Chicago: THE THIRD DEGREE (Curtiz, 1926) - 2/20/13

[buskeat]

At the Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago. I've never seen or heard of this one before!

Wednesday, February 20 @ 7:30pm
THE THIRD DEGREE
Directed by Michael Curtiz • 1926
With live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren!
Dolores Costello stars as a Coney Island trapeze artist whose marriage to playboy Jason Robards triggers a cascade of familial betrayal, murder, and false confessions in the American debut of future Casablanca director Michael Curtiz. Already a veteran of some sixty films in Europe, Hungarian émigré Curtiz (née Mihály Kertész) arrived in Hollywood in 1926 and immediately set about establishing himself as the most dogged and versatile filmmaker on the Warner Bros. lot. His first assignment was hardly promising: a 1908 stage melodrama pivoting on the novelty of police brutality that had already been filmed twice before. Shifting the play’s main action to a circus and finding the slightest pretext for an endless parade of elaborate camera movements and wild superimpositions, Curtiz and cameraman Hal Mohr made a film that earned favorable comparison to recent German imports like Variety. “I do not see a scene with my eyes,” claimed Curtiz, “I see a scene with camera-eyes.” (KW)
85 min • Warner Bros. • 35mm from the Library of Congress
Serial: Captain Marvel: “Boomerang” (John English & William Witney, 1941) – 35mm – 17 min