March 24, 25, 31 and April 1, 1:30pm, The Paramount, Oakland
The Eagle of Destiny
The life of Napoléon Bonaparte as the heroic savior of France is revealed from age 10 to 27. Beginning with his boyhood at military school in Brienne, Bonaparte is viewed as an outcast and a leader.
Emerging as a young officer during the Revolution, the adult Bonaparte (Albert Dieudonné) is first seen in Paris at the Club des Cordeliers where Danton introduces La Marseillaise to the mob as their national anthem. Bonaparte then attempts to unify his native Corsica, survives The Terror, becomes the hero of Toulon and embarks on his conquest of Italy.
Directed by Abel Gance, Napoleon (1927) was initially conceived as the first of six chapters on the life of Bonaparte. Cut by MGM from an original 29 reels to eight for its 1929 American release (with Erich von Stroheim's Greed a fresh memory), restoration of Napoleon became the life work of film preservationist Kevin Brownlow in 1954.
Presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in association with American Zoetrope, The Film Preserve, Photoplay Productions, and the BFI, Abel Gance's epic production Napoleon will be presented with live musical accompaniment performed by the Oakland East Bay Symphony with Carl Davis conducting his original score.
"From now on you are my prisoner of war -"
"- and my prisoner of love."
As the Russian revolution runs wild, a General in the Czar's army, Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings) escapes execution with the help of a beautiful spy. Years later, a former revolutionist turned Hollywood movie director (William Powell) recognizes a head shot of the general, now a decrepit old man working as an extra, and plans his revenge.
Directed by Josef von Sternberg, The Last Command (1928) was the highlight of Jannings' brief Hollywood career. Combined with his performance in The Way of All Flesh (1927), The Last Command received the first Academy Award for best actor in a leading role. Screenwriter Lajos Biró was nominated for best original story. Evelyn Brent, previously featured in von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), stars as the lovely femme fatale Natalie in a complex, pivotal role.
Inspired by the life of General Theodore Lodijensky, The Last Command features one extraordinary, unexpected shocker and a table-turning, earth-shaking finale.
A General on Pike Street
Emil Jannings in The Last Command opened at Seattle's United Artists Theatre on Friday February 24, 1928 for a week-long engagement. The program featured a "special score and concert number," by Jan Sofer and his United Artists Orchestra, with selected shorts featuring Hal Roach's "Leave 'em Laughing, The Laughing Lullaby." For most of its existence, the movie palace at 5th and Pike operated as the Coliseum. Opened in January 1916, it survives today as a retail-clothing store.
STG Presents!
Seattle Theatre Group and Trader Joe's present the third of four films in their current series of Silent Movie Mondays with Emil Jannings in Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command, featuring live musical accompaniment performed at the Paramount's original 1928, 4/20 Wurlitzer organ by Jim Riggs.
Some of these films premiered in the US in 2010, but didn't make
their way to Seattle until this year, in which case I deferred to lo-
cal release dates. Some missed the city altogether, in which case I
caught up via DVD, Blu-ray, or download. Altogether, I saw over
250 titles, and wrote about most of them for Amazon, Siffblog,
Line Out, and Video Librarian (the links lead to my reviews).
Just as my 2011 music list revolves around post-punk, a post-
punk vibe runs through many of these films. Animals also a-
bound, as do animalistic human beings, like Ryan Gosling's Driver with his scorpion jacket (a clue to his true nature).
The Tops: 1.Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn) 2.Poetry (Lee Chang-dong) 3.Hugo (Martin Scorsese) 4.Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki) 5.Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga) 6.Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt) 7.The Skin I Live In / La Piel Que Habito (Pedro Almodóvar) 8.Project Nim (James Marsh) 9.Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt) 10.Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / Loong Boonmee Raleuk Chat (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Runners-up: 1.The Descendants (Alexander Payne) 2.Attack the Block (Joe Cornish) 3.A Screaming Man / Un Homme Qui Crie (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) 4.The Help (Tate Taylor) 5.Beginners (Mike Mills) 6.Weekend (Alexander Haigh) 7.The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius) 8.Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino) 9.Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) 10.The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman)
Note: I enjoyed The Help. I realize I'm supposed to hate it, but I can't stand it when people do my thinking for me or assume that I don't know anything about African or African American cinema.
I can like The Help and I can like A Screaming Man, too. The thing is: Tate Taylor's mainstream movie got to me in a way Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's art house entry didn't. Which doesn't make it the superior picture; just one that had more personal resonance. I live for '50s-style melodramas about ordinary women, especially those who triumph over their small-minded oppressors, whether they're white, black, or red-eyed space aliens. The critical opprobrium heaped on this film carried a trace of misogyny that made me deeply uncomfortable.
Apparently, I'm not supposed to like The Artist either, in part because Harvey Weinstein produced it. But he didn't direct it, and the story centers on a man who refuses to compromise or to impose his will on others--un-Harvey-like qualities. In the film, he triumphs over adver- sity. In real life, it doesn't always work that way, but The Artist and Hugo are movies about movies and their makers. Not their producers.
Second Runners-up: 1.A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) 2.Moneyball (Bennett Miller) 3.The Princess of Montpensier (Bertrand Tavernier) 4.Norwegian Wood (Tran Anh Hung) 5.Hanna (Joe Wright) 6.Melancholia (Lars Von Trier) 7.Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen) 8.Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson) 9.The Yellow Sea (Na Hong-jin) 10.Winnie the Pooh (Don Hall and Stephen J. Anderson)
Openings:Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens at the Metro Cinemas (and other theaters) on 1/6 and A Separation on 2/3 (venue TBA).
Worthy of note:50/50 (Jonathan Levine), The Arbor (Clio Barnard), Aurora (Cristi Puiu), Bellflower (Evan Glodell), Carancho (Pablo Trapero), Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz), Contagion (Steven Soderbergh), Curling (Denis Côté), Gods / Dioses (Josué Méndez),The Guard (John Michael McDonagh), Henry's Crime (Malcolm Venville), The Girl / Flickan
(Fredrik Edfeldt), Hideaway / Le Refuge (François Ozon), The Ides of March (George Clooney), Kaboom (Gregg Araki), The Piano in a Fac- tory (Zhang Meng), Putty Hill (Matt Porterfield),The Rum Diary (Bruce
Robinson), Submarine (Richard Ayoade), Toast (S.J. Clarkson), The Tree
(Julie Bertuccelli), Vampire*, Vanishing on 7th Street (Brad Anderson), The War Horse (Steven Spielberg), Warrior (Gavin O'Connor), Win Win
(T. McCarthy), X-Men: 1st Class (M. Vaughn), Young Adult (J. Reitman).
* I left out the director and don't want to reformat the whole paragraph. Vampire is the first English-language effort from All About Lily Chou Chou's Shunji Iwai.
They've done better:A Dangerous Method (David Cron-
enberg), The Future (Miranda July), My Week with Marilyn
(Richard Curtis), The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat), Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols), and The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick).
Worthy of note:Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press), Broken Doors (Goro Toshima), Color Me Obsessed (Gorman Be-
chard), Crooked Beauty (Ken Paul Rosenthal), Girls on the Wall (Heather Ross), (POM Wonderful Presents)The Greatest Movie
Ever Sold (Morgan Spurlock), Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (Stuart Schulberg), Pearl Jam Twenty (Cameron Crowe), Rachel (Simone Bitton), Silver Girls / Frauenzimmer (Saara Alia Waas- ner), Sin by Silence (Olivia Klaus), Still Bill (Damani Baker and Alex Vlack), The Weird World of Blowfly (Jonathan Furmanski).
Missed (or haven't seen yet):13 Assassins (Takashi Miike),A Brighter Summer Day / Gu Ling Jie Shao Nian Sha Ren Shi Jian
(Edward Yang), The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg), Cap- tain America (Joe Johnston), Carnage (Roman Polanski), Cedar Rapids (Miguel Arteta), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David
Fincher), Incendies (Denis Villeneuve), The Interrupters (Steve James), J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood), Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan), Margin Call (J.C. Chandor), The Muppets (James Frawley), Mys- teries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz), Nostalgia for the Light / Nostalgia de la Luz (Patricio Guzmán),Shame (Steve McQueen), Source Code
(Duncan Jones), Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder), Terri (Azazel Jac-
obs), Tomboy (Céline Sciamma), The Trip (Michael Winterbot- tom), and We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay).
Note:Tomboy, which played the 2011 Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, opens at SIFF Cinema on 1/6. Certified Copy, Nostalgia for the Light, and Of Gods and Men made my 2010 "missed" list...and I haven't caught up with them yet. Looking forward to it.
Yes, I did see...Bridesmaids. And I didn't laugh much, but I'm glad that Jill Clayburgh, well cast as Kristin Wiig's mother, went out with a hit. Clay-
burgh's daughter (with David Rabe), Lily Rabe, who also got her start on the stage, proves her own mettle in Christopher Munch's Letters from the Big Man, an animal-oriented film almost as strange as Uncle Boonmee.
A final thought: Shame on The New Yorker's David Denby
for breaking the review embargo regarding Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--but more so for his spoiler regard-
ingThe Skin I Live In. And shame on his colleague, Richard Brody, for spreading the disease by quoting from Denby's Skin
review (though I still enjoyed Brody's comments about Tom
Cruise in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol). Critics!
Endnote: Cross-posted here. Drive image from Collider.
The following was written by North- west Film Forum program director Adam Sekuler to promote a screening of this under-seen gem. I'm posting it with his permis- sion on the occa- sion of the film's long-awaited ar- rival on DVD.
SKIDOO (Otto Preminger, US, 1968, 97 mins.)
The best film screening the first week of SIFF is easily Skidoo. It's this
Sunday at 3pm at the Film Forum, not in the SIFF program actually, but is
a part of our Secret Sunday matinee series. We don't typically divulge the
feature, but this is just that rare and just that good. I can't recommend
this enough, and in my typically verbose way, here's why you HAVE to be
here for it. Its not available on DVD or VHS, and the film rarely plays!
Skidoo presents an unlikely domestic situation in which Jackie Gleason
plays a retired San Francisco hit man-turned-car wash owner and Carol Channing plays his daffy wife. Yes, Gleason and Channing as man and
wife; can you imagine them making love? Gleason soon finds himself on a
mission from God. Not the God of the Father-Son-and-Holy Spirit fame,
but the head of the local mob who is known as God. God is played by Groucho Marx, and if you can believe Groucho as a mafia chieftain…
Anyway, Gleason is ordered by God to get himself arrested and sent to
Alcatraz, where he is to do a hit on a former gangster who turned infor-
mer. Unfortunately for Gleason, this target (played by Mickey Rooney,
who seems to be reading his lines from cue cards) is in ultra-tight protec-
tive custody and is thus immune from unpleasant visitors carrying shanks.
Unable to fulfill his assignment and stuck in Alcatraz on a bogus
rap, Gleason finds an escape by accident: he shares a cell with
a draft-dodging writer (Austin Pendleton, in his film debut)
who laced the glue of his stationery envelopes with LSD.
Meanwhile,
Channing is
coping with the
news their
teenage daugh-
ter [Alexandra Hay] has fallen
in with a group
of hippies. The
mod mom hap-
pily embraces
the hippies
and brings
them into her
home. She
tries to get
to God by seducing a young mobster (Frankie Avalon; yes, that
Frankie Avalon). When that fails, she and the hippies commandeer a
small armada and sail off to God's yacht off the San Francisco coast.
In 2009, the NWFF screenedModel Shop as part of their 1969 series. Jacques Demy's Los Angeles effort also features Alexandra Hay, the daughter in Skidoo. ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Meanwhile, Gleason spikes the soup in the Alcatraz commissar-
y with the LSD-laced envelopes and creates a makeshift balloon
out of garbage bags and a garbage can. He and his druggie cell-
mate fly off to God's yacht just as the hippie fleet arrives. After
much to-do, God and the acid-tripping writer abandon ship to-
gether and sail off into the sunset with a bountiful supply of acid.
Skidoo is such a wild assault on the senses that it's hard to im-
agine the film was ever made. Under Preminger's direction, LSD
is a liberating and empowering tool; it makes Gleason and Marx's
characters end their criminal ways in pursuit of a greater truth. It
also allows an astonishing number of guest stars in the Alcatraz
sequences (including Rooney, Peter Lawford, Richard Kiel, Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin) tripping on acid.
If that's not enough, the film is packed with other unlikely star
turns including Cesar Romero as Avalon's dad, George Raft
as the skipper of God's yacht, Arnold Stang as Gleason's stooge,
and the great character actor Fred Clark and singer Harry Nilsson (who wrote the music) as prison guards.
As for the acid
trips, Premin-
ger fills the
screen with
such imagery
as the Green
Bay Packers
mooning the
camera and
an elaborate
dance se-
quence with
women dressed in garbage cans doing a mock ballet under a
red light. Preminger reportedly experimented withTimothy Leary to get a feel for what one experiences on LSD, even
insisting that everyone try LSD before making the film!
Skidoo is one of the most wonderfully rude movies ever made. It is
so blatantly weird and in such marvelously bad taste that it feels as if
Preminger was prescient on the pending rise of underground counter-
culture comedy such as John Waters and Cheech and Chong.
It is a film where the druggies are the heroes and even criminals can
become angels if they just learn to chill with LSD. It is a movie where
Hollywood's icons happily ham it up while being under the narcotic in-
fluence and the closing shot, with Groucho Marx and Austin Pendleton
dressed as Hare Krishnas in a boat full of drugs is too funny to endure.
Okay, that's a hell of a lot about this film, but it's really the best
thing screening this week in Seattle, and you only have this one
chance to see it. Even if its 79 degrees on Sunday, don't miss out!
A gifted scientist is betrayed by his mentor who discredits him, then steals his research, and his wife. Humiliated, Paul Beaumont (Lon Chaney) disappears into self-exile and the anonymity of life as a circus clown. He contently suffers for years until his nemesis re-appears and plots to corrupt the lovely young bareback rider Consuelo (Norma Shearer) with the help of her wretched father.
The first original Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production had to be spectacular and it was. Based on the play by Leonid Andreyev, He Who Gets Slapped (1924) was the second of nine Hollywood films directed by Swedish master Victor Sjöström. Ethereal images of clowns used thematically throughout the film are both hauntingly beautiful and horrifying. Chaney delivers a searing (and possibly his best) role as a broken, demoralized shell of a man, opposite a luminous Shearer, John Gilbert as Bezano her intended, Tully Marshall, Ford Sterling and of course, Leo.
The 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Midnites for Maniacs present Lon Chaney in Victor Sjöström's MGM masterpiece, He Who Gets Slapped (1924) with live misical accompaniment performed returning artists, The Matti Bye Ensemble.
Saturday July 16, 8.30pm, The Castro, San Francisco
A prince of industry abandons his bride when his head is turned by a mysterious and beautiful woman. Catching a glimpse of Staacha (Marlene Dietrich) through a train window, Henri LeBlanc (Uno Henning) is instantly bewitched. His resolve crumbles as she pleads for his help to escape her sinister travelling companion Dr. Karoff (Fritz Kortner). She only reveals the truth after Henri is hopelessly under her spell.
Based on Max Brod's original novel, The Woman Men Yearn For (1929) stars Dietrich the year before her breakout film The Blue Angel in a largely forgotten and surprisingly substantial role as the femme fatale with a twist. Excellent use of miniatures, industrial montage, spectacular costumes and the furious New Years Eve party are memorable.
Director Curtis Bernhardt immigrated to Hollywood in 1940, establishing himself as a women's director in films starring Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner and many others.
The 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Film Noir Foundation, the Goethe-Institut San Francisco and German Consulate of San Francisco present <i>The Women Men Yearn For</i> (1929) with live musical accompaniment performed for returning artists, The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
THE GOOSE WOMAN (Clarence Brown, USA, 1925, 80 minutes)
Saturday July 16, 4pm, The Castro, San Francisco
A bitter old woman drowns her sorrows in gin and recalls her career as a great opera singer that ended with the illegitimate birth of her child. Long forgotten, the great Marie de Nardi (Louise Dresser) is known as Mary Holmes, the "Goose Woman" to her village, until detectives discover her past while investigating a murder. In an attempt to regain her lost fame she fabricates an eyewitness account of the crime which implicates her son.
Produced by Universal Pictures and directed by Clarence Brown, The Goose Woman (1925) begins as a beautifully stylized and modest character piece, but develops into a sensational morality play with a compelling performance by Miss Dresser as the title character. The supporting cast includes Gustav von Seyfertitz as Mr. Vogel, the States Attorney, Jack Pickford (inexplicably with top billing) as Mary's son Gerald Holmes and lovely young Constance Bennett as his fiancée Hazel Woods.
The 16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival and San Francisco Opera present Louise Dresser in The Goose Woman (1925), with live musical accompaniment performed by returning pianist Stephen Horne.
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is former president of Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
