanson in this overheated and melodramatic masterpiece. Flesh and the Devil contains, among its three smoldering love scenes, the first-ever horizontal-position kiss in American film, between Garbo and her real-life lover Gilbert. It also made a household name out of Garbo, who plays the ultimate femme fatale: a sophisticated and deliciously sultry incarnation of feminine desire=2 0whose white-hot evil - in classic Hollywood style - can only be purged by her sacrifice in an icy lake.
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February 11, 2010
VALENTINO FOR VALENTINES
SON OF THE SHEIK - 1926, starring Rudolph Valentino & Vilma Banky
The Son of the Sheik (1926) turned out to be Valentino's last film, and most critics think it's his best. Legendary screenwriter Frances Marion based her script on Hull's own sequel, Sons of the Sheik, but combined twin sons into one character, Ahmed. Valentino himself suggested that he play both Ahmed and his father. Agnes Ayres, who had played the sheik's love Diana, reprised the role in a cameo. Ahmed falls in love with a dancing girl, played by Vilma Banky. She's the daughter of a bandit, and when Ahmed thinks she's betrayed him, he prepares to have his way with her, but is stopped in the nick of time by his father. Much swashbuckling ensues, with father and son taking on the thieves. A lot had changed in Valentino's life between his 1921 film THE SHEIK and the onset of the filming of its sequel. Valentino had married and been divorced by designer Natacha Rambova, who had taken control of his career and set it on a disastrous course, choosing effete and somewhat bizarre roles for him. After the marriage broke up in 1925, Valentino had given an interview which was headlined, "I'm Tired of Being a Sheik." In it, he said, "I wanted to make a lot of money, and so I let them play me up as a lounge lizard, a soft, handsome devil whose only sin in life was to sit around and be admired by women....I was happier when I slept on a bench in Central Park than during all the years of that 'perfect lover' stuff....No, I am through with sheiking." Yet a few months later, there he was, "sheiking" again. But this time, he was in control, and determined to prove that he could turn the stereotype into a real hero. In The Son of the Sheik, Valentino seems to have loosened up and stopped worrying about his loverboy image. He's decided to not only make fun of it, but to have fun with it.
And this time, everything was first-rate: Marion was one of the finest writers in the business. Director George Fitzmaurice paced the film skillfully. The action sequences are particularly well-done, especially the climactic scene, with father and son fighting side by side. The desert sequences were shot on location in Yuma, Arizona, and cinematographer George Barnes gave them a shimmering beauty. Valentino personally selected Banky, whom he'd co-starred with in The Eagle (1925), as his leading lady, and their chemistry is excellent. William K. Everson writes in American Silent Film, "Son of the Sheik was everything that...The Sheik should have been and wasn't. It was lush, exciting, genuinely erotic, and direct in the key confrontations." Valentino had great hopes that The Son of the Sheik would turn his career around. But just one month after the film's premiere, Rudolph Valentino died suddenly of peritonitis at the age of 31. The Son of the Sheik turned out to be one of his biggest hits.
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March 11, 2010
THE GREATEST FILM EVER MADE
SUNRISE - 1927, starring Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien
A masterpiece of silent cinema widely considered among the greatest films ever made, SUNRISE tells an elemental tale with virtuosic visual invention. The relatively simple story revolves around a hard-working farmer (George O'Brien) torn between devotion to his virtuous wife (Gaynor) and desire for a seductive vamp from the city (Margaret Livingston). To watch Sunrise is to experience a pure cinematic revelation. The camera tracking during the city scenes is seamless and adept, echoing the frenetic pace and limitless possibilities of urban life. Emotional turmoil is reflected in contrasts of light and darkness, shadows, exaggerated physical stature, and translucent, superimposed images (The sequence depicting theMan's dilemma, with a superimposed Woman from the City goading him, was revolutionary for its time). Even the use of title cards is spare, unobtrusive, and relevant (Note the infamous dissolution of the word "drown" during a conversation between the husband and the Woman from the City as they plot his wife's murder). Sunrise is a testament to the indelible images of the silent screen, an affirmation of the power of human expression and visionary direction.
Sunrise was distinguished at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1927, where it won three awards (Best Actress for Janet Gaynor, Best Cinematography and Best Unique and Artistic Picture while sharing the first ever best picture award with Wings). Director F.W. Murnau's timeless classic of corruption, redemption and true love, Sunrise is widely regarded as one of the most exquisitely realized of all silent films, arguably one of the best films of the Twentieth Century and for many of today's filmmakers and film historians, the greatest film ever made. The film weaves fluidly through the canvas of human emotion with the poetic grace of a silent, visual masterpiece. Emigre director Murnau brought his experience as one of Germany's leading directors of the 1920s to slick Hollywood production methods, and the result was devastatingly beautiful portrait of human fallibility and nobility, nothing less than a masterpiece.
Sunrise tells the archetypal story of a poor farmer tempted by the lure of the city (Charles Farrell) and his steadfast wife (Janet Gaynor), an ageless tale of dichotomy: betrayal and redemption, duty and hedonism, innocence and guilt, tradition and modernization. The subtitle which Murnau gave to the film ("A Song of Two Humans") aptly summarizes its cinematic form - a composition of great expression and humanity which moves the soul and enchants the intellect. The film plays as a series of sustained poetic movements through contrasts - the mood shifts from extremes of dramatic intensity to out-and-out farce and you are never quite sure where the film will end up. It is much lighter than any of Murnau's earlier expressionist films; indeed, some parts of it (such as the farmer's pursuit of an errant pig) are quite funny. It is also a film with a striking poetic form, rivaling some of the greatest works of literature in its effective and innovative use of imagery and symbolism to convey meaning and emotion. In style, structure and impact, it is a very far from the kind of shallow meaningless tear-jerker which Hollywood would shamelessly churn out in the following decades - pale imitations of this work of sublime artistic genius.
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