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I found a reference on a blog that suggests that this book has a complete Technicolor filmography.

My guess is that since La Cucaracha was produced by Pioneer (that is, Merian Cooper and Jock Whitney's company formed to exploit Technicolor) to show off the process (which it certainly does), rather than by a studio with its own chain of theaters, it probably played some sort of special engagements...

Yet everyone says La Cucaracha was first. Was it made first but not released first? There's also the mystery of that independent Wizard of Oz cartoon made by Ted Eshbaugh (Sunshine Makers) in 1933. (You can see it on the Oz DVD set released a year or two ago.) It seems to be three-strip, which would...

My point, made more loosely earlier, is that two adaptations of the same material on film are NOT the equivalent of two adaptations of the same material on stage. A play is created to be staged multiple times by different casts. It is the thing, the performances are the expected expressions of that ...

As late as my childhood in Kansas in the 60s, in fact. Alas. Thanks Bruce for picking up my dropped ball on this thread and giving us such good accounts of these films. (I thought my kids might want to watch them on our recent trip, but they wound up watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks over and over a...

I guess I could see being annoyed by the juvenile Stewart (watch Of Human Hearts sometime and see the worst Abraham Lincoln scene in movie history), but from It's a Wonderful Life (so far as I know, the beginning of his "darker" persona) through the Mann westerns to Rear Window and Vertigo and Liber...

I resist most overseas DVDs for the same reason, but every once in a while my interest in obscure 40s-50s British cinema results in an order for an Alistair Sim disc from Amazon.co.uk or the like. I mostly don't order silents (well, I did get one of the Danish discs) since I want to support the US p...

Are you sure? In the old days the drives themselves would lock you out after X number of times, and resetting that was a big hassle and/or impossible. (You could reset the software limit, but you had to be careful never to trigger the hardware limit.) That may have changed since I got a region-free ...

Here's an even cheaper solution.

If you have multiple computers, set the DVD/CD drive in one of them to region 2. You have a limited number of times you can reset the region before a drive locks up, but if you make one of them a dedicated region 2 player, then it's not an issue.

Garbo?

Jimmy Stewart?

Man, tough crowd!

Frankly, I think all of these are different works, not just different expressions. The things that make a film distinct (such as performances, direction, camerawork, the time period in which it was made which it preserves long after all involved are dead) are separate, even when the material is fund...

Hugh, thanks for the very informative post, and welcome to NitrateVille. East Lynne is an interesting piece, historically if not dramatically; it was so well known that the same year as the Ann Harding version, some British comics (led by Herbert Mundin, of The Adventures of Robin Hood fame) did a m...

I would be annoyed with Robert Taylor, but what's the point? I guess that's where I come out on a lot of these things. The people I don't like are just too insubstantial to offend me. I either don't watch them at all, or I get through it (Maurice Chevalier, for instance, is clearly someone I don't ...

Great idea.

I seem to be one of the few who put himself up... well, me with Charley Chase's slicked back hair and ears.

http://www.silentcomedians.com/comedian ... chase.html

It works surprisingly well considering how unlikely it is I could fit into Chase's 32 Tall suit...

My concern when the forum was brand new and unproven was that if it was a hassle to sign up, the well-known AMS folks I wanted to attract first off would be put off at having to wait for approval. Or even if they weren't put off, they might never come back if that impetus to make an initial post is ...

The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira is close to being the only silent era filmmaker even living, let alone the only one still active. Admittedly, he only made a short documentary right before sound came in, and after his 1942 feature debut his output was infrequent until the 70s, but since th...

Cool. And how French that main image is...

Have a good time and feel free to talk up NitrateVille while you're there, all...

I think this was thought up by the same guy who came up with the "How Drunk Can You Drive To See Thunder Road" promotion.

Greenbriar Picture Shows has a new entry on D.O.A. I haven't read it yet, because I'm still getting my jaw back up off the floor from this promotional idea he found in the press kit: Pow! Also note the ad that promises "D.O.A. ... as exciting as its title!" From the producers of "Stiff As a Board" a...

Has anybody written THE study of the whole men's fraternal order movement? It was a big deal in the settling of the frontier, a way for you to gain acceptance in cities where nobody had a reputation or family to ease introductions, a way for business to know who was legitimate to deal with in a land...

I've never been wild about their features, or at least, their features are pleasant enough, three stars by Maltin's standards, but the great shorts are sublime, Mt. Olympus material. It's hard not to watch the features and feel that there's a great short being padded out, or stuck in the middle of a...

I find Wodehouse unfilmable, frankly. To me adapting his prose to film is like adapting a Mozart opera to a straight play-- you've tossed out the music, and thus the whole point. Some decent renditions have been done-- Fry and Laurie are surely as spot-on casting as you'll get, and Peter O'Toole mad...

Use my email link and email it to me, I'll optimize it. I don't know if that's the issue, 22K isn't THAT big, but mine is less than 3K, so it could be.

That's nice, to hear it's going to Bardelys. Thanks for the update Rodney, and cool to know I'll have a tiiiiiiiny share in the final product.

The East Lynne that was run in '03 at Cinecon was the Ann Harding 1931 version. Richard Roberts has a comment in the AMS thread about that that indicates the Bara version was shown at Cinecon in the 90s; a scan of the Google search results suggests that there's no direct report from that showing on ...

He seems to have filled a 20s niche for a big strapping man who's a harmless puppy. It's very odd at this distance, though not entirely inexplicable; it's not like many of the silent era's female stars weren't pulling off a similarly infantilized girlish act, though to be exactly equivalent to Farre...

KAIII-YOOOOOGA!

It just registered... Seven Footprints to Satan!

They're actually showing Seven Footprints to Satan!

Any word on whether it's from that Italian print that's supposed to be better (and that I think our friend the Count has seen?)

Hey, Archie, welcome. I saw that you registered but somehow I missed that you had posted (so much for keeping an eye on everything). Thanks for that report, very interesting hearing about Rosa Rio, truly one of the last survivors of the silent era.

Stars of the month for March are three of James Agee's four great silent comedians... wait a minute, scratch that... three members of the Sons of the Desert, Mr. Laurel, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Chase: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2158/2300412660_330c361dca_o.jpg I've started a thread on this trio here. ...

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Silent Director Still At It

Another great promotional idea, from D.O.A.