Tweet Karl Brown's STARK LOVE (1927) may be coming to DVD?

Wow! Karl Brown's STARK LOVE Starring Helen Mundey in her only screen appearance was voted into the National Film Registry in December of 2010. Now based on this video on Youtube, it sounds like the restored film could very possibly be forth-coming on DVD. Perhaps from Paramount. It also sounds as if TCM might be premiering it sometime this year.

I have seen STARK LOVE and it is a very interesting movie. Another Paramount Silent on DVD? This would be amazing news. If you count the TREASURES FROM THE AMERICAN FILM ARCHIVE Set 5 that came out last fall. We have had three Paramoutn Silents in less than 6 months released. The collection contained both WOMAN HANDLED with Richard Dix and Esther Ralston, as well as Clara Bow's MAN TRAP.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82DHr6I- ... re=related"


Whoops, looks like this post was from a year ago. Nevertheless, it may have taken that long to ink a deal with TCM. Assuming it is TCM that is the unnamed network? Who else could it be?

YES!, that's great news and about time. How did you find this out? Why is STARK LOVE considered a lost masterpiece when it has never been lost. Didn't know WOMAN HANDLED was out on dvd.

sepiatone,

Well, STARK LOVE was lost until 1968. But really has only been seen a scant few times since. It was featured on the Lost And Found series way back in in 1978, which is the only copy circulating The score is very interesting, and I would like to see it maintained. It is a small orchestra. At first I did not like it, but it fits much of the movie perfectly. I'm not so sure that the picture is complete. It's an interesting story. Unlike anything almost that's been done in some ways.

Actually, looking at the post more closely the guy says that the documentary on the film they are working on should be coming to DVD and possibly a major network soon. That was about a year ago., though the original post is older. He does not intimate that the movie itself would be included. So it's all kind of confusing. While I would be excited about STARK LOVE, I'd be even more excited about Universal's LONESOME.

[silentfilm]

Here is more information on the documentary, which was released in 2010.

The link Bruce provides is very accurate. Dr. White (who published a long article on "Stark Love" in the quarterly "Film History") hunted down descendants of the non-professionals who appeared in Karl Brown's film, which was made in the mountains near Asheville, NC. Not surprisingly, these descendants had almost nothing to contribute to the story although a couple of them remembered persons in the film from their childhoods.

The principal source for "Stark Love," no secret at all, is a fine book by Horace Kephardt called "Our Southern Highlanders." The author was a social worker for the YMCA who spent many years at the beginning of the 20th century riding circuit in the North Carolina mountains, helping folks who lived there in semi-isolation. I have a copy with notes that was given me by Mr. Brown -- by chance, I used to live directly across the street from him. However, the book has become a classic and I believe it is still in print.

I was at the AFI when the film was recovered from the Czech archive. It bore the title "In the Glens of California." We couldn't find a cutting continuity anywhere so we had to translate the Czech titles and I wrote English titles based upon those translations. We showed it at the 1969 or 1970 New York Film Festival and elsewhere. The foreign negative seemed to have been edited rather crudely from out-takes (there was only one camera) and when I showed our finished version to Karl Brown, he very politely said that he thought it bore sparse relation to the original domestic version, that in fact it was pretty awful, and was certainly no "lost masterpiece" in its present form. All we have today is a suggestion of what the film might have been. The preservation element is at MoMA.

David Shepard

I've never seen a poster for Stark Love, but here's some pre-release artwork from the 1927 Paramount Release Book:



I would think a Paramount DVD of this would be unlikely, if only because there are no memorable stars in the film, but I'd sure like to see it.

thanks Gagman, Bruce and David Shepard for that background info. Since I had read books by Kevin Brownlow "The Parade's Gone By" (1968) and the later "The War, The West, The Wilderness" (1979) I always assumed this film had survived but was just rarely seen , sort of like "White Shadows in the South Seas" of which Joe Franklin or Wm Everson praises in a 1959 publication "75 Stars, 50 Films". Daniel Blum also included a decent still of Stark Love in his 1953 "Pictorial History of the Silent Screen.

[silentfilm]

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/mar/25/silent-movie-wowed-critics-flopped-at-box-office/

Silent movie wowed critics, flopped at box office

By Matt Lakin
Posted March 25, 2012 at 4 a.m.

The film opened to rave reviews from The New York Times and featured Knoxville's first hometown girl to grace the big screen.

Just don't let its title fool you.

" 'Stark Love' is not a sex picture," the Knoxville Sentinel assured its readers. "A Knoxville girl has helped make a motion picture that will in turn help make motion picture history."

The silent movie, filmed in the Smoky Mountains near Robbinsville, N.C., saw the only star turn by Helen Monday, a 16-year-old Knoxville High School student plucked from a drugstore counter by a passing talent scout. She never made another film, despite praise for her acting as hillbilly heroine Barbara Allen.

Monday wasn't there to see her debut on the screen of Knoxville's Riviera theater June 21, 1927. She was busy touring in Nashville with Maynard Baird and his Southern Serenaders orchestra, a regular act on Knoxville's WNOX radio.

The movie's plot couldn't have been darker. Rob Warwick, an unlettered mountain boy played by teenager Forrest James, falls in love with Barbara, a neighbor's daughter. At her urging, he teaches himself to read and leaves the hills of home to study in the city.
Actress Helen Mundy in the 1927 silent film 'Stark Love.' Mundy was a 16-year-old student at Knoxville High School whose real name was Helen Monday. (KNS Archive)

Photo by KNS archive

Actress Helen Mundy in the 1927 silent film 'Stark Love.' Mundy was a 16-year-old student at Knoxville High School whose real name was Helen Monday. (KNS Archive)

He comes home to find his mother dead, exhausted by a life of hard work, and Barbara claimed as a replacement bride by his abusive, barbaric father. The climax comes when father and son face off in the one-room cabin home as the father drags the unwilling girl to the marital bed.

Barbara saves the day when she turns on the father with an ax and leads Rob to safety through a flood.

Director Karl Brown, a former cameraman for D.W. Griffith, had pitched the film as a documentary in the style of "Nanook of the North," made with real mountain people he claimed had never even seen a camera. In reality, he recruited Monday and James from restaurants and drugstores in Southern cities like Knoxville and rounded up the rest from locals.

He paid the sheriff extra for deputies to guard Monday, who basked in the limelight and nearly got her first taste of moonshine on set.

The movie's Oedipal storyline didn't sit well with executives at Paramount, its distributor. Audiences didn't take to the film, either, even though the Times endorsed it as an "engrossing and trenchant pictorial transcript of the daily life of those slothful mountaineers. ... all living, dressing and undressing, sleeping and eating in the same cabin room."

The dawn of talking pictures had already begun to shove silents like "Stark Love" to the side. Couple that with a controversial plot and half-hearted marketing by skittish studio heads, and the movie faded from public view.

The studio melted most of the reels for "Stark Love" down to salvage the silver nitrate stock. Film scholars considered it a lost classic until a copy surfaced in a Czechoslovakian archive in 1968.

Even today, the movie remains mostly unseen — never translated to home video, with all rights claimed by the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Library of Congress. The Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound worked for years to arrange a single screening five years ago at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville.

James and Monday never pursued Hollywood careers. James went home to Alabama to an athletic and business career and to father future Gov. Fob James. Monday married and moved to Galesburg, Mich., where she died in 1987.

The Sentinel's anonymous reviewer generally approved of "Stark Love" for its acting, storyline and cinematography but balked at a few details.

"It is to be hoped that mountain customs are not quite as primitive as the picture will have us believe," he wrote. "The mountaineers are not quite so hard on their women."
© 2012, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.

Bruce,

This would seem to infer that Paramount claims no lingering rights to the surviving print of the film?

Finally saw this although the print was pretty bad and the music awful. Is this slated for a DVD release?

Helen Mundy Mundey Monday was actually pretty good and struck a few Gish-like poses. I wonder if she directed to act like Gish or if she was familiar with Gish films?