Gardoni, a down-on-his-luck vaudeville performer, is taken in by a fellow performer, a clown who has a bicycle riding act. Gardoni shows his appreciation by stealing the clown’s act and his girlfriend, whom he marries.
Mordaunt Hall, film critic of the New York Times, praised the performances of Powell (“excellent”), Wray (“pleasing”), Skelly (“goes about his part with earnestness and intelligence”), and Francis (“does nicely”), but noted “the story is rather limp and disappointing.”[1]
The Cocoanuts is set in the Hotel de Cocoanut, a resort hotel, during the Florida land boom of the 1920s. Mr. Hammer (Groucho Marx) runs the place, assisted by Jamison (Zeppo Marx), who would rather sleep at the front desk than actually help him run it. Chico and Harpo arrive with empty luggage, which they apparently plan to fill by robbing and conning the guests.
Mrs. Potter (Margaret Dumont, in the first of seven film appearances with the Marxes) is one of the few paying customers. Her daughter Polly (Mary Eaton) is in love with struggling young architect Bob Adams (Oscar Shaw).
He works to support himself as a clerk at the hotel, but has plans for the development of the entire area as Cocoanut Manor. Mrs. Potter wants her daughter to marry Harvey Yates (Cyril Ring), whom she believes to be of higher social standing than the clerk. This suitor is actually a con man out to steal the dowager’s diamond necklace with the help of his conniving partner Penelope (Kay Francis).
The plot is almost beside the point, and the story and setting are little more than an excuse for the brothers to run amok. The film is notable for its musical “production numbers”, including techniques which were soon to become standard, such as overhead shots of dancing girls imitating the patterns of a kaleidoscope.
The musical numbers were recorded live on the soundstage as they were shot, rather than pre-recorded, using an off-camera orchestra. The main titles are superimposed over a negative image of the “Monkey-Doodle-Do” number photographed from an angle that does not appear in the body of the film.
One of the more famous gags in the film has Groucho giving directions to Chico, who keeps misunderstanding “viaduct” as “why-a-duck“. In another sequence Groucho is the auctioneer for some land of possibly questionable value (“You can have any kind of a home you want to; you can even get stucco!
Oh, how you can get stuck-oh!”) He has hired Chico to inflate the sale prices by making phony bids. To Groucho’s frustration, Chico keeps outbidding everyone, even himself. During the auction, Mrs. Potter announces that her necklace has been stolen and offers a thousand dollar reward, whereupon Chico offers two thousand. Still another sequence has Groucho, Mrs. Potter and Harvey Yates (the necklace thief) make formal speeches. Harpo repeatedly walks off, with a grimace on his face, to the punch bowl. (His staggering implies that the fruit punch has been spiked with alcohol.) Another highlight is when the cast, already dressed in traditional Spanish garb for a theme party, erupts into an operatic treatment about a lost shirt to music from Carmen (specifically, Habanera and the song of the Toreador). An earlier scene shows Harpo and Chico abusing a cash register while whistling the Anvil Chorus from Il trovatore, a piece also referenced in several other Marx Brothers films.
Zeppo Marx, Groucho Marx, Chico Marx & Harpo Marx Film: The Cocoanuts (USA 1929) Character(s): Jamison, Hammer, Chico, Harpo Director: Robert Florey & Joseph Santley 03 May 1929 AFF20867 AF Archive Picture Library/PARAMOUNT PICTURES **Warning** This Photograph is for editorial use only and is the copyright of PARAMOUNT PICTURES and/or the Photographer assigned by the Film or Production Company & can only be reproduced by publications in conjunction with the promotion of the above Film. A Mandatory Credit To PARAMOUNT PICTURES is required. The Photographer should also be credited when known. No commercial use can be granted without written authority from the Film Company.
Production
Referring to directors Robert Florey and Joseph Santley, Groucho Marx remarked, “One of them didn’t understand English and the other didn’t understand comedy.”[2]
As was common in the early days of sound film, to eliminate the sound of the camera motors the cameras and the cameramen were enclosed in large soundproof booths with glass fronts to allow filming, hence the largely static camera work. For many years, Marxian legend had it that Florey, who had never seen the Marxes’ work before, was put in the soundproof booth because he could not contain his laughter at the brothers’ spontaneous antics.[3]
Every piece of paper in the movie is soaking wet, to keep crackling paper sounds from overloading the primitive recording equipment of the time. In fact, this did not occur to director Florey until 27 takes had been made (of the “Viaduct” scene) and disposed of because of the noise made by the paper. Florey finally got the idea to soak the paper in water; the 28th take of the “Viaduct” scene used soaked paper, and this take was quiet and used in the film.[4]
The “ink” that Harpo drank from the hotel lobby inkwell was actually Coca-Cola, and the “telephone mouthpiece” that he nibbled was made of chocolate, both inventions of Robert Florey.
“Florida by the Sea” (instrumental with brief vocal by chorus during opening montage)
“When My Dreams Come True” (theme song, Mary Eaton and Oscar Shaw variously, several reprises)
“The Bell-Hops” (instrumental, dance number)
“Monkey Doodle Doo” (vocal by Mary Eaton and dance number)
“Ballet Music” (instrumental, dance number)
“Tale of the Shirt” (vocal by Basil Ruysdael, words set to music from Carmen by Georges Bizet)
“Tango Melody” (vocal included in the stage production, used in the film as background music only)
“Gypsy Love Song” (by Victor Herbert, piano solo by Chico Marx)
The Cocoanuts is one of the few Irving Berlin vehicles that did not yield any particularly memorable songs. Several songs from the stage play were omitted from the film: “Lucky Boy”, sung by the chorus to congratulate Bob on his engagement to Polly and “A Little Bungalow”, a love duet sung by Bob and Polly that was replaced with “When My Dreams Come True” in the film.
Irving Berlin wrote two songs entitled “Monkey Doodle Doo”. The first was published in 1913, the second introduced in the 1925 stage production and featured in the film. They are very different songs.
Although legend claims Berlin wrote the song “Always” for The Cocoanuts, he never meant for the song to be included, writing it, instead, as a gift for his fiancee.[5]
Reception
When the Marx Brothers were shown the final cut of the film, they were so horrified they tried to buy the negative back and prevent its release.[6] Paramount wisely resisted — the movie turned out to be a big box office hit, with a $1,800,000 gross making it one of the most successful early talking films.[1]
It received mostly positive reviews from critics, with the Marx Brothers themselves earning most of the praise while other aspects of the film drew a more mixed reaction. Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times reported that the film “aroused considerable merriment” among the viewing audience, and that a sequence using an overhead shot was “so engaging that it elicited plaudits from many in the jammed theatre.”
However, he found the audio quality during some of the singing to be “none too good”, adding, “a deep-voiced bass’s tones almost fade into a whisper in a close-up. Mary Eaton is charming, but one obtains little impression of her real ability as a singer.”[7]
Variety called it “a comedy hit for the regular picture houses. That’s all it has – comedy – but that’s enough.” It reported the sound had “a bit of muffling now and then” and that the dancers weren’t always filmed well: “When the full 48 were at work only 40 could be seen and those behind the first line could be seen but dimly.”[8]
“It is as a funny picture and not as a musical comedy, not for its songs, pretty girls, or spectacular scenes, that The Cocoanuts succeeds”, wrote John Mosher in The New Yorker. “Neither Mary Eaton, nor Oscar Shaw, who contribute the “love interest”, is effective, nor are the chorus scenes in the least superior to others of the same sort in various musical-comedy-movies now running in town. To the Marxes belongs the success of the show, and their peculiar talents seem, surprisingly enough, even more manifest on the screen than on the stage.”[9]
Film Daily called it “a good amount of fun, although some of it proves tiresome. This is another case of a musical comedy transferred almost bodily to the screen and motion picture treatment forgotten. The result is a good many inconsistencies which perhaps may be overlooked provided the audience accepts the offering for what it is.”[10]
Jump up^Paul Zimmerman, The Marx Brothers At The Movies. Putnam, 1968.
Jump up^Paul D. Zimmerman and Burt Goldblatt The Marx Brothers at the Movies,[page needed]
Jump up^Bader, Robert S. (2016). Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. p. 309. ISBN9780810134164.
Cast: Walter Huston, Kay Francis, Charles Ruggles, Betty Lawford, Norman Foster, Duncan Penwarden, Lawrence Leslie, Harry Lee, Brian Donlevy, Victor Killian
80 min
Gentlemen of the Press is a 1929 all-talking film starring Walter Huston in his first feature film role and Kay Francis in her first film role. The film still survives. This film’s copyright has expired and it is now in the public domain. It survives in a copy sold to MCA for television distribution.[1]
The film is based on Ward Morehouse’s 1928 Broadway play Gentlemen of the Press.[2]
Marya is the wife of medical student Victor Sablin, who finds it impossible to deal with military life when he is inducted into the Russian army during World War I. With her husband is sentenced to death by firing squad due to his insubordination, Marya offers herself to General Gregori Platoff in order to save him. When the two unexpectedly fall in love, Victor — not caring that his life has been spared — threatens to kill his rival. His determination to eliminate the general falters when Marya confesses she is not in love with her husband — and never was.
Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times called the film “a clever comedy with a splendid performance by Walter Huston” and added, “There is a constant fund of interest in this picture’s action. It is one of those rare offerings in which youth takes a back seat.[1]
George Cukor’s reflection in 1972
In the book On Cukor, director George Cukor confided to biographer Gavin Lambert: “It wasn’t much good. I’d be in great shock if they [film restorationists & historians] rescued this one. I remember that I enjoyed working with Kay Francis and Walter Huston, though.”[2]
Preservation status
A complete print of this film is held by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. However, the UCLA archive’s website says the print is too shrunken for projection.[3]
Jump up^Parish, James Robert; Mank, Gregory W.; Stanke, Don E. (1978), The Hollywood Beauties, New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House Publishers, p. 73, ISBN0-87000-412-3
Cast: Jack Oakie, Jeanette MacDonald, Kay Francis, Richard Skeets Gallagher, James Hall, William Austin, David Newell, Charles Sellon, Eugene Pallette, Virginia Bruce, John Elliott, Douglas Haig
Jerry comments on being the only man on an island populated by women, “It was one of the Virgin Islands, but it drifted.” The tagline was: “Paramount’s wild, merry, mad hilarious farce!”
John Marsden, a famed and powerful New York gambler who refuses to throw a game, is devoted to his wife, Alma, and his impressionistic younger brother, “Babe,” to whom he sends a wedding gift of $10,000, which Babe may keep on the condition that he does not indulge in gambling. Alma, dismayed by John’s ruthless tactics and his obsession with gambling, threatens to leave him unless he takes his winnings and leaves the city with her. He agrees.
However, that evening Babe, who has become a cardsharp, comes to town with his new wife, Judith. He goes to see his brother, whom he believes is a stockbroker, unaware of John’s true profession and the reality that he is trying to quit and rebuild his marriage. Babe insists on playing and tries to win a fortune with his savings in an organized gambling session. He wins remarkably. The professional gambler sees that his card-playing sibling is preparing to make the same mistakes he did.
John therefore decides to risk his life and gamble one more time, and to break the gambler’s code and cheat by throwing the game, in order to disillusion Babe, thereby teaching him an unforgettable lesson. However, John is caught cheating by Dorgan and becomes a marked man. John is later mortally wounded, in spite of his wife’s attempts to save him.
Cast: Kay Francis, William Powell, Scott Kolk, William B Davidson, Thomas E Jackson, Harry Walker, James Finlayson, Charles West, Bertram Marburgh, Billy Bevan, John Cromwell, Sidney D’Albrook
65 min
For the Defense is a 1930 Pre-Codecrimedrama film starring William Powell as a lawyer whose ethics are challenged when the woman he loves hits and kills a pedestrian while out driving with another suitor.
In New York City, William Foster (William Powell) is a criminal defense attorney so successful that prosecutors regard him as a menace. He holds himself to high ethical standards but is willing to mislead without actually lying.
Foster defends a man who planned a murder using explosives. District Attorney Stone (William B. Davidson) displays a vial and says chemical tests have shown that the liquid in it is sensitive nitroglycerin. Foster sniffs the liquid, questions him to verify the chain of custody, and then smashes the vial dramatically on the floor. When order is restored, he explains to the judge that he knew it was safe because nitro has a distinctive smell, and Stone says he had removed the actual nitro for safety after the chemical test. But Foster points out that only the liquid now in the bottle was entered into evidence, and wins his case.
Foster is in love with actress Irene Manners (Kay Francis), and she loves him, but she wants to be married and he does not. When another suitor, Jack Defoe (Scott Kolk), proposes to her, she says she needs to tell Foster about him before she can accept; but she finds she cannot do so. She stays out late enough at night with Defoe to leave only one implication of what they were doing, and while driving him home, she does agree to marry him. He suddenly hugs her and she loses control of the car, killing a bystander.
To protect Irene’s reputation, Defoe urges her to leave the scene, lying that the victim is not badly hurt. Presumed to have been driving while drunk, he is charged with manslaughter. They both still conceal her involvement, but she begs Foster to defend him. He asks why she cares enough about Defoe to insist; she says she and Defoe are just friends, but she had already promised him on Foster’s behalf, assuming Foster would be willing. Foster agrees, but finds that Defoe cannot tell a credible story at trial.
Then Foster finds out that Irene was at the accident scene and therefore must be much more than “just friends” with Defoe. Foster is crushed, but she still begs him to get Defoe acquitted, while Defoe fears Foster will throw the case and Irene will be charged and convicted as well. Foster eventually puts his love for Irene first and, for the first time in his life, bribes a juror to vote not guilty, hanging the jury.
Foster is quickly found out and arrested, and defends himself at trial. As he will not see Irene, she goes to Stone, admits what really happened at the accident, and says Foster was only trying to protect her. If Stone does not agree to recommend mercy, Irene says, she will tell her story in court. Stone says he will think about it.
Although his defense is going well, Foster then offers to plead guilty (and thus be disbarred, no doubt making life easier for prosecutors in future) if only Stone will agree not to retry Defoe; but Stone says he does not make deals. Back in court, Irene sends Foster a note pleading to let her testify and tell the truth. To protect her, Foster immediately changes his plea to guilty. Stone then tells Foster that neither Defoe nor Irene will be prosecuted.
As Foster arrives at Sing Sing to serve his sentence, Irene is there and says she will be waiting for him when he comes out. He says that if she does, then he will marry her.
Cast: Kay Francis, Joel McCrea, Lilyan Tashman, Eugene Palette, Alan Dinehart, Lucile Gleason, Anderson Lawler, Lucile Browne, George Barbier, Robert McWade, Louise Beavers, Judith Wood, Adrienne Ames
Wanda Howard (Kay Francis) and Marie Bailey (Lilyan Tashman) go out with two balding, middle-aged businessmen from out of town (for $500 apiece) to help Jerry Chase (Alan Dinehart) close a sale. However, the women, who share a luxurious suite in an apartment building, have their African-American maid Hattie (Louise Beavers) disguise herself as their mother, waiting at the window, to avoid having to invite the men inside.
Wanda is getting tired of how she makes a living, but she and Marie go aboard a yacht the next night to divert rich practical joker Benjamin Thomas (Eugene Pallette) and his handsome business associate Jim Baker (Joel McCrea).
Jim knows that the women are paid “entertainment”, but quickly finds himself falling for Wanda anyway, and vice versa. (When Jerry pays her for her efforts, Wanda tears up the check.) Once Jim realizes she genuinely loves him, he asks her to marry him. Although she is initially reluctant, she agrees. However, she informs Jim that there is one complication: her estranged husband Alex (Anderson Lawler). She asks him for a divorce, and he agrees.
Meanwhile, Benjamin’s wife, who is divorcing him because of his stinginess, shows up and asks Marie to stop making a fool of him. Marie realizes that Mrs Thomas (Lucille Gleason) is still in love with her husband, and comes up with a plan to cure him of his tightfisted ways. The next day, Marie steers Benjamin to the jewelry store where Mrs Thomas is waiting. Mrs Thomas, pretending not to see him, complains (in a loud voice) how cheap her husband is. Benjamin becomes so angry he buys Marie lots of expensive items for about $50,000.
That night, Alex crashes the birthday party Marie has arranged for Benjamin. He tells Jim that he wants $10,000 or he will name Jim as the co-respondent in the divorce. Alex insinuates that Wanda is part of the blackmail scheme. Believing the lie, Jim breaks up with Wanda.
Wanda visits Alex in Brooklyn and demands he give the money back. He introduces her (as “cousin Wanda”) to the ailing Mrs. Howard and their baby, the reasons he needs the money so desperately. He confesses that he got a divorce in Mexico 2 years before, and promises to pay her back once he is back on his feet financially. Touched, Wanda leaves without the check.
Wanda decides to auction off enough of her possessions to her friends to raise $10,000 and pay Jim back. She also asks Marie to return her jewelry. Wanda gives Jim the proceeds; even before that, however, he has come to his senses, and the couple reconcile. Marie gives Benjamin’s gifts to his wife and reunites that couple.
Mordaunt Hall, The New York Times film critic, gave Girls About Town a qualified favorable review, writing, “This handsomely staged and ably directed production is one that affords no little laughter, but unfortunately it is burdened in the latter stages by highly improbable serious sequences.”
Cast: Clive Brook, Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, Regis Toomey, George Barbier, Adrienne Ames, Minor Watson, Charlotte Granville, Lucille La Verne, Wade Boteler
66 min
24 Hours is a 1931 American pre-Code romantic drama film starring Clive Brook, Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins and Regis Toomey. It was based on the novel Twenty-Four Hours by Louis Bromfield and the play Shattered Glass by Will D. Lengle and Lew Levenson. An alcoholic married man is accused of murdering the woman with whom he has been carrying on an affair. The title comes from the fact that the film takes place from 11 pm one night to the same time the following night.
At an evening party in New York City, the Towners mourn their failing marriage, then leave separately. The somewhat drunk Jim walks to a bar for some more liquor. Before he arrives, a man is shot to death outside the establishment; those inside hastily carry the body inside and surmise that someone named Tony is responsible. Meanwhile, Fanny is driven home by her lover, David Melbourn. On the way, she breaks up with him, telling him she realizes now that she still loves Jim. However, she plans to leave her husband, thinking she is not good enough for him.
Jim next heads to a nightclub to see his lover, star singer Rosie Duggan. He asks her if it is possible for a man to love two women, then remarks that the snow was red outside the bar. After he leaves, her ex-con husband Tony Bruzzi shows up. He wants her to take him back, but she has him thrown out, though she keeps his gun; she guesses from the red snow that Tony killed someone.
Later, she takes Jim home. He falls asleep on her chaise longue. Then Tony shows up, jealous and determined to kill Jim. She tells him that Jim is not there, but he does not believe her. When she refuses to open a locked door, they struggle and he accidentally kills her.
The next morning, Jim wakes up and finds Rosie’s body. Meanwhile, Tony hides out at Mrs. Dacklehorst’s place, but he is tracked down by Dave the Slapper and his gang; the man Tony shot was part of Dave’s mob. Tony demands Mrs. Dacklehorst deliver or mail a letter to his gang, but she betrays him instead, and he is shot dead.
Jim is charged with Rosie’s murder. When Fanny shows up at the police station, Jim tells her to divorce him so she will not get entangled in his troubles, but she refuses to do so. Fortunately, fingerprints on a liquor bottle at Rosie’s place match Tony’s, and Jim is released. The couple reconcile, and Jim promises to stop drinking.
The plot of the film is based on the 1922 play Rain by John Colton and Clemence Randolph, which in turn was based on the short story “Miss Thompson” (later retitled “Rain”) by W. Somerset Maugham.
A westbound ship en route to Apia, Samoa, is temporarily stranded at nearby Pago Pago due to a possible cholera outbreak on board. Among the passengers are Alfred Davidson, a self-righteous missionary, his wife, and Sadie Thompson, a prostitute. Thompson passes the time partying and drinking with the American Marines stationed on the island. Sergeant Tim O’Hara, nicknamed by Sadie as “Handsome”, falls in love with her.
Her wild behavior soon becomes more than the Davidsons can stand and Mr. Davidson confronts Sadie, resolving to save her soul. When she dismisses his offer, Davidson has the Governor order her deported to San Francisco, California, where she is wanted for an unspecified crime (for which she says she was framed).
She begs Davidson to allow her to remain on the island a few more days – her plan is to flee to Sydney, Australia. During a heated argument with Davidson, she experiences a religious conversion and agrees to return to San Francisco and the jail sentence awaiting her there.
The evening before she is to leave, Sergeant O’Hara asks Sadie to marry him and offers to hide her until the Sydney boat sails, but she refuses. Later, while native drums beat, the repressed Davidson satisfies his lust with Sadie. The next morning he is found dead on the beach – a suicide. Davidson’s hypocrisy and betrayal cause Thompson to return to her old self and she goes off to Sydney with O’Hara to start a new life.
Rain was not well received – either critically or financially – upon initial release. The unglamorous role for Crawford, and bold story (religious hypocrisy being its main theme), caught Depression-era audiences off guard.
Motion Picture Herald commented, “Because the producers have made such a strong attempt to establish the stern impressiveness of the story, it is rather slow. In its drive to become powerful, it appears to have lost the spark of spontaneity….Joan Crawford and Walter Huston are satisfactory.”
Variety noted, “It turns out to be a mistake to have assigned the Sadie Thompson role to Miss Crawford. It shows her off unfavorably. The dramatic significance of it all is beyond her range…. [Director] Milestone tried to achieve action with the camera, but wears the witnesses down with words.
Joan Crawford’s get-up as the light lady is extremely bizarre. Pavement pounders don’t quite trick themselves up as fantastically as all that. In commercial favor of Rain is the general repute of the theme and Miss Crawford’s personal following, but the finished product will not help either.”
Box office
The film earned $538,000 in the United States and Canada and $166,000 elsewhere, resulting in a loss of $198,000.
Cast: Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, Boris Karloff, Edward Van Sloan, Frederick Kerr, Dwight Frye, Lionel Belmore, Marylin Harris, Ted Billings, Mae Bruce, Jack Curtis, Arleta Duncan
70 min
Frankenstein is a 1931 American pre-Codehorrormonster film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling (which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley), about a scientist and his assistant who dig up corpses to build a man animated by electricity, but his assistant accidentally gives the creature an abnormal, murderer’s brain. The resultant monster is portrayed by Boris Karloff in the film.
The make-up artist was Jack Pierce. A hit with both audiences and critics, the film was followed by multiple sequels and has become arguably the most iconic horror film.
In 1991, the Library of Congress selected Frankenstein for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
In a European village, a young scientist, named Henry Frankenstein, and his assistant Fritz, a hunchback, piece together a human body, the parts of which have been collected from various sources. Frankenstein desires to create human life through electrical devices which he has perfected.
Elizabeth, his fiancée, is worried over his peculiar actions. She cannot understand why he secludes himself in an abandoned watch tower, which he has equipped as a laboratory, refusing to see anyone. She and a friend, Victor Moritz, go to Dr. Waldman, Henry’s old medical professor, and ask Waldman’s help in reclaiming the young scientist from his experiments.
Waldman tells them that Frankenstein has been working on creating life. Elizabeth, intent on rescuing Frankenstein, arrives just as Henry is making his final tests. He tells them to watch, claiming to have discovered the ray that brought life into the world. They watch Frankenstein and the hunchback as they raise the dead creature on an operating table, high into the room, toward an opening at the top of the laboratory. Then a terrific crash of thunder, the crackling of Frankenstein’s electric machines, and the hand of Frankenstein’s monster begins to move, prompting Frankenstein to shout ‘It’s alive!’.
Through the incompetence of Fritz, a criminal brain was secured for Frankenstein’s experiments instead of the desired normal one. The manufactured monster, despite its grotesque form, initially appears to be a simple, innocent creation. Frankenstein welcomes it into his laboratory and asks his creation to sit, which it does. He then opens up the roof, causing the monster to reach out towards the sunlight. Fritz enters with a flaming torch, which frightens the monster.
Its fright is mistaken by Frankenstein and Waldman as an attempt to attack them, and it is chained in the dungeon. Thinking that it is not fit for society and will wreak havoc at any chance, they leave the monster locked up, where Fritz antagonizes it with a torch. As Henry and Waldman consider the monster’s fate, they hear a shriek from the dungeon. Frankenstein and Waldman find the monster has strangled Fritz.
The monster lunges at the two but they escape, locking the monster inside. Realizing that the creature must be destroyed, Henry prepares an injection of a powerful drug and the two conspire to release the monster and inject it as it attacks. When the door is unlocked the creature lunges at Frankenstein as Waldman injects the drug into the creature’s back. The monster falls to the floor unconscious.
Henry leaves to prepare for his wedding while Waldman examines the creature. As he is preparing to vivisect it, the creature awakens and strangles him. It escapes from the tower and wanders through the landscape.
It has a short encounter with a farmer’s young daughter, Maria, who asks him to play a game with her in which they toss flowers into a lake and watch them float. The monster enjoys the game, but when they run out of flowers the monster thinks Maria will float as well, so he throws her into the lake where, to his puzzlement, she drowns. Upset by this outcome, the monster runs away.
With preparations for the wedding completed, Frankenstein is serenely happy with Elizabeth. They are to marry as soon as Waldman arrives. Victor rushes in, saying that the Doctor has been found strangled in his operating room. Frankenstein suspects the monster. A chilling scream convinces him that the monster is in the house. When the searchers arrive, they find Elizabeth unconscious on the bed. The monster has escaped.
Maria’s father arrives, carrying his daughter’s body. He says she was murdered, and a band of peasants form a search party to capture the monster, and bring it to justice. In order to search the whole country for the monster, they split into three groups: Ludwig leads the first group into the woods, Frankenstein leads the second group into the mountains, and the Burgomaster leads the third group by the lake.
During the search, Frankenstein becomes separated from the group and is discovered by the monster, who attacks him. The monster knocks Frankenstein unconscious and carries him off to an old mill. The peasants hear his cries and they regroup to follow. They find the monster has climbed to the top, dragging Frankenstein with him. The monster hurls the scientist to the ground. His fall is broken by the vanes of the windmill, saving his life. Some of the villagers hurry him to his home while the rest of the mob set the windmill ablaze, killing the entrapped monster inside.
At Castle Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s father, Baron Frankenstein celebrates the wedding of his recovered son with a toast to a future grandchild.
In 1930, Universal Studios had lost $2.2 million in revenues. Within 48 hours of its opening at New York’s Roxy Theatre on February 12, 1931, Dracula starring Bela Lugosi had sold 50,000 tickets, building a momentum that culminated in a $700,000 profit, the largest of Universal’s 1931 releases. As a result, head of production Carl Laemmle, Jr. announced immediate plans for more horror films.
Production
Frankenstein begins with Edward Van Sloan stepping from behind a curtain and delivering a brief caution before the opening credits:
How do you do? Mr. Carl Laemmle feels it would be a little unkind to present this picture without just a friendly word of warning: We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation; life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So, if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now’s your chance to uh, well, ––we warned you!!
Immediately, following his success in Dracula, Bela Lugosi had hoped to play Dr. Frankenstein in Universal’s original film concept, but the actor was expected by Carl Laemmle, Jr. to be the Monster (a common move for a contract player in a film studio at the time) to keep his famous name on the bill.
After several disastrous make-up tests (said to resemble that of Paul Wegener in The Golem), the Dracula star left the project. Although this is often regarded as one of the worst decisions of Lugosi’s career, in actuality, the part that Lugosi was offered was not the same character that Karloff eventually played.
The character in the Florey script was simply a killing machine without a touch of human interest or pathos, reportedly causing Lugosi to complain, “I was a star in my country and I will not be a scarecrow over here!” Florey later wrote that “the Hungarian actor didn’t show himself very enthusiastic for the role and didn’t want to play it.”
However, the decision may not have been Lugosi’s in any case, since recent evidence suggests that he was kicked off the project, along with director Robert Florey when the newly arrived James Whale asked for the property. Whale had been imported from England by the Laemmles and given a free hand as to his choice of projects at Universal.
He was immediately attracted to Frankenstein and greatly revised the script and conceptualization of the project, which had troubled the management. Florey and Lugosi were given the Murders in the Rue Morgue film, as a consolation.
Lugosi would later go on to play the monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man a decade later, when his career was in decline (in the original shooting script the Monster spoke, cancelling Lugosi’s initial objection to the part, but his filmed dialogue sequences were cut prior to release, along with the premise that the Monster was blind, which was the way Lugosi had played it).
Actors who worked on the project were, or became familiar to, fans of the Universal horror films. These included Frederick Kerr as the old Baron Frankenstein, Henry’s father; Lionel Belmore as Herr Vogel, the Bürgermeister; Marilyn Harris as Little Maria, the girl the monster accidentally kills; Dwight Frye as Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, Fritz; and Michael Mark as Ludwig, Maria’s father. Kerr died a year and a half later.
Kenneth Strickfaden designed the electrical effects used in the “creation scene.” So successful were they that such effects came to be considered an essential part of every subsequent Universal film involving the Frankenstein Monster. Accordingly, the equipment used to produce them has come to be referred to in fan circles as “Strickfadens.”
It appears that Strickfaden managed to secure the use of at least one Tesla Coil built by the inventor Nikola Tesla himself. According to this same source, Strickfaden also doubled for Karloff during the creation scene, as Karloff was afraid of being burned by sparks being thrown off the arcing electrical equipment simulating lightning.
Although he was partially covered by a surgical drape, Karloff’s abdomen was otherwise exposed during the scene and the high-voltage arc “scissors” threw white-hot bits of metal when they were used to create flashes.
The film opened in New York City at the Mayfair Theatre on December 4, 1931, and grossed $53,000 in one week.
Pre-Code era scenes and censorship history
The scene in which the monster throws the little girl into the lake and accidentally drowns her has long been controversial. Upon its original 1931 release, the second part of this scene was cut by state censorship boards in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Those states also objected to a line they considered blasphemous, one that occurred during Frankenstein’s exuberance when he first learns that his creature is alive. The original line was: “It’s alive! It’s alive! In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!” Kansas requested the cutting of 32 scenes, which, if removed, would have halved the length of the film.
Jason Joy of the Studio Relations Committee sent censor representative Joseph Breen to urge them to reconsider. Eventually, an edited version was released in Kansas. The shot of Maria being thrown into the lake was rediscovered during the 1980s in the collection of the British National Film Archive. Modern copies incorporate it.
Mordaunt Hall gave Frankenstein a very positive review and said that the film “aroused so much excitement at the Mayfair yesterday that many in the audience laughed to cover their true feelings.” “[T]here is no denying that it is far and away the most effective thing of its kind. Beside it Dracula is tame and, incidentally, Dracula was produced by the same firm”.
Film Daily also lauded the picture, calling it a “gruesome, chill-producing and exciting drama” that was “produced intelligently and lavishly and with a grade of photography that is superb.”
Variety reported that it “Looks like a Dracula plus, touching a new peak in horror plays,” and described Karloff’s performance as “a fascinating acting bit of mesmerism.” Its review also singled out the look of the film as uniquely praiseworthy, calling the photography “splendid” and the lighting “the last word in ingenuity, since much of the footage calls for dim or night effect and the manipulation of shadows to intensify the ghostly atmosphere.”
John Mosher of The New Yorker was less enthused, calling the film only a “moderate success” and writing that “The makeup department has a triumph to its credit in the monster and there lie the thrills of the picture, but the general fantasy lacks the vitality which that little Mrs. P.B. Shelley was able to give her book.”
Frankenstein has continued to receive acclaim from critics and is widely regarded as one of the best films of 1931, as well as one of the greatest movies of all time. It holds a 100% “Fresh” rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.[24] In 1991, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.[25][26] In 2004, The New York Times placed the film on its Best 1000 Movies Ever list.[27]
The film was a big hit. In June 1932 the film had earned reported rentals of $1.4 million. In 1943 Universal reported it had earned a profit of $708,871. By 1953 all the Frankenstein films earned an estimated profit of $13 million.[35]
Sequels
The next sequel, 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, was made, like all those that followed, without Whale or Clive (who had died in 1937). This film featured Karloff’s last full film performance as the Monster.
The Ghost of Frankenstein was released in 1942. The movie features Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Monster, taking over from Boris Karloff, who played the role in the first three films of the series, and Bela Lugosi in his second appearance as the demented Ygor.
Karloff returned to the series, but not the role, in the 1944 followup, House of Frankenstein, which also featured Chaney, and adds Dracula, played by John Carradine, and a Hunchback for good measure. 1945’s House of Dracula continued the theme of combining Universal’s three most popular monsters.
Many of the subsequent films which featured Frankenstein’s monster demote the creature to a robotic henchman in someone else’s plots, such as in its final Universal film appearance in the deliberately farcicalAbbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).
Other adaptations
Karloff would return to the wearing of the makeup and to the role of the monster one last time in a 1962 episode of the TV show Route 66.
The popular 1960s TV show, The Munsters, depicts the family’s father Herman as Frankenstein’s monster, who married Count Dracula‘s daughter. The make-up for Herman is based on the make-up of Boris Karloff.
Although Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant is often referred to as “Igor” in descriptions of the films, he is not so called in the earliest films. In both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein has an assistant who is played both times by Dwight Frye who is crippled. In the original 1931 film the character is named “Fritz” who is hunchbacked and walks with the aid of a small cane.
In Bride of Frankenstein, Frye plays “Karl” a murderer who stands upright but has a lumbering metal brace on both legs that can be heard clicking loudly with every step. Both characters would be killed by Karloff’s monster in their respective films.
It was not until Son of Frankenstein (1939) that a character called “Ygor” first appears (here played by Bela Lugosi and revived by Lugosi in 1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein after his apparent murder in the earlier film). This character — a deranged blacksmith whose neck was broken and twisted due to a botched hanging — befriends the monster and later helps Dr. Wolf Frankenstein, leading to the “hunchbacked assistant” called “Igor” commonly associated with Frankenstein in pop culture.
Guillermo del Toro had expressed interest in directing the reboot film for Universal.[36] Del Toro said his Frankenstein would be a faithful “Miltonian tragedy”, citing Frank Darabont‘s “near perfect” script, which evolved into Kenneth Branagh‘s Frankenstein.[37] Del Toro said of his vision, “What I’m trying to do is take the myth and do something with
Del Toro said of his vision, “What I’m trying to do is take the myth and do something with it, but combining elements of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein without making it just a classical myth of the monster. The best moments in my mind of
The best moments in my mind of Frankenstein, of the novel, are yet to be filmed […] The only guy that has ever nailed for me the emptiness, not the tragic, not the Miltonian dimension of the monster, but the emptiness is Christopher Lee in the Hammer films, where he really looks like something obscenely alive. Boris Karloff has the tragedy element nailed down but there are so many versions, including that great screenplay by Frank Darabont that was ultimately not really filmed.”[38]
He has also cited Bernie Wrightson‘s illustrations as inspiration, and said the film will not focus on the monster’s creation, but be an adventure film featuring the character.[39] Del Toro said he would like Wrightson to design his version of the creature. The film will also focus on the religious aspects of Shelley’s tale.[40] In June 2009, del Toro stated that production on Frankenstein was not likely to begin for at least four years.[41] Despite this, he has already cast frequent collaborator
Despite this, he has already cast frequent collaborator Doug Jones in the role of Frankenstein’s monster. In an interview with Sci Fi Wire, Jones stated that he learned of the news the same day as everybody else; that “Guillermo did say to the press that he’s already cast me as his monster, but we’ve yet to talk about it. But in his mind, if that’s what he’s decided, then it’s done … It would be a dream come true.”[42] The film will be a period piece.[43]
In June of 2017, producer/director Alex Kurtzman revealed that Frankenstein is one of the films that will have an installment in the Dark Universe.[44]Javier Bardem is cast to portray the titular character.
Jump up^Vieira, Mark A. (2003). Hollywood Horror: From Gothic to Cosmic. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. p. 35. ISBN0-8109-4535-5.
Jump up^It’s Alive! The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein – A.S. Barnes, San Diego, California,1981
Jump up^“”Frankenstein” Cast Chosen.”. New York Times. August 30, 1931. The Universal production of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is taking shape under the knowing guidance of James Whale. Boris Karloff and not Bela Lugosi is the final choice to play the monster.
Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. New York: Columbia University Press 1999. ISBN 0-231-11094-4
Vieira, Mark A., Sin in Soft Focus. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2003. ISBN 0-8109-8228-5
Cast: Lew Ayres, Mae Clarke, Boris Karloff, Dorothy Revier, Russell Hopton, Hedda Hopper, Clarence Ruse, Bert Roach, George Raft, Arleta Duncan, Jack La Rue
The movie was directed by Hobart Henley and features an early Busby Berkeley music number, “Who’s Your Little Who-Zis”.[2] Although Karloff is a villain, he plays a charming man, quite unlike most of the parts he was allowed to play at the time.
On a cold winter’s night outside Happy’s Nightclub, Irish-American police officer Ryan (Robert Emmett O’Connor) chats with African-American doorman Tim Washington (Clarence Muse), who is worried about his critically ill wife.
Inside, club owner Happy (Boris Karloff) is arguing with his shrewish but glamorous wife Jill (Dorothy Revier) and welcoming frequent customers Ed Powell (George Raft), a crooked gambler, and Michael Rand (Lew Ayres). Rand is a wealthy college boy who watched his mother kill his father after catching him with another woman, a case widely covered by the tabloids. Rand is now drinking heavily to deaden his pain.
Backstage, gambler Powell asks chorus girl Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke) for a date and, after losing an impromptu bet, she agrees to go out with him. After the floor show, all the chorus girls are asked to stay late by their cruel dance master, Klauss (Russell Hopton), who is secretly having an affair with Happy’s wife Jill.
Edith Blair (Dorothy Petersen) spots a drunken Michael sitting alone at a table. Edith was the ‘other woman’ in the murder of Michael’s father. She tell Michael that she and his father were only good friends, and that his father loved him deeply.
She also tells Michael that his killer mother never loved his father, and cursed him as he was dying. An upset Michael creates an outburst and overturns a table at the nightclub. He passes out after being punched, and is taken to the back room of the club where Ruth cares for him.
Happy leaves to discuss bootleg liquor purchases with another gangster, Jim. (Huntley Gordon.) As he exits, doorman Tim asks if he can leave early to visit is ailing wife, but Happy refuses.
When Michael wakes up from his liquor-related nap, he and Ruth have a warm chat. Gambler Powell interrupts them and insists Ruth to come to his apartment immediately. Michael punches Powell and Tim takes the fallen gambler out to a taxi. Suddenly, Michael’s mother (Hedda Hopper) arrives at the nightclub. Michael confronts her about the way she treated his father.
The late-night dance rehearsal continues, but Klauss calls a break so he can spend more time with Jill. Happy returns, and Tim asks again if he can go see his wife in the hospital. Happy refuses. Happy catches Jill and Klauss together, and Klauss leaves in disgrace. Happy tells Jill that he will not divorce her, but remain married to her and do his best to make her miserable.
Michael and Ruth sit down for a meal together. Michael asks Ruth if she would be interested in running away to Bali with him, as his wife, even though they have only known each other for a few hours.
Their happy moment is interrupted by Tim, who has just learned that his wife is dead. As he leaves the club to finally go to her bedside, he is fatally shot by gangster Jim and a comrade, who have come for Happy. They shoot Happy and then his wife Jill. When they turn their guns towards Michael and Ruth, they are suddenly shot dead by the returning police officer Ryan. Michael and Ruth get into the police wagon together, and Ruth agrees to go Bali with Michael.
Cast: Mae Clarke, Ralph Bellamy, Marie Prevost, Hale Hamilton, Ferdinand Gottschalk, Ernest Wood, Sam Godfrey, Lucille Browne, Frank Fanning, Raul Freeman
When Sylvia Day (Mae Clarke) is caught trying to pull a scam on the Taylor Department Store in New York City, she pleads with the store manager to let her go, but his boss, Joe Smith (Ralph Bellamy), insists on following store policy, and she is handed over to the police, convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. Sylvia is consumed with the idea of getting revenge on Joe.
She becomes friends with chatty fellow inmate Jeanie Vance (Marie Prevost), who offers to team up with her (and commit more crimes) once they have served their time. When Sylvia learns that Jeanie has a surprising connection to Joe, she decides to get out early. She sets a fire, then passes out from the smoke while trying to put it out. For her “heroism”, she is granted parole.
Tony Gratton (Hale Hamilton), her partner in the failed con, tries to talk her into marrying him and going to Chicago to continue their life of crime, but she is determined to avenge herself. Besides, she knows that Tony is already married.
Sylvia stalks Joe, learning all she can about him. Then, she pretends to be an old acquaintance at a nightclub where Joe is celebrating his promotion to general manager by getting drunk. The next morning, Joe discovers her in his apartment. She informs him that they have gotten married. Joe laughs, then tells her that he already has a wife. She tells him she knows (it is Jeanie), then reveals her motives. Tony shows up, masquerading as the person who married them; he gives Joe the marriage license the couple supposedly left behind. Threatened with a charge of bigamy, Joe reluctantly agrees to support Sylvia for a year, the length of her parole.
Tony tries again to get Sylvia to be his partner in crime. When she refuses, he slips a counterfeit $20 bill in her purse. Sylvia goes on a shopping spree and pays for some of her purchases with the bill. It is traced back to her, but when a policeman shows up to take her back to jail, Joe pretends that she took the money out of his pants pocket. As a store manager, he deals with counterfeit money all the time. The ploy works, and Jeanie sends back her extravagant purchases.
Later, Joe calls her from the office and asks her for a favor. Mr. Taylor (Ferdinand Gottschalk), the store’s somewhat eccentric owner, has found out that Joe is married, so he is coming to dinner at their apartment. While Sylvia is cooking, Jeanie shows up. Her friend has been released early and intends to blackmail her husband (whom she married long ago while he was in college and then lost track of), once she can locate him, before heading to Florida with Sylvia. Sylvia gets her to leave before Joe and Mr. Taylor show up (early) by promising to give her a decision the next day. Taylor insists on doing the cooking; he is fed up with being waited on by servants. He becomes very fond of the couple and hints at a promotion to vice president if they were to have a baby.
The next day, Sylvia persuades Jeanie that it is too dangerous to try blackmail in New York because of her record and agrees to go with her to Florida. Sylvia leaves a letter for Joe explaining everything, ending with the admission “I love you”. On the train, however, Jeanie reveals that she divorced Joe without his knowledge. Sylvia gets off and rushes back to the apartment; Joe has already read the letter and takes her in his arms.
Cast
“The Players” as listed in the opening credits of Parole Girl:[1]
Mae Clarke is the same actress who two years before the release of Parole Girl had a grapefruit shoved into her face by James Cagney in the film The Public Enemy. That same year, in 1931, she also appeared in Universal Studios‘ horror classic Frankenstein, portraying the fiancee of the monster’s creator.
By the time of Parole Girl’s release in 1933, Ralph Bellamy had become a busy actor and a very popular one among American movie audiences. Bellamy appeared in eleven other films released that same year, including the Picture Snatcher, an action film in which he plays second-lead to James Cagney.[2]
Sam Godfrey, who plays “Walsh” in Parole Girl, rarely received an on-screen credit like the one he has in this film. Godfrey’s career as a peripheral or supporting character lasted only a few years, from 1932 until his death at the age of forty-three in 1935. He managed, however, during that brief period to appear in forty-one films. Of that total he received a screen credit in only seven of those productions.[3]
References
Jump up^A full copy (1:51) of Parole Girl is available for viewing on YouTube. Search by film title on YouTube’s homepage. Retrieved March 14, 2017.
Dillinger Is Dead (Italian: Dillinger è morto) is a 1969 Italian drama directed by Marco Ferreri. It stars Michel Piccoli, Anita Pallenberg and Annie Girardot. The story is a darkly satiric blend of fantasy and reality. It follows a bored, alienated man over the course of one night in his home. The title comes from a newspaper headline featured in the film which proclaims the death of the real life American gangster John Dillinger.
The film proved controversial on its initial release for its subject matter and violence but is now generally regarded as Ferreri’s masterpiece. It was acclaimed by the influential French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma and afterwards Ferreri worked and lived in Paris for many years. Since the mid-1980s the film has been screened only very rarely.
Glauco, a middle-aged industrial designer of gas masks, is growing tired of his occupation. Having discussed alienation with a colleague at the factory, he returns home. His wife is in bed with a headache but has left him dinner, which has become cold. He is dissatisfied with the food and begins preparing himself a gourmet meal.
While collecting ingredients he discovers an old revolver wrapped in a 1934 newspaper with the headline “Dillinger is dead” and an account of the famous American gangster’s death. Glauco cleans and restores the gun while continuing to cook his dinner, then paints it red with white polka dots.
He also eats his meal, watches some television and projected home movies, listens to music and seduces their maid. With the gun he enacts suicide a number of times. At dawn he shoots his wife thrice in the head as she sleeps. Then he drives to the seaside where he gets a job as a chef on a yacht bound for Tahiti.
Themes
The film, and especially its surreal finale in which the character Glauco leaves home and finds a job on a yacht, has been interpreted variously. Author Fabio Vighi approached it from a psychoanalytical standpoint, suggesting the uxoricide is an attempt to “kill” something inside himself. Glauco repeatedly stages his own suicide throughout the film. The final murder, then, is a means to escape his life by eliminating the primary link to his bourgeois lifestyle, which he would otherwise be unable to leave.[1]
Writer Mira Liehm posits director Marco Ferreri followed in the style of the Theatre of the Absurd and did not apply psychology or logic to his characters but then placed his absurdist creations in a real world context. The home with its many luxuries, such as the gourmet dining and film projector, as well as the cleaning and decoration of the gun, are meaningless diversions which trap Glauco in a metaphorical prison and suffocate him. His isolation leads to death or an “illusionary escape.”[2] As Italian film historian Paolo Bertetto explained, “The escape to Tahiti means a total closure of all horizons, the paralysis of all possibilities; we are brought down to zero, stripped of all perspectives, and restored to the original nothingness.”[2]
Cast
Michel Piccoli as Glauco: a middle-age designer of protective masks which allow people to breathe under inhospitable conditions. Isolated, ennuyed and insomniac, he searches his house for diversion. Piccoli viewed the role as that of an “eternal child or this childlike rebirth of ‘mature’ man, between despair, suicide, simple insomnia, dream.”[3]
Ferreri had Piccoli read a few pages from Dillinger Is Dead and hired him immediately. Piccoli has said Ferreri did not direct his performance and only gave simple blocking instructions. He played the character as solitary and volatile, comparing it to his role in Agnès Varda‘s The Creatures (1966).
Release and reception
The film was entered into the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.[4]Dillinger Is Dead was the subject of controversy on its release for its violence and depiction of the parvenu set.[3] Critics have also called it director Marco Ferreri’s masterpiece.[2]
The influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma praised the film, interviewed the director and translated two of his previous interviews from the Italian magazine Cinema & Film. The acclaim opened the resources of Paris to Ferreri and he spent much of the next 15 years living there.
During that time he made his internationally best known films, including The Last Woman (1976) and Bye Bye Monkey (1978). Ferreri and Michel Piccoli became fast friends and worked together subsequently on films such as The Last Woman and La Grande Bouffe (1973).[5]
A doctor (Frank Powell) leaves his sick daughter (Adele DeGarde) to assist a neighbor that is gravely ill, and ignores his wife’s requests to come home and take care of his own daughter who is getting worse.
Cast: Mary Pickford, Frank Powell, Kate Bruce, Robert Harron, Dell Henderson, Arthur V Johnson, James Kirkwood, Marion Leonard, Owen Moore, Lottie Pickford, Mack Sennett
George Peabody has a drinking habit. Ruth, his friend from childhood loves him, brings him back to the right path and makes him abandon the bad companions who contributed to his downfall. George decides to mend the tatters of his life. Sets out for the West; and before leaving, greets his beloved Ruth, then realising that he truly loved her. She, then, as a token of love, gives him one half of her precious medallion. He will bring together the two pieces when he comes back to her.
In the West, George follows a new life, achieving success in his work. But, one day, ends up succumbing to the desire for a nightcap. This will be the beginning of his end. He falls into the arms of a Mexican girl who pretends to love him, and then his descent becomes unstoppable. His mistress, to completely remove the memory of Ruth, writes a letter in which she says that George is dead.
Without a penny, now reduced to a filthy, tattered exisitence, George returns. One day in front of the girl who still loves him and who is still waiting to reassemble their medallion.
She, who is now blind, cannot see it. George ashamed of everything he did, escapes from her. The medallion will remain broken forever.
Production
The film was produced by the Biograph Company and was shot in Edgewater, New Jersey.
Distribution
Distributed by the Biograph Company, the film – was released in US cinemas on September 13, 1909. In the projections, was programmed with the split reel system, merged into a single coil with another short film produced by the Biograph and directed by Griffith,
It was screened with another short film produced by the Biograph and directed by Griffith, The Children’s Friend [1] .
In August 2006, the Grapevine has included this film in an anthology on DVD titled DW Griffith, Director, Volume 4 (1909) , containing eleven Griffith films [2] .
Cast: Mary Pickford, Marion Leonard, Kate Bruce, Frank Evans, Arthur V Johnson, James Kirkwood, George Nichols, Anthony O’Sullivan, Billy Quirk, Mack Sennett, Dorothy West
Cast: Mary Pickford, Gertrude Astor, Wilfred Lucas, Helen Raymond, C Norman Hammond, Elinor Fair, Adolphe Menjou, Peaches Jackson, Doreen Jackson, John Harron, George Dromgold, Kate Price
The movie starts in Belgium in the early 1900s. Jeanne (Mary Pickford) is the 10-year-old daughter of Louise (Gertrude Astor). Troubles start when Louise remarries a selfish but rich man named Elton Reeves (Wilfred Lucas). He convinces her to move to America and leave Jeanne behind in Belgium to live with the maid Marie (Helen Raymond). At first Louise refuses to, but eventually gives in and leaves Jeanne in the care of Marie.
Five years pass and Jeanne and Marie bonded. Meanwhile, Louise hated living in America and feels guilty having left her kid behind. She returns to Belgium to reunite with Jeanne, but Marie doesn’t want to give her up. When Louise finally arrives, Marie lies to her Jeanne drowned in a river nearby. Louise is devastated and collapses, before returning to America. This results in estranging from Elton.
World War I broke out and Belgium is occupied by Germany. Marie fears for Jeanne’s safety and brings her to America to live with her mother. After an emotional goodbye, Jeanne sets out for America to find her mother. Along the way she meets two orphan boys and decides to take care of them. When she finally arrives in America, she travels to Louise’s big mansion.
Too afraid to tell her she is her daughter, Jeanne applies to serve as her maid. While pretending to be someone else, she gets to know her mother. However, she has trouble keeping up the lie and wants nothing more but have a reconciliation. Waiting for the right time to tell the truth, Jeanne hopes everything will come to a right end. When guests of the mansion plot to fleece Elton, Jeanne is forced to reveal her true identity to save the day. A happy reunion follows.
Cast: Mary Pickford, Elmer Booth, Charles Hill Mailes, Jack Pickford, Christy Cabanne, Max Davidson, Grace Henderson, Adolph Lestina, Alfred Paget, Harry Hyde, Frank Evans
Jump up^Catalog of Holdings The American Film Institute Collection and The United Artists Collection at The Library of Congress p. 125 c.1978 by The American Film Institute
Bigger Than Life is an American DeLuxe ColorCinemaScope film made in 1956 directed by Nicholas Ray and starring James Mason, who also co-wrote and produced the film, about a school teacher and family man whose life spins out of control upon becoming addicted to cortisone.
The film co-stars Barbara Rush as his wife and Walter Matthau as his closest friend, a fellow teacher. Though it was a box-office flop upon its initial release,[2] many modern critics hail it as a masterpiece and brilliant indictment of contemporary attitudes towards mental illness and addiction.[3]
In 1963, Jean-Luc Godard named it one of the ten best American sound films ever made.[4]
Schoolteacher and family man Ed Avery (James Mason), who has been suffering bouts of severe pain and even blackouts, is hospitalized with what is diagnosed as polyarteritis nodosa, a rare inflammation of the arteries. Told by doctors that he probably has only months to live, Ed agrees to an experimental treatment: doses of the hormone cortisone.
Ed makes a remarkable recovery. He returns home to his wife, Lou (Barbara Rush), and their son, Richie (Christopher Olsen). He must keep taking cortisone tablets regularly to prevent a recurrence of his illness. But the “miracle” cure turns into a nightmare when Ed begins to misuse the tablets, causing him to experience wild mood swings and, ultimately, a psychotic episode which threatens the safety of his family.
Bigger Than Life was extremely controversial upon its release,[citation needed] and it was not a financial success. Mason, who produced the film as well as starring in it, blamed its failure on its use of the then-novel widescreen CinemaScope format.[2]
American critics panned the film, considering it melodramatic and heavyhanded.[6]Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it tedious, “dismal”, and “more pitiful than terrifying to watch”.[7]
However, the film was popular with critics at the influential magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Jean-Luc Godard called it one of the ten best American sound films.[4] Likewise, François Truffaut praised the film, noting the “intelligent, subtle” script, the “extraordinary precision” of Mason’s performance, and the beauty of the film’s CinemaScope photography.[8]
Modern critics have pointed out Ray’s use of widescreen cinematography to depict the interior spaces of a family drama, rather than the open vistas typically associated with the format, as well as his use of extreme close-ups in portraying the main character’s psychosis and megalomania.[9]
The film is also recognized for its multi-layered examination of the American nuclear family in the Eisenhower era. While the film can be read as a straightforward exposé on medical malpractice and the overuse of prescription drugs in modern American society,[10] it has also been seen as a critique of consumerism, the male-dominated traditional family structure, and the claustrophobic conformism of suburban life.[3][11][12]
Truffaut saw Ed’s drug-influenced speech to the parents of the parent-teacher association as having fascist overtones.[13] The film has also been interpreted as an examination of masculinity and a leftist critique of the low salaries of public school teachers in the United States.[14]
Jump up^Truffaut 2009, pp. 145–146. Truffaut noted Nicholas Ray’s low opinion of the medical profession, and of so-called “miracle drugs”. His discussion of Bigger Than Life points out the visual similarity between the doctors in the film and “gangsters in crime films”.
My Life to Live (French: Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux; To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes) is a 1962 French drama film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It was released as My Life to Live in North America and as It’s My Life in United Kingdom. The DVD releases use the original French title.
Nana (Anna Karina), a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties, leaves her husband and infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitute.
Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and Nana is killed in a gun battle. Nana’s short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written intertitle.
The film was shot over the course of four weeks for $40,000.[1][2]
Style
In Vivre sa vie, Godard borrowed the aesthetics of the cinéma vérité approach to documentary film-making that was then becoming fashionable.
However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films.[citation needed] The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.
Influences
One of the film’s original sources is a study of contemporary prostitution, Où en est la prostitution by Marcel Sacotte, an examining magistrate.
Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma (the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht and his theory of ‘epic theatre‘.
Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitles appear before the film’s ‘chapters’ explaining what will happen next; jump cuts disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over; and so on.
Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard’s former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard’s personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.[citation needed]
The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard’s Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana.
It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat, who is performing his own hit tune “Ma Môme” on the track that he has just selected.
Nana’s bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks in the 1928 film Pandora’s Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.
The film was remade as She Lives Her Life in 2014 by director Mark Thimijan.
Reception
The film was the fourth most popular movie at the French box office in its year of release.[1]
Critical response
Vivre sa Vie enjoys an extremely positive critical reputation. Author and cultural critic Susan Sontag described it as “a perfect film” and “one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of.”[4] According to critic Roger Ebert in his essay on the film in the book The Great Movies, “The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt.”[5]
References
^ Jump up to:abcArcher, Eugene (27 Sep 1964). “France’s Far Out Filmmaker”. New York Times. p. X11.
A French production, the dialogue is mostly in French and German, with a few English language sequences. The most expensive European film produced up to its time, Lola Montès flopped at the box office.
It had an important artistic influence, however, on the French New Wave cinema movement and continues to have many distinguished critical admirers. Heavily re-edited (multiple times) and shortened after its initial release for commercial reasons, it has been twice restored (1968, 2008). It was released on DVD and Blu-ray in North America by The Criterion Collection in February 2010.
In the mid-19th-century, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) is a famous, past-her-prime dancer and courtesan who has led an eventful and highly scandalous life. (She supposedly holds a world record for number of lovers.)
She is now reduced to performing in a New Orleans circus, where an impresario/ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) has both befriended and exploited her by making her the central attraction. In the course of a single circus performance — which dramatically reenacts Lola’s life and career — flashbacks reveal, first, her affair with composer Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg); second, her unhappy youth and marriage to her own mother’s boyfriend, Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny); and then her scandalous public breakup with conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau).
Along the way, her career as a dancer and “actress” has its ups and downs and she initially rejects the career advances of a younger version of Ustinov’s impresario. In a longer flashback, constituting most of the second half of the film, her career as courtesan reaches a peak: her affair with the Bavarian King Ludwig I (Anton Walbrook), which incenses his subjects and leads to his eventual downfall in the March Revolution of 1848. In a final circus sequence, Lola — a “fallen woman” — ascends to the apex of the big top tent for a symbolic, death-defying plunge. She is last seen allowing herself to be touched, or kissed, by a very long queue of male, fee-paying circus patrons.
This would be the last film directed by Ophüls before his death of a heart attack in March 1957. As originally shown in France in 1955, the audience sees the events of Lola Montès’ life through the use of flashbacks. Use of the technique was criticized upon its release and the movie did poorly at the box office. In response, the producers re-cut the film and shortened it in favor of a more chronological storyline, against the director’s wishes.
According to Roger Ebert, a “savagely butchered version was in circulation for a few years” following Ophuls’ death.[1] The film critic Andrew Sarris and others eventually showed improved versions, progressively closer to the original, at the New York Film Festival in 1963 and 1968.
Restoration
Certain elements remained missing and believed lost, but the recent discovery and restoration efforts by Technicolor artists of the lost footage allowed a new version to be edited according to Ophul’s original intentions. The color version of the film with missing footage was digitally restored by a small team of restoration artists including John Healy at Technicolor under the direction of Tom Burton.
The black and white version of the film was repaired by Martina Müller and Werner Dütsch.[2] The color version including lost footage was shown at the New York Film Festival according to the director’s edit version on Sept. 26 – Oct. 12, 2008.[3]
Lola Montès was re-released by Rialto Pictures in November 2008 with the full Cinemascope aspect ratio restored and with five minutes of additional footage never before shown in any U.S. release.
Roger Ebert lauded the film’s camerawork and set design, but felt that Carol’s “wooden [and] shallow” performance as the titular character prevented the film from achieving greatness.[1] Nonetheless, it is today among Ophüls’ revered works.[5]Dave Kehr called it a masterpiece, and wrote that “certainly this story of a courtesan’s life is among the most emotionally plangent, visually ravishing works the cinema has to offer.”[6]
Its title refers to it being Fellini’s eighth and a half film as a director. His previous directorial work consisted of six features, two short segments, and a collaboration with another director, Alberto Lattuada, the latter three treated as “half” films.[3] The plot concerns a director (played by Marcello Mastroianni) who suffers from stifled creativity as he attempts to direct an epic science fiction film.
Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), a famous Italian film director, is suffering from “director’s block“. Stalled on his new science fiction film that includes thinly veiled autobiographical references, he has lost interest amid artistic and marital difficulties.
While attempting to recover from his anxieties at a luxurious spa, Guido hires a well-known critic (Jean Rougeul) to review his ideas for his film, but the critic blasts them as weak, intellectually spineless, and confusing. Meanwhile, Guido has recurring visions of an Ideal Woman (Claudia Cardinale), which he sees as key to his story. His vivacious mistress Carla (Sandra Milo) comes from Rome to visit him, but Guido puts her in a separate hotel and mostly ignores her.
The film production crew relocates to Guido’s hotel in an attempt to get him to work on the movie, but he evades his staff, ignores journalists, and refuses to make decisions, not even telling actors their roles. As the pressure mounts to begin filming, Guido retreats into childhood memories: spending the night at his grandmother’s villa, dancing with a prostitute (Eddra Gale) on the beach as a schoolboy, and being punished by his strict Catholic school as a result. The film critic claims that these memories are too sentimental and ambiguous to be used in Guido’s movie.
Granted the rare opportunity to have a personal audience with a Cardinal in a steam bath (a scene which Guido plans to replicate in his movie), Guido admits that he isn’t happy. The Cardinal responds with quotes from the catechism and offers little insight into his condition.
Guido invites his estranged wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée) and her friends to join him. They dance, suggesting that the couple still has a chance to reconcile, but Guido abandons her for his production crew. The crew tours the steel infrastructure of a life-sized rocket ship set built on the beach, and Guido confesses to his wife’s best friend Rosella (Rossella Falk) that he wanted to make a movie that was pure and honest, but he is struggling with something honest to say.
Carla surprises Guido, Luisa, and Rosella outside the hotel, and Guido claims that he and Carla ended their affair years ago. Luisa and Rosella call him on the lie, and Guido slips into a fantasy world where he lords over a harem of women from his life. They bathe him (like at his grandmother’s villa) and spray him with powder, but a rejected showgirl starts a rebellion. The fantasy women attack Guido with harsh truths about himself and his sex life, and Guido literally whips them back into shape.
Fed up with delays, the producer (Guido Alberti) forces Guido to review his many screen tests, but Guido still won’t make any decisions. The screen tests are for roles portrayed earlier in 8½, such as Carla, the prostitute, the Cardinal, etc. When Luisa sees how bitterly Guido chooses to represent her in the movie, she flees the theater, declaring that their marriage is over since Guido is unable to deal with the truth.
But Guido’s Ideal Woman arrives in the form of an actress named Claudia. Guido takes her to visit a proposed set, explaining that his movie is about a burned-out man who finds salvation in this Ideal Woman. Claudia listens intently, but concludes that the protagonist is unsympathetic because he is incapable of love.
Broken, Guido calls off the film, but the producer and the film’s staff announce a massive press conference at the rocket ship set. Guido attempts to escape from the frenzied journalists, and when pressed for a statement, he instead crawls under a table and shoots himself in the head.
The crew begins to disassemble the rocket ship, since the film is canceled. The critic praises Guido for making a wise decision, and Guido has a revelation— he was attempting to solve his personal confusion by creating a film to help others, when instead he needs to accept his life for what it is. He asks Luisa for her assistance in doing so, and she says she’ll try.
A group of musical clowns, led by a young Guido, transform the rocket ship set into a circus, leading the men and women of Guido’s life down the steps of the set. Shouting through a megaphone, Guido directs them into a circus ring, and Carla tells him that she figured out what he was trying to say— that Guido can’t do without the people in his life. The men and women hold hands and run around the circle, Guido and Luisa joining them last.
In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering creative block: “Well then – a guy (a writer? any kind of professional man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-too-serious disease. It’s a warning bell: something is blocking up his system.”[8] Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist’s profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy “looking for the film”[9] in the hope of resolving his confusion. Flaiano suggested La bella confusione (literally The Beautiful Confusion) as the movie’s title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on 8½, a self-referential title referring principally (but not exclusively)[10] to the number of films he had directed up to that time.
Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired cinematographerGianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn’t decide what his character did for a living.[11] The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had “lost his film” and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of 8½, Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he “felt overwhelmed by shame… I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make”.[12]
When shooting began on 9 May 1962, Eugene Walter recalled Fellini taking “a little piece of brown paper tape” and sticking it near the viewfinder of the camera. Written on it was Ricordati che è un film comico (“Remember that this is a comic film”).[13] Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director’s American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale. Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels “on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional – the realm of fantasy”.[14]
8½ was filmed in the spherical cinematographic process, using 35-millimeter film, and exhibited with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. As with most Italian films of this period, the sound was entirely dubbed in afterwards; following a technique dear to Fellini, many lines of the dialogue were written only during post production, while the actors on the set mouthed random lines. Otto e mezzo marks the first time that actress Claudia Cardinale was allowed to dub her own dialogue; previously her voice was thought to be too throaty and, coupled with her Tunisian accent, was considered undesirable.[15]
In September 1962, Fellini shot the end of the film as initially written: Guido and his wife sit together in the restaurant car of a train bound for Rome. Lost in thought, Guido looks up to see all the characters of his film smiling ambiguously at him as the train enters a tunnel. Fellini then shot an alternative ending set around the spaceship on the beach at dusk but with the intention of using the scenes as a trailer for promotional purposes only. In the documentary Fellini: I’m a Born Liar, co-scriptwriter Tullio Pinelli explains how he warned Fellini to abandon the train sequence with its implicit theme of suicide for an upbeat ending.[16] Fellini accepted the advice, using the alternate beach sequence as a more harmonious and exuberant finale.[17]
After shooting wrapped on 14 October, Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro’s cinema.[18]
Reception
First released in Italy on 14 February 1963, Otto e mezzo received virtually unanimous acclaim, with reviewers hailing Fellini as “a genius possessed of a magic touch, a prodigious style”.[19] Italian novelist and critic Alberto Moravia described the film’s protagonist, Guido Anselmi, as “obsessed by eroticism, a sadist, a masochist, a self-mythologizer, an adulterer, a clown, a liar and a cheat. He’s afraid of life and wants to return to his mother’s womb…. In some respects he resembles Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce‘s Ulysses, and we have the impression that Fellini has read and contemplated this book. The film is introverted, a sort of private monologue interspersed with glimpses of reality…. Fellini’s dreams are always surprising and, in a figurative sense, original, but his memories are pervaded by a deeper, more delicate sentiment. This is why the two episodes concerning the hero’s childhood at the old country house in Romagna and his meeting with the woman on the beach in Rimini are the best of the film, and among the best of all Fellini’s works to date”.[20]
Reviewing for Corriere della Sera, Giovanni Grazzini underlined that “the beauty of the film lies in its ‘confusion’… a mixture of error and truth, reality and dream, stylistic and human values, and in the complete harmony between Fellini’s cinematographic language and Guido’s rambling imagination. It is impossible to distinguish Fellini from his fictional director and so Fellini’s faults coincide with Guido’s spiritual doubts. The osmosis between art and life is amazing. It will be difficult to repeat this achievement.[21] Fellini’s genius shines in everything here, as it has rarely shone in the movies.
There isn’t a set, a character or a situation that doesn’t have a precise meaning on the great stage that is 8½“.[22] Mario Verdone of Bianco e Nero insisted the film was “like a brilliant improvisation…. The film became the most difficult feat the director ever tried to pull off. It is like a series of acrobats [sic] that a tightrope walker tries to execute high above the crowd,… always on the verge of falling and being smashed on the ground. But at just the right moment, the acrobat knows how to perform the right somersault: with a push he straightens up, saves himself and wins”.[23]
8½ screened at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival in April to “almost universal acclaim”[24] and was Italy’s official entry in the later 3rd Moscow International Film Festival where it won the Grand Prize. French film director François Truffaut wrote: “Fellini’s film is complete, simple, beautiful, honest, like the one Guido wants to make in 8½“.[25]Premier Plan critics André Bouissy and Raymond Borde argued that the film “has the importance, magnitude, and technical mastery of Citizen Kane.
It has aged twenty years of the avant-garde in one fell swoop because it both integrates and surpasses all the discoveries of experimental cinema”.[26] Pierre Kast of Les Cahiers du Cinéma explained that “my admiration for Fellini is not without limits. For instance, I did not enjoy La strada but I did I vitelloni. But I think we must all admit that 8½, leaving aside for the moment all prejudice and reserve, is prodigious. Fantastic liberality, a total absence of precaution and hypocrisy, absolute dispassionate sincerity, artistic and financial courage these are the characteristics of this incredible undertaking”.[27]
Released in the United States on 25 June 1963 by Joseph E. Levine, who had bought the rights sight unseen, the film was screened at the Festival Theatre in New York City in the presence of Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni. The acclaim was unanimous with the exception of reviews by Judith Crist, Pauline Kael, and John Simon. Crist “didn’t think the film touched the heart or moved the spirit”.[24]
Kael derided the film as a “structural disaster” while Simon considered it “a disheartening fiasco”.[28][29]Newsweek defended the film as “beyond doubt, a work of art of the first magnitude”.[24]Bosley Crowther praised it in the New York Times as “a piece of entertainment that will really make you sit up straight and think, a movie endowed with the challenge of a fascinating intellectual game…. If Mr. Fellini has not produced another masterpiece –another all-powerful exposure of Italy’s ironic sweet life –he has made a stimulating contemplation of what might be called, with equal irony, a sweet guy”.[30]
Archer Winsten of The New York Post interpreted the film as “a kind of review and summary of Fellini’s picture-making” but doubted that it would appeal as directly to the American public as La Dolce Vita had three years earlier: “This is a subtler, more imaginative, less sensational piece of work. There will be more people here who consider it confused and confusing. And when they do understand what it is about –the simultaneous creation of a work of art, a philosophy of living together in happiness, and the imposition of each upon the other, they will not be as pleased as if they had attended the exposition of an international scandal”.[31] Audiences, however, loved it to such an extent that a company attempted to obtain the rights to mass-produce Guido Anselmi’s black director’s hat.[28]
Fellini biographer Hollis Alpert noted that in the months following its release, critical commentary on 8½ proliferated as the film “became an intellectual cud to chew on”.[32] Philosopher and social critic Dwight Macdonald, for example, insisted it was “the most brilliant, varied, and entertaining movie since Citizen Kane“.[32] In 1987, a group of thirty European intellectuals and filmmakers voted Otto e mezzo the most important European film ever made.[33]
In 1993, Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote that “despite the efforts of several other filmmakers to make their own versions of the same story, it remains the definitive film about director’s block”.[34] It came number two on the 1992 and 2002 Sight & Sound Director’s Poll beaten only by Citizen Kane. 8½ is a fixture on the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics’ and directors’ polls of the top ten films ever made. It ranked number two on the magazine’s 2002 Directors’ Top Ten Poll and number eight on the Critics’ Top Ten Poll[6] and stayed within the top ten, but slightly lower in the 2012 poll (number four on the 2012 directors’ poll[35] and ten on the 2012 critics’ poll).[36] Director Martin Scorsese also listed it as one of his favourite films of all time.[37]
Themes
8½ is about the struggles involved in the creative process, both technical and personal, and the problems artists face when expected to deliver something personal and profound with intense public scrutiny, on a constricted schedule, while simultaneously having to deal with their own personal relationships. It is, in a larger sense, about finding a sense of meaning in life despite its being difficult and fragmented. Like several Italian films of the period (most evident in the films of Fellini’s contemporary, Michelangelo Antonioni), 8½ also is about the alienating effects of modernization.[38]
Later in the year of the film’s 1963 release, a group of young Italian writers founded Gruppo ’63, a literary collective of the neoavanguardia composed of novelists, reviewers, critics, and poets inspired by 8½ and Umberto Eco‘s seminal essay, Opera aperta (Open Work).[42]
The 1993 music video for R.E.M.‘s song “Everybody Hurts” draws heavily from 8½‘s opening dream sequence, with the band stuck in a traffic jam. Subtitles of the thoughts of people trapped inside cars appear on screen until everyone abandons their vehicle to walk instead; then they vanish.
The European Network of Young Cinema NISI MASA was named after the phrase “Asa Nisi Masa” in 8½.
In 2010, the film was ranked #62 in Empire magazine’s “The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema”.[45]
At the Saint Vincent Film Festival, it was awarded Grand Prize over Luchino Visconti‘s Il gattopardo (The Leopard). The film screened in April at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival[47] to “almost universal acclaim but no prize was awarded because it was shown outside the competition. Cannes rules demanded exclusivity in competition entries, and 8½ was already earmarked as Italy’s official entry in the later Moscow festival”.[48] Presented on 18 July 1963 to an audience of 8,000 in the Kremlin‘s conference hall, 8½ won the prestigious Grand Prize at the 3rd Moscow International Film Festival[49] to acclaim that, according to Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich, worried the Soviet festival authorities: the applause was “a cry for freedom”.[28] Jury members included Stanley Kramer, Jean Marais, Satyajit Ray, and screenwriter Sergio Amidei.[50]
Jump up^Alberto Arbasino (1963), review of 8½ in Il Giorno, 6 March 1963: “The film is a step forward in the history of novelistic form. The block structure of La Dolce Vita already paved the way in both cinema and littérature. Otto et mezzo, however, not only outdistances by many years almost all films currently made but impacts our narrative at the most sensitive moment of the friction between convention and avant-garde, and may well provide a boost in the direction of the experimental, i.e. the future, as regards, among other things, the problems of being, of writing, and the relationship with reality.”
Jump up^Film scholar Charles Affron writes that “the status of 8½ as a ‘classic’ text can be recognized in the homage of its imitations and versions.” Cf. Affron, 5. Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella concurs: “As might be expected from the work’s important place in the history of the cinema, the criticism on 8½ is voluminous.” Cf. Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, 163
Jump up^8½, Criterion Collection DVD, featured commentary track.
Jump up^“The suicide theme is so overwhelming,” Pinelli told Fellini, “that you’ll crush your film.” Cited in Fellini: I’m a Born Liar (2002), directed by Damian Pettigrew.
Jump up^Alpert, 174-175, and Kezich, 245. The documentary L’Ultima sequenza (2003) also discusses the lost sequence.
Jump up^John Simon considered the film’s originality was compromised “because the ‘dance of life’ at the end was suggested by Bergman’s dance of death in The Seventh Seal (which Fellini had not seen)”. Quoted in Alpert, 181
Jump up^First published in the NYT, 26 June 1963. Fava and Vigano, 118
Jump up^First published in The New York Post, 26 June 1963. Fava and Vigano, 118.
Jump up^Gabriele Pedullà, Alberto Arbasino [2000] “Interviste –Sull’albero di ciliegie” (“On the Cherry Tree”) in CONTEMPORANEA Rivista di studi sulla letteratura e sulla comunicazione, Volume 1, 2003. Q: In some of your texts written during the 60s – I’m thinking above all of Certi romanzi – critical reflections on questions of the novel […] are always interlaced in both an implicit and explicit way with reflections on cinema. In particular, it seems to me that your affinity with Fellini is especially significant: for example, your review of Otto e mezzo in Il Giorno. A: Reading Musil, we discovered parallels and similar procedures. But without being able to establish, either then or today, how much there was of Flaiano and how much, on the other hand, was of [Fellini’s] own intuition.
Cast: Mary Pickford, Alfred Paget, Kate Bruce, Charles Craig, Frank Evans, Edith Haldeman, Ruth Hart, Arthur V Johnson, James Kirkwood, Henry Lehrman, Owen Moore, George Nichols, Lottie Pickford, Mack Sennett, Dorothy West
According to the New York Dramatic Mirror, the film is about “the helpless Indian race as it has been forced to recede before the advancing white, and as such is full of poetic sentiment”.[2]
According to Scott Simon, “the film’s title works out to mean “The Red Man’s Point of View”, and for all the film’s difficulty in making drama from a long, passive march, there’s nothing like The Red Man’s View in Hollywood until John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn more than fifty years later”.[3]
Cast: Mary Pickford, William Scott, Kate Price, Ida Waterman, Norman Kerry, Fred Goodwin, Margaret Landis, Tom Wilson, Gustav Von Seyffertitz, Leo White
67 min
Marshall Neilan
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley is a 1918 American silent comedy romance film starring Mary Pickford that was directed by Marshall Neilan and written by Frances Marion based upon a novel by Belle K. Maniates.[2]
Set in San Francisco during the early 1900s, the film revolves around Amarilly (Mary Pickford), the daughter of a widowed scrubwoman. Amarilly is proud of her hard-working Irish family, and takes care of her five roughhouse brothers. She is engaged to bartender Terry McGowan (William Scott), who gets her a job as a cigarette girl in his cafe after a fire unfairly causes her to lose her job as a theater scrubwoman. While working as a cigarette girl, she meets Gordon Phillips (Norman Kerry), a handsome and wealthy but frivolous young man, who is a society sculptor.
Terry becomes jealous when Amarilly starts hanging out with Gordon, and he breaks off the engagement. Gordon offers Amarilly a job with his wealthy and snobbish aunt, Mrs. Phillips (Ida Waterman). When the neighborhood is quarantined after a breakout of scarlet fever, Mrs. Phillips decides to take the time to teach Amarilly high class manners in a Pygmalion-like experiment. However, once she discovers her nephew has fallen in love with Amarilly, she turns against her. Mrs. Phillips tries to humiliate Amarilly by inviting her family over for a social party.
Amarilly is outraged and returns to her old home. She sees Terry and invites him for supper. He is delighted, and on the way to her house, he stops to buy expensive 50 cent violets, even though he had earlier passed up violets at 15 cents. He is shot by accident, and barely makes it to Amarilly’s house before collapsing. Fortunately, Terry survives. Amarilly visits him in the hospital and tells him that when he gets out, they have a date at City Hall.
The final scene is five years later. Amarilly is in a side car on Terry’s motor bike; they both are nicely dressed and seem to be doing well. Then it is revealed under the blanket she has a baby, and behind Terry is a little boy.
Like many American films of the time, Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley was subject to cuts by city and state film censorship boards. For example, the Chicago Board of Censors required a cut, i Reel 1, of a closeup of money in a man’s hand and, Reel 4, maid opening door to alleged house of ill-fame and man entering.[3]
Film Dialogue 
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