Tweet Gallery of Mastheads

Aw, I'm going to miss Jean Dujardin!

I have to say that the worst thing about the dawn of April is saying farewell to the glorious George Valentine.
I can't think of a better masthead! I just loved seeing him each day.

Loved the film in the theater, & I look forward to the April 24 DVD/BLU-RAY release.

The Wynyard picture is spooky, almost like a fun house mirror shot. Plus she keeps looking at me....

Feed me, Seymour!

Bob

[Mike Gebert]

There's a relatively new bio of Spencer Tracy out— well, since last year— but other than that he just seemed a good choice, along with other woman Glenda Farrell from Man's Castle, because he was one of the key stars of the 1930s (and certainly more interesting then as a young man playing often somewhat raffish or brutish characters than he often was as MGM's resident paragon of virtue), and because this is a great still that, well, says it all in a single shot. Some threads involving Tracy:

Tracy Biography Coming Out
Quick Millions
The Power and the Glory
Man's Castle
Pre-1935 Fox Films

As for Farrell, well, who else could play someone called Torchy Blane? She's as quintessential a gum-cracking female sharpie of the early 30s as anyone, with quite a list of credits for a short starring career (she came back later to TV), including I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and Little Caesar for Mervyn LeRoy, the indelible Havana Widows, and Mystery of the Wax Museum.

I am lovin' this 'un.

Martie

Excellent masthead, Mike! Tracy, not unlike Jeanette MacDonald, played much more interesting characters before they landed at MGM. There were still a few rough edges as Father Tim in SAN FRANCISCO. As for Glenda F, who else could credibly play Al Jolson's sister?

Timely - I've just begun reading the new Tracy book.

Fabulous masthead. I will enjoy logging on to see Spence all through the month.

The Great Glenda.... remarkably never made the A list

Hows about a nice Crawford one month....please??

[Mike Gebert]

We had Crawford early on. Someday somebody will get repeated (Glenn Tryon of all people nearly became the first) but not yet.

And why Glenn Tryon? Well, because we were talking so much about Lonesome (which however was already honored) and then about Broadway... so I found a nice still that seems to cover both the striking Art Deco-Expressionist design of that film and its female stars, Evelyn Brent and Merna Kennedy. As noted there, both will be included in the Lonesome set coming from Criterion in late August. (There are enough worthy releases coming this summer that I can't honor them all in their exact months of release.)



Kennedy I don't really know apart from The Circus, but I've seen a lot of Brent lately thanks to the festivals, and she's an interesting actress— though her thing seemed to be being full of seething anger, which maybe isn't going to make you loved in the long term, and her fall after sound came quickly even though she was perfectly capable in it (and worked, at least, until the 1950s). But she was striking looking, in an angular adult way when so many female stars were childlike, and she's certainly memorable in things like Underworld and The Last Command, as the older sister shown up and outshone by Louise Brooks in Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, and as a woman coming unglued in The Showdown.

Perfect summer time masthead. I feel an urge to borrow Evelyn's swimsuit and take a swim in the dirty looking, green yet fun Galveston waters.

Martie

I don't think they are swimsuits.

I don't think they are swimsuits.

Damn. Actually though, now that I think about it, borrowing someone's swimsuit is...
Ew.

Martie

I don't think they are swimsuits.

They're for swanning around the waterside.

Jim

[Mike Gebert]

One hundred years ago this month, two sisters went to work for the Biograph studio under its star director, D.W. Griffith. The first film Dorothy and Lillian Gish appeared in was An Unseen Enemy, but they would go on to be the director's most important stars (Lillian in particular) in films such as The Musketeers of Pig Alley, The New York Hat, The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Orphans of the Storm, while both would have significant post-Griffith careers as well— Lillian into the 1980s, when you would have been hard pressed to think of anything else, performer or studio or anything, left in the movies that stretched back into those pre-feature film, pre-big studio days. The picture this slightly altered illustration draws on isn't from 1913, of course— it's from a later period, apparently 1922 when Orphans of the Storm would have been in release and Griffith could legitimately wear that king of the world expression— but it serves well to recognize one of the most fruitful and impactful collaborations in movie history. (Thanks to NitrateVillain Jim Gettys for the suggestion of subject matter.)

Great masthead. Dorothy Gish seems to have fallen into that silent star limbo in that she's really only remembered for her films with Griffith & Lillian. But she had a major career of her own in silents and on into talkies in supporting roles up to 1963. Here and there she had good roles in good films like Our Hearts Were Young and Gay and The Whistle at Eaton Falls.

Great masthead. Dorothy Gish seems to have fallen into that silent star limbo in that she's really only remembered for her films with Griffith & Lillian. But she had a major career of her own in silents and on into talkies in supporting roles up to 1963. Here and there she had good roles in good films like Our Hearts Were Young and Gay and The Whistle at Eaton Falls.

Well, here's hoping I can help correct this. A few years from now...

Great masthead

Problem with Dorothy is that many of her silent films are unavailable or just plain missing- and she made few sound films.

Of her solo films I've seen Hulda from Holland and Old Heidelburg (both very nice films) and I know Nell Gwyn is out there.
Our Hearts Were Young And Gay get shown on TV, but her others don't.

[Mike Gebert]

Yes, I've liked her in all of the starring vehicles I've seen her in, all at Cinesation-- Madame Pompadour, The Country Flapper and The Bright Shawl. Vivacious and funny and unpretentious next to Lillian, much as Constance is to Norma....

[Christopher Jacobs]

Very nice masthead, which also ties in with the new book on D. W. Griffith by William M. Drew, Mr. Griffith's House With Closed Shutters: The Long-Buried Secret That Turned Lawrence Into D. W. (and a very interesting read, by the way, not only for its information on Griffith but on the once notorious but now long-forgotten actress he was involved with before getting into the movies)!

Time for someone to put out a new collection of Biograph shorts (preferably on Blu-ray, with all the high-quality film sources that have been preserved on Griffith). And yes, Dorothy Gish needs to become better known. NELL GWYN is great fun, especially with an audience, and she's just as memorable as Lillian in both HEARTS OF THE WORLD and ORPHANS OF THE STORM.

Actually I think Dorothy is a considerably better actor than Constance Talmadge. Connie is nice but if you see several of her pictures in close succession she's got a fairly limited repertory of tricks. Then again you could say that about most actors. It's also probable the studio had little interest in giving her any variety in roles- just like Clara Bow.

Terrific masthead, and it's especially nice to see Dorothy get some attention. She was so good in Gretchen the Greenhorn, whose sole surviving print was found in a barn, which suggests there may be a few more forgotten films out there somewhere, still recoverable. Last year I saw her in Nell Gwyn, and she was remarkably sexy in it. Very warm and earthy.

[Mike Gebert]

Here comes Monsieur Louis Feuillade, respectable bourgeois and film director for the Gaumont company. But something seems to have furrowed his brow with worry! And— do I sense someone skulking in the bushes? Could there be some unnamed mystery that haunts him, some secret society of criminals at this very minute conspiring against him?



Kino is releasing a new version of Les Vampires this month, which demonstrates how far Feuillade has come in the last decade or so. When I was a kid reading about early film, Feuillade was one of the most elusive and mysterious figures himself, his films unavailable in any form in the U.S., the screenings limited to dreamlike 7-hour marathons in Greenwich Village art houses (only later did I realize that part of what made them so dreamlike was what the hepcats writing about him were smoking before the show). At that time the Museum of Modern Art distributed only a single chapter of Fantomas... which was a considerable disappointment when I saw it in college, a random middle chapter with what seemed to be primitive filmmaking technique.

That finally changed with David Shepard's release of Les Vampires on VHS and laserdisc in 1998, and now we have Les Vampires, Judex, Fantomas and a range of his non-serial work in the Gaumont Treasures set with him, Leonce Perret and Alice Guy Blache. So how do we judge Feuillade now? He was a skilled filmmaker for the time but clearly, part of what we respond to in his work is the inadvertent surrealism— the way he seems to be recording in almost documentary fashion the France of 1915, only to suddenly introduce fantastic, and often quite disturbing, elements. In some ways the Feuillade cult was a precursor of the Ed Wood one, where the heightened movieness and the reality of a somewhat low budget collide bizarrely (but with utter conviction). I can't help but wonder what he would have made of what we make of his movies now, in a way I wouldn't about one of his successors like Lang. I feel like this polite-looking, well-dressed gentleman would be a bit baffled that his crime fantasies for his time have such resonance for our time as exposing the reality, or the surreality, hidden just underneath the surface of that starched and proper past.

I was dreading the day when I'd have to bid adieu to the Sisters & Director G...
Not that this is a bad masthead, though! I will admit, those eyes behind the N'Ville logo will surely haunt my dreams, however...

A beautiful piece of work, Mike. Thanks for putting in the effort each month.

[Christopher Jacobs]

At first glance, I was wondering "what's Ben Kingsley doing on a NitrateVille Masthead?" Then I noticed Les Vampires hovering behind the title logo and it all made sense.

I prefer JUDEX to LES VAMPIRES, but they're both fascinating, and as Mike alluded, LES VAMPIRES is almost an odd documentary of World War I Paris, with this strange story and some off-beat comedy going on at the same time. Although I've only watched my DVD edition once or twice, I'll look forward to getting the upcoming and apparently longer Blu-ray edtition.

The Marilyn Monroe Blu-ray collection just came out, but in September we'll be getting the Universal monster collection on Blu-ray and in October is the Hitchock classics Blu-ray collection. Then there's the promised Blu-ray releases of INTOLERANCE/THE MOTHER AND THE LAW/THE FALL OF BABYLON as well as the official release of the Mary Pickford Blu-ray collection many of us already have. Might they foreshadow Nitrateville mastheads to come?

Are there any notable differences between the new edition of LES VAMPIRES and the old one?

Great masthead, Mike! Feuillade is a favourite of mine. I hope that one day Gaumont will release other wonderful Feuillade serials and features such as Vendémiaire, Tih-Minh, Barrabas and Parisette. I have seen them all and loved them. By a funny coincidence, I was yesterday evening in a small Parisian street that features in Fantômas. It is still the same as in this capture showing Fantômas (René Navarre) escaping in a car from Juve and Fandor:

The street is Cité Malesherbes, 9th Arrondissement.