Yes, it was two years ago today that we here at the Monkey posted for the first time. What a wild trip it has been—we started with The General in 1927, crawled forward to 1933 and then allowed the tide of history to sweep us back into the first decade of film. But I promise we'll start moving forward again. One day. Maybe when the economy recovers ...
In any event, we here at the Monkey plan to party 'til dawn. Join us.
Venus Armida of the blog "They Had Faces!" has bestowed upon the Monkey the "Stylish Blogger Award"—hey, good for me! Like the Monkey, Venus has devoted herself to, in her own words, "discovering, and helping others discover, the cool interesting world of silent films." A worthwhile mission, if I may say so myself.
According to the rules of the award, I have to post a link to Venus's blog, reveal seven facts about myself and pass the award along to seven more stylish bloggers. The first is easy (done), the last well-nigh impossible, the second is as follows:
1. I've been watching the animated series Archer on FX recently. A cross between James Bond, Charlie Sheen and Brewster Rockit, Sterling Archer is the sort of spy who can't quite grasp why it's not a good idea to loudly announce he's a spy everywhere he goes.
"M as in—what?!" "Mancy. What'd you think I said?" "Nancy! You idiot!" "Oh. Yeah. I could see how you might—" "Tell me what to do!" "Uh, do you have parachutes?" "No!" "Because that would be, you know, problem solved."
The entire first season is available for instant streaming on Netflix.
2. Speaking of Cold War jibber jabber, I ran across this photo on Unexplained Cinema, a blog I follow and that you should follow, too:
Yes, I used to tell my toys the same thing, but I recently had an epiphany, that our solar system's sun will one day burn out and when it does, the human race will vanish from the universe like a soap bubble, which not only means that the whole of human endeavor is completely pointless, but also that I can safely skip my law school reunion later this week. Win-win.
3. By the way, the kid is reading from the wrong text—this is Marxism for beginners:
4. No, actually the epiphany was, as Thomas Boswell put it in the Washington Post sports section this morning, "Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you have." And I woke up recently and realized I am a happy man. Probably after napping with Katie-Bar-The-Door while watching The Thin Man for the hundredth time.
"Nickie, can you reach the water? No, I just—I don't want it. I just wanted to be sure you could reach it."
5. Just to underscore that I'm not a nihilist, I built this train layout for my brother's kids a couple of Christmases ago:
Nihilists rarely build train layouts for their brother's kids, especially at Christmas. It's like a rule or something.
6. Speaking of brothers, I have two, which you may have surmised from careful reading of this blog over the years. My older brother is the one who lives in Auburn and saw the Beatles play live. My younger brother has played drums and guitar live with some of the finest session musicians Nashville has to offer—which is to say, the finest in the world. As our former neighbor and lifelong friend Bobby Bare Jr. once sang, "In Nashville, Tennessee ... the world's greatest living guitar pickers can deliver you a pizza." Talk about the boulevard of broken dreams!
7. And lastly, a family portrait:
I'm more of a speak-no-evil kind of Monkey myself, but I've seen and heard plenty. And I keep meticulous notes. So don't get any ideas.
As for passing this award on to seven more bloggers, well, that's easier said than done—I follow something like 160 blogs and I like them all. There are a few, however, I owe a favor for various reasons; perhaps this will balance the books:
We here at the Monkey pause to note the passing of one our favorite actresses, Jane Russell. As my big brother noted an e-mail, "in 'the day,' she was hot, hot, hot."
She was indeed.
I am of an age that my first introduction to Jane Russell was during her stint as a foundation undergarment spokesperson "for us full-figured gals," as she put it. I was a little too young to understand what part of her figure she was referring to. Later I figured it out. Hubba hubba.
Probably her most famous role was her first, The Outlaw, in which she co-starred with a cantilevered bra designed by Howard Hughes and his team of aeronautical engineers. Truth be told, it's not a very good movie and she didn't wear the bra anyway. Filming was completed in 1941, but Hollywood's censors delayed its release until 1943, with a nationwide release not coming until 1946.
"They held up The Outlaw for five years," she said later. "And Howard Hughes had me doing publicity for it every day, five days a week for five years."
Russell didn't appear in another film until 1946.
If you want to see her in something good, I'd recommend the two movies she made with Robert Mitchum, His Kind Of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), and what I think is the best performance of her career, as a nightclub singer trying to keep her gold-digging pal Marilyn Monroe out of trouble in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
I know everybody remembers Marilyn Monroe's signature performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," but personally, give me Jane Russell.
So what has the Monkey been up to recently, other than posting trivia questions straight out of TCM's Now Playing? Working on another of those mammoth essays, this one about early silent comedy, from its beginning around 1890 up to 1914. So far from the era I've watched one hundred sixty-eight comedy shorts and counting. Some are funny, but most of them, I can emphatically assure you, are not.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with any of that. Instead, this post harkens back to Part Two of my essay covering the films of 1906-1914, specifically the paragraph I wrote about Segundo de Chomón, a.k.a. "the Spanish Méliès." Chomón specialized in trick photography and surreal optical effects. Here's one, Le théâtre de Bob from 1906, that relies on stop-action animation and hand-tinted frames.
Just part of our continuing effort here at the Monkey to load you up with useless information ...
Aspiring Imp Girl Ginger Ingenue has requested more of French comedian Max Linder, and we here at the Monkey never turn down a reasonable request—or even an unreasonable one, within reason. Here he is in Le hasard et l'amour (Love Surprises) from 1913 with a plot I'm pretty sure the Three Stooges recycled in 1952 as Corny Casanovas.
The latest Oscar trivia question from Turner Classic Movies (read it here) inspired me to start another poll. Of the top five songs in movie history, as chosen in 2004 by the American Film Institute, which is your favorite?
The AFI's Top Five, in reverse order:
5. "White Christmas"—Holiday Inn (1942)
4. "Moon River"—Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
3. "Singin' In The Rain"—Singin' In The Rain (1952)
2. "As Time Goes By"—Casablanca (1942)
1. "Over The Rainbow"—The Wizard of Oz (1939)
I often tell you that there are no wrong answers, but in this case there really are no wrong answers.
The Best Of The Best Most people consider 1939 to be Hollywood's Golden Year. Of the 10 films nominated as Best Picture that year, which was a musical fantasy starring Judy Garland?
Gee whiz, can TCM make 'em any tougher? In case you need a hint:
You can read the 2400 word essay I posted yesterday about D.W. Griffith's development of a film "language" and how he taught every director from Charlie Chaplin to Christopher Nolan how to manipulate an audience's emotions, or you can watch this 49-second clip from 30 Rock, which pretty much covers the same territory. Your call.
You know a television show has run seriously off the rails when your wife turns to you and says, in all sincerity, "This would have made more sense with a llama."
Flu-ridden and snowbound yesterday afternoon, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I watched a rerun of Lost in Space on the Family Net cable channel, specifically the infamous "Carrotman" episode, a.k.a. "The Great Vegetable Rebellion." For those of you old enough to remember Lost in Space, the Carrotman needs no introduction. For the rest of you, well, let's just say '60s camp never got any campier.
For those of you with an unquenchable thirst for useless trivia, the part of the Carrotman's sidekick, Willoughby, was originally to be played by a talking llama—yes, the kind with four legs, painted purple, no less. (It does not compute!) But the trained llama kept biting Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith) who finally refused to continue production. Which is a pity, because it really would have made more sense with a llama. But the llama was fired, a human was hired, and the series was cancelled two weeks later.
Oh, the pain, the pain.
You can watch "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" here at the Monkey, courtesy of Hulu.com.
"You have to go back to Lancelot Link's piano player to find anyone this ineffective at a keyboard."
He was referring specifically to a reporter for the New York Times but he could have been talking about me. I'm 171 movies and 4000 words into this essay about the film years 1906-1914, but I'm not any closer to being done than I was a week ago. I think what I'm going to do is throw in the towel and publish my notes bullet-fashion, the way I did for an unfinished essay about innovations in the use of sound back in 2009.
It's either that or stop blogging for the next six months. I don't see any other way.
In the meantime, does anyone else remember the Saturday morning kids show Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp? It was a live action show about a chimpanzee spy named Lancelot Link. He worked for the Agency to Prevent Evil ("APE"), had a girlfriend named Mata Hairy, and battled a parade of villains including Dr. Strangemind, Baron von Butcher, and other henchmen of CHUMP.
Here's a clip of their band, The Evolution Revolution:
Bonus Trivia: Lancelot Link was played by the same chimp who played the Bloop on television's Lost In Space.
Yes, yes, I've been busy lately—Auburn football, Spring cleaning, walking the dog, a never-ending construction project. And I've fobbed off a lot of old movies on you and called it blogging. Fortunately, I know you've been eating these movies up with a spoon—you have been eating them with a spoon, haven't you?—here's another one to tide you over: D.W. Griffith's first feature film, 1914's Judith of Bethulia. It doesn't have the epic scope of The Birth of a Nation, but then neither does it feature the Ku Klux Klan as the hero of the story.
More to the point, Judith, along with The Musketeers of Pig Alley, The Lonely Villa, The Lonedale Operator, The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, and many others, undercuts the notion that Griffith invented movies with The Birth of a Nation. The invention of a film language was a steady evolution, not a one-picture revolution; indeed, I would say The Birth of a Nation didn't invent anything except a long-overdue recognition on the part of audiences and critics that movies were an art form unto themselves.
I've made it up to the final year of my research for an essay about the film years 1906-1914. One hundred fifty-one films strong with, I don't know, thirty more to go. I think.
Among those who emerged during this period was Charlie Chaplin. Working at first as a supporting player at Mack Sennett's comedy factory, Chaplin quickly became a star. While many of his early efforts are simple variations on Sennett's "everybody-hit-somebody, everybody-fall-down" brand of comedy, Chaplin had an innate sense of rhythm and comic timing that turned these random free-for-alls into a sort of dance—a Waltz of the Violently Clumsy, if you will.
Here's one of his early directorial efforts, The Rounders, co-starring Roscoe Arbuckle, Phyllis Allen and Minta Durfee.
Matthew Blanchette steered me to an even earlier surviving film from Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince than the one I've previously mentioned, Roundhay Garden Scene. This one is called Man Walking Around A Corner and it dates from 1887 or 1888. Thanks, Matthew! It was shot on an earlier version of Le Prince's camera, this one with sixteen separate lenses. Looks more like a spider's eye than a camera, don't you think?
I've added this note as a postscript to my original essay, but what are the chances you comb through old blog posts looking for updates, right?
Anyway, here's the film. Oh, and check out Matthew's blog, A Day In The Life, while you're at it.
Here's another artifact I've brought back from my sojourn into early film. The plot of the 10-minute short Suspense—an intruder menaces a lone woman while her savior rides to the rescue—was already a cliche by 1913 (so much so that an early Keystone Kop comedy that year featured a spoof of both it and such D.W. Griffith's two-reelers as The Lonedale Operator that has used the same storyline).
Suspense is notable, however, for a couple of reasons. First is its imaginative use of the camera—split-screen, overhead shots, tracking and extreme close-ups (witness the two stills from the movie). The second is that it is the work of Lois Weber, the first really successful American woman director.
Rumor has it this and other works of Lois Weber will be coming out on DVD next year. In the meantime, check it out:
Meanwhile, for those of you wondering what's become of me, I'm still watching movies in preparation for my essay "1906-1914: The Birth Of The Feature Film." One hundred seventeen (117) of them so far and counting. Okay, so most of them are ten minutes long, but still! The effort will be worth it, I promise.
Here's a taste, The Musketeers Of Pig Alley, the world's first gangster movie:
Must-See Films:A Trip To The Moon (1902); The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Trying to say definitively who invented the movies is a little like trying to say who invented fire—the records are sketchy, everybody who knows for certain is dead, and what evidence that does remain comes largely from the self-serving accounts of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.
And where do you start, which is to say, what was the first indispensable step toward what we now think of as motion pictures? If I knew his name, I'd say it was the first caveman who thought to entertain his neighbors with shadow puppets and firelight. In fact, two of the key elements of film, movement and representation, have been staples of art and entertainment since at least the ancient Greek stage.
Turner Classic Movie's recent documentary, Moguls and Movie Stars, began with seventeenth century Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens who in 1659 invented the magic lantern show—a process of projecting light through a painted slide onto a wall or screen—and in terms of being entertained while sitting in the dark looking at pictures on a wall, the magic lantern is a reasonable place to start a history of the movies. Over the course of the two hundred years that followed, these magic lantern shows became quite sophisticated—by stacking slides one in front of the other and manipulating them, a projectionist could create the illusion of movement—and were one of the most popular forms of entertainment during the 19th century.
And then there was Eadweard Muybridge, who on a bet took a series of photographs in 1872 of a galloping horse to prove that all four of its hooves leave the ground simultaneously when it runs. Strung together on a glass cylinder and spun quickly enough, this "magic lantern show gone mad" created the illusion of a horse in motion. Muybridge also had a fondness for photographing nude models performing mundane tasks and audiences had a fondness for paying to see them, proving once again that pornography often drives the acceptance of new media. (Also check out Étienne-Jules Marey who similarly used a "chronophotographic gun" to capture remarkable images of birds in flight.)
But if we think of movies as something involving a strip of film and a projector, then I think the history of movies starts with Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince who in 1888 used a single-lens camera and paper film produced by George Eastman to film two seconds worth of fashionable men and women walking around a garden in Roundhay, England. Along with equally brief footage of horse and buggy traffic crossing a bridge in Leeds, Le Prince is generally credited with producing the first "films" in movie history.
Alas for Le Prince, while preparing for a cross-Atlantic trip to exhibit his invention in New York, he boarded a train bound for Paris in 1890 and literally vanished without a trace. Although theories abound—suicide, fratricide, assassination—his disappearance has never been explained. In fact, investigators turned up no leads at all and the case went cold until just seven years ago, when, while combing through its nineteenth century archives, Paris police found a photograph dating from 1890 of an unidentified drowning victim who bore a resemblance to Le Prince. But whether it was positively him or how he might have drowned on a moving train, no one can say.
After Le Prince, the story of film picks up with Charles-Émile Reynaud. A French science professor who directed and exhibited what may have been the world's first animated film, Pauvre Pierrot ("Poor Pete"), his most lasting contribution to film history was the invention of a camera that recorded images not on photographic plates but on perforated film advanced by sprockets, resulting in longer filmed sequences than a cylinder or drum would allow.
Reynaud demonstrated his camera-projector, which he called the Praxinoscope Théâtre, at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889 (the one with the Eiffel Tower). In the audience was the famed American inventor Thomas Alva Edison who had been struggling to come up with his own movie camera without much success. By his own admission, two of Edison's greatest inventions were credit stealing and patent lawyers, deploying armies of the latter to accomplish the former—along with the light bulb, his most lasting and influential contributions—but he later insisted that his epiphany that the future of motion pictures depended on perforated film on sprockets was purely coincidental. The U.S Patent Office agreed.
"Everyone steals in industry and commerce," he said later. "I've stolen a lot myself. The thing is to know how to steal." (An idea he no doubt stole from his attorneys.)
Reynaud died penniless, but Edison—or more precisely his assistant William K.L. Dickson—ran with Reynaud's ideas (and, I don't know, maybe some of his own), and by 1894 created what he called the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peepshow" housed in a bulky cabinet, whereby the bored and the curious could one at a time watch brief films for a nickle. The movies were neither artistic nor adventuresome—just brief scenes of men sneezing, couples dancing, Annie Oakley shooting—but for a time at least the paying public was enthralled.
It was two French brothers, however, Auguste and Louis Lumière, who first thought to exhibit movies not to one person at a time but to a theater full of paying customers. Starting their careers in film as assistants in their father's photographic firm, the brothers—Louis as the inventor, Auguste as the business manager—developed a new and improved camera-projector. Where Edison's Kinetoscope was bulky and hard to maintain, the Lumières' combination camera-projector, the cinématographe, was light and mobile and relatively easy to use. In December 1895, these two brothers rented a hall in Paris and charged the public admission to see their new invention—the first time in history an audience paid money to see a motion picture in a theater.
Here in its entirety is that groundbreaking film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat:
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the only proper way to study movie history is to watch movies, and when I sat down and watched a couple of dozen of the Lumière brothers' best-known movies (judging by the number of votes they've received on the Internet Movie Database), it quickly became clear that while the Lumières may have invented the camera, they didn't have a clue what to do with the camera. Their films never progressed beyond fifty-second home movies of whatever they happened to be standing near—trains entering a station, babies eating breakfast, etc.—audiences quickly grew jaded and early in the 20th century, the brothers famously concluded that "the cinema is an invention without any future." Instead, they turned their full attention to photography, finding their lasting success with a color photographic process, the Autochrome Lumière, which they patented in 1903.
It was instead another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, who was the first to grasp the unique potential of the new motion picture technology. A stage magician by trade, Méliès saw movies as a successor to the tradition of fanciful entertainments. Where Edison and the Lumière brothers used their cameras to record reality, Méliès realized that through editing and photographic trickery, film could be used to create a new reality, one that could never exist apart from film. It was perhaps the single greatest insight in movie history.
Among his many movies, one, Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip To The Moon), from 1902, is perhaps the one indispensable film from the quarter century of film history and gave us the single most famous movie image before Charlie Chaplin first donned his little tramp outfit.
I'll grant you, A Trip To The Moon is a relic by the standards even of the decade that followed it, but it was also wholly original, deriving from nothing before it, inspiring so much of what came after it, and containing images that are still unique and unforgettable despite the passage of a century's worth of filmmaking. Or to put it another way, that The Simpsons could spoof A Trip To The Moon as an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon (in French, no less) without the need to explain it, tells you all you need to know about how much a part of the culture Méliès really is.
Unfortunately, Méliès wasn't much of a businessman, and Edison and his lawyers were able to copy prints of A Voyage To The Moon and exhibit them in the United States without paying royalties. Too, Méliès stopped progressing as a filmmaker. His 1912 movie, The Conquest Of The Pole, for example, could have been made a decade earlier in terms of its sets, acting, storyline and editing, and while D.W. Griffith later said of Méliès "I owe him everything," Griffith and others quickly surpassed him in terms of artistry and technique.
Méliès went bankrupt in 1913 and wound up selling toys in Paris's Gare Montparnasse train station. He was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1932 and died six years later.
Méliès's story is a none-too-subtle reminder that while movies are the greatest art form of the 20th century, they're also a business, and whatever else you can say about Thomas Edison, he did figure out how to make money from the movies and to popularize the medium. While men such as Le Prince and the Lumière brothers were more clever inventors and Méliès was a superior artist, it was Edison who made movies pay, and his realization that nobody was going to buy a film projector if there were no films to project on it may have been the second greatest insight in movie history. Certainly the most practical.
A variety of men made movies at Edison's behest, but the two most important were the aforementioned W.K.L Dickson and Edwin S. Porter. Dickson was primarily an inventor and his contributions as a filmmaker are largely those of a cinematographer recording his own experiments. His first works, the first American films, are simple scenes filmed in his own workshop—men blacksmithing, sneezing or shaking hands.
These snippets of life provided the content of Edison's peepshows and in the beginning were sufficient to satisfy the public's curiosity. But with more interesting films arriving from the Lumière brothers and especially Méliès, Edison realized he needed more substantial fare if his fledgling film company was to survive. Edison put Porter, who had formerly worked as a touring projectionist for a rival company, in charge of motion picture production at his New York studios, and there Porter set to work filming not just workplace scenes, but stories.
Porter directed more than one hundred eighty films between 1898 and 1915, but far away the most important and enduring of them is the 1903 western, The Great Train Robbery.
"In literature and music, as well as movies," Daniel Eagan wrote in America's Film Legacy, his collection of essays about the National Film Registry, "the past can seem slow, obvious and at times filled with odd, unexpected touches too far removed from our experiences to decipher easily—which makes The Great Train Robbery an even more remarkable achievement. The blockbuster of its time, it has lost none of its power to entertain over the past hundred years."
Put simply, The Great Train Robbery was the first great American film. Not only is the shot of Justus Barnes firing a Colt revolver directly at the camera one of the most indelible images in movie history, but Porter grasped that unlike with the stage, the "best seat in the house" was wherever the camera needed to be to show the action. Porter placed his camera on top of a movie train or riding along with the outlaws on horseback, a "conceptual leap" (Eagan again) that puts the film a decade ahead of its time.
Porter's use of jump-cuts, cross-cutting, matte shots and hand-tinted frames was equally cutting-edge, and that the film also established the narrative conventions for decades of westerns to come makes The Great Train Robbery the most important American film before The Birth Of A Nation a dozen years later.
Despite the commercial success of The Great Train Robbery, neither Porter nor his boss were comfortable with the film's technical and storytelling innovations, and thereafter, to the disappointment of the ticket-buying public, the studio's product reverted to more conventional forms. A Trip To The Moon notwithstanding, ultimately the one thing Thomas Edison couldn't steal was quality and within a few years, immigrant entrepreneurs such as Adolph Zukor and Carl Laemmle and directors such as D.W. Griffith equaled then surpassed Edison as a filmmaker. The company lost steam, Porter left Edison's employ in 1909 and an adverse ruling in an anti-monopoly case in 1915 exacerbated the decline. With the coming of World War I and the closing of the European market, Edison sold his studio and abandoned film altogether.
It was an ironic and somehow fitting end to the master inventor-thief's involvement in the history of motion pictures.
Postscript:Matthew Blanchette steered me to an even earlier surviving film from Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, called Man Walking Around A Corner. It was shot on an earlier version of Le Prince's camera, this one with sixteen separate lenses—it looks more like a spider's eye than a camera. Thanks, Matthew!
Last week's poll question—"Which is your favorite Hollywood movie of the early sound era?"—resulted in a record turnout.
How you voted:
Duck Soup—14 King Kong—8 City Lights—7 Grand Hotel—6 Other—6 All Quiet On The Western Front—5 Trouble In Paradise—5 Frankenstein—2 Scarface—2 The Jazz Singer—0
Wonder what movies those six voters had in mind when they opted for "other." There are a lot of good choices, I have to admit. If you want to stop by and tell us, we at the Monkey would like to know.
In the meantime, you might well ask, where are the real blog entries? I'm working on it—two thousand words on the Nickelodeon Era and counting. Should be up tomorrow. Here's a taste of things to come:
I wasn't actually planning to write about John Lennon today—this is a movie blog and while he and his compadres made the finest musical comedy films of the 1960s, he wasn't even a gleam in his randy no-good louse of a father's eye in 1933, the time we're currently covering here at the Monkey.
But then my good pal, Mister Muleboy, wrote at length on the subject (here) and now I feel like saying just this, that Lennon made music and writing and painting cool for me at a time and in a place when no one otherwise approved of such things or even gave them a second thought. Aside from the apparently endless pleasure I derive from listening to his music, that sense that life might promise something other than soul-crushing conformity is what I am most grateful for when I think of John Lennon.
Anyway, this is my favorite Lennon number.
And because I love you, here's his home demo of the same song, which I find fascinating—you can practically hear the moment inspiration hits.
Yes, it was two years ago today that we here at the Monkey posted for the first time. What a wild trip it has been—we started with The General in 1927, crawled forward to 1933 and then allowed the tide of history to sweep us back into the first decade of film. But I promise we'll start moving forward again. One day. Maybe when the economy recovers ...
Venus Armida of the blog "They Had Faces!" has bestowed upon the Monkey the "Stylish Blogger Award"—hey, good for me! Like the Monkey, Venus has devoted herself to, in her own words, "discovering, and helping others discover, the cool interesting world of silent films." A worthwhile mission, if I may say so myself.
"M as in—what?!"
Yes, I used to tell my toys the same thing, but I recently had an epiphany, that our solar system's sun will one day burn out and when it does, the human race will vanish from the universe like a soap bubble, which not only means that the whole of human endeavor is completely pointless, but also that I can safely skip my law school reunion later this week. Win-win.
4. No, actually the epiphany was, as Thomas Boswell put it in the Washington Post sports section this morning, "Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you have." And I woke up recently and realized I am a happy man. Probably after napping with Katie-Bar-The-Door while watching The Thin Man for the hundredth time.
5. Just to underscore that I'm not a nihilist, I built this train layout for my brother's kids a couple of Christmases ago:
Nihilists rarely build train layouts for their brother's kids, especially at Christmas. It's like a rule or something.
7. And lastly, a family portrait:
I'm more of a speak-no-evil kind of Monkey myself, but I've seen and heard plenty. And I keep meticulous notes. So don't get any ideas.
We here at the Monkey pause to note the passing of one our favorite actresses, Jane Russell. As my big brother noted an e-mail, "in 'the day,' she was hot, hot, hot."
Probably her most famous role was her first, The Outlaw, in which she co-starred with a cantilevered bra designed by Howard Hughes and his team of aeronautical engineers. Truth be told, it's not a very good movie and she didn't wear the bra anyway. Filming was completed in 1941, but Hollywood's censors delayed its release until 1943, with a nationwide release not coming until 1946.
If you want to see her in something good, I'd recommend the two movies she made with Robert Mitchum, His Kind Of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), and what I think is the best performance of her career, as a nightclub singer trying to keep her gold-digging pal Marilyn Monroe out of trouble in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
So what has the Monkey been up to recently, other than posting trivia questions straight out of TCM's Now Playing? Working on another of those mammoth essays, this one about early silent comedy, from its beginning around 1890 up to 1914. So far from the era I've watched one hundred sixty-eight comedy shorts and counting. Some are funny, but most of them, I can emphatically assure you, are not.
Aspiring Imp Girl Ginger Ingenue has requested more of French comedian Max Linder, and we here at the Monkey never turn down a reasonable request—or even an unreasonable one, within reason. Here he is in Le hasard et l'amour (Love Surprises) from 1913 with a plot I'm pretty sure the Three Stooges recycled in 1952 as Corny Casanovas.
The latest Oscar trivia question from Turner Classic Movies (read it here) inspired me to start another poll. Of the top five songs in movie history, as chosen in 2004 by the American Film Institute, which is your favorite?
The Best Of The Best Most people consider 1939 to be Hollywood's Golden Year. Of the 10 films nominated as Best Picture that year, which was a musical fantasy starring Judy Garland?
You can read the 2400 word essay I posted yesterday about D.W. Griffith's development of a film "language" and how he taught every director from Charlie Chaplin to Christopher Nolan how to manipulate an audience's emotions, or you can watch this 49-second clip from 30 Rock, which pretty much covers the same territory. Your call.
You know a television show has run seriously off the rails when your wife turns to you and says, in all sincerity, "This would have made more sense with a llama."
For those of you with an unquenchable thirst for useless trivia, the part of the Carrotman's sidekick, Willoughby, was originally to be played by a talking llama—yes, the kind with four legs, painted purple, no less. (It does not compute!) But the trained llama kept biting Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith) who finally refused to continue production. Which is a pity, because it really would have made more sense with a llama. But the llama was fired, a human was hired, and the series was cancelled two weeks later.
"You have to go back to Lancelot Link's piano player to find anyone this ineffective at a keyboard."
It's either that or stop blogging for the next six months. I don't see any other way.
If he were still around, George Burns would be 115 today—and he'd no doubt be performing on stage somewhere. You can read a bit about him here.
Yes, yes, I've been busy lately—Auburn football, Spring cleaning, walking the dog, a never-ending construction project. And I've fobbed off a lot of old movies on you and called it blogging. Fortunately, I know you've been eating these movies up with a spoon—you have been eating them with a spoon, haven't you?—here's another one to tide you over: D.W. Griffith's first feature film, 1914's Judith of Bethulia. It doesn't have the epic scope of The Birth of a Nation, but then neither does it feature the Ku Klux Klan as the hero of the story.
More to the point, Judith, along with The Musketeers of Pig Alley, The Lonely Villa, The Lonedale Operator, The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, and many others, undercuts the notion that Griffith invented movies with The Birth of a Nation. The invention of a film language was a steady evolution, not a one-picture revolution; indeed, I would say The Birth of a Nation didn't invent anything except a long-overdue recognition on the part of audiences and critics that movies were an art form unto themselves.
I've made it up to the final year of my research for an essay about the film years 1906-1914. One hundred fifty-one films strong with, I don't know, thirty more to go. I think.
Matthew Blanchette steered me to an even earlier surviving film from Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince than the one I've previously mentioned, Roundhay Garden Scene. This one is called Man Walking Around A Corner and it dates from 1887 or 1888. Thanks, Matthew! It was shot on an earlier version of Le Prince's camera, this one with sixteen separate lenses. Looks more like a spider's eye than a camera, don't you think?
Here's another artifact I've brought back from my sojourn into early film. The plot of the 10-minute short Suspense—an intruder menaces a lone woman while her savior rides to the rescue—was already a cliche by 1913 (so much so that an early Keystone Kop comedy that year featured a spoof of both it and such D.W. Griffith's two-reelers as The Lonedale Operator that has used the same storyline).
Rumor has it this and other works of Lois Weber will be coming out on DVD next year. In the meantime, check it out:
Meanwhile, for those of you wondering what's become of me, I'm still watching movies in preparation for my essay "1906-1914: The Birth Of The Feature Film." One hundred seventeen (117) of them so far and counting. Okay, so most of them are ten minutes long, but still! The effort will be worth it, I promise.
Trying to say definitively who invented the movies is a little like trying to say who invented fire—the records are sketchy, everybody who knows for certain is dead, and what evidence that does remain comes largely from the self-serving accounts of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.
Turner Classic Movie's recent documentary, Moguls and Movie Stars, began with seventeenth century Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens who in 1659 invented the magic lantern show—a process of projecting light through a painted slide onto a wall or screen—and in terms of being entertained while sitting in the dark looking at pictures on a wall, the magic lantern is a reasonable place to start a history of the movies. Over the course of the two hundred years that followed, these magic lantern shows became quite sophisticated—by stacking slides one in front of the other and manipulating them, a projectionist could create the illusion of movement—and were one of the most popular forms of entertainment during the 19th century.
But if we think of movies as something involving a strip of film and a projector, then I think the history of movies starts with Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince who in 1888 used a single-lens camera and paper film produced by George Eastman to film two seconds worth of fashionable men and women walking around a garden in Roundhay, England. Along with equally brief footage of horse and buggy traffic crossing a bridge in Leeds, Le Prince is generally credited with producing the first "films" in movie history.
After Le Prince, the story of film picks up with Charles-Émile Reynaud. A French science professor who directed and exhibited what may have been the world's first animated film, Pauvre Pierrot ("Poor Pete"), his most lasting contribution to film history was the invention of a camera that recorded images not on photographic plates but on perforated film advanced by sprockets, resulting in longer filmed sequences than a cylinder or drum would allow.
Reynaud died penniless, but Edison—or more precisely his assistant William K.L. Dickson—ran with Reynaud's ideas (and, I don't know, maybe some of his own), and by 1894 created what he called the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peepshow" housed in a bulky cabinet, whereby the bored and the curious could one at a time watch brief films for a nickle. The movies were neither artistic nor adventuresome—just brief scenes of men sneezing, couples dancing, Annie Oakley shooting—but for a time at least the paying public was enthralled.
It was two French brothers, however, Auguste and Louis Lumière, who first thought to exhibit movies not to one person at a time but to a theater full of paying customers. Starting their careers in film as assistants in their father's photographic firm, the brothers—Louis as the inventor, Auguste as the business manager—developed a new and improved camera-projector. Where Edison's Kinetoscope was bulky and hard to maintain, the Lumières' combination camera-projector, the cinématographe, was light and mobile and relatively easy to use. In December 1895, these two brothers rented a hall in Paris and charged the public admission to see their new invention—the first time in history an audience paid money to see a motion picture in a theater.
It was instead another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, who was the first to grasp the unique potential of the new motion picture technology. A stage magician by trade, Méliès saw movies as a successor to the tradition of fanciful entertainments. Where Edison and the Lumière brothers used their cameras to record reality, Méliès realized that through editing and photographic trickery, film could be used to create a new reality, one that could never exist apart from film. It was perhaps the single greatest insight in movie history.
Méliès went bankrupt in 1913 and wound up selling toys in Paris's Gare Montparnasse train station. He was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1932 and died six years later.
These snippets of life provided the content of Edison's peepshows and in the beginning were sufficient to satisfy the public's curiosity. But with more interesting films arriving from the Lumière brothers and especially Méliès, Edison realized he needed more substantial fare if his fledgling film company was to survive. Edison put Porter, who had formerly worked as a touring projectionist for a rival company, in charge of motion picture production at his New York studios, and there Porter set to work filming not just workplace scenes, but stories.
Despite the commercial success of The Great Train Robbery, neither Porter nor his boss were comfortable with the film's technical and storytelling innovations, and thereafter, to the disappointment of the ticket-buying public, the studio's product reverted to more conventional forms. A Trip To The Moon notwithstanding, ultimately the one thing Thomas Edison couldn't steal was quality and within a few years, immigrant entrepreneurs such as Adolph Zukor and Carl Laemmle and directors such as D.W. Griffith equaled then surpassed Edison as a filmmaker. The company lost steam, Porter left Edison's employ in 1909 and an adverse ruling in an anti-monopoly case in 1915 exacerbated the decline. With the coming of World War I and the closing of the European market, Edison sold his studio and abandoned film altogether.
Last week's poll question—"Which is your favorite Hollywood movie of the early sound era?"—resulted in a record turnout.
I wasn't actually planning to write about John Lennon today—this is a movie blog and while he and his compadres made the finest musical comedy films of the 1960s, he wasn't even a gleam in his randy no-good louse of a father's eye in 1933, the time we're currently covering here at the Monkey.
