This 1926 poster for a little-known tenement-set silent drama Sunshine of Paradise Alley grabbed my attention recently. Though it conforms to a lot of the conventions of 1920s movie posters, especially in the billing, there is something ineffably not-of-its period about the image. Maybe it’s the coloring (that yellow face, reminiscent in its oddity of Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl, painted 26 years later) or maybe it’s the tousled hair of star Barbara Bedford, so unlike 1920s movie star styles. And then there’s that beautiful title treatment (the same color as the face) with its unconventional “S”s and stacked “L”s.
Another unusual aspect of the poster is that it is signed—a quite uncommon occurrence in the 20s. (I wrote previously about Henry Clive who was an exception to the rule). The artist was Josef Bakos (1891-1977), a New York-born son of Polish immigrants who was a founding member of “Los Cinco Pintores,...
Another unusual aspect of the poster is that it is signed—a quite uncommon occurrence in the 20s. (I wrote previously about Henry Clive who was an exception to the rule). The artist was Josef Bakos (1891-1977), a New York-born son of Polish immigrants who was a founding member of “Los Cinco Pintores,...
- 3/15/2014
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Wallace Beery from Pancho Villa to Long John Silver: TCM schedule (Pt) on August 17, 2013 (photo: Fay Wray, Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa in ‘Viva Villa!’) See previous post: “Wallace Beery: Best Actor Oscar Winner — and Runner-Up.” 3:00 Am The Last Of The Mohicans (1920). Director: Maurice Tourneur. Cast: Barbara Bedford, Albert Roscoe, Wallace Beery, Lillian Hall, Henry Woodward, James Gordon, George Hackathorne, Nelson McDowell, Harry Lorraine, Theodore Lorch, Jack McDonald, Sydney Deane, Boris Karloff. Bw-76 mins. 4:30 Am The Big House (1930). Director: George W. Hill. Cast: Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Robert Montgomery, Leila Hyams, George F. Marion, J.C. Nugent, DeWitt Jennings, Matthew Betz, Claire McDowell, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Tom Wilson, Eddie Foyer, Roscoe Ates, Fletcher Norton, Noah Beery Jr, Chris-Pin Martin, Eddie Lambert, Harry Wilson. Bw-87 mins. 6:00 Am Bad Man Of Brimstone (1937). Director: J. Walter Ruben. Cast: Wallace Beery, Virginia Bruce, Dennis O’Keefe. Bw-89 mins.
- 8/17/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Wallace Beery: Best Actor Academy Award winner and Best Actor Academy Award runner-up in the same year (photo: Jackie Cooper and Wallace Beery in ‘The Champ’) (See previous post: “Wallace Beery Movies: Anomalous Hollywood Star.”) In the Academy’s 1931-32 season, Wallace Beery took home the Best Actor Academy Award — I mean, one of them. In the King Vidor-directed melodrama The Champ (1931), Beery plays a down-on-his-luck boxer and caring Dad to tearduct-challenged Jackie Cooper, while veteran Irene Rich is Beery’s cool former wife and Cooper’s mother. Will daddy and son remain together forever and ever? Audiences the world over were drowned in tears — theirs and Jackie Cooper’s. Now, regarding Wallace Beery’s Best Actor Academy Award, he was actually a runner-up: Fredric March, initially announced as the sole winner for his performance in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, turned out to have...
- 8/17/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
In Robert Wiene’s 1920 dreamlike horror classic, veteran German actor Werner Krauss plays the mysterious Dr. Caligari, the apparent force behind a creepy somnambulist named Cesare and played by Conrad Veidt, who abducts beautiful Lil Dagover. The finale in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has inspired tons of movies and television shows, from Fritz Lang's 1944 film noir The Woman in the Window to the last episode of the TV series St. Elsewhere. In addition, the film shares some key elements in common (suppposedly as a result of a mere coincidence) with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio's 2011 thriller Shutter Island. The 1920 crime melodrama Outside the Law is not in any way related to Rachid Bouchareb's 2010 political drama. Instead, the Tod Browning-directed movie is a well-made entry in the gangster genre (long before the explosion a decade later). Browning, best known for his early '30s efforts Dracula and Freaks,...
- 4/1/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
In the grand scheme of father and son/daughter directors, Jacques Tourneur is the one clear case of offspring surpassing his parent. It may not have seemed so at the time, since father Maurice Tourneur had been in charge of big movies like The Last of the Mohicans (1920), while Jacques was "merely" the director of "B" horrors like Cat People (1942). But now it's fairly obvious that Jacques was much more than his "B" movie budgets. Of the major second-stringers, he was the only one who never seemed to be scrounging, digging to discover art within trash. Rather, he elevated his films to some kind of new level of ethereal, mysterious, shadowy beauty.
One of his many hard-to-find movies, Nightfall (1957), gets a released on DVD this week as part of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II. It has a particularly wretched little plot, from a David Goodis story: Aldo Ray stars...
One of his many hard-to-find movies, Nightfall (1957), gets a released on DVD this week as part of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II. It has a particularly wretched little plot, from a David Goodis story: Aldo Ray stars...
- 7/10/2010
- by Jeffrey M. Anderson
- Cinematical
Clarence Brown made a long and successful career, after getting his start taking over The Last of the Mohicans from Maurice Touneur in 1920 (see last Thursday's article), as a director of MGM romantic melodrama, scoring several notable successes with Garbo and Crawford. 1931's Possessed, with Joan C., is particularly impressive, a fluid early talkie with pre-code sass, class consciousness, glitz and glamour, and a famous shot where a train slowly glides past a yearning Joan, each compartment featuring illuminated scenes of the urban sophistication she craves. It's like a beautiful tracking shot, only Joan and the camera stand still and the world tracks past.
As excellent as Brown's glossy studio artistry was, it pales somewhat compared to the surprising masterpiece that appears out of left field in 1949. Intruder in the Dust was made as part of MGM's anniversary output, which also included Siodmak's The Great Sinner, a movie which exemplifies the MGM approach to art,...
As excellent as Brown's glossy studio artistry was, it pales somewhat compared to the surprising masterpiece that appears out of left field in 1949. Intruder in the Dust was made as part of MGM's anniversary output, which also included Siodmak's The Great Sinner, a movie which exemplifies the MGM approach to art,...
- 10/10/2009
- MUBI
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