I'm Beginning to Like Segundo de Chomón Almost as Much as Georges Melies

Fancy Running into You Here, Leonard Maltin

Yesterday I caught two films at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival -- The Wild Rose (1932) and and Underworld (1927).

The Wild Rose is supposedly one of China's most popular films of all time, and it was not surprisingly very nationalistic but surprisingly filled with a lot of giddy slapstick. It also broke from the norm by having a female lead who was a strong-willed country girl who was anything bu fragile but cute and a male lead who was pretty, artsy and cultured. There were some great art deco sets in plush homes of 1930s Shanghai.
Underworld by contrast featured very manly man leads whose names were Buck and Bull. The fourth feature of Josef von Sternberg, it had plenty of characteristic excess and was an example of why blonde women did not come into vogue until the advent of sound. Is there something about peroxide that simply didn't mix with melodramatic gestures and inter-titles.

Von Sternberg has always been one of my favorite examples of glorious pretense and self invention. Sometimes I think about following his lead and renaming the blog Dieb von Trödels.

As always it was a well presented slate of films, and there were several I wished afterwards that I'd seen. This year, I passed perennial speaker and viewer Leonard Maltin several times. There's something odd about seeing such a familiar face standing in line with the masses to wait for his turn in the men's room.

See What It Can Do For You

What is your greatest fear? One of my closest friends in Park Slope (who just happened to be from Belgium which explains a lot) said that he had a fear of people with two first names. At the top of the list was Lisa Lisa, with or without the Cult Jam. Second was Tina Louise. Third was Rose Maire. I was never sure if it was Rose Marie or Rosemarie.

We've moved on from the era of two first names to three names, with the middle one not being a real middle name but either a second first name or a precursor last name. True middle names are accents not actual names. (Mine, for example is Lynn.) Bobby Lee Gentry is a perfect example of a nice progression of first, middle and last names. I think it was Jan Michael Vincent (Almost three first names, depending on your perspective) who got things on the wrong foot. Of course, we would then have our share of the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, Tommy Lee Jones, Jennifer Jason Leigh (Hello! Three first names), Mary-Louse Parker (Don't even get me started on hyphens), Haley Joel Osment (or was it Haley Kate Osmond, some fifth cousin of Donny and Marie?), Neil Patrick Harris and Edward James Olmos. It makes one long for the days of Nico, Brickhouse, Odetta and Lambchop. Singular names are so grounding. The Rock is not a singular name but a pretense. When I go by JunkThief, I fear it's a pretentious hybrid with that big capital T sitting in the middle like a shrink trying to reconcile a conflicted couple.

Do you know who was the first singularly name superstar? I really don't. I want to say Nazimova but I'm not sure.
UPDATE: Not that I want to get in an argument with The Angry Young Man, but based on this 2008 photo of Tina with Sylvia Miles, for a 75-year-old woman she does not look that "pathetic". Sylvia, of course, continues to amaze us with her eternally youthful and ageless beauty.

Hush, Hush Sweet Junk Thief

I wrapped up the silent film festival weekend with two completely unrelated films as the afternoon moved into early evening.

A restored print of Her Wild Oat discovered in the Czech Republic and starring Colleen Moore was a nice treat. I first discovered her nearly 40 years ago in middle school when I picked up her autobiography in the bargain bin. Though she was the top box office draw in 1926 and 1927, she is pretty much forgotten by non-silent movie fans. Ironically, Louise Brooks was relatively obscure at the time and considered a cheap Colleen Moore knock off. Colleen had the flapper thing going long before Louise went to Berlin to be Lulu. Perhaps because she retired fairly happily and spent the next 50 years happily married and sane hurt her reputation as a legend. Her persona was somewhere between Clara Bow and Mary Pickford. Speaking of which, the feature was preceded by a two minute techincolor screen test of Pickford having dropped the orphan-waif and looking vampish, seductive and ready to play Lulu. Her Wild Oat merged the hard working orphan with the gauche flapper with scenes at the Del Coronado Hotel that seemed the template for Some Like It Hot to ultimately copy.
Having such a light but touching comedy before Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro was not the best build up for such an intensely dark film. I appreciated that it was not a film about samurais, geishas, martial arts or an Ozu family chamber drama. Its central theme of a younger brother declaring to his big sister "I will follow you to the end of the earth" carried greater resonance after the screen faded to black, and it was all so dark -- sets painted gray and filmed at night -- with plenty of rain, blood, ash, painted hussies, a greedy old madam and a host of villains with bad teeth.

As always, this festival is the best trip to a foreign land -- the first quarter of the 20th century -- and I come away wishing I'd seen even more in the series.

Get Up and Make Us a Meatloaf -- NOW

Being just a few inches away from Guy Maddin last night, I wished I'd been brave enough to ask him when My Winnipeg will finally be screened in this cultural backwater that is San Francisco. They're showing it in Palm Springs fro Chrissakes!

I really need to see those Canadian man pageants.

Midnight Dismemberment and Sissies

Few things confirm my film nerddom more than the annual Silent Film Festival, but I am always in good company with the packed houses. Last night was the latest film screening in the festival's history with the director's pick, The Unknown. The hour-long Tod Browning directed featured starred Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford and heavily featured dismemberment. You could tell what sort of crowd was there when the theater erupted in hysterical applause when during the pre-show slide show there was an image from Browning's Freaks. To top things off, there was an introduction and English reading of the French inter-titles by Guy Maddin, director of The Saddest Music in the World (which also features dismemberment and glass legs filled with beer), Center of the World and Sissy Boy Slap party. The last entry drew heavy, knowing applause too. What, you've never seen it? Here it is.

Shh...the Silents Are Coming

Film discovery of the week was the career of Lois Weber whose 1915 The Hypocrites which is credited with being the first mainstream film to feature explicit female nudity, albeit in the Biblical visions of a troubled suburban vicar. Kino is often equal to Criterion of bringing obscure, and especially obscure American silents, to the weary DVD consumer. It's a perfect prelude to the upcoming Silent Film Festival the best of all celluloid gatherings of the year. Tickets bought, research underway. Oh, and Guy Maddin will be there.

JTTV - Season 2, Episode 17 - It's That Junk Thief!

Our greatest episode ever. We promise.

If you watch only one episode of Junk Thief TV, watch this one.

Honestly, we want to bring more episodes similar to the finale of this one that features a silent movie treatment of the mythical San Francisco. Let us know if you want more and any suggestions for future episodes (including guest stars; we love guest stars!).

Northern Comfort

I am really anxious to see Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, which he is billing as a "docutasia" and pulling in stories from his own life, the history of Winnipeg and his usual weird silent era Soviet film influences. It's slowly making its way across the border into New York and may be out west come July.

Oakland, Chinese Family Values and Le Cochon Danseur

Friendatella (whom I know well enough to call just F'tella) and I went to see a wonderfully obscure film tonight in Oakland's Lake Merritt District called The Curse of Quon Gwon, believed to be the oldest extant Asian American film, committed to celluloid in 1916. Clocking in at just around 35 minutes, it was a tale of a couple dealing with issues of in-laws, contemporary vs. traditional values, and cultural identity. There was also a moment or two of odd footwear and head dresses.

It was coupled with a 90 minute documentary called Hollywood Chinese that was also heavily promoted at the Asian American Film Festival last month where I saw the great documentaries on Anna May Wong and the Long/Leung family but have not gotten around to writing about. For better or worse, having a life has made me a bit delinquent on reporting and critiquing on this blog.

The best part of the evening may have been that I may be turning F'tella into a silent film buff after he went reluctantly to a Louise Brooks flick at last summer's Silent Film Festival. Speaking of which, I am glad to post this clip from one of my favorite discoveries from that festival last year in a retrospective called Saved From the Flames that featured many short Melies films and other early silent obscurities. Dancing, stripping pigs are always a great joy, as the clip below attests.

Anybody Know...

...if there is a print available in any form of 1957's Jeanne Eagels starring Kim Novak in the titular role? I absolutely adored this film after seeing it only once in 1972 on late night TV. To the best of my knowledge, it's not available in any form or, for that matter, any of Eagels' own movies. It touched me on a deep level, and I hope that when I finally see it again I am not disappointed by it. Eagels, according legend, was sort of an American Anita Berber. Not unlike Louise Brooks coming from Wichita, she came from Kansas City but was a flame that dimmed too soon.

If I could find Skidoo, surely I can track this one down.

More Melies, One Century On

I just can't seem to get enough of George Melies these days. In recognition of its centennial, I post perhaps my favorite of all of his films: The Eclipse - The Romance of the Moon and the Sun. Is it the first same sex romantic story ever committed to film? I'm not sure. But when the sun gets behind the moon, the expression on the face of the lunar star is, well, captivating.

Merry Méliès

I've long been a fan of the film sof Georges Méliès, but he has figured unusually prominent in my psyche this year. Perhaps all the dreamy swirls of Gaudi in Barcelona from a century earlier and the Centennial of such Méliès classics as The Dream of the Opium Eater, The Eclipse and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea have added to it. Like other cinematic pioneers from Griffith to Welles, he spent the last decades of his life in obscurity and near squalor.

Thus Brian Selnick's "children's" book The Invention of Hugo Cabret is proving to be a perfect holiday season read. Its 500+ pages are made up of nearly 300 pages of illustrations, yet it is less a graphic novel or Harry Potteresque fantasy as it is a more lyrical Doctrow treatment of history and redemption of an overlooked artist.

Fittingly, I added another volume of Méliès films to my library this week yet have yet to come across a print of the The Dream of the Opium Eater which has long intrigued me. The San Francisco Silent Film festival featured a number of his century old works this summer, yet they have yet to share this one. There is always hope.

Concentric Circles of Zasu

When I was in middle school, a girl who worked on art projects with me had an obsession with the actress Zasu Pitts. I had no idea who she was talking about but acted as if I did. No slouch, the girl asked me, "So what are your favorite movies of hers?" Not missing a beat, I responded, "Oh, you know, the German ones." She responded back, "Oh, indeed, Von Stroheim and Greed." That ended the conversation, but the words Greed and Zasu stuck with me for years, years before we had imdb.com and Wikipedia. There was just something about someone named Zasu that stuck with me, especially when paired with a moniker like Pitts.

Only in my college years, would I have my first opportunity to see Greed on a big screen, albeit in a very poorly preserved print. But her portrayal of Trina did not disappoint me in this rarely afforded opportunity to finally see that face and personality paired with such an odd name. The passing this week of Leona Helmsley harkened back to that image of Pitts' character Trina as well as the miserly Hetty Green whose bio I've referred to earlier here.

What is it about greed in men that is so repulsive but fascinating when embodied in a woman? Of course, Pitts would go on to play mainly comic, light characters, but her early career always fascinated me. Only recently did I discover that she was born and spent her earliest years in Parsons, Kansas, where I have several family members. How fitting that like Louise Brooks, Kansas with its flat, abstract landscape produced a disturbed and distrubing artist.

Stranger still while researching a piece on Zasu for my vlog that I came across this embodiment of the name Zasu in, of all places, Melbourne, Australia. Sometimes sweet, beautiful madness smiles down on a flat landscape and transports its bent poets into great places.

Thieves Be Not Too Proud to Beg

I've long been a great fan of silent films, something that some folks consider insane. Why follow an obsolete, inferior medium when there are so many glossier, noisier options, some may ask. It's so melodramatic? As if opera isn't I reply? Don't you want to go to a movie to be entertained instead of being forced to read? You do more reading with subtitled films, I respond. Folks either get it or they don't.

I agree that there are some really bad, overblown silent films with too much make up, primitive camera angles and lame scripts. But when they work, they have the capacity to transport you into a time and place far, far away that are far more compelling than most high tech CGI adventure. So I always greet the San Francisco Silent Film Festival with great anticipation and usually see at lest two to three offerings. Last night Friendatella joined me for William Wellman's Beggars of Life, a not exactly great but compelling film that had the distinction of being Louise Brooks' last film before going of to Berlin to be turned into an art house icon by G.W. Pabst.

I've only seen her three European ventures, so I held out mixed hopes for seeing if her claim that she was a lousy actress was true. Would she prove to be just a pretty tool of the Weimar era puppet master in her Hollywood era phase? Fortunately she was anything but that, and she was just as captivating as "the girl" as she was as Lulu. Dressed in "boy's clothes" she could pass for boho chic in any urban environ in 2007. Her co-star Richard Arlen was equally fetching. A tidbit of trivia that Friendatella shared was that in the 1960s Arlen and Wings co-star Buddy Rogers were reunited on Petticoat Junction. The relationship between the two leads in Wings has often been characterized as having strong homoerotic overtones, plus it has a very young Gary Cooper, who in his youth managed to send the homoerotic score of any film a few notches up the scale.

According to Patrick Loughney of the George Eastman House. who introduced the film, there is a long lost sound and dialogue track for the film that may surface some day. Though not quite worthy of a Criterion treatment, I hope Beggars of Life makes it to DVD by itself or with a few other Brooks' Hollywood era films. In the meantime I've been toying with buying the VHS of Overland Stage Raiders (1938), Brooks' last film made with, oddly enough, John Wayne just months before he went huge with Stagecoach.

1980s Fun Band of the Week - Alaska y Dinarama

What is there not to love about Alaska? She's made a comeback of sorts this year thanks to a duet with Miguel Bosé . She was in Almodovar's first film in 1980. And in this video for "Ni tú ni nadie" she and the boys look like the house band at the coolest gay bar in the world circa 1985. This tune has it all -- punk and goth attitude, a gorgeous string interlude midway (sounding like a Trevor Horn production circa 1982's The Lexicon of Love by ABC), Abbey Road era horns, an oohing and ahhing chorus, and Ms. Alaska doing her best Theda Bara at the heart of it. It's the perfect wake up and seize the day anthem in my book.

And who can top Alaska for all around coolness? A girl that longed to be a gay man, her father fled Spain to escape Fascism, her mother fled Cuba to escape Communism. Out of the romance of two exiles came genius.

Alaska













Theda