Tweet Gallery of Mastheads

I was loving the Sennette masthead..
I hate to see it go early.

Agnes

Nice variation. For a split second there, I thought I'd entered the wrong theater.

A request (have these folks ever appeared on the masthead?):

[Mike Gebert]

Well, I have a Marx Bro. and someone else well-liked in a nice one to use one of these days, when there's not a tie-in some month. But for October...



Though you might not know it from our masthead most months, they did make old movies in places besides the U.S., and one of the things I really enjoy about NitrateVille is participation from overseas (well, it's overseas to me), as well as the threads which dig into the rich but not always familiar history of entertainment films in other places— like the British Film Review and Discussion Thread. So this month pays tribute not only to Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in the delicious Gainsborough melodrama The Wicked Lady, one of the biggest hits in British film history, and to Criterion releasing it and two other Gainsborough pictures on an Eclipse set, but to one of my favorite threads to dive into and learn about something I never, ever heard of before.

Have these folks ever appeared on the masthead?:

Good image. As a fan of all 4 Marx Brothers I appreciate that you selected a shot that includes Zeppo.

Good God, I thought it was Vivien Leigh and Sir Larry!

I must get my glasses cleaned...

Jim

That was my first thought, Jim. "Is that from Wuthering Heights?" Then I wondered what they were thinking about: "My god! Is that dip?!"

Bob

Have these folks ever appeared on the masthead?:

Good image. As a fan of all 4 Marx Brothers I appreciate that you selected a shot that includes Zeppo.

Me too. But I think that photo has been flipped.

Well, I have a Marx Bro. and someone else well-liked in a nice one to use one of these days, when there's not a tie-in some month. But for October...



Though you might not know it from our masthead most months, they did make old movies in places besides the U.S., and one of the things I really enjoy about NitrateVille is participation from overseas (well, it's overseas to me), as well as the threads which dig into the rich but not always familiar history of entertainment films in other places— like the British Film Review and Discussion Thread. So this month pays tribute not only to Margaret Lockwood and James Mason in the delicious Gainsborough melodrama The Wicked Lady, one of the biggest hits in British film history, and to Criterion releasing it and two other Gainsborough pictures on an Eclipse set, but to one of my favorite threads to dive into and learn about something I never, ever heard of before.

WHOOPEE! SQUEEE!! One of my favorite movies ever! Ever, do you hear???

But I think that photo has been flipped.

You may be right. Groucho's eyes, in particular, seem wrong. Here's my source for the photo, which has certainly been heavily airbrushed for press reproduction, as was common. If anyone can recognize the posters in the background (presumably for Paramount films) and compare with the originals, the question could be easily settled.

[Mike Gebert]

Chico's hair matches the way it's usually combed, and the jacket's buttoned the right way. Also I doubt that poster in the back right with the man and woman would have been the other way.

Madonna of the Seven Moons is an excellent film.

I need to see this film! Lockwood and Lamont (oops Mason)

But I think that photo has been flipped.

You may be right. Groucho's eyes, in particular, seem wrong. Here's my source for the photo, which has certainly been heavily airbrushed for press reproduction, as was common. If anyone can recognize the posters in the background (presumably for Paramount films) and compare with the originals, the question could be easily settled.

OK, now that I can see the whole picture, it does look all right. I remembered seeing a picture similar to this one in Richard J. Anobile's The Marx Brothers Scrapbook, only they're all shot from their right side instead of the left. It just might have been taken from a different angle, rather than being flipped. But boy, did they have to do a lot of airbrushing to bring up the detail! I can tell from the marks that the photo editor might have given up and just cropped out the problem areas.

Lockwood and Mason. What a lovely surprise when I just logged in

That was my first thought, Jim. "Is that from Wuthering Heights?" Then I wondered what they were thinking about: "My god! Is that dip?!"

Bob

Thank God I'm not the only one. Put bad wigs and velvet coats on 'em, and all these British actors look the same!

Jim

That was my first thought, Jim. "Is that from Wuthering Heights?" Then I wondered what they were thinking about: "My god! Is that dip?!"

Bob

Thank God I'm not the only one. Put bad wigs and velvet coats on 'em, and all these British actors look the same!

Jim

(THUNK.)

...I remembered seeing a picture similar to this one in Richard J. Anobile's The Marx Brothers Scrapbook, only they're all shot from their right side instead of the left. It just might have been taken from a different angle, rather than being flipped...

That still was shot during the filming of the 1931 Paramount promotional film THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT and was also used for promotion of the Marxes' 1931 movie MONKEY BUSINESS.

Here are some other shots from THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT:

Marx Brothers with father - The House that Shadows Built (1931).jpg (69.11 KiB) Viewed 1364 times

Marx Brothers - The House that Shadows Built (1931) - 1.jpg (15.6 KiB) Viewed 1364 times

And another from THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT (1931):

Marx Brothers - The House that Shadows Built (1931) - small version.jpg (42.49 KiB) Viewed 1362 times

And the same, in detail:

Marx Brothers - The House that Shadows Built (1931) - detail (small version).jpg (44.6 KiB) Viewed 1362 times

At the left hand edge of the last still, you can just see the right half of the poster above Harpo's head in the original queried still......if that one was flipped, both were....

At the left hand edge of the last still, you can just see the right half of the poster above Harpo's head in the original queried still......if that one was flipped, both were....

I'm sure none of them were flipped.
For example, we can read printing on some of the posters on the wall and in all the photos the stripes on Chico's tie are all going the same way, indicating that if any of the photos were flipped the stripes would go the other way.

[Mike Gebert]

With Kino releasing four early films on DVD and Die Nibelungen on blu-ray this month, it seems a good time to honor one of the most consistently entertaining filmmakers of the 20th century, and I would argue, one of pop culture's most influential artists— Fritz Lang. After all, where does all our superhero and supervillain culture, all our James Bonds and Batmans and their baroque adversaries, originate if not in Lang's silent thrillers? They may have had literary and even, in Feuillade's films, primitive cinematic antecedents, but it was in Mabuse and Metropolis and Spies that they first became indelible icons of cinema. (Then, of course, there's a certain real-life supervillain who seems to have been much inspired by Lang's fantasies of world conquest expressed in overblown architecture.)

His American work is usually discounted next to his German epics, but I feel he gained enormously in Hollywood not only from having Nazism as a frequent subject but from the collaboration with American screenwriters like Hecht or Odets nursed in journalism and the hardboiled school; where Thea Von Harbou's plots could be grandiosely loopy, Lang was the perfect collaborator to bring an air of Euro-sinisterness to realism-based American thrillers. For me he's like Hawks— one of cinema's great underpromisers/overdeliverers, the genuine clunkers few and far between and the finds waiting to be found almost limitless. Some Lang threads:

Favorite Metropolis DVD?
The All-New Metropolis
Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler
The New Restoration of Die Nibelungen!
The Secret Beyond the Door

Good choice Mike, and the photo is excellent. I recall reading an interview with Lang some years ago where he was asked why he made AN AMERICAN GUERRILLA IN THE PHILIPPINES (1950). I love his answer - he said that even great directors have bills to pay. I recently watched another 1950 work of his, THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER. Looks like another bill-payer to me.

A very nice image, as always,
but wouldn't an Old Lang Sign
be more appropriate for
New Year's Eve?

[Mike Gebert]

That's funny, JFK.

American Guerrila in the Phillipines is probably a low point-- not awful, but completely routine-- but even House By the River, though at best it's an hour episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Show, has good atmosphere and performances within a weak plot. Lang always brought more to the table than the project might have rated otherwise. It seems to have eaten him up personally, and he was happy to get the hell out of Hollywood in the end, but he must have found some way to accommodate the system— the German director played by Alan Mowbray in Stand-In seems to be a Lang parody, suggesting that he and producer Walter Wanger (who'd just made You Only Live Once with Lang) were not the closest of pals afterwards, but somehow he stayed steadily employable after that for 20 years before going back to Germany. Which is more than, say, Pabst (one American flop) and Murnau (clearly on his way out of Hollywood when he died) managed.

[Mike Gebert]

So... I took Rollo Treadway's suggestion, with a holiday spin:

Nothing says "Merry Christmas" like four manic Jews.

Bob

[Mike Gebert]

Exactly! That's what makes it a Marxy Christmas.

Hah...nice one.

Nothing says "Merry Christmas" like four Jews.

Bob

Next thing you'll be telling us there's no Sanity Claus.